Just last week I took a CNN analyst to task for not seeing the importance of MySpace. How quickly things come to pass on the online world. Yesterday came the announcement that News Corp is looking for a search partner to help them monetize the incredible traffic that MySpace is generating. See, create an online community and there will be ways to monetize it. Analysts, look up just a little from the quarterly returns and try to look a little further down the road.
Category Archives: Web Search
Stay Tuned for more from Quintura
The developers of Quintura, the semantic mapping engine that I took a look at last month, apparently took my comments to heart. I got an email from Yakov Sadchikov saying they launched a new service for the Russian market and an English Version should be coming soon. Yakov says, “we will keep on introducing new features to solve this issue of ‘longer than a second and more than one click to refine search'”. He also pointed me to a good review on Tucows. He says to keep tuned. I will!
Google, Microsoft, Print, TV and other Thoughts on a Rainy Day
It’s raining and I’m not feeling particularly industrious, so I’ll push back the “To do” pile a little bit farther and catch up on some blog posts.
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the search engine’s foray into the world of print advertising, and Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan tries to pinpoint where Google’s attempt to introduce an auction based model to print could have gone wrong.
One point put forth in the column (although not Dave’s) that’s worth considering is that an auction based market is a tremendously efficient one. It has little overhead and it allows prices to find their own sustainable levels, based on the value in the buyer’s mind. This worked well for search because it presented untapped value. There was no place for search to go but up. Which it did.
Print is another matter. It represents an entire food chain with an accompanying industry that subsists on it. That comes with built in inefficiencies and therefore, pricing inflation. Arguably, when introduced to an open, dynamic, buyer controlled pricing market, print had nowhere to go but down. Which it did. And that was the problem.
But Dave points to another issue, and that’s the significant differences between print and search. Search is driven by intent, which means that search interactions generally lead to a purchase event in the not too distant future. And each click is an expression of that intent, which makes it easy for markets to start assessing value to the click. This measurable value provides easy justification for the bid price. In fact, it’s this direct response approach to search that’s introducing many of the challenges we face in trying to quantify value to search touch points as we move further away from the purchase.
Print is a different animal. It’s often used for branding, a much less quantifiable objective, and it’s not clickable. There’s no way to immediately and easily assign value, which makes bidding a guessing game at best, rather than a provable strategy.
In the end, it comes to down to a number of factors, including underestimating the inertia of the print market, the fact that in a price inflated market, an auction based model will find efficiencies, not profit, and, once again, Google thinking that as soon as they enter a new market and affix a Google label, the world will change rotational direction to accommodate them.
And yes, there is a theme emerging in my posts. I’m not a Google basher. I like much of what they do, I like their cocky optimism, I love what they’ve done for search and deep down inside, I do hope they reinvent at least part of the way we do business (nods to John Battelle) but the fact remains that I don’t agree with their strategy of attacking everything at once. It’s not sustainable.
I was in an interesting conversation yesterday with a multi year veteran of the technology wars. He said that Google takes a typical engineer’s view of the universe, and that is in any model, including business models, the more points you have between the producer and the end consumer, the more friction that is introduced. Google’s view is that friction is inefficient and should be eliminated, disintermediated, freeing the flow to go direct. Other companies, through long experience, including Microsoft, have learned differently. Friction is good, friction is valuable, and friction is inevitable in a world populated by people, not machines. Each friction point is an opportunity to add value.
With the two different views of the universe, it’s interesting to note that Microsoft is looking to enter the offline world as well. They announced that their vision of adCenter is a multi channel platform, that will introduce an auction based model and search like accountability to other channels, including television and print. Boy, if you thought print was a tough model to crack, wait til you take on television! Google’s problem, says Microsoft, is that they didn’t understand the print medium. By the way, in this story near the bottom there’s a really interesting line that speaks of many blog posts to come:
Bradford also indicated that Microsoft was gearing up to compete with Google for employees. She said Microsoft hopes to lure staff from Google when the company’s stock options begin vesting next year.
But another post, another day.
