Government in the Age of Web 2.0

New Report: The Blogging Revolution - Government in the Age of Web 2.0 Offers Tips & Best Practices for Public Sector Bloggers

Jun 19, 2007 20:18:32 GMT

In this new report, titled "The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0," commissioned by the IBM Center for the Business of Government, Dr. David C. Wyld, Maurin Professor of Management and Director of the Strategic e-Commerce/e-Government Initiative, Department of Management at Southeastern Louisiana University examines the phenomenon of blogging in the context of the public sector.

Wyld observes that blogging is growing as a tool for promoting not only online engagement of citizens and public servants, but also offline engagement. He describes blogging activities by members of Congress, governors, city mayors and police and fire departments in which they engage directly with the public. He also describes how blogging is used within agencies to improve internal communications and speed the flow of information.

Based on the experiences of the blogoneers, Wyld develops a set of lessons learned and a checklist of best practices for public managers interested in following in their footsteps. He also examines the broader social phenomenon of online social networks and how they affect not only government but also corporate interactions with citizens and customers.

The report examines the rise of blogging in the public sector, blogging options for public officials, the current state of blogging in government, case studies, a guide for public sector bloggers, tips for blogging by public sector executives, and some suggestions for possible metrics, as well as a look at the future of research on public sector blogging and many other topics.

A .pdf of the report can be downloaded here. Many thanks to Dr. Wyld for sharing this report with the Society.

Selling Web Advertising Space Like Pork Bellies

WSJ - The next big Internet race might turn the buying and selling of advertising space on Web sites into the online equivalent of the pork-bellies pit.

Over the past few years, a host of small companies has started electronic exchanges where advertisers and Web sites can buy and sell online advertising space. The companies, with names like Right Media Inc., AdECN Inc., Turn Inc. and ContextWeb Inc., have been an obscure sideshow to a broader battle over Internet advertising.

That's changing quickly. The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks.

Over time there will be "a handful of winners that build very high-tech marketplaces," predicts Jim Barnett, chief executive of San Mateo, Calif.-based Turn. "That's what we're trying to do; that's what Google is trying to do."

Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way -- through a salesperson -- or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space -- called "inventory" -- remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.

With ad exchanges, member advertisers specify the price they're willing to pay for a certain type of ad spot, such as a banner ad that will be viewed by a female in Boston. When a woman in Boston pulls up a Web page of an exchange member with a banner slot available, software assesses the exchange's offer. If the price offered is better than the site's minimum rate for that page and higher than what it can get from other sources, such as ads sold by its sales staff, the site will usually accept the exchange-brokered offer. The exchange's computers can then deliver the winning ad to be displayed as the Web page loads on the consumer's PC. The exchange immediately notifies the site if it doesn't have a buyer for the ad space, and the site can then put in a nonpaying house ad or try other means to unload it on the fly.

Web sites rely on data such as IP addresses -- identifiers for PCs connected to the Web -- to know the general location, gender and other characteristics of the Web surfer pulling up an ad. Sites also use cookies, small files stored on users' computers, to track their Web activity, such as recent searches. Web publishers say the cookies generally don't allow them or advertisers to know the actual identity of specific users -- and any data are made anonymous. But for a car maker who might want ads to be shown only to consumers who had previously visited auto sites or had done car-related Web searches, for example, the targeting such technology makes possible can be attractive. By bringing together a lot of ad sellers, exchanges can potentially help advertisers buy a larger quantity of such specifically targeted ads across different Web sites.

AdECN says it can complete an auction for the ads on a Web page in 12 milliseconds after a consumer clicks to pull it up. AdECN runs an exchange where 28 advertising networks, which purchase ad slots from many different sites and sell them at higher rates to advertisers, buy and sell ads.

Exchanges usually collect payments for ads and pass them along to the sites, taking a commission. Ads are generally priced per thousand times they're viewed by consumers, a unit known in the industry as CPM.

