Category Archives: Search Marketing

Think You’re Strategic? Think Again.

First published April 17, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It’s one of the banes of this industry that we often use the words “strategies” and “tactics” interchangeably. Conferences that fly the strategy banner offer a deep dive into multiple tactical tracks. Sessions that promise cutting edge strategies in fact deliver tactics. Now, I have nothing against tactics. The right tactic can be a beautiful thing, when it’s used to execute on a strategy. But they’re not the same thing.

The Dingoes Ate My Strategy

I went off on this topic at the recent SMX in Sydney. I was asked to present at a session that offered out-of-the-box PPC tactics. I hijacked the session and said that it’s hard to know what out-of-the-box is until you’ve defined the box. Strategy defines the box. If you’re building a house, strategy is the blueprint; tactics are the tools you use to put the house together. Apparently I scared a few Aussies by my impassioned plea not to confuse the two.

The reason for my rant? Because all too often in search we get enamored with a brand new tool and forget to look at the blueprint. This is not a new message for me. Check the byline blurb at the bottom of this column. It’s been the same message since I started writing this column, almost 4 years ago now.

I don’t think anyone disagrees with me that strategy is a good thing. But why does our focus so often slip from the strategic to the tactical? Why do we keep losing sight of the forest for the trees? Rick Tobin, our director of research, came up with one possible reason. Tactics are easy to own and even easier to delegate. They’re a “tick off” item on our to-do list. Strategy requires more thought. It’s a lot slipperier to get hold off.

The First Step is Admitting You Might be Making a Mistake

I tend to take a strategic slant when I present at conferences and shows. And because of that, I think I ask more from my audience. I’m asking them to question what it is they might be doing right now, because it might be the wrong thing. Strategy demands that you ask tough questions of yourself. It challenges your beliefs. And that’s a hard thing to ask of humans. We’re wired to ignore anything that might cause us to change our mind.

I know firsthand how tough it can be to keep focused on your strategy and to execute effectively against it. It’s a constant challenge in my company, and the same is true for every company I know that values strategy. You have to think your way through this stuff. You can’t do it on autopilot.

Tactical Mastery or Strategic Stumbling

It’s a lot easier to focus on a tactic. We like to master things, and you can do this at a tactical level. You can be a great link builder, or PPC manager. You can become the wizard of analytics, or the master multivariate tester. And these are the things you’ll find on the typical search conference agenda. I think it would scare the hell out of most attendees to go to a session titled “Strategic Soul Searching: Are All Your Marketing Efforts in Vain?” To be fair to the show organizers, most attendees come looking for tactics. Almost no one comes looking for strategy. They may think they’re looking for strategy, but they’ve mixed up the terms.

Books like “Good to Great” and “Built to Last,” as well as almost anything by Peter Drucker or Tom Peters, ask you to look at things from a strategic vantage point. Even Covey’s “The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People” provides you with the strategic building blocks for a more effective personal life. In his books, Jim Collins warns that this is not a quick process. Companies can take a decade of dedicated persistent effort to really discover their soul and define their strategic direction. You can pick up a tactic in a 15-minute presentation, but a strategy takes a lot more time.

The Strategic Common Denominator

Personally, I’ve felt that by providing glimpses into user behavior, I can help provide a lens to help see things from the outside in, an essential perspective for strategic evaluation. Part of any strategy in marketing always depends on gaining a deeper understanding of the common denominator, humans. The more years I add to my CV, the more I realize we need to spend some time understanding the weird quirks and traits that make us all too imperfectly and irrationally human. And it’s from that understanding that your strategy will eventually spring forth.

To wrap up for this week, I leave you with a quote from Sun Tzu, the military strategist:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Back from SMX Sydney

SMX Sydney was a great show. Barry Smythe did an awesome job putting the show together, along with some pretty cool introductions, like real time polling, but shows are about people and location, and in this case, you couldn’t ask for better in either regard. Rand and Neerav from Oz posted more.

I mentioned at the show that I had never spent so much time on a plane to get to somewhere that felt so much like home. Everyone was amazingly friendly and really interested in anything that we International Speakers (Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Ciaran Norris, Adam Lasnik, Jane Copland, Ani Babian, Frederick Vallaeys…sorry if I missed anyone) had to say. And when you add in dinner at the Opera House and a real Aussie BBQ under the bridge, well, jaw dropping to say the least.

Also quite enjoyed a trip to Manly Beach with Rand, Geraldine and Jane. I wrapped up my visit with Canadian ex-pat Tom Petryshen and his wife (who comes from my part of BC) for a great dinner of BBQ’d kangaroo and prawns.

Rand called this possibly the best conference he’s attended..ever. Organizer Barry Smythe assumed he meant outside of North America. Barry, I think Rand meant that without qualifiers. For us, who made a long journey down to attend, the entire event was amazing.The size, the people and the location combined to make this one a home run.

Wedding Night Advice for Microsoft and Yahoo

First published February 7, 2008 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Now that there seems to be some sort of union in Yahoo’s future, blessed or otherwise, I felt the urge to pass along some advice to whoever the happy couple might be. For, in all this talk about the impending nuptials, the clear objective is to survive and compete in the business of attracting the attention of prospects online.

I offer this advice on behalf of users, because frankly, I think that’s the only perspective you should be interested in. I’ll explain why.

