Initial reactions to SSL Search were mixed

SSL search has been live for over a month now, and for some industries, the percentage os search terms ‘not provided’ keeps on going up. Ironically just as data driven decision making becomes more important to marketing professionals, one of the more valuable sources of information has become compromised.

Keywords are far more revealing about what a visitor is trying to do, what their interests are and how they describe products or ideas. Segmenting traffic by the words they used to arrive on the site can reveal a lot about how effective a campaign is through changes in campaign terms, identifying returning customers through navigational terms like the use of brands and URLs as queries, and also the success or otherwise of search optimisation campaigns.

Read all of Google’s secure search and missing data on MarketingMag.com.au

Whenever a brand throws out the old in favour of something topical it gets attention. It is bold, and both the professional and amateur media love it. In the end the numbers will either vindicate or invalidate the experiment, assuming they measure the ROI in a way that reflects reality. Everything else is speculation, informed or otherwise.

Facebook has got to be better than email...

As interesting as the lively debate between the social media exponents and eDM professionals was at the time, it just begged the question: ‘Why not just do both?’ After all, I am sure you won’t get tarred and feathered at your favourite morning coffee do if you dabble in the black arts of using stuff that works.

Social Media and Email: With, not Instead Of

How you can use a social media platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, et al, is different from the tools available with email, from users’ expectations regarding content and frequency to how the user can interact with the material, and the platform’s restrictions on what can be delivered in what form to whom.

To borrow from Mitch Joel, it is ‘With’ not ‘Instead Of’. Using both social media and email gives you more options, and increases the size of your potential audience. Connecting with customers across multiple platforms facilitates different interactions, and gives the customer the choice of how they want to connect with the brand. Maybe a Facebook fan that finds no value in your updates would actually love the email newsletter, or perhaps the Twitter account amuses them during their work day while they find eDM invasive. Giving the customer the choice can mean that when they opt out of one channel, they might still connect through another.

Building Audiences on Other People’s Platforms

Building eDM and Social Media Audiences

Facebook fans are not really yours; neither are Twitter followers. Without the accounts they are connected to, these audiences don’t exist. Unlike email. There is also little point in building different engagement strategies for multiple channels without cross-promoting them.

Competitions, surveys and other data collection or content driven special events can accomplish both of these goals:

• Making the brand’s audience aware of other touch points and
• Collecting contact details and other information through either a microsite or the brand’s main web presence.

The nature of eDM as a one way communication channel without the ability to demonstrate social proof makes it better suited to direct customers to a range of appropriate social media touch points, where most of the content would be published during the campaign. Cross promotion of the brand’s social media touch points and a call to action that would lead to further entries in the brand’s email database and CRM will generate better connection with and a better picture of the audience.

Promoting campaigns such as these should not be restricted to just eDM and social media. Getting the most out of it requires that other media is added to the mix, be it print, broadcast, SMS, MMS, PR, online display and promotional activity on the brand’s site. However it is executed, there should be two returns to the business:

• More information on the brand’s customers
• More points of contact with the brand’s customers.

Do Everything You Can Do Well

Limited access to resources and avoiding uneconomic channels are the only reasons that should affect what tools are and are not used online. There is no reason to abandon one kind of promotional activity online in favour of another. With so many ways to go online and consume information, arbitrarily limiting a brand’s options in how it can reach and be reached by its customers is not a winning strategy.

Brands in the Cesspool

Since 2008 if you talk about brands and search anyone familiar with search marketing immediately remembers Eric Schmidt’s speech to an audience of visiting magazine executives. The then CEO of Google stated that:

Brands are the solution, not the problem, brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

Since the Vince / Brand update and Eric Schmidt’s infamous ‘cesspool’ remark, a lot has been written about how Google treats brands in search. Sites directly linked to brands appear to have an easier time ranking, can occupy more space on the results page and can have an edge over aggregators competing for long tail queries including brand terms.

The crowded Search Engine Results Page

Constricted space in the first pageview of the search results page and the range of content being displayed, including places, headlines, video, products and information, place a premium on the top two spots. The range of content a brand generates can help to increase the area on the results page it occupies across some searches:

• User Generated Content
• Press Releases
• News Items
• Advertising and Marketing Content

Brands benefit from more than just the way Google handles and displays data. As significant as the Vince update and Google’s changes to their search engine results pages are, there is more to marketing brands in search than the mechanics involved.

