Posts from — July 2010

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch, July 30, 2010

The Yahoo-Bing search alliance is gathering momentum. Watching this coverage from the U.K., where Google has close to 90 percent market share, I can’t help asking: will the deal succeed for both parties — and what does success look like?

Focusing on the Numbers

For Yahoo, the obvious win is cost saving — no longer employing staff or maintaining systems to process billions of searches a year and monetize them. We’ve already seen several waves of layoffs from Yahoo, including search staff.

For Bing, revenue is the win. More searches to monetize means more paid search revenue (although Yahoo will receive payments from Microsoft). Alongside this, they will no doubt hope to attract new advertisers from Yahoo’s bank of accounts, raising competition between advertisers, and therefore bid prices — further adding to their bottom line.

This is the virtuous circle any paid search division wants to fuel — more advertisers, increased keyword coverage resulting in an increased average number of advertisers per keyword, increased bid completion, and a higher average revenue per click.

This is the circle that both Overture and Espotting worked hard to fuel at the start of last decade when paid search was in its pre-AdWords infancy. Working at Espotting, I experienced how keyword coverage and bid competition were major concerns — and when the company lost Yahoo Europe as a distribution partner, I saw the circle slowing, coverage shrinking, and CPCs falling. Bids that once reached a high point of £15 (“serviced offices”) fell beyond the £3 mark as volume, quality and CPCs fell.

Which brings us to the risks…

The Risks for Yahoo

The risks for Yahoo are around revenue, market share, and brand differentiation. If the average revenue per click Yahoo receives under the deal is significantly lower than from Panama, they will suffer financially. However, the operating expenses they save may outweigh this loss. Overall, they will be in a better position.

Aside from CPCs, the long-term risk for Yahoo stretches beyond search into their wider business.

Yahoo has stated they intend to continue differentiating themselves via their search interface. Fine in theory, but there’s real risk here.

Doing this without a large search team of the ability to reach inside the machine is difficult. If consumers learn over time that Yahoo is effectively Bing, and decide there’s no reason for them to stick with Yahoo, will they go directly to Bing?

Inertia often rules our behavior as consumers, but with Bing running advertising campaigns and offering cash-back schemes to attract consumers, the lack of a unique search experience on Yahoo may be enough to push some consumers to go straight to source and get cash back on their purchases into the bargain. The word “frenemy” springs to mind.

Any lack of search market share could impact their wider business. Content is undoubtedly part of Yahoo’s core strategy — even more some with their acquisition of Associated Content — and one of the main ways visitors get to this content is via search.

So any decline in the flow of traffic from Yahoo search into their own properties will hurt their revenues from display advertising — and undermine the data gathering that is at the core of the behavioral advertising, ad exchanges, and other initiatives that in turn are crucial to Yahoo’s non-search advertising revenues.

Yahoo search traffic isn’t their only source of traffic and data. They receive traffic from the other engines and other areas of their properties, and they gather data from display ads across many other sites as part of their wider network (just like Microsoft does across its network).

Yahoo will have to innovate to ensure they can offer search retargeting for their display clients. Right now, Microsoft and especially Google are innovating in this area.

So for Yahoo, the risk is a decline of overall market share — and revenues beyond search alone.

The Risks for Bing

The obvious risk: the numbers don’t add up, and the revenues from the Yahoo deal are less than the costs of the partnership to Bing, even if they have increased their market share. This could vary significantly by country; in some, Bing-powered Yahoo may prove profitable; in others, average CPCs may make the deal less attractive versus costs.

The other risk is less obvious and more damaging for Bing’s ambitions. What if Yahoo’s users don’t like Bing search results?

If Yahoo’s audience perceives a decline in the quality of results, they may shift to Google — hurting both Yahoo and Bing in the process. However, Microsoft is investing a lot of money, time, and — crucially — talent into their search division, so this seems, on the surface, unlikely.

So, Will it Succeed?

I believe it will be a success — in terms of revenue, and in terms of market share (Google won’t be seriously challenged anytime soon, though).

The real story will be what Yahoo does next, and how the frenemy relationship works out while they compete in the display and mobile spaces — and Google builds their display armory around AdWords and DoubleClick.

Swiftcover.com is set to become the first insurer to use in-game advertising. The new brand campaign will feature virtual billboards in games such as Pro Evolution Soccer; Guitar Hero, Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Blur (a racing game).  The ads will run through August and September on Xbox Live.

The in-game ads will tie into Swiftcover’s “Get a Life” advertising campaign theme featuring Iggy Pop and the “Little Iggy” puppet.

Tina Shortle, Marketing Director for AXA Insurance and swiftcover.com, commented on the initiative, “Swiftcover and Steak have worked closely together over the past five years to stay ahead of the competition. We were the first online only car insurer in 2005, we launched the first car insurance mobile site back in 2007 and have pioneered emerging media channels including Video on Demand and Spotify. Most importantly, we’ve capitalised on early-adopter advantage and have seen some fantastic results.”