Why Search is Essential

First of all, there’s a lot of talk about how a Microsoft-Yahoo deal would give you the biggest chunk of the online ad network space, and this is true. But I hasten to add: Don’t forget search. Google has stumbled in rolling out another significant revenue channel that holds up against its search business, yet it has still dominated. That’s because the importance of search has been understated up to this point. Here’s why search matters.

Search is the thin edge of a wedge that is marking a fundamental change in advertising. And it’s fundamental because it’s initiated by the prospect. The importance of that sometimes gets missed by marketers, who start looking at search as just another weapon in their arsenal.

Search is important because of expressed intent. That puts it in a whole different league than all other advertising, online or off. Behavioral targeting is effective, but it’s still intrusive and interruptive. We ask for search results. That’s a different level of engagement, a different balance of control, and a different mindset on the part of the prospect. It’s the first place that balance shifted from the marketer to the customer, but it won’t be the last. Search is forging the way, but customers will demand that level of control and relevance to intent in more commercial communication from corporations. So, for all the talk about ad serving networks, it’s vital that the new duo gets search right. All the truly effective revenue channels will lead from search and the new principle of prospect initiation, including the vast untapped mobile and local markets. You can’t afford to screw it up.

Users Come First, Advertisers Will Follow

Secondly, all you should be focused on is one thing, and that’s meeting the expressed need of the user. Don’t talk to me about balanced ecosystems or serving the needs of both users and advertisers. While as an advertiser I appreciate the consideration, as a user I call it hogwash.

Search cannot serve two masters. One has to prevail. And it should always, always, always be the user. Users are the prospective customers, and without them, the equation doesn’t work. Get users, and the advertisers will follow. And those advertisers will play by the rules laid out by the users because they have no choice. Google gets it (probably due to the philosophical bent of Google and an inherent suspicion of advertising) and you’ll have to get it too to compete. So those ads better be highly relevant and in the user’s interest if they appear. If they’re not, don’t show them.

If you pay attention to nothing else, please pay attention to this one point. It’s vital to your success.

Church and State: Antiquated Concept?

The final piece of advice is not to be so set on holding on the divide between church and state on the search results page. This is one holdover from the offline world that may be due for rethinking.

The concept of the church/state divide came from the fact that advertisers will always push their advantage. That’s one reason why you can’t have a balanced ecosystem. Advertisers have always had a much louder voice that gets heard more often. So in traditional channels, the only answer was to divide up the page (or other real estate). Advertisers had free reign over some sections, but they had to keep their hands off others. Consequently, we’ve learned to largely ignore the real estate given over to advertisers. The success of this church/state division has been questionable in the past, but it’s a relic of journalistic thinking that somehow became entrenched in the world of search.

But if you pay scrupulous attention to my first two pieces of advice, you don’t have to worry about church/state. The fact is that in search we have expressed our desire for relevant information, and if that information is commercial in nature, and it matches our intent, than we’re open to it. At my company, we’ve looked at interactions with search advertising in minute detail, and while people will self-report an aversion to advertising in general, in the midst of a task, relevance trumps all. If an ad is the closest match, it will succeed.

This opens the door to mash up editorial functionality with commercial messaging in a richer way. As search becomes better at determining intent and delivering richer results, the opportunity exists to seamlessly integrate commercial messaging with other information in a user-centric way. But user trust is paramount. Let the user set the rules of what’s acceptable.

So, whatever happens, this is the advice I would give. There’ll be a lot on your mind in trying to navigate the new union, so I’ve kept it simple. You can thank me later.

Still Live (But Slightly Bruised) from Park City, Utah

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

Yesterday at the Search Insider Summit in Park City, I was precariously perched out on a limb. I kicked off the summit by defending my position that big agencies won’t “get” search. Given that the Summit attracts a fair number of attendees from the world of big agencies, I’m wondering if the organizers of the show (thanks, Nick… thanks, Ken) were setting me up for an unfortunate ski jump accident.

My opponent in the debate was Mike Margolin. If you’ll check the comments on the blog from the previous column, you’ll see that Mike and I started the debate there, and have now brought it to the ski hills of Utah.

“Doing” and “Getting” Are Two Different Things

My position is that search is something big agencies will “do” because they have to, but they’ll do so reluctantly. Search is not aligned to the cultural or creative DNA that defines a big agency. So, they’ll never “get” search.

Mike’s position is that big agencies will absolutely “get” search, because they have no choice. The big agency table is where the brand strategies are determined, and search will play an integral role in that. In fact, if you’re not at the table, you’ll be shut out.

What Does History Teach Us?

The argument is a good one. It’s logical and seeming inevitable. But if you look at history, it’s also without much precedent.

When discontinuous innovation happens (and search is definitely a discontinuous innovation) it’s almost never the established power players that adopt it and capitalize on it. I previously used the example of the adoption of electricity by corporate America, another discontinuous innovation. Then, the big, established companies had invested heavily in steam power. It took them 50 years to adopt electricity, even though the advantages of electrical power were obvious. By the time they made the move, younger, smaller, faster-moving and more nimble companies had passed them by. Many of the industrial dinosaurs never recovered and died away.

That’s how evolution works. The succeeding species replaces the previously entrenched one because of a change in DNA — but also because the existing power species underestimates the importance of that change.Why would the dinosaurs change? From their vantage point, towering over the mammals, they were invulnerable. It was inevitable that they would prevail. Or so it seemed at the time.

How’s the View Up There?

From the big agencies’ perspective, high atop their vast media-buying empires, the agency monoliths seem invulnerable. It’s only if you’re scurrying around down here at ground level that you see the cracks in the ground underneath them.