Own Your Keywords

Your Brand Name is Your Castle

It takes time, money and consistent performance over time to build a brand. Being an Apple or a Coke isn’t cheap, and maintaining a market-defining identity is hard, as the Yahoo!s and Nokias of the world have demonstrated. The ability to lay claim to a collection of words, like iPod or Googling, is a very powerful marketing tool, and has a real impact on search.

Being able to dominate a search term or query space naturally tied to the name of the company is very powerful, especially if the company dominates its industry. Search is as much a navigational tool as one used for information discovery. Training a market to search for your products with terms that you create or control (now with additional help from Google) ensures it is harder to lose share of search.

Building a query space where the incumbent has a natural advantage over any invasion is very much a castle and moat strategy. Challenging the brand that ‘owns’ the query space can be costly, and challenging on the brand name itself prohibitively so.

Nothing is Really this Simple

Not all searches including a brand term are treated the same way, and not all brands are used alike. In most cases the name itself will return the brand’s main site at the top of search, but without an optimisation strategy, long tail queries with brand terms are still open to competition.

The brand’s custodians still need to consider optimising for phrases where a brand term is entered with other qualifying words. Long tail queries like these are still open to direct competition, especially in markets where the brand is used to describe a product or activity, or is used as a proper noun. It is the difference between a search for ‘Nokia’ and a search for ‘Nokia N9 prices Australia’. The latter is easier to optimise for, and there is more of a financial motive to do so. Even with no money to be made, fans will build out the brand’s query space and generate content that will populate the search results, as many companies demonstrate, such as Apple.

Not every brand is directly selling something. Some provide information or opinion, aggregate or organise information from other sources, represent an interest, a group or a franchise. Broadly speaking, most brands fall into one of the following loose groups:

• Representative (governments, interest groups, lobby groups)
• Product (Apple, Nike)
• Franchise (McDonald’s, Oporto)
• Informational (newspapers, TV stations)
• Portal/Search engines (Facebook, Google, Yahoo!)

How a brand manages competition within its query space and optimises both its main and micro sites depends on its business model. A brand that sells product through partners or retailers may not need to optimise for location or transactional searches. Brands whose business model depends on an ad model need as much traffic that is relevant to the advertisers as they can get. An entertainment brand with a specific product offering, such as a TV station or sports team, might benefit from a more focused approach, targeting product specific phrases and usage terms.

Most of the options available to these business models apply almost equally for non-branded participants in the market as much as for brands; the difference is in execution. Due to their very nature, brands can affect the search behaviour of the market through other advertising and public relations channels. By announcing new products or creating content and interest around new terms, they can drive search behaviour to terms that they have optimised for, with their primary touchpoints or with campaign-specific content.

Marketing a brand in search is different to optimising for general traffic and has its own advantages. Google seems to favour what it defines as an ‘entity’ and creating searches on a word or phrase of your own creation through brand identity and other promotional activity is a real edge. Brands take time and resources to create, but there is value in the result that goes beyond an algorithm update.

Generic versus Brand Searches

Creating a Generic versus Brand Search Rule

Brand search term rules are so important that Google Analytics uses ‘Generic Keywords vs Brand Keywords’ as an example name during the custom Multi-Channel Funnel grouping creation process. It is a very powerful tool, assessing the general performance of a search related campaign, paid or otherwise. Further segmenting search by paid and unpaid and adding both direct and referral traffic makes it even more useful.

Search, Direct and Referral Paths

Search marketing is a great opportunity to reach people without much awareness of your brand and change their behaviour. Online search is more or less a de facto collection of bookmarks, where people enter queries based on URLs, brand or product for sites they have already visited. Tracking queries by the presence of brand terms through Multi-Channel Funnels can reveal how often non-branded search leads to branded queries, direct or referral sales. This can be a great tool for selling the value of SEO internally by demonstrating its value in the customer’s product research behaviour.

Regular Expressions for the rules

Regular expressions are a great way to keep your sanity when you are building the rules for any group of keywords. For example, brand traffic is not just going to be attributed to the correct, proper name of the brand. Variations in spelling and construction have to be accounted for. As an example, for tracking queries on the brand ‘Greyhound Australia’, the regular expression would include the brand and its most common misspellings:

greyhound|grey hound|grayhound|gray hound

The same kind of regular expressions can be used in other rules, like product terms or search terms targeted in a focused SEO project.

