Author Archives: ghotchkiss

Creating Conversations, One Column at a Time

First published July 12, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve been writing this column for almost three years now. In that time, one of the most rewarding and often humbling aspects is when I get to connect with the community that’s formed around the Search Insider column. I applaud MediaPost for introducing the Search Insider blog, allowing us to turn each column into a conversation. As a writer, you get lazy and a little sloppy when you get too far disconnected from your audience. Getting feedback brings you back to earth. It reminds you that your musings are not going out in the great void. You’re connecting with readers, and hopefully engaging them enough with a concept with which you elicit a response. This is one of the most powerful aspects of the Internet.

Rewiring Communities

I’m tremendously intrigued by how the Internet has rewired our concepts of community. I’ve talked about this before, and it formed the basis of my opening remarks at the Search Insider Summit in Florida in May. I love how we can participate in so many communities that are not tied by geography, but form around ideas and concepts. The online manifestations of our communities are the conversations that ensue. Each one of these columns can instantaneously create an ad hoc community that debates a topic.

My column a few weeks ago was a great example. We formed a community around the concept of whether advertisers “get” search advertising in Canada, and together we created content through our conversation. I started the ball rolling, but the 18 of you that chose to leave a comment picked up the momentum and left something of value. You provided different perspectives, and the conversation grew richer for it. Some of you questioned my premise, some questioned my delivery and forced me to defend it. Many of you, while agreeing in principle, went further and added your own vision and expertise.

For as long as MediaPost decides to leave that conversation accessible, anyone who chooses to see if such a community exists can pick up our threads through a search. They can connect our conversations with others that may have happened on the same topic through linking. They can build on the community by starting their own conversation. They can do a little detective work and track down some of us that commented and re-engage us with further dialogue. The community has permanence. It is real, and it is defined both by the concept we shared and by search, which connects the online outposts that make up the community.

Is Anybody Out There?

You know, for as long as I’ve been writing for Search Insider (and I believe David Berkowitz and I are the two remaining original writers) I’ve had no idea how many of you were out there, reading it. At the beginning, I asked MediaPost what the number of readers was; I never did get a reply. At first, this question was important to me because I was looking at the column as a promotional vehicle. But I think one of the reasons I didn’t pursue my inquiry was because I realized that the purpose of my writing each week is more than just getting my name out there. As I travel from search show to search show, this column acts as a way for me to connect with many of you. The connection is more one-sided than I may like, but it’s gratifying when you mention that you read my Search Insiders, or that the topic of one piqued your interest. They’re like little “community seeds” that can in turn sprout into another conversation. And isn’t that what the Internet is all about? Isn’t that where its tremendous power lies? It’s the world’s largest conversation, and it’s most powerful as a reciprocal activity.

Sorry to get all philosophical on you, but I’ve actually been doing research for a book and these concepts are inextricably tied into its topic. I’ve been threatening to do a book for a long time and someone (probably tired of hearing me go on and on about it with no apparent intention of actually doing it) told me that committing publicly is a great way to make it happen. So I’ve gone on record, and I hope each of you when you see me at a show asks me how the book is going. Or just tell me to get my butt in gear! One of the biggest challenges is for me to take the same interactive conversations that happen online and figure out how to incorporate that into the creation of a book. The Internet has changed everything else. Why should writing a book be any different?

But back to the topic at hand. I often wonder about the future of anything that is centered on search, and this column is no exception. I’m an ardent believer that search is such a fundamental online activity, the glue of the Internet, that soon search will disappear as a distinct function. It will go under the hood, powering the new evolution of the Web, connecting us with the very best matches to our intent. I hope this column evolves along with search, and the conversations continue. In my mind, the best ones are yet to come.

Is Personalization the Path to Follow?

First published July 5, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Aaron, Aaron, Aaron. Could I possibly leave you as a lone voice out in the wilderness, prophesizing about personalized search? Of course not.

Last week, fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman pointed out some loopholes in personalized search nirvana. It’s hard to find fault with his points. They’re all very real flaws in making personalization a credible evolution in search relevancy. Also, somewhere along the line, it appears that I’ve become the cheerleader for personalized search. I do admit I’m somewhat bullish on it, but I think I should clarify why I think personalization is important.

It’s Time to Break Search’s Paradigm

Search has hit the ceiling, at least in its current embodiment. We’ve pushed the paradigm as far as it will go. Search’s nose is smashed up against the window. (I should stop writing these columns late in the evening, after a 15-hour day!). Search needs to go somewhere, and after looking at the alternatives, I believe personalization is the most probable path.

All the improvements in search over the past decade have largely been in the background. The interface you and I use has hardly changed since I first discovered Infoseek and AlltheWeb back in 1995. Sure, the algorithms have been tweaked, but they’ve all been improvements down the same path, and that path is at a dead end. For search to evolve, it needs to move beyond a pure query-initiated, algorithmic-driven exercise. Even universal search, which is the biggest change we’ve seen to the results page in the past few years, is really still a tweak on the existing paradigm. It’s just mixing the bag of results, powered by the same algorithm.

