Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I just read this Wired article about click fraud...a decent overview of the click fraud problem, but what the heck do splogs have to do with it? Yeah, they're spammy, but the clicks on the adsense links on splogs are typically genuine users, so it's a different issue entirely.

The article's author, Charles Mann, quotes Bill Gross as saying that CPA will overtake CPC as the advertising scheme of choice. Of course Gross says that, since his new little baby, Snap is based on CPA (cost per action) advertising. But, I think it's much more likely that Google and Yahoo will eliminate their affiliate programs before they switched to a purely CPA model. The reason is simple, they have way too many advertisers with a crappy conversion rate that continue to pay out the ear for clicks. They'd never make anywhere near as much on a pure CPA basis. Besides, clicks are easier to track and verify (for the search engines, that is) than orders or leads.

I doubt we'll see either of those things happening anytime soon unless the number and scope of complaints about the quality of traffic begins to exceed the amount of money the search engines are making from spammy affiliates and click fraud. If they got rid of their affiliate programs, they would eliminate nearly all click fraud, but they would also decrease their click volume by probably 1/3...not likely to happen.

I had an experience the other day that made me think a lot about what goes into a successful search engine marketing campaign. The experience was at Home Depot and doesn't have anything to do with search per se, or even the Internet for that matter. But it has everything to do with successful commerce and customer service.

'Twas the day after Christmas and I went to Home Depot to cash in some gift cards I'd gotten in exchange for Amex points. I had $400 in gift cards and was on a mission to find the best dishwasher I could for under $400. I'm a regular shopper at Home Depot and have always found their employees to be very helpful for my home improvement projects. This was my first time venturing into the appliance section of the store, however. I found that I was a lone man in a sea of large appliances. "Someone will show up soon," I thought to myself, and began browsing the merchandise. Soon several other customers started looking at the appliances, but not a single Home Depot employee was anywhere to be found. I'd managed to narrow my choices to about 4 models simply based on price, but wanted to get more info to complete the purchase. Where was that appliance expert when I needed him (or her)? I sat there for a minute, but it was obvious that noone was going to show up if I simply waited so I meandered over to the flooring department and had them page someone to help me. After another 10 minute wait, a nice older gentleman showed up and asked how he could help. Perfect, I thought, I explained what I was looking for and asked which dishwasher was the best in the price range I was looking for. He proceeded to show me the 4 models I had narrowed my choices to, then I asked which one he recommended, and he said, "Well, I like Maytag." Hmm. I think Maytag is a fine brand, but I wasn't too convinced that this guy knew anything about dishwashers. Since there were a couple Maytags in my price range I decided to go with his suggestion and then had to decide between two models. "What's the difference between these two," I asked. "This one has more features," he explained, "see how it has more buttons." Hmmm...I could have figured that out. "Is there any difference in how well they clean?" "No, they're both Maytags" was his reply. Well, I'm not sure I follow that logic, but I decided to save the $50 and to with the cheaper one.

I had a heck of a time getting the stupid thing installed, but that's a story for another day. It was mostly due to my ignorance about how to install a diswasher (and uninstall the old one), but there was a little elbow connector thingy that I had to go back for twice to get the right size.

What does all this have to do with Internet marketing? The lesson I learned from this is that it takes more than simply getting customers into your store (or website) to complete the sale. I was a very targeted customer. I had a mission to find a dishwasher. I was intent on buying one and just needed someone to hold my hand a little and help me feel like I was making the right decision about the purchase. I didn't feel that way at all. In fact, if I didn't have those gift cards, I would have left and bought from a different store--one that cared more about my business. As it was, I stuck it out because I was locked into buying there because of the gift cards, but I probably won't recommend Home Depot to anyone else shopping for a dishwasher.

Getting targeted customers to your site is only part of the equation. The other important piece is to provide enough relevant, expert advice and information to help customers feel like they are making the right purchase decision by buying from you. You may be getting some sales now if you're not doing this, but it's probably only the people who are too sick of shopping around to leave and buy elsewhere. Think about how much more you could be doing with a little more virtual hand-holding down the sales process.

Chris Sherman over at SEW serves up a nice helping of 2005's top search keywords, a year in review. He's got links and commentary on several good sources to tap into the collective search mind of the 'net to see what the heck people were searching for this year.