Finally, let’s touch on the fact of just how important search is. Search is just the thin edge of the wedge that’s forever changing the nature of marketing. Mass marketing is gone. Micro marketing is here, but the thing that makes search so fundamentally important is pull versus push. It’s about people (as fellow columnist Kaila Colbin pointed out in Tuesday’s column ), but more than that, it’s about knowing them and meeting them halfway, one person at a time. That’s what search does, and what it will do with increasing effectiveness over the next decade. This market doesn’t lend itself to mass campaigns. Instead, it means millions of micro campaigns.

But here’s the fundamental reason why agencies won’t embrace search and its pull versus push paradigm. Agencies persuade. It’s why they exist. Their jobs are to use everything at their disposal — creativity, cleverness, research, targeting, emotional appeals — whatever it takes to get us to buy something. That fits well with their push mentality. That’s why agencies love TV. At this point, TV is still the most persuasive medium out there.

But you can’t persuade someone in search. Advertisers have tried, and it’s failed miserably. Search is, at best, multiple-choice. Pick from A, B, C or D, based on which you think is the best match for your intent. There’s no room for persuasion. There’s only what’s present, and picking, and the last of these, the fundamental outcome of search, is totally in the user’s control. We spend a few seconds making our decision. We don’t even read the text. We don’t need to be persuaded to learn more. We’ve already made that choice. So we’re immune to persuasion when we’re on a search engine. In fact, we’ll purposely ignore it. By trying to do search, agencies are going against their most fundamental nature.

Passing the Tactical Torch to the New Kids

First published November 29, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

After the recent SMX show in London, I had a chance to have a wrap-up dinner with conference chair and Search Engine Land Executive Editor Chris Sherman. Chris and I, both feeling a little long in tooth, realized that there’s been a generational transition in search. The new generation is taking over the tactical stuff. As Chris said, “This blows away the traditional block and tackling stuff we used to do.” These are hotshots that live and breathe social media optimization, get a visceral rush out of an elegant link baiting campaign and measure their prowess through the number of Diggs they collect. They’ve taken organic optimization to a new level.

The Slow Surrender of the Sluggish Synapse

It was somewhat ironic, as I spent my sessions at SMX talking about things like bounded rationality, working memory and satisficing. To me, the working of the human mind is infinitely fascinating and that’s where I’ve been spending my free hours. I’m quite content to leave it to the up-and-comers to scramble up the listing hierarchy to grab the top slots. I’m more interested in what happens from the user side when they’re presented with those listings. Of course, I have the luxury of having a talented team working with me that can focus on the tactics while I play in my little strategic sandbox.

It reminded me of a passage I remember reading somewhere. A mathematician’s washed up by the age of 35 (I know, this is a point of controversy and I’ve read arguments on both sides, but I’m just using it as an example, so don’t get all worked up about it) but philosophers only hit their stride well into middle age. There’s a difference between sheer mental acuity and wisdom. Now that my synapses are slowing down, wisdom is really the only option open to me, so I’m grasping at it with both hands.

Wisdom: The Consolation Prize for Growing Older

I think it’s generally true that younger people tend to flex their mental muscles by solving puzzles of defined scope. They concentrate on the question ahead of them and revel in pushing the limits, punching holes in traditional thought and taking on risk that would prove unpalatable to a more pragmatic middle-ager, all in search of a solution that allows you to say, undeniably, that you’ve won. There are definitely winners and losers in the game of SEO. Number one is a winner. Everybody else is a loser, although in this case, the degrees of losing increase as you move down the page. It’s like sports. Nobody remembers second place. This appeals to the bravado of youth. SEO is for the young, and the young at heart.

But the question of who wins is a little more difficult to determine if you’re asking “why” questions. Why do people do what they do on search engines? Why do they make the decisions they do? Why do they pick certain brands over others?

I think unraveling the answers to “why” questions require patience and a more seasoned world view. There are fewer “aha” moments that signal victory. Answers are teased out little by little and added to the general body of knowledge about why we do what we do. The qualities that lend themselves to this approach come with age. They require being students of human nature. I’ve found that as I’ve grown older, I’ve become less frustrated with human frailty and more fascinated by human complexity. Of course, I’ve also become crankier. All of which makes me difficult to live with.

Search’s Big Picture: Step Back and Refocus

This trend also speaks to a maturity in the search space. It’s encouraging to know that search has started to develop a “big picture” that allows for strategic thought. Search was exclusively tactical in its early days, because its limited, siloed scope made it so. But now, search has become so integral in so many activities, we find overlap in almost everything we do. I can find much common ground in how we make decisions and how we use search engines. The top of this particular box is starting to open. And the broadening of approaches to optimizing search both as a marketing channel and as a human activity is healthy. As author Daniel Pink said, we need to develop our right-brain skills, “such as forging relationships rather than executing transactions, tackling novel challenges instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing a single component.”

So, as we walked down Edgware Street in London looking for a restaurant (we ended up finding quite a good Lebanese place), Chris and I talked about this passing of the torch and came to the conclusion that we’re okay with it. To be honest, I really don’t have a lot of interest any more in the tactics of search. That doesn’t diminish the importance of them; it just means that I’d rather do something else with my time. “What” doesn’t really capture my attention anymore. But “why”? Now there’s a question I can sink my teeth into. At least, while I still have teeth.

Will Agencies Get Search? Don’t Hold Your Breath

First published November 1, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It seems like anytime I have a conversation with anyone who knows search and its effectiveness, we always come back to the same question: “Why don’t more ad agencies and brand advertisers get search?”