So, when we look at where search can go, there are precious few alternatives. They all aim at the holy grail, disambiguating intent. We can look at human-powered search. The idea behind this is that real, live human beings can deliver greater relevancy than an algorithm ever could. Here tread Jason Calacanis (Mahalo) and Jimbo Wales (Wikia).  Then we have the very close cousin (and in some cases, a stand-in) social search. If we somehow tag results, or implicitly give our vote, even through a click-through, will others who share our interests find the same results more relevant? Finally, we have personalization.

Don’t Expect Perfection Anytime Soon

Each approach has potential flaws. Any time you break a paradigm, iterative failure is almost a given. Nobody is going to get it perfect out of the gate. Getting to the next evolution of search will involve trial and error. That’s why I think it’s particularly brave of Google, given its current market leading position, to be moving aggressively down the personalization path. They’re eating their own lunch. It’s an inevitable move, but one that it takes guts to make. And don’t judge the potential of personalization based on what you’re seeing today. It would be akin to trying to determine the eventual impact of the automobile based on your impression of the first horseless carriage that lurched through town. There’s a reason it’s in beta.

Aaron worries about the search “ruts” that may evolve with personalization. If we tend to go down the same paths again and again, what happens when we want to explore new territory? Will personalization have formed a groove so deep we can’t crawl out of it?

Aaron is also concerned about multiple profiles on the same machine within a household. Or for that matter, multiple profiles with the same person. I search differently at work than I do at home. How will a search engine reconcile this search schizophrenia?

Of course, we haven’t even touched on the biggest challenge facing personalization: the privacy issue. Personalization is powered by mountains of sensitive data. The potential pushback on this is the biggest red flag that personalization has to contend with.

Making the Leap

But no matter which path search chooses to follow, there will be monumental challenges to address. That’s the whole crux of innovation. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But search has no option. For it to evolve into its next stage, which is to take its rightful place as the fundamental glue that connects us all to the highly functional, highly personal semantic Web, search needs to break the current paradigm. And that’s why I’m bullish on personalization. As Google’s Matt Cutts said to me once (about a totally different topic), if I had a dozen eggs, I’d be putting 11 of them in this particular basket. Sure, personalization has some big hurdles to jump. So do the alternatives. And I think the potential wins for personalization are far bigger. I have the suspicion that if personalization works as well as I think it can, we’ll look back five years from now with bemusement at the concerns we had in 2007 around the issue.

That’s the problem when you come to the end of a development path — and fundamental change, rather than incremental change, is required. It’s very difficult to see what lies ahead.

So You Really Want to Integrate Search?

The Ontario tourism board and I have been butting heads a little bit in the blogosphere as of late.  It all came about from an article I wrote a few weeks ago saying that perhaps Canadian advertisers have their “heads up their ass” with search marketing.  I used the Ontario Tourism Board as an example of a major organization that was not doing search and was quickly corrected by Nick Pedota from the board, who indicated that they were in fact doing a search campaign.  My problem was that I couldn’t find them for any of the keywords I thought they would typically appear for.  It seemed to me that there was a disconnect here.  This week I published a follow-up column indicating that perhaps there was a mismatch between the objectives and the allocation of budget in the Ontario Tourism strategy. In a follow-up comment to the column, Nick graciously complemented me on my research and admitted that perhaps there was room for improvement in their integrated search strategy.  My suspicion is that the cracks in the strategy don’t lie exclusively with either the Ontario Tourism board or their agency but likely fall somewhere in between. And it’s not uncommon to find these cracks when major advertisers move into trying to integrate search in their overall campaign strategies.   Kudos are in order for Ontario Tourism’s recognition of search at all.

In the spirit of improvement, I’d like to offer Nick and other marketers a few tips for successfully integrating search into an overall marketing campaign.

Search should be your first dollars in

Typically, search is added as an afterthought in most marketing campaigns.  In fact, search should be the foundation of the campaign.  This should be the first allocation of funds. Searchers are often your best prospects. They’re the ones that are actively involved in trying to find you.  In the case of the Ontario Tourism Board the entire campaign objective was to drive people to their website.  Therefore, it didn’t make much sense to not fully utilize search as a channel and to steer dollars instead to less efficient branding channels such as print and television.

In this case, the first thing that should have been done was to accurately assess the size of the potential search market.  This would’ve been done during the keyword analysis, when the prime keywords were identified and the corresponding search volumes were discovered.  A smart search marketer would be able to determine the key phrases most likely to convert and would start with these, but would then work outwards to determine the total size of the keyword basket. Going hand in hand with this is the determination of the average click cost for these keywords.  The search marketer has to make the determination if the cost per click is justified, given the likelihood to convert.

