Search Sense

Google’s latest innovations in the way it displays search results in its natural listings has huge implications for user experience and the way we create websites.

‘Sitelinks’ emerged late last year. They are the links that appear under the number 1 search listing that enable you to click directly on a main navigational link that resides on the destination site - think of them as shortcuts. OK, so this helps us get from A-B better and extends the brand’s success at capturing search real estate - effectively pushing other sites lower down the results page.

This example for Woolworths illustrates the natural search navigation at work:

A good overview of Sitelinks can be found on the Google Webmastercentral blog here.

More recently Google has started presenting a ’secondary search’ box within the natural results. This allows people to search all pages that Google has from a site without leaving the search engine. Which means that the much of the huge usability investment you may have made can be by-passed in a click…

The implications are more clear than ever. Search friendly site design means taking into account the whole user journey, from search through to action. This extends the idea of usability from optimising e.g. a shopping cart process into the way people navigate through brand networks.

Now x this by every device and interface Google will interact with people in 3 years time. Wow.

Once we accept that we have lost control of the ‘home page’, and that every page on our site can now reside somewhere else before the click,we can start to put search at the heart of our creative planning. not an original idea, but one that I will keep repeating until someone tells me I am insane, and then I will not believe them.

The latest Forrester report, Europe’s Search Engine Marketing Investment Exceeds €8 Billion In 2012, on paints a very healthy picture of the European search market. With the sector set to grow from a current €4.5 billion to well beyond €8 billion by 2012 and taking half of all online marketing investment all search marketers should be overjoyed shouldn’t they?

In fact the UK’s increase over the period is the slowest of all European markets researched. There are a number of good reasons for this: we’re still by far the largest market, followed by Germany and France and have enjoyed the biggest growth over the past five years and UK companies still invest heavily in search and online.

I wonder, however, whether a slowing market at home combined with media agencies becoming specialists in their own right, and *everyone* joining the search bandwagon, and some clients taking paid search in-house, whether we will start to see some casualties? The 101 search business plan remains: invest in skills, technology and training or be damned.

Nilhan Jayasinghe, Spannerworks’ Head of Search and Natural Search Strategists Jonathan Stewart, Alex Asigno and Addam Hassan are currently at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California. Here’s their thoughts on the conference so far…

The big thing that everyone is talking about this year is blended search – the incorporation of multimedia content within natural search results. Google call it Universal Search, Ask call it Ask 3d – whatever you want to call it, it’s making waves in terms of how search marketers need to react to vertical search. As can be attested by the number of people attending the multimedia seminars on podcast, image and video optimisation, and the standing room only in many of these talks, it seems everyone is eagerly rising to the challenge.

Some excellent examples are being played out in front of our eyes at the conference – the most notable being the search engine results for “hurricane dean”. On Monday, Greg Jarboe of SEO PR presented on Google Universal, and showed current search results for this query. He commented on the fact that at that point, the only extra content to be embedded within the natural search results were news articles, but that as the week progressed, we should expect to see more multimedia content appearing for that search result as people uploaded images and videos. Lo and behold, by Tuesday morning, images were showing up alongside news results within the search results:

This just goes to show the speed at which Google are seeking content from their vertical offerings to help keep their natural search results relevant and fresh.

This being the States, and with an impending presidential election looming, many presenters were using the examples of presidential candidates to highlight the importance of reputation management that blended search has now thrust upon search marketers. Googling Republican candidate Mitt Romney returns the following images befitting of a potential president, embedded within the natural search results:

However, try googling Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, and it’s a different story:

Is this Google showing their political allegiance, or perhaps the Republicans actively trying to discredit Clinton – maybe she just doesn’t photograph well – either way, this highlights the importance of managing the first page of results for your name and/or brand.

When most of us hear about digital and the music industry it is usually connected with downloads, declining CD sales or itunes. The recent news that all album tracks are now eligible for the singles chart caused a bit of fuss for the Arctic Monkeys last week, and is the latest in a long line of press around the subject.

However, we think there is another side to digital marketing that labels should be paying attention to.

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I’m a regular user of MSN and Yahoo Answers. I like asking obscure questions of experts and rating the results.

We at Spannerworks love observing/benefiting from the synergies that emerge when various technologies, products and people fuse together e.g. algorithmic search with social search, user tagged or user generated content.

When you and I contribute our opinions about products, services or websites rather than solely algorithmic assessment (granted a very smart algorithm), it adds so much to the relevancy of search engine results.

This appeal of humans and technology is one of the many reasons we have a content and social media division.

So it was with great interest that I read about Cha Cha going into Beta. Cha Cha is a search engine launched a couple of months ago that fuses “expert” tagged results with algorithmic assessed relevancy and also provides a “live search” feature.

This “live” feature is where you can conduct a search in partnership with a human expert assisting via an instant messaging session – in fact one of an ever increasing number of experts – currently about 20,000 worldwide.

They will help you refine your results, provide personal views upon results, products or services.

The idea is superb, and we wish it all the best. I for one will keep a watch out for it’s success or adoption by others. Check it out here.

The August survey conducted by MarketingSherpa reveals a lack of concern for click fraud from nearly 4000 marketers and recommends three actions - read more here.

The survey posed the question “why aren’t more marketers are concerned about fraud”:

I’d propose it is down to four key things:

• Ignorance - folk aren’t aware of the size or even the very existence of the problem.
• Trust - trust in media owners (Google, YAhoo, MSN) ability to take action overrides concerns.
• Good staff - they have appointed a good agency or have staff tackling the issue head on.
• Powerlessness - the feelings of inability to do anything or the issue’s complexity act as a barrier to action.

