"TimeBridge has been an extremely useful tool in helping to streamline our meetings by eliminating all the back and forth that traditionally takes place around scheduling," said long-time TimeBridge user Ian Strain-Seymour, director of product and service strategy at leading online marketing agency Apogee Search. "I am really excited that they are taking a broader approach to make it even easier for us to run more productive and efficient meetings." "
Bill Leake of Apogee Search tells us about the upsides and downsides of search that they have encountered in 2009, and how they have they have maintained their search campaigns with their clients.
SEO and PPC efforts can drive qualified traffic to your website, but in order to justify the time, effort, and expense, the site must be able to convert that traffic into either a lead or a sale. Different websites experience different obstacles, such as building trust, brand recognition, or simply experiencing high abandonment rates, and therefore require different solutions for improving conversion rates.
While tech-savvy consumers will download competing browsers, notably Firefox, or switch the default search engine on Internet Explorer to Google or Yahoo, consumers who are older, less educated or recent immigrants are more likely to use the default engine when they launch Internet Explorer on a new PC, says Bill Leake, CEO of search marketing firm Apogee Search.
New Enhancements Center Upon Specific Placement and Associated Measurement of Contextual Image Ads on Google
SAN MATEO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SearchForce announced today that it’s the first search engine marketing and bid optimization company to add support for content-rich image ads. SearchForce’s intelligent SEM management platform now allows users to dictate specific placement of image ads within Google’s network...
2009 has thus far been the year of innovation in regards to search engine marketing. The ever growing popularity of Twitter and its newly introduced Twitter Search has since opened the flood gates of what is now referred to as “Real-Time Search."
Consumer shopping habits are ever evolving, especially online, and more so in uncertain economic times. So what is the next “big thing” for reaching buyers online? Many search engine marketers are favoring local search...
Now more than ever, marketers are hyper-focused on getting the most out of their lead generation investments. Here are nine quick tips to give your current online campaigns a boost and get the highest quality leads coming to your website. For the most part, these techniques can be implemented fairly easily, and are highly effective at maximizing your campaign ROI.
Bill Leake, the CEO and Founder of Apogee Search, is one of those Austinites who can, and has, demonstrated that he could thrive anywhere but chooses to make Austin his home because of its unique character and creative mix. He’s not only a leader in our local community, he is known around the country as an expert in the interactive space including search engine optimization, paid search advertising and website effectiveness.
Driving traffic to your website is only half the battle. Your site also needs to be constructed to convert those visitors into leads or sales. A valuable first step to making your website more effective is to utilize Google Website Optimizer. Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that website owners can use to determine the most effective combination of content on their site through a variety of tests. The results from these tests can then be used to maximize conversion rates among existing traffic to your site.
The Bing technology and presentation will mean consumers see a significantly different results page than they see today in Google, says Bill Leake, CEO of search marketing firm Apogee Search. Based on sample screen shots that have been circulating online since Microsoft employees started testing the new search engine in March, when it was known by the code name Kumo, Leake says Bing is likely to make use of the semantic search technology Microsoft acquired last year when it bought a company called Powerset.
In Austin, Apogee Search are the pros. CEO Bill Leake did a fantastic presentation on search engine marketing with way too much advice to write in a single blog post… but here’s one incredible tip he shared...
Now more than ever, marketers are hyper-focused on getting the most out of their lead generation investments. Here are nine quick tips to give your current online campaigns a boost and get the highest quality leads coming to your website. For the most part, these techniques can be implemented fairly easily, and are highly effective at maximizing your campaign ROI.
Apogee Search's CEO Bill Leake highlights the importance of integrating online marketing initiatives and business goals.
"To accomplish our ultimate business goals, the focus needs to move beyond simply counting clicks and their sources. Each lead and every source of traffic needs to be analyzed to see where to best spend our time and resources. This process involves taking our analytics data and weaving it into the very fiber of our business models. "
Increasingly, people are using search engines as their first source of information. Nearly half (49%) of all US Internet users use search engines on a typical day, according to a Pew Internet study.