Once the total available search inventory that meets the quality threshold is established, this should form the core of your marketing budget. These are prospects are raising their hand, indicating that they’re looking to find you.  They should be the first ones captured in your marketing strategy. Then you can extend the campaign with other branding intiatives.

Realize that branding dollars will drive search volume

Even after you extend your budget into areas other than search, quite often the dollars spent here will translate into search activity.  In the case of Ontario Tourism, they ran their website address in all their ads.  But much of this activity would have translated into searches on the primary search engines.  Therefore, you need top of page presence to capture these navigational searches.  Ontario Tourism also did some national advertising, primarily on television, and in this case in particular there is a high likelihood that search would be used to find the site.  Unfortunately with Ontario Tourism’s geo targeting and other limits on maximizing their search presence, it’s unlikely that searchers would be able to find a site to click through to.  So, in effect, you lose two ways here.  You’re spending the money on branding to drive traffic and then you’re not capturing that traffic by ensuring you have an adequate search presence.

Bid on the head words if budget allows

A common mistake with many first-time search marketers is to compare click costs on different keywords against each other, rather than against other lead generation channels.  Head words, the high traffic key phrases that generally form the bulk of the potential traffic, typically cost much more than the long tail phrases.  The neophyte search marketer, in an attempt to be price conscious, often deletes the head words from consideration because of the expense, relative to more niche phrases.  But this is often the wrong comparison.  What the marketer should do is compare the cost per acquisition against the typical cost per acquisition of other channels.  In the case of Ontario Tourism, even their most expensive potential phrases would’ve cost under two dollars per click.  Even under the most optimistic of conversion scenarios, much of their print advertising would have been costing 15 times that.  It was a false economy to delete the head words from the budget consideration, as it would’ve closed the loop on their search strategy and ended up bringing highly qualified prospects at a much lower cost per conversion than their other channels. If you’ve truly allocated as much as possible to your search budget and the head words are still not within reach, then bidding on long tail phrases is really your only option.  But until you’ve made sure that you’re putting your first dollars in the search, don’t eliminate the head words from consideration.

Remember, if it isn’t clicked you don’t pay

It’s typical to use targeting extensively to make sure that traditional marketing is aimed at the right prospects.  You would pick your media channels based on their target demographics.  Often, this thinking is transferred into search but again this could prove to be a false economy. Ontario Tourism decided to use geo targeting to target their primary markets, which was the province of Ontario and the neighboring US border states.  They also put budget caps in place and put time parameters on their campaign. All of these moves would have made sense if budget were extremely limited.  It always makes sense to buy your best clicks first.  But as I mentioned above, in this case search should have been the first dollars in and this would’ve allowed Ontario Tourism to extend their search campaign to capture all of the potential traffic.  One of the beauties of search is that you can gain visibility with relatively little risk.  Unlike television or newspaper advertising, you only pay in search if the ad is clicked.  This eliminates much of the risk and allows you to relax your targeting to ensure that you’re capturing all the potential search traffic.

Understand the visibility dynamics of the search results page

Another source of false economy is the position you choose to occupy on the search results page.  There is generally five times the interaction with ads in the top sponsored position as opposed to ads on the right rail.  And in the case of Ontario Tourism, the official tourism site for the province of Ontario, this would be a site you would expect to see in the top sponsored ads for searches like Ontario vacations. By reinforcing this inherent trust with eye catchers like “official site” the Ontario tourism board would have been able to take advantage of quality scoring to reduce their bid price and maintain their top position. They would also have to use a close variation of the actual key phrase in the title to reinforce information scent. This relevance should, of course, carry through to the landing pages well.  This was an area that could lead to substantially increased conversions for the Ontario Tourism Board as well.

I embarked down this path in order to wake up Canadian advertisers and hopefully make them smarter about integrating search into their strategies.  It’s in that spirit that I offer these suggestions for those that are looking to seriously tap into the potential of search.

“Doing Search” Online Counts If You’re Seen

First published June 28, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m not making any friends with Ontario Tourism. Two weeks ago I said in this column they weren’t using search. I was quickly corrected by the tourist bureau’s Nick Pedota, who told me my claim was “wildly inaccurate” and that Ontario Tourism in fact has “an extensive search program.” But based on the following searches I did while in Toronto, Ontario Tourism didn’t show for: Ontario vacations, Ontario resorts, Toronto vacations, Ontario getaways and Ontario holidays. According to Google Trends’ keyword research tool, these are the most common searches for Ontario, by a substantial margin.

If You’re Not Seen, You’re Not Doing Search

Here’s the reality of search marketing. It’s one thing to say “we’re doing search” internally — and it’s a totally different thing to have the searcher realize that yes, you’re doing search. The smart thing to do here would be to give Pedota and Ontario Tourism the retraction they’re looking for and say I made a mistake (which I did). But this proves too good an example of the disconnect I see all the time; managing a search campaign to budgets, not objectives. I stand by my original claim: Canadian advertisers aren’t clueing into the power of search.