Online ticket seller StubHub in recent months started using exchanges and ad networks to spread its reach to sports and music fans on the Web. (Historically, the company used ads tied to Internet search results on Google to reach customers.) The exchanges have allowed StubHub to place ads on a broader universe of sites large and small that it never had used before. Some of those, including ads on Gawker, a gossip blog, and Internet radio station Accuradio, led to ticket sales, StubHub executives say.

In a few months of use, ad networks and exchanges "have already become material to our marketing mix," says Michael Janes, chief marketing officer at StubHub. He estimates the company now spends about 15% of its budget (up from zero at the beginning of the year) for display ads over networks and exchanges. There's still some disagreement over the actual differences between networks and exchanges. But many industry executives agree that transparent pricing and an open neutral marketplace where anyone can buy or sell ads are distinguishing characteristics of exchanges.

Q Interactive of Chicago this month started selling some ads on its sites through the Right Media exchange. And it believes that buying ads on other sites through the exchange, which it has begun doing as well, will offer a 20% to 30% better return on investment than its previous practice of going around and buying ads from different sites individually. "Right now if you want to do a media buy you have to buy on a lot of different networks and with a lot of different publishers," says Q Interactive CEO Matt Wise. "Theoretically, with an exchange, one technology platform can cover an enormous swath of the Internet."

Or so the big players hope. Yahoo thrust exchanges into the spotlight in April when it agreed to pay $680 million for the remaining 80% of Right Media, following a 20% stake it bought last October. Yahoo said that it wanted to own Right Media as a way to take a leadership role in promoting the exchange model. The company has been selling some ad space on its site through Right Media, and says it has seen increases of over 50% in prices for ad spaces sold through Right Media compared with what it brought in for them on its own.

The Right Media acquisition followed Google's $3.1 billion deal to purchase DoubleClick Inc., which is building an ad exchange. DoubleClick last week began conducting transactions for actual ads on the exchange it has been building.

David Rosenblatt, chief executive of DoubleClick, estimates exchanges could eventually handle 50% of all display ad sales. He compares the exchanges to auctions that Internet search providers like Google used to ignite search-related advertising several years ago. "I think the exchange concept will have the same impact on the display market," he says.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has started developing a prototype of an exchange and has also considered buying one of the start-ups, say people familiar with the company. Microsoft General Manager Joe Doran declined to give details but said Microsoft has been studying the exchange model and "what it would take to build an exchange." But, he said, "it's still very early for the exchange concept to really catch on and drive to large scale."

Indeed, if the dream is to have the same kind of impact on advertising that spot markets had on commodities and stock markets on equities, one or more exchanges will need a critical mass of buyers and sellers. As with stock markets, "liquidity" is key for the ad exchanges: the more participants, the greater the chance of finding buyers and sellers.

But with a bevy of exchanges large and small, the industry risks not having a critical mass of buyers and sellers on any one exchange to make a viable market. "That's the thing that's uncertain," says analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, Calif.

It's also unclear what percentage of their ads Web sites will be willing to sell through exchanges. Many industry executives say the exchanges are suited only for "remnant," or leftover ads and ad space that the biggest brands aren't interested in. Big advertisers generally want to have more control over where the online ads appear and who sees them.

With exchanges, "the underlying assumption to that is you're buying a commoditized product that anyone can sell you," says Steven Kaufman, senior vice president at Publicis Group SA's Digitas interactive agency. Many of the high-end ads that Digitas handles require human negotiation and tailoring before appearing on a Web site. "That's not coming through an exchange," he says.

Others disagree. Such high-end ads represent at most 10% of the ad market, counters AdECN CEO Bill Urschel. "And everything else is up for an exchange."

Survey Forecasts Increased Use Of Ad Networks

MediaPost - A NEW SURVEY OF DIGITAL media buyers and planners finds that 66% of advertisers plan to increase their use of online ad networks this year. In addition, 88% of respondents plan to use one--up from 77% in 2006.

