Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Danny wrote a very insightful article about SEO and web design in which he basically defends SEO as not being as shady, worthless, and criminal as many "pure" web designers are calling us. Danny makes several very good points in the article, including admitting that there are shady individuals in the industry, but that doesn't mean everyone who does search engine optimization is dishonest, scummy, or whatever. He closes by saying that anyone who paints the entire SEM industry as dirty crooks should buy into the following stereotypes:

• All car salesmen are crooks
  
• All lawyers are crooks
  
• Teachers teach because they can't do
  
• Bloggers don't check facts
  
• [Insert Race/Culture/Nationality Here] is [Insert Derogatory Comment/Stereotype Here]
  

I also like how Danny points out that most designers put a lot of effort into making sure their sites are properly rendered in IE and Firefox, yet many of them don't pay much attention to the "third browser"--the search engines. I think designers and SEOs need to understand the importance of a site that is well-designed for the user AND search engines. You can have the prettiest site in the world, but if nobody can find it, there's not a lot of value. On the other hand, if you have a site that gets a million visitors a month, but they all back out because they're afraid of the ugly flashing graphics, you're no better off.

I like the policy of moderation in all things--including web design and search engine marketing!

I read this on Slashdot yesterday. They've got some guy who did a study showing that a higher percentage of sites on MS servers show up at the top of the search results. I had never really heard of anything like that, but it wouldn't be the first time Micro$oft has favored their own technology over that of competitors.

One of the posters on Slashdot broght up an interesting argument, maybe it's not that MSN favors IIS servers, but rather that Google is baised against sites on IIS. I'm sure Google would never admit that, but these numbers definitely point to a signifcant difference in the search results between the two search engines. The reason for the discrepancy? I'm not sure, but it's the first time I've heard anything about a server-based search engine bias. It will be interesting to see what comes of it (if anything).

Adsense isn't exactly search-related ads, but it is tied in with keyword ads. Google is now venturing into blog advertising. Apparently they saw that a lot of bloggers were putting up non-Google ads, so they figure it's worth a shot. The new service is being tested by a few advertisers and should be available to the rest of us within a few weeks (still in beta, of course).

It looks like Google is looking to become a super-sized ad network. I wonder if they'll forget their roots and move away from their core expertise of search like so many search engines have done before them. They already seem to be losing their edge--at least in terms of quality of search. Can you blame them for trying to horizons a little bit? Or will this move lead them astray?

In the true me too spirit of the search engine wars, Yahoo announced an ehanced version of their My Web Personal Search. It's not clear if users even want this type of search functionality, but if they do, they can get it from Yahoo just as easily as they can from Google.

More from Chris Sherman on SEW

There's not much dispute over Google's dominance in the search engine wars, but there has been a lot of conflicting data regarding just how dominant Google is. Andrew Goodman wrote a nice article on Clickz about the subject of search engine popularity. His article is a summary of the Search Landscape panel at the Search Engine Strategies conference a couple months back.

One interesting "nugget":
Tancer offered a surprising nugget about the emerging category of desktop search: it is popular with older users. He made the audience laugh with an anecdote about his mother. Finding out that she and many of her friends were early adopters and frequent users of desktop search, he had to know why. "Because older people lose things, dear," she replied.

Read the article

In a move that potentially cuts down on click fraud, Google today is expected to announce that it will now allow advertisers who participate in AdSense to purchase inventory on a cost-per-thousand impression basis, rather than cost-per-click. The search giant also will announce today that AdSense advertisers may now purchase ad space on the sites of specific publishers, and also serve image ads through AdSense. The upgrades, currently offered in beta to a select set of Google advertisers, will be rolled out to all Google advertisers within the next few weeks, a Google spokesman said. Advertisers will be able to select specific Web sites on which to place their ads, and then set a cost-per-thousand impression bid, as opposed to paying on a cost-per-click basis. Google already calculates likely cost-per-thousand impression prices by looking at cost-per-click and click-through rates.

