Digital Advertising On Baidu: A Recipe For Success
Confused or overwhelmed by all the red tape surrounding Baidu search advertising? Contributor David Roth has some tips for how to navigate the advertiser certification process.
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David Roth's latest articles
Optimizing Apps For Maximum Findability
Although platforms like Apple’s App Store and Google Play are “closed” environments, content can and should be optimized to be more easily found. App store optimization requires SEO techniques that go beyond the usual web optimization processes. During the App Store Optimization session at SMX West 2014, panelists discussed the best ways to get your […]
Up-Close @ SMX West: Twitter For Business
Yesterday, I attended a great session on Twitter at SMX West, about using the service for business purposes. It covered everything from a glossary for the beginner to advanced tips for those looking to gain more. For my session review, check out my post on Marketing Land: How To Get Started Using Twitter For Business
5 Ways To Fail Fast Using Paid Search
Let’s face it. Nobody ever learned a valuable lesson from success. Sure, succeeding feels great, and we can often look back at success and credit a number of meaningful contributing factors. I love it, we all do. In fact, our society and culture celebrate success to such a ridiculously high degree that we forget that […]
5 Ways To Capture Brand Equity With SEM & Affiliates
Last week, I read David Rodnitzky’s Enterprise SEM column on brand term bidding, and I loved it! Even better, it got me thinking about search and affiliate marketing again. While I think David made some excellent points, as I consumed his endless wit and wisdom, I kept thinking: All that brand keyword goodness, it’s almost […]
4 PPC Tactics To Ensure You Meet & Exceed Your Plan
In this column, we routinely write about some fairly advanced topics: Next-level optimization, automated bidding algorithms, hyper-targeted search campaigns, paid vs. organic search, etc. Lost in all this is the underlying discussion around the need to hit your financial goals. The majority of large enterprises engage in annual planning, which means that as SEM managers, […]
Three Questions To Ask When Selecting An Enterprise SEM Tool Provider
Having just experienced a round of demos from some of the major enterprise PPC tools, I can’t help but love my job. It’s always fun because I get to peek under the hood of some of the biggest, baddest, most robust search management tools on the market. Within these demos, we talk about thin data, […]
SMX West: Where Search Marketers & Fire Alarms Meet
The sirens suddenly sounded, shattering my concentration and halting the flow of my presentation. “Please evacuate the building immediately”, the robotic recorded male voice advised. More blasting sirens. “This is the emergency response system. Please evacuate the…” Was this really happening? I’d been preparing all morning and patiently waiting my turn to speak as the […]
An Inside Look At How Yahoo! Handles Olympic Games Marketing
Last month, I wrote about managing search in a decentralized marketing organization. We covered budgets, goals, alignment, etc. All good in theory, but how does it work in real life? To answer that question, I thought I would take a close look at how we’re working on one of our major marketing initiatives of the […]
To Centralize Or Decentralize SEM – That’s The Question
Having been through a number of re-orgs over the past few years, I’ve been thinking lately about SEM and direct marketing within the larger organization, and it seemed like a good time to take a step back and look at the different ways companies organize around SEM, and which models make the most (or least) […]
From The Experts: Enterprise-Level PPC Campaign Management
Last month, I wrote about a conference session I moderated on Building and Training In-house SEO Teams. And while that get-together was a blast, I didn’t really get my geek on until I was presenting on a panel on Enterprise Level Bid Management. The title was a bit of a misnomer, as we covered topics well […]
How To Build & Manage Enterprise Search Marketing Teams
On a panel at a recent conference, I had the pleasure of moderating a great discussion on building and managing in-house SEO teams. What made this panel superb was that it wasn’t just about in-house SEO teams.There was quite a bit of content around hiring, working with third parties, and the interaction between marketing and […]
Three Steps To SEM Planning Success
