There’s an article with this video too – click on the link above to see the whole thing. Apart from the iCrossing family connection, as it were, Rosenblatt’s eHow is a pretty interesting to me as a media venture, encouraging user generated content and then sharing ad revenue with the creators…
I knew before I went on holiday to Japan that my husband is concerningly excited about QR codes but I was impressed to see just how much more excited he could get with every turn in the shopping malls as more and more QR codes appeared round every corner.
He is a creative/designer, mainly for print and is massively excited at the potential that QR codes can add to any advertising and marketing campaigns. Now having seen these QR codes in action, whether be on leaflets, carrier bags or billboards, I can’t help myself to join in the excitement.
For those of you who don’t know, QR codes (Quick Response Codes) are two dimensional barcodes which can hold more data than the usual barcode and can be read by many mainstream cameras on phones, like the iPhone, providing particular reader software is installed. Here is an example of what a QR code that links to the iCrossing website looks like.
QR codes can be used to hold a variety of information, including hyperlinks and can prompt web pages to load as a result of taking a photo of the QR code. When used in conjunction with offline marketing material these QR codes can provide quick access to online material on the same subject.
Japan is using QR codes everywhere on their print material to send traffic to their online domains, whether it is for further information or via promotions. At the Muji clothing store, they were using a QR code for discount offers, sending traffic to their online store whilst visitors are browsing their high street stores, owning both your physical and virtual self at that very same moment in time.
What Bing’s new twitter search will allow is much faster, more reactive brand marketing.
Travel
The biggest sector to be impacted will probably be travel with last minute deals being much more reactive via Bing’s twitter search and without having to constantly update PPC ads.
Retail
As we are coming up to the Christmas and New Year sales, retail brands will also start to see the benefit of this new integrated search as they can market short-term price discounts quicker without having to rely on search engine spiders crawling their site immediately.
Voucher code marketing will also benefit from this development, which given the current economic climate interest will only continue to grow.
Twitter
Robin Goad from Hitwise recently spoke at ad:tech London about how 55.9% of traffic from twitter goes to online media sites as opposed to 9.5% that go to transactional sites. The recent development should increase the amount of downstream traffic from twitter to transactional site which would further increase the profitability of the twitter business model – no need to cover the social network with advertisements just market it as a qualified traffic driving service to transactional website.
With Google’s announcement to also include twitter results within its search results this can only mean further growth in twitter is inevitable and marketers focus on incorporating social networks into their marketing is becoming more paramount.
Since Google has been rolling out more frequent updates to their search engine, with the brand (Vince) update being the most recent, we have seen a number of changes to Google’s search results.
Now…
Double indents for branded searches
Here are some examples of branded search queries with the extra indented result
Argos toaster
Double indented result for Argos toaster
Patrick Altoft from BlogStorm wrote a great post about how user data may be used in the brand update and he summarised the Google’s patented “document scoring based on link based criteria” document. Some of the information here will not be news to those who are keen readers, some of the information may need to be thoroughly tested before some of the theories are widely accepted. Here are those summarised points with my opinion on how we can improve web pages in light of additional user data which may also be affecting the search results.
Natural Link Growth
For brands to benefit from an expected spike in link growth to their site it is advised to create a “buzz” within your brands industry so the sudden increase in links from the media, press releases, blogs are counted and not devalued as the spike in links will relate to the topical release of a new product or service. A majority of the natural links which a brand will attract during this period of timely link growth will not be optimised, however links will be coming from relevant pages which will enable Google to associate the right about of SEO value to the link. This is another step forwards for Google being less reliant on anchor text to assign link value as Google will be looking see where the link is coming from and to what page the link is pointing to assign link value.
It is also advised to leave the natural links un-modified. Some SEO’s will use the tactic reconfiguring existing links to add search terms into the anchor text. Once links are updated Google will treat the link differently as it has been modified and will ‘throttle’ the link juice until the amended link has been live for a period of time (I estimate this period to be 12 weeks). This could results in a drop in rankings if many links are changes within a short period of time. As long as the link is coming from a relevant page pointing to the right page I would advise against reconfiguring links en masse
This is a classic reason iCrossing does not condone link buying as it is a very expensive exercise with reoccurring costs which need to be paid, otherwise links are not renewed and the website will be seen as being “stale” and will result in their rankings being affected. There is a much smaller chance of losing links when you have attracted naturally them.
Google Can Hold You Back
This is a common issue for large ecommerce sites which are opened up to search engines or are have migrated to a new domain. When migrating a website to a new domain you will need a rock solid redirect strategy so the impact on rankings are minimised. If you are starting out on a new domain with small number of links you will need to create a “buzz” around the site so rankings can grow faster as Google will see the number of searches for your band increase and will allow the increase in links to pass more value as the links are topical.
A few SEO guys have been talking about a couple of new things that are now available in the Google Webmaster Tools. Webmasters now have access to a malware search, and a tool to ‘fetch’ a URL as Google would.
The malware details tool is nice, and should probably be a standard item in the toolkit, but I think the more interesting development is the ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ tool. At the moment it is very basic, and only returns the header response of a page and the details of any redirects or problems with a page, but if this is the shape of things to come, this could prove useful. What I am imagining is a site header/redirect checker that highlights any 302′s, and allows you to submit a list of redirects that should be in place, and alerts you if they are broken. That would be nice, and I believe that these are the type of things that Microsoft’s IIS SEO Toolkit provides, but that is limited to people using Microsoft servers, as well as being comfortable changing their server configuration.
These new tools are obviously a first iteration of some potential new features, but it is good to see that the Webmaster Tools are still being looked at by Google, and there are new things on the way.
