Manhattan Marketing Maven

Did Google Goof?

Google’s decision to weight its +1 button and display Google+ results has created a very interesting contretemps. On one hand, Google is puting its thumb on the scale they invented. On the other hand they are monetizing their unique IP and stitching together their own technology, ostensibly to serve us better. 

Google presents and spins these changes as a consumer benefit. Google transforms “into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships,”  they claim. The three new features are: personal results, profiles in search and people and pages. The so-called benefit is that your Google search results will be even more personalized, thanks to information shared on Google+. 

Predictably Microsoft is crying foul, arguing that Google unfairly weights its own stuff above everyone else’s and in so doing skews the real value of search engine results. They have begun to aggressively use this move to switch pitch users and advertisers. 

Google streaked to success by offering a different way to categorize and rank search engine results based on inferred popularity and usefulness. They’ve used this mantra to cloak every subsequent move. At the same time, they’ve taught us all how to search. Google is both a verb and an deeply embedded part of our online behavior and muscle memory, so to speak.

The likelihood of BING, newly ascendant over Yahoo, creating enough negative buzz over a sustained time period to prompt mass defections is low. Though Google’s own behavior may help Microsoft’s cause depending on the extent to which they favor themselves in SERPs and the reach, depth or intensity of the perception that Google has conned all of us for the last decade. 

It’s a very interesting turn of events, though it’s hard to predict how things will shake out. But its gonna be fun to watch.

 

Search -- The Missing Link

Search marketers have always assumed that some kind of relationship between organic and paid search exists, but we’ve never been able to put our fingers on it exactly. Clients, looking for efficiencies, often question the value of paid search versus organic or natural search because they assume if they get SEO right it obviates the need to spend incremental dollars on SEM. 

A team of math guys at Google added a new dimension to this debate by looking at 446 search campaigns in four countries between October 2010 and March 2011. Their methodology was simple. They studied organic campaigns in isolation and counted the click throughs. Then they looked at organic campaigns run in-tandem with paid search and counted the clicks again. They were searching for incremental clicks by drawing a baseline and counting the added impact of paid search. 

The objective was to answer a fundamental sales objection. “Why should I buy search ads when my organic search effort will get me the traffic I want?” 

By understanding how many clicks a campaign would have gotten naturally and then how many clicks paid search added, Google documents the long standing mix assumptions and simultaneously defends its core value proposition. 

The result was … running both at the same time yielded 89% more incremental clicks. 

There were slight variations by vertical category. Retail was slightly lower (87%) and healthcare was slightly higher (93%). Interestingly, when an organic search result and a paid search ad appeared in close proximity to each other, the impact was reduced. 

This suggests three interesting implications:

A. SEO and SEM compliment each other. The addition of paid search appears to justify itself from a Cost-per-Click perspective.   

B. Results in close proximity on the search results page cancel each other out. Seeing two similar results, users pick one, usually the organic version, and get the answers they need. Maybe search planners should run campaigns based on likely projections about organic results. Since high organic rankings seem to negate the results of a highly ranked paid search placement, heavy up the buy if you don’t expect much in terms of natural search results.

C. Brand awareness and media weight weren’t factored into this study. Conceivably better known brands and brands with high frequency or a large number of search campaigns generate different levels of natural search results, which are affected in different ways by adding paid search campaigns. 

The bottom line is that both SEO and SEM contribute to driving traffic though the mix and frequency is still a matter for testing and learning.

 

Why Google Blinked

Don’t believe the spin on why Google changed its algorithm. Google isn’t proactively helping users. In the on-going battle between Google and the geeks who game their system; the geeks won a round. Somewhere SEO guys are smirking.

The change, which affects 12 percent of searches in the United States only – that’s 1 out of every 6 – is a tacit admission that SEO masters beat the system; at least for a while. After staring down those relentlessly seeking ways to improve their rankings in this endless cat-and-mouse game, Google blinked. The significant change is both an offensive and defensive play from the Mountain View team.