But for promoting events, search engine optimization (SEO) may not be the first marketing channel that comes to mind—and rightly so. SEO campaigns can take months to prove effective, and most events, unless they are annual or seasonal, do not have the time to build a successful SEO strategy.
Some searchers place more trust in the organic results from search engine optimization; while for others, paid search is more effective and measurable. Our experts, William Leake, CEO of Apogee Search, and Ken Saunders, President of Search Engine Experts, assess both.
Brian Combs, Senior VP, Apogee Search touched on the vertical search types including video, local, image and blog.
"It's not all text anymore. We're now looking at rich media experiences," said Combs. Vertical listings are often more prominent and accessible to all searchers. Many verticals are less competitive and help with reputation management.
Some might be surprised to hear this from a partner in a search marketing agency, but I don't recommend search engines as either your first or second source of online leads. The best source of leads online is word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing.
Analytics and Content and how they should be optimized in order for easy searchability and findability, plus guests Bill Leake, president and CEO, and Alissa Ruehl, manager of website effectiveness consulting for Apogee Search.
Do you have a paid search campaign that is on its last legs?
Perhaps your spending has spiraled out of control and your conversions haven't budged. Or, like many of us, maybe your performance is fine but your budgets have been slashed, forcing you to produce the same results with less spend.
Before you scrap everything and start from scratch, pull out this trusty first-aid kit for PPC campaigns.
From Apogee Search natural search specialist Lauren Perdue: "Ads will disrupt twhirl et al.; sub. model based on TPM rate. Doesn't punish occasional users & feeds off tweet addicts who won't mind paying." (OK, gang, I had to ask, too -- TPM is tweets per month.)
Apogee Search CEO Bill Leake said his company, a search engine optimization firm, grew 53 percent in 2008, adding about 25 clients.
Some of Apogee’s clients have been forced to scale back their interactive programs as their businesses have been hit by the recession, Leake said.
“The good news is that clients choosing to go with us this year are doing it with a lot of commitment. They are looking to us as a lifeline that gets them through the next 18 months,” Leake said. “It is now part and parcel of how to beat the recession.”
With more and more evidence of the spiraling economy all around them, marketing departments and firms everywhere are bracing for a hit.
Historically, marketing has been disproportionally on the receiving end of layoffs and budget cuts once a recession kicks in, but will this ring true for those in search engine marketing (SEM)?
Search engine optimization consultant and CEO of Apogee Search, William Leake said companies need to do several things to ensure safety. One of them is protecting the company name.
"Think about some of the other ways that people can misspell your business name and try to buy those as well," he said.
If not, Leake said scammers could purchase a Web address and do whatever they want to take a business's customers and harm its reputation.
Trademark bidding is a debated search strategy in which one company bids on its competitors' name or trademarked terms in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Google search “Ford F-150,” and ads for Toyota Tundra appear in addition to Ford.
Marketers are divided on this issue, as are the major search engines. Yahoo forbids it. MSN's rules state that you are not allowed to infringe trademarks within its editorial guidelines. Google allows advertisers to bid on trademarked search terms as long as the term is not used within the advertiser's ad copy.
Until the search engines and the industry come together to create standards around usage of trademarks in PPC campaigns, the decision is up to you.
Another great money-saving holiday tip for smaller e-commerce businesses, although it doesn't have to do with marketing, is to consider temporarily reassigning staff from other departments/areas to help out with fulfillment and shipping during the busy holiday season, instead of hiring temporary staff, said Brian Combs, the senior vice president and chief futurist a Apogee Search.
"Even seasonal employees have real costs," he pointed out. And by rotating employees into fulfillment duties, say, one or two days a week, you minimize hiring and maximize efficiency. The result: employees often welcome and feel invigorated by a temporary change in their day-to-day duties — and happier employees lead to happier customers and increased sales.
Google putting significant muscle behind content creation on Google-owned and Google-controlled Web sites theoretically threatens the objectivity of Google’s search results because Google sites are now competing with non-Google sites for higher rankings. Naturally, Google strongly argues that it does not grant any priority to Google-owned sites.