The idea was conceived by Steak, who brokered the deal with Massive, the leading video game network, on behalf of swiftcover.com. 

Alastair Boyle, Group Account Director at Steak added, “In-Game advertising is a perfect fit for the swiftcover.com brand and their target audience. This is the latest in our drive to use innovative ad formats for the right reasons, rather than jumping on every new media trend.”

Chris James, EMEA Manager at Massive concluded, “We’re very pleased to be working with Steak to select the right in-game placements for swiftcover.com. In-game ads have been shown to have some of the best recall rates around so it’s fantastic that more and more advertisers are now realising the potential of this medium.”

Studies have shown 72% of gamers recall seeing ads for brands in-game. In 2009 there was a 20% increase in average ad recall from the year before and the average brand recommendation lift scores were 29% ahead [MICROSOFT, 2009] 73% of gamers agreed that “ads enhanced the realism of the game” [INTERPRET, 2008]; and that across 600 gamers on Xbox 360 and PC showed that brand familiarity increased by 64%, brand rating increased by 37%, purchase consideration increased by 41% [NIELSEN, 2007].

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, July 28, 2010

My last post, “What’s Next for Search, SEO?,” managed to produce some interesting takes on the future, past, and present of devices and how we use them/optimize for them. Thanks for your responses. They got me thinking — what year am I stuck in?

The simple answer is that I never quite came to terms with the ’90s. Having been born in 1980, I just couldn’t accept that a new decade had anything to do with me. Plus, my football team was unbeatable in the ’80s and is now average at best. So if I were really pressed for an answer, I’d say I was stuck in 1988. Early May, to be precise.

But I’ve also noticed some definite differences in search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns and approaches to SEO from agencies and in-house teams that can give clues about when they last carried out a root and branch review of how they do SEO.

Since 2000, SEO has been developing as an art and as a defined function of marketing. Each year has tended to see specific approaches and developments that have helped to define how you should approach SEO. If 2005 was about internal linking, then 2009 was about optimized PR and advertorials.

What I’m particularly interested in is defining SEO in 2010. This isn’t necessarily about finding something new, more about what seems to really be producing results after the Caffeine update and the May Day changes.

The trend we’re seeing is that highly relevant links from sites with quality link profiles of their own are adding the most value to an SEO campaign, rather than those with outright PageRank (we have also seen a large number of sites suffer ranking drops due to an inordinate number of sitewide inbound links, but that’s another story).

This may not be anything new in itself — highly relevant links have always been important and difficult to come by for a number of reasons. But the reduction in apparent value of PageRank, and increase in the value of a purely relevant site and content, is interesting.

What is doubly interesting (and helpful) is that Google has a tool that can specifically identify what those highly relevant sites might be. (It won’t actually get links from them, you’ll still have to be creative there).

The tool? Google Ad Planner — allowing you to see what sites match the same user profile as your client’s site, and also filter by industry sector/classification of the site, giving a neat picture of what Google feels is a relevant link profile for your client. You can then export a list of the best sites to target for links — it can even tell you which ones are using Google text ads on their site, thereby giving you a foot in the door to discuss advertising rates, content hosting, reciprocal links, or whatever you feel is the right approach for each site.

So, if there’s a theme for 2010, it has to be that taking the time to identify your market and focusing on how to build relationships with those relevant sites will put you above SEOs that are still focusing on optimized PR and advertorials. They’re stuck in 2009…

Very pleased that the work we’ve done for British Gas Business has been shortlisted for ‘Best Use of Search’ in this year’s B2B Marketing Awards.

Sadly we have to wait until November to see if we win, so fingers crossed until then…

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch, July 2, 2010

The iPad. Surrounded by hype, adored by some, denigrated by others.

Like the iPhone before it, the iPad is a category igniter — it won’t end up being the dominant product in its category in terms of sales volumes, but as the poster boy of tablet computing it has drawn attention and media coverage, which has promoted the device category to the public.

However, it’s first to market — and as an iPad user myself, I’m beginning to glimpse how the device will have an impact on search and digital strategies going forward. Here are my thoughts so far.

Search Engines and Tablet Devices

Obviously search engine interfaces need to be tailored to the device. The iPad doesn’t support Flash, so any video content embedded into search results will need to be available as HTML 5 video — and for any other formats that different tablet don’t support. This is important as Bing in particular looks to integrated media content directly into the page as part of it’s entertainment channel.

Google has already launched an iPad app — similar to their mobile one — which incorporates search, e-mail, and other popular Google products, as well as a built-in browser. The iPad can only run one app at a time, so this makes it easier to switch between Google products and the web. However, most consumers won’t want to install an app, so ensuring search websites work with the operating systems and browsers of different tablets is key.