Amit Singhai’s announcement blog post starts the spin. The obvious objective is stated; “to give most people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible.”   This suggests that they are improving the system to serve users better. What it doesn’t acknowledge is that Bing is hot on their heels in head to head comparisons of results relevancy so they are highly motivated to protect their 66% share of US searches. It also conveniently sidesteps the fact that SEO mavens have successfully manipulated their own rules against them in 1 out of every 6 searches.

The bad guys, in Google’s view, are content farms. “Low quality sites” that copy and aggregate content and in so doing artificially boost their Google rankings. These sites range from Demand Media’s eHow.com and Answerbag.com to Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed. The change will disenfranchise endless numbers of no-name sites that scrape content and repost it in Google optimized ways to draw traffic and sell ads.

Keep in mind that these qualitative judgments about sites are based on quantitative inputs. The algorithms count things like repeated words, sequences, content adjacencies, internal and external links and IP address. Google’s robots and spiders can’t make real quality judgments about the “usefulness” of content; which generally is in the eye of the human beholder.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand is calling the change “The Farmer Algorithm” to distinguish it from previous Google mathematical zigs and zags. He recounts a conversation with Google’s Matt Cutts who told him that 84% of the top 50 sites most reported for SPAM will have their results downgraded by this new change. So Google is also spinning punishment as progress.

One immediate negative implication of the new formula will impact online PR guys who count scrapers and aggregators to pick up online press releases giving them hundreds of feeder links which used to translate into Google mojo. Similarly, marketers using content syndication and aggregation as a cost-savings distribution strategy will have to rethink their tactics.

There’s a David and Goliath aspect to this story which will warm the hearts of SEO specialists and keep all of us watching and waiting for the next series of moves and counter moves.   

SEO as a Copywriting Tool

In the old days – 24 months ago – copywriters never heard of SEO. They bridled at the thought of being told where or how to start the creative process. Today, according to Bryan Cummings of The Garrigan Lyman Group, writing in Adweek,

“For creatives, SEO is like handing a composer the most popular notes, as identified by research, and demanding a hit song. Or giving a writer word magnets from the refrigerator and expecting the Great American Novel.” 

And while Bryan offers tips to help writers square up contemporary language and creativity with search imperatives, he overstates the case.

Effective key words and phrases can be creative cues for other forms of branded customer engaging messaging. But too few creatives mine the insights from SEO analytics.

Maybe its because SEO is considered to be an arcane art like alchemy or maybe because the data-centric nature of SEO puts off copywriters, but there is little connection between these two; which to my way of thinking, is missed cue and waste of resources. It seems to me that effective key words or phrases -- defined as those words and combinations of words that prompt significant clicks -- are proven indicators of rational or emotional brand or behavioral triggers.

Something about these words or phrases instantly communicates a brand value or a proposition that searchers understand, believe and are willing to click on. What better cue about how to craft messages that will resonate with target audiences. And while two-to-five words do not an ad or an e-mail or a sell sheet make, there is an explicit direction to be discerned.

Writing effective key words is like origami. You have to twist, turn, fold and re-fold your ideas, expectations and standard copy points in unusual and sometimes surprising or convoluted ways to create a short pithy and motivating message that strikes a chord with searchers. The task is daunting. The writer is trying to psyche out potentially millions of searchers coming at an information problem or a question from an infinite number of perspectives with an infinite number of expectations, points of view and search habits. So when you craft a phrase that attracts a significant amount of traffic, its a fair bet that something in the choice of words and/or the sequence of words creates a meaning, an understanding or an answer that speaks to potential customers. Is anybody willing to ignore this ind of intelligence?

I'm advising everyone I work with to mine keyword successes and draft contextual language and proof points around them to build compelling marketing communications assets for use on-line and offline. I'm also insisting that we export the test-and-learn sensibility and discipline from the SEO world into the creative and design process.

 

GoogleTV -- Another Play for Domination

Google TV directly addresses the greatest unsolved fantasy about the Internet; tying content, channels and devices together to build and control a limitless selling and customer relationship ecosystem. 

Since the dawn of the World Wide Web, marketers have drooled over the prospect of consumers watching TV, clicking on the screen and seeking out information (accompanied by ads) or directly buying the stuff they see on their favorite shows or characters. The coalition and firepower of Google, SONY, Logitech, Intel and Best Buy just might pull it off if they can strike the right deals with broadcast and cable networks. 