Chris Sherman offers an overview some of the new players in shopping and comparison search

I'll be working most of the day tomorrow, but I'm not sure if I'll have time to blog. Hopefully there won't be anything too exciting in the search engine world, so it won't matter, but I wanted to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!

Search Engine Journal just announced their 2005 Search Engine Blog Awards. No, this blog wasn't even nominated. I guess you forgot to nominate me...or I forgot to nominate myself. Maybe next year...

Why not create our own search engine? says Japan, according to a ZDnet report.

It's that joyful time of year when we can all join arms and sing Kumbaya as we look back on the past year in search. Google offers their own retrospective look at the year that was 2005 with the year end Zeitgeist for 2005. It's always very interesting and sometimes quite entertaining to see what the heck people were looking for over the past 12 months. Most of the time this list provides very little actual value for businesses, but it's still worth taking a minute or two to peek into the collective psyche of Google web searchers.

A good overview of the virtues of search marketing - including some good stats from a few different sources on the relative cost of acquiring a new customer through various media.

Read Scott's article on Search Engine Guide

A new encyclopedia-type site called Digital Unverse aims to be the PBS of the Web. They plan to add another level of "quality control" by having content that is written by certified experts in various subjects, in addition to the un-certified "experts" who can write whatever they want about any topic they choose.

It will be a welcome addition to the Web if it's as good as they say it will be. The site doesn't launch until January, but looks like it will be found at digitaluniverse.net

From News.com

Carl Icahn aims to block an alliance by Time Warner Inc.'s America Online unit and Web search leader Google Inc. saying the pact could undermine a potential merger between AOL and a Google rival, the billionaire investor said on Monday.

Reuters.com Article

I think Icahn is just mad that Google's only buying a 5% share in AOL and not the whole thing.

It's been up in the air for the past several weeks or so (at least in the media it was up in the air) whether AOL would stick with Google or jump ship for a better offer from another search engine company. According to reports from CNet, Google not only held onto the deal, they're going to buy a 5% stake in AOL for a billion bucks. The article talks alot about how the deal pretty much bursts MSN's hopes for becoming a powerhouse ad network anytime soon. Maybe, but what does this mean for Google? And how about AOL? The fading giant has recently revamped their business model and the USP of their advertising and this could signal a serious bid to regain some of their marketshare in the online advertising space. Although the deal essentially means things will continue as is, I think we'll continue to see some changes with AOL as they complete their rediscovery of who they are in the online world.

Got a pretty cool Christmas gift from Google that showed up in the mail yesterday.

It's a laptop accessory pack including a 4-port usb hub, mini optical mouse, 64MB flash drive, and a USB light that looks cool but only works occasionally due to an apparent intermittent connection in the wiring.

There wasn't any letter or card with the gift, but it came in a cool polka dotted box that said "From your Friends at Google". I'm guessing it's because I spend so much of my own and my clients' money with them this year.

Thanks Google!

Good news for us search marketers.

Hot off the press from a Hitwise news release:

According to Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, the market share of U.S. Internet searches containing the words “gift card” was up 32 percent for the week ending December 10, 2005 compared to the previous week (week ending December 3, 2005). Hitwise captured 643 unique search phrases containing the words “gift card” for the four weeks ending December 10, 2005, up 13 percent versus the same week last year (week ending December 11, 2004). Retailer-agnostic gift cards associated with major credit cards such as; “visa gift card,” “american express gift card” and “master card gift card” dominated general gift card searches, while “itunes gift card,” “olive garden gift card” and “gas gift card” dominated specific gift card searches.

Speaking from personal experience, I bought more gift cards this year than in years past. I bought gift cards from iTunes, Tony Romas, Target and Nordstrom.

Another little tidbit from the Hitwise release:
...the week after Christmas will be a busy one for online retailers as shoppers seek to take advantage of post-holiday sales and redeem their gift cards.

I was just talking to my wife the other day about what a good idea gift cards are form a business standpoint. The nice thing about gift cards (from the stores' perspective) is that they get the money up front, and the cards will be redeemed sometime in the future, and a certain percentage don't ever get redeemed, so they turn into 100% profit. Not bad. Plus, gift cards are easy to send to far away friends and they carry a high perceived value (depends on the face value of the card, I guess), and they allow the receiver to redeem it for exactly what they want.

I've been giving out Super Certificates from GiftCertificates.com lately and people really seem to like them. They let the receiver choose the merchant they want to use the certificate at. Very cool. I'm guessing that business is booming for the guys over at GiftCertificates.com right now.

