It has been announced that after years of a consistent character limit for Facebook ad body copy, Facebook will be changing that limit from 135 characters to 90. This change will be enforced on new ads beginning February 29, with retroactive enforcement beginning in May. While new ad types have been designed around this length, this new limit will apply to every ad type on Facebook. These changes will limit new ads created through the Facebook user interface, Facebook Power Editor and the API.

More information on how the new character limit will affect ads is expected to be released at fMC in New York City on February 29^th.

While some bloggers have speculated that the change in character limit might make room for more ads on the page, it should be noted that other factors such as default advertising image dimensions would also have to change. Rather than speculate, we will be tuning in to the keynote address. The event will be streamed on the Facebook site from 12 pm – 6 pm on February 29th.

Pinterest Changes Followed Links

Pinterest is the hot new kid in town, referring more traffic for many sites than Google + (crazy!) and almost as much as Twitter. Since its inception, SEOs and link builders were excited about the do follow links Pinterest allowed — until now.

The images that can be “pinned” link out to the source URL and were once followed, flowing equity from the strong Pinterest.com domain.  Those links are now nofollow. The rel=”nofollow” attribute tells search engines to not follow a link, preventing search engines from passing link equity and anchor text to the targeted URL.

Not all is lost however. There are a few places on Pinterest where links are still followed. One of them being within the description of a pin, with the caveat being that the anchor text is the rootdomain.   Or, if a user inserts a link pointed to a deeper URL, Pinterest shows the following as anchor text: rootdomain.com/…

Additionally, links found within a “board” are still followed and these links can point to deeper pages of a site as well (still Pinterest limits the anchor text to only the root domain):

Example code:

The website button found on a Pinterest user profile is also followed:

Example code:

Although Pinterest removed some of the followed links, it is still a viable platform for link building and social interaction. Brands are seeing incredible referring traffic from Pinterest, proving it to be worth the time and resources to build out Pinterest profiles and become active within the community.

Sign up and get pinning!

Technorati Tags: character limits, facebook, nofollow, pinterest

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Today I have the privilege of sharing with you how RKG approaches link development, how we see it in the context of SEO strategy overall, and if you’re lucky, a bit about where we see our efforts going in the future. I’d love to hear your thoughts on our philosophy as well – let me know on twitter (@forefront1) or drop a comment below.

Philosophy Point #1: Link development will not save your skin. We’re approached with an unfortunately high-level of frequency by businesses that believe link development is the SEO version of the Golden Gun. Now, I’m going to be the first in your ear preaching the value of it, the necessity of it, and the flat-out power of it, BUT I’m only going to do that if you’ve fixed the holes in your boat first.

Clearly, if your boat has a fundamental problem, it doesn’t matter how sweet your sail is, the thing is going to sink. It’s an obvious truth for boats, and the same principal is true with your website (or half a million other things). If your site has technical problems of some kind, it’s likely that no amount of link development is going to produce the results you’re after. It’s pretty hard to rank a page that can’t even be indexed by a search engine. In fact, that’s a challenge. I’ll mail you $20 if you can do it.

Fix your site first, optimize your architecture, and then think about link dev. Oh, and we can help with all of that ☺.

Philosophy Point #2: Link Development should be customized. If you believe one type of link solves all problems, give me a call and let’s talk. I want to back you off the ledge before you jump. Link development is about understanding your industry, your market, and what makes your little world go ‘round on the Internet. There are ways to quickly gain an understanding of your market and where you fit in (I like to think we have a pretty efficient process here at RKG), but to believe that .edu links, .gov links, or whatever other flavor of link you’re after is always going to be right is just plain wrong.

If you’re looking for someone to help you with link development, ask them about how they build link strategies, what tactics they often use and what they feel is important when evaluating a link. Warning: A good answer might be “It depends”. They should be able to back that answer with sound reasoning.

