Category Archives: Online Trends

Microsoft and the NY Time’s new reader

I always find it amusing (and a little frightening) when reality imitates parody. Does anybody remember a SNL skit about wearing a VR helmet and reading a virtual book, which was Moby Dick? In effect, somebody sat in a chair, donned this huge awkward helmet, which gave the experience of sitting in a chair, and reading a book.

Now, Microsoft and the NY Times have come perilously close to this with their new on screen News Reader.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8H9AJC8B.htm?campaign_id=alerts

The idea is to simulate the experience of reading a newspaper online, to more fully engage the reader. There is a cost. Apparently, the reader costs more than a year’s subscription to the Times.

Is it just me, or is this really dumb? We choose to read our news online because the online format gives us a different experience and more functionality. We are rapidly adapting to a new online way of assimilating information, and this includes news. To me, this is kind of like buying a car, but then getting a horse to pull it.

Canada’s Wired!

It’s been a few days without a post, so I thought I’d get a quick one in tonight before I call it a night. I’m in Montreal for the InfoPresse Search Marketing Event (catch my Search Insider this week for more adventures from Old Montreal) and as luck would have it, happened to see an article from MarketingSherpa about how wired Canadians are. I’ve been trying to tell people this for years. I read somewhere that Canadians were the best shoppers in the world. We research more before the purchase than anyone else. We also have more broadband penetration than the US. Add this up and it seems like a match made in heaven for search marketing, but Canadian business has been slow to jump on the bandwagon. The big brands are either not present in search at all, or are just toying with it. The good news is that Canadians marketers are beginning to wake up, as was seen by high interest rates at SES Toronto and at today’s event in Montreal.

Well, I’ve got an early flight tomorrow, and it’s almost midnight, so I’ll cut this short. Just wanted to thank Thomas Gobeil at Infopresse for the invite. The city was amazing and I’d love to come back. Thanks to all who attended the session as well and who bore with me through my acute unilingualism. Also had a chance to meet Mitch Joel from Twistimage and had a spirited discussion about “melt your brain” ideas that keep us both up at night. Check out Mitch’s blog. And thanks to Jonathon Markoff from Acquisio for the conversation over dinner. A great visit, all in all!

 

Engagement with Video Online

In the past week I’ve read a number of articles precipitated by Google’s move to show video ads across their network. The introduction of video to online seems to be heralded as “the next big thing” by almost everyone, and I admit I’ve taken a turn on that particular band wagon.

Yet, this weekend, I pondered the nature of our engagement with online video and find it wanting in many respects. Why? The particular event that triggered this train of thinking was my trying to watch the documentary “Loose Change” on my computer. If you haven’t seen the video, it’s a Michael Moore-ish type investigation of the events of 9/11. Whether you believe it or not, there’s little doubt that the subject matter is engrossing. I watched Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911 on my television and had no problem watching them in one sitting. I was highly engaged and was pretty much oblivious to other distractions, including children.

With Loose Change, I’ve been trying to watch the documentary for 2 months now, and I’m only half way through it. It’s not that it’s less interesting. It’s that my environment is different.

When we sit at a television, we’re used to being passive. I think the past 50 years have conditioned us to expect to relinquish control and be willing sponges for whatever happens to flash on the screen. Recently, remote controls and DVR’s have given us some degree of control over the box, but we’re just beginning to exercise that control. When we sit down in front of a TV set, we’re not expecting to “do” anything with it.

The other place where we tend to watch sights and sounds is the movie theater. Again, we expect to be a passive audience here.

But when we sit in front of a computer, we usually do so to accomplish a task. It’s the most useful box in the house, and I believe it’s this very usefulness that may be keeping video from being more engaging online.

Look at the videos that tend to be watched online. They’re short, they have to be highly stimulating and we usually only watch them because a trusted source has labelled them a “must see”. Either a friend has emailed us a link with their recommedation, or word of mouth has spread about the video and it’s the latest viral craze. And usually they require no intellectual engagement. The most watched clips on YouTube fit these criteria to a T. #1 is the Evolution of Dance, watching a (undoubtedly talented) comedian morph from one dance to another in 5 minutes. #2 is a lip sync done in a bedroom of two teenagers in an ode to Pokemon. And #3 is the live version of the Simpson’s intro. Production values are usually minimal, and there is no intellectual content. There is a kind of counter-culture, anti establishment feel to them, which probably adds to their viral appeal.

If a video meets all these criteria, then it will be watched online.

Now, what do we do with our computer, whether it be a laptop or a Media Center, if we want to watch a show on it in the same manner as we would on TV?We maximize the window, blocking out the other stimuli and making it a TV set.