Heard about Alexa's New Fee-Based Vertical Search Services? Danny over at SEW weighs in.

I'm not sure how Alexa can justify charging for its API services, when the big boys offer theirs for free. Seems like a stupid move to me.

MediaPost's article about MSN's plan to pay searchers. I tend to agree that paying searchers will dilute the qulality of traffic to advertisers' sites. It's got the potential to generate a lot of interest and could be just what MSN needs to grow their marketshare, but will it come at the expense of advertisers' ROI?

from Infoworld - this study says Googlers are wealthier than their Yahooing and MSNing couterparts.

From the adwords blog:

"Incorporating landing page assessment into the Quality Score will help us improve the overall advertising experience for users, advertisers and partners by increasing the quality of the sites we present in our ad results."

Google is starting to include the landing page as a relevance factor in where your adwords ads will show up. The truth is, landing pages are a much better indicator of relevance than ad text, which can sound relevant, but often is not what you think you're clicking on. What kind of effect will this have on adwords advertisers? If you're linking to quality, relevant pages, it shouldn't have any effect at all, except possibly improving your ROI as some of the less relevant sites are sifted down in their quality scores.

Newsweek article about the "shadowy" world of SEO.

The guys over at Search Engine Roundtable always have the best coverage of search marketing conferences and events. This year is no different, with the roundup of all the sessions they covered at this year's Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago.

Advertising copywriter superstar Bob Bly doesn't believe in SEO copywriting He says you should write copy with your single core audience in mind (hint: your core audience isn't the search engines). Bob makes some good points about not selling out yur ad copy for the sake of the search engines, but I would make the argument that it is possible to have it both ways. You can do a good job on the SEO of your website and have a site that sells. The truth is, incoming links count a lot more towards getting you that top spot in the search engines that on-page text anyway, so it is very possible to have it both ways. I'm sure Bob Bly makes a lot of money at his trade, but who's to say he couldn't have made even more with some good SEO and some professional web design.

USA Today has a story about Google. I found the part about Google's spending on government lobbying very interesting. Google. the media darling of the past 5 years, is starting to draw concerns about the behemoth they've become.

It's easy to "not be evil" when you're just a couple Stanford PhD candidates running a search engine out of your basement, but how can you not be evil in at least someone's eyes when you start putting other companies out of business? Do the benefits outweigh any negative consequences? Perhaps they change their slogan to "don't be too evil"? Or maybe change it all together to something like, "don't be stupid". Then they don't have to worry about splitting hairs about what's evil and what's not. Evilness is often in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

I'm concerned about security online. I hate spyware and viruses and trojans and keyloggers and all the crap that bogs down the 'net and scares the bejeebers out of me and my fellow netizens. And don't even get me started on phishing, not to mention plain old spam email...but does any of that stuff stop me from shopping online? Heck no. I won't let the bad guys win. If I refuse to shop online (from reputable reatailers...i.e. the ones that aren't spamming me) I show that I believe in the Internet as a medium for commerce. Yeah, there's a lot about the 'net that's messed up, but we can't let that stop us from spending some cash in the new, old fashioned ecommerce way, right?

Well, apparently 25% of consumers are keeping their wallets closed this year--due to concerns with security with online transactions. I haven't seen the actual data, so it's hard to know exactly what these numbers mean, but it seems like consumers are taking their frustrations out on the wrong guys. Online retailers for the most part are very careful with how they handle consumers' information and take security very seriously, it's the spoof sites that steal your identity and if possible your money. Wake up, people! You can't let the bad guys win. Pull out your wallet, go to Amazon.com and buy something. Go ahead, you can do it. Then come back here and finish reading this.

Regardless of the results of this most recent survey, all I'm hearing are reports of significant growth in online sales this year, so that tells me that people are obviously buying, so it must be that other 75% that are making up for their ecommerce-shy friends.

Got a Question? Yahoo's got the answers.

As many of you may know, Google was not ready for the huge demand for their products. They have now posted an update on their progress. According to their site, they are now updating the analytics data more regularly (fresher data), they've also re-enabled linking of analytics to adwords accounts, and they are incementally enabling users to add more profiles to their accounts. Unfortunately, I'm not one of the priveledged few who they've enabled new profile addition for...at least not as of this morning. Bummer.

