SMX — East 2009 in New York was packed with three insightful days of marketing sessions. The overall session content was strong, with local, mobile, social media and conversion attribution emerging as the expo’s hot topics. And while these topics were each granted their own sessions at the conference, we marketers must not lose sight of the growing need for integration of strategy that begins with testing new and emerging opportunities. No doubt, this is an exciting time in the online industry, with words like “tweet” becoming common vocabulary verbs and visitor volumes occurring in new vehicle types. Chances are that what we currently define as “search” will look much different 12 months from now.

With that in mind, I summarized SMX by topic (below) and indicated under each the main lessons learned and what we can expect in the future:

Mobile Search

• What’s Now:

1. High interest but low volume.
2. Google is now showing mobile search ads in it’s mobile maps applications. Both Google and Yahoo! show them in their mobile Web searches. Yahoo! is converting search advertisers into mobile advertisers.
3. Smartphone growth is increasing, changing the ways in which people use the mobile Web.
4. Many sites are not compatible with the mobile Web.
5. Advertisers are trying to test (but not always as a stand-alone strategy).
6. The reality of mobile devices is that a large percentage of users who do not have smartphones are limited in what they can see on the screen. Typically, no more than two paid ads appear on the screen simultaneously.

• What’s Next:

1. Mobile search volume will grow as smartphone usage continues to increase.
2. Mobile marketers must achieve optimization of user experience — ensuring mobile-specific sites and landing pages, as well as testing ad copy and site views across various mobile layouts, better tracking of mobile marketing and determining offline performance impact (e.g. call tracking, mobile coupons, etc.).
3. Redefine relevancy/quality score formulas in mobile as advertiser volume grows.
4. Move to the long tail, as advertisers attempt ways to increase volume and conversions.

Use of Trademark Names in Search

• What’s Now:

1. Each engine has slightly different policies surrounding the use of third-party trademarks as keywords or in ad copy within paid search.
2. Complaint procedures exist for advertisers within each engine, based on the respective engine’s specific policies.
3. It is often up to advertisers to take action against infringing companies, as guidelines are somewhat loose.
4. “Black hat” tactics are in play, as affiliates sometimes try to hide their third-party-trademark usage from their own advertisers (e.g. geo-targeting exclusions, copying a company’s ad text, etc.).

• What’s Next:

1. Expect an increase in trademark monitoring services and technologies to help identify offenders.
2. Potential for legislation exists to standardize definitions and policies across search engines.
3. Looser policies are in effect outside the U.S. Just this year, Google opened up the ability to buy third-party-trademark names as keywords in many countries outside of North America, a practice previously prohibited.
4. Develop global recognition of trademark registration. Currently, trademarks registered in one country are not necessarily recognized as registered by other countries.

Local Search and Technologies

• What’s Now:

1. SMBs represent the fastest growing advertiser segments.
2. Scalability is an issue. SMBs often lack access to resources that help execute search programs in strategic ways, including testing, tracking and optimization.
3. Adoption is still somewhat low.

• What’s Next:

1. SMBs continue to get more sophisticated, moving away from visibility as a KPI and moving toward conversion.
2. Develop practices and platforms to help scale small-budget programs and optimize them.
3. Explore new models for SMBs that will make it easier to buy and understand (e.g. Google’s recent announcement that it was beta testing flat-fee placements in paid search).

Social Media and Search

• What’s Now:

1. Heavy users of social media are also heavy searchers, according to comScore.
2. A large percentage of social media users continue to be younger, heavy Internet users, and more affluent than the general population.
3. Advertisers are trying to test social platforms; however, many are doing this as a “burst” strategy where initiatives decrease over time.
4. Social media is helping build consideration and awareness of brands.

• What’s Next:

1. Integrate strategies among paid search, organic search, and social media, with means of measuring the impact of one on the others.
2. Develop long-term social media strategies, and deliver consistently fresh content with a unified marketing message.
3. Increase the use of social media vehicles by older and less-affluent demographic segments.
4. Identify and test multiple social media types to determine where the fits are for specific advertisers. Twitter and Facebook may not be the “right” opportunities for every industry or business type.
5. Increase paid advertising opportunities in the social space.

Analytics and Conversion Attribution

• What’s Now:

1. Last-click attribution is prevalent among a majority of advertisers.
2. Multiple tracking technologies are used across agencies or publishers, potentially duplicating reporting of online conversion data.

• What’s Next:

1. Emerging technologies with advanced capabilities track cross-channel and cross-publisher attribution (universal tagging-capability refinement).
2. Develop models at the advertiser level to determine important online and offline touch points, and assign levels of credit to each touch point.