At RKG we have an approach that allows us to efficiently understand your link situation and identify a course of action for building your site’s Domain Authority, or if you’ve already got what you need capitalizing on it. While our tactics are similar across strategies, the approach and focus is different based on the situation.

Philosophy Point #3: Link development is not scalable as you know it. Link development has long been a manual process. Yes, there are exceptions and ways of garnering large amounts of links at one time other than going to India, but be ready to really invest to make these options work well. Developing large quantities of links can be very worth the investment, but when engaging in content development, promotions, etc., we believe there is more value to be had than just the links. In fact, the biggest value may not even come from the links themselves. Shocking I know. Content is how you scale link building.

Philosophy Point #4: Link development isn’t about quantity. Now that I’ve told you that quantity is attainable, I’m going to tell you that it really does not matter 99% of the time – at least not in a silo. It’s true that sometimes the 10-ton backlink gorilla is simply too much to handle, but most of the time, quality links from quality sources that have other important factors going for them will provide much more value than sheer quantity, especially when directed to deep pages.

I don’t believe Google is perfect here, and there are plenty of instances where quantity, and frankly crappy quantity, is still winning the day, but you have to focus on the future, or you’ll always be chasing the past. So cheesy I could barely write it…

Philosophy Point #5: Link development isn’t really about link development, it’s about marketing. In it’s best form, link development is an after shock of other things you, your business, and the people that make up that business are doing well. To reach SEO nirvana you should be focusing on providing your customer and those interested in what you’re selling with something of value.

Too often link building is seen as something akin to getting beaten up: a painful, long, disappointing, and frustrating process. The truth is, people like linking. They like talking about stuff, they like sharing with their friends, they like showing off what they know, and they like being in the know. Being the “thing” that is being discussed is fun! Who doesn’t like some attention?

Do a good job at what you do and give someone a reason to actually WANT to talk about you and you’ll be dead before your competition ever catches up. That’s 95% of the battle. If you’re fortunate enough to be in that situation, feel free to leave the other 5% to us. If you’re not, we can help you get there before the previously over-exaggerated death event takes place.

Again, let me know your thoughts, especially the bad ones. What tenants make up your link philosophy?

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Digging into our logs, we found ad traffic from DuckDuckGo dating all the way back to May of last year, but it was very spotty through most of 2011.  It looks like they made a change to significantly ramp up ad serving in mid-January of 2012 though.  Paid search ad clicks originating from DuckDuckGo have jumped at a far greater rate of growth than their reported query figures:

We saw ad traffic from DuckDuckGo grow 607% between the weeks of January 2nd and February 6th.  Over the same period, DuckDuckGo direct queries were up a very impressive, but much smaller 83%.

Room for More Ad Growth

It should be pointed out that this still represents an incredibly tiny slice of the paid search pie.  We see DuckDuckGo only generating 0.02% of all adCenter-powered clicks and they are not even one of the top hundred search partners for Bing and Yahoo.

If DuckDuckGo really holds a 0.1% share of the overall U.S search market — which is not unreasonable — it should have a lot of room left for ad growth.  That is, of course, if they choose to go that route.  For one thing, they only appear to be showing a single paid search ad at a time, while the larger engines generally run about 10 ads with two or three of them appearing above the organic listings.  Were DuckDuckGo generating ad clicks in line with that 0.1% share figure, they would be a top 3 or 4 search partner for the adCenter platform.

Meanwhile over at Blekko…

Blekko is roughly in the same league as DuckDuckGo.  They both have decent name recognition among a tech-savvy audience and similar traffic levels.  If we believe the Alexa rankings, Blekko ranks 2216 for U.S. traffic, while DuckDuckGo is at 1855.  Looking at RKG traffic figures, they also seem to have had similar plans for ramping up the monetization of their audience through ad growth.

As we did above, we’ve pegged the week of 1/2/2012 at 100% to show the relative growth in traffic.  That growth is remarkably similar for the two engines with Blekko showing a 567% increase in paid clicks from the week of January 2nd to the week of February 6th, compared to DuckDuckGo’s aforementioned 607% increase.

