Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Doubleclick Performics to sell off search marketing division

2008-04-02T17:22:00.004-06:00

No, this blog isn't dead. Not yet anyway. I've just been busy. Anyway, I just got an email from Performics that I thought was interesting. I didn't think it was really worth posting on my main SEO blog but might be worth a quick mention here on Search Trends. I found it interesting because back when Google announced that they were going to buy Doubleclick/Performics, there was a huge outcry in the search marketing community because Google was going to own an SEO company. I can see the conflict of interest, but I figured since the search marketing division was such a small part of what Performics offered (and even smaller when you look at the entire DoubleClick offering), I figured they would sell it off to avoid being accused of being evil (heaven forbid).

Sure enough, that's exactly what's going to happen, according to the lastest email from Performics:

As you are aware, Google closed its acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, 2008. Since that time, we have been actively involved in integration planning for each of our products and business units. We have recently completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics business.

As a result of our planning, we are formally splitting DoubleClick Performics into two separately-run business units - Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing. We plan to integrate the Affiliate Marketing business into existing Google operations, providing enhanced value and reach for our Affiliate advertisers and additional tools and monetization opportunities for our publishers. We plan to sell the Search Marketing business unit to a third party. In Europe, these plans and their implications for our employees are subject to consultation with staff and employee representatives, where applicable.

During this transition, we will ensure that customers receive the same high level of service that they have always experienced. For those of you who have DoubleClick Performics relationships that include both Search and Affiliate Marketing services, we will assign separate account teams for each service. We will contact you shortly with more information regarding your assigned account team.

The Search Marketing business will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold. All client data will, of course, be kept confidential. Please contact your
Search account manager for additional information.

We plan to continue to aggressively invest in and grow our Search Marketing business during this period of transition, and we look forward to continuing our relationship with each of our Search clients.

Thank you for your continued support of DoubleClick Performics.

So there you have it. Google won't be competing with us SEOs after all. At least not as an SEO/SEM firm themselves. Just like I suspected would happen.

Risk

2008-02-16T09:43:00.001-07:00

A few great quotes about risk from today's Quote of the Day email.

The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.
- Jawaharlal Nehru, 1889 - 1964

It's better to be boldly decisive and risk being wrong than to agonize at length and be right too late.
- Marilyn Moats Kennedy

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.
- Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides), 1135 - 1204

Fun is like life insurance; the older you get, the more it costs.
- Kin (Frank McKinney) Hubbard, 1868 - 1930

Super Bowl Twitterpation

2008-02-07T15:11:00.000-07:00

One other cool thing I saw this morning was the twitter activity graph for Super Bowl Sunday it's interesting to see how tweets correspond with actual events. I didn't watch the game this year, but I did catch the highlights, and I still need to check out the ads on YouTube when I get a few spare minutes...any worth checking out this year?

Presidential Election Predictions and Resources

2008-02-07T10:51:00.001-07:00

My guys at SEO.com recently spent some time analyzing Google Trends to predict the outcome of Super Tuesday. So far the results didn't quite match up (Google showed Obama on top after Tues), but it is interesting to look at how search popularity corresponds to the actual vote. We'll be posting a follow up to compared the trends estimates with the actual results within the next few days.

I've come across a few other interesting sites with data related to the election across the web including these:

Google Map/Twittervision mashup for Super Tuesday

This article on Search Engine Land with links to how voters and candidates are using the web this election season

UVEF Panel Recap / Audio Podcast

2008-01-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

John Pilmer posted a recap of the UVEF Panel from last week including audio. I thought the discussion was good, I could have talked about that stuff for hours, and a lot of good ideas came out of it, I think. It was interesting to hear the different perspectives from an extremely successful viral marketer (George), genealogy/facebook marketer (Paul), b2b online marketing (Cydni), and SEO (yours truly). There's a lot of overlap in each area, but also a lot that we can learn from each other.

New SEO forum

2008-01-09T13:16:00.000-07:00

We recently launched the SEO Forums on SEO.com. Come over and check it out if you have any questions about SEO, or if you already know it all and have something to share. We hope to build this into a thriving community that will add value and maybe a slightly different perspective than the existing forums and communities out there.