The survey of 100 digital media buyers and planners was conducted by Collective Media, an online ad network. The survey found that while the use of ad networks and ad spending is growing, respondents indicated frustration over the number of ad networks and complexity of the marketplace.

For example, some 62% of the media buyers polled said there are currently too many ad networks. That said, only 17% of respondents maintained that all ad networks are pretty much alike.

"The ad network space is a cluttered and competitive arena. We wanted to learn more about it and how the use of ad networks is changing," said Joe Apprendi, CEO, Collective Media. The firm also sought to find out how it might lure more brand marketing dollars to its ad network. Currently, direct marketing budgets are responsible for the majority of revenues to ad networks.

The survey found that 80% of brand marketers are using ad networks for direct marketing purposes, while only 6% are using them for branding purposes. However, 40% are using ad networks for both direct and brand marketing purposes.

"That's a positive," Apprendi noted, adding: "As a result, they're not just measuring the performance on a pure conversion rate, but the interaction rate is becoming more important."

In addition, 20% of survey respondents considered affiliate marketing an alternative to ad networks and 18% considered e-mail an alternative, both tactics typically deployed by direct marketers.

Beyond that, 79% considered portals like AOL, MSN and Yahoo as an alternative to ad networks and 69% considered publishers an alternative.

"We found that ad networks aren't just being pigeonholed on a direct marketing basis alone," Apprendi said.

The survey indicated that 59% of agencies/advertisers limit their use of ad networks due to a perceived lack of editorial control including concerns over the types of ads being used and position, among other factors. In addition, 38% of respondents cited audience duplication caused by publisher overlap among ad networks as a major impediment to using networks.

When trying to determine what criteria makes one ad network different from another, more than 57% of respondents said that how an ad network targets audiences was the No. 1 differentiating factor. The survey found that reach (at 52%) and efficiency (at 66%) remain key drivers for why agencies/advertisers include ad networks in digital media plans.

The survey marks the first of a series of surveys Collective Media has planed to better understand how publishers and advertisers are using ad networks.

Online ad spending to grow fastest in Canada in next 5 years

Globe and Mail - Internet advertising is expected to grow faster in Canada than anywhere else in the world over the next five years, however countries in Asia and Latin America will begin quickly closing that gap soon after, a report suggests.

The annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook published by the consulting and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP predicts spending on Internet advertising in Canada will reach $2.03b (U.S.) by 2011.

That represents a compound annual growth rate of 23.5%. It is well ahead of the global rate of 13.4% and higher than in the United States, where Internet advertising revenue is forecast to grow 16.1% during that time.

Canadian ad spending online is being driven by the high percentage of broadband Internet users in Canada, which is higher than in most other parts of the world. Meanwhile, online advertising markets in Canada are not yet as saturated as in the United States.

"We have had higher broadband penetration rates than other countries around the world ... and we're now seeing a bigger shift in advertising revenue," said Tracey Jennings, leader of the entertainment and media practice for PwC in Canada.

Looking beyond 2011, however, countries like India and China are expected to make up a lot of ground on North America in terms of growth, Jennings said.

"What you're going to see over the next five years is the other countries' penetration rates are going to grow quite significantly. It just means we're kind of at the head of the curve."

The report predicts advertising trends between 2007 and 2011. It is watched closely by the broadcasting, print and online sectors each year as a gauge of global ad spending trends.

Over all, Canada's entertainment and media market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 5.6% over the next five years, hitting 46.8b in spending by 2011, an increase from $35.7b last year.

While Internet advertising will grow fastest, other industries will continue to expand. Radio and out-of-home advertising, such as billboards, will see revenue increase at a compound rate of 11.7% during that time, to $2.8b in 2011.

Ad spending on TV networks and cable channels in Canada is expected to increase to $4.6b, at a rate of 4.5%.

Print media will see slower rates of growth, with ad spending on magazines expanding at a compound annual rate of 1.8% to $1.5b. The newspaper industry will see compound annual growth of 1% in that time, to $3.2b.