Read more on MediaPost

My only question is, what's to stop the scammers from using their bots to generate impressions instead of clicks? They're probably doing some of that already to avoid getting "too high" a click through rate. I'm just not convinced this change will fix any of the click fraud problems. It will just give fraudsters another source of revenue.

Remember when sponsored ads on Google (pre-Adwords) were sold on a CPM basis? Is this progress or a step backwards?

Just got this in my email from the Center for Media Research about conversion rates for non-brick and morter online retailers.

Nielsen//NetRatings released the first Internet retail report card today from the MegaView Online Retail service that highlights the top 10 online retailers ranked by sales conversion rates, and top 15 product categories ranked by average order size during February 2005.

The report found that among the top 10 online retailers ranked by conversion rates in February 2005, only Coldwater Creek has a significant brick-and-mortar presence. The remaining nine retailers are comprised of a television shopping network, catalogs and online-only retailers.

QVC marked the highest conversion rates out of approximately 117 online retailers. The average conversion rate is 4.9 percent among the top 100 retailers, as reported in the MegaView Online Retail service.

Here's the PDF from Neilsen//Netratings

I'm not surprised to see QVC at the top of the list (16%) since they're preselling a lot of customers on TV, but even proflowers.com, Amazon, and eBay have 11-13% conversion rates! They suggest that non-brick and mortar sites perform better because consumers already have all the information they need and just go to purchase. I'm not sure about that, but one thing they don't mention is that sites that have a brick and mortar counterpart probably get a sizeable percentage of customers who research prices online and then go buy the item at their local store--to save on shipping and get it quicker. Interesting data, nonetheless.

US Government's Earth Day site

Earth Day Network

Earth Day from Wilderness Society

As an active advertiser on Adwords, I have to take at least partial credit for Google's profitability:

Google Inc. on Thursday posted a quarterly profit nearly six times higher than a year earlier, blowing past Wall Street targets as search advertising grew rapidly.

The results sent shares of the Web search leader nearly 8 percent higher in after-hours trade to $219.88 on the Inet electronic brokerage. More consumers clicked on ads, more advertisers moved to the Web, and company costs fell, Google said.

"Outstanding is the only way to describe the results," said Robert Lutts, chief investment officer at Cabot Money Management Inc. "They have people all over the world clicking and paying." -- yeah, including me.

More from Reuters

Danny Sullivan takes Jason Dowdell to task for his recent study of shopping search results.

Jason shot back that Danny didn't know what he was talking about, (gotta love the blogosphere) and that he WAS comparing the natural search results of the major search engines to Become.com's natural search results.

I have to admit that I misunderstood exactly what his little study was comparing. I was thinking along the same lines as Danny. However, I didn't take a lot of time looking over the results to criticize them, or I probably would have realized what was going on. Danny basically had to eat crow because he totally didn't know what he was talking about, and then Jason pointed it out, he had to come up with some other "reasons" that the study was invalid.

Truth is, I don't care about this study, or the dispute, but it is kind of funny to see a couple of the big name search engine marketing gurus in a war of words!

This report from ZDNet talks about how Google unleashed a personalized Google that lets users view and search their history of web searches. Sounds like an online version of Google desktop search, which already searches the text of previously viewed web pages. So Google's personalized search will be a lot different from everyone else's, but my question is, will anyone really care? I personally see the value in thise feature, but I don't know if the general population will really utilize the feature.

Danny Sullivan was quoted as saying, "Having this kind of feature has become a requirement for all the search engines in the last year."

I wouldn't say it's a requirement, it's just that everyone else is doing it, so why not jump on the bandwagon? I'm sure personalized search will continue to evolve, and someday gain wide adoption by the masses, but for now, I think it's a lot of hype without any actual usage to back up the hype. I haven't seen any numbers on this (send them if you've got 'em), so this is based solely on my anecdotal interaction with "normal" people (non-web geeks) who are not using personalized search, or if they are, they don't know it.

