Category Archives: SEM

Just Behave Archive: Q&A With Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products & User Experience

This blog is the most complete collection of my various posts across the web – with one exception. For 4 years, from 2007 to 2011, I wrote a column for Search Engine Land called “Just Behave” (Danny Sullivan’s choice of title, not mine – but it grew on me). At the time, I didn’t cross-post because Danny wanted the posts to be exclusive. Now, with almost 2 decades past, I think it’s safe to bring these lost posts back home to the nest, here at “Out of My Gord”. You might find them interesting from a historical perspective, and also because it gave me the chance to interview some of the brightest minds in search at that time. So, here’s my first, with Google’s then VP of Search Products and User Experience – Marissa Mayer. It ran in January, 2007 :

Marissa Mayer has been the driving force behind Google’s Spartan look and feel from the very earliest days. In this wide-ranging interview, I talked with Marissa about everything from interface design to user behavior to the biggest challenge still to be solved with search as we currently know it.

I had asked for the interview because of some notable findings in our most recent eye tracking study. I won’t go into the findings in any great depth here, because Chris Sherman will be doing a deep dive soon. But for the purpose of setting the background for Marissa’s interview, here are some very quick highlights:


MSN and Yahoo Users had a better User Experience on Google

In the original study, the vast majority of participants were Google users, and their interactions were restricted to Google. With the second study, we actually recruited participants that indicated their engine of preference was Yahoo! or MSN (now Live Search), as the majority of their interactions would be with those two engines. We did take one task at random, however, and asked them to use Google to complete the task. By almost every metric we looked at, including time to complete the task (choose a link), the success of the link chosen, the percentage of the page scanned before choosing a link and others, these users had a more successful experience on Google than on their engine of choice.

Google Seemed to Have a Higher Degree of Perceived Relevancy

In looking at the results, we didn’t believe that it was the actual quality of the results that lead to a more successful user experience as much as it was how those results were presented to the user. Something about Google’s presentation made it easier to determine which results were relevant. We referred to it in the study as information scent, using the term common in the information foraging theory.

Google Has an Almost Obsessive Dedication to Relevancy at the Top of the Results Page

The top of the results, especially the top left corner, is the most heavily scanned part of the results page. Google seemed to be the most dedicated of all the three engines in ensuring the results that fall in this real estate are highly relevant to the query. For example, Google served up top sponsored ads in far fewer sessions in the study than did either Yahoo or MSN.

Google Offers the “Cleanest” Search Experience

Google is famous for its Spartan home page. It continues this minimalist approach to search with the cleanest results page. When searching, we all have a concept in mind and that concept can be influenced by what else we see on the page. Because a number of searches on Yahoo! and MSN were launched from their portal page, we wondered how that impacted the search experience.

Google Had Less Engagement than Yahoo with their Vertical Results

The one area where Google appeared to fall behind in these head to head tests was with the relevance of the OneBox, or their vertical results. Yahoo! in particular seemed to score more consistently with users with their vertical offerings, Yahoo! Shortcuts.

It was in these areas in particular that I wanted to get the thinking of Marissa and her team at Google. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working. In fact, I have said in the past that Google has set the de facto standard for what we expect from a search engine, at least for now.

Here’s the interview:

Gord: What, at the highest level, is Google’s goal for the user?

Marissa: Our goal is to make sure that people can find what they’re looking for and get off the page as quickly as possible

If we look at this idea of perceived versus real relevancy, some things seemed to make a big difference in how relevant people perceived the results to be on a search engine: things like how much white space there was around individual listings, separating organic results from the right rail, the query actually being bolded in the title and the description and very subtle nuances like a hair line around the sponsored ads as opposed to a screened box. What we found when we delved into it was there seemed to be a tremendous attention to that detail on Google. It became clear that this stuff had been fairly extensively tested out.

I think all of your observations are correct. I can walk you through any one of the single examples you just named and I can talk you through the background and exactly what our philosophy was when we designed it and the numbers we saw in our tests as we had tested them, but you’re right in that it’s not an accident. For example, putting a line along the side of the ad as opposed to boxing it allows it to integrate more into the page and lets it fall more into what people read.

One thing that I think about a lot are people that are new to the internet. A lot of times they subconsciously map the internet to physical idioms. For example, when you look at how you parse a webpage, chances are that there are some differences if there are links in the structure and so forth, but a lot of times it looks just like a page in a book or a page on a magazine, and when you put a box around something, it looks like a sidebar. The way people handle reading a page that has a sidebar on it is that they read the whole main page and then, at the end, if it’s not too interesting, they stop and read the sidebar on that page.

For us, given that we think our ads in some cases are as good an answer as our search results and we want them to be integral to the user experience, we don’t want that kind of segmentation and pausing. We tried not to design it so it looked like a side bar, even though we have two distinct columns. You know, There are a lot of philosophies like that that go into the results page and of course, testing both of those formats to see if that matches our hypothesis.

That brings up something else that was really interesting. If we separate the top sponsored from the right rail, the majority of the interaction happens on the page in that upper left real estate. One thing that became very apparent was that Google seemed to be the most aware of relevancy at that top of page, that Golden Triangle real estate. In all our scenarios, you showed top sponsored the least number of times and generally you showed fewer top sponsored results. We saw a natural tendency to break off the top 3 or 4 listings on a page and scan them as a set and then make your choice from those top 3 or 4. In Google, those top 3 or 4 almost always include 1 or 2 organic results, sometimes all organic results.

That’s absolutely the case. Yes, we’re always looking at how can we do better targeting with ads. But we believe part of the targeting for those ads is “how well do those ads match your query?” And then the other part is how well does this format and that prominence convey to you how relevant it is. That’s baked into the relevance.

Our ad team has worked very very hard. One of the most celebrated teams at Google is our Smart Ads team. In fact, you may have heard of the Google Founder’s Awards, where small teams of people get grants of stock of up to $10,000,000 in worth, split across a small number of individuals. One of the very first teams at Google to receive that award was the Smart Ads team. And they were looking, interestingly enough, at how you target things. But they were also looking at what’s the probability that someone will click on a result. And shouldn’t that probability impact our idea of relevance, and also the way we choose to display it.