Technically Google TV will marry a bunch of technologies together into a single complete package using a set-top box, Blu-Ray players or a web-based interface supporting a remote controller with a QWERTY keyboard. Commercially Google TV aims to capture a huge share of the combined ad revenues for TV and the Internet, which are estimated to be in the $100 billion range. 

And while there will be a lot of commentary and hand-wringing about which services are offered, who partners with whom and how far the Android OS can be stretched, the real test, as Dan Nosowitz describes in FastCompany is how GoogleTV fares with the moms and nerds. The former predict scalability and the potential for widespread consumer acceptance. The latter determine buzz, early adopters and the likelihood of an attendant developers community dedicated to creating apps, extensions and add-ons.  For nerds, “if Google TV is mostly a search bar for all my existing crap, plus Web video and assorted stuff on the Internet, it won’t revolutionize my TV experience – it’ll just make parts of it easier.” 

Revolutionizing the TV experience – the last remaining cultural commonality all Americans share – are the stakes behind the Google TV play. Forget about Google trying to trump Apple TV or Google edging out Amazon, Hulu, Rhapsody or NetFlix for a slice of consumer attention, traffic and spending. This is about owning the box that has dominated our cultural life and leisure time our since the 50s. 

Search Drives Online Shopping

Search is a critical selling tool for retailers. Twenty-seven percent of 102 online merchants, cataloguers and direct-selling manufacturers, in a recent Internet Retailer survey, attribute more than 50 percent of their sales to search engine marketing. 

Natural search drives more than 25 percent of total traffic for 51 percent of the respondents while paid search accounts 28 percent. And based on the responses these levels are stable with the yield and the click-thru-rates remaining about the same. For two-thirds of merchants, Google accounts for 70 percent or more of their traffic and has the highest conversion rate. Though 4 in 10 expect to shift some paid search spending to Bing in the coming year. 

As a result a third of merchants spend most of their online marketing budgets on search. Almost half increased their search budgets in the last year with 23.5 percent spending less than a dime per click and 32 percent investing 50 cents or more per click. 

Tactically 56 percent have keyword inventories of 1000 words or less.  Improvements planned include experimenting with more multiple-word phrases, rewriting keyword descriptions on product and home pages, incorporating common search terms onto product and home pages, adding common search terms to image file names, and writing more descriptive ad copy. 

As Google expands its image searching capabilities and increases the number of images displayed on SERPs and the options to switch to image searching, merchants are following suit.  A third of respondents are sending images to search engines and more than half expect the images to improve click-thru-rates by as much as 15 percent. Another 40 percent say they’re working on it. 

As retail search matures, marketers need to get more sophisticated in how they deploy, measure and iterate campaigns. The number of new searchers is low so the battle shifts toward share and toward achieving high rankings for the terms most commonly used to find your product or service. 

5 Hints at Google's Next Moves

Google’s greatness lies in its ability to continuously get smarter and better. It doesn’t hurt to have all the money and most of the talent in the world to apply to this task. Yet the ethos of consistent testing and tinkering toward improving search results is driven by the culture as much as the desire to outpace or anticipate competitors.

 

Every so often, we mortals get a glimpse into what they’re up and what they might do next. I’m indebted to Jann Kanellis, Brad Gosse and Josh Titsworth for cueing me about these 5 developments.

 

Different Results on Different Computers. Last December, Google began tracking search results by machine address. That means if you search the same term on your work computer and your home computer, its possible to get different results. This is probably more likely if the search has a local angle, which might be a clue about Google’s future direction and their desire to improve penetration and ad sales among local ands small businesses. It also might reflect their understanding of what you’ve searched for on that particular machine. Remember they watch what you type in and what you click on to track and study this stuff.

 

As it is Google serves up local results if you enter a city, state, region, postal or zip code in the search bar. Since they know your location from either your IP or machine address, they can automate the process of including the nearest products, retailers or services. And while it’s not 100% accurate, it is regularly getting better.