I've given it a quick test drive and it seems like a pretty cool tool for keeping track of searches, sites visited, etc. It's cool because it has a total search count calendar that shows how many times you search each day of the month--kind of a search odometer.

Try it out for yourself (beta--of course)

Jason Dowdell conducted an interesting experiment to compare the shopping search results of Froogle, MSN Shopping, Yahoo Shopping and Become.com.

The results?

I think it's fairly clear that the top search engines have a long way to go before they can ever be considered truly unique. On the other hand, since I started this little experiment as a way to test Become's algorithm and whether or not they were bringing something truly unique to the table, I think the results speak for themselves.

When compared to the major search engines they delivered the most unique urls on every list of keywords tested. They also tended to return more deep results in their top 10 than the other engines. By deep results, I mean pages other than the homepage or main domain of a web site. When I did a "spot check" of the actual quality of the results from Become versus the other Big 3 search engines I felt [I know, I know, you're not suppose to have feeling when you're conducting an experiment] the results were much better from the standpoint of shopping research. I was frustrated, however, that I couldn't do any comparison shopping when I found a product that met my needs but I'm told that feature is currently in development.

See it for yourself

Danny writes about search's long tail. I've always found it a very interesting topic to discuss and to monitor how much of a site's traffic comes from the "tail" of search terms--that is the more specific keyword phrases that aren't searched on a lot, but in aggregate they add up to a lot of traffic. Danny makes some good points and links to several useful resources on the subject.

The search tail applies to paid search, organic search optimization and paid inclusion. If you aren't paying attention to the "search tail" your competitors will take advantage of it and you'll miss out on a huge opportunity.

John Battelle mentioned a new suggestion feature on Snap. It's similar to Google Suggest, but it's actually cooler in that it does substrings...in the words of Bill Gross, founder of Snap:

Google suggest is awesome, but doesn’t do substrings, just the leading characters of the search term, I believe. Also, Google shows you hit count in the index, not number of searches performed by users. Number of searches by users seems to yield useful results from the “network” of people in a collaborative filtering kind of way. Just try typing in, say PASADENA, or SOLAR ENERGY, or anything, and watch what a relevant list you get because it’s using the collective knowledge of the whole network!

Check out Snap.com to try it out

I just mentioned to my wife the other day that sites like GasBuddy.com and others that monitor gas prices must be doing well with gas prices as high as they are. Thank you HitWise for backing me up on this one:

According to Hitwise, searches for several key terms related to gas prices increased 300 percent or more for the week ending March 26, 2005 versus four weeks earlier. Terms with significant increases in searches included: “electric cars” up 2,900 percent; “gas prices” up 559 percent; “fuel economy” up 333 percent and “gas mileage” up 300 percent.

At the same time, the market share of visits to the sites www.fueleconomy.gov, www.gasbuddy.com, and www.gaspricewatch.com increased by 334 percent, 214 percent, and 282 percent, respectively.

Searches for “hybrid vehicles” were flat, but searches for “toyota prius” increased 36 percent. Interestingly, after “toyota” and “toyota.com,” “toyota prius” was the top search term driving traffic to www.toyota.com. In addition, five of the top fifteen search terms that drove traffic to Lexus.com were hybrid related – “hybrid cars,” “hybrid suv,” “hybrid vehicles,” “hybrid” and “lexus hybrid” during the four weeks ending March 26, 2005.

Bill Tancer, vice president of research, Hitwise, said “Search behaviors are a window into the consumer psyche,” said. “While it doesn’t take a genius to see a market opportunity amidst astronomical gas prices, the fact that “prius” is such a dominant search term for Toyota suggests the tremendous significance its hybrid model has in its retail lineup.

Source: Center for Media Research

An article about Google in the current edition of Newsweek talks about what Google is up to. One of the topics addressed is why Google probably won't try to enter eBay's territory in the online auction space. Google's Eric Schmidt says they probably wouldn't because eBay does a fine job. I love eBay, but I'm not sure Google (or someone else) couldn't improve online auctions just like they've done with search. It's not like nobody was doing search before Google came onto the scene. Google just came in with the intention of doing it better. In the process, they've forced the other players to do a better job with search just to keep up.

