Quality Score is King in the Land of Generics

The issue of quality score has been receiving even more press than usual of late.  Unsurprisingly the consensus is that click through rate (CTR) is king.  We all know the ins and outs of maximising your CTR to ensure the core generics and brand terms get maximum traffic for minimum cost, but how do we get the mid to long tail performing well?

No Sandbox for the Long Tail

When a keyword with low traffic volumes is launched it takes far longer for you to prove its worth to Google.  We often see high volume terms appearing surprisingly high in the rankings when they are newly launched, before bedding down to a normal level.  This is the paid search version of the ’sandbox’ where Google can quickly assess whether your ad is any good and assign a true quality score pretty quickly.  For the less popular terms though Google doesn’t rely on this method, rather it takes the word history from everyone else’s campaigns.  In this way if you have an obscure term albeit relevant to your account, if everyone else has used it poorly in their campaigns your quality score is likely to be low.  Unfortunately the only way to combat this is to raise the bids… 

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An interesting new study by the guys over at Catalyst Group shows that although users like Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, they are unlikely to switch.  From a usability focus group of 12 (expected to capture 80-90% of issues), after using both engines 8 said they preferred Google while 4 said they liked Bing.  That being despite the fact that 82% preferred Bings design, 64% preferred Bings organisation of features and another 64% preferred Bings refinement and filtering options.  With regards to relevance of results, the majority of users thought both engines preformed equally well.  I think  this goes to show how entrenched Google has become in our thinking when it comes to search.  Even though Microsoft won 3 out of the 4 tests and tied the last, two thirds of users were unprepared to switch.  After all, we no longer search for something, we Google it!

What I found particularly insightful, was in seeking out participants for this study the researchers were unable to find anyone who hadn’t heard of Google, but none of the participants had heard of Bing.  Granted it’s a new engine, but it just goes to show the marketing mountain Microsoft has to climb if it wants to even get close to knocking Google off the top spot (although I’m sure having $100 million to throw at the problem won’t hurt!)

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Over the past week I have seen the SERPS in the UK fluctuate massively, with sites coming into the top 10 for a couple of hours or even a day and then returning to outside the top 30. This has been happening for a number of terms such as ‘flights’, ‘hotels’ and ‘travel insurance’. The SERP I have most closely been monitoring is the ‘car insurance’ SERP with sites jumping in to the bottom 3 listing of the first page for a day and then back out. Some examples of this are:

Diamond:

Coming in from outside the top 30 and ranking in position 9 on Wednesday. Bell and Elephant also coming in from outside the top 30 and ranking in position 9 and 10 on Thursday:
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The Federal Trade Commission wants power over bloggers who fail to declare their commercial interests a move that fails to recognise the ruthlessly democratic nature of content popularity on the web and the ‘connectedness’ of its consumers.

Yes, as a journalist, a failure to disclose a conflict of interest was not just wrong from a legal standpoint but against the very essence of journalism, which, even in the business press, we liked to think was to unearth and fully reveal ‘the truth’.

And, yes, bloggers, in contrast, come from all walks of life and, in many cases, are driven by an imperative far removed from such pompous ideals. Most often, the imperative is commercial, whether to build a profile, increase a site’s SEO ranking, or, even - as a ‘media owner’ and affiliate - drive traffic and sales to advertisers.

And, true, most often - since this is not formal ‘publishing’ - there are no clear boundaries between commercial and editorial, which means that the editorial output can be indistinguishable from a blog’s commercial needs.

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Photo credit: by Kris Kros

Since its launch around 3 weeks ago there has been a lot of industry buzz and discussion about Bing’s pros and cons, whether the results are any good, and generally if it is actually any better than MSN’s previous incarnations. Read Jonny’s to Bing or not to Bing post for a more general overview. The consensus seems to be it is better, not just in appearance but also usability and effectiveness.

From a paid search perspective however we are really not that bothered by all this - we simply want to know if it gives ROI!

With this in mind I’ve taken conversion and click data from the past 3 weeks and compared it to the previous three weeks on MSN/Bing - and some trends have shown up already.

As impressions and spend will vary according to budget allocation and other factors, I’m more interested in the cost-per-click, cost-per-order and sale/lead conversion rate.

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Image credit: by nolanisan

Last week Yahoo! announced that their search engine would be supporting the Common Tag – a recently released new tagging format for Web pages, to go alongside their Search Monkey functionality. Publishers will be able to use these new semantic tags to make their content more “discoverable, connected and engaging”.

What is a Common Tag?

Tags have been used for a long time to organise  content online. However, in the absence of a common tagging format for Web content, the benefits of tagging have been limited. Individual things like New York City are often represented by multiple tags (e.g., “nyc”, “new_york_city”, and “newyork”), making it difficult to organize relatedl content; and it isn’t always clear what a particular tag represents - does the tag “jaguar” represent the animal, the car company, or the operating system?

Common Tags are defined using RDFa, a standard format for expressing structured data within HTML.

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The SEO industry has been awash with lively discussion since SMX Advanced in Seattle a couple of weeks ago.  At the event, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) let slip with a few comments that suggested that PageRank sculpting no longer worked.  The exact nature of his comments have subsequently been torn apart by shrewd SEOs, and so early this week, Matt decided to clear up the situation with this blog post.

PageRank sculpting is the practice of manipulating the flow of PageRank throughout a website using the NoFollow tag, so that the most important pages get the most PageRank.  The benefits of this technique have long been debated, with some webmasters apparently seeing significant improvements in terms of visibility and traffic following the implementation of PageRank sculpting, while others seeing no change at all.

Matt Cutts yesterday dispelled the myths by clarifying exactly what happens to PageRank that meets a NoFollowed link - rather than being channeled elsewhere within the website, it simply evaporates.  To add insult to injury, this “evaporation” has been happening for over a year, leaving many SEOs with egg on their face; plenty still thought this was a valid and useful amendment to website architecture. 

Matt Cutts has been issuing veiled references to the fact that NoFollowing probably isn’t the best use of a webmaster’s time for a while.  Here he responds to Randip Dhesi - one of iCrossing’s Natural Search Analysts - who asks “what are your views on PageRank sculpting”.

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Search engine, browser, link, HTML. All common and usual terms right?
Well, maybe this will change your opinion…

It makes us realise that the jargon and terminology  native to us in digital can easily be mis-understood in the offline world.

And you, would you know what a browser was?

Many years ago I worked for an eBusiness incubator called Dom-James plc. They were part of a large Financial Services empire and tasked to create new products and services online that would serve the needs of a community. Really it was social media before that term even existed.

One of the ideas was a relocation portal to help people move around the world with the minimum of pain and the target customer was the HR professional and recruiter. As we formulated the product I got to know my customer well and whilst this is quite a generalisation, I surprisingly discovered a closed community in what is essentially a people focused, highly social job.

We found recruiters and HR professional slow to adopt new technologies and new ideas, and obsessed with privacy, accuracy and legislation. A view borne out by the lack of HR mashups and frankly when is the last time you saw a ground breaking commercial models in recruitment.

The brand we launched into this space took over 12 months to gain any traction, so you can imagine my surprise of seeing some facets of HR and recruitment firmly embracing Social Media and doing so in vibrant, new ways.

Job boards like Monster and Jobserve have been around for a while and it is now interesting to see those brands now see un-moderated blogs as essential way of attracting high calibre candidates.

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