Who’d release a product on Friday the 13th after all! :-0

From a marketing viewpoint I did wonder why they elected for  a Friday rather than a Monday. A rolling week of events from Monday to Friday would have made more sense. Still, it looks like there’s a bit to come, with lots of sponsorships in place with xfactor and options to win holidays and other prizes.

I wonder what Google will do in response.

New media Age has picked up on it too with a nice quote from Alex Hoye of Latitude

Microsoft will need to put effort into marketing as it has in the US and explore channel deals to increase traffic.“In terms of features, advertisers and search agencies may find certain terms further down the distribution curve than head terms more attractive due to filters, but significant search volume and subsequent changes in user behaviour would be required to bear this out

Interesting times; I must confess though, I couldn’t really see much difference between the old Bing and the new.

Still early days, one to watch.

Meantime  I  thought it might be handy to have a quick compare US Bing with  UK bing

You can find it here

Update: Andrew Blogged on it, so I added a Goog UK vs Bing UK tool too.

My brand ‘robwatts‘ is fairly small – I have various social profiles on sites that have popped up here and there over the years. The nature of my job and the things that interest me about the online space dictates that I usually sign up for new things and see what I can learn from them. The benefits are twofold – I learn a bit and I get to impart anything useful to colleagues or clients I work with.

After years of suspicion and reticence, I recently decided to enable Google Social search and updated my Google profile to make it all work, adding my twitter feed, search blog and Google reader.

When I’m logged in to Google.com (not very often as .co.uk is my default) I now get to see results from my ‘Social Circle’ at the bottom of the search results for certain queries.

A search for ‘analytics’ when logged in to my Google account, shows the following at the bottom of the results page.

We can see that Google has identified this post from Latitude as being of interest to the query, simply because I’ve added the blog feed to my Google reader.  As Google indexes my social graph, I’d expect to see different things from people I might follow on Twitter or friendfeed. Maybe I’ll one day see a video that a friend had tagged as ‘analytics’ in their youtube account.

It really does depend on how extensively I build my network out, and according to Google how well connected/integrated that second tier network is. The idea being that I not only see content from my first level network, but people one step outside with connections to my inner circle too.

Brand Impact

This has obvious massive potentials for businesses, especially those with developed social profiles. It’s one simple example of how the importance of social media and the networks that it helps nurture are.

The Dell Approach

Social accounts like https://twitter.com/DellOutlet for example, with its close to 1.4 million followers are in an excellent position to appear for all manner of brand and product related searches, and that’s just at first network level. Every single one of those 1.4 million followers who have a Google account (think Google Docs, Gmail, Youtube, Blogger ) searching for related products in everyday Google search, might just see the boxed representation similar to my example above.

Dell.com clearly recognises that a well developed social strategy has the potential to offer massive benefits. It’s probably a good reason why they have developed strategic social accounts targeting a variety of markets and segments. Just take a look at their twitter page here.

The positive benefits to Dell for this alone are very difficult to determine, but it’s very clear that whatever way it’s sliced, the opportunity to have a positive message returned in a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) at zero cost is just awesome. As Google grows its social offering and improves its products it’s reasonable to assume that uptake and buy in to such features will improve and like most of its better experiments, will be rolled out by default.

Another benefit to brands and companies is that CTR (Click Through Rate) and the interest it generates shouldn’t go unnoticed.  A key flaw with Google and other search engines too, is that they all place a big emphasis on signals that are relatively simple to manipulate through SEO – anything that gives them a strong signal of quality outside of things like on page factors or external link popularity is of use. The view here is that signals like these are much more difficult to manipulate and as a result could be potentially useful in terms of factoring into any algorithmic system.  A social circle result with a disproportionate high level of click through could point to something worthy of interest. Add sentiment interpretation into the mix and things start to get very interesting indeed.

The how much is it worth in PPC terms scenario

It might be useful to put this into some kind of financial context and take a quick look at a CPC cost for a keyword like ‘laptops’. According to Google globally, this keyword has a CPC of between £2.09 and £3.12 for estimated ad positions 1- 3. Search volume on exact match (considerably overestimated perhaps) is around the 2,740,000 searches per month mark. For one keyword, that’s a lot of searches. Getting to play on the page for that keyword at those levels of interest has clear value. Social search, it would appear, enables for access to that SERP – given the right kinds of social activity.

Keep connected to your customer base

So what else does this mean? What should companies do to both insulate them and enhance potential benefits that could stem?