“Biased results? No way. Providing great search is the core of what we do. Business partnerships will never compromise the integrity or objectivity of our search results. If a partner’s page ranks high, it’s because they have a good answer to your search, not because of their business relationship with us,” wrote Google on its official blog following their partnership with AOL.
Description: We have had over a year now with the changes to the stock SERP, and it is clear that the 10 little blue link SERP isn't what it used to be. Today's SERP is more complex than ever. This session will examine today's SERP with its images, videos, stock quotes, weather and other entities, and explore how this can radically change SEO.
Session Notes:
Up first is Brian Combs...
Blasting throught the first few slides in order to get to the meat of the presentation.
Google says universal search is the largest revision they have made in the last few years. Brians feels this was done to increase their inventory. Users are roughly twice as likely to click on a vertical/blended search.
With more and more catalogers transitioning online, search marketing, in particular pay per click (PPC), has become essential to their marketing plans and budgets. At last week’s Search Marketing Expo East conference in New York City, a panel of search experts led a discussion on how to revive a failed PPC campaign. Here are some thoughts/observations/tips gleaned from that session.
* Many sites aren’t lacking for traffic, noted Alissa Ruehl, manager of paid search services at the online marketing services firm Apogee Search. But for the most part, it’s irrelevant traffic. The first step is to find irrelevant search terms in Google’s search query report. Then, when you find these terms, use them as negative keywords in all search engines, Ruehl advised. Try testing keywords in multiple match types on Google, she added. For Yahoo, adjust advanced match settings. These techniques can reduce unqualified traffic by 50 percent or more.
Bill Leake will be speaking at Innotech Austin on October 16th at the Austin Convention Center. A former McKinsey consultant and Dell veteran, Bill Leake draws on a deep expertise in both business and marketing to help increase revenues for a wide range of clients. He has been involved in driving provable revenues through Internet marketing techniques since the early 1990s when, as part of the management team at Power Computing, he built the first company to sell $1 million of product over the internet. Bill has guided Apogee Search from inception to its current position as the largest search engine marketing firm in the Southwest, and one of the 20 largest in North America.
Does this scenario sound familiar? You have an overwhelming amount of data. You are running a number of different campaigns and don’t know which campaigns are generating the leads your sales team loves and which campaigns are simply producing leads that end up just wasting their time. Often, information overload leads to confusion around what to measure and how to use that data to improve your online marketing programs.
After Frans, Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Paid Search Services at Apogee Search, took the podium. She brought the presentation back to the basics by outline 10 landing page ‘proverbs’ that every marketer should be aware of.
The complicated obstacles to achieving digital marketing and advertising nirvana are unchanged. All opening speakers agreed there is a dire need for more accurate, actionable metrics, as well as greater interactivity with consumers. "It's not enough to be marginally better than Google," quipped keynote panelist William Leake, president and CEWO of Apogee Search.
Early this year, “Recession-Proof Marketing” was the buzzword of the minute. Now, into Q3 2008, online marketers are finding that the recession is not affecting their budgets as much as they thought and are continuing to push those marketing dollars to online initiatives. However, the scare did one notably good thing to the industry – it forced companies to take a deeper look into their return on investment. It was a significant shift in the move toward accountability in online marketing.
2008.06.20 | Bulldog Solutions blog posting on Interactive Austin Beware the Zealot
Some good info, although a surprisingly low-tech setup, at yesterday’s Interactive Austin 2008. Great observation came from Bill Leake, CEO of Apogee Search. (Come to think of it I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bill Leake speak at a conference and not have something insightful and useful to say.)
The topic was Integrating New Media into Your Marketing Plan. The specific discussion was around how to get up to speed on social media tactics and decide which ones might suit your organization’s goals, and what to look for if you’re outsourcing some or all of this. Bill’s main point, and I think it’s a really good one for companies exploring these tactics to remember, was: Look for a marketing company that can guide you on social media, not a social media “expert” (actually I think he used the word “zealot”) to put together a marketing plan.