So we do tend to be very selective and keep the threshold on what appears on the top of the page very high. We only show things on the top when we’re very very confident that the click through rate on that ad will be very high. And the same thing is true for our OneBox results that occasionally appear above the top (organic) results. Larry and Sergey, when I started doing user interface work, said we’re thinking of making your salary proportional to the number of pixels above the first result, on average. We’ve mandated that we always want to have at least one result above the fold. We don’t let people put too much stuff up there. Think about the amount of vertical space on top of the page as being an absolute premium and design it and program it as if your salary depended on it.

There are a couple of other points that I want to touch on. When we looked at how the screen real estate divided up on the search results page, based on a standard resolution, there seemed to be a mathematical precision to the Google proportions that wasn’t apparent on MSN and on Yahoo. The ratio seemed pretty set. We always seemed to come up with a 33% ratio dedicated to top organic, even on a fully loaded results page, so obviously that’s not by accident. That compared to, on a fully loaded page, less than 14% on Yahoo.

That’s interesting, because we never reviewed on a percentage basis that you’re mentioning. We’ve had a lot of controversy amongst the team, should it be in linear inches along the left hand margin, should it actually be square pixelage computed on a percentage basis? Because of the way that the search is laid out linear inches or vertical space may be more accurate. As I said, the metric that I try to hold the team to is always getting at least one organic result above the fold on 800 by 600, with the browser held at that size.

The standard resolution we set for the study was 1024 by 768.

Yes, we are still seeing as many as 30% plus of our users at 800 by 600. My view is, we can view 1024 by 768 as ideal. The design has to look good on that resolution. It has to at least work and appear professional on 800 by 600. So all of us with our laptops, we’re working with 1024 by 768 as our resolution, so we try to make sure the designs look really good on that. It’s obvious that some of our engineers have bigger monitors and bigger resolutions than that, but we always are very conscious of 800 by 600. It’s pretty funny, most of our designers, myself included, have a piece of wall paper that actually has rectangles in the back where if you line up the browser in the upper left hand corner and then align the edge of the browser with the box you can simulate all different sizes so we can make sure it works in the smaller browsers.

One of the members of our staff has a background in physics and design and he was the one that noticed that if you take the Golden Ratio it lined up very well with how the Google results page is designed. The proportions of the page lined up pretty closely with how that Ratio is proportioned.

I’m a huge fan of the Golden Ratio. We talk about it a lot in our design reviews, both implicitly and explicitly, even when it comes down to icons. We prefer that icons not be square, we prefer that they be more of the 1.7:1.

I wanted to talk about Google OneBox for a minute. Of all the elements on the Google page, frankly, that was the one that didn’t seem to work that well. It almost seemed to be in flux somewhat while we were doing the data collection. Relevancy seemed to be a little off on a number of the searches. Is that something that is being tested.

Can you give me an example?

The search was for digital cameras and we got news results back in OneBox. Nikon had a recall on a bunch of digital cameras at the time and we went, as far as disambiguating the user intent from the query, it would seem that news results for the query digital cameras is probably not the best match.

It’s true. The answer is that we do a fairly good job, I believe, in targeting our OneBox results. We hold them to a very high click through rate expectation and if they don’t meet that click through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query. We have an automated system that looks at click through rates per OneBox presentation per query. So it might be that news is performing really well on Bush today but it’s not performing very well on another term, it ultimately gets turned off due to lack of click through rates. We are authorizing it in a way that’s scalable and does a pretty good job enforcing relevance. We do have a few niggles in the system where we have an ongoing debate and one of them is around news versus product search

One school of thought is what you’re saying, which is that it should be the case that if I’m typing digital cameras, I’m much more likely to want to have product results returned. But here’s another example. We are very sensitive to the fact that if you type in children’s flannel pajamas and there’s a recall due to lack of flame retardation on flannel pajamas, as a parent you’re going to want to know that. And so it’s a very hard decision to make.

You might say, well, the difference there is that it’s a specific model. Is it a Nikon D970 or is it digital cameras, which is just a category? So it’s very hard on the query end to disambiguate. You might say if there’s a model number then it’s very specific and if only the model number matches in the news return the news and if not, return the products. But it’s more nuanced than that. With things like Gap flannel pajamas for children, it’s very hard to programmatically tell if that’s a category or a specific product. So we have a couple of sticking points.

So that would be one of the reasons why, for a lot of searches, we weren’t seeing product results coming back, and in a lot of local cases, we weren’t seeing local results coming back?. That would be that click through monitoring mechanism where it didn’t meet the threshold and it got turned off?

That’s right.

Here’s another area we explored in the study. Obviously a lot of searches from Yahoo or MSN Live Search get launched from a portal and the user experience if you launch from the Google home page is different. What does it mean as far as interaction with search results when you’re launching the search from what’s basically a neutral palette versus something that’s launched from a portal that colors the intent of the user as it passes them through to the search results?

We want the user to not be distracted, to just type in what they want and not be very influenced by what they see on the page, which is one reason why the minimalist home page works well. It’s approachable, it’s simple, it’s straightforward and it gives the user a sense of empowerment. This engine is going to do what they want it to do, as opposed to the engine telling them what they should be doing, which is what a portal does. We think that to really aid and facilitate research and learning, the clean slate is best.

I think there’s a couple of interesting problems in the portal versus simple home page piece. You might say it’s easier to disambiguate from a portal what a person might be intending. They look at the home page and there’s a big ad running for Castaway and if they search Castaway, they mean the movie that they just saw the ad for. That might be the case but the other thing that I think is more confusing than anything is the fact that most people who launch the search from the portal home page are actually ignoring and tuning out most of the content on a page. If anything you’re more inclined to mistake intent, to think, “Oh, of course when they typed this they meant that,” but they actually didn’t, because they didn’t even see this other thing. One thing that we’re consistently noticing, which your Golden Triangle finding validated, is that users have a laser focus on their task.

The Google home page is very simple and when we put a link underneath the Google search box on the home page to advertise one of our products, we say, “Hey, try Google video, it’s new, or download the new Picassa.” Basically it’s the only other thing on the page, and while it does get a fair amount of click through, it’s nothing compared to the search, because most users don’t even see it. Most users on our search results page don’t see the logo on the top of the page, they don’t see OneBox, they don’t even see spelling corrections, even though it’s there in bright red letters. There’s a single-mindedness of I’m going to put in my search, not let anything on the home page get in the way, and I’m going to go for the first blue left aligned link on the results page and everything above it basically gets ignored. And we’ve seen that trend again and again. My guess is that if anything, that same thing is happening at the portals but because there is so much context around it on the home page, their user experience and search relevance teams may be led astray, thinking that that context has more relevance than it has.