Only 9% of marketers were worried it would get worse and 20% said it was a non issue - oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

I can boldly state if you are playing in financial services or bidding on terms with a value of £3.00 per click or higher then you most definitely have been a victim of click fraud. The high prices and competitive markets act as a honey pot.

The primary search engines (Google, ASK, MSN and Yahoo) do try to eliminate invalid clicks and have very sophisticated technology and teams to do this. The but is and it is a very BIG BUT, is that search engines do not have access to conversion patterns of your customers from a variety of channels or access to large quantities of post click data.

So whilst the search engines are excellent at trapping most robot activity and dodgy affiliates pre click and automatically refund your marketing spend in most cases, beyond the click it becomes trickier. However, it need not be a “fact of life” as the respondees to MarketingSherpa’s Click Fraud survey seem to believe. Nor do the “Second-Tier” search engines (AOL, Miva, Mirago, WebFinder, etc) need to be a no go area, they just need more skill to manage.

MarketingSherpa recommended three actions:

• track conversions by source
• review contracts for protection
• invest in fraud prevention services or software.

I’d agree with them all, but throw in some more detail and one or two actions of my own.

Tracking: If you don’t monitior it you can’t catch the fraudsters. Good tracking technology and services are the CCTV of the internet. We at Spannerworks use three different types of fraud detection/prevention software and have data analysts ready to assess the information obtained. Our clients get real money benefits from this and we are thinking of launching the service for a wider audience.

All you web server log files will contain IP information - if funds don’t exist to buy tracking software then perhaps your friendly neighbourhood IT guy can help extract this information for you to identify unusual traffic sources.

Contracts: Don’t just examine contracts with search engines to see if you’re covered for fraud, but consider using a third party which is incentivised to bring you customers and not just clicks. Look for shared risk models or deals based upon cost per action. Pay differenetial pricing for clicks based upon the quality of the traffic (especially important with second tier engines and if using content networks).

Invest in services: Sounds good to me, especially if it’s a Spannerworks PPC service with fraud prevention, but hey I would say that. Seriously though, getting access to data from a wider network, so you can spot unusual activity when compared to an industry trend is sound advice. Even just talking to your trade body may help.

Spannerworks are very active combating fraud through our Aperture technology, the IAB (Internet Advertisers Bureau) and directly with the search engines.

Tails and Timing: Aggregate those low cost, highly targeted terms as a a strategy to reduce the threat of fraud - also makes it easier to spot. Consider week / month parting strategies to cool and heat up campaigns when the click quality changes.

I’ll end by saying fraud is more serious than spam email, because the cost is real money - every click, every month. Like spam email it is also time and hidden costs - a triple whammy.

So don’t sweep fraud under the carpet, take action now and stop your competitors, dubious affiliates or others stealing both your time and money - do contact us if you’re interested in hearing more.

Mat Morrson of digital marketing consultancy Ryan Morrison & MacMillan has published a great post on its blog entitled “5 things you never knew about search” which quotes our very own David St John Tradewell liberally.

For the full run-down read the original article, but the five things are headlined:

1. It’s not about search, it’s about find.
2. Search businesses are service companies. They are only as good as the technology they employ.
3. Show me the money. (”If you can’t put a value on a transaction, you can’t optimise your search.”)
4. Good search businesses can’t afford to have all their staff in London offices.
5. Something makes people search….

I’d certainly agree emphatically with the first and last points especially.

But I’d go further, adding my own impressions as a brand communications specialist who has spent a few months in the world of search marketing now.

Often people see search marketing simply as a transaction-based or lead generation business. It is very, very good that, but it is also becoming more: search should be viewed as media, and search marketing as a part of brand communications as well as a powerful customer delivery tool.

Search is the most powerful application for making sense of the exponentially growing complexity of the online networked world.

Product information and pricing are only part of the story of how people are using the web, and search, in their daily lives, about how they navigate and make sense and use of online networks.

People are using the web (and therefore search) more than ever and their sophistication in its use, their demands of it, are growing more complex too. It’s an intimate, sometimes unwittingly so, relationship that many have with their search engines, and search marketing must evolve alongside that.

: : I’d also add to point two that search businesses are also only as good as the people they employ.  Technology is massively important, but not more important than people who can put it to best use, read and action data to best effect, plan and execute strategies to succeed, find  the best ways to market online with search.

I’m a big fan of search research - using data about what people are searching for to tell you more about a market, demographic or trend. Heather Hopkins of Hitwise correctly predicted that Bebo would overtake MySpace as the number one social network in the UK based in part on the growing number of people searching for “Bebo”.

Well, despite Bebo having taken the number one spot a couple of months back it seems that even more people are searching for it now than ever, according to new Hitwise data. In fact almost as many people are searching for Bebo as for eBay, the most ussed search term in the UK.

What that expresses is even more people wanting to know more about the site, which should lead to more sign ups for the service. I read that as menaing there’s plenty of growth potential yet for services like this.

: : Could there also be a decline / plateauing in the fortunes of eBay here, I wonder? I’ve heard a good few grumbles of discontent among friends who are users of the auction site recently.

Cross-posted to Open.

There’s a real sense that marketers are taking search, both paid and natural, far more seriously. (more…)

The AOL data provides a rare chance to see accurate statistics from a major engine fed by Google. (more…)