There’s an opportunity here to innovate. Google already offers voice-based searching on the iPad and Android phones; so far I’ve found the accuracy variable but no doubt that will improve over time. This innovation can go further: touch screens actively encourage the use of the fingers — so there’s an opportunity to enable uses to interact with search results in this way, for example, expanding plus boxes by swiping down or drawing circles on maps to find local businesses with that radius.

So experts are predicting the days of keyboards and mice are numbered — but I think they will be around for a long time to come. Just as we’ve accepted touch screens on phones alongside keypads, so will touch screen computing be a mainstream experience alongside the keyboard and mouse. However, this could lead to an increase in typos and misspelled search queries; we’ve all got fat-finger syndrome at times!

Geo-targeting

Tablet computers are ideal for using search on the move via a phone or wireless connection. So detecting the user’s location and personalizing search results accordingly is another important aspect of the tablet computing search experience, just like it’s increasingly becoming on “normal” computers.

This doesn’t just extend to search results, though — brands need to embrace geo-targeting, too, driving consumers to landing pages that are tailored to their location — whether that is with store information, products shipped to that area, or other customization. This is getting easier for brands to execute — alongside IP lookups, there’s a W3C initiative that HTML5 supports to develop a standard way for browsers to determine the user’s location after they opt-in to providing that data — so there soon won’t be any excuses. Firefox users can try it here; Chrome and Safari support it already, too.

Landing Pages

As well as localizing page content, brands will need to look at how well their pages work on the browsers and operating systems on tablet computers — some sites simply don’t work well, or at all.

Take Google Reader for example — it relies on a lot on scrolling up and down lists of feeds and within articles; but the scroll bars simply don’t always work when using the touch screen of the iPad, resulting in the user grabbing the whole browser window by mistake. This is a Google issue not an Apple one; other sites with some (but less) scroll bars are fine. Google have assumed that everybody has a mouse; a contrast to using Gmail on iPad, which has a well-designed interface suited to touch screens.

I’ve also noticed a few brands customizing the iPad keyboard in their apps, for example moving the @ key onto the first keyboard layer if the app requires it a lot. Little touches like this make apps and websites a joy to use — as opposed to a nuisance.

Time to Plan

Table computing is, of course, in its infancy and I’m not advocating widespread website redesigns for this device category over night. Brands that offer products particularly suited to the leisure-time orientated nature of the iPad should consider developing apps; most brands should concentrate on fixing any glaring bugs with their website on tablet computers while monitoring their analytics and market research reports for the growth of tablet computing. Now’s the time to plan for the future and ensure you have the CMS infrastructure and analytics capabilities to set up device-specific paid search campaigns and landing page in future.

Brands will need to learn how to offer a rich experience on tablet devices — or risk providing consumers with a poor experience they’ll associate with the brand across all devices.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, June 30, 2010

One of the points that will be high on the agenda at this year’s Online Marketing Show will be that the web has finally graduated from our PC monitors and now exists firmly in the air around us, waiting to be accessed at any given moment. Internet usage on mobile devices is now growing at the rate that was predicted some three or four years ago, making this year definitely, officially, the year of mobile… hooray!

It’s not all about mobile. Any number of devices during the next decade and beyond will be able to access the wonders of the Internet, and all of them will need to be able to search and quickly retrieve the information or websites that people are looking for. This is where search engines need to think about how their interfaces and results will work on any number of new devices.

Even on the biggest, prettiest smartphones, Google’s search results don’t fit on the screen, removing the majority of paid search listings that make up so much of Google’s revenue. If everyone were to use mobiles only to search for info, Google might even go bankrupt!

Google has a separate index for mobile devices, so it’s not as though they haven’t thought about this. But as the web becomes ever more accessible, two questions remain:

1.How will search engines really help users find what they’re looking for, especially on the smaller devices?
2.How will they continue to know what are the most important results for natural search?
The second question is particularly important for SEO. So much of what we do boils down to ensuring that the myriad of connections on the internet make it clear that our sites, or our clients’ sites, are viewed by the search engines as important. Not only important, but important for specific themes and keywords, and we manage this using techniques on and off the website itself.

So how does that change when people are using the Internet in different ways via different devices and potentially being given different results depending on what device they use? How will search engines know what is important, or whether something is more important for a mobile user than a tablet or laptop user?

There are still a lot of “ifs” involved here. Ultimately, the search engines might feel that what exists now is good enough to tell them which are the most important sites.

In SEO we’ve become accustomed in more recent times to viewing off-site optimization techniques as having the biggest impact on rankings. But perhaps there is an argument that for each device you will need a site specifically optimized for each different version of Google. Google for mobile, Google for smartphone, Google for tablets — each version might prefer different types of web property to display higher in the listings.

Ultimately, there isn’t a definitive answer right now. However, in the near future it’s likely that SEO will not only encompass social media (that’s if you believe it doesn’t already), but SEO teams may well need to ensure their skill-sets include a large degree of developer knowledge specifically for ensuring websites are compatible with multiple devices.