One thing eye tracking allowed us to pull this apart a little bit is that when we gave people two different scenarios, one aimed more towards getting them to look at the organic results and one that would have them more likely to look at sponsored results, and then look down to organic results, we saw the physical interaction with the page didn’t vary as much as we thought, but the cognitive interaction with the page, when it came to what they remembered seeing and what they clicked on, was dramatically different. So it’s almost like they took the same path through, but the engagement factor flicked on at different points.

My guess is that people who come to the portal are much more likely to look at ads. I like to think of them as users with ADHD. They’re on the home page and they enjoy a home page that pulls their attention in a lot of different directions. They’re willing to process a lot of information on the way to typing in their search, and as a result, that same mind that likes that, it may not even be a per user thing, it may be an of-the-moment thing, but a person that’s in the mindset of enjoying that, on the home page, is also going to be much more likely to look around on the search results page. Their attention is going to be much more likely to be pulled in the direction of an ad, even if it’s not particularly relevant, banner, brand, things like that.

I want to wrap up by asking you, what in your mind is the biggest challenge still to be solved with the search interface as we currently know it?

I think there’s a ton of challenges, because in my view, search is in its infancy, and we’re just getting started. I think the most pressing, immediate need as far as the search interface is to break paradigm of the expectation of “You give us a keyword, and we give you 10 URL’s”. I think we need to get into richer, more diverse ways you’re able to express their query, be it though natural language, or voice, or even contextually. I’m always intrigued by what the Google desktop sidebar is doing, by looking at your context, or what Gmail does, where by looking at your context, it actually produces relevant webpages, ads and things like that. So essentially, a context based search.

So, challenge one is how the searches get expressed, I think we really need to branch out there, but I also think we need to look at results pages that aren’t just 10 standard URLS that are laid out in a very linear format. Sometimes the best answer is a video, sometimes the best answer will be a photo, and sometime the best answer will be a set of extracted facts. If I type in general demographic statistics about China, it’d be great if I got “A” as a result. A set of facts that had been parsed off of and even aggregated and cross validated across a result set.

And sometimes the best result would be an ad. Out of interest, when we tracked through to the end of the scenario to see which links provided the greatest degree of success, the top sponsored results actually delivered the highest success rates across all the links that were clicked on in the study.

Really? Even more so than the natural search results?

Yes. Even the organic search results. Now mind you, the scenarios given were commercial in nature.

Right… that makes much more sense. I do think that for the 40 or so percent of page views that we serve ads on that those ads are incredibly relevant and usually do beat the search results, but for the other 60% of the time the search results are really the only reasonable answer.

Thanks, Marissa.

In my next column, I talk with Larry Cornett, Senior Director of Search & Social Media in Yahoo’s User Experience & Design group about their user experience. Look for it next Friday, February 2.

The World vs Big Tech

Around the world, governments have their legislative cross hairs trained on Big Tech. It’s happening in the US, the EU and here in my country,  Canada. The majority of these are anti-trust suits. But Australia has just introduced a different type of legislation, a social media ban for those under 16. And that could change the game – and the conversation -completely for Big Tech.

There are more anti-trust actions in the queue in the US than at any time in the previous five decades. The fast and loose interpretation of antitrust enforcement in the US is that monopolies are only attacked when they may cause significant harm to customers through lack of competition. The US approach to anti-trust since the 1970s has typically followed the Chicago School of neoclassical economy theory, which places all trust in the efficiency of markets and tells government to keep their damned hands off the economy. Given this and given the pro-business slant of all US administrations, both Republican and Democratic, since Reagan, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen relatively few anti-trust suits in the past 50 years.

But the rapid rise of monolithic Big Tech platforms has raised more discussion about anti-trust in the past decade than in the previous 5 decades. These platforms suck along the industries they spawn in their wake and leave little room for upstart competitors to survive long enough to gain significant market share.

Case in point: Google. 

The recent Canadian lawsuit has the Competition Bureau (our anti-trust watchdog) suing Google for anti-competitive practices selling its online advertising services north of the 49th parallel. They’re asking Google to sell off two of its ad-tech tools, pay penalties worth up to 3% of the platform’s global gross revenues and prohibit the company from engaging in anti-competitive practices in the future.

According to a 3-year inquiry into Google’s Canadian business practices by the Bureau, Google controls 90% of all ad servers and 70% of advertising networks operating in the country. Mind you, Google started the online advertising industry in the relatively green fields of Canada back when I was still railing about the ignorance of Canadian advertisers when it came to digital marketing. No one else really had a chance. But Google made sure they never got one by wrapping its gigantic arms around the industry in an anti-competitive bear hug.

The recent Australian legislation is of a different category, however. Anti-trust suits are – by nature – not personal. They are all about business. But the Australian ban puts Big Tech in the same category as Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and Big Pharma – alleging that they are selling an addictive product that causes physical or emotional harm to individuals. And the rest of the world is closely watching what Australia does. Canada is no exception.

The most pertinent question is how will Australia enforce the band? Restricting social media access to those under 16 is not something to be considered lightly.  It’s a huge technical, legal and logistical hurdle to get over. But if Australia can figure it out, it’s certain that other jurisdictions around the world will follow in their footsteps.

This legislation opens the door to more vigorous public discourse about the impact of social media on our society. Politicians don’t introduce legislation unless they feel that – by doing so – they will continue to get elected. And the key to being elected is one of two things; give the electorate what they want or protect them against what they fear. In Australia, recent polling indicates the ban is supported by 77% of the population. Even those opposing the ban aren’t doing so in defense of social media. They’re worried that the devil might be in the details and that the legislation is being pushed through too quickly.

These types of things tend to follow a similar narrative arc: fads and trends drive widespread adoption – evidence mounts about the negative impacts – industries either ignore or actively sabotage the sources of the evidence – and, with enough critical mass, government finally gets into the act by introducing protective legislation.