There are a couple interesting differences in strategy here though.  Blekko is showing ads through Google’s search partner program and they are running a lot more of them at the same time:

Blekko has four ads above the organic results and four on the right rail. It’s not pictured here, but they also repeat the top four ads beneath the organic results.  The referrer information we see for Blekko also suggests that a good deal of their PPC traffic is  being generated through other sites that have Blekko-powered search incorporated.  One example is Topix, which shares a founder with Blekko in Rich Skrenta.

Potential for a Backlash?

It has to be a tricky situation being a niche search engine that’s trying to grow its user base while driving up revenue per search.  Both DuckDuckGo and Blekko surely benefit from being an alternative for users that find the major engines’ results to be too commercial.  DuckDuckGo drives this point home on their about us page, saying that, among other things, they are a search engine with, “way less spam and clutter.”  That’s certainly true now when it comes to sponsored links, but will they be willing or able to keep it that way for long?  If they do continue to ramp up monetization through ads, will it destroy one of their selling points or will their users take it in stride?

Postscript: Just before publishing, I caught MediaPost’s article from yesterday evening confirming that Blekko “began testing ads”.  Check it out for some more detail and a quote from Blekko’s CEO.

Technorati Tags: blekko, duckduckgo

Under the new Enhanced Sitelink format, Google will display two lines of text under each sitelink – essentially providing multiple sub-ads under the main text ad.  Google will dynamically fill the sub-ads by pulling ad copy text from elsewhere in the account to provide accurate and relevant messaging.  Google uses the sitelink destination URL and ad copy destination URL as the matching link to qualify which version of ad copy text to show for the sitelink.

The Enhanced Ad Sitelinks not only provide the user more information in the ad, they also take up a great deal more real estate on the page, benefiting the advertiser as well as Google itself.  In addition to this, it continues Google’s trend of designing ads that look more like organic results:

While this should have a positive effect on advertisers’ click-through rates, it does raise some interesting questions.  Because Google is automatically determining the text that will show under the sitelinks, we will never be 100% certain that it will be the ideal choice.  If you happen to be testing multiple lines of copy with the same destination URL, which text will Google choose to show in the Enhanced Sitelinks?  If the advertiser is already choosing the sitelinks themselves, why not let them choose the text that will now accompany the sitelinks?  Also, to what extent is this simply cannibalizing “free” traffic that the advertiser would have received from the organic listings, particularly for searches on their own brand terms?

With all that said, the new sitelink format should ultimately be beneficial to the advertiser.  Again, overall CTR should improve, but also CTR on the now more prominent sitelinks should improve as well, helping users navigate deeper into the site on their initial click.  It should also be noted that it will clearly be beneficial to Google by driving more clicks and revenue for them.

If you have any thoughts or any changes in performance once you start to see the new sitelink format please feel free to share below.

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In 1927, Werner von Heisenberg documented what he referred to as an “Uncertainty Principle” governing quantum mechanics. The Uncertainty Principle holds that an observation cannot precisely reveal both the position of a particle at a point in time and its momentum. The more the observation reveals about one, the less the observer can know about the other. A similar principle governs paid search.

(Physics sidebar, feel free to skip! If memory serves the notion is that the act of observation impacts the object. To observe anything — by sound echo-location, sight, touch — we have to bounce something off of the object we observe. For big things this is irrelevant. Shining a flashlight on a tree doesn’t impact the tree. However, in the world of subatomic particles, bouncing photons or anything else off a tiny particle has a big impact. If you want to know where a particle is at an instant in time, you have to “hit” it hard to get the answer quickly, but in doing so you impart a huge and unpredictable change in momentum to what you’re trying to observe.)

The Paid Search Uncertainty Principle:

This reads: “The amount of variance tolerated in Advertising Efficiency (“E”) times the amount of variance tolerated in the volume of advertising spend (“V”) is greater than some constant, K.” As the variance in one approaches zero, the variance in the other approaches infinity.

