For the first time in a good while, I managed to spend a few hours sitting in sessions here in London, re-absorbing some information and even picking up a few new bits here and there. Short post, but I figured if it's new/interesting to me, it might also be enjoyable to others (hopefully).

Lisa Ditlefsen opened a new consulting agency - Verve Search. She's the brains behind some genius campaigns, including Conde Nast Hotels' Johansens property, this embarassing tragi-comedy, SEO Chicks and much more (in her former role as Head of Search for Base One). Congratulations & best of luck, Lisa!

Lisa had a few interesting items of note during her chat on Universal Search:

• She pointed out that many folks using Google Analytics don't know how to separately track universal search results. To do so, you can create a filter based on the referring URL (universal results, this local one or this image one, for example, contain a unique piece in the URL string). The string to filter for is "oi=", which can refer to a number of items. More detail in this post from SearchCowboys (you can also apply this same logic to any analytics package).
• She also mentioned, briefly, that you can use vertical search results (videos, images, news results, etc.) as a great way to help with reputation management campaigns. This one should have been obvious, but I actually never considered it!
• During the session, Will and I wondered (via Twitter) if one could actually build a network to game Google's display of image search results...

Horst Joepen, CEO of SearchMetrics in Berlin, had some interesting stats to share based on their amalgamated rank tracking data (note that SearchMetrics' tool pulls from Google's results with 100 URLs displayed at a time) from December 2008 of 3.3 million keyword searches (that's a lot of tracking!):

• 29.9% of the results contained at least one video result
• They estimate that a video result in the top 10 pulls between 10-30% of the clicks from the page
• Of the video services, the shares (in Google SERPs) are YouTube (69%), Metacafe (11%), Google Video (7%)

Luisella Mazza from Google's Search Quality Team in Dublin also spoke on Universal and has some surprisingly good marketing tips (keep putting her on panels, Google):

• Google's video sitemaps let you map your own thumbnail images to videos, which can help create much more compelling images and thus, improve CTR in the SERPs for those doing video SEO.
• For image search optimization, Google has an image labeler in Webmaster Tools that you can enable if you don't have the time/bandwidth to do so yourself.
• A brilliant use of Google Local's more advanced functionality is to submit coupons along with your advanced listing to help boost traffic & sales (you can also submit images of your business that contain a coupon, which is pretty cool)

On the measuring success panel, several panelists made some keen insights worth repeating:

• John Marshall of Market Motive noted that a critical reason to track rankings (or at least good competitive data) is that it gives you a better sense of how you're performing from a share perspective. For example, you could be getting more search traffic but losing share because traffic overall in your sector (or for your keywords) is up, but you're actually under-performing next to the competition.
• John also noted that many people trust Google Analytics simply "because the graphs are pretty." Productizing SEMs; heed this call.
•  Another panelist noted that E-Benchmarkers, an anonymous peer rating service, can review your internal analytics and tell you how you perform in your given sector. Apparently, this is particularly applicable/useful in the world of finance.
• Onalytica - which measures "buzz" and brand mentions in the social media sphere, was also recommended as a high priced, but valuable service.

Unfortunately, that's all I've got for the day, but London has been terrific so far, particularly spending time with our partners, Distilled, whom I've neglected for far too long. I'm on a panel in 9 hours, so I need to run and attempt to banish my remaining jetlag, but will hopefully have more to share tomorrow.