Just this week, I was having this conversation. Twice, in fact. One of my pet peeves is an arbitrary allocation of budget to search, with no regard for the objectives of a cross-channel campaign. “We’ll take this pile and give it to television. We’ll take this slightly smaller pile and give it to print. Here’s a small pile for online, and, oh, make sure you take a little bit of that and set it aside for search, because everyone’s telling us we should be doing search.” I guess I shouldn’t be complaining. At least there’s now a little bit left over for search, which is a vast improvement from where we were just a few years ago.

But what this approach does is force your search campaign to be managed to budget, rather than to overall objectives. So we see more restrictive targeting, movement down the tail into longer and more specific key phrases, day parting and flighting, geo targeting and other ways to slice and dice the campaign to get the best quality clicks from the budget available.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s called campaign optimization. But it’s often done to keep within an arbitrary budget cap that has no logical reason to exist. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Search dollars should be the first ones in, not the last. Take as much search inventory as you can get. Judge your costs per acquisition not against your top performing keywords, but against your other channels, both online and offline. If even the marginal search traffic is generating a lower CPA, beg, borrow and steal as much budget as you can and top up search. Only then should you move from “pull” (prospects holding up their hands to purchase through search) to “push” (trying to persuade latent prospects to purchase). Only put restrictions on your search campaign if you’re absolutely certain that another channel can exceed its effectiveness.

The Classic Brand Building Gambit

Sure, you say, but what about ‘branding”? That’s TV’s domain. Well, I disagree. I think there’s no better branding opportunity than deep engagement with a Web site from a qualified prospect. Again, this is someone well down the funnel who is considering his or her purchase options. And search drives these opportunities. Sure, TV, print and other channels can build brands, but I challenge anyone to prove to me that they build brands as cost-effectively as search driving Web site engagement. I’ve yet to see a study that shows that. I’ve seen several that show search blowing away other channels, including the CPG study I wrote about last week. Brand-build with prospects that are ready to buy first, then build with the “maybe, someday” crowd with what’s left over.

So, why is it such a struggle to get search on the horizon of big agencies and advertisers? I’ve come to the conclusion that search is being held back by four things:

Search is small. Advertisers and agencies like to think big. They like big, bold ideas. Killer campaigns. Knock-your-socks-off creative. Search is none of those things. Search is thousands of micro-niche campaigns. Search is granular and gritty. Search is turning a whole bunch of dials and pulling a lot of levers, to squeeze out new customers a few at a time. You can’t “unveil” a new search campaign, like snatching a sheet off a sculpture. Launching a search campaign is more like putting a million grains of sand into a bucket, one spoonful at a time. That’s not a concept that “brilliant” advertising minds can get fired up about.

Search is measurable. You can measure the hell out of search. You can hold everyone accountable. You can demand to know who screwed up the campaign because your ROI dropped 10 points. That can cause a lot of red faces round the ol’ agency conference table.

Search is hard. Because search is granular, search is hard. It takes a lot of work to squeeze out an impressive bottom line. And the harder you work, the more impressive that bottom line will be. You’ll never hit a search home run with one inspired brainstorm. There is no golden concept. You just keep plugging away, tweaking keywords and pulling in prospects. Agencies and big advertisers are looking for that single perfect run down the mountain, with fresh powder and the sun shining. Search is more like cross-country skiing up the mountain.

Search is utilitarian. Search is constantly accused of not being sexy. That drives me nuts. The irony is that in pigeonholing search as being boring and utilitarian, all these brilliant advertising minds are missing the biggest idea of all: search works because it’s the customer driving the process, not the advertiser. All you have to do is a half decent job of meeting them halfway. Some say it’s that lack of control that scares the bejeebers out of agencies and brand marketers. To be fair, I don’t think that’s always true. I just think that search just doesn’t get the juices going in the average marketer. It may not be that they’re scared; it may just be that they’re bored.

And for all these reasons, I don’t think big agencies will ever truly get search. It’s too much of a cultural mismatch for them. They’ll bring search in-house, but they’ll silo it off, in a back room, far from the playground which is really where everyone wants to be, cranking out killer creative for the next TV campaign.

It’s just too bad that those TV ads won’t work very well. At least, not when you compare them to search.

 

The Other Long Tail of Search

smallcoverIn 2006 Wired Editor Chris Anderson released The Long Tail, and suddenly we were finding long tails in everything. The swoop of the power law distribution curve was burned on our consciousness, and search was no exception. Suddenly, the hot new strategy was to move into the long tail of search, those thousands of key phrases that individually may only bring a handful of visitors, but in aggregate, can bring more than the head phrases. At Enquiro, we were no exception. But lately, I haven’t heard as much about long tail campaigns. And I think it’s because our thinking was a little flawed.

One of the key elements of a long tail marketplace is that there can’t be a scarcity bottleneck. Shelf space has to be unlimited, production, distribution, etc. The economics of supporting a long tail have to make sense. There has to be little to no overhead in making a vast selection available to the market. The ideal example is digital entertainment. Once an MP3 is encoded, the only overhead for the distributor is a couple of megabytes of storage capacity.

That’s just not true in search management. It takes time to set up a campaign for a keyword. It takes time to organically optimize for it. There’s significant campaign management overhead associated with search. From a resource perspective, search marketing is expensive, and as anyone who’s tried to recruit a search marketer can tell you, there is no abundance mentality at play here. Sure there’s thousands of keyphrases that may potentially bring one or two visitors a month, and if you add them up, it would be hundreds of thousands of potential leads, but we just can’t move from the head to the tail because we don’t have the time.