Google have recently released yet another feature for its registered users. After the release of ‘SearchWiki‘ some months ago we got a glimpse of how Google may use people’s profiles to help navigate (based on search history) and place their own judgement of relevance and reviews around sites.
So after adding functionality to be able to comment on search results Google have now introduced Sidewiki, which allows users to “contribute helpful information to any webpage“.
Here’s an example of Sidewiki in action on apple.com.
Note: you can only view Sidewiki at the moment using the new version of the Google toolbar, which you can install on Firefox or IE.
In the past reputations can be made or tarnished offsite in the networks, or onsite when we allow it through comments etc, but Sidewiki allows people to come and write anything right on your front page. This is a form of social media which is even harder to ignore, ‘if you can’t see/hear it it’s not my problem’ will no longer apply, the reviews are coming directly to the site.
I imagine Sidewiki could have some pretty large implications for brands. Will there be a need for an ongoing monitoring and engagement strategy?
Site owners are able to place a ‘sticky’ post to their own sites, some sites appear to have placed purposely large entries here, perhaps to block out negative comments below the fold.
Links can be placed within Sidewikis. I’ve seen some sites using the space for ‘quick links’. It has also been used as another way of introducing a site, with a quick intro paragraph, in a more informal style knowing that most of the audience at this stage will be early adopters and technically minded.
I see Sidewiki potentially being very useful from a brand engagement and customer service point of view if it becomes more widely adopted.
So is Sidewiki something that brands should be worried about or embrace? Do you think it will take off or remain relatively un-adopted functionality much like Searchwiki?
Thinkbox and its chief Tess Alps were right to take issue with the way the IAB reports online advertising figures and pitches them against traditional channels. But breaking them down in the way she proposes doesn’t make things look much prettier.
When the IAB reported last week that internet advertising had overtaken TV as the UK’s biggest media channel – the first major economy, it said, in which this shift had occurred – the TV industry, in the shape of Thinkbox, was quick to point out that pitching the whole of online against any one channel was unfair. And they were right.
As Tess Alps explained, if you added press display and press classified together, for example, then ‘press’ would far outweigh ‘TV’, let alone ‘online’. And if you added programme sponsorship and iTV spending (not that there’s much of the latter going on), to spot advertising then TV would leap online too. To gather all the activity that occurs on the web together and pitch it against traditional channels individually is indeed misleading.
So here’s the truth for traditional channels: their decline is much scarier than the phony war against ‘the internet’. All mainstream media – save cinema – declined in ad spend by a much fiercer degree than any online equivalent – save ‘solus’ email (since it’s based on media-owner figures, the IAB can’t effectively report on the amount advertisers spend on their own email programmes).
Meanwhile, the uncomfortable truth for digital remains the absolute dominance of spend through paid-for search. If we accept that Google accounts for 90% of PPC spend in the UK, then we can say that one business accounts for more than half of all online ad spend. Paid search is also the only format to be growing.
When proper work is done to finally put search in its rightful place in the user journey (that means doing appropriate justice to the power of ‘brand’ work on the success of direct channels like search) this golden cow of online – and online itself – should face a reality check that makes the likes of Thinkbox feel a little more justified in their indignation, though no closer to a solution for all media’s ails.
Google’s Vince update, which first affected the US results early in 2009 and then later the UK results in July, is still a mystery. It looked at first like an update designed to boost brands, as Aaron Wall first mentioned – but how could Google, a search engine that relies on algorithms, possibly determine which sites were brands? Matt Cutts later announced that “within the search ranking team we don’t really think about brands”, and mentioned that “we try to return whatever we think the best results are for users”. Which makes sense, but doesn’t help to explain how brands might have received a boost.
There was some talk about how the large brands that gained a boost after Vince also frequently appeared in the related search results. And this is where we think we’re close – here’s the science part (concentrate):
The related searches are now driven by user data. In the past a search on something like “hotels” used to bring up results that looked very similar to the “hotels” keyword, almost as if it had been run through the AdWords keyword tool. Search terms like “hotels ireland”, “hotels in scotland”, “hotels in newcastle” and “hotels england” appeared in the related searches. At some point, quietly, around December of 2008 this changed significantly. Looking at them now for the UK (and using Google’s fairly new expanded ‘related searches’ option) I’m seeing more brands being listed like Travelodge, Last Minute and Premier Inn. The most likely idea here is that Google is now using more user-data to populate these related searches. Theory #1 is that for high volume terms that have a large number of people refining the query, Google records all queries that are refined and the most often searched terms following the original query form the related searches. That sounds complex, but really it just means when people search for “biscuits”, don’t click on the results but instead search for “mcvities”, Google records that and will list it in the related searches if enough people refine their search like that.
When people search for “X”, can’t find what they are looking for within the results and instead refine the query to “Y”, and then one of the results gets a much higher click-through rate than expected (e.g. the result in position 1 gets 70% of the clicks instead of the usual 50% or so), then that listing becomes a candidate to rank for “X”. To put that into context, if people search for “biscuits” and then refine the query to “mcvities”, and one of those results gets a huge click-through rate (which will probably be UnitedBiscuits.com who own McVities) then that result gets a chance to rank for the original search term “biscuits”. So, in short, related search results that do well may be brought into the original search.
Read more…
Google has recently begun beta testing a new paid ad format that includes natural search style site links. Currently limited to only a handful of advertisers, those selected will be able to display an additional four links under their premium position Ad.
Advertisers are able to submit up to ten links but only four will be displayed at any one time and there is a strict criterion that must be met in order for the links to appear. The Ad must appear in 1st position in the auction and “also meet an additional quality threshold to be modified into a Sitelinks ad”.
This criteria means that we will most likely see these ads appear against brand searches but any keyword that meets the criteria can be modified into a Sitelinks ad.
Read more…
Matt on