Conversion Science: New Column From Search Engine Land
Our newest Search Engine Land column, Conversion Science, launches today. Conversion Science focuses on that all important aspect of search marketing, persuading users to take action. Columnists write about ad and landing page testing and tuning, techniques for moving searchers through the conversion funnel, and more. The Conversion Science column appears weekly at Search Engine [...]
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Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results
Beginning today, Google will now personalize the search results of anyone who uses its search engine, regardless of whether they’ve opted-in to a previously existing personalization feature. Searchers will have the ability to opt-out completely, and there are various protections designed to safeguard privacy. However, being opt-out rather than opt-in will likely [...]
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Google’s Local Coupons Go Mobile, But Who’ll Bite?
Google has offered local coupons for a couple years now, but the response has never matched the promise. Neither business owners nor local searchers have embraced coupons as much as many thought they would.
Maybe this will change things? Google has announced the availability of mobile coupons. All new coupons created in the Local Business Center [...]
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Google AdWords Expands Product Ads
Google announced they are expanding the product ads within the AdWords listing that they have been testing for a while.
Google said, in the U.S., searchers should see them more frequently. It is however still a beta but Google will continue to expand it over time.
Here are the key features:
Pay only for results: [...]
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Where Can Google Be Beaten?
Ad Age today summarize the state of the search engine marketing industry—and it’s largely good, including the fact that we’ve weathered the recession well so far, we’ve seen tremendous growth over our lifespan and most marketers are convinced of, interested in or doing SEM in some form.
Naturally, the report focuses on the elephant in the room—the biggest search engine in the world. Google dominates the search market in almost every country of the world—but there are a few places where competitors might be able to find a chink in Google’s armor.
Bingahoo is cited as one possible challenger, although by the measure Ad Age is using, a combined Yahoo/Bing share would be 26% to Google’s 65% of the market. However, Bing has shown notable success, including a report from Nielsen in July:
According to Nielsen data from July for the U.S., 27% of Google searchers also used Bing at least once that month, and 39% used Yahoo. Of course, the same holds true for Bing and Yahoo searchers — a majority of them also use Google.
We saw similar reports on low search-engine loyalty back in February as well, even before Bing and its marketing blitz. But the fact that people are at least trying Bing bodes well for Microsoft—since CEO Steve Ballmer pledged to spend up to 10% of MSFT’s operating income a year to pushing Bing to the top of the heap (up to $2b/yr).
The other major area is mobile search. While lots of people do turn to Google for their mobile search, just like they do with . . . “immobile” search—and Android is helping with that—Ad Age reports that the number of mobile Internet devices outweighs the number of computers—which means that lots of mobile Internet users don’t have a desktop habit of Googling. Instead, they may use whatever default their service provider or phone includes (again with the Android).
What do you think? Does it really matter if Google is so dominant in the search industry, or is fine and dandy (as long as they don’t penalize your site)? Can they be beaten?
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Social Media and Content Discovery: A Growing Relationship
While the commercial Internet age is in its teens according to linear age it has some difficulty focusing. Just when users are getting used to a world that is search engine centric there comes along the social web or social media or social networking or social (insert your word here) to truly change how people make sense of the sheer volume of data on the Internet. This change or movement toward the social web is happening at an ever increasing rate and creates opportunities as well as difficulties for those who are trying to harness this power for business.
Nielsen reports at its blog in a post from Jon Gibbs, VP Media Analytics
In the beginning there were ISPs, which then gave way to portals ― aggregators of content and links ― which then led to the rise of “search” as the dominant form of Internet navigation or, how we get to where we we’re going on the web. However, as with most forms of evolution, change is constant, and over the past two years search navigation has appeared to shift to social media.
We continue to see that social media has not only changed the way consumers communicate and gather on the Web, but also impacted content discovery and navigation in a big way. But how? Is social media taking the place of portals and search as the hub of online navigation?
Nielsen goes on to categorize people as either ‘searchers’ who primarily get their data from search engines, ‘portalists’ who use a portal site to access data and ‘socializers’ who use, you guessed it, social media to get their information. As this last group grows there could be some significant implications moving forward for everyone who is using the Internet for business.
As a result the socializer group actually feels that there is too much information on the Internet. Much more so than those who simply use search engines. Think about it. A search engine user takes it on faith (the vast majority of the time) that the entire Internet for a keyword or key phrase is boiled down to just 10 best results. Of course, if they only take their online sophistication that far then the Internet does appear to be easy to manage. Socializers, on the other hand, spend a lot more time online and hear / see a lot more than regular Internet users. It can become very noisy very quickly.
So how do they manage this? Through their online social network of buddies, of course. At this point, now the real recommendations and buying decisions are happening based on what other people, not an impersonal engine says. Hopefully, they are giving actual experience to help their online connections make more informed purchasing decisions. That’s the theory at least. Take a look at the significant differences in how socializers and searchers use various formats for information. Why Wikipedia is even part of the discussion baffles me but what do I know?
So what are you? Searcher? Portalist? Socializer? A little of all of them. Will social media displace search engines as a primary source of information in the near future? What does it mean to you TODAY as an Internet marketer? Share your thoughts and let’s learn from each other.