Okay, okay, enough of the physics metaphor, the idea is this: you can’t control both spend levels and efficiency metrics. The more you predetermine one, the less control you have over the other.

This fundamental law of paid search may be its least understood, as many many companies determine an efficiency target and then simultaneously fix a rigid budget for how much they will spend in media. Those companies are often frustrated with their results.

Fixing a budget for ad spend translates to the following: “I’m going to spend this amount of money regardless of market opportunities. I will flush money down the toilet if I must in order to spend my entire budget. If, on the flip side, the market conditions are such that I can make $20 in profit for every $10 I invest, I will nevertheless stop spending money when I reach my budget.”

Fixing an efficiency target translates to the following: “I am going to spend my advertising dollars at an efficiency that makes sense for my business. I will spend an unlimited amount of money if I can do so efficiently. I will spend no money if market conditions dictate that I can’t spend efficiently.”

Stated as such, the Uncertainty Principle clearly follows.

Yet advertisers try to violate this principle all the time. “We’re going to spend $1 Million this month, and we need to see an ROI of 5 to 1 (or a CPL of $30).” It’s nice to have goals, and it’s smart to try to forecast what you’re likely to see, but at the end of the day market conditions may dictate that you pick one or the other target to hit, or you’ll likely end up missing both.

Important caveat: this assumes that your program is well managed. We’ve taken over many horribly mismanaged programs and both grown the spend and greatly improved the ROI. But all things being equal, for any well managed program there is a trade off between efficiency and volume that has to be understood.

Paid search managers have control over many pieces of the game:

• The user searches that will and will not fire an ad
• The text of the ad fired by a particular search
• Where ads are served (both domains to a greater or lesser degree, and geographies)
• On what devices they are served
• The maximum amount the advertiser pays for a click on a given ad under almost any circumstance

As I’ve argued relentlessly in the past, we’d like more and better controls over many of the above, but we certainly do have a large degree of control.

But it is also important to recognize those factors paid search managers do not control:

• The volume of user search in a category. If the users don’t search, we can’t serve ads.
• How much other advertisers are willing to pay for clicks. If other advertisers behave irrationally, or change their bidding practices significantly it will have a material impact on the marketplace opportunities.
• The advertiser’s selection, pricing, content quality, and promotions are often outside of the control of the paid search manager. These impact the value that can be extracted from traffic and thus the amount the paid search manager can spend for that traffic.
• Competitors’ promotions, selection, content quality, pricing, etc. Significant changes in the business practices of competitors impacts CTR, QS, and conversion rates for their ads and thereby shifts the Volume v Efficiency landscape in ways we can’t control.

The point of this isn’t to make excuses. Indeed, if the goal of paid search is to spend a budget, there is no excuse for spending significantly more or less than the budget. If the goal is to hit an efficiency metric (CPL, ROI, Margin to cost ratio, whatever) for non-brand search, there is no excuse for missing that target.

However, introducing two targets often creates an unsolvable problem for paid search managers. Hitting both an efficiency metric AND a volume goal requires good execution, yes, but it also requires favorable market conditions over which the paid search manager has no control.

Paid search managers must be held accountable for those elements that are within their domain, but holding folks accountable for conditions outside of their control is both unfair and unwise.

****** Note *****

In the category of the truly bizarre: Barry Adams wrote a fantastic post on SEO January 24, making a very similar analogy with Quantum Mechanics. As I told him when he pointed this out, I actually had a draft of this started on January 20th so I’m quite sure I didn’t consciously or unconsciously borrow his metaphor without attribution. That said, what are the odds?!? Psi-star Psi suggests…oh, nevermind.

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If you’ve been working in the SEO industry for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “Domain Authority” (DA), “Domain Strength”, etc. For those not in the know, DA essentially refers to the ability of a domain to rank in the SERPs based on its backlink profile alone with ALL ELSE EQUAL. If you’re interested in learning more, this explanation by SEOmoz will get you up to speed.

