David Frishman is an experienced marketing professional who’s been around the online industry for a while. As familiar with technical points of online marketing as he is with the mindsets of some of its tougher cookies, he has a savvy view of the business. We spoke over the phone and by email some months ago, and this is what he shared.
David Fishman – Vringo Phone Video Sharing
What do you think of outsourcing search marketing services?
“Outsourcing is cost-efficient.”
When he breaks it down on a spreadsheet, the challenge is that if you want to push envelope on ROI, you can’t incentivize individuals as opposed to an agency.
For instance, having a 120K contract with a bonus to get more commitment. The idea being to use a sliding scale based on increase in ROI. This pushes down overall spend.
FYI, David has had both some inhouse and some outsourced building. A variety of departments contributed.
What are the pros and cons you see to bringing organic / paid search marketing inhouse? What is your current situation?
The advantage of in-house search marketing is that the “knowledge is easily (or more easily) transferred and documented. The challenge is that finding someone that wants to only do PPC or SEO for a single product – it can get somewhat boring.”
Vringo currently outsources this work, however the firm acts as a direct extension of the company.
Do you build tools inhouse to help with your SEO/SEM. If so, what do they do / what do you use them for?
“We build tons of analytics tools to help understand what keywords drive traffic, what value these have, what ads convert etc. The primary use of all of our tools is to
1) Increase quality score,
2) decrease cost per click,
3) Increase conversion
4) Increase organic rank.
Everything drives to these metrics.”
Which search marketing trade shows you personally attended inthe past year, and which ones did your team members go to?
“I can’t even remember all of them. SES for sure, Adtech, and a bunch of others.”
He used to attend shows for knowledge, but now it’s more about the networking. “It depends on where you’re at in your business life.”
Do you experiment with your SEO campaigns? With your SEM campaigns? Can you share any case studies and results?
We do experiment like crazy.
One of the major changes recently has been with the concept of universal search; this has reaffirmed my belief, which I’ve had since a number of years back, that ALL content on the web is important and how that is connected will affect your organic rankings.
Within SEM we have done some very aggressive A/B testing and optimized accordingly. The big key here is your landing page. It is critical to success.
Do you survey your customers regarding influences on their buying choice? If so, what form does it take?
For Vringo we are just beginning this.
Have you bought sites for SEO before? How did that go? Did theykeep getting as much organic traffic as they had been earlier? Howdid the site change, if at all, after you bought it?
NA
Has your site ever been the target of DOS/DDOS attacks? how did your IT team handle it? Any impact on SEO/M?
Vringo has not. In other situations yes. This is a sticky one to answer. [We discussed the rest of this off the record.]
Eric Quanstrom Vp Marketing SightSpeed Video Chat
Eric is also a knowledgeable internet marketer, and he’s in a unique positionand I began our chat with him filling me in on what Sightspeed does and its new partnership with Dell.
There’s been huge growth in this segment, according to Eric – lots of year-over year growth. He would know, since Sightspeed’s been around this area of video since 2003.
The “biggest barrier to entry for any customer is having a webcam.” From 03 to 07 people talking about video chats were about tethered webcams. When you force mainstream user to try and change their behaviour, buy webcams and get software, you lose lots of folks.”
Eric continued to cite Jeff Moore. “Lots of technologies don’t ‘cross the chasm’ because of these barriers.”
Apple led with embedded icams and ichat software. That was a fundamental change. Fast-forward to 08 – OEMs are going to embed these in 75% of laptops!” [Hello Youtube turning a profit as even more users create and upload videos! Not to mention that this rising tide in video will likely make Vringo more succesful too!
The number of companies in the space is booming. It’s a hot space. Ebay, via Skype, Microsoft and others are all competing.
What are some of your most effective ads?
We focus on the message that Sightspeed is video chats made easy, and use a freemium model. A conversion is a download/install. Then we work on keeping quality up.
It’s a virtuous circle – folks adopt, use [and then there are referrals to others?].
The last Youtube campaign Sightspeed did was 3-4 months ago. It worked effectively.
[If memory serves, the following was in relation to questions on buying sites for SEO.]
Dellvideochat.com [a domain, not a site] was bought after signing the term sheet with Dell. It’s been 301 redirected to – sightspeed.com/dellvideochat. “A lot more searches are occurring for Dell video chat now. Before june 26th when we launched, there was a small result set [in the search results]. Now it’s 1.63 million results!
What are the pros and cons you see to bringing organic / paid search marketing inhouse, and what is your current situation?
“We have had both in-house and agency led SEO/SEM. Currently, we handle our campaigns in-house. Broadly, here are pros and cons:
“Pros: Control, implementation flexibility, lessons learned (best practices) [stick with the organization], longterm cost [is lower, assuming the inhouse SEO sticks around]
“Cons: Expertise [is inferior], shortterm cost [is greater], resource allocation [i.e. you’re using human resources that could be used elsewhere]”
Do you build tools inhouse to help with your SEO/SEM? If so, what do they do / what do you use them for?
We use a number of the tools provided by Google. We also have a Google account team, plus we use some of the free analytics services out there—including Quantcast.
Which search marketing trade shows have you personally attended in the past year, and which ones did your team members go to?
[I] went to no specific search marketing shows, but attended most search marketing tracks at Web 2.0 and other conferences.Do you experiment with your SEO campaigns? With your SEM campaigns?
Yes to both.
Can you share any case studies and results?
“We’ve recently shifted many of our SEM text ads to rotate between our various portfolio products:
· SightSpeed Free http://www.sightspeed.com/
· SightSpeed PLUS http://www.sightspeed.com/personal
· Dell Video Chat powered by SightSpeed http://www.sightspeed.com/dellvideochat
· SightSpeed Business http://www.sightspeed.com/business
We’ve seen a definite spike in click-thrus from playing around with different messaging, and even simply cleaning out keywords that do not perform (negative keywords have played a role here).
For example, in our business —video chat— a number of webcam porn sites proliferate with slightly overlapping keyword traffic tied to specific keyword combos, which have little to do with the legitimate operation of the SightSpeed service. Simply getting rid of known keywords / keyword combos that lead to traffic uninterested in our “clean” services, we’ve increased qualified click-thru’s which are better able to convert for us.
Do you survey your customers regarding influences on their buying choice? If so, what form does it take?
Yes. Form-based recipient survey (KeySurvey).
Have you bought sites for SEO before? How did that go?
We have not bought sites specifically for SEO, but SEO was a consideration. It went well. Having a large footprint (wider funnel) has never hurt traffic figures, in my experience.
Did they keep getting as much organic traffic as they had been earlier? How did the site change, if at all, after you bought it?
Most sites we have purchased have been new-to-the-world (unregistered). [Domain names.]
Has your site ever been the target of DOS/DDOS attacks? How did your IT team handle it? Was there any impact on SEO/M?
“Yes. Our Engineers have mitigated damage and averted crises such that they have not impacted SEO/M.
“Lots of folks try to hack into that service/or the site. It’s not unique to our company – Skype and MSN see it too. Apparently Yahoo gave up this business largely because of these types of attacks.”