Google Still Can’t Deliver Real-Time Search; Offers Warmed Up Leftovers Instead
There’s no doubt that Google’s feeling the heat from Twitter. Just about everyone wants to know what Google has planned to address Twitter’s rise in dominance for "real time" search results.
The biggest problem for Google is that it’s built its market share by being the most relevant search engine. How can it balance relevance and ranking with freshness and trending?
Enter Hot Trends for search results.
Google has announced that when your search query matches one of the top 100 fastest rising search terms, you’ll see a graph at the bottom of the search page–complete with data on just how popular it is, how fast it’s rising and…that’s about it, actually.
There are a couple of problems with this integration.
Have you seen what makes it onto Google’s Hot Trends list these days? Allow me to demonstrate Hot Trends in search results, and just how utterly useless it can be, all in one screenshot:
Huh? Acne pillowcase? I’ve seen some bizarre stuff show up in Twitter Trends, but this one tops them all!
So, if this is Google’s response to "real time" search, you have to ask yourself what’s driving this data? Yeah, it’s search queries. Let me explain. When you look at most real time search engines–or Twitter Trends–the data is based on signals, such as what people are discussing or linking to. Right? Well, Hot Trends is based on what people are searching for on Google. So the question becomes this: what prompted the search in the first place? Hot Trends is not Google telling us what content is rapidly making its way into the index. Nope, it’s just what keywords are popular among searchers.
To its credit, Google is not presenting this new feature as its answer to real time search, but it’s subtly implied…
We hope it will help you keep up with everything there’s to know about the latest trends online. No more being out of the loop at your office watercooler!
Actually, we’ve replaced the watercooler with Twitter and Facebook. Google’s still the place we go to to dig deeper into the news we’ve just learned–not the place we go to discover it.
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Is Google a Habit or the Best Search Option?
I just got back from the SES San Jose show. Good show. It was interesting to see the search world’s “Murderer’s Row” (relax …. it’s a reference to the 1927 New York Yankees batting lineup and not something offensive …. relax) consisting of Google, bing and Yahoo all lined up in the front row of the exhibit hall. Interesting, of course, because you have to wonder what the messages will sound like once the Microhoo co-joining finalizes sometime in the distant future. For now it’s a lot of talk of business as usual etc. etc.
So what is business as usual? SearchEngineLand takes a look at some new comScore data that tries to put some definition to that idea. The comScore report tells us that Google searchers are more loyal but that also begs the question: Is it loyalty or habit? For me personally, I just use Google out of habit but it’s not one that I feel is harmful to me so don’t plan any search interventions on my behalf. Maybe it’s best described as comfort but underneath all of it is the fact that the results are what matter and I have had no truly compelling reason to make a switch at this point. So am I a Google user by habit or choice? I suppose a little of both. One thing I am though is loyal and that is the area that the Microhoo search effort will need excel in if it is to make a dent in Google’s dominance.
The data below shows that the loyalty of Google searchers far outperforms that of the combined scores of Yahoo and Microsoft as they stand currently.
When looking at search share Google is still comfortably out in the lead as comScore notes
In June 2009, Google Sites had a 65.0 percent share of searches in the U.S. core search market, compared to 28.0 percent for Yahoo Sites (19.6 percent) and Microsoft Sites (8.4 percent) combined. Despite lagging considerably in terms of overall search share, the combined searcher penetration of Yahoo! and Microsoft was 73.3 percent, not far behind Google at 84.0 percent. The source of the discrepancy between search share and searcher penetration is that searchers on Google conducted significantly more searches on average in a month (54.5) than did searchers on Yahoo and Microsoft (26.9).
So here we are in the land of numbers but simple observation says it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that Google is still Google and the likelihood of unseating them is, well, pretty unlikely. No matter how people get to Google or why they stay with it, they have a search dominance factor of “a lot’ according to the completely unscientific and not even close to fully thought out Frank Reed Search Index Study of the Moment. I honestly don’t run into people that use Yahoo or bing as their primary search engine. On the rare occasion I do these people often have an anti-Google stance (like those who would use anything other than Microsoft even if it caused them personal harm) which may just be more about emotion than rational thought.
So is Google your habit or your choice? If you use another option tell us why. I need some feedback since my ultra scientific study of one has an overwhelming Google weighting.
Optimizing For Re-finding Search Behavior
Re-finding search behavior is common in web search, image search, and video search. What is it, and how can you make it easy for searchers to re-find your content?
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One in Three Searchers May Prefer Bing Over Google
A study of twelve people is not statistically relevant, but it does make for interesting headlines!
According to the Catalyst Group, 1 in 3 Google users preferred the search experience of Bing over the search leader. OK, so that was actually 4 of the 12 total people that Catalyst studied in a report obtained by TechCrunch, but hey, Bing will take all the good news it can get, right?
What is amazing is that when the test subjects were asked to rate Bing on specific criteria (visual design, organization of features, filtering options, and relevance of results), Bing handily beat Google in everything but result relevance. Arguably, that is the most important criteria, but most of the study participants thought that both search engines tied on result relevance. So even though Bing ranked better on design, and tied on relevance, that was not enough for most of them to switch.
Here’s a breakdown of the strengths of each search engine:
You can grab the full study here.
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