As a link director, DA is just one of many metrics I examine when looking for links or while crafting a backlink strategy. While there is some information related to how important DA is, what role it truly plays is still largely unknown. Remember, correlation isn’t causation, as the SEOmoz folks like to remind us.

This often leaves us SEO’s wondering what level of importance to place on issues such as developing DA for a site, or earning links from high DA domains. Common sense can take you a long way, but truly understanding the power that this metric represents takes some study.

My goal in presenting the following information is to shed some light on the level of importance we should be placing on DA. It certainly has backed up and informed our opinions here at RKG. If you’d like to stop reading now, I’ve summed up the message in the following sentences, but you will miss the good stuff :).

Domain Authority is so powerful, that it easily woos Google into giving up her prizes: rankings. DA is the Kavorka and Google cannot resist.

During some recent SERP analysis, I noticed a particularly odd result (from a metrics standpoint) ranking in the top 10. The more I dug, the more that result seemed to stick out.

While there are likely billions of examples similar to the one I came across (how do you think Amazon has such great rankings for so many pages?), this one stuck out to me particularly because of how the domain authority seems to have been achieved, but more on that later.

As a disclaimer, I performed the following searches while using private browsing in FF to help limit personalization. I did not go to all extremes, but I’m pretty confident in how these results were displayed based on having others in different locations perform the same query.

Take a minute to consider the following:

SERP: “Earth Shoes”
Order of results (by domain):

1. Earth.us
2. Kalsoearthshoes.com
3. Zappos.com
4. Shoebuy.com
5. Planetshoes.com
6. Planetshoes.com
7. Onlineshoes.com
8. Overstock.com
9. En.wikipedia.org
10. Sierratradingpost.com

URL Smackdown 1:

http://www.shoebuy.com/earth-shoes.htm (position 4)

VS

http://www.onlineshoes.com/kalso-earth-shoe-b_id84 (position 7)

This screen shot from SEOmoz highlights a few key metrics often looked at when examining perspective link targets. Clearly, the onlinshoes.com result ranking three spots lower (read “that shoebuy.com is significantly out ranking”) has the strongest page-specific metrics across the board. Beyond that, the mozRank to mozTrust ratio of the shoebuy.com URL displays a pretty odd discrepancy, making the result even more unusual.

It’s also important to note that the one link achieved to the shoebuy.com page is (according to Open Site Explorer) from shoebuyblog.com – a relatively weak domain. The page containing the link is relatively weak as well.

When performing a URL search in Majestic SEO, no results are returned for the shoebuy.com URL.

Examining the page will show you that there isn’t anything that noteworthy going on either.

Social Sharing? Not much to speak of.

Let’s look at the domains:
*Note: I included mT and mR metrics as points of further reference.  Since they are included in the DA score, that’s our focus.

URL Smackdown 2:

http://www.shoebuy.com/earth-shoes.htm (position 4)

VS

http://www.planetshoes.com/earth (position 5)

A similar story, except with an even more dominant set of page metrics. An on-page and social look reveal a similar situation to the first comparison as well.

Let’s look at the domains:

Clearly, the shoebuy.com URL appears to be very poor but is coupled to a very strong domain.  In both cases, this URL is outranking URLs that from a backlink metric standpoint are superior pages on very respectable domains.  Their results (in my opinion) are equally relevant from other viewpoints as well.

Time to get to the point. If you aren’t considering DA in your linking building strategy and working to understand how to harness and utilize it, you’re missing out big time.

So, we believe domain authority is good. No, GREAT. So how do we go get some? Well, let’s take a look at one example that might surprise some of you based on how we’ve all been trained to understand good linking.

Ok, so, it’s easy just by looking at a few of their top links to start to understand why shoebuy.com’s DA is so high. But, how did a shoe company get links on sites like hotwire.com, hsn.com, and expedia.com? And on the their homepages!?! Let’s take a look…

Example: Hotwire.com

Example: Expedia.com

Takeaway? Partnerships with the right site can apparently be valuable.

