This year’s SES boasted record attendance with over 70 sessions dedicated to the world of search. This issue is dedicated to our team coverage – sorry, no Avenue A | Razorfish News Jackets – of top sessions including Local, Universal and Personalized Search, as well as a recap of the Cick Fraud Panel.

Because of the amount of information each session had, we’ll provide a brief synopsis here with a link over to a more full-length feature of the sessions covered.

Local Search

Wanna know how big local search will be? Perform a search for Westin New York and look at the page Google dedicates to a map listing. Notice how your eye is focused there and not as much on those revenue-generating AdWords?

Justin Sanger from LocalLaunch! and Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing provided the most useful insight into this market, as well as specific optimization that Joshua Palau covers in this Local Search Optimization Feature.

Universal Search

Do your Google results look a little different these days? In an effort to provide users with a mixture of news, video, and image results, Google launched Universal Search. For an in-depth overview of Universal Search, please read Ray Rosti’s Universal Search POV.

Associate Account Manager Jenny Popov provides an update on this heavily attended breakout session, and provides this Universal Search SES Recap.

Personalized Search

In an ode to sappy songs of the 70s, Personalized Search makes me think of The Carpenter’s “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Google has been employing personalized search results as part of the Organic listings, which provides users with results that are customized based on various patterns. If two people search for the word “Jaguar,” one may get car results while another may get information on the animal. Jenny Popov discusses the Personalized Search Breakout session at SES.

Search Account Manager Ali Manning attended this year’s Click Fraud panel. This year’s panel was a mix of advertisers, vendors, and the search engines, discussing various click fraud tools and the steps being taken to minimize this problem.

The engines took an interesting approach in focusing more on the quality of clicks rather than their validity. While they discussed their tools to detect and refund advertisers for invalid clicks, the approach seems to be focusing on evaluating a syndication partner’s value on the whole, and how to charge advertisers based on that value.

Ask.com and Yahoo! discussed discounting syndicated clicks based on conversion tracking as well as upcoming tools, such as domain reporting and exclusion for advertisers, to better understand and control where their clicks come from. Ask is implementing URL stuffing, which will allow marketers to include unique elements in a tracking URL, which can include match type, campaign IDs, etc. This would allow an advertiser more real time tracking of specific syndication partners.

The engines also cited greater visibility and accountability for advertisers. Live encouraged advertisers to pull click quality reports to see how many clicks they are not being charged for. Yahoo! stated that it discards 12-15% of clicks on the front end, but admitted that their system for advertisers to report suspicious click behavior needs improvement. Google presented how it errs on the side of caution when charging for click fraud, explaining that it has a high false positive rate to ensure malicious activity is accounted for.

While representatives from several companies heckled the engines during the session, and pressed concerns over visibility and accuracy, the engines stood firm that they are combating the problem of fraud in search engine marketing, and are taking a wider view to incorporate the quality of clicks into the CPC they charge.

There is seemingly no way to end click fraud; however, active campaign management and utilizing click tracking tools will help marketers manage this more effectively.

Our London office provides a feature article on the Yahoo! Panama release in Europe and how it is effecting clients.

Ray Rosti looks at some recent Google and Yahoo! activity in China as the giants battle for dominance.