Engines tried to open up the bottle neck by offering broad match, but results from broad match campaigns are dramatically less than spectacular. In many cases, we needed to go back to the more granular control that comes with exact match to keep performance levels where we needed them to be.

But in perusing some of our spreadsheets from past studies, and with Anderson’s Long Tail curve fresh in my mind, I found another long tail in search. In several studies, we’ve tracked click throughs by position. Look what happens when you take the most popular click through position, the number one organic spot, and then work down by position:

clickthrough tail

As you can see, we have another long tail. Now, due to the scale of the graph, it looks like the tail goes to zero. This isn’t the case, but by the time we get to the second page of results, we tend to hit percentages that are fractions of 1%. As long tails go, this is skinnier than most, showing the power of position on the first page of results.

But now let’s combine the two long tails. If you take the head being a #1 organic ranking for your most popular phrase, and work down from there, the results get quite dramatic. For the sake of this example, I’ll move down one position for each keyword. Here’s a table showing the numbers:

Keyword Volume Position X Click Through % Clicks
#1 46500 Org 1 26.35 12252
#2 38450 Org 2 13.05 5017
#3 32500 Org 3 10.2 3315
#4 23400 Spon 1 8.75 2047
#5 15750 Org 4 5.35 842
#6 12450 Spon 2 4.125 513
#7 8750 Org 5 3.875 339
#8 5250 Org 6 2.875 150
#9 4325 Side 1 2.5 108
#10 2750 Org 7 1.875 51

Now, let’s plot that on a graph:

clickthrough tail2

Given that search is a resource hog in terms of manpower, I argue that we’d be far better working our way up the tail rather than down it. And by moving up the tail, I mean the click through by position tail. By moving up the page, even a position or two, with relatively popular keywords, you can leverage the compounding effect of the two curves and dramatically improve your campaign performance.

Search and the Digital CPG Shelf

First published October 25, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last April, James Lamberti from comScore, Randy Peterson from Procter and Gamble and I (representing SEMPO) grabbed a relatively quiet corner at the New York Hilton to talk about a potential research project. Here was our wish list:

–    A study that tied together online activity to offline purchase behavior
–    A study that identified the impact of search in a category not typically one that would be identified with search marketing
–    A study that would attempt to quantify the leveraged impact of search with brand advocates

Search and CPG: Are You Kidding?

As you can see, these were pretty lofty targets to shoot for. Choosing the product category was done at that table. What is the last category you would think of as generating significant search activity? Consumer packaged goods. After all, aren’t these either replenishment purchases, where we keep buying the same brand over and over, or a non-considered purchase, where we’re not really concerned with doing much research? Why would we need to turn to a search engine to figure out which toothpaste to buy, or which would be the right chips for Sunday’s ball game? We reasoned that CPG had the “Sinatra” Factor going for it: If search can make it here, it can make it anywhere.

To be honest, we really didn’t know what to expect, but comScore, together with a lot of help from Yahoo and Procter and Gamble, managed to come up with a workable study design. SEMPO jumped on board as a co-sponsor and we put the study out in the field. This week, with numbers crunched and charts drawn, the results were released in a study labeled The Digital Shelf. After several months of holding our collective breaths, we were about to see if people had already locked CPG brands into their brains, eliminating the need to search for product information.

Apparently not.

People went online for CPG information — in fact, to a significantly higher degree than even our most optimistic predictions.  Over a 3-month period, comScore recorded over 150 million visits to CPG websites in four categories: Food Products, Personal Care Products, Baby Products and Household Products. Those are numbers no marketer should ignore. But even more significantly, search drove significant portions of that traffic, from 23% of all visits in Household Products to 60% in Baby Products.

It’s not just automotive or travel that drive search traffic. We search for recipes, how to get the stains out of carpets, the most eco-friendly disposable diaper and yes, even the nutritional information for potato chips. We search, a lot!

And our searching sets us apart as a consumer segment. Searchers tend to be more interested in product information, comparing against competitors and what they need to make a purchase decision. Non-searchers are more interested in special offers and coupons.

Searchers spend more, about 20% more  — in all the categories in the study. In fact, in the Baby Care Category alone, people searching for information and eventually purchasing could result in almost $12 billion in sales.

Search = Opportunity

But perhaps the most compelling finding was this: People search because they’re comparing alternatives. This means they’re not locked into a brand. They could very well be your competitor’s customer right now. Non-searchers are more likely to go directly to a site because they do have a brand preference. They’re just looking for a bargain on that brand. The study found that 36% of searchers had recently switched their brand, compared to 29% of non-searchers. And, interestingly, searchers are less motivated by price. Only 27% of searchers switched because of price, compared to 38% of non-searchers.

So, the study delivered on our original wish list, and then some. It showed that search is a significant influencing factor in the most unlikely product category of all, the stuff on your pantry shelf or under the sink in your bathroom. In fact, I have yet to see a study done on any product category where search didn’t blow the doors off the competition in its effectiveness in connecting with customers. So perhaps the biggest question left unanswered by the study is this: Why are all those branding dollars still going everywhere but search?

Personalization Catches the User’s Eye

First published September 13, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I looked at the impact the inclusion of graphics on the search results page might have on user behavior, based on our most recent eye tracking report. This week, we look at the impact that personalization might bring.

