23 Musings

According to SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) it does.

Apparently money is shifting into search and away from print and classified at an increasing rate. The reason for this I'd surmise is that search is being seen as a way to follow consumers rather than just trying to put an ad in front of them. It's now widely accepted that most markets have a need to be active in search so it's natural for spend to shift towards it.

Key findings from the SEMPO study are:

• The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007.
• North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.
• Marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs
• Paid placement captures 87.4 percent of 2007 spending; organic SEO, 10.5 percent; paid inclusion, 0.07 percent, and technology investment, 1.4 percent.
• Google AdWords remains the most popular search advertising program, but both Google and Yahoo sponsored search spending has decreased from a year ago

Here's how the spend is shifting:

Shifting to search is great for all the SEO agencies out there but is also going to make their jobs a lot harder as they have to work for their money to get clients to the top of the listings. As competition grows, so it becomes more difficult to get dramatic improvements in position, some SEO agencies have had an easy ride in recent years and that's going to get harder.

Other developments will also affect SEO such as the introduction of semantic search technology (as announced by Yahoo recently). Developments such as this could change the rankings entirely and again will mean the agencies have to stay ahead of the game and work hard (not a bad thing).

Interesting take on the role of search marketing in travel here from Elisabeth Osmeloski of Search Engine Watch.

Not completely sure I agree that seasonality will disappear, there will surely always be a place for targeting specific seasonal activities and travel times with certain keywords. Yes you may run the campaign full time but it's usually a good idea to ramp it up in the appropriate seasons.

A report (here via Marketing Charts) shows that ROI on search marketing has improved in the past year.

What is really interesting is the figures showing ROI improvements by search engine. Google has improved ROI by 7.5% (and it's taken a whopping 76% of the total spend). Yahoo showed a 39% improvement in ROI returned to advertisers since the launch of Panama which is great news for them although coming at a difficult time. MSN interestingly shows the highest clickthrough rate and ROI, it's ROI was 27% greater than the average across other engines.

Just shows why the money is still all in search at the moment. While returns like this are to be had it's going to be tough for anyone to convince me that it's worth moving money out of search into other areas.

Paid search (according to Marketing Charts) contributed 57.1% of the total spend on online marketing in the UK. The spend was up 44% year on year for the first six months of 2007 compared with 2006.

This just shows how effective it is and where your marketing pounds should be aimed.

Classifieds has shown good growth as well but this is not as targeted so it's obviously not going to get the same amount of interest as search for the moment.

Reasons for using search are cited to be lead generation, driving direct sales and traffic generation. Great to see sales being the equal top reason for using search. For too long it's been seen as a way to drive traffic and acquire leads, when actually it is the most effective way to drive a direct sale available to online marketers.

Hitwise have released a new report on the market share of the major search engines today (based on U.S. data). Unsurprisingly, the report shows that Googles dominance continues to grow rapidly. Google is said to now account for 65.1% of the search traffic delivered online, up 5% from this time last year. Yahoo, MSN and Ask are said to be at 21%, 7% and 4%, all down slightly year on year.

Interestingly for those of us in the travel market 33% of travel traffic is said to be from search engines, thats 15% up year on year. That's a big jump, perhaps we're all finally nailing our SEO and PPC strategies.

Google shows its dominance in the online travel sector by donating 21% of travels traffic all by itself which really shows where the focus needs to be for search engine marketers in the travel industry. That's a 26% increase in the amount of travel traffic that Google contributes to since last year, again a huge leap.

All this bodes very well for the forthcoming January peak booking period!

We all know how notoriously difficult paid search is to get right in a highly competitive marketplace. Take car rental, loads of players, very high bid prices and some really proficient PPC campaigns. Need a what to stand out from the crowd? Take the lead from Sixt of Germany then, they've done something very clever with ascii art to make their adverts stand out from the crowd.

This is genius, and they experienced a 40% plus increase in clicks on the campaign! Something that could be applied to many industries!


This campaign has just won an award, more details here.

I posted the other day surmising whether Yahoo is catching up in search based on some new metrics from Compete. The general feel from that post was that they weren't really and the numbers were questionable in value.