With tobacco in the US, that arc took a couple of decades, from the explosion of smoking after World War II to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 1964 report linking smoking and cancer. The first warning labels on cigarette packages appeared two years later, in 1966.

We may be on the cusp of a similar movement with social media. And, once again, it’s taken 20 years. Facebook was founded in 2004.

Time will tell. In the meantime, keep an eye on what’s happening Down Under.

The Seedy, Seedy World of Keto Gummies

OK, admit it. I play games on my phone.

Also, I’m cheap, so I play the free, ad-supported versions.

You might call this a brain-dead waste of time, but I prefer to think of it as diligent and brave investigative journalism.  The time I spend playing Bricks Ball Crusher or Toy Blast is, in actuality, my research into the dark recesses of advertising on behalf of you, the more cerebral and discerning readers of this blog. I bravely sacrifice my own self-esteem so that I might tread the paths of questionable commerce and save you the trip.

You see, it was because of my game playing that I was introduced to the seediest of seedy slums in the ad world, the underbelly known as the in-game ad. One ad, in particular, reached new levels of low.

If you haven’t heard of the Keto Gummies Scam, allow me to share my experience.

This ad hawked miracle gummies that “burn the fat off you” with no dieting or exercising. Several before and after photos show the results of these amazing little miracle drops of gelatin. They had an impressive supporting cast. The stars of the TV pitchfest “Shark Tank” had invested in them. Both Rebel Wilson and Adele had used them to shed pounds. And then — the coup de grace — Oprah (yes, the Oprah!) endorsed them.

The Gummy Guys went right the top of the celebrity endorsement hierarchy when they targeted the big O.

As an ex ad guy, I couldn’t ignore this ad. It was like watching a malvertising train wreck. There was so much here that screamed of scam, I couldn’t believe it. The celebrity pics used were painfully obvious in their use of photoshopping. The claims were about as solid as a toilet paper Taj Mahal. The entire premise reeked of snake oil.

I admit, I was morbidly fascinated.

First, of all the celebrities in all the world, why would you misappropriate Oprah’s brand? She is famously protective of it. If you’re messing with Oprah, you’ve either got to be incredibly stupid or have some serious stones. So which was it?

I started digging.

First of all, this isn’t new. The Keto Gummy Scam has been around for at least a year. In addition to Oprah, they have also targeted Kevin Costner, Rhianna, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Selleck, Kelly Clarkson, Melissa McCarthy — even Wayne Gretzky.

Last Fall, Oprah shared a video on Instagram warning people that she had nothing to do with the gummies and asking people not to fall for the scam. Other celebrities have fallen suit and issued their own warnings.

Snopes.com has dug into the Keto Gummy Scam a couple of times.  One exposé focused on the false claims that the gummies were featured on “Shark Tank.” The first report focused just on the supposed Oprah Winfrey endorsement. That one was from a year ago. That means these fraudulent ads have been associated with Oprah for at least a year and legally, she has been unable to stop them.

To me, that rules out my first supposition. These people aren’t stupid.

This becomes apparent when you start trying to pick your way through the maze of misinformation they have built to support these ads. If you click on the ad you’re taken to a webpage that looks like it’s from a reliable news source. The one I found looked like it was Time’s website. There you’ll find a “one-on-one interview” with Oprah about how she launched a partnership with Weight Watchers to create the Max Science Keto gummies. According to the interview, she “called the CEO of Weight Watchers and said ‘if you can’t create a product that helps people lose weight faster without diet and exercise, then I’m backing out of my investment and moving on.”

This is all complete bullshit. But it’s convincing bullshit.

It doesn’t stop there. Clickbait texts with outrageous claims, including the supposed death of Oprah, get clicks through to more bogus sites with more outrageous claims about gummies. While the sites mimic legitimate news organizations like Time, they reside on bogus domains such as genuinesmother.com and newsurvey22offer.com. Or, if you go to them through an in-app link, the URLs are cloaked and remain invisible.

If you turn to a search engine to do some due diligence, the scammers will be waiting for you. If you search for “keto gummies scam” the results page is stuffed with both sponsored and organic spam that appear to support the outrageous claims made in the ads. Paid content outlets like Outlook India have articles placed that offer reviews of the “best keto gummies,” fake reviews, and articles assuring potential victims that the gummies are not a scam but are a proven way to lose weight.

As the Snopes investigators found, it’s almost impossible to track these gummies to any company. Even if you get gummies shipped to you, there’s no return address or phone number. Orders came from a shadowy “Fulfillment Center” in places like Smyrna, Tennessee. Once they get your credit card, the unauthorized charges start.

Even the name of the product seems to be hard to nail down. The scammers seem to keep cycling through a roster of names.

This is, by every definition, predatory advertising. It is the worst example of what we as marketers do. But, like all predators, it can only exist because an ecosystem allows it to exist. It’s something we have to think about.

I certainly will. More on that soon.

What Media Insiders Were Thinking (And Writing) In 2021

Note: This is a year back look at the posts in the Media Insider Column on Mediapost, for which I write every Tuesday. All the writers for the column have been part of the Marketing and Media business for decades, so there’s a lot of wisdom there to draw on. This is the second time I’ve done this look back at what we’ve written about in the previous year.

As part of the group of Media Insiders, I’ve always considered myself in sterling company. I suspect if you added up all the years of experience in this stable of industry experts, we’d be well into the triple digits. Most of the Insiders are still active in the world of marketing. For myself, although I’m no longer active in the business, I’m still fascinated by how it impacts our lives and our culture.

For all those reasons, I think the opinions of this group are worth listening to — and, thankfully,  MediaPost gives you those opinions every day.

Three years ago, I thought it would be interesting to do a “meta-analysis” of those opinions over the span of the year, to see what has collectively been on the minds of the Media Insiders. I meant to do it again last year, but just never got around to it — as you know, global pandemics and uprisings against democracy were a bit of a distraction.

This year, I decided to give it another shot. And it was illuminating. Here’s a summary of what has been on our collective minds:

I don’t think it’s stretching things to say that your Insiders have been unusually existential in their thoughts in the past 12 months. Now, granted, this is one column on MediaPost that leads to existential musings. That’s why I ended up here. I love the fact that I can write about pretty much anything and it generally fits under the “Media Insider” masthead. I suspect the same is true for the other Insiders.