Product Terms with or without Brand

Whether or not a search contains a brand term only really speaks to awareness. Brand terms alone don’t distinguish between navigational, informational or transactional queries. A search for just ‘Greyhound Australia’ is clearly navigational. The search lacks any other qualifying term and Google’s recent change to how sitelinks are displayed for some queries seems to indicate even they regard such searches as purely navigational.

Brand rules with and without product terms

Creating rules that label traffic using qualifying terms and traffic that doesn’t can make the difference between navigational and informational searches in the funnel clear. Differentiating between a search for ‘Greyhound Sydney to Canberra’ and ‘Greyhound Australia’ is the difference between seeing a funnel with two brand searches, and a funnel with a search for a product including a brand term and a navigational brand search.

Campaign Source Attribution

There are more online customer acquisition channels than search. Directories, display networks, guest posts, links and advertorial are all tools that can reach new customers or initiate research and purchase behaviour. Multi-Channel Funnels and custom groupings make it easy to see how they feed into other traffic sources.

Tracking more than search traffic

Adding rules for campaign URLs used in advertising or branded content and source URLs such as social media touchpoints make it possible to see how these activities drive customer behaviour. The ability to identify campaigns that drive sales both directly and through other channels make informed decisions regarding future activity easier.

Custom Groupings: Just Start Using Them

Multi-Channel Funnels make it easier to see what works, what doesn’t and how certain activities can lead to sales. The ability to differentiate between broad information searches and brand focused queries and identify how they are linked across different search mediums is valuable. Tracking conversions across campaigns and channels makes it easier to make informed decisions about social media activity, guest posts and display advertising or directory lists as well.

Plan how to integrate Multi-Channel Funnels with your current online activities. The process to get started can be as simple as:

• Create custom Channel groupings focusing on sources that matter:
  • To you
  • To the people you report to
• Create new Channel groupings from existing ones to monitor new campaigns and sources
• See what works, see what doesn’t, see what can be improved

What are your Must Have Multi-Channel Funnels?

The single most important thing I think Multi-Channel Funnels can give you is the ability to see what broad research behaviours lead to direct navigational activity, either as direct visits or navigational brand searches.

How are you going to use these new tools in Google Analytics?

Getting return on your rankings? on MarketingMag

How a query is structured can be as important as how many search for it. The words someone uses can indicate how close they are to buying or what level of information they need. Sometimes a general high traffic term is not the best if it is conversions you want.

In a paper called ‘A Taxonomy of Web Search‘ (PDF) that categorised search queries by the searcher’s intent into a number of groups, each indicating a different task. Matching your keyword strategy to customer intent instead of just looking for the words with the most volume is a powerful strategic tool when optimising for conversions.

In any organisation with a website, someone has received an email a little like this. It would have been sent from a Gmail address, and the letters ‘S E O’ are in the subject. The copy would mention whitehat, search, optimisation, link building and sometimes there would be a line a little like this: “Your site only ranks 12th for ‘keyword’”; ‘keyword’ being a single word that relates to your industry. There are a lot of variations on this theme, that try a lot of different approaches, but they all fail to make one point. Why is ranking for that one search term worth paying for? . . .

Read the full version of “Getting return on your rankings?” on MarketingMag.com.au

Diaspora's Kickstarter t-shirt

Diaspora’s privacy management is based on Aspects. The user groups their connections by a set of personal criteria, and can choose who gets to see which updates, and which stream of content they consume. Grouping people in this way isn’t really new; Google’s other social network, Orkut, employs a similar system, as does their new social project, Google+, with its Circles. Diaspora’s big point of difference is as a federated network. Anyone can take the software, install it on a server, and connect it to other installations, called pods. Now after almost a year and with Google+ live to a limited audience, how has Diaspora gone?

The View from Diaspora

The view from Diaspora

Since launch the development of Diaspora has not stopped. The interface has been improved, Diaspora supports mentions and hashtags in status updates and searches on public posts. Users can post from Diaspora to Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and anyone’s public stream is available as an RSS feed.

Diaspora has a few more tools than it had at launch that make it easier to share sites and images while not on the site. A bookmarklet and an awesome photo sharing tool called cubbi.es (It saves an image on shift+left click, posts it to your cubbi.es account, into your stream on Diaspora, and can back it up to your Dropbox account as well). But there is one part of Diaspora’s user experience that has been stagnant for a while, and that’s mobile.