Let’s go back to Loose Change. While arguably this has been a viral success online, it has still been a struggle for me to watch. Why? Well, it’s long, at an hour and 20 minutes. It’s online resolution forces me to watch it in a window, with other stimuli surrounding it. And I have to think and absorb, it’s not mindless.

When I’m watching a video in these circumstances, I find it very difficult not to be distracted by what surrounds it on the page. I feel this innate guiltiness, thinking that there are a hundred other useful things I should be doing rather than watch this video. In fact, we have been conditioned to consider watching a video as a “waste” of time. We can justify it if it’s a few short minutes out of our day. It’s mindless entertainment. But otherwise, guilt starts eating at us. An inexplicable anxiety starts, with the feeling that there has to be something more useful to do with my computer.

Back to my original point. I think we have to reinvent the paradigm through which we engage with video online. I don’t think moving the types of videos we used to watch on TV to our computer screen will work. And my prediction is that advertisers will spend millions of dollars to discover this. Probably the biggest success online has been the Subservient Chicken for Burger King. And the key? It’s different, and it’s interactive.

With Google’s announcement, there will be many who throw video online, in the assumption that it will be more engaging than a simple graphic ad, or even a text based ad. Don’t count on it. The rules are different, and they’re still being written.

Partnership-Palooza! But Do Any of Them Matter?

My inbox was inundated today with talk of new partnerships. Obviously, the search engines are rushing to fill up their dance cards (and when was the last time anyone used a dance card? Maybe it’s time we put that saying to rest.)

What’s interesting about these is the importance of sheer number of users in various online communities. The most travelled intersections of the webs are beginning to look to each other for obvious synergies, trying to stake out a larger slice of online interaction. It’s a bit like an online land grab.

Yahoo and eBay

This is a pretty straightforward swap. Yahoo can show it’s ads to eBay’s 75 million users, and in return, Yahoo will help bolster eBay’s defences agains Google Base, which is seen as a major future threat to the auction based marketplace. Me thinks this threat might be a lot more bark than actual bite, as Hitwise’s Bill Tancer points out in the linked article.

Google and MSN and MySpace

This one’s still in the rumor category. Apparently, MySpace is the single biggest referrer to Google, accounting for 8.7% of its traffic, according to Hitwise (nice job grabbing press mentions Bill!). Apparently, MSN is also sniffing around MySpace, and they probably have things to prove after being beat out with AOL by Google. This one is probably more defensive than strategic for Google, who would hate to lose almost 9% of their traffic to a competitor. On the other side, I would think the motivation is huge for MSN, who have to start turning around their declining marketshare to hang on til the release of Vista. The hope with Vista is that tighter integration of search into apps and OS will immediately bolster marketshare.

Meanwhile, MySpace is booming, with no end in sight. They experienced 1000% growth in users last year, becoming the most visited property online. And it’s all about the numbers.

Associated Press and Topix

The last partnership isn’t really a partnership. Topix.net is a search engine that will work with Associated Press to try to enhance links to the lead source of a news story. The problem is that when stories go out on the wire, they’re picked up by other papers and the news engines don’t differentiate between them. The paper that breaks the story wants credit as the original source. Topix will enhance the links to the paper that’s been identified as the source.

There’s one flaw in this strategy. Who the hell is Topix? Nobody uses them to find news. People use Yahoo…26 million of them. People use CNN, about 24 million. They’re the number one and two sources of news (finally, one area where Google isn’t number one!). Going down the list, Topix ranks 29th, with 2.7 million visitors. So, all together now, a collective yawn as we say, “Who cares?” Again, the importance of visitors, or lack of them, is painfully apparent.

The so called partnership begins to make more sense when you know that Topix is controlled by three newspaper publishers, Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune. So it’s not so much a partnership as a directive.

It just shows, popularity is the only currency that matters online. If you have visitors, you matter.

Welcome to the Search Marketing Sweat Shop

First published May 25, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the latest Business Week, buried on page 70, there’s a story about outsourcing in search marketing. The story is titled “Life on the Web’s Factory Floor,” and it’s about the thriving business in assembling search marketing ads.

From the description, it sounds like search marketing is nothing more than a big Scrabble game. You throw a bunch of combinations of words up in the air, see how they land. and cut and paste them into your ads. In fact, in the story a search marketing specialist is defined as someone who “types phrases to drive ad traffic.” One gets the mental image of the proverbial room full of monkeys sitting at typewriters. At least the writer, Burt Helm, called the process “slightly creative.”