Most readers of this blog are already convinced of the cost-effectiveness of search marketing. Just read an article from Reuters that talks about the relative value of search engine marketing compared to other forms of advertising. These numbers are presumably from paid search (ppc) -- organic (natural) search would likely be an even lower cost per new customer acquisition cost.

According to Piper Jaffray, the cost to acquire a customer is about $8.50 for search, $20 for Yellow Pages, $50 for online display ads, $60 for e-mail and $70 for direct mail. Data for television was not included.

Three cheers for search engine marketing!!!

With an 83% increase in traffic in February, Overstock.com posted the highest growth rate among the top 10 online shopping destinations, Nielsen/NetRatings reports. Unique visits totaled 11.5 million, up from 6.3 million a year earlier. Dell saw the second-highest increase, with visits totaling 14.3 million, up from 12.2 million in February 2004.

More from InternetRetailer.com

I just had to mention this since Overstock.com is a local Utah company--gotta support the locals. The people I know who work there are very cool, and I'm glad to hear they're growing their traffic (and hopefully sales/profits). I'm guessing their new auction site plays a big part in their growth. Way to go, Overstock!

Hope you're not waiting until the last minute to file your taxes this year, unless you're like me and have to pay taxes, then I don't blame you for waiting. Don't get too stressed out over it.

SEMPO conducted a study about click fraud that shows it is a great concern among marketers:

Pay-for-click is a key driver behind the growth of online advertising, but now marketers are asking how many of those clicks are bogus.

The growth of the Internet as a communications, commercial, information and entertainment medium has been phenomenal, but for all the excitement and optimism that has caused, occasionally a shadow falls and the sunshine cyberworld grows dark and ominous. The newest dark cloud on horizon is click fraud.

Click fraud is not much of a concern to individual surfers, but it could become a big problem for marketers and advertisers. Some marketers are charging that search engines, the big benefactors of pay-for-click advertising, are not doing enough to protect them against the growing practice of click fraud. Lane's Gifts and Collectibles, a Texarkana, Arkansas, retailer, filed a lawsuit in February against Google, Yahoo, AOL and other search sites alleging that they knowingly overcharged Lane's and other companies.

In a survey of marketers taken late last year, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) found 77% of marketers were concerned about click fraud to some degree...

Yahoo is offering free business websites to businesses. These sites tie in directly with Yahoo Local search. As with any template-driven site, you're going to be limited in what you can do with these sites, but it's better than nothing for businesses who currently don't have a site, and the price is right!

This article about click fraud is sure to catch a lot of attention--probably due more to the fact that it's a PPC search engine guy writing the article. He does seem to have a unique perspective because of his experience and position in the indstry. He also accuses the other search engines of ripping people off while trying his best to make Blow Search look an angel. More than anything it's probably a stab at trying to get some publicity for his search engine by taking a controversial stance on the pay per click fraud issue.

However, Joe makes several good points in his article. I agree that something needs to be done about click fraud. The primary reason advertisers aren't making more noise about this is that the fraudsters are so good at creating these automated clicks that look like real clicks, it makes it hard for the PPC search engines to differentiate fake from real, and it makes it almost impossible for the average website owner to tell the difference.

I'm not convinced that there is a technological solution that will catch all incidences of click fraud. I think the solution to the problem lies in the search engines changing their business models to take away the incentive for click fraud. If the search engines were more discerning in who they allow to be partners, a lot fewer rip-off artists would be allowed, so the quality would improve.

I disagree with Joe's statement that Google isn't any better than anone else. I know they do have a lot of automated and manual processes in place to detect fraud. I'm sure they miss some, too, but I've seen a lot more credits given for fraudulent clicks by Google (even to small advertisers) than any other search engine--even without the advertiser having to contact them to complain.

