Search For The Soul

This week - news broke that Facebook has changed the way its cookie works and it now follows us across the internet. Much of the internet community was up in arms about the changes and the story even reached the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald website. 

So - social networking and web privacy, you may be asking how it’s all relevant to search marketing. Assumptions have already been made that Facebook is using this information to inform their advertising product which is currently running second behind Google in dominating the internet advertising world. 

Facebook’s new tracking ability uses all of its plugins (that are available on millions of pages across the web) to track user ability. Any page that contains a like button or social stream is now tracking your actions and adding to a user profile about you stored by Facebook. So the question is how is Facebook going to use this information for targeting and what will it mean for Google and their current Search/Display offering. 

While my opinion is pure speculation, I’m predicting that Facebook will be looking to expand their advertising platform outside of its own network. A Facebook display product could be extremely powerful with it’s accurate demographic targeting ability. This combined with contextual/profile based targeting could mean the most targeted display advertising we have seen to date. 

The true task for Facebook will be getting the advertisers (us) on board. Google’s advertising platform has now become the standard for advertising with a large portion of all Digital Marketing spend being driven through it. Facebook’s advertising product is clunky and their account service has been less that optimal so their first step in taking some of Google’s revenue will be improving their current offering to build up trust with advertisers. Once they have done this they will be able to showcase new product offerings to help give consumers a look a the true power of their advertising product built around a seriously large amount of data gathered around their users.

Think Facebook is going to start dominating the online advertising space? Or is Google too good. I know many marketers who would be ready to through Google under the bus as soon as a more suitable alternative is available.

- Matt

Digital and specifically search marketing is rapidly changing. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with all of the changes and trends so below is a snapshot of the biggest movers in search for 2011.

 Mobile Devices

It’s no surprise that mobile features in this post, and I guarantee that it will continue to feature for the next 6 years. In 2011 Google has moved a step closer to AdMob starting to use Google Display Network ads to fill Dormant AdMob inventory. There has also been a huge shift in usage numbers with 50% of Australians set to own a smartphone by the end of 2011.

 Ad Formats

Google has toyed with a variety of formats for ads this year their biggest changes have been:

 Displaying the display URL underneath the ad headline rather than beneath the second description line

 Displaying a modified display URL to form part of the ad headline - this was tested for around 3 months and is currently not active across most markets. It seems to come back into format quite erratically.

 Also note that for this format the display URL has been capitalized where as capitalization for all other display URLs has been removed.

 For those of you wondering why Google is making this subtle but often changes – it’s all about revenue maximization. Each of these formats has been tested to improve CTR (ie more paid clicks) hence a larger amount of $ per search for Google.

 Top Page Stats

Speaking of revenue maximization – in 2011 Google has released two new features in the AdWords interface relating to top page stats. Top Vs Side results segmentation and Top Page bid. The first to be released was Top Vs Side results, these results made it easy to segment results based on precisely where your ad was shown. For almost all advertisers the CTR in top position was tenfold of that in the side position.

 This addition has led to the ability for AdWords users to optimize based on performance. To assist this Google has introduced the top page bid estimate – telling advertisers at what level they need to set their bids on a keyword level to get a high proportion of top page results. The downside for advertisers is that the marketplace knows what they need to bid to be in position 1 on page meaning a more competitive auction at the top of the page.

 Obviously there is a whole variety of new features not mentioned here (+1, GDN targeting, product feeds) but I could go on for days. Stay tuned to the blog for further updates.

To be honest, thats a great question. Clients and other colleagues regularly ask me why I work in search and where I get my enjoyment out of search, so I thought I would share my passion. 

Marketing in general can be exciting, from the beginning of the process its planning, building a strategy, execution of the strategy and then seeing the impact on results. Imagine if you could do all of that within 24 hours, or less. It’s all possible with paid search. The results are close to instant you can choose keywords, write text ads and implement them and with 20 minutes you can evaluate how those changes are performing and within 24 hours you can find out the impact on sales, cost-per-conversion and return-on-investment. Once this process has finished then you can start it over again using the results already gathered and improve the results again by making further changes. 

So thats the marketing side of search covered but what about the enthralling (and no I’m not being sarcastic) analytical side of search. Excel and search marketing go hand in hand together - while there are many automated programs and search tools there is nothing more powerful than human optimisation. Search marketing platforms spit out comprehensive amounts of data and getting that data into a readable state is difficult. I once pulled out a keyword-by-day level report that had to use 3 separate spreadsheets. Thank-God for pivot tables! Turning this data into something readable, analysing results and making changes based on these results can be the most rewarding part of working with search. 

So, does it sound exciting to you? Well I hope so, I know that I am not the only person that loves search because a few of the guys at work and I have had this discussion before - that we love search but can’t for the life of us figure out why. If you’re in love with search and want to find out more - drop me a line matt.seakins@gmail.com and I can hopefully help to introduce you into the world of search. 

-Matt