I don’t disagree with introducing efficiencies in the ad buying market. I believe it’s long, long, long over due. And I love the idea of introducing more accountability. But everyone has to understand going in that this means the tearing apart of an existing and considerable power construct (or several) and reinventing from the ground up. That takes time and resources. It takes patience. It takes adoption. Each of these speaks to a strategy that will take a considerable time for execution and to turn a profit. The fact that everyone is jumping on the Google print experiment (including Google themselves) because it wasn’t profitable out of the gate is a little ridiculous. Did Google really think they were going to change the world that quickly? Did the analysts? Did we learn nothing from the Dotcom bust?
Speaking of Google and TV, there’s an interesting column over at iMedia by Alan Shulman about the Googleization of TV. Check it out.
Okay, the rain is stopping, I thinned a few items out of my “blog fodder” in box, my “To do” pile is inching closer and the hordes are starting to gather at my door. Time to get back to work!
Friday’s Fodder Folder Clear Out
After almost 2 months of blogging, I’m started to get a system. Usually, when I see items of interest come through my inbox or have interesting conversations, I file them away for a future blog post in a folder called Blog Fodder. Well, the folder is overflowing, and I don’t have time to do full posts, but I did want to pass them along, so I’m cleaning house today.
More Search Research
The Daves (Williams and Berkowitz) and the rest of the gang over at 360i and SearchIgnite released a study looking at the value of multiple clicks on a search ad. This is an interesting indicator of the complexity of the search interaction in a purchase life cycle, something that needs a lot more light shone upon it. I remember Greg Sterling and I talking at one point at a SES session about the messy and twisting nature of a consumer’s online path in a purchase cycle. I’m happy to say that research companies are starting to focus on this Gordian knot (and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t named after me).
ComScore is one of those jumping on board with a recently announced study to look at the influence of online research on offline purchase. The value here is huge, just never quantified that well (or at all) and the ComScore study should be a step in the right direction. I’m hoping to chat with VP James Lamberti more about the study next week. If I’m able, I’ll drop a few tidbits about what they’re looking at.
OMD and Yahoo also released a study looking at this, called the Long and Winding Road. Speaking of Greg Sterling, he’s got a look at the study on his blog, with links to the press release and a few columns. Not sure how publicly available the study is. If you’re interested, perhaps contact your friendly neighborhood Yahoo rep. Fascinating reading!
The Bulls of SEM
Sapna Satagopan from JupiterResearch is bullish on the future of SEM, saying as the number and size of companies moving into search continues to increase, it will drive SEM outsourcing. At first glance, this seems to contradict the findings from the annual SEMPO survey, which indicates that more companies are bringing this in house. Steven Rappaport, a writer who’s currently working on an online advertising field guide for ARF, asked about this in a conversation this week. I explained that the two seeming different viewpoints are two stages in the same cycle. As companies dedicate more attention and budget to search, they do want to gain control in-house, so they are looking for search expertise to bring on board. While these new “directors of search” oversee search activities, they look for experts in specific areas to outsource to. It’s not really efficient for companies to set up an entire search marketing division in-house, and many companies realize this after going down this road for awhile.
Long Tail and other Musings
Cory Treffiletti wrote a column on the Long Tail model of business that has been exploited expertly by Amazon, eMusic, iTunes and the king of long tails, eBay. This is an idea I’ll have to come back to, as it has fascinating implications for retail. But until then, consider, an internet etail model doesn’t have any of the physical limitations of a traditional store. With virtual inventory, provided by direct suppliers, the store, or site, simply acts as the connector. And with expert use of search, the primary connection vehicle, it becomes possible for an online story to carry everything, but with the inventory infinitely segmentable. This brings about the idea of a mega-online shopping site, which is close to what eBay and Amazon have become. Tie this in with smarter shopping search tools and the social networking WOM power of a MySpace, and you’ve got a convergence model that’s mind blowing in its implications.
Tom Hespos takes a stab at a favorite subject of mine, the transference of control over brand messaging from the advertiser to the consumer.