Nick wasn’t really in a mood to share many details of the bureau’s campaign, but he did share that they’re were bidding on thousands of “targeted keyphrases” and were using heavy geo-targeting to focus on their prime markets (Ontario and the border states). He said that’s simply “smart marketing”. I can’t disagree. It makes sense to target in on your best clicks first, especially if budgets are limited.

Where’s the Money Going?

But in this case, are budgets really limited? Let me share some things I was able to dig up on Ontario Tourism’s site. First of all, the tourist bureau is doing print (lots of print) and TV (lots of TV). The goal? To drive people to its Web site. Full-page 4-color ads are running multiple times in over 70 dailies and weekly newspapers and 9 magazines. One 4-color full-page ad in the Toronto Star would run about $54,000 (there’s a certain amount of guessing here, as print rate cards are really a mathematical exercise in confusion and frustration). Circulation of the Toronto Star is 350,000 (on an average day). An excellent conversion rate for a newspaper ad would be 0.5% That means, ideally, 1,750 people would actually visit the Ontario Tourism website. Now, I have never in my life seen a newspaper ad convert this well, but even if it did, that would be a cost per visitor of $30.85. If the ad doesn’t work that well, the average cost climbs dramatically. And you pay whether or not the ad works.

What People Actually Use

Now, courtesy Yahoo Canada and a recent survey, let’s look at what actual travelers cite as the most important influencers in making travel plans. Search and Web sites are tied for number one and two, used by 51% of respondents in a recent survey. Newspapers and print? Only used by 7%. But yet, only 2.1% of Canadian ad budgets get spent on search, and 42% gets spent on newspapers and magazines. I couldn’t get any specific percentages for Ontario Tourism, but one only has to look at their campaign page to see that search is very likely getting only a fraction of what’s going to newspapers and magazines. And don’t even get me started on the TV buys.

The Search Story

So, where is Ontario Tourism in the search results? As Pedota shared, they’re only geo-targeting the prime markets, and then only for a 3-month period (April through June). Only 1 of the 7 highest traffic key phrases I found (using an Ontario IP) returned an ad or an organic listing for Ontario Travel (the site also hasn’t been organically optimized). More specific phrases, like Ontario Summer Vacations or Ontario Wine Getaways, did return more ads.

But by bidding on specific phrases (even thousand of “long tail” ones) and not on the more popular ones, Ontario Tourism is catching less than 10% of all the people using search to plan a vacation in Ontario. And unless you’re in the top-sponsored ad locations (which few of the ads I saw were) you’re actually only being seen by a small percentage of those searchers (usually 10% to 30% of them) on the results pages you do appear on. So, according to 97 out of 100 people who are using search to find the official site for Ontario Tourism, the tourism bureau is not “doing search.” By the way, you could maintain top spot in Google and Yahoo for all the top traffic phrases for less than $2 per visitor. Remember, that ad in the Toronto Star cost, at a minimum, 15 times that!

Again, let’s recap. What’s the purpose of the campaign? To drive people to the Web site. And not just any one — THE official Web site of Ontario Tourism, the site most people are looking for on these key phrases.

And You’re Spending Your Money Where?

Is it really “smarter” to ignore 97% of the people who are actively searching online to find you, so you can spend more money running ads in newspapers for the 99.5% of people who have no interest in your site at all? And the real irony here is that if people don’t click on a search ad, you don’t pay! Take a fraction of that budget from the Toronto Star and blow out the geo-targeting and time parameters and go for the high-traffic phrases. After all, there might be people in Saskatchewan or Nova Scotia that are planning a trip to Ontario. Or, perhaps they’re planning their trip in September, or February. If not, it’s not costing you anything. Try getting the Toronto Star to offer the same pricing model!

Is this really smarter marketing? You decide. The readership of this column includes some of the smartest marketers on the planet. Blog about this and give me your opinion. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve decided I shouldn’t apologize for trying to get advertisers to spend money more effectively. After all, in this case, it’s really our money they’re spending. At least, it would be if I were an Ontario taxpayer. Something tells me after this column, it might be a good thing I live 2000 miles away. As I said, I’m not making any friends in Ontario.

Yahoo + Yang = Google + (Page+Brin)?

First published June 21, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

So Jerry Yang is no longer just the chief Yahoo, whatever that means. Terry Semel has vacated Yahoo’s CEO office and Jerry Yang has set up shop there. At the same time, Sue Decker has stepped into the president’s role. While Terry Semel’s departure didn’t come as a great surprise to anyone in the search space, Jerry Yang’s appointment as CEO did raise a few eyebrows. In retrospect, the move seems to make a lot of sense but in the numerous conversations I’ve had on this topic in the last few weeks, no one mentioned Yang’s name as Yahoo’s possible savior.