Revenge of the Mommy Blogs

2007-12-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

Has anyone else noticed that there has been a recent surge in "mommy blogs"? I mean, I know there's a new blog born every second or whatever, but all of a sudden I've seen this huge surge of blogs by people I know. Well I should say women I know. They're setting up blogs (almost all on blogger/blogspot.com) with photos and little anecdotes of what they're up to. Several Christmas cards included a blog URL and I just got an email from my sister in law with their new blog address. It's nuts! Is it just me, or is there new wave of mommy-bloggers coming online?

Google Announces Squidoopedia Clone - Google Knol

2007-12-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

From the Google Blog: Google is launching Knol - which appears to be a Squidoo-like service with a little Wikipedia thrown in for good measure. Just another step towards total world domination for the big G.

Analytics: Data Into Action - SES Chicago almost live blog

2007-12-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

Ok. I kind of suck at live blogging, but it's not all my fault. There aren't a lot of places to plug in and my battery keeps dying...time to get a back up batt.

Anyhow, I'm sitting here in a web analytics session moderated by Amanda Watlington, from Searching for Profit

Matt Bailey - SiteLogic

I came in late, so I missed the first part of Matt's talk, but he seemed to really be keying on the idea of segmenting traffic and conversion rates. Rather than looking at the entire site and saying we get X-number of visits, X conversion rate, look at what your customers are doing based on what keyword they came from, or how they got to your site.

3 C's of Analytics: Context, Comparison, Contrast

Come up with KPI's and look at how those KPI's by user segment. Keyword, landing page, etc.

"Analytics is not about numbers, it's about improving the customer experience." (so true!)

He quoted numbers from some study (not sure which) that showed that companies who hired a web analyst saw improvement between 900-1200% -- IF they take action.

Laura Thieme - BizResearch

Laura talked about specific reports she uses from several different analytics providers, including Omniture, ClickTracks, and Google Analytics. ClickTracks is good for funnel reports, Omniture is good for trend and A/B reports,

C-Level Execs want to see high level, bottom-line numbers like conversion rates, sales, etc.

She recommends using more than one analytics tool. Google is free, so why not use it? There is not any one perfect analytics tool. She like different reports from each one.

Set up conversion goals.

Q&A

Matt: don't be afraid to spend money on analytics. Whatever you spend on a good analytics package, you will make back within a few months. However, it doesn't matter if you have the most expensive analytics tool, but nobody to interpret the data, you won't get any benefit from it. Avinash Kaushik has an 80/20 rule - spend 80% on the person, 20% on the tool.

What do you tell clients who use flash?
Matt: don't do it. He likes to show them that most people back out of that page without even making it to the real site. Laura: Clients need to be educated. Difference between hits/visits.

Couldn't hear the question, maybe something about segmentation...
Matt: The amount of information is limited, but the trick is to not get boggled by numbers. Build the context.

How much time to spend on this stuff?
Matt: How much time do you have? With analytics, it's easy to get wrapped up on stuff. Start with the high level issues and work your way down. Don't get so wrapped up in the details.

Matt: Overlay doesn't matter unless you're segmenting the traffic (clicktracks offers this option)

Usability and SEO - SES Chicago live blog

2007-12-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

I thought I would try to live blog this session. I'm realizing that it's hard to keep up with everything that's going on. We'll see if I have the stamina (and laptop battery power) to do more of this live blogging stuff.

Shari Thurow - Omni Marketing Interactive
Web developer, library sciences, human and computer interfaces - wrote Search Engine Visibility

Search Usability
Misconception: SEO and usability do not go together

Ease of use with which users are able to find desired information before they view a web page and while they are viewing a web page.

- effectiveness
- learnability
- efficientcy
- error prevention
- user satisfaction

Search behavior does not only mean querying behavior. Search encompasses a wide variety of behaviors including but not limited to:
- querying
- refining
- expanding
- foraging
- pogosticking
- browsing/surfing
- orienting
- scanning
- reading

Marcia Bates, berry picking

Key Concepts of Search Usability

1. Sense of place
-Where are you?
-Whate page are you viewing?
-What makes you feel confident about this page?

2. Scent of information
-is the info you desire available on the page
-what can you do?
-where can you go
-how do you get there?
-how do you get back?
-where have you been?

When you provide sense of place and scent of information - your pages are keyword optimized

3. Information architecture
- organization of content into groups
- always do keyword research research before you begin info architecture
- headings are the first thing people look at
- primary navigation, 2nd level navigation, etc.