One of the biggest hurdles is that personalization, as currently implemented by Google, is a pretty tentative representation of what personalization will become. It only impacts a few listings on a few searches, and the signals driving personalization are limited at this point. Personalization is currently a test bed that Google is working on, but Sep Kamvar and his team have the full weight of Google behind them, so expect some significant advances in a hurry. In fact, my suspicion is that there’s a lot being held in reserve by Google, waiting for user sensitivity around the privacy issue to lessen a bit. We didn’t really expect to see the current flavor of personalization alter user behavior that much, because it’s not really making that much of a difference on the relevancy of the results for most users.

But if we look forward a year or so, it’s safe to assume that personalization would become a more powerful influencer of user behavior. So, for our test, we manually pushed the envelope of personalization a bit. We divided up the study into two separate sessions around one task (an unrestricted opportunity to find out more about the iPhone) and used the click data from the first session to help us personalize the data for the search experience in the second session. We used past sites visited to help us first of all determine what the intent of the user might be (research, looking for news, looking to buy) and secondly to tailor the personalized results to provide the natural next step in their online research. We showed these results in organic positions 3, 4 and 5 on the page, leaving base Google results in the top two organic spots so we could compare.

Stronger Scent

The results were quite interesting. In the nonpersonalized results pages, taken straight from Google (in signed out mode) we saw 18.91% of the time spent looking at the page happened in these three results, 20.57% of the eye fixations happened here, and 15% of the clicks were on Organic listings 3, 4 and 5. The majority of the activity was much further up the page, in the typical top heavy Golden Triangle configuration.

But on our personalized results, participants spent 40.4% of their time on these three results, 40.95% of the fixations were on them, and they captured a full 55.56% of the clicks. Obviously, from the user’s point of view, we did a successful job of connecting intent and content with these listings, providing greater relevance and stronger information scent. We manually accomplished exactly what Google wants to do with the personalization algorithm.

Scanning Heading South

Something else happened that was quite interesting. Last week I shared how the inclusion of a graphic changed our “F” shaped scanning patterns into more of an “E” shape, with the middle arm of the “E” aligned with the graphic. We scan that first, and then scan above and below. When we created our personalized test results pages, we (being unaware of this behavioral variation at the time) coincidentally included a universal graphic result in the number 2 organic position, as this is what we were finding on Google.

When we combined the fact that users started scanning on the graphic, then looked above and below to see where they wanted to scan next with the greater relevance and information scent of the personalized results, we saw a very significant relocation of scanning activity, moving down from the top of the Golden Triangle.

One of the things that distinguished Google in our previous eye tracking comparisons with Yahoo and Microsoft was its success of keeping the majority of scanning activity high on the page, whether those top results were organic or sponsored.

Top of page relevance has been a religion at Google. More aggressive presentation of sponsored ads (Yahoo) or lower quality and relevance thresholds of those ads (Microsoft) meant that on these engines (at least as of early 2006) users scanned deeper and were more likely to move past the top of the page in their quest for the most relevant results. Google always kept scan activity high and to the left.

But ironically, as Google experiments with improving the organic results set, both through the inclusion of universal results and more personalization, their biggest challenge may be in making sure sponsored results aren’t left in the dust. Top of page scanning is ideal user behavior that also happens to offer a big win for advertisers. As results pages are increasingly in flux, it will be important to ensure that scanning doesn’t move too far from the upper left corner, at least as long as we still have a linear, 1 dimensional top to bottom list of results.

Search Engine Results: 2010 – Marissa Mayer Interview

marissa-mayer-7882_cnet100_620x433Just getting back in the groove after SES San Jose. You may have caught some of my sessions or heard we have released a white paper looking at the future of search and with some eye tracking on personalized and universal search results. We don’t have the final version up yet, but it should be available later this week. The sneak preview got rave reviews in SJ.

Anyway, I interviewed a number of influencers in the space, and I’ll be posting the full transcripts here on my blog over the next week. I already posted Jakob Nielsen’s interview. Today I’ll be posting Marissa Mayer’s, who did a keynote at SES SJ. It makes for interesting reading. Also, I’ll be running excerpts and additional commentary on Just Behave on Search Engine Land. The first half ran a couple weeks ago. Look for more (and a more regular blog schedule) coming out over the next few weeks. Summer’s over and it’s back to work.

Here’s my chat with Marissa:

Gord: I guess I have one big question that will probably break out into a few smaller questions.  What I wanted to do for Search Engine Land is speculate on what the search engine results page might look like to the user in three years time.  With some of the emerging things like personalization and universal search results and some the things that are happening with the other engines: Ask with their 3D Search, which is their flavor of Universal, it seems to me that we might be at a point for the first time in a long time the results that we’re seeing may have a significant amount of flux over the next 3 years.  I wanted to talk to a few people in the industry about their thoughts of what we might be seeing 3 years down the road.  So that’s the big over-arching question I’m posing.

Marissa: Sure, Minority Report on search result pages…Well, I’d like to say it’s going to be like that but I think that’s a little further out.  There are some really fascinating technologies that I don’t know if you’ve seen..some work being done by a guy named Jeff Han?

Gord: No.

Marissa: So I ran into Jeff Han both of the past years at TED. Basically he was doing multi-touch before they did it on the iPhone on a giant wall sized screen, so it actually does look a lot like Minority Report. It was this big space where you could interact, you could annotate, you could do all those things.  But let me talk first about what I see happening as some trends that are going to drive change.