With this move will come the inevitable speculation about how this will bolster Yahoo’s chances of competing against Google. Just last week I was interviewed by Bloomberg TV and was asked about that very topic. At that time I mentioned that the biggest difference between the two was the lack of corporate focus at Yahoo and the fact that focus, at least on the search side, has never been an issue for Google.

My belief is that there’s a lot behind the scenes that we’re not privy to that will explain Yang’s appointment as CEO when it becomes public knowledge. My suspicion is that there may be an acquisition deal in the works and this is a “feel-good” move to help shore up Yahoo’s eroding stock price until the deal can be finalized. But whether or not that’s the case, I did want to take a few minutes to make some comparisons between Google and Yahoo in light of Monday’s news.

Sacred Cow = Balanced Ecosystem?

Search is the sacred cow at Google. More correctly, the search user experience is the sacred cow of Google. And it’s the quality of that search experience that has driven the vast majority of Google’s revenue and has put them in the position where they can pose a significant threat in virtually every information channel in the world.

Recently I was worried about search appearing to take a backseat at Google. With all the media hype surrounding Google’s moves into other channels, I was worried that perhaps the corporation itself had lost sight of how important search was in their overall strategy.

It appears my fears were misplaced. Google’s Matt Cutts was quick to comment on a blog post that search is still integral to everything that Google does and that the team was hard at work improving that search experience. Shortly after that, the personalization and universal search announcements began to roll out of Google labs. From everything I’ve been seeing, Google is more intent on improving the search user experience than ever and is using universal search and personalization as the hub that will drive a much more extensive user interaction with Web content and information. Of course, a more efficient delivery of advertising goes hand-in-hand with that strategy.

I’ve always been a big believer in corporate sacred cows. These are the untouchable tenets that drive the overall strategy of the company. From everything I’ve seen, heard or read about Google, the search user experience is its sacred cow. The company is focused on engineering the most effective and relevant connection between users and their desired content. The advantage of the sacred cow is that it gives an unquestionable rallying point for the company. All else is fair game but that single strategic foundation is what keeps the company on track.

Yahoo has no sacred cows. In all my conversations with the company there’s a lot of talk about community and a balanced ecosystem. Those very terms suggest compromise. There are a ton of Yahooers (although, like the Yahoo share price, this number is eroding as well) who are passionate about their jobs and would love to see their particular interest elevated to the status of the corporate sacred cow, but they’ve become frustrated with the lack of support from the CxO level. Just last year, Sue Decker was quoted saying that Yahoo is quite content to be No. 2 in the search game. In fact, the company’s strategy was trying to hang on to their eroding market share. It was, in effect, a public capitulation to Google. That announcement hit the Yahoo search team squarely in the gut. They definitely were not ready to give up on search.

Eric Schmidt = Terry Semel?

From the outside, it may appear that Eric Schmidt and Terry Semel served fairly similar roles. In both cases they are cofounders still actively involved in the business. The cofounders were incredibly young and lacked traditional “business expertise.” And both Schmidt and Semel stepped in with a significant amount of past experience.

But there the similarities ended. From the very beginning, Schmidt understood that while he served as CEO, Page and Brin were always going to take a very active role in running Google. And Schmidt stepped into his role with a tremendous amount of respect for the sheer intellectual horsepower that Page and Brin brought to Google. He never wanted to remove them from their decision-making roles. He understood that they were a key element in Google’s success.

Semel, on the other hand, came from the Hollywood Warner Bros. power structure and was intent on making Yahoo the new entertainment giant.

That strategy, however, had one fatal flaw. No one at Yahoo, least of all Semel, understood that media consumption was going to be an entirely different game online. Prepackaged bits of content, carefully packaged for easily digested consumer consumption, pushed out to us by a media giant – this was not how we were going to find our entertainment in the future. Now, we were completely in control and we would choose what, where and when we would watch. We didn’t need a power channel pushing us content. We needed a better tool for finding the content we were interested in. The rules had changed and Yahoo didn’t have a new version of the rulebook. No one had the rulebook, because it hadn’t been written yet.

Larry + Sergey = Jerry + David?

Finally, to me the biggest difference between Yahoo and Google is in the day-to-day role of the founders. Brin and Page have never backed off from their control positions at Google. In fact one of the running jokes at Google is their tendency to swoop in, roll up their sleeves and bury themselves in the minutiae of one particular item or project, much to the frustration of the team working on it. There is a Google-wide conspiracy aimed at trying to keep their hands off of any important code. As frustrating as this micromanaging might be to the individuals involved, it does give the two an intimate knowledge of everything that’s happening at the company. Their voracious intellectual appetite gobbles up this tremendous amount of detail and somehow digests it into strategic decisions that are very seldom wrong. Someone recently told me that one of the reasons that Brin has some challenges relating to the real world is that he’s never been wrong in his life. He doesn’t know what it means to fail.