So, what should I see this morning? New, useful features in Yahoo's main search interface, the kind of features that make search a whole lot less painful for users and add a lot of value, helping users to target searches more effectively.

The first thing I noticed was that they have integrated images from Flickr and also playable videos, kind of like Google's universal search idea and equally as useful to the user. So if you search for a music artist (eg. Unkle) you should get images and video in the results along with useful additions such as links to albums, lyrics, photos and more videos. Next I did a search for a hotel (eg. 'hudson hotel new york') in New York (being the online travel buff that I am) and the top result in this case was a Yahoo Local listing for the hotel complete with map links, again extremely useful (although possibly doing themselves out of a small amount of ad revenue here). Another cool feature is the inclusion of custom results for searches such as health related (eg. 'lyme disease'), quick easy access to relevant info is the killer in search and here Yahoo have it spot on.

And then there's the biggest and most useful addition, and it's an addition that Google haven't yet implemented... It's an AJAX based search assistant panel that appears if it senses you hesitate while typing a search query. It works as an auto-complete assistant and also a guided search tool as it will both try to guess what you were typing and give you suggestions as well. This is extremely powerful and really makes search easier for the user. It also adds a lot of value to advertisers as it should mean more qualified clicks on paid search results as the searches are better informed.

I'm actually really surprised this has come out of Yahoo first, I've been waiting for Google to implement something like this for a while now but for once Yahoo have the upper hand. Now all they need to do is sort out the problems with their paid search results (relevancy, gaming etc), fix their algorithms for natural search and improve the interface and they could become my search engine of choice!

Okay, so Google are still miles ahead on market share in the search world. Below is the latest graph from Compete.com showing just how commanding a lead they have.
However, Compete have some interesting insight into quality rather than reach. Quality in search is rarely discussed and whenever it has been Google has always been assumed to be in the lead there as well due to their massive research and development capabilities.

That may be the wrong assumption though!

Compete have looked at a metric they call search fulfillment. They came up with this because even though there are many searches taking place on the major engines, not all result in a click on a result and a referral. In fact, according to their data out of approx 7.5 billion monthly searches only 5 billion result in a referral.

So, if Google looks like the leader from a search volume point of view, how about from a fulfillment point of view. The graph below shows an interesting picture...
So Google is not getting the referrals the volume suggests it should.

Yahoo seems to do really well from this which I find strange as the relevancy of results in Yahoo never seems as good to me as Google. Of course there are many other possible reasons for this, a couple being that the figures may exclude clicks on paid links and that Google returns much more useful snippets in the results than any other engine often negating the need to click through.

Of course Google's figures could be vastly inflated by all the agency types, SEO's and webmasters out there who perform daily searches to check their sites rankings without ever clicking on anything. It would be really interesting to understand those volumes!

A new search engine has launched to not much fanfare and pretty stealthily called iRazoo. It's interesting to me as it's doing a similar thing to Mahalo in that it's using the input of users to qualify search results.

Rather than go down the Mahalo route where specialists are paid to put together search results, iRazoo is allowing users to recommend a search result while they are surfing. When users click a search result it's opened in a new window, this could annoy a lot of users as pop-ups (even user activated) are generally a no-no these days. That's purely a user interface issue though and I'm sure they will change it if they get enough feedback requesting it. There's a bar across the top of the new window asking whether you recommend the site and allowing comments to be left as well.

As an incentive users are able to earn points for their recommendations. However you need many thousands of points to get any meaningful prizes (camera or mp3 player) and so it could take quite some time.

It's an interesting concept and one that could work quite well if it was designed with the user in mind. At the moment it's a fairly clunky and unwieldy process with the pop-up windows and the bar across the resulting websites. A few small changes could fix that though and a bit of usability testing, and they may need to do this to gain traction with users.

Of course, it is possible to game the site a little by recommending your own websites, but I'm sure (or at least hope) they will have thought of that. If they can gain the much needed traffic and signed up members then it should even itself out anyway.