Using the example above it isn’t too much of a stretch to envisage a scenario whereby a negative representation of a brand or a product could potentially appear in that same social circle box, for that same query.

A query for laptops could say ‘Dell Laptops are rubbish’. If shown enough times to enough people, then click through rates to the negative piece could easily snowball a message embedded. Online awareness of the perception could also spread, tweets would get made, negative sentiments re-tweeted, and reinforcing blog posts made into the bargain.

The illustration above is an example of how a disgruntled customer or unfortunate news event, left unmanaged could grow – previously to social search, negative sentiments like the scenarios cited might only appear in a news result, or blog result on a high profile strong authority search result – these could be managed by search tactics designed to push negative sentiments down and positive sentiments up, often post event. Social search if rolled out wholesale, would make this a little more difficult to achieve quickly – as a result companies and brands will increasingly need to be alive to events as they happen, monitoring online in a proactive engaging way. As a direct response tool, Social media is an obvious asset, an almost why wouldn’t you scenario.

There are many different examples of brands and people who have suffered through poor brand management. It is still true that companies are reluctant to invest in social media as their marketing dept, or online marketing manager simply doesn’t see the potential for a ROI.

Invest in Social, it’s the future

It’s a crying shame of course and many a CEO will no doubt have made their concerns known as they’ve watched their brand take a battering in a SERP, the simple reality is however, that had the company team had the foresight to invest in a strategy that not only helps protect the organisation from bad vibes, but has added CRM and SEO benefits that directly contribute to the bottom line, then they might have found themself concentrating on more positive rather than negative outcomes.

Maybe if we go back to basics and ask ourselves why it is that  companies have customer services departments and press offices, perhaps we’ll all conclude that the simple answer is that they recognise that to not have either would be customer base and marketing suicide. Nuff said?

Originally published here

I read a great post yesterday on Joost’s blog by Andre Scholten that discussed tracking keyword ranking positions in Google Analytics – genius and well, I could babble on about it forever as it has been the missing part in any analysis for like, ever! Excellent stuff guys!

It’s all been made possible by the ajaxification of the Google serps . Matt Cutts talked about this ajaxification back in March, (you can see it on youtube here ) saying that Google were testing and that < 1% of users would see this behaviour. Based on my numbers, it would seem that this test has been ramped up some as at least 8% of my visitors used this yesterday to reach the site I’m discussing.

So, with all this in mind I thought it would be cool to set it up and to see what kinds of traffic share each position gave. It’s a limited sample of 1 days data( follow up post will follow with bigger numbers) showing amongst other things the importance of position one in Goog for ones keywords and the value of choosing a good SEO to get you there.

It’s also really cool to see what types of keywords, en masse are appearing and providing traffic for the various positions, especially for the longer tail stuff. The patterns and query types also help inform subsequent content production choices as well as any on page tweaks I might decide to employ subsequently.

A few words on factors that influence CTR first though

Now, granted, it’s not a perfect representation as there are many factors that influence CTR. I can hear some readers saying hang on a minute, 75%, so what, it’s a limited sample, on just one vertical that may� well be devoid of all manner of other signals that influence such things. Yep – I agree too, it is but a snapshot, it is but a sample, but it’s an insight nonetheless.� I won’t reveal the site or the niche, but I will reveal that it’s in travel. I accept completely too, that no vertical is the same, all have their nuances – the nature of the query, its length, user motive, all affect the decision of the user in their click journey.

For those who don’t know, CTR ( click through rate) is influenced by all sorts of things like; calls to action in the snippet displayed by Google, instances of keywords in the title, url or url file path that match the query.

(The image below shows a typical example for the query’ play poker’� showing the instance of the keywords that match the query)

And then there’s other factors like ’site links’, ‘indentation’, ‘double facing ppc and organic’, ‘brand awareness’, ‘universal/blended search’, ‘local search’, ‘news results’, ‘PPC ad position’ to name but a few.

Content and Site Type Traffic Considerations

As for traffic itself, again you might have a site that is huge and is accessed by millions of long tail queries that account for the majority of your traffic. OTOH, you might have a site that is just 4 pages deep but carries the best review of a product ever, where one keyword like ‘product review’ accounts for the majority of your traffic. IOW, no two domains are ever the the same – each site is different and is subject to content, depth, breadth, authority, age, location etc.