David Filo and Jerry Yang, while still actively involved in Yahoo, have been quietly influencing from behind the scenes. They’re easier-going and not nearly as intense as Brin and Page. They suggest rather than demand. They stepped back, willing to let Semel run the show. In traditional wisdom, they did exactly what entrepreneurs and cofounders should do. They passed the torch on.

But in this case, it didn’t work. Yahoo lost its way. Brin and Page’s nettlesome but much-needed day-to-day involvement kept Google on track. Yahoo was left to founder and flopped back and forth, never being exactly sure what it was.

Even in the few hours since the announcement was made (as of the writing of this column) there has already been reports that the management change is exactly what Yahoo needs. Jerry Yang is recognized as a champion for the user experience on Yahoo and, in stepping back into the CEO’s old role, seems to signal a return to the fundamental principle of the user’s importance. In my view, it’s too little too late. If users were really that important to Yahoo, why were they pushed out of the driver’s seat in the first place?

The Cranky Canadian is Back from Toronto

Apparently I stirred the pot a little bit when I was in Toronto. Yahoo invited me to give a breakfast talk to the handful of Canadian advertisers and I managed to hijack the session for 10 to 15 minute rant about how Canadians don’t get search.  I quickly followed this up with a column in  the SearchInsider to the same effect. I did make one mistake.  I did mention that the Ontario government doesn’t do search for their official tourism information site.  I was quickly corrected in that.  There is in fact the search campaign going on.  It just wasn’t registering for any of the searches I did.  I think I’ll follow up on this a little more for next week’s SearchInsider column.

I apologize to show chair Andrew Goodman for breaking the cardinal Canadian rule of politeness.  Andrew is shipping a case of generic cola with a Canadian politeness serum cleverly mixed in to try to return me to the accepted norms for Canadian behavior. I noticed another blogger who picked up on my rant indicated that as a Canadian living in the US, I would be well advised to escape back south of the border. I don’t know if this is good news for Canadian advertisers or not, but I actually am a resident Canadian.  I call Kelowna, B.C. home.

You know, the funny thing is, other than poor Nick at the Ontario Tourism Board who I mistakenly said had his head up his ass, most everyone else has agreed with me.  Perhaps being a cranky Canadian pays off.  To my knowledge there’s nobody who really is filling this role currently, although Canadians have a long tradition of being cranky.  Notable cranky Canadians in the past included Gordon Sinclair, Pierre Berton and Jack Webster.

If it makes you feel any better, Canadian advertisers weren’t  the only ones I turn my sights on in the past week.  I also took a few shots at Yahoo during an interview on Bloomberg TV. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been traveling for past 2 1/2 months and I think the last time I actually got seven hours of uninterrupted sleep was back in March. This weekend I think I’ll have a stiff shot of Canadian whiskey (we call it rye up here), have a good night’s sleep and maybe I’ll come back next week kinder, gentler and more polite.  Or not.

Semel Says So Long – Yang’s Back

Well, the other shoe dropped. Terry Semel’s stepped down and Yahoo is dusting off co-founder Jerry Yang and bringing him back as CEO. Sue Decker steps in as President.

There’s a whiff of desperation here. I’ve often said that one of the reasons Google has excelled in search is the hands on involvement of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They had an intimate interest in the Google user experience and made it a sacred cow at Google, closely watched by Marissa Mayer. The entire Google empire has been financing solely by the strength of that user experience, so don’t ever underestimate the power of it.

The Yahoo or MSN (Live..etc) user just never had as highly a placed champion (or champions). The fact that Jerry Yang and David Filo cashed in relatively early at Yahoo and watched from the sidelines allowed the search also-ran to drift and be run into the ground by bean counters and those who had dreams of an online media empire. The waffling back and forth came close to killing Yahoo, and may yet.

Sue Decker is a fiscally responsible executive (a.k.a. bean counter) and Jerry Yang, who still has a garage full of Yahoo stock, is probably a little worried about slipping down the Forbes list if the share price continues to erode. So he’s stepping back into the ring, full time.

Will this have much of an impact on the Google/Yahoo rivalry? No, I don’t think so. Jerry cashed in and eased back, where Sergey and Larry would have never dreamed of it. The motivations are different. And Sergey and Larry take an engineer’s proprietary interest into the nitty gritty minutiae of Google, where Yahoo was never really an engineering brain child. It was a collection of links, the manifestation of a online community. It embraced technology because it had too.

To me, this seems like it’s buying time, to keep share prices propped up until a deal can be inked, nothing more. The faces have changed, but the look of desperation remains the same.

Coincidentally, I was just in Toronto last week and talked on Bloomberg TV about the need for leadership and focus at Yahoo.

Canada, It’s Time to Clue into Search!