One is that we are seeing more and more broadband usage and I think in three years everyone will be on very fast connections, so a lot more to choose from and  a lot more data without taking a large latency hit.  The other thing we’re seeing is different mediums, audio, video.  They used to not work.  If you remember getting back a year ago, everytime you clicked on an audio file or a movie file, it would be, like, ‘thunk’?  It needs a plug in, or “thunk”, it doesn’t work.  Now we’re coming into some standardized formats and players that are either browser or technology independent enough, or are integrated enough that they are actually going to work.  And also we’re seeing users having more and more storage on their end.  And those are the sort of 3 computer science trends that are things that are going to change things.  I also think that people are becoming more and more inclined to annotate and interact with the web. It started with bloggers, and then it moved to mash ups, and now people are really starting to take a lot more ownership over their participation on the web and they want to annotate things, they want to mark it up.

So I think when you add these things together it means there’s a couple of things.  One, we will be able to have much more rich interaction with the search results pages. There might be layers of search results pages: take my results and show them on a map, take my results and show them to me on a timeline.  It’s basically the ability to interact in a really fast way, and take the results you have and see them in a new light.  So I think that that kind of interaction will be possible pretty easily and pretty likely.  I think it will be, hopefully, a layout that’s a little bit less linear and text based, even than our search results today and ultimately uses what I call the ‘sea of whiteness’ more in the middle of the page, and lays out in a more information dense way all the information from videos to audio reels to text, and so on and so forth.  So if you imagine the results page, instead of being long and linear, and having ten results on the page that you can scroll through to having ten very heterogeneous results, where we show each of those results in a form that really suits their medium, and in a more condensed format.  A couple of years ago we did a very interesting experiment here on the UI team where we took three or 4 different designs where the problem was artificially constrained.  It was above the fold Google.  If you needed to say everything that Google needed to say above the fold, how would you lay it out?  And some came in with two columns, but I think two columns is really hard when it was linear and text based.  When you started seeing some diagrams, some video, some news, some charts, you might actually have a page that looks and feels more like an interactive encyclopedia.

Gord: So, we’re almost going from a more linear presentation of results, very text based, to almost more of a portal presentation, but a personalized portal presentation.

Marissa: Right and I think as people, one, are getting more bandwidth and two, as they’re more savvy with how they look at more information, think of it this way, as more of serial access versus random access.  One of my pet peeves is broadcast news, where I really don’t like televised news anymore.  I like newspapers, and I like reading online because when I’m online or with newspapers, I have random access.  I can jump to whatever I’m most interested in.  And when you’re sitting there watching broadcast news you have to take it in the order, at the pace and at the speed that they are feeding it to you.  And yes, they try to make it better by having the little tickers at the bottom, but you can’t just jump in to what you’re interested in.  You can only read one piece of text at a time, and it’s hard to survey and scan and hone in on one type of medium or another when it’s all one medium.  So certainly there is some random access happening with the search results today.  I think as the results formats becomes much more heterogeneous, we’re going to have a more condensed presentation that allows for better random access.  Above the fold being really full of content, some text, some audio, some video, maybe even playing in place, and you see what grabs your attention, and pulls you in.   But it’s almost like random access on the front page of the New York Times, where am I more drawn to the picture, or the chart, or this piece of content down here?  What am I drawn to?

Gord: Right.  If you’re looking at different types of stimuli across the page, I guess what you’re saying is, as long as all that content is relevant to the query you can scan it more efficiently than you could with the standardized text based scanning, linear scanning, that we’re seeing now

Marissa: That’s right.

Gord: Ok.

Marissa: So the eyes follow and they just read and scan in a linear order, where when you start interweaving charts and pictures and text, people’s eyes can jump around more, and they can gravitate towards the medium that they understand best.

Gord: So, this is where Ask is going right now with their 3D search, where it’s broken it into 3 columns and they’re mixing images and text and different things.  So I guess what we’re looking at is taking it to the next extreme, making it a richer, more interactive experience, right?

Marissa: Rather than having three rote columns, it would actually be more organic.

Gord: So more dynamic.  And it mixes and matches the format based on the types of material it’s bringing back.

Marissa: Well, to keep hounding on the analogy of the front page of the New York Times.  It’s not like the New York Times…I mean they have basically the same layout each time, but it’s not like they have a column that only has this kind of content, and if it doesn’t fill the column, too bad.  They have a basic format that they change as it suits the information.

Gord: So in that kind of format, how much control does the user have? How much functionality do you put in the hands of the user?

Marissa: I think that, back to my third point, I think that people will be annotating search results pages and web pages a lot.  They’re going to be rating them, they’re going to be reviewing them.  They’re going to be marking them up, saying  “I want to come back to this one later”.  So we have some remedial forms of this in terms of Notebook now, but I imagine that we’re going to make notes right on the pages later.  People are going to be able to say I want to add a note here; I want to scribble something there, and you’ll be able to do that.  So I think the presentation is going to be largely based on our perceived notion of relevance, which of course leverages the user, in the ways they interact with the page, and look at what they do and that helps inform us as to what we should do.  So there is some UI user interaction, but the majority of user interaction will be on keeping that information and making it consumable in the best possible way.

Gord: Ok, and then if, like you said, if you go one step further, and provide multiple layers, so you could say, ok, plot my search results, if it’s a local search, plot my search results on a map.  There’s different ways to, at the user’s request, present that information, and they can have different layers that they can superimpose them on.