 

Different Results at Different Times. Google changed the search algorithm and has instituted random A/B testing. So it’s not unusual to search the same term at different times and find yourself getting different results because you’ve been silently assigned to either the control of the test group. You can get much more technical information about this here. But this hints at an effort to segment audiences and identify times, topics, geographies, demographies and affinities for more discrete results.

 

More Real-Time Results. To counter the influence of Twitter, Google has struck deals with an array of social networks to include posts, tweets and updates in search results. Google doesn’t display these randomly but instead has developed its own process for weighting based on numbers, frequency, authority and intensity of sentiment. We’d all like to get a look at the assumptions and the data sets underlying this effort because the ability to track not only what’s going on but what people are feeling and doing right now can be a very powerful insight for marketers and politicians.

 

More Pictures. Google knows how many people are looking at still and moving images online. After all the own YouTube and are looking for better ways to drive traffic and increase ad sales and the monetization of video content. Notice that photos and videos are steadily creeping into your search results pages. Notice also whose videos get served higher up on the page.

 

More “Related Searches.”  Google knows that the math doesn’t always work. So to set your expectations and reduce the disappointment you might feel when they get it wrong, they are serving up additional phrases; usually variations on what you searched for listed under a header that reads “Searches related to ….” This hedges your bets and theirs and signals a desire to try their best to get it right. In many cases it’s useful because consumers often don’t know how to phrase an effective search request.

 

Some of these changes will up-end your existing SEO tactics and some will challenge your PPC tactics. But carefully watching and handicapping Google is something every marketer will have to do into the foreseeable future.

 

 

 

Serving Searchers & Surfers

Psychological research conducted by Kevin Wise, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and published in the Journal of Media Psychology, suggests that how you find information online affects your reaction to that information. The implication for marketers and publishers is that you have to anticipate how people find you and address audiences differently on the basis of their glide path.

This notion is significant because on any given day about 1/3 of all Internet users either search for something specific or come across content by random surfing, according to the Pew study on the Internet and American Life. People invest different types of energy and emotion into finding content online. Surfers undertake what academics call "ritualized" use of media. They flit from thing to thing, sorting one against the other until something catches their eye or captures their imagination. This is a random process that requires less intention, investment and brain processing.

Searchers are "instrumental" users of media determined to seek out and find a specific content and evaluating search engine results against each other to figure out which is most relevant, on-point and worth reading first. Evidently this requires more attention, brain power and more functions from each searcher's CPU. 

To prove this Kevin and his team wired up 92 freshmen in an introductory advertising class to measure heart rate, skin conductance (sweat to us) and electro-magnetic activity (a surrogate for brain processing power). They set up a site filled with awful photos and descriptions of a shooting rampage at an elementary school in Utah. Apparently disturbing images prompt more distinct responses and can be better mined for content, recall and reactions.

Having run earlier research studies to understand the inter-play of getting there versus being there or in regularspeak --finding stuff versus reacting to stuff -- Kevin wondered if how you got there influenced what you found, remembered and how you reacted. Here's what he found:

Heart rates for searchers accelerated more than those of surfers. Purposely looking for content cranks up your ticker faster than stumbling across things. Maybe this suggests a greater investment in the process which leads to an eagerness to find and consume the content.

Searchers remembered more details than surfers. You expect the directed searcher to pay more attention and care more than the casual surfer.

Searchers had more skin response. Searching and finding gets you more hot and bothered than coming across something worth checking out.  There's probably a lesson for keywords in here. Though the result isn't shocking; it's the directed dude versus the laid back dude. DItto for EMG activity.

Searchers were more disturbed  by what they found than surfers. They rated the content as more unpleasant. People looking for something specific add a dose of intensity to their reading or understanding of the searched object? Could this be a self-fulfilling prophecy because we invest ourselves more in the stuff we've invested time and energy to find?

The data suggests that different ways of getting there drive how people react and respond online. The implications are that marketers have to weigh the intensity of searching versus the serendipity of surfing as they design and display information and/or craft keywords and phrases. Assuming intense and invested searching behavior puts the impetus on copywriters and designers (not to mention SEO jockeys to hyper-serve searchers while spreading around enough bait to reel in the random surfer.

