When: Tuesday the 4th of December from 7:00AM to 9:30AM
Where: Terminal City Club, 837 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

What: A breakfast series event featuring Jim Sterne the founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits, and the founding Chairman and current President of the Web Analytics Association. This event will also show case a case study presented by John Hossack of VKI Studios.

Details: Jim will be speaking about the current maturity and status of the web analytics industry. Jim will share insights into the level of expertise among today’s practitioners; challenges they face; the opportunities that are available; and the role we play as companies adopt the continuous improvement method of marketing optimization and truly start listening, engaging and participating in a dialogue with customers.

John Hossack will be presenting a recent VKI Studios case study that focuses on marketing/landing page optimization. This case study will feature the use of web analytics and testing (in this case Google Analytics and Google’s Website Optimizer) and the importance of planning and process to maximize results.

This event is targeted at marketers, business owners and the like who want have an interest in marketing optimization, web analytics, and testing. Attendees will gain a solid understanding of the current state of the analytics arena from Jim and an appreciation of the benefits of becoming a data driven organization and the importance of planning and process from my from the VKI Studios case study.

Click here to register

Every time Gord Hotchkiss, President of Enquiro based in Kelowna (BC) Canada and also Chairperson of SEMPO, write an article, you can be confident that he is going to hit the nail right on the head. In his most recent article on Ad Agencies and Search Marketing, Gord mentions that Ad Agencies are far from “getting” search and follow search marketing best practices. Even when they include search, for as little as they do, they miss the mark by a mile. It is especially dramatic when it comes to budgeting for it. Media plans & budgets are based on arbitrary numbers which are not a reflection of comprehensive business objectives. According to Gord, “Search dollars should be the first ones in, not the last. Take as much search inventory as you can get. Judge your costs per acquisition not against your top performing keywords, but against your other channels, both online and offline. If even the marginal search traffic is generating a lower CPA, beg, borrow and steal as much budget as you can and top up search. Only then should you move from “pull” (prospects holding up their hands to purchase through search) to “push” (trying to persuade latent prospects to purchase). Only put restrictions on your search campaign if you’re absolutely certain that another channel can exceed its effectiveness.”

Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro

For a review of all the benefits for doing Search Marketing, budgeting for it as well providing a perspective on the utilization of search to reach branding objectives, take a minute to read the article.

If you want more, take a minute to read this: Search And the Digital CPG Shelf. It is about the utilization of Search Marketing for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), an area that has historically never used Search Marketing. The findings of the study are quite revealing and will convince the most skeptics.