Search engine marketing group Apogee Search is heading north of the border.
Austin-based Apogee says it will open an office in Toronto, Canada to reinforce its relationships with several Canadian companies and expand its reach in that market. The new operation will open in September.
This is the third new office for Apogee this year. In January the company opened a satellite in San Francisco and followed that up in April with an office in Chicago. So far, both of those operations have exceeded revenue and profitability projections, the company says.
Apogee Search CEO William Leake compares reputation management and crisis management, and explains how companies can effectively influence how the world perceives them in today's dynamic Web 2.0 world.
Trademark bidding is a debated search strategy in which one company bids on its competitors’ name or trademarked terms in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Google search “Ford F-150,” and ads for Toyota Tundra appear in addition to Ford.
Marketers are divided on this issue, as are the major search engines. Yahoo forbids it. MSN’s rules state that you are not allowed to infringe trademarks within its editorial guidelines. Google allows advertisers to bid on trademarked search terms as long as the term is not used within the advertiser’s ad copy.
Until the search engines and the industry come together to create standards around usage of trademarks in PPC campaigns, the decision is up to you.
Session Intro: When paid search results in leads, are you keeping track of them in an organized, efficient manner? This session looks at integrating leads with Salesforce, ensuring that leads related to search but happening offline get properly tracked and other issues related to lead management.
Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land is moderating this session along with Chris Winfield, President & Co-Founder of 10e20 doing the Q&A moderating. Speakers include Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of ClearSaleing, Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Paid Search Services at Apogee Search, John Tawadros, Chief Operating Officer of iProspect and Lauren Vaccarello, Director of SEM and Analytics at FXCM.
Next up is Alissa. She asks what does your company really want to get out of its marketing effort. Most often it has to do with money. What then are you using to measure that success? All leads are not created equal. So how can you separate the wheat from the chaff.
“Google Checkout is phenomenally good for paid search,” says William Leake, founder and CEO of Apogee Search, of early tests. “There are so many paid search ads that look and read the same. So how do you stand out among the clutter? The Google Checkout icon pulls shoppers’ eyes in.”
Leake adds that smaller retailers can “borrow” Google’s brand appeal and trust to give shoppers more faith in an e-retailer with which they are unfamiliar.
Some search marketers agree. Bill Leake, CEO of search marketing firm
Apogee Search, says Panama overall is better than AdCenter. But others tell a
different story.
Pay per click (PPC) search marketers are faced with an increasingly challenging task: analyzing the multitude of performance reports available to help optimize campaigns. Web analytics tools and PPC reporting features are becoming more sophisticated, offering savvy marketers vital insights into what’s working, what’s not and what needs more effort to work efficiently. However, there is so much data available that it can become difficult to determine which data points to look at and which to ignore. TMI (too much information) can lead to either focusing on the wrong data, or not focusing on the data at all, because it’s overwhelming.
Search marketing firm Apogee reported a 17% increase in January in paid clicks from Google to its retail clients, mostly retailers of moderately priced goods like clothes and sporting goods. “We haven’t seen anything hit those sectors from a click perspective,” says Bill Leake, Apogee CEO.
Even after many years of clean business practices, a single negative event can stain your brand image in the public eye for a long time. Simple things like a negative product review in a blog can be detrimental to your brand, especially when competitors are standing close by to snatch up customers. One way to combat that threat is through a reputation management strategy, which can begin with search engine optimization.
At least one PayPerPost customer, search-engine-optimization firm Apogee Search, thinks the challenges will likely continue. Part of the problem, according to CEO William Leake, is that many posties provide little more value than linking to an advertiser's site. The number of links going to a site helps boost its PageRank with Google, but doesn't necessarily influence public opinion about a product.
"I think a large part of this change is going to be relatively permanent, and there will be constant challenges," Leake said.
Austin-based Apogee Search plans to expand its sales staff into Europe and to other parts of North America in the coming months.