But even with that in mind, this year was different. I think we’ve all spent a lot of the last year thinking about what the moral and ethical boundaries for marketers are — for everyone, really — in the world of 2021. Those ponderings broke down into a few recurring themes.

Trying to Navigate a Substantially Different World

Most of this was naturally tied to the ongoing COVID pandemic.  

Surprisingly, given that three years ago it was one of the most popular topics, Insiders said little about politics. Of course, we were then squarely in the middle of “Trump time.” There were definitely a few posts after the Jan. 6 insurrection, but most of it was just trying to figure out how the world might permanently change after 2021. Almost 20% of our columns touched on this topic.

A notable subset of this was how our workplaces might change. With many of us being forced to work from home, 4% of the year’s posts talked about how “going to work” may never look the same again.

Ad-Tech Advice

The next most popular topic from Insiders (especially those still in the biz, like Corey, Dave, Ted and Maarten) was ongoing insight on how to manage the nuts and bolts of your marketing. A lot of this focused on using ad tech effectively. That made up 15% of last year’s posts.

And Now, The Bad News

I will say your Media Insiders (myself included) are a somewhat pessimistic bunch. Even when we weren’t talking about wrenching change brought about by a global pandemic, we were worrying about the tech world going to hell in a handbasket. About 13.5% of our posts talked about social media, and it was almost all negative, with most of it aimed squarely at Facebook — sorry, Meta.

Another 12% of our posts talked about other troubling aspects of technology. Privacy concerns over data usage and targeting took the lead here. But we were also worried about other issues, like the breakdown of person-to-person relationships, disappearing attention spans, and tears in our social fabric. When we talked about the future of tech, we tended to do it through a dystopian lens.

Added to this was a sincere concern about the future of journalism. This accounted for another 5% of all our posts. This makes almost a full third of all posts with a decidedly gloomy outlook when it comes to tech and digital media’s impact on society.

The Runners-Up

If there was one branch of media that seemed the most popular among the Insiders (especially Dave Morgan), it was TV and streaming video. I also squeezed a few posts about online gaming into this category. Together, this topic made up 10.5% of all posts.

Next in line, social marketing and ethical branding. We all took our own spins on this, and together we devoted almost 9.5% of all posts in 2021 to it. I’ve talked before about the irony of a world that has little trust in advertising but growing trust in brands. Your Insiders have tried to thread the needle between the two sides of this seeming paradox.

Finally, we did cover a smattering of other topics, but one in particular rose about the others as something increasingly on our radar. We touched on the Metaverse and its implications in almost 3% of our posts.

Summing Up

To try to wrap up 2021 in one post is difficult, but if there was a single takeaway, I think it’s that both marketing and media are faced with some very existential questions. Ad-supported revenue models have now been pushed to the point where we must ask what the longer-term ethical implications might be.

If anything, I would say the past year has marked the beginning of our industry realizing that a lot of unintended consequences have now come home to roost.

I Was So Wrong in 1996…

It’s that time of year – the time when we sprain our neck trying to look backwards and forwards at the same time. Your email inbox, like mine, is probably crammed with 2021 recaps and 2022 predictions.

I’ve given up on predictions. I have a horrible track record. In just a few seconds, I’ll tell you how horrible. But here, at the beginning of 2022, I will look back. And I will substantially overshoot “a year in review” by going back all the way til 1996, 26 years ago. Let me tell you why I’m in the mood for some reminiscing.

In amongst the afore-mentioned “look back” and “look forward” items I saw recently there was something else that hit my radar; a number of companies looking for SEO directors. After being out of the industry for almost 10 years, I was mildly surprised that SEO still seemed to be a rock solid career choice. And that brings me both to my story about 1996 and what was probably my worst prediction about the future of digital marketing.

It was in late 1996 that I first started thinking about optimizing sites for the search engines and directories of the time: Infoseek, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Altavista, Looksmart and Hotbot. Early in 1997 I discovered Danny Sullivan’s Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines. It was revelatory. After much trial and error, I was reasonably certain I could get sites ranking for pretty much any term. We had our handful of local clients ranking on Page One of those sites for terms like “boats,” “hotels”, “motels”, “men’s shirts” and “Ford Mustang”. It was the Wild West. Small and nimble web starts ups were routinely kicking Fortune 500 ass in the digital frontier.   

As a local agency that had played around with web design while doing traditional marketing, I was intrigued by this opportunity. Somewhere near the end of 1997 I did an internal manifesto where I speculated on the future of this “Internet” thing and what it might mean for our tiny agency (I had just brought on board my eventual partner, Bill Barnes, and we had one other full-time employee). I wish I could find that original document, but I remember saying something to the effect of, “This search engine opportunity will probably only last a year or two until the engines crack down and close the loopholes.” Given that, we decided to go for broke and seize that opportunity.

In 1998 we registered the domain www.searchengineposition.com. This was a big step. If you could get your main keywords in your domain name, it virtually guaranteed you link juice. At that time, “Search engine optimization” hadn’t emerged as the industry label. Search engine positioning was the more common term. We couldn’t get www.searchenginepositioning.com because domain names were limited by the number of characters you could use.

We had our domain and soon we had a site. We needed all the help we could get, because according to my prediction, we only had until 2000 or so to make as much as we could from this whole “search thing.” The rest, as they say, was history. It just wasn’t the history I had predicted.

To be fair, I wasn’t the only one making shitty predictions at the time. In 1995, 3Com co-founder Robert Metcalfe (also the co-inventor of Ethernet) said in a column in Infoworld:

“Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

And in 1998, Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman said,

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”

Both of those people were way smarter than I was, so if I was clueless about the future, at least I was in good company.

As we now know, SEO would be fine, thank you very much. In 2004, some 6 years later, in my very first post for MediaPost, I wrote:

“I believe years from now that…2004 … will be a milestone in the (Search) industry. I think it will mark the beginning of a year that will dramatically alter the nature of search marketing.”

That prediction, as it turned out, was a little more accurate. In 2004, Google’s AdWords program really hit its stride, doubling revenue from 1.5 billion the previous year to $3 billion and starting its hockey stick climb up to its current level, just south of $150 billion (in 2020).