So having said all that I’m almost inclined to say, what’s the point in even discussing it if every query is different, if its dependant upon so many variables what is the point even! But I won’t, as maybe it’ll encourage others to do the same and share their findings. The more we share, the more we learn, the more we� can best serve ourselves and our clients, right?

Lets not confuse things either…

First off, my data from GA simply reveals that 75% of sampled visitors came to the site through clicking on an organic position one result. It does not mean that in my entire niche that 75% of people always click on the position one result. Neither does it mean that in every niche or vertical that 75% of people click position one either, as we touched upon previously, it’s complicated and subject to widely varying factors.

No discussion on CTR’s generally, would be complete without at least touching upon previously known related stuff, so it’s most certainly worth talking about the AOL data set from back in the day that revealed interesting findings in that it showed that aggregately, over a few million queries, 40% of people clicked through to the position one result – if we analysed that data further, we’d see all sorts of contradictions and different outcomes as we pared and refined the data set.

If we were able to see a similar result set today, then there is no doubt that universal search, news, images etc will have t impacted such a figure and for some organic queries today, you’d expect that figure to be a whole lot lower or higher even.Two competing theories being that one; people would be dissatisfied with the 1 or 2 organic results followed by news and local or images so would scroll down further in an effort to get more choice, and two; people are lazy and are therefore more inclined to glaze over the rich media or news or local results preferring to click the organic results at position 1, therefore increasing the CTR and value of #1.I couldn’t possibly do that whole debate justice here, as it’s a massive multi facted issue full of all sorts of fascinating twists and turns which I don’t have the time to get into to, but it’s a debate to bear in mind when you look at this stuff.

Anyhow, without further ado here is the image showing the CTRs from Organic Google SERPs for 582 visitors yesterday who used ajax Google SERPs to arrive at the domain, revealing that 75.4% of traffic yesterday came from position #1 results.

It’s interesting to note too that position 10 got a greater percentage of clicks than position 8.

If you have a client who uses GA, then do yourself, and them a huge favour and implement what Joost and Andre have shown, do it now!

There’s a lil bita buzz in the twitter and blogosphere today over the whole spotify app approval thing with Apple and iTunes.

To be honest, I’ve no idea what’s going to happen – I don’t know, Apple top execs do, Spotify insiders prolly have an inkling ( and a strategy) but that’s about all I can deduce from these 969k or so blades of grass in my garden.

What I do know is that Spotify is absolutely kick, I mean, I seriously love it to death – fast, useful, free or cheap, and has literally changed the way I access and listen to music.

I was an avid, blip.fm and last.fm user, for a time; but both offered restrictions to market, or offered urls to iTune purchaes that didn’t work. Today I use them, but only for the community value add sense.

See, I like quirky, obscure, niche stuff that, doesnt really have a mass market and is prolly quite hard to find too. Prior to these services, I had to be content w/ a little judge jules or ancient Danny Rampling to fire up my old skool house dancey shoes.

We all love the iPhone Yada Yada Yada

I won’t go off on one about how great the iPhone is either, I’m a confessed iPhonoholic often seen w/ head bowed tapping away or grinning inanely at some random cussive tweet from a random person w/ too much time on their hands too,if it isn’t that, then I’m usually annoying the person on a train seat next to me w/ a reflexive over-volumised bass tinctured reverb or two. Bought and paid for ( honest guv) from� iTunes or from a mates new found old piece of vinyl, masterly digitised and available for download oft tinternet. ( A mate for the purpose of this piece, is anyone who loves house/techno/hip hop/ dance and just so happens to have stored it online somewhere, for convenience of course)

So imagine my delight having already played with Spotify as a desktop app and finding the various bits and bobs� like the ability to stream choons� and listen to them instantly for free, in learning that they’d developed an app that would enable for the same!

Wow, said I, how amazingly cool will that be! My own playlists, and even Shared Playlists accessible from the cloud, w/ a great interface, no fannying around,� pre-caching abilities and all for less than the price of four pints of lager in the Crown or a random Irish bird talking about her backend every so often by way of adverts – winner winner chicken dinner.

Yet, when you look closer you begin to hear the slow winding sound of the cat on your turntable, driving that top notch tune to a halt – stop we say, like yeah right, Apple soooo aren’t going to grant Spotify app status in a zillion years, not w/ out risking massive potential damage to its bottom line.

iTunes can be a pain in the arse – if your computer dies, or you want to migrate to another PC or MAC even, then to take your choons and migrate it all is little short of agony, with a dollop of time added for good measure, yet we� still use it, cos by and large, it’s the only real way of getting our stuff onto our iPhones and dulling our mind numbingly boring treks into the office.

