Paid Search

Sam Fenton Elstone wrote an interesting post on site links a couple a months ago.

To recap; Google’s been offering the choice for advertisers to have 4 additional site links to their Paid Search ads. One of the major positive aspects of site links is to shorten the users navigation to conversion as well promoting seasonal services or products.

However, another great benefit of the site links is… gaining visibility on highly competitive keywords.

I’ve been running site links for one of our clients. One of the site links is based on the keyword ”Theatre tickets”. As you can imagine this terms is one of the most competitive and expensive keywords found in its particular sector.

Nothing exciting?

For the period between 23rd December 09 and 21st January 2010, the “theatre tickets” generic campaign had fairly decent results in terms of conversation rate. But the ‘theatre tickets’ site link performed even better, with a conversation rate 216% higher for 92.5% cheaper!

This really shows how beneficial site links can be to a paid search campaign, particularly when concerned with highly competitive generic terms.

It also seems that generic keywords placed in site links have a positive effect on brand CTRs too.

Advertisers on your Site links blocks. Ready? Get set? Go!

I am currently doing a bit of personal development by spending regular time with the PPC team to learn what they do, and to find areas where our two departments can help and learn from each other. “Synergy” if you speak business-talk.

We recently had a session looking at the Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) feeds that we run, and an interesting point came out of it. This point was about the amount of coverage a brand could have on a single SERP where there are Natural Search results, Paid Search results, and Product results from Google Product Search.

What are CSE’s?

Comparison Shopping Engines are sites like Shopping.com, Nextag, and Ciao, where retailers can submit a product feed of all their current stock, and these sites can then provide their users with huge lists of products in a selection of categories. Retailers can gain incremental sales from users who may not have used search in their purchase process. The CSEs make their money from charging a CPC on all the referrals to the retailer sites.

Read more…

As part of our decade in search series I wanted to pick out a few highlights that have caught my eye in 2009. We know of late Google has been pumping out new products and services quicker than Santa delivers presents. However, before we even touch the wonderful world of Google let’s take a quick look at what was called a pretender to Google before we really understood its main purpose.

The Pretender

WolframAlpha is “an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would”. With that in mind this young pretender turns in to a no hoper if you were planning to do conventional queries. But where it comes in to its own specific data related queries or referencing. One of the weird ones is the ISBN barcode

Yes that’s right. It’s pulled up the corresponding barcode for the ISBN number. I’m not sure this will leave any of the search engines quaking in their boots.

A Familiar Friend

Nevertheless moving on to another new but familiar friend we have Bing who also made a splash in 2009. Bing is the new search engine from Microsoft that was formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search.

Just like with their names Microsoft keep trying to improve their search engine. However apart from the name changing Microsoft have made an effort to bring something new to its service. First of all the ever changing homepage image which has always impressed me each time I see it. Another is how Bing now organises search results into categories. For instance typing in Margret Thatcher will allow you to see the normal set of results on the right hand side but on the left there are options to delve in to more relevant and related results such as the ones listed below:

Not to be left out Yahoo! made a deal with Microsoft that would mean Bing would power Yahoo! Search. This all being said Google has pretty much owned this year and not just because of the size of the power house search engine but the developments they have put live.

Here Comes Google

The Vince update that boosted big brand websites within Google SERP’s was the cause of much conversation here as iCrossing UK. Liz Ayers and David Peiris did some fantastic analysis trying to unravel how Google might be using it’s algorithm to display this SERP’s . I’d advise you to take some time out and have a good read of it.

Caffeine was another update that was more focused on upgrading the engine of Google rather than the enhancements of the algorithm. Matt Cutts explains on the Webmaster Central blog that “The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results” and that this update is “the first step in a process that will let Google (us) push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Google Social Search is a personal favourite of mine and is an experiment featured in Google Labs.  Basically “Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results.” Right now in Brighton it’s snowing so a quick search shows this for the term ’snow’

The content areas that Google uses can be broken down in to three areas (Web Search Help):

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles.
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles.
• Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions.

To find this content Google uses your social circle. “The following people make up your social circle:

• People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
• People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list.
• People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.

It’s all very logical, simple in it’s idea but very clever and useful. If you want to find out more try watching MattCutts (with his lovely shiny Minority Report looking head, sorry Matt I couldn’t resist.)