If you’re interested in doing some more digging related to this, take a look at the page metrics associated with the overstock.com result or the token “informational” result from the always-popular Wikipedia. While these aren’t over taking the stronger pages listed above, I’m willing to bet there are results with quality domains that also have strong page metrics listed 11-20 on the second page that are being passed up. In my opinion, according to the various sources of information that guide us related to links, it’s interesting those pages rank at all.

Get the Kavorka. It can’t be resisted.

Technorati Tags: link building

The organic search result rendered a preview of the correct landing page:

Notice the different landing page when previewing the PPC Ad:

Thankfully it was discovered that the Google preview user-agent was being redirected to the mobile domain, resulting in the preview showing the mobile content.

Duh?! Right? Hindsight is 20/20.

In defense of all involved, Google previews weren’t clearly stated on how they actually worked.

Are they cached or on-the-fly?

Google states that they generally generate previews using cached content but if it is not available then they will generate one on the fly using the user-agent “Google Web Preview.” We knew there was something signaling a redirect but without full access to a client’s site, it is difficult to dig deep enough to find the culprit.

However, we were able to test the PPC ad URL against the Google Web Preview user-agent and voilà! There was the answer in a 2 second test.

The site was redirecting the desktop URL to the mobile URL for the Google Web Preview agent only.

Conclusion: Running the target URL against the user-agent string showed us exactly how the web preview bot was reacting to the URL. Interesting to see confirmation of Google’s vague explanation of how previews work. It seems that in this case, the organic results showed a cached version of the preview, but the PPC ad showed an on-the-fly version, rendering the mobile the URL.

The client was able to remove the user-agent redirect and the mystery of the incorrect preview was solved.

How to Test for This

So how can you test your site against something odd like this? We will show you! There are tools that can help you do this, but we prefer the manual way in order to remove any points of weakness (and to get our nerd on).

To test a URL against a user-agent string, follow the steps bellow:
*For this example, we will use the Google Web Preview, but you can replace this user-agent string with any other user-agent string you’d like to test. User-agent strings are easily found online.

1. For Mac OSX or Unix users, open a Terminal window. For Windows users, you can use Putty or your favorite SSH method…
2. Type: curl –head –user-agent “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/[WEBKIT_VERSION] (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/[CHROME_VERSION] Safari/[WEBKIT_VERSION]” www.domain.com
3. To be clear, there are single spaces separating the text entered in the curl command and two dashes (it is hard to see in this WordPress font). There are no tabs or enters (new lines) and the user-agent string needs to be placed within quotes
4. After typing the curl command, hit enter
5. Review results

The above example ran www.rimmkaufman.com against the google web preview user-agent. It returns a 200 header response code (perfect). Let’s see what a googlebot mobile should see when properly being redirected to a mobile site.

Notice the “302 Moved Temporarily” and the location http://m.cnn.com” (by the way, CNN should change that to a 301 redirect).

This curl command tutorial is handy for many situations, and it confirmed an annoying issue for our client. We often find clients serving different header responses and redirects to different user-agents. Performing this exercise can be a big find and easy win, saving your site potential problematic issues.

A big thanks to Jody O’Donnell and the RKG crew for helping with the discovery and testing of this situation.

Adding to the buzz around tablets has been Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which was released in November, but was the subject of intense speculation long before it was even announced.  While Amazon’s earnings report last week offered some nuggets of information, it didn’t exactly spell out how many units were sold or the impact to Amazon’s overall bottom line.  According to the release, all Kindle unit sales, including e-readers, were up 177% during the holidays while the Fire, specifically, has been the best-selling product on Amazon.com since its introduction.

