Internet World conference highlights

Yesterday I attended the Internet World conference in Earls Court, London. I’ve never been to the event before but found many of the conferences and exhibitions very useful, below I’ve listed some of the main notes I took away from the day.

Microsoft adCenter
The first talk I attended was from Microsoft adCenter, this was basic but my experience of adCenter isn’t great so I found this useful.

Some information I found useful was:

• The Average MSN searcher spends £2,000 online in 6 months (I think this must be based upon adCenter conversion information).
• Over 11 million people in UK use MSN Messenger
• 8.8 million people in UK have an MSN Hotmail account
• Over 5 million people use Live search each month in the UK
• adCenter audience “is also more likely to convert than any other - 70% more than the average UK searcher and over twice as likely as Google searchers.”

This also talked about how Windows Live Passport details are used for demographic targeting, this allow you to bid upon keywords targeted to a specific age group or gender. An NNR Megaview Search report showed in May- July 2006 that Microsoft adCenter had a 4.5% conversion rate, compared to Google’s 2.1% and Yahoo’s 4.1, demographic targeting must help towards this and it sounds like it would work very well to increase conversion rates. This was highlighted by examples of the age groups searching for “Disney holidays” as opposed to “Saga holidays”, it was also interesting to find that a higher percentage of males searches for “lipstick” (for presents, I hope), while females will actually know what they are looking for more specifically and search for keywords such as “mac lipstick” far more frequently than men. If a Windows Live Passport cookie is not found the ad will run at the minimum bid level.

The Future of Blogging
This session was run by Loïc Le Meur, formerly of SixApart, talking about the history of blogging, why people like the reality and honesty of blogs (as highlighted by this look at the Burger King advertising) and how this has influenced people, explaining that the total coverage of all blogs in France outnumbers the amount of media attention. This moved on to look at the direction blogging is going, starting by making the point that the popularity of blogging has grown so much that people will have too many email/blog comments to possibly reply to and will end up paying attention to their friends first. Maybe monitoring where friends are traveling to on sites like Dopplr or reading messages on Twitter, even if it is “I’ve just tied my shoelaces”!

Google AdWords - Delivering ROI through a search marketing case study
Russ Cohn works for Google’s online team and he talked about his experience as a direct account manager for one Google’s larger AdWords advertisers in the UK, Hoovers. To be honest this was aimed more at businesses looking to learn more about improving their conversion rates, explaining about the importance of keyword research, ad copy testing, landing page quality and how an ad’s quality score, CTR and maximum bid can effect the final cost per click and postioning.

I also caught part of some other useful sessions which talked about Web 2.0, targeting multiple user platforms, B2B marketing, Pay-Per-Click and web usability, as well as gaining some useful information from some of the UK’s leading SEO companies which were exhibiting. Hopefully I’ll have some more updates during the year from further SEO conferences, I booked the ad:tech London event ages ago so they’ll be at least one.

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