Google Social Search was a step in to the Social Web but was then later followed by real time search. Amit Singhal a Google Fellow goes on to explain what this means for the end user.

“..Immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before”

Of course the main difference between Social search and Real time search is that latter is focused on topic, trending and drawing content from sources that will predominately feature outside your social circle. Not stopping there Google’s personalisation that was only available to users who had Google accounts changed its policy and made it available signed-out users worldwide using a 180 day cookie. This means the traditional ranking factors that Google uses to rank still are valid. However in your day to day searching your frequently visited sites will be more prominent in your search results where relevant.  This has caused a real stir in the SEO community but like always this is yet another opportunity for the digital community to come together and provide digital strategy as opposed to single channel marketing.

Well that’s what caught my eye in 2009. It’s been a very challenging year for us all and will be the year that saw social come in to its own. I wish you the very best of luck in 2010 and I leave you with this final link that made me smile.

2008, eh? Well, something must have happened during it, since iCrossing kept paying me. ::surreptitiously consults Google Timeline::

Insofar as a BIG THEME can be detected, (besides the ongoing Yahoo! soap opera), it would be wirelessness. Google began the year by bidding heavily in the US wireless spectrum auction, not to win but to bust the cash threshold that forced open-access rules on to the winner. By freakish coincidence, the Android mobile OS was being demoed by May and launched on the shiny G1 in September.

Google also released this awesome comic strip drawn by the Infinite Canvas guy. It was about a browser or something? I forget.

Meanwhile in the trenches:

As is traditional, around April we all hallucinated an algorithm update, triggering weeks of the usual Beaker-like shrilling in SEO fora around the world. As is also traditional, Matt Cutts denied all knowledge of it, despite inadvertently dubbing it Dewey. The industry also freaked out over a couple of waves of visible PageRank penalisation - apparently aimed in the direction of link sellers. But no, wait - PageRank doesn’t mean anything anymore! Phew.

Also, in no particular order:

Googlebot began crawling through certain HTML forms to discover content not conventionally linked to.

Google brought in 10-box results for local blended search, replacing the previous 3-box - because I know *I* just can’t get enough locksmiths in my morning SERP.

Long-tail freaks celebrated as the average number of keywords per search went from 3 to 4.

Redirects and vanity URLs became invalid as AdWords display URLs from April, causing PPC teams to become grouchy and overly attached to certain coffee mugs.

Cuil demonstrated that a dorky misspelled name is necessary but insufficient for online success.

So the year was 2006 - I was at Aston Uni (or “up north” as my colleagues would describe L ) studying for my post-grad.  Looking back now, that year was pretty significant for my future career choice as that was the first time I’d ever heard of SEO.  My group was randomly assigned a report topic for an e-marketing module - you’ve guessed it - SEO. We thought we had drawn the short straw at the time as it sounded complicated and way too techy even for the average nerd (erm….)

Anyway, I wanted to share one of the examples we used in the report to describe “black hat” SEO - one I still refer to today - the case of BMW Germany.

The German BMW site was penalised for cloaking (showing one thing to a user and a completely different thing to a search engine)/ creating ‘doorway pages’.  Danny Sullivan called it a “poor man’s cloaking” - When users click on the URL in search engine results, a JavaScript redirect would occur taking users to a slick looking page.

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Staying Competitive in 2010 is the next in the series of iCrossing hosted events attracting many clients wanting to hear from our search specialists on how to stay ahead of the game in 2010.   Doug Platts, Head of Natural Search and Tom Jones, Head of Media gave a snapshot of this year followed by a compelling look at 2010, highlighting these 3 key areas to ensure 2010 is successful for your brand:

• Integrate your marketing including aligning your goals, sharing data, paid and natural search synergy, consistent messaging and measurement
• Flexibility to change and adapt when necessary including real time marketing, contingency planning and response time
• Try one new thing including measurement, engagement, tools, brand recognition, and creating advocates

Here’s the presentation with accompanying notes for your own use.

Remember 2005? No? It was only 4 years ago!

2005 was, once again, the year of Google. It all began with exciting news from Microsoft, Bill Gates unveiled their “revolutionary” search engine called… well…. MSN Search. What was its secret weapon? Encarta. Yes, really. While it was a good idea to include factual answer in SERPs, the idea never really gained any popularity and Encarta was soon forgotten by most of the world.