The reason search – and organic search optimization – never fizzled out was that it was a fundamental connection between user intent and the ever-expanding ocean of available content. Search Engine Optimization turned out to be a much better label for the industry than Search Engine Positioning, despite my unfortunate choice of domain names. The later was really an attempt to game the algorithms. The former was making sure content was findable and indexable. Hindsight has shown that it was a much more sustainable approach.

I ended that first post talking about the search industry of 2004 by saying,

“And to think, one day I’ll be able to say I was there.”

I guess today is that day.

Saying So Long to SEMPO

Yesterday afternoon, while I was in line at the grocery store, my phone pinged. I was mentioned in a Twitter post. For me, that’s becoming a pretty uncommon experience. So I checked the post.  And that’s how I found out that SEMPO is no more.

The tweet was from Dana Todd, who was responding to a Search Engine Journalarticle by Roger Montti about the demise of SEMPO. For those of you who don’t know SEMPO: it was the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization.

It was a big part of my life during what seems like a lifetime ago. Todd was even more involved. Hence the tweet.

Increasingly I find my remaining half-life in digital consists of an infrequent series of “remember-when” throwbacks. This will be one of those.

Todd’s issue with the article was that much of the 17-year history of the organization was glossed over, as Montti chose to focus mainly on the controversies of the first year or two of its existence.

As Todd said, “You only dredged up the early stages of the organization, in its infancy as we struggled to gain respect and traction, and were beset by naysayers who looked for a reason we should fail. We didn’t fail.”

She then added, “There is far more to the SEMPO story, and far more notable people who put in blood sweat and tears to build not just the organization, but the entire industry.”

I was one of those people. But before that, I was also one of the early naysayers.

SEMPO started in 2003. I didn’t join until 2004. I spent at least part of that first year joining the chorus bitching about the organization. And then I realized that I could either bitch from the outside — or I could effect change from the inside.  

After joining, I quickly found myself on that same SEMPO board that that I’d been complaining about. In 2005, I became co-chair of the research committee. In 2006, I became the chair of SEMPO. I served in that role for two years and eventually stepped down from SEMPO at the same time I stepped away from the search industry.

Like Todd (who was the president of SEMPO for part of the time I was the chairman), I am proud of what we did, and extraordinarily proud of the team that made it happen. Many of the people I admired most in the industry served with me on that board.

Todd will always be one of my favorite search people. But I also had the privilege of serving with Jeff Pruit, Kevin Lee, Bill Hunt, Dave Fall, Christine Churchill and the person who got the SEMPO ball rolling, along with Todd: Barbara Coll. There were many, many others.

Now, SEMPO is being absorbed by the Digital Analytics Association, which, according to its announcement,  “is committed to helping former SEMPO members become fully integrated into DAA, and will be forming a special interest group (SIG) for search analytics.”

I’ve got to admit: That hurts. Being swallowed up, becoming nothing more than a special interest group, is a rather ignoble end for the association I gave so much to.

But as anyone who has raised a child can tell you, you know you’ve been successful when they no longer need you. And that’s how I choose to interpret this event. The search industry no longer needs SEMPO, at least as a stand-alone organization.

And if that’s the case, then SEMPO knocked it out of the park. Because that sure as hell wasn’t true back in 2003.

Search in 2003 was the Wild West. According to legend, there were white-hat SEOs and black-hat SEOs.

But truth be told, most of us wore hats that were some shade of grey.

The gunslingers of natural search (or organic SEO) were slowly and very reluctantly giving up their turf to the encroaching new merchants of paid search. Google Adwords had only been around for three years, but its launch introduced a whole new dynamic to the ecosystem. Google suddenly had to start a relationship with search marketers.

Before that, the only Google attempt made to reach out was thanks to a rogue mystery poster on SEO industry forums named “googleguy” (later suspected to be the search quality team lead Matt Cutts).  To call search an industry would be stretching the term to its breaking point.

The introduction of paid search was creating a two-sided marketplace, and that was forcing search to become more civilized.

The process of civilization is always difficult. It requires the establishment of trust and respect, two commodities that were in desperately short supply in search circa 2003.

SEMPO was the one organization that did the most to bring civilization to the search marketplace. It gave Google a more efficient global conduit to thousands of search marketers. And it gave those search marketers a voice that Google would actually pay some attention to.

But it was more than just starting a conversation. SEMPO challenged search marketers to think beyond their own interests. The organization laid the foundation for a more sustainable and equitable search ecosystem. If SEMPO accomplished anything to be proud of, it was in preventing the Tragedy of the Commons from killing search before it had a chance to establish itself as the fastest growing advertising marketplace in history.

Dana Todd wrapped up her extended Twitter post by writing, “I can say confidently Google wouldn’t be worth $1T without us. SEMPO — you mattered.”

Dana, just like in the old SEMPO days when we double-teamed a message, you said it better than I ever could.

And Google? You’re welcome.

Just in Time for Christmas: More Search Eye-Tracking

The good folks over at the Nielsen Norman Group have released a new search eye tracking report. The findings are quite similar to one my former company — Mediative — did a number of years ago (this link goes to a write-up about the study. Unfortunately, the link to the original study is broken. *Insert head smack here).

In the Nielsen Norman study, the two authors — Kate Moran and Cami Goray — looked at how a more visually rich and complex search results page would impact user interaction with the page. The authors of the report called the sum of participant interactions a “Pinball Pattern”: “Today, we find that people’s attention is distributed on the page and that they process results more nonlinearly than before. We observed so much bouncing between various elements across the page that we can safely define a new SERP-processing gaze pattern — the pinball pattern.”

While I covered this at some length when the original Mediative report came out in 2014 (in three separate columns: 1,2 & 3), there are some themes that bear repeating. Unfortunately, I found the study’s authors missed what I think are some of the more interesting implications. 

In the days of the “10 Blue Links” search results page, we used the same scanning strategy no matter what our intent was. In an environment where the format never changes, you can afford to rely on a stable and consistent strategy. 

In our first eye tracking study, published in 2004, this consistent strategy led to something we called the Golden Triangle. But those days are over.

Today, when every search result can look a little bit different, it comes as no surprise that every search “gaze plot” (the path the eyes take through the results page) will also be different. Let’s take a closer look at the reasons for this. 