First published June 14, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve never hid the fact that I’m Canadian. I’m fervently proud of that fact, and more than willing to take the good-natured ribbing I often get on the road from my American friends. I usually bear the brunt of some Canadian joke on a panel (often, I’m the one telling it) and I’m more than happy to act as a one-person tourism bureau. But this week, at SES Toronto, I’ve got to say that when it comes to search marketing, Canadian advertisers have their heads up their ass.

Being a Canadian, I’ve pondered long and hard about whether to soften that comment. After all, heaven forbid it comes off sounding rude. Saying someone, anyone, especially your fellow countrymen, have their heads up their ass sounds so, well, American. It’s unequivocal, to the point, in your face, aggressive: everything that Canadians generally aren’t. We’ve had it bred and/or frozen out of us.

But after looking at the facts, I couldn’t come to any other conclusion. The irony is that Canadians (I hope myself included) have played a major role in shaping the North American search industry. People like Barbara Coll, Todd Friesen, Andrew Goodman, Ian McAnerin, Ken Jurina and Jim Hedger are considered world-class in the game. But most of us are shaping the industry working with American clients. It’s because Canadian advertisers haven’t woken up to search yet, and there’s just no excuse for that, because Canadian customers are light years ahead of them.

Canada’s wired!

Canadians use the Internet more than anyone else in the world. According to comScore (responsible for all the stats in this paragraph), we spend more time online, have more wired households, are more sophisticated in our online behavior, do more searches. Pick your metric, Canada is ahead of the pack when it comes to online usage. For example, when we look at average hours spent online per month, Canadians are top with 40 hours, followed by Israel with 37.4 and South Korea with 34. The U.S. is in 8th place with 29.4. Canada also leads the pack in online reach, with 70% of households wired. This time, the U.S. comes in second with 59%. Average pages viewed per visitor? Canada comes in tops with 3800. The U.K. is second with 3300 and the U.S. clicks in with 2500.

See a pattern emerging? We spend a hell of a lot of time online up here. And much of that time is looking for something to buy. Canadians are the world’s best shoppers. We research every purchase down to the nitty-gritty detail. The Internet was created for shoppers just like us.

But what about the advertisers?

I’m writing this at SES Toronto. By common consensus with most Canadian search marketers I’ve talked to, Toronto seems to be the epicenter of the orifice that Canadian advertisers have lodged their collective heads in. The city doesn’t get it, the province doesn’t get it, the country doesn’t get it. When it comes to search, Canada (with a few exceptions) is clueless.

I remember my first SES in Toronto. I had been attending the U.S. shows for a few years previously, and it was with more than a hint of nationalistic pride that I attended the first Canadian show. But my jaw soon dropped at the questions I was fielding from the audience. This group was at least three years behind the U.S. market. That was four years ago. Since then, the U.S. has dramatically outpaced Canadian growth in search savviness. And if you look elsewhere, almost every market I’m familiar with, including the U.K, France, Italy, Germany and even China is rapidly gaining on the U.S. But Canada still seems to be blundering its way forward, overlooking the fact that Canadians spend a huge amount of time online using search engines. It’s to the point where it’s unforgivable.

Show us the money!

Here are just a few of the stats I pulled from comScore, Yahoo Canada and other sources:

  • Canadians spend $28.05 in online advertising per Internet user. The US spends $71.43.
  • 21% of Canadians media usage is online, but it gets 6% of the budget.
  • In contrast, newspapers and magazines get a 7% share of total media usage, but capture 42% of Canadian ad budgets,
  • The U.S. spends almost twice as Canada per capita on search marketing.

I did a few searches from my hotel in Toronto to see if the big brands show for common searches. They don’t. The quality of sponsored ads up here is abysmal. If you were planning a vacation in Ontario, don’t expect to see the official tourism site for the Ontario government in the top sponsored ads. They don’t do search. If there’s anything our research has shown, it’s that you need relevance in top sponsored to encourage interaction with this real estate. Until you get quality advertisers, sponsored is No Man’s Land.

So, in an atypical move for a Canadian, I’m railing against the cluelessness of our advertising community. Next time I come to Toronto, you’d better have your act together. Canadian shoppers get it, why don’t you?

By the way, sorry if this sounds harsh. Must be all the time I’m spending out of the country. Hopefully my passport won’t get revoked.

Planning for Personalization

First published June 7, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I should have known as soon as I saw the speaker roster. Google’s Matt Cutts, Yahoo’s Tim Mayer, Atlas Web Service’s Michael Gray and myself on the same panel. Guess who got the lion’s share of attention in the Q&A and after-session scrum? Michael and I might as well have checked out early and hit the Google Dance before the crowds.

The title of the panel at the inaugural SMX in Seattle was “Search Personalization: Fear or Fear Not.” (Discussed from an attendee’s point-of-view in yesterday’s Search Insider.) As moderator Danny Sullivan often does, he set the panel up to generate a little debate: Michael Gray vs. Google, Yahoo vs. Google. I was like Switzerland, in neutral territory. Danny did get his conflict, with Michael taking a few shots at Google and Tim Mayer throwing down the gauntlet about the lack of transparency on Google’s personalized search results.

