Autumn in the UK’s Search Marketing world is rapidly becoming synonymous with British ‘leg’ of the excellent conference series from Search Marketing Expo. The second SMX London kicked off with venerable Chris Sherman introducing a quality Microsoft double act which looked at the latest offerings from this major search engine.

ZhaoHui Tang, the Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft adCenter commenced the presentations by discussing the latest from AdCenter labs and drilling down into the information now available, even looking at the topical issue of the elections and looking at demographics related to searches around that topic. The audience were introduced to the downloadable analysis tool which identifies click through rate for various different keyword phrases and highlighted the functionality of Adcenter labs which can also look at search funnels and conversion funnels.

Nathan Buggia, the Lead Program Manager from Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center introduced the Webmaster Center – relationship for portal web publishers.  He kicked off with a live demo of how webmaster center interacts with publishers to offer support and advice in helping them to enhance their web sites.  Nathan demonstrated using live data from MSN, identifying pages not found and other errors within Microsoft’s (millions of) pages.  As with Google webmaster tools, to ensure privacy of data verification of the web site is required before information like this is provided.  Like Google, it shows 404 errors,  pages blocked by robots.txt file, etc.  It also identifies URLs with too many parameters which could cause an issue for the crawlers. All of the data provided in the webmaster center are actionable and where they are highlighted by one search engine will probably be true of all and will occur with all of the major search engines.  Nathan focused in on a couple of areas to give the audience a feel for the tools:

Outbound links. In addition to demonstrating who you are linking to, this function also identifies pages that you are linking to that are malware, for instance.  A filter can be applied to only show this information.  This also allows you to identify all of the pages on your site that link to this URL, for instance.

Keywords.  Web site owners want to ensure that he highest ranking page is the highest converting page.  Microsoft gives pages a Page Score – is a proxy for the MSN version of page rank.  In broad terms, 5 ‘buckets’ means a well regarded page.

Web site owners want more information about their customers but also they want help with web site placement and visibility plus information on ROI which is the feedback from webmasters and this is their continued aim.

Microsoft has been working on these tools for about 18 months and there is, according to Nathan, much more to come.  They have a 3 part strategy to help internet marketers:

1. Best results – relevance is the Number 1 investment in search.  Microsoft are making huge gains in terms of relevance.
2. Helping people find new information & ‘get stuff done’.  Looking at users:  what do they want? User intent is key.  Looking for those 10 blue links is only wanted about 40-50% of the time.  Sometimes people are looking for help to understand something & refining their search queries over time to facilitate this.  These explorer searchers want a richer experience.  Microsoft is wanting to deliver this.
3. Business model of search.  Today cost per click is the driving model.  But is there more that can happen.  Live search has been exploring cash back and cost per action.  How does that change the dynamic of the equation?  This has big implications for the future.
   

Chris and the audience then asked a variety of questions, including :

What is the best piece of advice that Nathan and ZhaoHui give?

Build really good stuff.  Microsoft has a bunch of people with PHD’s – if it is good, Microsoft can find it!

In 5 years, what will we be talking about then?

Advertising market size will grow – systems platforms will be more connected and option based according to ZhaoHui,  maybe for paid; for display ads; for search.  Everything will be much more transparent and with real time options based to assist the user.  They will be easy to manage and with lots of tools.

According to Nathan, this room (the Edinburgh Room at the New Connaught Rooms) won’t be big enough to hold SMX London in 2014.  Search will be a much richer experience.  At that time, we will reminisce back to the fond old days of 10 blue links.  The idea of measurable ROI will continue to affect advertising throughout.  Fortune 500 or global 100 companies will be substantially more sophisticated in their online interaction.

An excellent start to an interesting first day at SMX London 2008 with an exciting lineup of industry experts.

Tags: Microsoft Ad Center, Microsoft Webmaster Tools, Search Engine, Search Marketing, Search Marketing Expo, SMX London, SMX London 2008

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