SERP Eye Candy

In the Nielsen Norman study, the authors felt “visual weighting” was the main factor in creating the “Pinball Pattern”: “The visual weight of elements on the page drives people’s scanning patterns. Because these elements are distributed all over the page and because some SERPs have more such elements than others, people’s gaze patterns are not linear. The presence and position of visually compelling elements often affect the visibility of the organic results near them.”

While the visual impact of the page elements is certainly a factor, I think it’s only part of the answer. I believe a bigger, and more interesting, factor is how the searcher’s brain and its searching strategies have evolved in lockstep with a more visually complex results page. 

The Importance of Understanding Intent

The reason why we see so much variation in scan patterns is that there is also extensive variation in searchers’ intent. The exact same search query could be used by someone intent on finding an online or physical place to purchase a product, comparing prices on that product, looking to learn more about the technical specs of that product, looking for how-to videos on the use of the product, or looking for consumer reviews on that product.

It’s the same search, but with many different intents. And each of those intents will result in a different scanning pattern. 

Predetermined Page Visualizations

I really don’t believe we start each search page interaction with a blank slate, passively letting our eyes be dragged to the brightest, shiniest object on the page. I think that when we launch the search, our intent has already created an imagined template for the page we expect to see. 

We have all used search enough to be fairly accurate at predicting what the page elements might be: thumbnails of videos or images, a map showing relevant local results, perhaps a Knowledge Graph result in the lefthand column. 

Yes, the visual weighting of elements act as an anchor to draw the eye, but I believe the eye is using this anticipated template to efficiently parse the results page. 

I have previously referred to this behavior as a “chunking” of the results page. And we already have an idea of what the most promising chunks will be when we launch the search. 

It’s this chunking strategy that’s driving the “pinball” behavior in the Nielsen Norman study.  In the Mediative study, it was somewhat surprising to see that users were clicking on a result in about half the time it took in our original 2005 study. We cover more search territory, but thanks to chunking, we do it much more efficiently.

One Last Time: Learn Information Scent

Finally, let me drag out a soapbox I haven’t used for a while. If you really want to understand search interactions, take the time to learn about Information Scent and how our brains follow it (Information Foraging Theory — Pirolli and Card, 1999 — the link to the original study is also broken. *Insert second head smack, this one harder.). 

This is one area where the Nielsen Norman Group and I are totally aligned. In 2003, Jakob Nielsen — the first N in NNG — called the theory “the most important concept to emerge from human-computer interaction research since 1993.”

On that we can agree.

Search and The Path to Purchase

Just how short do we want the path to purchase to be anyway?

A few weeks back Mediapost reporter Laurie Sullivan brought this question up in her article detailing how Instagram is building ecom into their app. While Instagram is not usually considered a search platform, Sullivan muses on the connecting of two dots that seem destined to be joined: search and purchase. But is that a destiny that users can “buy into?”

Again, this is one of those questions where the answer is always, “It depends.”  And there are at least a few dependencies in this case.

The first is whether our perspective is as a marketer or a consumer. Marketers always want the path to purchase to be as short as possible. When we have that hat on, we won’t be fully satisfied until the package hits our front step about the same time we first get the first mental inkling to buy.

Amazon has done the most to truncate the path to purchase. Marketers look longingly at their one click ordering path – requiring mere seconds and a single click to go from search to successful fulfillment. If only all purchases were this streamlined, the marketer in us muses.

But if we’re leading our double life as a consumer, there is a second “It depends…”  And that is dependent on what our shopping intentions are. There are times when we – as consumers – also want to fastest possible path to purchase. But that’s not true all the time.

Back when I was looking at purchase behaviors in the B2B world, I found that there are variables that lead to different intentions on the part of the buyer. Essentially, it boils down to the degree of risk and reward in the purchase itself. I first wrote about this almost a decade ago now.

If there’s a fairly high degree of risk inherent in the purchase itself, the last thing we want is a frictionless path to purchase. These are what we call high consideration purchases.

We want to take our time, feeling that we’ve considered all the options. One click ordering scares the bejeezus out of us.

Let’s go back to the Amazon example. Today, Amazon is the default search engine of choice for product searches, outpacing Google by a margin rapidly approaching double digits. But this is not really an apples to apples comparison. We have to factor in the deliberate intention of the user. We go to Amazon to buy, so a faster path to purchase is appropriate. We go to Google to consider. And for reasons I’ll get into soon, we would be less accepting of a “buy” button there.

The buying paths we would typically take in a social platform like Instagram are probably not that high risk, so a fast path to purchase might be fine. But there’s another factor that we need to consider when shortening the path to purchase – or buiding a path in the first place – in what has traditionally been considered a discovery platform. Let’s call it a mixing of motives.

Google has been dancing around a shorter path to purchase for years now. As Sullivan said in her article, “Search engines have strength in what’s known as discovery shopping, but completing the transaction has never been a strong point — mainly because brands decline to give up the ownership of the data.”

Data ownership is one thing, but even if the data were available, including a “buy now” button in search results can also lead to user trust issues. For many purchases, we need to feel that our discovery engine has no financial motive in the ordering of their search results. This – of course – is a fallacy we build in our own minds. There is always a financial motive in the ordering of search results. But as long as it’s not overt, we can trick ourselves into living with it. A “buy now” button makes it overt.

This problem of mixed motives is not just a problem of user perception. It also can lead publishers down a path that leaves objectivity behind and pursues higher profits ahead. One example is TripAdvisor. Some years ago, they made the corporate decision to parlay their strong position as a travel experience discovery platform into an instant booking platform. In the beginning, they separated this booking experience onto its own platform under the brand Viator. Today, the booking experience has been folded into the main TripAdvisor results and – more disturbingly – is now the default search order. Every result at the top of the page has a “Book Now” button.

Speaking as a sample of one, I trust TripAdvisor a lot less than I used to.

 

Disruption in the Rear View Mirror

Oh..it’s so easy to be blasé. I always scan the Mediapost headlines each week to see if there’s anything to spin. I almost skipped right past a news post by Larissa Faw – Zenith: Google Remains Top-Ranked Media Company By Ad Revenue

“Of course Google is the top ranked media company,” I yawned as I was just about to click on the next email in my inbox. Then it hit me. To quote Michael Bublé, “Holy Shitballs, Mom!”