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to SEM…

I admit there are companies, some thriving, who take this sweat-shop approach to search marketing. But every time I see the mainstream press reduce my passion to this elemental level, I die a little bit inside. I’m already having enough trouble explaining what I do for a living. Just this past weekend, I was trying to explain to an importer/exporter the rapid growth in search marketing, and what I did most days between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. He had no idea the search marketing industry existed, and when I told him it was a $7 billion dollar a year industry (just guessing at where we’ll be this year) I could see the question in his eyes. “How the hell can $7 billion change hands in an industry that doesn’t seem to be based on anything?” I’ve been struggling with this attitude for years now, and had finally thought that I was past it. But in one short weekend, with the help of a two-page story in Business Week, I’m right back where I started.

Perhaps the problem is that most users’ touch point with search seems so simple. I type in words, I see words come back–and not a lot of them, either. Most messages are 15 to 20 words at most. How hard can it be? It’s this prevailing attitude that has made search the bastard child of the online ad space. We get no respect. From the outside, it seems like anyone with an IQ topping 60 could market this way. So agencies launch search divisions. Large companies find people that seem to have no pressing items on their to-do lists and make them the new director of search marketing. Everyone throws their hat in the ever increasing search marketing ring.

HELP, I need somebody (preferably a search marketer)…

As an aside, I always find it enlightening to sit at a table during lunch at a Search Engine Strategies show where I don’t know anyone. As introductions are made around the table, you can bet you’ll flush one of these newly minted search marketers out of the crowd. The story is usually the same–the boss thought it would be good to come to the show and “get up to speed.” They look at you with hapless confusion, shell-shocked with the sheer amount of data to digest. Four days, four tracks crammed with information. That’s well over 100 sessions and 400 individual presentations, all dealing with some nuance of search marketing. Before the show, these people thought they had search pretty much pegged. At best, they thought they’d pick up a hint or two. They come back from the show realizing they’ve just jumped into labyrinth of arcane knowledge and tactical expertise.

I Fall to Pieces…

It’s the sheer volume of minutiae in search marketing that makes it such a daunting proposition. I’ve been immersed in it for over 10 years now and I can tell you, there’s no way one person can stay on top of it. That used to be possible, but it’s not today. Even Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman can’t keep up, and they work unbelievable hours to try.

Search is advancing on all fronts at once. You’ve got Google, Yahoo and MSN trying to gobble up new online territory at a frightening pace. You’ve got new players like MySpace emerging (for the first time, ComScore has included MySpace in its search share numbers). You’ve got new ways of using search, for broadband, on mobile devices and for finding local advertisers. And on top of that, we’re just starting to understand how, when and why consumers use search. I remember once in high school chemistry a classmate spilled a bunch of mercury on a workbench top. A hundred little globs of quicksilver scattered everywhere, proving impossible to round up and contain. That’s what search is like, multiplied by a factor of 100.

It’s Only Words, and Words Are All I Have…

I suppose when you pick search apart at the single message level, it can look pretty simple compared to other channels. Consider the time required to put together one message for one key phrase, compared to what it takes to put together a television ad.

We know that there’s this whole sexy industry behind television ads, with actors, special effects, huge buys and (sometimes) brilliant brand strategies. Now that’s something to admire. They’re like little tiny movies, and we all love movies. But a search ad is, well, just a few words thrown together. What we forget is that every key phrase is its own campaign, infinitely controllable and measurable. For the big search advertisers, that can mean millions of individual campaigns. We buy customers by the penny, building business click by click in a grueling marketing marathon.

There are a lot of moving parts to each of those campaigns, including page placement, maximum bids, messaging, landing page performance and other conversion factors. We obsess over numbers, fine-tuning each campaign to provide maximum performance–or at least, that’s what search marketing should be. It’s this incredible granularity that makes search such a challenge to execute properly.

Search is not easy. Given the choice, I think it would be far easier to consolidate your marketing strategy into a few television ads that are measured on an ephemeral “brand lift” metric, rather then fragment it into millions of individual campaigns, each measured down to the click.

I realize there’s a paradox here. I know it’s this incredible amount of detail that gives rise to the web factories that Burt Helm talks about in Business Week. There’s a lot of heavy lifting to be done. But don’t discount the entire industry by simplifying it down to a room full of people throwing words together. That’s one rather unfortunate aspect of an incredibly dynamic marketing channel. “Typing phrases to drive ad traffic.” Give me a break!

What Sport Rules on Search?

I’ve been meaning to post on this for awhile, but you know how things go.

Anyway, Google Trends is pretty fun to play with. Being in Canada in hockey playoff season, I thought it would be interesting to compare the big 4 sports in North America.