User-gen content's ad revenue to surge 4 times in 4 years: report

eMarketer - The days of giant media conglomerates controlling the creation, distribution and monetization of content are fading. An explosion of user-generated content is reshaping the media landscape, shattering the status quo and creating new opportunities for marketers.

The User-Generated Content report analyzes the fast-changing new world of content ownership and distribution, where for the first time everyday people determine exactly what is created and consumed—not marketers or publishers.

Led by the companies that started the revolution—YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket and others—eMarketer estimates that US user-generated content sites will earn $4.3 billion in ad revenues in 2011, up from $1 billion in 2007.

CBCNews Partners with Technorati Bloggers

CBCNews.ca reports it is the world’s first broadcaster website to partner with leading blog and social media search engine Technorati.com.

Technorati currently tracks over 86 million blogs. In a new level of interactivity, CBCNews.ca stories now include direct links to blogs around Canada and the globe that are discussing the news. It is designed, the CBC says, to give Canadians more ways to access comprehensive news coverage of local, national and international stories.

As part of its continuous commitment to enhancing the web experience for users, the new service can be found at http://cbcnews.ca/blogwatch

The announcement comes on the heels of CBC's interactive experiment, carried out through one of Canada’s most popular social networking websites, called The Great Canadian Wishlist, where Canadians are encouraged to share their wish for the nation. CBC News also has its own “wishlist” web page at www.cbc.ca/wish, where visitors can follow the discussions through the CBC blog.

CBCNews.ca also reports launching several new features recently, including: an embedded media player highlighting CBC News audio and video; a much greater emphasis on interactive features; compilations of the most popular news stories, from the most viewed to the most blogged; wider pages allowing for more content; prominent placement showcasing original online feature stories (in-depths, columns and photo galleries) and additional on-air highlights and podcasts.

Online sales lose steam

NYT - Has online retailing entered the Dot Calm era?

Since the inception of the Web, online commerce has enjoyed hypergrowth, with annual sales increasing more than 25 percent over all, and far more rapidly in many categories. But in the last year, growth has slowed sharply in major sectors like books, tickets and office supplies.

Growth in online sales has also dropped dramatically in diverse categories like health and beauty products, computer peripherals and pet supplies. Analysts say it is a turning point and growth will continue to slow through the decade.

The reaction to the trend is apparent at Dell, which many had regarded as having mastered the science of selling computers online, but is now putting its PCs in Wal-Mart stores. Expedia has almost tripled the number of travel ticketing kiosks it puts in hotel lobbies and other places that attract tourists.

The slowdown is a result of several forces. Sales on the Internet are expected to reach $116 billion this year, or 5 percent of all retail sales, making it harder to maintain the same high growth rates. At the same time, consumers seem to be experiencing Internet fatigue and are changing their buying habits.

John Johnson, 53, who sells medical products to drug stores and lives in San Francisco, finds that retailers have livened up their stores to be more alluring.

“They’re working a lot harder,” he said as he shopped at Book Passage in downtown San Francisco. “They’re not as stuffy. The lighting is better. You don’t get someone behind the counter who’s been there 40 years. They’re younger and hipper and much more with it.”

He and his wife, Liz Hauer, 51, a Macy’s executive, also shop online, but mostly for gifts or items that need to be shipped. They said they found that the experience could be tedious at times. “Online, it’s much more of a task,” she said. Still, Internet commerce is growing at a pace that traditional merchants would envy. But online sales are not growing as fast as they were even 18 months ago.

Forrester Research, a market research company, projects that online book sales will rise 11 percent this year, compared with nearly 40 percent last year. Apparel sales, which increased 61 percent last year, are expected to slow to 21 percent. And sales of pet supplies are on pace to rise 30 percent this year after climbing 81 percent last year.

Growth rates for online sales are slowing down in numerous other segments as well, including appliances, sporting goods, auto parts, computer peripherals, and even music and videos. Forrester says that sales growth is pulling back in 18 of the 24 categories it measures.