Sure, if our file is small enough and we’ve managed to jump through all the hoops AND maintained our connection then sure, we can get tunes on the go, and sample a new sound or two, but it isn’t easy ,� it’s a pain in the arse. The Spotify app on the contrary looks to be anything but.

Music, accessible, simply.

So getting back to the question I started w/ – what will Apple do? Will they approve or reject?

Approving Spotify

On the face of it, it really doesn’t really make a lot of sense for them to approve the thing, Turkeys really wouldn’t vote for xmas given the chance.

What value, other than a miniscule amount of one time skimback would the inclusion of Spotify add to the bottom line of Apple? Moreover, what damage could the Spotify app do to the bottom line of Apple?

Frighteningly scary idea number one: If just 1% of people decided to say, “hmmn, you know, Apple, poke your �9 fee for that album download, I’ll go with Spotify and rent the rights to listen to the thing instead and listen to things that I want to, when I want to, rather than buy some random bit of plastic that gets scratched or I’ll get bored w/” then the cost to Apple would be huge.

Frighteningly scary idea number two: Adopters like those mentioned previously, usually have a good little network of people who look to them for ideas and new cool things on the block. Before long, such adopters would probably be heard saying in various forms of accent, “you know what dude, you really need to save yourself a few quid and liberate your bank balance from the tyranny that is iTunes”

Frighteningly scary idea number three: The world awakens as a result and realises that cd’s are old hat and just silly in 2009, ups sticks and moves on.

Rejecting Spotify

So Apple do the expected and say “fonk that for a game of hairy mary’s” reject stamp, sorry Spotify, clause xyz precludes us from accepting that apps that yada yada yada…

But would that be the end of it? Could Apple really get away w/ such a position? Is not restraint of trade the first thing that springs to mind? And what about the market? Can the market really be bucked in this way? In fact why isn’t/hasn’t iPhone furiously devved an alternative? Is it not a no brainer almost? An app that stores music in the cloud that people can stream from and access from anywhere – or maybe it isn’t that simple, perhaps the whole cloud music to mobile device idea is locked away and owned by Spotifyand Apple, cognisant of this are crying pins and needles unable to move and adapt…

I don’t know, IANAL (always wanted to say that) and I know very little about trademark law or music law( as I’m sure is abundantly clear) or any of that other restrictive/protective bs other than that I’ve read at Techcrunch or through some other random blog somewhere so I’ll leave that bit there.

What I would say though is that for Apple, Spotify, the Music industry and the consumer at large is that a real opp exists for the 3 main players in this little shindig, to sit down and sort something out, be that through app embedded buy now, rev share, iTune links or a bigger slice of the Spotify pie with share options and whatever other compromise the smartest mover can place on the dumbest shaker, really does seem like the only viable option open – anything less will show it all up for the sham of a rip off that the status quo is.

Finally, none of this is really new, at least not from the perspective of the desktop. Napster showed the way w/ peer to peer and heck it rocked, rocked so hard in fact that they were eventually forced to comply or die to the demands of Sony et al, all of whom quaked at the thought of this freeness thing running riot. People like Daniel Ek ( Spotify CEO ) have long seen the� writing on the wall , and puts it well asking almost “why wouldn’t they, (the music industry)� see it any other way” .� They all know the game is up, they can’t keep mugging people off with ridiculously high priced glossy packaged plastic, especially when people have other options.� Apparently, 90% of online music is still obtained by non paid ‘illegalz meanz’, showing that there’s still massive demand for the stuff, even if they aren’t paying for it – put simply, try as they do, they can’t shut it down, they can’t stop people sharing music, downloading it for free etc, coz at its heart, the current system sucks arse and no one likes being ripped off.� Consumers, given the option will vote w/ their feet.� I like Spotify, game changers ftw

We need a new SEO head in the Latitude London SEO team – It’s a Junior Role, so a great opp to learn lots and work with a great bunch of nerds. If interested� please at me on @robwatts on twitter and I’ll get back to you.� Requirements – An absolute demonstrable Passion For Search! You’ll be able to demonstrate your knowledge of search, evident through your participation and general knowledge.

You’ll be working with great brands and will get an excellent grounding in search and onlihne marketing� from a group of people who live and breath it daily, it really is a great opportunity.

I� hope to hear from you soon!