The idea of the 'crowd' providing intelligence to search results is a great one and in my opinion beats the Mahalo idea of specialists. Crowd wisdom is a far better way to measure the value of something and as such this could have potential with a little better execution.

So Compete is saying that Microsoft Live search has grown massively in the last month in the number of searches and users it's accommodating. They have increased the volume of queries by 67% from May to June and by 48% from the same time last year. Good going! Pretty impressive growth rates I hear you cry.

I thought that until I dug a little deeper and discovered via Marketing Charts that Live search has been running a promotion where users play games in return for tickets they can collect towards free gifts. All the games played involve the use of the Live.com search engine so it's easy to see how this growth has occurred.

The prizes are worth having too, and with reports of users running bots against the games to speed up the winning of prizes it does make me wonder if this is a last gasp effort by Microsoft to get some revenue from search marketing (both for themselves and for advertisers) to try to impress.

I can't see Google or even Yahoo quaking in their boots about the growth figures now...

Google's Webmaster Central blog has an interesting post detailing their position with regards to the practice of creating startpages. Startpages are webpages with a lot of links about a specific topic. The startpages are hosted on a startpage domain and each separate startpage is maintained by an individual webmaster. The links on startpages are usually ordered by categories related to the topic of the page.

Great! They're useful starting points on the web containing a load of links and content relevant to what you are looking for.

But, can this practice be misused to spam search engines? Yes, of course it can. Create yourself a load of startpages with links into your own websites and services, make them keyword rich and highly optimised for search engine crawlers. There you go, a load of doorway pages which don't sit on your own domain and therefore don't get looked on as SEO spam.

A winning formula for unethical SEO's everywhere. This practice already exists and I'm amazed that Google hasn't taken the opportunity to frown upon this practice in this article on their blog! They do mention that link farms are against their guidelines, but no mention of whether they'll be looking to filter them out or not.

Most savvy web folk will know better than to try that, but there are bound to be some who will see Google's endorsement of startpages as a sign that they can try some less ethical practices to gain traffic and SEO link equity.

Spannerworks are a great agency, I use them for SEO currently, but my relationship with them goes a long way back (a start-up I worked for built sites for their Chief Exec many years ago). Plus they're the local boys made good in the web world as possibly the most successful Brighton based new media concern.

So it's great to learn that they are still breaking new ground by launching innovative new products. Their latest offering is called Network Sense, and it's being touted by them as 'giving companies critical insights into the relationship between their brand and social media networks, such as blogs and wikis, and online communities such as MySpace and Bebo'.

Sounds like a very smart move to me! The buzz around social media and reputation is huge at the moment. It's also a topic very close to my heart as I used to program intelligent search agents designed specifically to track reputation, buzz and commentary on large companies when at that same start-up many years ago. Great to see this all coming full circle!

This from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation):

A Bad Idea From Utah: A Ban on Comparative Advertising
March 30, 2007

The Utah legislature has quietly passed a dangerous law allowing trademark owners to prevent their marks from being used as keywords to generate comparative ads. If this law takes effect, a company like Chevrolet couldn't purchase "sponsored link" space on the Google results page when a user types "Toyota" as part of a search query--at least if the latter term is registered in Utah as an "electronic registration mark."

As Martin Schwimmer notes, Utah's own General Counsel warned the legislature that the law was likely to be found unconstitutional given the burden it would put on interstate commerce. To comply with the law, a search engine that received a search request would have to determine whether a user was located within Utah and, if so, check the search terms against Utah's registry of trademarks to prevent the unlawful triggering of advertising. The cost to search engines would be staggeringly high: "Literally millions of search requests from locations worldwide each day would be subject to verification of location."

Aside from its constitutional flaws, the law is just bad public policy. It undermines the fundamental purpose of trademarks: to improve consumer access to accurate information about goods and services. Trademarks are just shorthand terms that designate the origin of a product. Comparative advertising uses those shorthand terms to provide more information about the trademarked product and competitive products. That's why comparative trademark use is clearly protected under federal trademark law. If it weren't, Pepsi wouldn't be able to tell consumers that more people think Pepsi tastes better than Coke, and Apple wouldn't be able to make fun of Microsoft on national television every night.

