Optimize & Prophesize

Category: Search

  • 2009 Recap: My Faves, Posts & Presos

    "A friend is one before whom I may think aloud." – Emerson 2009 was an amazing year of discovery for me and I tried to share as much of that here as I could. This year also presented a sea change in my writing because I started using a new communications platform, Twitter (you can…

  • Waiting to Rule the Ad World: The Next Decade Will Shift to Search

    With apologies to BTO, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Over the next decade we’ll see Search explode unlike any media we have ever seen before. Dollar for dollar, in one form or another, sometime before the end of the coming decade, Search will become the most important and valuable media channel in the world. Search…

  • Rising Tide of PPC Means SEO is Sinking

    With all current fuss about automated content for SEO I've found the recent changes by Google here and here have only greatly diminished the value of SEO for the most valuable keywords (those that have transactional value). Case in point is this SERP for "rifle scopes." This was a query used during my Ad Copy & Continuity…

  • SES Chicago Next Week

      Next week I’ll be speaking for my 5th year at SES Chicago. I feel privileged that the good folks putting on the show now and in the past have been gracious enough to keep inviting me back. The sessions I’ve spoken on through the years: 2005: Searcher Behavior Research 2006: Ads in a Quality Score World          Ad…

  • Read All About It: Online News Has No Clue About Optimization

    I’ve been reluctant to write more about publishers issues with monetization having recently written pieces here, here, here and here but the recent spotlight cast by Rupurt Murdoch on Google’s traffic and sympathetic follow up pieces by respected writers like Tom Foremski and Michael Arrington have now boiled me over. Having spent the better part of a…

  • Interviewed by AdExchanger

    If you are at all involved in display advertising AdExchanger.com is a daily must read. So I was really psyched when they wanted to interview me and that interview was published today. It covers what we are doing at RAMP Digital and my POV on the state and future of the digital ad industry.  …

  • Reaping The Ads You Sow

    Trends in search provide amazing intelligence. So much so that Google has provided a destination site with information even non-data junkies will find interesting. You can look at this data and understand two things about online marketing. TV drives a great deal of search inventory/demand/price/scale Getting media channels to work together can reap huge rewards Different…

  • Recap: Search Becomes the Display Operating System

    "So yeah I sampled your voice, you was using it wrong/ You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song" – Jay Z, Takeover It was with the swagger that comes from presenting at my 5th SES in San Jose that I created a new presentation below for the session I put…

  • Data is Easy. Optimization is Hard.

    For the past 15 years web analytics has been namely about one thing, counting. Counting is very important and as an industry we have become infatuated with it. Never before could a medium really count what was happening with it. Attributable media was and continues to be truly revolutionary. Attribution quickly formed the business models…

  • Google Stripping Referring URL Parameters Will Leave Many Naked

    Back in early February Google did a little test. It decided to test an AJAX SERP. This meant Google sent natural search result traffic to sites without any passing identifying parameters except the top-level domain google.com. Message Boards and Blogs lit up immediately. They stopped the test (to 10% of traffic) quickly but in March seemed…

  • Busy Being Born: Creative Technology & Analytics

    Twice in the past week I have had conversations about the creative use of technology. My point was that technology by itself has all the elements necessary for creativity to flourish. Coding is creative. The web has progressed to date only because of those who thought about technology from a creative perspective. It’s something many…

  • SES Presentation: Search Becomes the Display OS

    75% of the audience was agencies and amazingly 80% of those people were running both Search and Display campaigns. As my fellow presenter Scott Rafer has noted on more than one occasion the falling cost of Display can bring back better returns than search. Believe it! I saw it myself three times this week for…

  • Google Will Own Realtime Search by Indexing, Filtering and Ranking Tweets Better than Twitter

    The conventional thinking now is that Twitter’s search will spell trouble for Google. I believe that it will be Google that will be the first to filter tweets and deliver useful, relevant results sets. This seems so obvious yet I have not seen anyone write about it yet. Maybe the Twitterati is high on their…

  • Speaking and Clinic at SES New York

    Next week Search Engine Strategies rolls into my home turf and I’ll be involved in a couple of ways. On Tuesday March 24th in the Expo Hall I will running an audience based clinic. 3:00pm Expo Hall: CPA Optimization StationWith advertising dollars more accountable than ever optimizing your Cost Per Acquisition or Cost per Action…

  • Interviewed by Aaron Wall at SEO Book

    Aaron Wall is a legend in SEO and his site SEO Book gets about 1 million uniques a month so I was really psyched when he asked to interview me. Aaron asked some really thought provoking questions and we covered everything from my career path, to what I’m working on now, to the future of…

  • Search Becomes the Display Operating System

    I first wrote about the idea of search strategies working in display to deliver more relevant ads two years ago. In the ensuing two years as followers of this blog know I’ve become passionate about the opportunity to build creative technology that makes display ads more relevant. One advantage I have working on these solutions…

  • Advanced Landing Pages – SMX West

    For years, first with javascript testing and content targeting tools and now adding APIs and semantic technology, I have maintained that landing pages are the most advanced forms of digital marketing — the ultimate marriage of technology with creative. So it was great to finally get an “advanced” landing pages session on the schedule this…

  • Misguided Notions: A Study of Value Creation in Real-Time Search

    This past week has seen a ton of hype that real-time search is different. That the content creation and behaviors expressed and implied are fundamentally new and exclusive to places like Twitter and mining this data has incredible potential. Having spent a decade in search and the last four years working with dynamic content, APIs and…

  • Speaking & Pushing the Envelope at SMX West

    I’m going back to Cali. Next week I’ll be in SF/SV with my primary purpose speaking and attending SMX West in Santa Clara.  Day one I’ll be on the panel Up Close with You Tube. What’s an optimization guy doing on this panel? Well it is not because of my fascination and bullish outlook with…

  • Ads as Content – Content as Ads

    It is hard to believe but we are ONLY 5 years into search advertising reaching critical mass. In the blink of an eye it has emerged as one of the world’s most disruptive and successful technology initiatives. Google alone made over $20B in revenue from it last year. For me the key takeaway for the…