American “Idol”izing Google Trends
First published June 8, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider
Let me apologize right off the bat. I’m going to jump on a pop culture bandwagon, but I’m doing it to prove a point. Search trends reflect the interests of our society, and they can provide an invaluable way to gain intelligence about what’s on the public’s mind.
First of all, some facts to consider:
- The most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate were 54.5 million, for Ronald Reagan in 1984.
- On Wednesday, May 24, 63 million votes were cast in the final voting episode of “American Idol”
- All votes for “American Idol” were cast in a 2-hour window. Typically polls are open for most elections for 13 hours, not including advance polling.
- In “American Idol,” there was not one hanging chad.
Obviously, “American Idol” struck a chord with the public this year. Some say the final choice of Taylor Hicks was a surprise, but was it? With the help of Google Trends, I did a little forensic investigation and charted the rise in popularity of the contestants, as captured on Google.
A couple of caveats. Total search volumes are an approximation, as Google Trends doesn’t show actual numbers, and currently Google is only showing trends up to the end of April. But as you’ll see, for the purposes of this column, that’s enough.
I divided the contestants into three groups based on indicated search volumes: the Front Runners, the Also-Rans and the Basement Dwellers. I’ve included a link to the chart for each.
Taylor Hicks started the strongest out of the gate, dominating search volumes in February during the early rounds. Although he lost ground to Kellie Pickler and Chris Daughtry in March, he came back strong in April, only being edged out in total volume for the month by Kellie, due to a surge in searches the week she was voted off.
Pretty boy Ace Young was No. 2 in February, but lost steam moving into March and never seemed to recover. Chris Daughtry was a slow starter in February, but built steam through strong performances in March. Unfortunately, he seemed to lose his edge in April, as search volumes started to drop from their high in mid-March.
The sleeper in this group was Katherine McPhee, who slowly built up steam through late February, March and April, with a huge peak towards the end of April.
If one was to predict outcomes based on search trends from February through April, I would have called it this way
1. Taylor Hicks
2. Katherine McPhee
3. Chris Daughtry
4. Kellie Pickler (one has to adjust for the spike on the week she was voted off)
Remember, this was almost a full month before the final show.
In the middle of the “Idol” pack was a group that just couldn’t seem to spark the interest of America, despite significant talent.
- Lisa Tucker started off the strongest of the group, but could never seem to rise above the search volumes generated mid-February. There was no “buzz” around her. Kevin Covais, on the other hand, emerged out of nowhere and did build through February and March. It’s also interesting to note that when many of the contestants were voted off, their search volumes dropped off the Google trend radar. However, Kevin was voted off March 22, but kept showing up well into April.
- Diva Mandisa started from nowhere, but generated some of the highest search volumes of all on the night she was voted off. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. And poor Elliott Yamin didn’t have a chance. Despite a great voice (maybe the best, if you believe the judges) he just didn’t turn America’s crank. Although he built search volume slowly, he never emerged as a contender.
The three who were certified “buzz”-less were Paris Bennett (maybe she should change her name to Hilton), Bucky Covington and Melissa McGhee.
Paris started off hot right out of the starting gate in January, but never went anywhere from there. It seems we got used to the dynamic vocals, the pixie-like speaking voice and the cool hats–and ceased to care. Bucky and Melissa really only attracted significant volumes on the days they were voted off.
The point of this exercise is this. Search volumes do mirror public opinion, and can act as an amazingly accurate indicator of our collective interests. If you would have had access to search volume information, you could have called the results of “American Idol” long before the final show.
The other thing that was interesting was to see the power of community, both in the search results and the actual results. When you look at the top locations for searching, they are, in order: Greensboro, N.C., Charlottesville, Va., Raleigh, N.C., Charlotte, N.C. and Atlanta.
The North Carolina contingent was incredibly active in its quest for information on Chris, Kellie and to a lesser extent, Bucky, far out-searching the rest of the country for those individuals. The search demands for Taylor, Katharine and Ace were spread evenly throughout the country.
If you haven’t played with Google Trends yet, give it a spin. It can provide a fascinating glimpse into search buzz, and through it, what’s on our collective minds at any given time, on any given subject.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Out of My Gord 