Meanwhile though, Amazon’s net income fell a whopping 58% year over year in the fourth quarter.  With the Fire losing a reported $3 dollars or so on every sale, Amazon is clearly thinking long-term and hoping to draw new users into its larger ecosystem of products and services, including e-books, digital content and the $79-a-year Amazon Prime.  That logic is reasonable enough — although Apple manages to hook users into iTunes quite well with hardware that is highly profitable per unit — but for it to work, they are going to need to gain traction with the Fire.

The Kindle Fire Jumps to Second Place in Tablet Traffic

As we reported in our Q4 Digital Marketing Report, the Fire is indeed succeeding as a low priced alternative to the iPad and gaining appreciable traffic share where a slew of big name competitors have failed.  Shortly after its launch, the Fire became the second biggest tablet in terms of traffic share, generating a little over 4% of tablet ad clicks in late December, before declining a bit to 3.5% at the end of January.

The iPad still generates the overwhelming majority of tablet traffic though, with a commanding 88% share, and it’s widely expected that the next iteration will debut within the next couple of months.  Still, it’s clear that consumers are buying and using the Fire in numbers that no one, but Apple, can claim.  Exactly how those consumers appear to be using them may be of particular interest to marketers.

Not All Tablets Convert Equally: Kindle Fire vs iPad and Other Devices

Looking at conversion metrics across tablets, phones and desktop, we found that clicks from shoppers using the Kindle Fire were far less valuable in January than those from users on almost any other device:

In terms of revenue generated per click (RPC), the Kindle Fire ranked worse than all other tablet classes, and even the iPhone.  RPC for the Fire was 83% lower than desktop and 84% lower than the iPad.  The Fire does run a version of the Android OS, but still fared poorly compared to other Android tablets, which themselves did not hold up well to desktop computers or the iPad.

We see a greater variance in conversion rate than average order value (AOV), which may speak to some potential reasons for our findings here.  AOV for the Fire is just 28% lower than that for desktop, but conversion rate is 76% lower.  Both metrics put Amazon’s tablet closer in league to a typical Android phone than an Android tablet.

Why is Kindle Performance so much Worse than the iPad?

Some hypotheses:

• Demographics:  While the iPad is becoming more and more ubiquitous, there’s reason to believe that its users skew toward higher income brackets.  Last year, comScore found that about half of iPad owners made more than $100,000 a year.  With conversion rates and average order size both running above desktop, the iPad owner is not only more likely to make a purchase, but they spend more when they do.  Conversely, with the Kindle Fire costing less than half of the cheapest iPad 2, we may be able to assume that it’s users fall into lower income brackets, or are at least more price-conscious.  Other Android tablets in general are cheaper than the iPad, but more expensive than the Fire, with AOVs and CRs in the middle of the two, pointing to a correlation between product price and conversion potential.
• Smaller screen size:  It’s an old story at this point, but the tinier the screen on our device, the more challenging it is to go through an online checkout process.  So, many users of smartphones may browse for products, but ultimately complete their purchases on a desktop.  The Fire has a 7″ screen versus the 9.7″ screen on the iPad 2, and while that difference doesn’t sound huge, it can have a big impact on web browsing.  Most of the other Android Tablets in our segment adopt a form factor very similar to the iPad’s and, again, their higher conversion metrics may be evidence that smaller tablets simply convert worse.
• Performance issues?: Although Amazon has provided updates along the way, early reviews suggested the Fire was considerably more sluggish than the iPad despite similar-sounding internal specs.
• More Local/Offline Intent: Because of its smaller size and price tag, users may be more inclined to actually take the Fire with them when they’re out and about, something traffic patterns suggest isn’t as common as you might think for larger tablets like the iPad.  Truly-mobile users frequently have different intentions and are more likely to search to aid an offline purchase.
• Users buying online, but buying from Amazon:  Lastly, if Amazon is having any luck, the entire ecosystem around the Fire is driving its users to buy products from the online retail giant even if they found those products somewhere else first.  The device plays content available from Prime, which also comes with free two day shipping at a sunk cost and it’s already set up for 1 click ordering, etc., etc.  This line of thinking has been expressed over and over at this point, but the poor conversion metrics we see may actually be evidence for it working.
  