4 Reasons the MSFT-YHOO Deal Doesn't Matter

The highly publicized Yahoo-Microsoft deal doesn’t matter.. It’s a corporate strategy, balance sheet and market share play for the participants. There’s nothing in it for those of us marketing products, services or ideas online.

Here’s four reasons why you can safely ignore this development, just like Wall Street did.

It won’t change search traffic patterns. Google still rules. There’s no reason to believe huge numbers of well-trained Googlers will switch to Bing-Yahoo. There’s no technical improvement, no consumer incentive, no perceptual difference and no reason to think that we will have exposure to bigger or qualitatively different search audiences.

Google will still have a dominant share. I’m not only talking share of search. I’m talking about of advertiser and agency share of mind. The deal might motivate Google to love buyers and middlemen more but they’ve been on a love jihad for the last couple of years and already have a robust set of tools and a pipeline filled with new ones. Their early arrogance has been tempered with a corporate sensitivity to agencies and advertisers. We are not feeling oppressed by an ogre nor are we yearning for relief from a Ballmer in shining armor. 

There’s no price deals. The auction mechanism doesn’t put any more money in our pockets. We have no financial incentives to change our behavior. 

It will take a while to close. We’re struggling day-by-day to stretch budgets and deliver more ROI faster. There is no quick impact to the deal or savory short term benefits because it will take months of regulatory scrutiny before this becomes real.

 

 

Seeking Answers in Search Results

Frustrated at trying to find a list of the top 10 all-time best selling women's fragrances on Google, it dawned on me that increasingly we are looking for specific answers to specific questions rather than a trove of documents on a particular topic. It forced me to think about the changing nature of search and how quickly search has become an almost automatic reflex.

And while we often focus on the accuracy of using search to target customers, we don't really spend much time analyzing the accuracy of search results. After all Google has set our baseline expectations with "good enough" search that's fast and free. So who are we to question how they get results? In fact, most of us are so focused on the instant gratification that we don't really know or care how it came about. But as search becomes completely integrated into our thinking process differences in the way data is found and the immediate relevance of the data presented will become more important to us. It seems like a natural developmental path; that as we use and understand the tool we want more from it and want it to be even better. 

Maybe this is the implication of  new research from Hitwise that indicates that longer search queries are growing fastest. Search queries of 6 words or more increased between 8 and 20 percent over the last year while one and two word searches posted slight declines. To some extent this has to reflect increased understanding of how to search. It also suggests that people are using more words in an attempt to refine or better define the query in the hope of getting more accurate results faster. Its a yearning for the answer; not for the source documents. As we get used to the idea that vast amounts of knowledge are available, we want our clicks to zero-in and present the answer to us. We want search engines to go the last mile for us.

It's not just that we are greedy or ungrateful. This idea of fishing out the answer has intrigued computer scientists forever. It has led Kosmix to build complex taxonomies to sort through and cluster data. It has driven the creation of high powered math to mine and organize relational databases that underlie Freebase, Powerset and Hakia. And it promises to leverage the promise of semantic search in the forthcoming Wolfram Alpha tool which is being hyped as the super-searchable digital library of Alexandria on steroids. Yet in spite of all this promise, search still needs to discern instantly what millions of people using the same vocabulary and syntax actually mean and actually want. 

To that end, all this philosophizing suggests a few concrete things marketers should be doing in designing SEO or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

Compile Answers. Look at your business and develop a list of the most frequently sought answers. Build the answers into your sites, press releases, videos, etc in ways that can expedite search.  In many cases these will be obvious and are probably already there in some form but not necessarily served up succinctly. Consider simplifying and expanding your FAQs.

Test Longer Search Phrases. Analyze your traffic and mirror customer and prospect search behavior. Experiment with longer, alternative ways to describe or explain your goods or services. Test different words and word sequences to see if they return more relevant results.Longer phrases might also be cheaper than shorter phrases especially in categories dominated by generic or name brand terms, at least until everyone catches on.

Use Terms that Impact Sales. For most things there are predictable sales stages and inflection points. If you think carefully about these stages/points and buy or embed the phrases that reflect them you can more directly influence the awareness-consideration-conversion sequence. Maybe more descriptive, more accurate or more complex phrases can bring prospects through the pipeline faster.