Jupiter Research, another market research firm, says the growth rate has peaked. It projects that overall online sales growth will slow to 9 percent a year by the end of the decade from as much as 25 percent in 2004.

Early financial results from e-commerce companies bear out the trend. EBay reported that revenue from Web site sales increased by just 1 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year. Bookings from Expedia’s North American Web sites rose by only 1 percent in the first quarter of this year. And Dell said that revenue in the Americas — United States, Canada and Latin America — for the three months ended May 4 was $8.9 billion, or nearly unchanged from the same period last year.

“There’s a recognition that some customers like a more interactive experience,” said Alex Gruzen, senior vice president for consumer products at Dell. “They like shopping and they want to go retail.”

The turning point comes as most adult Americans, and many of their children, are already shopping online.

Analysts project that by 2011, online sales will account for nearly 7 percent of overall retail sales, though categories like computer hardware and software generate more than 40 percent of their sales on the Internet.

There are other factors at work as well, including a push by companies like Apple, Starbucks and the big shopping malls to make the in-store experience more compelling.

Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies retailing and consumer habits, said that the leveling off of e-commerce reflected the practical and psychological limitations of shopping online. She said that as physical stores have made the in-person buying experience more pleasurable, online stores have continued to give shoppers a blasé experience. In addition, online shopping, because it involves a computer, feels like work.

“It’s not like you go onto Amazon and think: ‘I’m a little depressed. I’ll go onto this site and get transported,’ ” she said, noting that online shopping is more a chore than an escape.

But Ms. Koehn and others say that online shopping is running into practical problems, too. For one, Ms. Koehn noted, online sellers have been steadily raising their shipping fees to bolster profits or make up for their low prices.

In response, a so-called clicks-and-bricks hybrid model is emerging, said Dan Whaley, the founder of GetThere, which became one of the largest Internet travel businesses after it was acquired by Sabre Holdings.

The bookseller Borders, for example, recently revamped its Web site to allow users to reserve books online and pick them up in the store. Similar services were started by companies like Best Buy and Sears. Other retailers are working to follow suit.

“You don’t realize how powerful of a phenomenon this new strategy has become,” Mr. Whaley said. “Nearly every big box retailer is opening it up.”

Barnes & Noble recently upgraded its site to include online book clubs, reader forums and interviews with authors. The company hopes the changes will make the online world feel more like the offline one, said Marie J. Toulantis, the chief executive of BarnesandNoble.com. “We emulate the in-store experience by having a book club online,” she said.

The retailers that have started in-store pickup programs, like Sears and REI, have found that customers who choose the hybrid model are more likely to buy additional products when they pick up their items, said Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

Consumers are generally not committed to one form of buying over the other. Maggie Hake, 21, a recent college graduate heading to Africa in the fall to join the Peace Corps, said that when she needs to buy something for her Macintosh computer, she prefers visiting a store. “I trust it more,” she said. “I want to be sure there’s a person there if something goes wrong.”

Ms. Hake, who lives in Kentfield, Calif., just north of San Francisco, does like shopping online for certain things, particularly shoes, which are hard to find in her size. “I’ve got big feet — size 12.5 in women’s,” she said. “I also buy textbooks online. They’re cheaper.”

John Morgan, an economics professor from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said he expected online commerce to continue to increase, partly because it remains less than 1 percent of the overall economy. “There’s still a lot of head room for people to grow,” he said.

Title tags, image filenames, headline tags affect Google rank: study

The German company Sistrix analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?

Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

• Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.
  
  
• Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don't seem to have an effect.
  
  
• Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
  
  
• Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
  
  
• Keywords in the file path don't seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
  
  
• The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
  
  
• It's no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

Can you use that information to get high rankings for your own website?

While general advice can help you to get higher rankings, it is much better to get detailed advice specifically for your website and your keywords.

It might be that your keywords trigger slightly different ranking filters at Google and that the algorithms have been changed since Sistrix performed the study.

