Search Sense

For many months Google has analysed search queries and carried forward or customised one set of search results in Paid Search with information from the previous search.

For example, a search for “Brighton Car Parks” followed by a search for “Cheap Hotels” results in the top paid listing being a Brighton Hotel listing, rather than a generic cheap hotel business, like the example below.

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Back in May, I reported Google was testing green backgrounds above and below the search results. This test happened on a weekday. As far as I can remember most of the tests have always been noticed on a weekday. I guess Google do not really need too much attention to their SERP tests so they decided to trial a new design at the weekend.

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No doubt there are a few hangovers today following last night’s NMA Effectiveness awards in London at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane. Having been shortlisted for the Best Use of Web category, the iCrossing team were extremely pleased to be commended for the Cosmos campaign. The commendation recognised our paid search campaign for UK tour operator Cosmos (now Monarch Holidays), which was judged against 500 entries and a criteria of the most imaginative, innovative and successful use of the Internet to build business, in any sector.

The campaign produced a significant increase in revenues and substantially reduced the cost per customer with increased conversions through more relevant page deliveries from search queries. After much hard work, the team were pleased to enjoy the evening with Trevor Inch, Marketing and Distribution Director at Cosmos, along with a few other clients.

We are also pleased to have sponsored the Entertainment category. Our chief client officer Mel Alcock presented the award to Line Industries who won the award for their Blog A Penguin Classic campaign…congratulations! 

A case study of the Cosmos campaign will be available on our website soon…watch this space!

As mentioned in Joe’s previous blog post, Google last week announced changes to its pay-per-click trademark policy which for the first time will allow any company to buy keywords associated with a rival’s brand name.

We’ve had a great deal of interest from our clients and industry journalists, who are keen to understand the implications and effect of Google’s plans to allow any company to bid on competitor brand names.

So we asked Paul Doleman, our CTO and Head of Paid Search, to give his advice and opinion on:

• What has happened and why
• Google’s motivation behind the policy change
• How it might affect the market and businesses
• The likely impact to brand owners

Find out what Paul has to say…(advise using your headphones)

The policy comes into effect in May, ahead of which the debate will no doubt continue. For example, Travolution discussed the impact to travel brands in an article posted yesterday.

Google have just announced changes to their trademark policy in UK & Ireland that will bring it in line with US & Canada. This basically means that from 5th May, Google will no longer stop advertisers bidding on the registered trademarks of their competitors. All keywords suspended in your account due to trademark violation will be activated on that day. Any trademark complaints received by today will be processed in the usual way but any received after today will only be processed for ad copy and not keywords. As far as I am aware, Google will still stop people using your trademarks in Ads, provided you have registered the trademark properly. The official Google blurb can be found here

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US

Personally, I think this has been on the cards for a long time and have sensed a big shift in Adwords account managers attitude towards trademarks throughout last year. Although this change it makes the job of the Paid Search agency harder, I think it’s fair enough and I am quite pleased that Google are recognising that it’s not necessarily their job to enforce trademark policy. In the travel sector, I think this could work to an advertiser’s advantage quite well, as there are many hotel chains with high search volume featured travel operators’ sites that one simply couldn’t bid on before. In finance, I think it will be less advantageous, as cheap, good-converting brand traffic will suddenly be open to competition by aggregators who will push bid prices up. In retail, I think both scenarios will be relevant, as retailers tend to promote their own brand as well as sell other high-profile brands. However, a lot of retailers will already have had permission to bid on their best selling products’ brand terms so it may lean towards the less advantageous end.

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.

Technopedia has a round up of the top marketing articles of 2007. With over 250 articles, this is an extremely comprehensive and useful resource. There are articles covering all the various online marketing services we offer such as SEO, paid search, social media, web development, and content.

Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007

Before I begin I have a confession - I am a Google fan through-and-through. It’s natural results have become the benchmark of the search industry. The results are relevant, it’s intuitive and quick to use and I can’t find a better alternative. But I am also a fan of Wikipedia and Knol worries me.

It’s a no-brainer right? Let’s monetise, sorry ‘organise’, the world’s information.

Since the phenomenal success of the most effective new advertising system for a century, Google Adwords, search engines have been monetising every bit of real estate they can lay their hands on. Yahoo! decided that it’s ‘natural’ results could be bought by advertisers using it’s ‘feed’ system, and everyone tried placing CPC adverts in a variety of locations. Natural results in Google, however, have been left largely untouched and advert-free.

Hmm, well Google does place news, images and videos (via youtube) within the search results - all of which have differing degrees of Adwords penetration. Late last week our friends at Mountain View added a new way of getting into their own search results via Knol. Details as yet are thin on the ground, but we know that select authors are being invited to write articles within their area of expertise ‘to find a way to help people share their knowledge‘… Sounds like a more ivory tower like version of Wikipedia to me.. But with Adwords, and close to the top of the natural results guaranteed?

The guys are Techcrunch are debating this under the heading ‘Google knol a step too far?’ It’s worth a look.

Personally I think that Google will make Knol earn it’s place in natural results fairly but at a cost to commercially orientated websites, many of which have been forced to invest more into the Adwords campaigns over the past few years as a result of algorithm tweaks…

The process of organising the world’s information just got a bit more lucrative, I think.

In 2008 growth kickers go and as of January 1st 2009, Google Best Practice Funding is completely gone and in Spannerworks’ view about time too!

I’ve been having conversations with Dara Nasr (agency manager at Google) over the last few months, about a great many subjects, not least Best Practice Funding (BPF). When Google introduced the scheme as a replacement for straight forward agency commission, they had high hopes for it. They had recently launched the Google AdWords Professional (GAP) training and hoped that by setting minimum criteria of GAP qualified staff, spend levels and growth incentives it would encourage the industry to train, grow the search channel and generally improve their services and use a broad range of Google products.

It has however, been fraught with difficulties including:

* media planner/buyers back loading campaign spend, breaking the spirit of the scheme in order to sneakily obtain the growth incentives,
* search agencies using their best staff to retake the GAP exams on behalf of others in order to remain qualified or simply to brag,
* lazy media planners not really taking search seriously and fully rebating the BPF to clients, simply to hide poor performance,
* small agencies just about competing by using the rebate to maintain profit instead of creating and charging for added value.

Spannerworks welcomes the removal because we have diverse marketing programmes that make use of Social Media, Display, Paid Search, Natural Search, Usability, Web Development and more.

A strategic, value adding, global agency like Spannerworks doesn’t work with major brands like Coca Cola, Abbey, COSMOS, Sears, Travellocity, Hilton and more by being lazy. It’s hard work, joined-up thinking and powerful, integrated campaigns for us with amazing technology and service.

So even though Google has reduced the qualifying spend levels for 2008, which means there’ll be a little more rebate next year and although we have benefited from top tier rebates from Google for years now, we say thanks Google for helping create a level playing field that allows great service to shine.

It is the right thing to do, so Google folk, ride out the undoubted media storm, complaints, accusations of money making - you have our whole-hearted support. Hey, if Google went further and opened up by sharing data, research, search volumes, that’d be a truly level playing field and really quite something!

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.