4. Interface
- locational breadcrumb links
(example site: midwestmetalfabrication.com/drilling.html)
use captions (considered primary text, unlike alt text)
people's eyes naturally go from areas of heavy color saturation to areas of low color saturation

5. User confidence

The time to become involved with seo/search usability is before the site is designed.

Website usability testing - measures the ability of a person to complete a task

Behaviors reported in focus groups do not reflect bhaviors observed during usability testing.

Goal is to balance between user (customer) expectations and business goals (the user isn't always right--you have to make money)

Graphic images vs css text - TEST! Don't assume text/css is always better. see which one performs better.

Usability can help with link building, because other site owners are more likely to link to the site that is easier to use.

Also mentioned that the new edition of her book, Search Engine Visibility is coming out very soon (or just came out, I'm not sure).

Matt Baily - Sitelogic

1. Get people to your site
2. Get them to do what you want them to do

If they can't find it, it's not there
If they can't find you, you're not there

Position yourself in a way so that when people get to your site there's no question about what they need to do.

Types of searchers
1. Shartshooters - know what they want - product, brand name, etc
2. Shotgun - concept searching, not specific product or brand, but now generally what they want
3. Artillery - idea search, looking for something that will feel good

Coke website - in flash, still loading

Shop now or enter website (pacific customs website--Matt says it's the worst website he has ever seen)

PetSafe example - nothing on homepage to indicate that they have more than one product.

Taxonomy - how do you organize information?
Hierarchal Structure, Classification, Grouping

Different ways to shop for wine. Wine.com offers many choices to find wine. vs. winerackshop.com - which has adsense ads on the right nav and no clear navigation system on their own site. Plus the blue/black links on dark background. Nice!

Every page on your website is a homepage! From every page on your site they need to be able to find what they need. Navigation should be in grouping that makes sense to the user.

dynamism.com - too many products on a single page
chefgadget.com - have to go back to the main navigation to find the other products in subnav
thinkgeek.com - does a good job with subnav, wine.com also does a good job of this with interior pages

Not just organization of information, but how you display that information
John Deere - example of marketing hooey...doesn't tell people how it will make things better

Hates ppc ads - "big waste of money"

Coke site is still loading

They're not going to find you unless you call it what the customer calls it.
Examples:
Butt Paste (diaper rash ointment)
toilet tank aquarium
doc fizzix - good job using words to explain what their products are
sushi usb

coke is still loading

You should not have to explain to your customer how to use your website.

Geek Toys - usb cup warmer example - paramountzone.com, well written - also used keywords (gadget) in reviews that were not used in the product description

Tip for International websites - make the address fields international friendly in contact forms.

Quote from Jacob Nielsen: After usability design, websites increase desired metrics by 135%

Bob Tripathi - Search Strategist, Discover Financial Services

Website Usability - how easy it is for website visitors to perform/complete a task on your site.

Search Engine Usability - determines how easy it is for search engine crawlers to index your site

Another quote from Jacob Nielsen (these usability gurus love that dude).

Search engines are looking for text, links, images, video, etc. = traffic
Website visitors are looking for information, to buy a product, download software, etc. = convert (sale, lead, etc)

The ownership issue--who is responsible? Your design and development experts and you--the SEO.

In bigger organizations, you have more players, usabilty, design/dev, seo, acquisition, content, legal. Everyone has a stake--and an opinion.

You have to get all the stakeholders in a room (shows picture of two bulls fighting). Your job is to get everyone on the same page and act like a modern Budda - the doctrine of non-attachment. Don't be attached to any one department, but look at the holistic goals.

Collaboration is the king - work with all the various teams and players on what needs to be done.
Keyword generation, SEO guidelines, on-page SEO
Create prototypes, usability testing phase, design phase, quality testing -> website launch

Be clear what needs to be done

Educate each team on the basics of SEO, get them speaking your language. Build together, stay together.

Examples from website usability iemployee.com, goldfish.com.

Q&A
Why do bloggers get our articles to show up better than on our own site? Matt: Bloggers present information in bite-sized chunks. Shari: it's a duplicate content issue--the bloggers have a better link architecture, more links, etc.

How to test w/focus groups & multivariate testing? Shari: Focus groups are guided and aren't always best. Multivariate testing,
Matt: focus groups are liars. for multivariate, make a lot of little mistakes fast and learn from them
Shari: balance user goals and business goals. Sometimes you have to sacrifice user goals to make money, sometimes you'll make more money
Matt: there's no such thing as a completed website, it's never done?