Ahh, annual planning season. Nothing quite like it. You can almost smell it in the air. Dozens of spreadsheets packed with endless assumptions, each one more fantastic than the last, combining to ultimately seal a marketer’s fate for the next 12 months. What could be better than that? Well, how about three steps to make […]
The Relationship Between Enterprise SEO & PPC: SMX East Recap
During a whirlwind stay at SMX East, I had the enviable opportunity to speak at length about two of my all-time favorite topics: Enterprise PPC, and the relationship between paid and organic search. Enterprise PPC It was interesting to get some very different takes on Industrial Strength SEM from the seasoned pros seated next to […]
3 Steps To Adopting A New Attribution Model In A Large Enterprise
When I first got to Yahoo! and asked about attribution models in our marketing team, our marketing analytics lead informed me that we had developed, and subsequently scrapped, a very elegant attribution model. In fact, we were back to square one with a last-ad model, the same one that’s been dominating our industry for what […]
Get These Three Things Right In Enterprise SEO
The other day in URLs café at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, I had a great conversation with our head of SEO. He was telling me about significant recent success SEO has been enjoying at Yahoo! At many large companies, SEO is an uphill battle, so any victory should be fully celebrated. I asked what happened […]
3 Reasons To Form A Direct Marketing Center Of Excellence
If you’re at all like me, you’re marketing a variety of different web assets – products, properties, businesses – and you’re working alongside a number of other marketing channels in a larger group. In our case, it’s the Direct Marketing (DM) group – in your organization, it may be called ‘acquisition marketing’ or ‘performance marketing’. […]
3 Ways To Connect The Dots With Search Marketing
At a conference last month, I had the privilege of speaking on a really fun panel with some of the brightest minds in Search, where we told some stories about integrating search into larger marketing efforts. We called it ‘Connecting The Dots’. I love these kinds of tales because they nod to the promise of […]
PPC Tactics For Large Enterprises: Search Network Targeting
At SMX West last month, I spoke at length about what it means to manage PPC programs at large companies. One of the topics I covered at some depth was using the various search engines’ targeting options to break keywords down into smaller bits of data to optimize them individually. This type of tactic can […]
In-House PPC Programs For Big Companies – Part II
Having just spent a spectacular few days at SMX West, the real challenge was getting past the buzz around content farms. But if you bothered to dig a bit deeper, there was an astounding amount of great, um… content, covering the many facets of search marketing other than search algorithm changes. Aside from the usual […]
SMX West Preview: Managing PPC For Large Companies
Next month, I’m going to be speaking at SMX West, talking about one of my favorite topics, managing PPC campaigns at big companies. To be honest, I’m pretty passionate about this stuff and I have a lot to say on the topic. I’d like to use this space to add some detail to the presentation […]
My Search Marketing New Year’s Resolutions, 2011 Edition
Looking through some old material the other night, I came across a column I wrote in 2009 about my Search Marketing New Year’s Resolutions. Not surprisingly, like many New Year’s resolutions, some of them didn’t get accomplished. But enough of the world has changed since I inked that column two years ago that I thought […]
My Holiday Search Marketing Wish List
Ah, the holiday season. Creative refreshes, keyword expansions, bidding up to capture all those credit card-wielding customers. As yet another action-packed holiday season descends upon us, while we light the menorah again and again, exchange gifts and happily hang delicate decorations on the tree, as we make lists and check them twice, I want to […]
Next-Level Optimization: Measuring Success In Paid Search
You’ve made the case for advanced optimization, implemented loads of slick technology and deployed across some or all of your paid search programs. Did you do the right thing? Did you make more money? If so, how much more? To answer the question “did I make more money” implies a baseline. Trouble is, you don’t […]
Next-Level Optimization Part 2: Beyond Paid Search
Last month we took a look at identifying some ways to leverage targeting options and automated algorithms to ensure your paid search campaigns are well optimized. Now its time to up-level your optimization efforts by considering media other than paid search.