Personally Diaspora never really took off within my own social circles. No-one I know in real life, or through other social networks, is currently active within Diaspora. All the people with whom I currently interact on Diaspora, I met there, and they all sit in a ‘People from Diaspora’ Aspect.

Adding Google to the mix

A Google+ Perspective

And now there is Google+. The project has had an awesome take-up rate and already has over 10 million users. A lot of my acquaintances who were on Diaspora but never really used it are now very active on Google+. Whether this is the result of a solid product on Google’s part, or simply of the initial hype, remains to be seen.

Google+ does a lot of things differently to Diaspora (and Orkut) even if there is some overlap of the core mechanics of Circles vs Aspects. Notifications for activity on Google+ are visible while on other Google products, like Gmail and Google Reader, and can be acted upon without returning to Google+.

Eric Schmitt’s “Put your best people on mobile” is obvious on Google+. The project’s mobile experience is awesome on both mobile web and the Android app (which I love). Google+ has a number of other features, the most talked about being their desktop video feature called Hangouts, and mobile group messaging feature called Huddle.

Google+ probably won’t ‘kill’ Facebook. The size of the networks most users have built on Facebook represents a massive switching cost should they wish to migrate to another platform. Google+ will, at least for now, be a second social network, similar to how many people have active LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and other social media profiles as well as their Facebook accounts.

Where Google+ can clearly replace Facebook is on mobile. For ages the Facebook mobile experience has been bad, bordering on malicious. The only reason that Google+ isn’t actually replacing Facebook on mobile for me is because I stopped using Facebook on my phone ages ago. Facebook’s app and mobile website are horribly slow and unstable, and do not offer me enough as a user to make it worth the aggravation to use. Google+’s Android app is the opposite. It is fast, easy to navigate and use, and lets me see public posts by people near me and tag posts with my location.

Why Google+ will expand and Diaspora will remain niche

Diaspora is a solid, open platform that gives the user as much control as they want to take on, and judging from the work the team has put into it so far, will continue to improve. Google+ has a lot of awesome features on launch and has the benefit of the Google brand and integration with their other products. Both platforms have good reasons to use them and both cover areas that Facebook does not. Diaspora is more sensitive regarding user privacy and Google+ offers features that Facebook either doesn’t have, or does badly.

The biggest difference between Google+ and Diaspora is that while both do things that Facebook does not, most people don’t care about the needs that Diaspora meets, whereas those Google+ cover are obvious from the start. There are a few small differences, like how Diaspora sorts posts either by the date of the post, or the latest comment, which Google+ does not do. There are also other similarities, in that both let the user export their data easily and fully, unlike Facebook.

Diaspora does have a future, but it won’t be as large as Google+. Facebook will probably start to fill the gaps that Google+ seems aimed at, and this can already been seen in the rumours surrounding Project Spartan. For now though, Google+ will continue to gain users at a greater rate than Diaspora, and for all its flaws, Facebook isn’t going anywhere.

Clickthroughs by Average Position on the first page

Google’s first pageview looks very crowded. In seeking to answer the searcher’s query as best they can, search engines are creating richer, more nuanced search result pages, with video, images, news and other kinds of information displayed along with links to the ranking sites. All this extra content has to go somewhere, and thus increases the competition for screen real estate.

The first spot for an organic result has always been the best, and the click through rate (CTR) certainly justifies this. The interesting question is where does this trend leave spots two through to ten? Is third still worth something? Can you be happy with being fourth on a competitive query, as the costs associated with ranking higher begin to scale upwards at an alarming rate? Just how bad is it once you fall below the fold, and where is this even happening?

The Personalised Search Nightmare

There is no single search engine result page (SERP) for any term. Assuming one person’s search experience is going to be the same as another’s is not a sustainable position. Previous behaviour on the part of the user as an individual, and users as a group defined by data-centre or location, all potentially affect what is shown. Recent news and updates need to be considered too in the fast updating post-caffeine world. You could build a model for an average SERP within a given audience, given access to enough information from a decent sample. This might give an indication of what is included in the SERP, and which results would be seen in the first pageview.