Here’s the results:

So…over all Football rules in terms of search volume, with very regular peaks in basketball during playoffs.

On the top graph, hockey doesn’t look too impressive, but check out the search volumes in the cities. Hockey rules! Even in Minneapolis, the lone US city to make the list, they’re still looking for hockey. To be honest, we consider Minnesotans honourary (notice the Canadian spelling?) Canadians anyway.

Winnipeg is die hard hockey heartland, and they haven’t had a NHL team in 10 years (the Jets moved to Phoenix and became the Coyotes).

I’m not sure whether to be proud of our national obsession, or a little embarassed.

And in the interest of being topical, here’s how searchers cast their votes in April (the latest month available) for American Idol contestants. Hmm..this was almost a full month before the finals. Could search be the crystal ball for reality TV?

MySpace #6 in Search, Google Still #1

ComScore just released their April search market share numbers, and for the first time, they’ve added MySpace on the list, debuting at a respectable number 6 with 43 million searches and a 0.6 share.

This is an interesting generational development. Kids always need to carve out a space for their own that doesn’t seem controlled by adults. Online, this appears to be happening at MySpace. Will this territoriality change the search habits of a new generation? I can admit I’m way past this generation, so I don’t “get” MySpace but I’ll be watching with interest anyway. 43 million searches is nothing to sneeze at.

Other numbers from the ComScore release.

Google gained market share in the US for the ninth consecutive month, with 43.1 percent. Yahoo came in second with 28 percent and MSN third with 12.9 percent. Yahoo has dropped almost 3 points in the past year, and MSN dropped 3.2 points.

Despite my admiration for Ask’s new interface, it appears that not many are sharing my enthusiasm. Their market share has also dropped slightly in the past year, from 6.1 % down to 5.9%. By the way, I can’t say I’m a big fan of the Apostolos Gerasoulis commercials that Ask is running. In their attempts to position Ask as an alternative to Google, the message comes off a little desperate. And as cute as Apostolos’s son Eli is, I’m thinking this is the kid everybody asks for help with homework, but who probably won’t get invited to many parties in high school. (I may or may not have personal experience being this type of kid). Anyway, see what you think.

It does appear that we’re searching more than ever, with total search volume up to 6.6 billion queries a month for the US. That’s a 4% increase over March.

Overall gist of the numbers? Playing it safe won’t beat the Google juggernaut. Time for some bold strategies.

Lights! Camera! Google!

Google will be rolling out user initiated video advertising across it’s AdSense network.

Broken record time. I applaud Google’s decision to keep engagement with the video in the hands of the user.

But on a more fundamental level, I have to question the whole level of engagement with display advertising on sites. It seems like the harder advertiser’s scream, the more determined we are to ignore them. On a recent eye tracking study we did for MarketingSherpa, we were absolutely amazed with the small amount of scanning done in the typical ad positions on a page. Less than 10% of visitors even looked at these sections (top banner, right and left rail) of the page. Now, the purpose of the study wasn’t to look at this aspect specifically, but the scan patterns were undeniably clear. Interestly, text based ads that appeared within the flow of the main content had higher scanning levels, even when they appeared well below the fold.

Of course, these numbers are probably not terribly surprising, given the fact that visitors aren’t there to look at ads, but it makes you question the whole idea of paying by impression. If you’re buying based on a CPM model, realize that for every 1000 impressions, only 60 or 70 people are actually seeing the ad, even for a split second. Suddenly, those low clickthrough rates start to make sense.

A Conversation with Ask’s CEO, Jim Lanzone

First published May 18, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I had the chance to spend some time talking to Ask’s new CEO, Jim Lanzone. The first thing that become very clear is that Lanzone is tired of his company’s being compared to Google, MSN and Yahoo. I immediately slipped into the trap of asking how Ask intends to fight the big G and the two other contenders. It was obviously a question that he has heard all too often in the past. “Let’s begin by resetting the framework for the question,” Lanzone replied. “We don’t want to climb Everest right now. We’re not planning on knocking out Google. Our goal is to take our 20 million users, who are currently using us twice a month, and bump that up to four times a month. That doubles our market share,” he said.

“Search is not a zero sum gain,” Lanzone continued. “Americans use about 3.2 engines a month. We want to get on the list. We want to offer an alternative to Google.” As he pointed out, it’s much easier to post impressive market share growth percentages when you’re starting with a relatively small slice of the pie. “For Google to move the needle even a few points, they have to attract huge numbers of new searches,” he said. “We can achieve huge growth just by getting people to use us a few more times each month.”