What Should Advertisers Do?

For most advertisers, it is probably not worth the trouble to further segment their traffic beyond: tablet combined with or distinct from desktop, and smartphones.  The traffic from non-iPad tablet sources likely still comprises less than or around 1% of total traffic for most.  RKG pegs it at 0.8% for the month of January.

That said, since last July Google has provided an option in AdWords to target tablets by OS and now even allows segmentation by OS version:

Our figures suggest that the OS distinction makes a significant difference to expected conversion rates and thus the price we are willing to pay for that traffic.  If tablet traffic is particularly heavy for a site, that’s one line that we might one to draw.  It doesn’t appear possible to segment or filter out the Kindle Fire specifically at this time, but again, it is still a tiny piece of overall traffic (~0.2%), even if it has a much larger share of the tech world’s attention.

Technorati Tags: ipad, kindle-fire, smartphones, tablets

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Google’s move into the social world seems to be rockin’! Larry page, CEO of Google, announced that Google + users reached over 90 million, doubling the amount of users just three months prior.

Companies who have yet to jump on board with Google + should be paying strong attention to this social avenue and amping up their +1 presence with quality content.

Focus on the User
The launching of Google’s Search Plus your World ruffled feathers around the Internet. Most publicly was Twitter slamming Google for not including Twitter content, aka tweets. In revolt of Google’s eclectic search results, some smart engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace (among others) teamed up to create “Focus on the User,” a tool that instantly “googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+.”

The Focus on the User bokmarklet works in Firefox and Chrome, and temporarily enables the functionality to show additional social results that are available.

The bookmarklet is super easy to use and pretty fun. Check it out.

SEOmoz Directory Database

Looking for quality directories to add your site to? SEOmoz updated their directory database, saving lots of time researching for niche directories. The only bummer is you need to be a pro member to access the full database.

Google Page Layout Update

Google made an algorithmic change that evaluates a page’s layout and the content-to-ads ratio above the fold. Although this change will affect less than 1% of searches globally, if you have a site that contains many ads above the fold, then you should strongly consider reducing or removing them and adding quality content above the fold.

Additionally, different screen resolutions or sizes will come into play. You can use Google’s browser size tool to help visualize the ratio on your pages.

Guest Blogging

Ethan Lyon from SEOmoz created a fabulous tool that scans Twitter for the queries “guest post” or “guest author” and automatically parses the data into a nice, organized report of guest blogging opportunities.

This is a helpful tool for any link builder or in-house SEO looking for guest blogging connections. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/want-guest-post-links-find-them-via-twitter-tool

Broken Links Do Not Penalize

We actually have been asked this question before from clients if broken external links can negatively affect a site, and if you too have ever wondered about linking out to 404 pages, then you might be happy to know that they won’t. John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, confirmed this on a Google Webmaster Help thread.

It is however a lame user experience and consideration should be taken to clean them up or minimize them.

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One tactic that has paid off for Sweetwater has been the appropriate segmentation of tablet and smartphone traffic.  RKG was one of the first to point out the vastly different conversion rates for the two segments — nearly two years ago — and Sweetwater quickly took action to segment its paid search bids in light of those findings.  As Matthew Mierzejewski, RKG Vice President of PPC put it, “We were able to leverage iPad user data to increase our bids on that segment of the mobile audience. By leveraging this segmentation, we’ve been able to increase iPad CPCs by close to 90% compared to bundling smartphone and iPad devices together, efficiently driving more revenue for Sweetwater.”

The Google post includes a number of other tips and metrics and we encourage you to check it out.  Also, MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan adds some additional perspective to the study in an excellent article here.

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• RKG Digital Marketing Report: Q4 2011 Released Today we released the RKG Digital Marketing Report for the fourth quarter of 2011, offering data and analysis for paid...