Maybe that headline doesn’t seem extraordinary in the context of today, but I’ve been doing this stuff for almost 20 years now, and in that context – well-it’s huge! I remembered a column I wrote ages ago about speculating that Google had barely scratched its potential. After a little digging, I found it. It was in October, 2006, so just over a decade ago. Google had just passed the 6 billion dollar mark in annual revenue. Ironically, that seemed a bigger deal then their current revenue of almost $80 billion seems today. In that column, I pushed to the extreme and speculated that Google could someday pass $200 billion in revenue. While we’re still only 1/3 of the way there, the claim doesn’t seem nearly as ludicrous as it did back then.

But here’s the line that really made me realize how far we’ve come in the ten and a half years since I wrote that column: “Google and Facebook together accounted for 20% of global advertising expenditure across all media in 2016, up from 11% in 2012. They were also responsible for 64% of all the growth in global ad spend between 2012 and 2016.”

Two companies that didn’t exist 20 years ago now account for 20% of all global advertising expenditure. And the speed with which they’re gobbling advertising budgets is accelerating. If you’re a dilettante student of disruption, as I am, those are pretty amazing numbers. In the day-to-day of Mediapost – and digital marketing in general – we tend to accept all this as normal. It’s like we’re surfing on top of a wave without realizing the wave is 300 freakin’ feet high. Sometimes, you need to zoom out a little to realizing how momentous the every day is. And if you look at this on a scale of decades rather than days, you start to get a sense that the speed of change is massive.

To me, the most interesting thing about this is that both Google and Facebook have introduced a fundamentally new relationship between advertising and it’s audience. Google’s outré is – of course – intent based advertising. And Facebook’s is based on socially mediated network effects. Both of these things required the overlay of digital connection. That – as they say – has made all the difference. And there is where the real disruption can be found. Our world has become a fundamentally different place.

Much as we remain focused on the world of advertising and marketing here in our little corner of the digital world, it behooves us to remember that advertising is simply a somewhat distorted reflection of the behaviors of the world in general. It things are being disrupted here, it is because things are being disrupted everywhere. As it regards us beings of flesh, bone and blood, that disruption has three distinct beachheads: the complicated relationship between our brains and the digital tools we have at our disposal, the way we connect with each other, and a dismantling of the restrictions of the physical world at the same time we build the scaffolding of a human designed digital world. Any one of these has the potential to change our species forever. With all three bearing down on us, permanent change is a lead-pipe cinch.

Thirty years is a nano-second in terms of human history. Even on the scale of my lifetime, it seems like yesterday. Reagan was president. We were terrorized by the Unabomber. News outlets were covering the Iran-Contra affair. U2 released the Joshua Tree. Platoon won the best picture Oscar. And if you wanted to advertise to a lot of people, you did so on a major TV network with the help of a Madison Avenue agency. 30 years ago, nothing of which I’m talking about existed. Nothing. No Google. No Facebook. No Internet – at least, not in a form any of us could appreciate.

As much as advertising has changed in the past 30 years, it has only done so because we – and the world we inhabit – have changed even more. And if that thought is a little scary, just think what the next 30 years might bring.

Farewell Search Insider. It’s Been Fun!

Note: This is my farewell column for MediaPost’s Search Insider.

476.

What’s significant about that number? Well, it’s a Harshad number. Math geeks can learn more here. For history buffs, it’s also the year in the Julian calendar when we switched from the Julian to the Anno Domini calendar. Generally, it’s when most historians say the Roman Empire fell and we went from ancient history to the Middle Ages.

It also happens to be the number of Search Insider columns I’ve written since my first appearance here 10 and a half years ago.

It’s been a good run. I’ve had fun. I’ve ranted the odd time. I’ve taken you with me on my family vacations. Most of all, I’ve had a ringside seat at the emergence of a true industry. In fact, that’s what my very first column was about – Search growing beyond the confines of a cottage industry into a real contender for ad budgets. Here’s how I ended that column:

Search will become much more sophisticated, and the price of entry to play the game may prove to be too expensive for many smaller providers. Alliances will form and total solutions will begin to emerge. Google and Yahoo! will have to address the huge amount of time and effort required to manage a large, sponsored search campaign. Real money will start to be invested and made.

And to think, one day I’ll be able to say I was there.

Well, I guess that day has arrived. In the next 5 years, according to Forrester, digital will surpass TV as the single biggest destination for marketing budgets and search will make up the lion’s share of that spend. Digital budgets combined are forecast to top $100 billion. I think that qualifies as “real money.”

But regular readers will also know that over the past 10 plus years, my columns have spent less and less time inside the “Search Insider” box. I’ve talked before about the artificiality of the way we’ve divided online up into channels. As our digital world has become richer and more robust, it’s become increasingly difficult to keep it compartmentalized into arbitrarily defined boxes. My personal interest has always centered on human behaviors and the rapidly growing intersection between behavior and technology. Search is part of that, but so is social and mobile and content and rich media and wearable technology and – well – you get the idea. Digital is a deeply and widely interwoven part of our lives. It makes up much of the context of our environment. Trying to talk only about one part of it would be like trying to describe the world by only writing about water.

At the end of 2014 (AD – just to keep our calendar references consistent), Ken Fadner, the publisher of MediaPost, asked me if I’d consider a move. I said yes. So this column – number 476 – will be my last one for the Search Insider. Starting next week, I’ll join the Online Spin lineup. It’s probably more appropriate. I haven’t been active in search marketing for the last 2 years. I’m hardly an “Insider” any more. I am, at best, a somewhat informed observer commenting from the sidelines. I think that can still be a useful perspective. I hope so. I will continue to write about the things that interest me: corporate strategy, human behavior, evolving cultures, digital technology – and yes, the odd rant.

So, for those of you who have been along for the ride for the last 10 and a half years, thanks for sticking around. When this ride started, there was no Facebook, no iPhone, no YouTube, no Twitter – and Google was just starting to figure out how to make some real money.

We’ve come a long way. But I suspect we’ve barely started. Maybe we’re even transitioning from one era to another. After all, it’s happened before when we’ve hit the number 476.

See you next Tuesday at Online Spin.