Rapid Web Design SEO Blog

Here is my review and thoughts on day 2 of adtech, ad-tech, ad:tech Sydney, however you want to spell it. Talk about brand awareness and consistency?

Before I start the adtech reviews, I need to say that I had an enjoyable time and meet some great people. So thank you to all the people who allowed me to chat to you and thanks again if you’re now reading my site. I look forward to another ad-tech in Australia and hopefully this time in Melbourne!

Ad-tech to me was money well spent from my business and personal point of view and I would recommend the trade show to others. What I think that made at-tech stand out form other trade shows is that it brought together different web technologies and tactics and outlined how they should and need to link together to provide one hell of a successful site.

So to give an example a site owner should be running PPC along with organic results, collect analytical data, which should be used to optimise the site and the PPC campaigns. When an email or SMS marketing strategies are broadcasted the results should also have an impact to the PPC and the business web site. It’s a life cycle that never ends, a web site should grow stronger and evolve to a volume never thought possible and this will only happen if all the data collected is analysed and actions are taken to reflect the results.

At Rapid Web Design we do take all this into consideration when developing our client’s web sites, so feel free to drop us a line or email any questions or services you would like more information about!

09:00 - 09:50 _ Publishing and Media in the Digital Age
MODERATOR: Andrew Reid, Managing Director - Australia, Nielsen//NetRatings
KEYNOTE:
Ian Smith, CEO, Yahoo7
Tony Faure, CEO, nineMSN
Jack Matthews, CEO, Fairfax Digital
Chris Smith, General Manager, Sensis Interactive
Nick Leeder, COO, News Digital Media

With some of the big CEO’s and one COO from leading Australian publishers this was a great panel. This panel spoke about how the web has changed the way media is distributed in Australia not only online but also offline. Yahoo7 and ninemsn both made comments of the fact that having more assets was a huge advantage for their growth. Yahoo just recently merged with Channel 7 to form yahoo7! and ninemsn has been established for a lot longer. As competitors of each other the comments were that in many cases they need to collaborate to archive their business goals and focused outcomes.

10:00 - 10:50 _ Keynote Roundtable Panel - The New Media Mix
MODERATOR: Ross Dawson, Chairman, Future Exploration Network
KEYNOTE:
Harold Mitchell, Chairman, Mitchell & Partners Pty Ltd
Richard Kimber, Managing Director, Google
Foad Fadaghi, Technology Editor, BRW

Discussion was focused to create debate in this keynote panel but much was not debated. Some points outlined form this discussion was that a recent calculation/study found that there are 1 billion internet users online, and 1/3 is from the Australasian region. Of this 1/3 Australia is the more advanced for internet technologies but compared to the rest of the world we are no where near the top.

A strong concept that was mentioned during this discussed was “the long tail” and how this concept is now implemented in web technologies today. Another mention was made to the fact that the internet is now being accessed on different devices such as mobile phone, PDAs and laptops of all shapes, sizes and weights.

One speaker made a valid point to the fact that the Australian broadband infrastructure is not up to scratch and is causing Australia to fall to far behind in the internet space. A resolution to fix this problem was to increase government funding in educating students to a better level and have a better engineering perspective, as new web technologies need a strong foundation of engineering and not just programming. He also made the point that if this slow internet did not fix soon Australia would be too far behind to fix for the future. This started some debate but time was up before it got juicy.
11:00 – 11:50 _ Search Engine Optimisation
MODERATOR: David Cropley, Managing Director, SearchForecast

PRESENTER:
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Ian Leuchars, Senior Vice President - Search North America, 24/7 Real Media
Tom Petryshen, Founder & CEO, Amplify

Let me just say I was great to meet Bruce Clay and not just read his great website! Bruce opened the discussion and quickly started to speak all the stats about SEO and Search patterns. 1/2 the clicks to web sites are from organic results opposed to PPC. Web designers need to stay up to date with the changes in the SEO and the Web industries. He also stressed the need for web designers and SEOs to become much more familiar with their clients and the end user of the web sites needing SEO. 90% of search results clicked are at position 1 and 2, if a site is not I the top 5-10 there is no chance of any click thru rate.

A great tip that was outlined was that 80% of users are researcher’s not actual shoppers, what this means for site owners is to give better descriptions for their products, on average the number 1 result for competitive keywords have at leats 800 words on their pages.

Also mentioned was the fact that search engines have improved their spam detection and black hat SEO tactics. 2 years ago it would take 9 months to detect bad activity nowadays its only 6 weeks and it’s not worth the chance of being banned.

Another great point is the “click here” problem (way to go Adobe) where sites need to ensure that people linking to them use relative keywords and that the site is related in some way, no point of a shoe site linking to an SEO firm, it makes no sense.

Google has about 128 factors in it algorithms that it considers when evaluating a site it’s not possible to achieve high results for each one of these factors but the more the better for higher result rankings.

14:10 – 15:00 _ Email Marketing Optimisation
PRESENTER:
Evan Fortune, Executive Director, Vision 6
Elaine O’Gorman, Vice President of Strategy, Silverpop
James Gaskell, Head of Technology Strategy, s8 Travel Group
Stephan Gervois, Marketing Director, Forty Two International
Ian Lyons, Digital Relationship Strategist, Traction
This panel had the most number of speakers and even though the information was speed out like a session of speed dating, the information I gained from this panel was very informative and much to which I would consider during my next newsletters and email campaigns.

The panel spoke about the frequency that emails should be sent by companies, if companies only send one email every so often they are more likely to be considered spam. Email communication needs to be engaging and create dialogue with the customer. Emails should create an easy channel for the customer to act on a call to action. A big no no was that emails should never say “do not reply to this email” or have an email address as “no_reply@mycompapny.com” this makes it harder for the customer to easily replay and make connection.

A great point made was that email travels though many highly complex spam filtering systems and it is not uncomment for a permission based email newsletter to be not delivered due to the fact it was marked as spam. Spam filters are here to stay and are evolving to be more sophisticated then ever, this means that companies using email as a form of communication need to test their emails to ensure that they are not being filtered as spam. A great suggestion and one I practice and always recommend is to create different testing accounts with Gmail, Yahoo mail, hotmail and also create an in house testing team where employers use home addresses as a form of testing.

With the introduction of image blocking on most email clients nowadays a great question was asked by the audience to how this should be prevented, unfortunately this can not be prevented but a way to allow a recipient view the e mail is by displaying a line which reads “if you can not see this email correctly please view it online”, this should be the first line of the email and engage a call to action.

It was also recommend by the panel to implement double opt-in systems where the user needs to validate their email or be re asked that they are opting in to receive further communication, not only does this ensure that the email is real it also give another email that will have a higher open rate which will give your company the opportunity to up sell products and service or display promotions.

This process of using emails to up sell your products was explained to me transactional emails, these are email which the user needs to read such as a validating email and more importantly an e-Invoice. These emails are highly read emails and why not utilise this as a way to up sell your services or promotions currently running. This is a great idea which I think we will see more of very shortly.

A final point but not the last of the panel was to always follow up on unopened emails or emails that had no reaction. Keeping in touch with your customer is a key to successful email marketing. Even if a user opts out of an email why not send a post card via mail or SMS given you have their details?

Well there were some more speakers and the content I covered is not the complete information but I guess it’s a guide for those who did not get a chance to make it to ad-tech and also people who attended the other panels at the same time.