Focusing on the User

Ask has come out of the gate strongly since the rebrand and the removal of Jeeves. The focus has been squarely on improving the search experience for its existing user. “We want to put the right tool in the right place at the right time,” said Lanzone. “We want to be waiting for the user when they need us.”

Distancing Ask from the helpful butler has proven itself to be difficult. “People are much more aware of us as Ask Jeeves than Ask. It will take time,” he said. For right or wrong, the efforts of Ask Jeeves to brand themselves as a natural query engine have stuck. A long-time member of Ask’s usability team, Michael Ferguson, pointed out the challenges of trying to change how people search. “For years, we’ve been telling people to ask us a question. We’ve perhaps been a little too successful in encouraging them. I once asked a lady what was the last thing she searched for on (then) Ask Jeeves. She was disappointed in the results she got when she typed in ‘Midnight basketball programs are more successful in LA than in St. Louis. Why is that?'”

I had written some time ago that I believe we’ve become used to truncating our search intent into a few words. Apparently, Ask now agrees. Rather than trying to accommodate natural language, Ask now takes a more standard approach to query construction.

Tools When You Need Them, Where You Need Them

Even the physical layout of Ask’s new home page tried to ease the transition from the once ubiquitous butler. Ferguson said, “We put the new tool palette where Jeeves used to be. It’s about the same height and size, so visually it has the same balance.”

The palette is a big part of the new usability focus of Ask. Lanzone explained, “We have some great tools, and we wanted to move them more upfront for the user. We didn’t want to hide them with tabs, which no one clicks on. With the palette, it’s right there, waiting for them.”

Based on initial numbers, people are using the tools more than ever before. Usage on most of them has doubled, with some, like image and map search, posting far higher gains.

Another change was a rethinking of how to use the real estate of the search results page. “The ads from the right rail are gone,” said Lanzone. “We’ve replaced that with something searchers can use, the ‘Narrow’ and ‘Broaden’ your search suggestions. Rather than 1 or 2 percent click-throughs on ads, we’re getting 30 percent click throughs on those suggestions. We know that search is an iterative process, so why not help make it easier by helping the user get to the right search faster?”

Another cleaned up area of the SERP is the top-sponsored ads. It used to be that organic results were pushed right off the page by far too many sponsored listings. Top-sponsored listings have since been restricted to three, in line with other major engines, with the rest shown at the bottom of the page. This used to be one of my pet peeves with Jeeves, and apparently I had plenty of sympathizers in the Ask usability team. “We were a public company, responding to demand for profits,” Lanzone explains. “A lot of us never agreed with that.” Kudos to parent company IAC for eventually listening to the champions of the user experience.

Not Bolder, Just Better

I wrapped up by telling Lanzone that I believed Ask was in a good position to become the bold innovator in search. Unlike Google and Yahoo, it isn’t solely dependent on a huge revenue stream from search, so it can afford to take some risks in testing new interfaces and developments. He replied, “You know, we’ve never considered what we’ve done, or plan to do, as being bold. It just has to be right for the user. All the changes we’ve made were done because in our testing, it felt right. We’re not chasing technology for its own sake. We have a laser focus on the user experience. We just want to do search right.”

I’m a huge believer in focused strategy and feet on the ground, practical user-centricity. They’re two commodities that are in drastically short supply in the current heated search space. If Ask sticks to its guns, it just may just get a shot at the big dogs in search.

Search Supercharges Ad Platforms but What’s In It for the User?

Seems like all the innovation lately with the search engines has been in rolling out sophisticated ad targeting platforms. Yahoo’s the latest to blow their horn about their own back end (and I realize that paints an ugly picture).

I’m a search marketer, and I love the advances that are being made in being able to target geographically, demographically and behaviorally, but I can’t help but think, “Who are we targeting?”. While the engines try to woo advertisers with better tools, what good is it doing if their market share is dwindling because they’re not giving the user a reason to use the engine?

I have not seen a significant improvement to the every day search user experience from any of the big 3 in years. One may argue that if you take advantage of search history or other enhancements that have debuted in beta, it offers more value to the searcher. But that does nothing for the vast majority of searches that happen every day on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Nobody has upped the ante. Ask is the only engine I’ve seen that made some significant changes on the interface (more about that later today).

As a search marketer, it’s all about market share. It takes time to target and strategically plan a campaign, and while the new platforms offer some impressive capabilities, they also add time required to manage them. Am I going to use that time to target 11% of the search market, 23%  or 50%? It just makes sense to use your time where it gets you the biggest return.

A word of advice. Worry about getting the users first, then worry about the tools to target them.