The good news is that, given the constitutional problems, the law is likely to be challenged in court. But it's too bad the Utah legislature didn't heed its own counsel's advice and save Utah taxpayers the cost of defending this anti-consumer legislation.

Now, as far as I know Google will stop people from bidding on a trademarked term if they are notified of the fact. I have instigated this myself in the past when we've found someone bidding on our company name. So quite why these lawsuits are happening is beyond me, I know Yahoo etc don't apply the same controls over trademarks but with the bulk of the paid search market poured into Google I question the point of trying to ban it (also find it hard to imagine how it could be policed purely for Utah).

Google is trialing cost-per-action adverts on publishers sites in the U.S. I've been expecting this for some time as a natural progression for Adwords/Adsense to move to a similar model to affiliates. This will help advertisers avoid click fraud and see more of a return on investment.

More details on the trial are on the Googleblog.

So Google is now moving into TV advertising. Reports state that they've begun buying ad time on a small cable TV station called Astound in Concord, California. They're then selling ad breaks to advertisers via an auction system that's similar to the one they're trialing for print ads. The auction system doesn't use technology however, rather it's using salespeople to regulate the auctions as they're technology isn't yet up to the job.

This trial is partly to test the concept for advertiser buy-in (something I'm certain they'll get) and also to test they're own network infrastructure in anticipation of rolling out TV ad's to cable networks globally.

This is the first confirmed news of the move into TV though there have been mentions in a previous earnings filing.

Google have also filed a patent to deliver ads to billboards recently. If they keep up this momentum we could see Google become one of the biggest advertising networks very quickly. Having such broad coverage on web, building penetration in print and with the move into TV they could quickly become a dominant (if not the dominant) force in ad placement.

Quite how this fits with the company mantra of making information useful and accessible is beyond me...

Edit: Another story has just broken about Googles' TV ad desires which sounds much more like it could become a good fit for them. The below taken from Marketing Vox about the rumours of an upcoming deal with Dish Networks:

The rumors of a Dish Networks deal come just a day after reports were confirmed of Google's testing TV ads in Concord, California. But delivery over Dish Network's system would allow the commercials it serves up to be better targeted and relevant to what people were watching.

There's also the issue of interactivity. Dish operates one of the most interactive networks in the country, allowing users to search by keywords and define their programming according to their tastes.

All of that is data that Google could potentially mine to serve up ads that appeal directly to the viewers.

Now that sounds right up Googles' street. Attention meta-data to be had and targetted advertising a plenty...

Personalised search is going to be big! That's my prediction since I started using the feature on Google recently. It's made a huge difference to the quality and relevance of results I receive and made finding the information that appeals to me a lot easier. The idea of personalised search is that it learns from your searching and clicking habits so it can return results that are more likely to appeal to you. I've found that after a few weeks of use the amount of search engine spam that appears in the top 20 results has dwindled significantly for the majority of searches I perform, that alone is worth switching the feature on for!

So, from a user perspective, personalised search definitely looks like it is a good thing and the more intelligent Google etc can make it the more value it will add to the user experience. But the question I have is how will this impact on companies SEO (search engine optimisation) strategies going forwards?

The idea of a personalised search is that it learns from your queries and the results that you click on so it can return more relevant results to you. Initially, when you switch on personalised search you will get the usual results, ranked according to whatever search engines algorithm you happen to be using at the time. After a short amount of time you'll notice it begin to learn from your habits and present slightly different results. This means that you are overriding the search engine algorithm, but more importantly you are overriding a lot of the SEO efforts made by the site owners. SEO will still be key in bringing you to the top of the results in the initial searches, but as the personalisation kicks in the SEO efforts are going to matter less and less.

So, maybe site owners would be better investing in ensuring their websites are created in well formed code which adhere's to standards rather than link exchanges and copy writing specifically for SEO (as we know, search engines love well formed code)? Possibly... but SEO will still be an important method of ensuring you get good visibility in search engines. The factors that will probably (possibly, this is my supposition) become more important are things like well formed code, quality inbound (and outbound) links, pagerank (of course) and other factors that a good SEO can influence. Keyword density etc may be less important as personalisation takes hold of the web.