Question for Matt. Can you clarify the considerations for international you mentioned in your presentation?
Matt: US-specific forms ask for state and Zip, but that doesn't work for international addresses.

Search Marketing vs. Facebook

2007-12-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

Danny is the guest co-host on whiteboard Friday, where he makes some excellent points about how Search doesn't get the respect it deserves as an advertising medium. The discussion talks about how everyone is all nuts about facebook, but they don't realize that search marketing is really the most revolutionary ad medium of the past decade plus.

I first heard Danny talking about this on the Daily Searchcast Podcast a few days back. He also wrote an article for Adage on the topic. He makes very good points and I agree wholeheartedly. The beautiful thing about search is that it doesn't interrupt anything--it gives people exactly what they are looking for. What other type of advertising can do that?

Yahoo Ads in Adobe PDFs

2007-12-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago Adobe and Yahoo announced that they are going to start serving up Yahoo ads in PDF docs. It's kind of an interesting development, because this not only expands the types of content that can be used by advertisers, it also gives publishers another way to monetize PDF ebooks and other useful content. There is already a lot of good, free pdf docs out there, but this will give people even more incentive to publish great content that can be monetized with ads rather than charging for the content.

Details about how PDF ads work

Here's a sample screenshot of what the ads look like

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised that it's taken this long for them to figure out this revenue model. Everyone else has been doing this type of ads for a long time. The way it works is that the publisher of the PDF doc has to opt in to show ads on their doc and then they get a cut of the ppc fees. I assume Adobe's making a cut, too, and of course Yahoo gets their piece of the pie. The ads that are displayed are pulled from Yahoo's content ads, based on the content of the pdf.

If you want to sign up for the beta program and display ads in your pdfs, they're taking signups for the beta

If you want to advertise on other people's pdf docs, you can do so thorough a regular YSM account. Just make sure you're using "Content Match" and your ads should start showing up on relevant PDFs.

More on the news from Search Engine Land

Can Google Index PHP Pages?

2007-11-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

Peter just wrote a post about SEO for PHP pages on the SEO.com blog. Indexability of dynamic pages of all varieties (including PHP) is often misunderstood. I think a lot of it comes from changes that have occured over the years in terms of Google's ability (or rather willingness) to index dynamic pages, and it also comes from uninformed SEOs spreading outdating information or even outright rumors as though they were facts.

For all you SEO geeks, Peter's post offers a good intro to the topic of the CURRENT situtation regarding dynamic pages--not how it was 5 years ago. Remember, this is the first in a series of articles about the topic--so stay tuned to our SEO Blog to learn more.

Forget shopping, give me some pizza!

2007-11-23T14:51:00.001-07:00

Yahoo's Buzz Log talks about the surge in searches for pizza the day after Thanksgiving. Who wants to cook after preparing that big feast yesterday, anyway?

Credit Card Searches Surge With Holidays Looming

2007-11-17T14:00:00.000-07:00

According to this from Hitwise, searches for credit cards have doubled, presumably as people gear up for the holidays. Apparently this increase in searches happens in November every year.

Google Makes Adsense Less Clickable (but in a good way)

2007-11-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

Google announced on both the Adwords blog and Adsense blog that they've changed the format of their content ads. So now instead of the entire ad body being clickable, it's only the link and URL portions--yeah, the parts that should have been clickable all along. I'm not sure how much of Google's revenue comes from accidental clicks, I'm guessing it's not huge, but I've clicked on an adsense link accidentally by clicking on the text of the ad. This seems like good news for advertisers: fewer junk clicks, but bad news for adsense publishers: less revenue from accidental (junk) clicks. On the adsense blog, they try to spin it as a positive saying that advertisers will be more satisfied and spend more, but they admit that they're doing it to get rid of bunk clicks--which will reduce publishers' revenue. Bummer for them (us), but sweet for advertisers (oh wait, that's us, too!).

Twitter and MyBlogLog as Marketing Tools

2007-11-17T08:18:00.000-07:00

Lee Odden offers up some great advice (with the help of several contributors) about

Using Twitter for Marketing/PR

and

Using MyBlogLog for Marketing

I still don't get twitter, but I know there a lot of people that really love it. That's the thing with social media, it's not for everyone--and different people connect with different social networks. I do like mybloglog and I get it, even though I haven't spent a lot of time getting the full benefits I could. Lee's article gives some good ideas on what other people are doing with it.

