Danny Sullivan, who’s facilitating the session, came in 2 minutes late, but made a grand entrance by telling everyone that he was late because he got the Javits wifi, which was really sucky about 3minutes earlier, fixed. Thanks, Danny, you’re super!
So now, with a front row seat to the Video Search Marketing session, and a pretty fast wifi connection, I think I’ll be able to do some quick note-taking.
Michael Benedek of AlmondNet starts with what opportunities online video advertising has for us: 67% of all internet users viewing some form of video advertising at least once a month in 2008, and is projected to grow to $3 billion by 2012.
Some behavior of a typical internet user:
- 5% of their time declaring purchase-intent on SE sites and other similar sites that account for 30% of Internet ad spending.
- 95% of their time browsing ad-supported content on “other” sites where display inventory is unsold or sold for less than $1CPM.
Online video advertising has still a long way to go. Some challenges that are being encountered involving this type of online marketing are ad server standardization (searchers use different video players), scalability, and video content categorization (via category-specific tags).
Behavior Advertising / Video Advertising are the hottest and most promising ad-focused areas online right now. Inventory is inexpensive (compare it to search or TV), and branding / engagement is comparable to TV. (I, myself, am not keeping a television where I stay, and prefer online video viewing/searching because I can watch what I’m looking for the exact moment I want to watch them.)
Enter Gregory Markel, President and Founder of Infuse Creative.
He asks what’s the most popular video in YouTube. Someone in the audience answers some Avril Lavigne video, which has over a million views. Gregory asks, but are they real?
Turns out, “video” is more popular than “god” and “britney spears” as far as search trends are concerned. Take this: 24M Youtube.com homepage impressions a day alone. There is no submission cost or cost per click for a YouTube result, it’s FREE. Even more so, when we say Video Advertising, we’re not even talking about Youtube alone but also AOL, Yahoo, and Google video, and this just in, iPhone videos. Videos are viewed in increasing numbers. (I’m starting to sound like home shopping network.)
In taking advantage of Video Marketing, make sure your video has targeted keywords. Optimization tips: keyword infused titles, descriptions, tags, and categories are important.
There is BLACK HAT in Video Search Optimization! (The number of views can be tricked, he didn’t say how.)
1. Define success metrics, goals, and tracking requirments.
2. Analyze the cmpetition both in youtube and google.
3. Research keywords, write keyword rich and compelling title, description & tags.
4. Add/Modify “in video” branding/call to action/URL to suit marketing goals.
5. Decide submission strategy/type. (Upload only? Mass blast? By hand? Automated?)
6. Spread the word, encourage community, remember mobile/iphone.
7. Monitor/track your progress and tune.
Video Search Marketing is very much like SEM in a lot of ways. Tracking is important (much like web analytics), promoting your site and getting links are essential steps to drive traffic to your site (much like link baiting), and keyword research and competitive analysis are necessary to improve your campaign strategies.
Gregory’s speaking warpspeed, he has less than 4 minutes left. He’s discussing about additional best practices and techniques (which will be posted online anyway), zoo yezz, I zhall waitz fur ze powerpoint prezentation online. :P
Eric Papczun, the next speaker, says that Greg’s presentation needs 10 cups of Starbucks coffee to digest. It sure is loaded. :)
Moving forward, Eric discuses the new Google audio indexing — Google has indexed all the words in YouTube political channel videos with their speech recognition technology, so that spoken words are transformed to text.
Videos are actually ranked by spoken keyword relevance, YouTube metadata, and freshness. However, the speech-to-text technology is still not perfect. I.e., Obama says “shift”, and GAUDI (Google Audio Indexing) translate it as “shit”.
Eric adds that the best chance that publishers have in getting their videos indexed and ranked high on Google is to upload to YouTube. This is because Google and Yahoo have an easier time reading YouTube metadata than they do reading video-housed on a native site. True enough, we’ve all seen how YouTube videos rank in the organic listings for high search-volume keywords — now that’s an opportunity worth taking advantage of.
Q&A is ongoing as I post this. :)
It’s my first day (and the first time) at SMX, and I’m having a grand time. :)