In one article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/10/bing_google_eyeballs/) we are led to believe that Bing is in fact better than Google for advertisers.

This is based on ‘research’ carried out by User Centric. They tracked the eyeball movement of users as they browsed both Google and Bing search results and found that although there was very little difference between them in terms of natural results, Bing attracted far more eyeball time when it came to the sponsored links.

User Centric’s results showed that Bing’s sponsored results on the right of the page attracted more eyeballs than Googles. 42% of the participants looked at Bings wheras 28% looked at Googles. Those that did look at them - spent pretty much the same amount of time looking at them.

All the research is carried out in User Centric’s labs using infra red technology to track eye movement across the page. So I trust the findings and it’s really interesting stuff - so I thought I’d do a bit more digging and see if I could find out some more.

So I went to the User Centric site and read their original article on the experiment where I discovered that the reasearch was carried out on just 21 people! http://www.usercentric.com/news/2009/06/08/eye-tracking-bing-vs-google-first-look

That strikes me as a very low sample of what is an enormous universe of internet surfers.

And lets face it - everyone is pretty much familiar with Google and considerably less familiar with Bing - so where do you think people are going to spend the most time looking around? At something they know already or at something they may never have seen before.

It may well turn out that Bing is indeed better for advertisers and that’s cool - but I don’t think we can be sure of that. Just yet.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to find that we can get free impressions on Facebook engagement ads. And those free impressions work as hard if not harder than the ones you pay for.

Here is how it works on a typical ‘get fan’ campaign.

Firstly you buy impressions on a Facebook engagement ad. The engagement bit is very important.

So lets say you buy 1m impressions on a CPM basis.

The way engagement ads work is that the ad is served up to those people who you have targeted. Engagement ads include underneath them the names of friends who have already ‘become a fan’. That is the engagement bit - you are more likely to click through if a friend has done the same.

Facebook records these clicks in the normal way.

But the really good part is that if I become a fan then that comes through into ALL my friends news feeds. These are the free impressions.

What is really great is that for the campaigns we have run for Canterbury and for PDSA - we have found that these free impressions generate the same level of fan sign as the paid for impressions. In fact, for PDSA, for every fan we generated through the paid for ad we got 2 from their news feed. So for the PDSA campaign we generate c15k new fans of which 10k signed up through friends news feeds.

This is what social is all about, peer to peer recommendation working better than any other form of advertising.

With click through rates of around 2.2% this is an extremely effective form of advertising. With careful targeting, good creative and a decent incentive we managed to get two of our Facebook campaigns into the European top 5.

For example our current Canterbury campaign is targeting males aged 18 plus and using rugby keywords, the engagement ads aim to drive sign-ups to the Canterbury of New Zealand fan page initially through a 20%

Canterbury Facebook 'Become a Fan' Campaign

The idea is that with careful planning of post sign up activity like that I’ve mentioned above we can keep fans engaged in the page for longer.

In summary, there is good free stuff out there but you need a decent plan to make good use of it.

In the UK, Google’s plans to allow advertisers to use competitors’ trademarks in the text of their ads, will of course encourage the cowboys. But before jumping on this bandwagon, I’d encourage any brand to consider how exploiting competitors’ trademarks will give you a competitive edge. You should have the clearest of differentiators that doesn’t explicitly denigrate competitor brands . You should carry it through and ensure that your messages are consistently supported in all copy. Failure to do so could denigrate your quality scoring and result in you having to spend more to maintain rank position.

Clearly many brands, for example supermarkets who refer to competitor’s prices in their TV ads, could extend their campaigns successfully. But if this is not the case, direct digital marketing should be consistent with other marketing messages and channels. So if mentioning competitors in other channels is not something you would consider, then don’t do it in your paid search ads. It will devalue your brand.

Resellers of branded products - brands who already mention ‘cheaper than’ or ‘cheapest’ or ‘best price /range / quality’ in their existing marketing message will be able to generate further stand out and mop-up the traffic around an existing, strong brand. Since they trade off other established, recognised brands there will be little change to their brand or marketing strategy. But their paid search budgets may rocket as the competition increases to compete via brand association.

As a result big brands may be forced to increase their spend to reinforce their brand equity or risk losing traffic to ‘brand representatives’ who aren’t representative of the true brand values, the marketing message nor indeed the brand’s products and services.

Brand values should influence every decision that gets made, on- and offline, from paid search creative to in-store plastic bag policy. If a brand changes this approach based on an ‘opportunity’, without looking at the wider picture then that brand can be misrepresented and brand advocates may be quick to judge, blog, comment, tweet putting the brand at the risk of a digital beating.

The other thing to bear in mind is that consumers have a pretty good idea about what they want to buy, so are unlikely to be impressed by a pushy sales pitch about a product or service they don’t want. That said, there are ways to use this technique to your benefit, provided you can back any claims you are making to do with price or performance comparison, with validated research, eg saying, our tyres are miles better than Brand X, will certainly attract clicks searching for Brand X. And, since you are making a fair claim there will be no repercussions.

It’s all about managing your brand’s reputation. Companies make huge investments in building brands and maintaining brand equity. By hijacking a competitor’s trademarks you risk damaging your own by confusing your messages with those of competitor’s.