President and CEO Bill Leake says the company will open five offices overseas and in Northern California and at other places still to be identified. A Boston office opened in August.
Apogee Search helps LifeSize Communications, a high-definition videoconferencing startup, to increase lead flow though a careful search engine marketing strategy.
As the search marketing industry has matured, the proliferation of data that must be monitored, managed and acted upon to keep an organization’s search campaigns running optimally can become overwhelming. And as the performance data piles up and your search strategy becomes more multifaceted, so does the need for tools that help manage it all.
“With frequent mentions in blogs across the Web, small businesses can increase their chances of coming up in keyword searches, boosting search engine optimization efforts,” Leake said. “Advertisers can sign on for as little as $10 per blog post and begin working directly with bloggers.”
Apogee executives knew they could never pour as much money into buying search keywords as big companies could. That's how some companies get noticed on the Web -- by offering search-engine companies the highest bid on keywords related to their business. Apogee decided to explore other, newer tactics, hitching a ride on the growing popularity of online communities, blogs and social networks to get people talking about its Web site.
A couple of months ago, Apogee Search had to undertake a search of its own -- one for larger space.
Due to an increase in its client base and the subsequent staff it's had to hire, Apogee Search -- a marketing firm that helps businesses benefit from online search engines -- is moving into a 7,000-square-foot office at the Echelon Building, located at 9430 Research Blvd. in Northwest Austin, in mid-July.
Apogee Search CEO Bill Leake was featured as the search engine marketing expert this morning on CNBC's Squawk Box.
2006.04.28 | Austin Business Journal Search engine savvy Businesses turn to Google in a quest to reach more customers
Bill Leake, CEO of Apogee Search, a division of Austin-based Leads Customers Growth LLC, says businesses must have user-friendly Web sites.
"You also have to take a good look at your product," he says. "It might be a great product, but pricing is prohibitive or the product is too specific to translate to Web marketing."
Bill Leake, chief executive of Apogee-Search.com, a consultancy firm in Austin, said links are still the key to impressing Google. He advises businesses to take a two-step approach to boosting their Google rank. First, they should test search terms related to their business by purchasing Google ads for those words, which allows precise tracking of ad click-throughs and purchases. After learning which search words yield the best results on ads, businesses can hire a consultant to embed those terms into their sites and buy links relating to them.
Bill Leake, CEO of Leads Customers Growth, an advertising agency, also in an interview with OnlineMediaDaily, expressed his eagerness to test the service. "Really, the only limitation at this point is how rapidly the portals roll out pay-per-call," he said.
While the big search sites and pay-per-call technology companies are eager to see this market build, some advertisers are sad to see the secret start to get out, said William Leake, chief executive of Leads, Customers, Growth, a marketing consultancy based in Austin, Tex. Mr. Leake said one of his clients, a health care company that spends $70 million annually in direct marketing, had been buying pay-per-call ads since last year, but asked him not to disclose their name.
"They've been Hoovering up leads and they don't want competitors to start piling in and bidding up the prices," Mr. Leake said.
The service is especially appealing to small, local businesses that don't have a strong Web presence, Leake said. "It's particularly exciting for the small businesses that don't have Web sites [that are] optimized for collecting leads," he said. "I could be a local plumber or lawyer who could clean up with pay-per-call, even if my Web site would send people screaming to the mountains if they saw it."
2006.01.20 | Austin Business Journal An engine for growth Leads Customers Growth zeroes in on boosting Internet lead generation for its customers
"Pay-per-call will be huge. The question is, Who will be the big engine behind it?" says William Leake, CEO of Leads Customers Growth, an online marketing company that recommends Ingenio ads to some of its clients.
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"I have enjoyed working with Apogee since the launch of our website, PowerOverYourPain.com. We have seen wonderful results with their expertise in the last year. Our site has received top 10 rankings in several key terms. We have also seen great traffic generation from our search advertising. Thank you Apogee!"
Meredith Nguyen, Senior Marketing Manager
St. Jude Medical
Interview
