SES San Jose: Notes from the tradeshow

[Eurydice]

I was at SES most of today. Today, I attended sessions mostly about numbers: User behavior (Gordon Hotchkiss of Enquiro spoke about their landmark Eyetracking Study with lots of followup details and comments) and SE market shares (dozens of PowerPoint slides of graphs and tables: basically: Google is twice as big as Yahoo. Yahoo is losing mkt share. MSN is slowly deflating, despite tens of millions in MS marketing. AOL is in a death dive. Dump your AOL stock.)

Alison Kane of Atlas OnePoint and Cam Balzer of Performics talked about the purchase cycle. They pointed out that ROI tracking usually sets the cookies for 30 days. They found the purchasing funnel actually went up to 12 weeks back. So users could be searching and using PPC to make purchases, but since the research cycle was six or nine weeks ago, that won't show up in the conversion tracking. By increasing the cookies to 12 weeks, they showed up to 40% ROI improvment by discovering data that had not been tracked.

The Future: Local advertising is 20% ($100B) of the US $500B ad mkt, yet online local ads are only $4B. Lots of opportunity, esp. at the cost of Yellow Pages, newspapers, and radio. Instead of global SEO/PPC, we may see more specific SEO/PPC. The main SEs have flattened in
growth; they see future growth in various specialized, vertical, local, and personalized search tools. So we'll see an explosion of such tools (such as housingmaps.com, etc.) This means mkt fragmentation.

Distant Future Stuff: Microsoft Vista/Longhorn (the next MS OS). Coming in maybe (maybe) a year. Remember the Netscape Browser Wars? (Which incidentally, started ten years ago today, Aug. 8th, 1995, when NS IPOed.) MS killed NS by embedding the IE browser into the OS, which webified the OS. Here we go again. MS will attack Google by adding SE to the OS. Yahoo gets 73% of its SE traffic from its portal (in other words, people start at Yahoo and from there, many go to Yahoo Search). MSN gets 61% of its traffic from its portal. Thus if MS adds MS Search into the OS, they could get a substantial default user stream.

I have more notes; I'll write those up later. Tomorrow, more on LP, metrics, & ROI. I talk on Wednesday on Local Search Targeting.

Others here who are at SES: go ahead and post your notes.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Thanks: very informative "exec" summary!

Rgds

Damon

[Import Export]

Thanks for jotting the notes. I would be interested in hearing info others found while attending.

I think it's important to take the actual data these companies crank out with a grain of salt. Once you uncover the hard facts, if you can, you see it was taken out of context with biased taste -or- it was inflated -or- it's pure spec -or- a sister company performed the market tests -or- *

[Eurydice]

All of the numbers are based on moving targets. Each of the metrics companies measures different things, so the numbers will vary. In the last two weeks, I've read that AskJeeves has 7.2%, 5.1%, or 2% market share. The general point is the relative sizes: Google is roughly twice as big as Yahoo; MSN is about half of Yahoo, and the rest are niche players. Google continues to grow (and their growth causes Yahoo's decline); MSN has been mostly stable, despite tens of millions in marketing.

[beren]

Dump your AOL stock.

I just bought some Time Warner stock a few weeks ago. AOL is only a part of that large company.