Personalised search is only going to get more pervasive as we move to a more intelligent and semantic web so this issue is only going to get more relevant to SEO's. I'd expect to see some new SEO theory emerging in line with the move to more intelligent search. A full-on semantic web however is another article entirely and could throw the whole SEO world upside down very suddenly...

Google Earth is now becoming yet another bastion of advertising in the online world. You can now view Adsense adverts attached to pushpins. Google AdWords customers can now place sponsored local ads inside Google Earth. The new feature lets advertisers place contact details and a logo on a map marker in the 3D environment.

Google emailed it's customers saying:
'Advertise on Google Earth
If you've created Local Business Ads in your AdWords accounts, they'll now appear on Google Earth in addition to Google Maps. Advertising a hotel in Lake Louise? A neighborhood cafe in Paris? Google Earth users across the globe can zoom in on your business. Don't forget to add a customized icon to make your ad stand out.'

A sensible edition you might think, but as Earth is much more about leisure than actually being a tool for finding locations it may alienate some users (although I'm sure it won't deter the majority).

Yahoo's new paid search advertising system is being offered to new accounts now. Originally it was just offered to exisiting accounts in October.

Yahoo's counting on the new system as a way to grasp some market share back from Google. I believe they need more than just a new system. Simple issues such as preventing people from bidding on tradmark keywords would get Yahoo a lot more love from their advertisers.

However I do feel the main reason Yahoo can't compete with Google on paid search is due to their natural/organic search algorithm being so poor. Users go to search engines to find information, most of that information is found in the natural results so if the natural results are no good..... Without this core audience of searchers the paid results just don't get the volume of clicks and conversions that advertisers want from a pay per click campaign.

Clickriver is now in public beta. This is quite an exciting development from Amazon/A9 as they've chosen to build their own system to do this rather than syndicate Google Adsense or another solution.

The reason for going it alone is most likely because they really don't want any competing products displaying on their site. They're looking for complimentary advertising rather than competitive.

It will be interesting to see quite how much functionality there is in Clickriver. As a travel company based in the UK we'd want to only display ads on amazon.co.uk for example. We'd also only want our ads to appear when someone mentioned a destination in their search or were looking specifically at travel related products. So having this kind of functionality available to you through whatever interface Clickriver uses is really important.

As an official paid search fiend I'm quite excited by the prospects of this and it leaves scope for other companies to do similar. Tesco.com perhaps are big enough to do something like this.

When all others are predicting a downturn and slowing ad sales Google has turned in an amazing quarter yet again! Yahoo's quarter was less than inspiring, partly blamed on falling ad revenue, and other sources are predicting further slowing of ad spend but as yet it doesn't appear to have hit Google where it hurts.

Google have announced a doubling in third-quarter profit from a year ago with net revenue rising 70%.

That's impressive figures! So what is keeping it all steamrollering along? Well it seems to be PPC (paid search, Adwords). While the organic search results in Google are certainly getting worse, all the SEO's out there will testify to this) the paid links are booming, becoming easier to use for advertisers and becoming more relevant for users. All of this points to continued growth in this area.

Some are saying that even PPC will see a downturn, and yes, the volumes may drop a bit, but if managed correctly PPC is something that your company needn't slow down on. If you treat your paid search campaign as a cost of sale and always keep your average cost below a threshold where by you are still profiting from it then just keep going! Thats the beauty of paid search. You can monitor the results so closely and fine tune a campaign so much that any change in consumers spending can be adjusted for so that you don't lose out. It's a remarkable sales channel when managed effectively!

So while there may be a consumer slow down ahead the PPC revenue may slide a bit but I wouldn't see that causing Google any worries as it will always make up a sizeable chunk of their revenue. And with little competition coming from Microsoft and Yahoo (neither of their new paid search platforms are all that impressive) I think Google will continue to throw in record quarters for some time to come.