Marissa: So what I’m sort of imagining is that in the first basic search, you’re presented with a really rich general overview page, that interweaves all these different mediums, and on that page you have a few basic controls, so you could say, look, what really matters to me is the time dimension, or what really matters to me is the location dimension.  So do you want to see it on a timeline, do you want to see it on a map?

Gord: Ok, so taking a step further than what you do with your news results, or your blog search results, so you can sort them a couple of different ways, but then taking that and increasing the functionality so it’s a richer experience.

Marissa: It’s a richer experience. What’s nice about timeline and date as we’re currently experimenting with them on Google Experimental is not only do they allow you to sort differently, they allow you to visualize your results differently.  So if you see your results on a map, you can see the loci, so you can see this location is important to this query, and this location is really important to that query.  And when you look at it in time line you can see, “wow, this is a really hot topic for that decade”.  They just help you visualize the nut of information across all the results in these fundamentally different ways that ‘sorts’ kind of get at. But it’s really allowing that richer presentation and that overview of results on the meta level that helps you see it.

Gord: Ok.  I had a chance to talk to Jakob Nielsen about this on Friday, and he doesn’t believe that we’re going to be able to see much of a difference in the search results in 3 years.  He just doesn’t think that that can be accomplished in that time period.  What you’re talking about is a pretty drastic change from what we’re seeing today, and the search results that we’re seeing today haven’t changed that much in the last 10 years, as far as what the user is seeing.  You’re really feeling that this is possible?

Marissa: It’s interesting, you know, I pay am lot of attention to how the results look.  And I do think that change happens slowly over time and that there are little spurts of acceleration.  We at Google certainly saw a little accelerated push during May when we launched Universal Search.  I’m of the view that maybe its 3 years out, maybe it’s 5 years out, maybe it’s 10 years out.  I’m a big subscriber to the slogan that people tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.  My analogy to this is that when I was 5, I remember watching the Jetson’s and being, like, this rocks!  When I’m thirty there are flying cars!  Right?  And here I am, I’m 32 and we don’t even have a good flying car prototype, and yet the world has totally changed in ways that nobody expected because of the internet and computing.  In ways that in the 1980s no one even saw it coming.  Because personal computers were barely out, let alone the internet.  It’s interesting.  We do our off site in August. I do an offsite with my team where we do Google two years out. There it’s really interesting to see how people think about it.  I take all the prime members on my team, so they’re the senior engineers, and everybody has homework.  They have to do a homepage and a results page of Google, and this year it’ll be Google 2009.

Gord: Oh Cool!

Marissa: Six months out, it’s really easy because if we’re working on it, because if it’s going to launch in 6 months and it’s big enough that you would notice, we’re working on it right now and we know it’s coming.  And five years or ten years out we start getting into the bigger picture things like what I’m talking to you about.  When the little precursors that get us ready for those advances happen between now and then that’s what’s shifting.   So I’m giving you the big picture so you can start understanding what some of the mini steps that might happen in the next 3 years, to get us ready for that, would be.  The two to three year timeframe is painful. Everybody at my offsite said, “this timeframe sucks!” So it’s just far enough out that we don’t have great visibility, will mobile devices be something that’s a really big new factor in three years?  Maybe, maybe not.  Some of the things are making fast progress now may even take a big leap, right, like it was from 1994 to 97 on the internet.  Or if you think about G-mail and Maps, like AJAX applications..you wouldn’t have foreseen those in 2002 or 2003.  So, two or three years is a really painful time frame because some things are radically different, but probably in different ways than you would expect.  You have very low visibility in our industry to that time frame.  So I actually find it easier to talk about the six month timeframe, or the ten year timeframe.  So I’m giving you the ten year picture knowing that it’s not like the unveiling of a statue, where you can just take the sheet, snatch it off and go, “Voila there it is”.  If you look at the changes we’ve made over time at Google search they’ve always been “getting this ready, getting this ready”.  So the changes are very slow and feel like they’re very incremental.  But then you look at them in summation over 18 months or two years, you’re like, “you know, nothing felt really big along the way, but they are fundamentally different today”.

Gord: One last question.  So we’re looking at this much richer search experience where it’s more dynamic and fluid and there are different types of content being presented on the page.  Does advertising or the marketing message get mixed into that overall bucket, and does this open the door to significantly different types of presentation of the advertising message on the search results page?

Marissa: I think that there will be different types of advertising on the search results page.  As you know, my theory is always that the ads should match the search results.  So if you have text results, you have text ads, and if you have image results, you have image ads.  So as the page becomes richer, the ads also need to become richer, just so that they look alive and match the page.  That said, trust is a fundamental premise of search.  Search is a learning activity.  You think of Google and Ask and these other search engines as teachers.  As an end user the only reason learning and teaching works, the only way it works, is when you trust your teacher.  You know you’re getting the best information because it’s the best information, not because they have an agenda to mislead you or to make more money or to push you somewhere because of their own agenda.  So while I do think the ads will look different, they will look different in format, or they may look different in placement, I think our commitment to calling out very strongly where we have a monetary incentive and we may be biased will remain.  Our one promise on our search results page, and I think that will stand, is that we clearly mark the ads.  It’s very important to us that the users know what the ads are because it’s the disclosure of that bias, that ultimately builds the trust which is paramount to search

Gord: Ok.  Great to see you’re a keynote at San Jose in August.

Marissa: Should be fun.  This whole topic has me kind of jazzed up so maybe I’ll talk about that.