Just saw this press release on Digital IQ about iLead Media being acquired by Think Partnership. I found it interesting because I met Brady from iLead back in the WinDaily.com days, and I also know people at Think Partnership, which seems to be buying up a lot of companies lately.

Local entrepreneur Paul Allen taught a class on Internet marketing at BYU and posted an overview of the class project results, which was to help real companies test the waters of online advertising with PPC advertising campaigns. It's a very cool, real-world experience that gave these students a serious education that they can actually use to make some money. Is that cool or what?

Yeah, search is kinda becoming a big deal. I didn't need Hitwise to tell me that, but just in case you haven't noticed...I just got this press release in an email from HitWise:

NEW YORK, Dec. 7, 2005 — As visits to online retail sites continue to accelerate into the 2005 holiday season, search continues to be a leading source for visits to Shopping & Classifieds sites.

According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, Search Engines and Directories contributed 17.9 percent of all visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category for the week ending December 3, 2005. Google led search engine referrals by providing 10.8 percent of visits to online retailers, while Yahoo! Search and MSN Search provided 4.1 percent and 0.8 percent respectively. For the week ending December 3, 2005, the largest category sending visits to Shopping & Classifieds sites was shopping sites themselves at 49.5 percent, indicating that Internet users are visiting multiple retailers within an Internet session.

“Search referrals to shopping sites continue to grow as we enter the key holiday shopping weeks,” said Bill Tancer general manager of global research at Hitwise. “However, even with the impressive growth of search, the fact that almost 50 percent of visits to shopping sites originate from other shopping sites demonstrates that consumers continue to manually search and compare across several online retailers. Search engines and comparison shopping sites should consider this manual search behavior as proof of demand for better shopping and comparison search.”

Hitwise generally measures the big dogs' site traffic, but I know of a lot of online retailers--especially smaller players--who get a lot more than 11% of their traffic from Google.

Also from the same press release, a little insight into the hot toy searches for 2005:

Top product search terms driving traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds – Toys and Hobbies category for the four weeks ending December 3, 2005 were “barbie,” “american girl” and “build a bear”. When compared with top terms from 2004, new entrants to the top ten were “airsoft guns” and “jigsaw puzzles.” Top search terms driving traffic to the Shopping and Classifieds – Appliances and Electronics category for the four weeks ending December 3, 2005 were dominated by variations in “ipod” and “xbox 360” search terms.

“As we’ve seen in previous years, top search terms for toys and electronics leading into the last weeks of the year are a great indicator of what will be on consumer’s holiday shopping lists,” said Bill Tancer. “Given the prevalence of search as a driver to online shopping sites, search term data is an invaluable tool for the online and offline retailer as to what they should be stocking this holiday season.”

Last week I got a magazine in the mail called Website Services. I never subscribed to this magazine, it just came out of the blue. Looked like a pretty cool new mag at first, but as I started browsing a few of the articles, a few things struck me as very strange. First of all, nearly all the articles include no byline. I know of very few magazines that don't give credit to their writers. I also noticed quite a few spelling and grammatical errors in the few articles I read. Don't get me wrong, this blog is full of typos, but I also don't claim to be a professional magazine, nor do I employ a professional editor to review my work.

Upon further review, I found that most of the ads in the magazine are from 7Search.com and their family of websites/services. Hmmm...interesting...a quick check shows that websiteservices.com is hosted at 208.237.254.7 and seven search is hosted on the same ip block at 208.237.254.40...coincidence? Or how about their blog, which it looks like they're trying to update regularly with real content, but all the posts are by "administrator". No real blogger posts as administrator, couldn't they at least make up a name for their blogger?

What's up with this new magazine? Is it just a marketing gimmick by the 7search gang or is there more to it? Whoever it is, do they have something to hide?

From CNN.com - an article about the possible release of one-letter TLDs.

I just read a good blog post on the StepForth SEO Blog that offers a list of eight skills that are essential (or at least very helpful) when entering into the SEO/SEM business. Anyone who posesses these skills should see a lot of success in the business, as long as they have someone good to train them. These skills along with a lot of enthusiasm will take you a long way in the world of search marketing.

The truth is, it's very hard to find qualified people at an entry-level with all of the skills on their list, but if you have 4 or 5 of those skills and an eagerness to learn, you can pick up the rest "on the job" and still be very successful as a search marketer.

10 rules for web startups from Evan Williams. Some good advice...I especially like rule #11 (bonus rule).

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