The Best Best Guess

There is an alternative to attempting to identify the most likely combination of organic sites, videos, news, places, snippets, images and paid ad units to appear to a given user for assessing the value of a position. Projected search volumes compared to visits can potentially shed light on the relative worth of a position between queries. For sites you personally manage, Google’s Webmaster Tools is a great source for this kind of data. Google is far from transparent with most published numbers relating to organic search, and the figures presented are by no means precise. But for a site with significant search visibility, there should be enough data to begin to make reasonable assumptions.

The graph at the start of this blog post was created for just this purpose. The data was taken from Google Webmaster Tools for a site that gets a reasonable amount of organic traffic. The actual data set used is for searches of over 100 reported impressions for terms with an average position of ten or less within a single geographic region (country is the most specific location available). The data at a glance indicates that once the average position is greater than two, CTR is rarely better than 25%. (The graph is available here via Impure.)

What to Ask Next?

The terms used in building this data set include brand queries, product queries and general searches. They cover transactional, navigational and informational behaviours and numerous specific geographic terms. There is a lot more that can be done from here to find interesting, actionable insights.

The search terms themselves are an important part of the data set, and so far under-utilised. The next step in examining the data could be to:

• Examine geographic queries:
  • As one data set
  • As individual locations
• Remove branded queries
• Examine product queries
• Examine news/information queries

Splitting the data by query potentially accounts for the effect of maps in the SERPs, visibility by Place listing, the effect of the query matching the brand or product on CTR, and CTR for informational searches.

The options for examining the effects of ranking, CTR and search type is dependent on the nature of the site in question and what its actual search visibility is. Looking closer at what content gets clicked in search versus position across different kinds of queries can give great insights into what content works. It will also reveal where a few well performing search types are hiding the gaps in a poorly performing SEO strategy.

There is a site in there somewhere

Search engine result pages are made up of more than 10 blue links. As search engines like Google display more kinds of information and content and space within the first pageview is at a premium, how information is used in support of search marketing must evolve too.

Google’s search results page has come a long way from the original plain ten blue links. Over the years these ten links have been joined by a wide range of other kinds of information. Google has stated that their goal is to answer searchers’ questions faster and with more relevance, so the results page has become more informative and the content displayed more diverse.

Read the full post on MarketingMag.com.au

Living in a Fishbowl

When certain Queensland Association for Healthy Communities (QAHC) ads were pulled from bus stops around Brisbane this week, my Facebook and Twitter feeds filled with protests, jokes, demands that the ads be put back and a…

Read the full post on MarketingMag.com.au

Music in the cloud, and buying Skype

A Distributed Microsoft Social Network

Microsoft has a successful email service, a popular gaming platform with an online social network and a messaging client with a large install base. Also at the end of last year, Microsoft released a Facebook app for Live Messenger and began to incorporate social feeds into their own mobile and desktop chat clients. Microsoft already has a network covering multiple platforms and devices. Skype is an expansion of this network, and with Qik, it certainly shows some potential for mobile.

A more social Live

Reaching the Multi-Screen, Multi-Device, Multi-Platform User

There is more than one way to reach a new destination on the Internet. There is also more than one kind of software to use, device to operate and method to find new things. An Internet where banners and search advertising displayed in a browser are the only means of advertising no longer exists.

Mobile, gaming and social platforms are as important for building awareness as online advertising targeting desktop computer usage. The Microsoft Advertising blog has published a lot of content on reaching the multiscreen consumers, and advertising across multiple devices.

Buying An Audience

A number of interesting stats on Skype users were shared after the announcement. The most impressive was Skype’s current 170 million users and 40% year over year growth.

Buying Skype (with Qik in tow) gives Microsoft more users, much in the same way that their deal with Nokia will increase their Windows Phone 7 install base from 1.4% in Q4 2010. Even if Nokia loses an expected market of 50 million smartphones in 2011, the market share left by the time a Windows Phone 7 handset arrives will still be more than Microsoft has now.

Attention is all online

With information as easy to create and publish as it is now, it is curation that matters. Curation is more than a directory and a search engine now. Microsoft’s range of services, software and devices position them for a post-PC world, with its fragmented user experience. Microsoft’s own published reports say that we now:

…start our sessions in what I would call our intimate zones seeking personal information and contact through email, social networks, blogs etc.

Microsoft is building a distributed social network, covering computers, gaming, mobiles and tablets. They are creating a platform that can include Hotmail users, Xbox Live users, Facebook users, Windows Live users and now, Skype and Qik users. It reaches consoles, computers and mobiles and is accessible from different devices and platforms. It just isn’t limited to a single domain.