Despite the maturity of direct digital marketing; it is still all too often treated as an add on and given lesser attention than other marketing channels. Yet most marketers would agree that consistency is vital in conveying a brand’s message.

Similarly, Microsoft is one of the richest companies in the world, but in the UK is relatively unknown for its search engine. The Manchester City of search marketing you could say! But is all this about to change with the launch of its new search engine, Bing, and should we all be getting excited about it?

Well, it’s not everyday that one of the world’s richest companies launches a new search engine and surely with all the investment, brains and talent, if anyone can challenge Google’s dominance, maybe Microsoft can.

We should certainly be enthused about companies looking to push the quality and relevancy of search engines, especially as we all use them and rely on them so much for researching, learning and purchasing. But Microsoft’s new search engine isn’t going to dramatically change the landscape of the search market straight away. It won’t wipe Google off the face of the earth and it’s not going make a huge impact on Microsoft’s current UK search query share. AskJeeves.com has proved that through ingenuity and marketing you can increase query share, if only for a short while. It can be done..And Microsoft has realised it can take it to the next level as quite simply it has the cash to do so.

It’s no secret that buying Yahoo! would be the quickest way for Microsoft to gain search query share. This could still happen. In the US this would give it around 30% of the search market – a decent slice of a huge market. All of a sudden things look more favourable for Microsoft. The UK market is slightly different though, especially as doubts over the quality of Yahoo’s search traffic seem to be increasing.

So what can Microsoft and Bing achieve? It’s backed by an above the line marketing campaign throughout the UK it should definitely get enough attention for people to try it and realise that there are search engines they can use other than Google.

Consumers can expect more relevant results. Microsoft improved its algorithm greatly with ‘Live Search’ and has clearly made relevancy a focus with the way its paid search offering has developed. Bing is likely to build upon this further and with the likelihood that it is going to be indexing more and more web pages, it would be a sure step to providing the consumer with better results and a better experience. This means Microsoft could not only attract new users, but keep them too, which is ultimately the bigger challenge.

Bings new image search appears to take considerable strides and offers real promise. This is one thing that Google will definitely be looking at with interest as it’s an area Microsoft is really pushing – the scratch pad idea where you can store images and change sizes is something no other search engine can do quite as well. Let’s hope we see more of this from the new engine as it’s a great element of what Microsoft is bringing to the search market.

The results filter should also be great. A few years back there was talk of a ‘Search Macro’. This never quite took off, but the idea was very interesting and it looks like with the results filter Microsoft will include something similar in Bing, which is exciting. The idea with Search Macro was to add more context to what the user was searching for thus providing more relevant results. For example, if a user searched for ‘soup’, the macro would quantify whether they wanted information on recipes on soup or to buy soup. The ‘results filter’ appears to be an uncomplicated method for the user to add more context to their search. This would be an interesting feature for advertisers to test in the French market for example where users tend to use less keywords within their searches. It could potentially help advertisers to get cheaper clicks as the user can refine their search before clicking on ads.

However, what’s disappointing about this launch is that only the US version will have these cool new features. The UK is a highly sophisticated market, second only to the US with a high level of early adopters eager to test new services. If they’re not going to get the full fat version, they won’t be recommending it to later adopters. So any kudos gained from the launch is lost and as we all know, the Internet world is very unforgiving to services that don’t cater to individual audiences and markets.

How will this new engine affect your search strategy? Will your customers care or even notice? It might see a boost in traffic off the back of the advertising but will it breed brand advocacy? Microsoft needs to weary of ‘reinventing’ itself (as it did with Live Search – which didn’t move any mountains) with, for non-US customers, no USP. As far as the consumer knows, it’s just another search engine. AskJeeves has reintroduced their butler to breed an increased sense of brand empathy but how, crucially, will Microsoft differentiate Bing?

Will it gain market share? Not until it does something spectacular, or buys Yahoo! Do you have to adapt your search strategy? We’ll have to wait and see. For those expecting great things, we’ll have to watch the US and wait. It might change the search world, but Bing wasn’t built in a day.

As with most who’ve been using it, I’ve spent some time entering notable dates, famous names and mathematical equations.  I’ve also entered into a twitter dialogue with WA about their entertainment and media coverage – as the search for the BBC returns ‘Development of this topic is under investigation…’ but I’d not tried asking personal questions.

Amusingly,  and as covered in the telegraph’s article, WA returns results with personality.  Ask WA ‘How are you?’ It’s response is ‘I am doing well, thankyou’.  Type in ‘88mph’ and after a little bit of maths, the first result is to recognise that this is the speed Marty Mcfly had to reach in the Delorean in Back to the Future I.

Wolfram Alpha search for "how are you?

A search for ‘the meaning of life’ returns ’42 (according to Douglas Adams)’.  A wry smile later and I feel that somehow there is a bit more personality to WA than I’d thought. I vaguely remember Google doing things like this in the early days – certain topics would return results that were unexpected but not necessarily incorrect.  It would seem that this is a thing of the past for Google (unless someone can prove me wrong?) but Twitter shows us how brands who adopt/broadcast their personality can enhance their consumer interactions to positive effect,  (we are all human, after all) and as Twitter’s search function evolves, the market could find themselves having to adapt to keep up.

I’m sure the personal touch is a reflection that WA are a start-up and they are all a bit geeky ( they have built a new search engine, after all) , but that’s not such a bad thing now is it…?