But going back to Google, it was its year because of the amount of amazing products that they launched. It all started with iGoogle. While the service was not a success at first, it was a clever move from the big G. The ability of adding widgets and integrate all your google products in the homepage was the first step of many to come towards a more personalised experience in search engines.

It was quickly followed by Google Reader and Google Talk. RSS readers and instant messaging was nothing new, many services provided similar functionalities. However, none of their competitors had such a strong platform to launch their services. Again, while these were not a massive success at first, they slowly gained reputation and trust from happy costumers and end up becoming very succesfull services.

Google would later launch Google Blogs, a search engine only for blogs. This was significant for two reasons. One, Google started to recognise the power of social media and give it its own space, something that Google has had in mind since then. And two… erm… well, you know, it was a big year for blogs.

But the big (and I mean BIG) thing in 2005 was Maps. Google Maps was the first real, free and complete map service on the internet. Remember when we all spent hours and hours in front of the screen finding new and exciting places in Google maps?

But wait! There is ONE MORE THING. Google Analytics. Having acquired Urchin on March, it was only a matter of time until this service was released. It was the first time that such an advanced analytics system was free and available to all. Its intuitive usability and great interface was a recipe for success.

Lastly, here is a video from 2005 that shows the views from the “experts” at the time:

During 2004 search knowledge, tools & business continued to develop. Yahoo! and Google continued to strengthen their hold on the industry fiercely competing against one another. The year saw Google go public, Yahoo dropping Google’s search technology and the development of both search engines products.

From the beginning of 2004 Google’s search index hits a new milestone: 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images and by the end of the year its index of web pages reached 8 billion.

Throughout the first half of the year, SEOs focused on developing ‘Florida Theories’ to define Google’s logic to ranking which changed in the tail end of the previous year, and as the year continued debates raged on about the use of trademarks in PPC and SEOs discussed theories on the Google sandbox.

During mid February Yahoo! has ended its relationship with Google, which dated back to October 2002 and started its own search engine technology which was made up with recently acquired search technologies, such as Inktomi and commercial search provider Overture.

In March, Yahoo! launched a new local web search tool called SmartView that uses Yahoo Maps in order to allow users to search for restaurants, theatres, and other places by a single address. In the same month, Google introduced Google Local, offering relevant neighborhood business listings, maps, and directions.

On April the 1st Google launched Gmail, for which at this time, to get an account you needed an invitation. This provoked other email providers to create better offerings to maintain their users.

Shortly after in April the official Google Blog went live, covering news about various products, technologies and initiatives. Yahoo released their search blog later in the year, in August where they blog news and insight on all things search.

Also in April, Google filed for public stock offering and after a few months of buzz about internet stocks as Google’s company finances were released, the company finally went public on August 18th 2004.

To end the year, during December Google began to test the use of images within its web search results, by displaying related imaged to the search query.

This is the second post in the ‘decade in search’ series. We’ll probbaly  see a whole host of predictions being made for 2010, but before making ours we thought we’d the take time to  review the major events that have shaped the search industry over the last 10 years.

2001 was a hugely successful year for Google, despite the dot-com bust of the time. Eric Schmidt was appointed as the chairman in March, the man who would later announce for the very first time that Google was profitable. In the cautious world following the dot-com bust, Wall Street analysts valued the company at $250 million. In other search news:

To compliment the recent UK advent of YouTube’s Promoted Videos, Google have now made available a keyword suggestion tool for the world’s ’second largest’ search engine.

YouTube Promoted Videos have been released in the States for about a year now but it’s only been since October 2009 that Google have allowed UK-based Search Marketers to drive traffic to videos on YouTube directly from the Adwords interface. Today, Google released the UK version of the YouTube keyword suggestion tool.

This tool will be undoubtedly be of value to search marketers in helping provide understanding of the behaviour of users on YouTube. This tool will make it possible to identify and quantify (usual caveats apply about Google’s stated search volumes - namely, take with a large pinch of salt) the opportunity in different areas - and develop a strategy to capitalise on available traffic volumes. For instance, the new keyword tool will help you answer the question who has the most popular music video - Britney, Jacko, Shakira or ‘that woman off X Factor’ (Susan Boyle). As the results below illustrate, even in death, the King of Pop’s popularity seems to outstrip that of his rivals by between 2 and 4 to 1!
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