WABCON This Friday

2007-10-31T10:31:00.000-06:00

I'm speaking at WABCON this Friday. It's a business conference in Orem covering a bunch of essential topics for business decision makers. My session will be about SEO. It's supposed to be a basic SEO discussion, but I'll be answering any questions that come at me, so regardless of your experience with SEO, come on down and check it out. The other sessions look like they will be very good, too. If you use this promo code: SEO-WAB2007 - you can save $100 off the regular price of $129. At that price you can't go wrong, so go sign up now!

New Website Design for and blog for SEO.com

2007-10-24T23:51:00.001-06:00

We just launched the new version of SEO.com. It's still a work in progress, and we plan to add a lot more cool tools and resources over the coming months, but I feel like the web design by Graphics.net is leaps and bounds better than the previous design.

The new site also marks the launch of a new SEO blog on SEO.com. I will most likely be posting most SEO-related stuff over on that blog, but I'll try to keep this blog alive, probably focusing more on interesting trends in search keywords, etc.

Keyword brainstorming tips from Google

2007-10-16T08:09:00.000-06:00

Even though Google holds back a lot of their keyword data, they've slowly been offering up more and more tools to allow people to figure out which keywords to bid on (and/or to optimize for). This post from the Adwords blog points to a couple of these tools as well as giving the idea to search forums, wikipedia, and good old Google search for ideas on keywords. All good advice. If you want to get the most out of your search marketing campaigns, you need to make sure you're covering all the relevant keywords and it's tough to think of them all by your lonesome. Use the tools that are available, and get creative!

Worldwide Search Engine Popularity - Aug 2007

2007-10-11T09:38:00.000-06:00

Baidu.com beat out Microsoft for overall network traffic according to the latest numbers released by ComScore

SE Land for more

Low Trust for Search Engine Ads?

2007-10-11T09:15:00.000-06:00

According to a study by Nielsen Co. (via SEW blog) only 34% of consumers trust search engine ads. That puts it right above banner ads and just below ads before movies. This brings up a lot of interesting questions. I don't have time to explore all of them, but I wonder how accurately you can really measure trust? Or do we really care about trust if customers are buying products? I mean, SEM almost always gets much better results in terms of conversion rate and cost per conversion than Radio, TV, Sponsorships, movie ads, newspapers...so do they really trust those media more, or do they just think so when asked the question in a survey? Or do they buy from a search ad even though they don't really trust the site? If so, I'd rather have the sale than their trust. (For the record, I think you need their trust to get the sale). Also, I assume whey they say 'search engine ad' they're referring to the paid ads, not organic results. Where would these people rank the organic listings in terms of trustworthiness?

If it 'aint broke, don't fix it

2007-10-11T08:43:00.000-06:00

I've heard this a hundred times before...another A-list blogger is claiming that 'search is broken'. This time it's Steve Rubel who says search doesn't work. He goes on to admit that nearly everyone uses search engines (I think the 91% figure from PEW is low) and that we are largely satisfied. His argument for search being broken is that there are so many different types of content across all the various social networks, personal accounts, and whatever else, that can't be searched from one central place. I don't think that means search is broken, maybe it just hasn't evolved to that point, yet. Think back a few years compared to now and look at all the different content types we're able to search. We've come a long way, baby. And with desktop search tools like X1, Google Desktop search and others, a centralized, truly universal search is getting closer every day.

Link Building Interviews

2007-10-09T23:00:00.000-06:00

A list of 15 interviews of link building gurus.

Yahoo Better than Google?

2007-09-28T08:13:00.000-06:00

I feel like Google and Yahoo results are pretty comparable in terms of relevancy/quality--and have been for a few years now. Sometimes I get better results in Google, sometimes Yahoo. Well, according to the Compete blog Yahoo has a lot higher "search fulfillment" (meaning they find what they're looking for, or a least click through more on searches) than the other search engines. Too bad for Yahoo only 20% of the Internet population realize Yahoo's better.

Matt Cutts made the comment that more people use Google to find info that doesn't require a click through--and Google is better at providing info in a snippet so you don't have to click. Matt can't really argue with Compete's data, it's more like he's just caught up on the terminology. He's basically saying that just because people don't click through, doesn't mean they didn't "fulfill" their search query. Google doesn't need to defend itself on this issue--the fact is they have 70% of the market, so who cares if they get a slightly lower "fulfillment" ratio, or whatever you want to call it, they're still the king of search.