Online ads go go go

Keywords: speak your audience's language

Clickz By Fredrick Marckini January 24, 2005 - It's amazing how many marketers fixate on their site's HTML, believing that's where solutions to their search engine marketing (SEM) challenges are found. But they're looking inward when they need to be looking outward.

At a recent industry conference, I provided SEM assessments for Web sites belonging to audience volunteers. Participants invited me to review the sites in front of the other conference attendees and offer suggestions about how to initiate, or improve, their SEM campaigns.

Every brave volunteer's natural inclination was to immediately dig into their sites. That was the last place I wanted to look. It's as though marketers think their Web sites are the focus of their SEM campaigns. They're not. The audience is.

Many marketers worry about how they can attain top ranking without first understanding how their audience searches and where in search results they click. Consider these actual assessments I performed for the audience.

Home Healthcare Monitoring

One volunteer's company offers a system that remotely monitors certain medical conditions, allowing patients who would otherwise be in the hospital to rest comfortably at home. I asked the marketer to name the most important keyword her SEM campaign should target. The reply: "Home healthcare monitoring."

First, I searched for that phrase on the home page. Nothing. Clearly, this highlights a huge challenge.

Next, I used Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. This tool determines how many searches were performed on a keyword in the previous month. I input "home healthcare monitoring." Overture reported not one single search was performed on that term in the previous 30 days -- an even bigger challenge.

"Home healthcare monitoring" is an industry term. Sellers of these sorts of solutions use it to describe what they sell. As is too often the case, it's not how the audience describes it.

Users think about these services in terms of "medical alert," "alarms," and "systems." That the devices are installed in the home apparently isn't as important to them; they're interested in the systems' response features.

Some keywords that were searched:

• "Personal emergency response"
  
  
• "Medical alert systems"
  
  
• "Medical alert system"
  
  
• "Medical monitoring"
  
  
• "Medical alarm systems"
  
  
• "Medical alert devices"
  
  
• "Medical alert alarm"

Next I looked at Overture's View Bids tool. "Medical alert systems" has multiple bidders; the current high is a whopping $14 per click. "Personal emergency response" is selling for over $3 per click. How do we know we zeroed in on the right language? There were clues.

First, "home healthcare monitoring" had zero or low-query volume. It also had no paid search advertising bidders. "Medical alert system" was queried more frequently. It had multiple bidders and a high bid price (suggesting it's valuable to competitors).

This problem is more common than you might think. Marketers think of solutions in their own terms, not in their audience's terms.

Here's my favorite example: A major bank's executives recently asked me to ensure their site could be found on every search for "lending" because they're one of the world's largest "lending" institutions. I pointed out what I thought would be obvious: Their audience wants to "borrow." Smiles slowly formed on their faces. They got it.

Ring Tones

Another assessment I performed was for a large telecom. It's active in a number of markets, including data, cellular service, and local and long distance services. I was asked to review a wireless product's Web site.

I asked the audience what keywords should matter to this company. Someone shouted out "cell phone." Someone else suggested "calling plans." Then, I heard it. Some smart marketer blurted out, "the brand!"

Yup.

Big brands often find their branded keywords are the most important and enjoy the highest click-through and conversion rates. Again, I referred to Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. The most frequently searched term was the brand name and the phrase "cell phone." But the second most frequently searched term was a surprise to everyone. It was the brand name paired with "ring tones."

I asked the marketer if ring tones were a profitable business. He assured me they are. Yet the phrase "ring tones" was buried deep in the site. I searched Google and Yahoo for the company name with "ring tones." Dozens of other companies showed up in the search results but not this major brand.

Though the company is engaged in paid search advertising, no one thought to bid for this keyword phrase or to feature it on the home page, even though the keyword included the brand and was the second most frequently searched branded term.

To experienced search marketers, these examples seem simple and intuitive. To others, especially those new to SEM, they aren't intuitive at all.

Before focusing on your site's HTML, first look closely at how your audience searches. How they search is probably different than what you'd expect. Looking inward instead of outward can leave a lot of money on the table.