Next-Level Optimization For Search: When And Why You Need It
Used to be that you could optimize your site for search, buy some keywords and reap the benefits of plentiful and profitable search traffic. Turns out those days are long gone. A couple months ago I wrote about how incredibly complex and nuanced SEM and SEO tactics have become, and how perhaps some of our […]
Getting Started With Social Media Valuation
Even with all the buzz about social media, many people have questions about how to value social media marketing efforts. It’s not uncommon to hear (very legitimate) questions such as:
Forget Search: Let’s Go Social
If you have an extra hour in your very busy workday day, don’t spend it fine-tuning your site for algo search, or optimizing your SEM campaigns for efficiency, ROI or profitability. Spend it building out and executing on your social media strategy. I know, shocking advice coming from an old search jockey like me, but […]
Optimizing Yourself For The Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance
David Roth is Director Of Search Marketing for Yahoo, as well as being a very large Yahoo advertiser. Offering an insider's perspective, Dave provides some unique insights into the forthcoming Yahoo/Microsoft search alliance. Here are his tips and information that will enable both large and small advertisers, publishers, and webmasters to navigate the process smoothly.
Paid And Organic Search: Understanding The Math (And The Truth)
In last month’s column I talked about buying brand keywords and some of the great (somewhat) new ad products available to advertisers. All that talk about buying brand keywords brought me back to a familiar topic about which, if you read my post with any frequency, you just might be getting a tiny bit tired […]
Enhanced Brand Keyword Ads = Industrial Strength SEM
Are you still arguing with your management about whether you should buy your brand keywords or not? Good news for you: I’m here to make sure you have two more good reasons to go ahead and buy that brand and feel good about it. A few months ago I wrote about how advertisers should think […]
Search & Affiliate Marketing: Making Them Work For You
Search marketers will often say that you shouldn’t run affiliate programs because your brand will be damaged by affiliates. That’s a cop-out. To suggest that you will lose control of your brand by having other marketers drive sales for you is insulting to those of us who understand the business.
Five Questions To Ask Before Going Global
One of the things I mentioned in my previous series on Global SEM is that there is no such thing as going global. Going global means going local in 25 different ways. This holds true not only for brand campaigns, but even more so for broader marketing initiatives. Since I wrote about supporting a global […]
Why Most Attribution Analysis Is Fatally Flawed
At SMX West last week the halls were echoing with passionate cries about attribution analysis. It seemed as if all topics (other than the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal) had taken a back seat for a moment, and suddenly the most important thing to consider was attribution analysis, specifically whether or not you are giving too much credit to SEM and not enough to other media.
3 Ways To Optimize Your Bidding Strategies
If you’re managing multiple SEM programs across a broad landscape of web assets, as more and more of us are, it’s important to realize that when it comes to managing keywords and their bids, it’s not one-size-fits-all. In this reality of diverse business goals and revenue models, marketers looking for a singular approach to SEM […]
Paid vs. Organic Search: Understanding the Dynamics
“Why are we buying our brand keyword when we already rank #1 in the organic results?” “Why are we paying for traffic if we’re already getting it for free?” It turns out that the question isn’t whether or not you should be buying your brand keywords. The question is how much should you be willing […]
Supporting A Global Brand Campaign With Paid Search, Part 3
If you’ve been around me you’ve probably heard me say this, but it bears repeating: As soon as you, the marketer, pay for a search click, someone will want to know what you got for it. This means that you will need effective ways to both optimize and report out results on your campaign. This […]
Supporting A Global Brand Campaign With SEM, Part 2
Last month I took a look at how to plan, budget and organize a global brand campaign with paid search. Now I’d like to walk you through the launch process and talk a little bit about how you’ll need to set your campaigns up for tracking and optimization. Hopefully my experience will serve you in […]
Supporting A Global Brand Campaign With SEM
On the heels of launching Yahoo campaigns in three countries in eight days on an incredibly tight timeline, it makes sense to take a small step back and jot down a few thoughts about what went right, what went wrong, and how to improve next time.
Big Brands & Social Media Part 3 – Putting The Plan Into Action
After my last column on how big brands should organize around social media marketing, I thought it might be useful to get tactical and look at some specific ways that big brands can begin to move the needle on social media. Again, I’m crediting Bill Hunt with inspiring some of these thoughts in a great […]