Google is having a hard time keeping ahead of fraud, mainly because their adsense program lets anyone put Google links on their site, and there is just too much incentive for those guys to create a bot to rack up a bunch of fake clicks.

I doubt Google will get rid of their Adsense program anytime soon--they've got too many publishers who would freak out. But that very program that is driving a huge increase in their ad inventory will prove the most pressing problem related to click fraud. The funny thing is, Yahoo and MSN will probably be coming out with their own versions of Adsense soon, so they'll run into the same challenges. The real challenge for the search engines will come when advertisers quit spending money, not necessarily because they detect fraud, but because their ROI will be so terrible that it won't make sense to advertise anymore. Then we'll probably see the whole search engine biz cycle back to focusing on traffic to their own portal and maybe eliminate the partner programs all together.

It will be interesting to watch how the search engines cope with click fraud, but I'm not sure they'll ever be able to reduce click fraud unless they eliminate the financial incentive of those who are perpetrating the fraud.

I have long taken pride in the fact that Americans watch more TV per capita than anywhere else in the world. But, today I was surpirsed to learn that we don't watch the most. According to a new study by Eurodata TV Worldwide, the Japanese watch an average of 5 hours per day per person. Don't feel bad, though. We're still right up there with almost 4 1/2 hours of TV per day, average. The Chinese and Swedish are the most prudent with their TV watching, clockin only 2 1/2 hours of TV per day.

Frankly, I don't know how people find time to watch 4 1/2 hours of TV every day. I personally don't ever watch that much, so that means some people are watching a lot more than the average that to keep that number up.

As far as how this relates to search engine marketing...um, I guess it's not a stretch to say that people are obviously using the web to search for more info about stuff they watch on TV those 30+ hours a week. Google's Zeitgeist and Yahoo's Buzz index both show significant search popularity for keywords related to TV shows and celebrities. Between TV things and people and music stars, there's not much else that cracks the top searches--aside from an occasional current event or natural disaster once in a while.

Google has been putting a lot of work into improving their local search tools. They've got some good things going, and now they just released Google Local Search Mobile. Mobile is a good idea for local search, so you can get the local info you need as you're driving around wondering where to get some good chinese food or whatever.

Google Mobile Local Search

Become.com, the new shopping search engine, is going "live". Take a peek at become.com.

Jeeves just turned 8 last week. They've got an interesting retrospective look at what Jeeves has been up to over the past 8 years on their blog.

Jupiter Research's Nick Scevak talks to BtoB Magazine about current trends in search marketing.

The two main search trends discussed are vertical search and pay-per-call--both expected to gain ground among B2B advertisers this year.

Personally, I'm not convinced the pay-per-call model will work, at least not as currently implemented. It does have the potential to bring additional advertisers online who may not be interested in traditional PPC advertising.

Not a lot of details on this yet, but there's been a lawsuit filed by PPC advertisers who claim they were fraudulently charged by several (all of the) PPC search engines. here's the article -- and here's a link to the discussion thread on SEW.

Search Engine Watch's Chris Sherman writes about several of the top kid-friendly search engines, including filtering options, etc.

We all knew it was coming--eventually. Google has finally added Keyhole data to Google Maps.

Here's the map to my office -- pretty cool stuff.

Chris Sherman's article about it on SEW

Article about it on PCMag.com

Google recently filed for a new patent, and reveal a lot of information about their search algorithms and methods they use/plan to use for ranking sites in their search results.

There's a great overview of the patent application on seomoz.

You can also learn a lot by reading the actual patent application.

Google's always had a good sense of humor, or at least they used to...anyway, they're going back to their roots with a nice april fool's joke that's pretty funny. Hopefully they don't take the page down, it's an instant classic.

Google's says "big whoop" to Yahoo's recent announcement that they are increasing their email storage capacity to 1GB. Don't try to out-google the Google: Google's doubling theirs to 2 GB!

Who says you can't get anything for free in this world?