Guess What? SEOs are not your Average Search User!

To be honest, I was a little taken aback that the audience didn’t jump all over how personalization was going to change SEO. Most of the questions from the crowd centered on how you opt out of personalized search and why personalization wasn’t good for them. I have some issues with that, which of course I’ll share in this column:

  • First, this crowd was trying to argue from a user’s point of view. Okay, they’re SEOs (this was the organic track) and most of them have been using search since Lycos was a little baby spider. Just how typical do you think these users are?
  • Second, I question their motives. Do they hate personalization as a user, or as an organic optimizer? My guess is the latter, but it doesn’t seem very noble to joust with Google because the company is making your job harder. Far better to cry foul as a user than as a PO’d organic optimizer. As somebody said to me after the session, do you really think Marissa Mayer is losing sleep because the Google user experience for SEOs isn’t all the SEOs want it to be?
  • This was a perfect opportunity to start planning for the new world of SEO, post-personalization. There’s a ton of value we can add, as smart, proactive practitioners, but I didn’t see anyone take the opportunity to delve into this. Perhaps the really smart ones were keeping their mouths shut, content to let their competitors bitch about the inevitable while they plotted their takeover.
  • I found everyone fixated on the current threshold of personalization on the page, taking comfort in the fact that it’s only impacting a small number of searches. I reminded them that this threshold is a totally arbitrary one set by Google, and could (and will) change at any time.
  • Everyone is taking a siloed view of personalization, looking at the organic results in isolation. It’s almost as if they’re assessing the amount of damage control required. I’m not sure they realize the import of personalization. This is a rule changer, a paradigm-shifter. This is the new generation of search functionality. It changes the game dramatically. Whatever happens on the organic side will roll over to the sponsored side. It will drive universal search. It will drive everything.
  • Finally, this is not happening just on Google. Microsoft’s recent comments made it very clear its strategists are thinking long and hard about personalization. Tim Mayer cautioned me not to make the mistaken assumption that just because Google was first out with personalization, it’s the only one working on it. In fact, Matt was quite delighted when he found an article in Times Online discussing how Yahoo Vice President Tapan Bhat confessed at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam that personalization was the future of the Web, including search. You can define personalization in a number of different ways, but however you do it, it dramatically changes our online experience.

So, I leave you with this. I went into the SMX session ready to discuss four fundamental changes I see emerging from personalization that SEOs and SEMs have to think about, right now. No one asked me for the slide deck after the session. There was not one question about strategies for leveraging personalization. Everyone was more interested in grilling Matt on why the opt-out link had disappeared from the results page.

Although I’m tempted to join the smart and silent search marketers, I think I’ll make one last attempt to share this information with the SEM/SEO community — perhaps in a white paper, perhaps a future column. But I’m only going to do it if you’re serious about pushing the envelope into this new opportunity. Reply to the blog below and let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just shut up and nod my head while you bitch about the fact that it’s too hard to opt out of personalized search. You’ll excuse me if I don’t answer; you see, my mind is on something else.

China is so Last Week: Welcome to Seattle!

This is my first post since returning from China. I have to say that it was good to be home. In the plane flying over British Columbia, I had a new appreciation for the vast amounts of land with nary a human in sight.

So now I’m in Seattle, attending the first SMX, and it’s fair to say it’s a hit. I’m at the end of day one, the show is a complete sell out and everybody I’ve talked to seems to be generally pleased with the content and quality. It’s always tough programming the first show of it’s kind, but there’s been a lot more hits than misses. I think it may take a couple of cycles for the level of content and the level of expertise of attendees to completely mesh, but it’s a hell of a good start.

I’m particularly enjoying the size of the show. I’ve got to chat and meet more people here than any show I’ve attended previously, including many of my favorite people in the industry. There’s a great showing from all the engines, and everyone is very accessible. If you choose to work this show (not just in the sessions, but in the networking events) you can walk away with a lot of valuable take aways. One of the problems with many search shows is they outgrow their original appeal and loose a lot of their value in the process. I hope Danny, Chris and the Third Door crew keep the show size about where it is.

The experience of the attendees is also coming through in the Q&A. There’s a lot of experience sitting in the room and it’s coming across in some very savvy questions. Generally, I find the attendees to be high level practitioners, and as more of a strategy guy, I’m finding the show a little tactical for my taste, but I really believe that’s what the audience is looking for. The personalization panel I was on was more of a strategic look at the future, and the number of questions was noticeably less than some of the other more tactical sessions (i.e. dupe content or social media optimization) but it was interesting none the less.

The experience of the Third Door team has come through with a very smooth show there. So far, everything has gone off with almost no hitches (save for a little trouble with internet access earlier today) and no box lunches! A hot meal for lunch..imagine!