Search Sense

Yesterday, ICann the governing body for internet domains announced they will be allowing anyone to bid for almost an unlimited list of new domains. At a $100,000 for control of a domain, .hotel, .schools etc are all up for grabs.

Icann doesn’t expect there to be a huge rush and claims they simply want to recover the cost of setting up the infrastructure (they are a non-profit org.).

Some restrictions – no cyber squatting, anything too dodgy (they reserve the right to refuse) and no personal names unless you’re a business.

They will also allow non-Roman character sets in the domain, which is going to cause problems for international businesses as the Roman keyboard is well established.

Until recently, non-regional domains like .com caused problems for search engines as they attempted to provide more localised results. But these days you can set your geo-location at least in Google, and the others are likely to follow.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of this move by Icann – people are generally used to guessing the domain extension and if a lot of companies decide to use it, there’ll just be more confusion.

The barriers to owning and managing a top level domain is too high for most companies, though we will definitely see some of the more generic commercial domains being bought. I can imagine domains like .hotels, .property and .bank getting bought. And any companies within these industries having to buy their name, even if they simply redirect it to their existing domain.

You may see more creative use of domains in time, maybe celebrities and sport teams using them as merchandise. I’m sure most football fans would happily pay 20 quid to have their team domain in their name.

We’re exhibiting at the NMA Online Marketing and Media show…and it’s getting busy!

Our Head of Business Development David Tradewell is taking the floor at 2pm this afternoon delivering a workshop  on our connected  approach to digital marketing using case examples from Channel 4, Lipsy and More Th>n.

There has also been much intrigue around our NetworkSense Maps we are offering visitors to our stand today and tomorrow at the show. Visualising your online network and understanding how your customers are engaging with
your brand online is essential. If you are planning on popping in to the show, please come and see us for a NetworkSense map of your brand.

There are also some interesting sessions to come this afternoon in the conference include Speakers from O2 and Lovefilm.com. You can also enjoy a cool glass of Pimms with us if you are quick!

The show is in Islington at the Business Design Centre in London…see you soon!

’speling games online’ >200 searches per month

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.

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.

We are collecting in excess of 65 million consumers’ data every day at iCrossing. This data includes indications on people’s needs and behaviours - it is a staggering mine of useful information.

We collect it from search marketing, display campaigns and user behaviour tracking in real-time and, when compared with how marketing has been historically measured, with amazing accuracy… We have tools and people who work everyday to mine this data to develop actionable insights, and clients who are building business strategy based on this bigger, better, and faster way of connecting with consumers.

I’m totally convinced digital is not only going to become the driver of marketing tomorrow, but is largely already there, we’re just getting our ducks in a row. As Herzog says, ‘digital at the centre’.

It’s easy for those of us looking at digital everyday to take it for granted. Some days I just have to pinch myself and say ‘wow’, this is groundbreaking stuff…

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!

There’s still a huge amount of technical language surrounding web 2.0, including the phrase itself… This week I had to present my thoughts on the future of digital to a large group of senior executives at a European airline. I decided that APIs (application programming interfaces) really translate into the new Aggregators of Personal Information. Once viewed in this way we start to look at our own data assets in a different and more human way. I think that leads to excitement, engagement from the marketing mind, and ultimately engagement of people’s attention.

It’s been a long week, that’s it for today.

Recent announcement by Facebook to expose a cut-down public profile for search engines to index, has managed to stir up the search, brand and privacy advocates.

The Facebook blog stated that in a couple of weeks they will allow search engines to crawl public profiles. But, an interesting article on Search engine land claims that this is nothing new. Search engines have always been able to index a profile, providing they could find it – a point proven by Tom Critchlow at Distilled, who linked to his public profile and managed to find it by searching in Google.

So the main difference is likely to be the integration of a people directory within Facebook, which would allow search engines to index the profiles without needing to find them through external links. But, those profiles that are likely to get more links will have a greater reputation and will outrank others with the same name.

Things could get interesting if online authors used Facebook as a people reference, in the same way people refer to Wikipedia.

From an SEO perspective, there’s unlikely to be any real link benefit from a profile – though it’s difficult to gage until we can see the implementation. Any external links allowed on a profile page is likely to have the rel-nofollow tag added to prevent link spam.

For reputation managers, a Facebook profile will provide yet another way to occupy more space on the home page for a search on a name or brand.

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.