Microsoft

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Microsoft, Social and Gaming

April 3, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | 1 comment

Microsoft is the least talked about company in social media, yet they are involved in email, online gaming and provide personal profiles to millions of accounts. Windows Live is the online space that ties Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and Xbox Live profiles together. This also includes their blog platform, online groups and other social tools.

All users of Hotmail, Messenger, or Xbox Live automatically have a Windows Live ID, a single login that gives the user access to many Microsoft services. From ComScore’s 2 Million More Australians Go Social in 2009 report, Microsoft Live’s web presence had 1,962,000 unique visits in June 2009, just behind MySpace in Australia.

This does not include people using Microsoft’s services such as Xbox Live and Windows Live Messenger. With the addition of more web services to Xbox Live, Microsoft is certain to increase the use of their social platforms.

The first thing that struck me about the Microsoft Live profile pages and tools is the lack of opacity within its network. There are not many tools for sharing content or for finding new connections compared to sites like Facebook. It is easy to aggregate content from Flickr, RSS feeds and a number of other sources on the profile page but there is a lack of third party tools and applications. Microsoft’s main strength lies in their other products, and not in their web presence. In future it is their gaming platform and email services that will expand their reach.

In this regard, the most significant development for Microsoft will be cross platform gaming, encompassing Xbox360, mobile and desktop computing.

Xbox Live gives its users the ability to find new connections, share relevant content and access a lot of third party content via DLC games. It also provides a structured environment with engaging tasks, much in the same way that MMORPGs do the same for the social environments they create. There are other platforms that incorporate a gaming mechanic (Foursquare.com), have third party developers build one (Facebook.com), or have seen one emerge from user interaction (Twitter.com). It will be interesting to see how cross platform gaming, and applications in general, evolve in both their functionality and in how they are used going forward.

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Text ads and Disruptive advertising

November 23, 2009 in Advertising, Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | 2 comments

Text ads on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) are a disruptive form of advertising. The intention is to distract the viewer whilst they are engaged with one mode of product search, to use an alternative means which produces revenue. In relation to search, the relevance of the ad served is calculated using a different method to that of organic search, and is heavily influenced by both click through rates and money bid per click. AdWords advertising is visible next to and on top of the organic results, on Google Maps, within the AdSense network, in the Search Suggestion box, and so on.

With the option of now adding additional links and other content to an AdWords listing, the look of some AdWords ads is closer to that of organic search. If I were to have a tinfoil hat moment, I might go so far as to say this could potentially lead to the effective monetarisation of organic SERPs returned for branded terms.

NIB Search Engine Result Page

NIB Search Engine Result Page

There is one thing that has driven this renaissance of the text ad by Google, and that is the fact that disruptive advertising can work. AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft’s adCenter have worked because with all the tracking available the advertiser can prove that the money spent has a return, without falling back on nebulous metrics such as branding. With SEM, disruptive advertising does work, provided it is relevant enough.

One product of effective performance measurement is the emphasis on terms that denote an information search close to the point of purchase. The most competitive terms are those that indicate a pre-purchase search. With the exception of a few groups of generic terms, this mindset has left the research and discovery keywords in most markets ignored and possibly undervalued.

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The Yahoo! Microsoft deal

August 4, 2009 in Advertising, Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | No comments

This week saw a significant change in the search market place. A deal was announced that would see Yahoo! search being powered by Bing, and Yahoo! Search Maketing switch to Microsoft’s Adcenter . Soon, this will also mean that what I wrote in “Obvious Paid Search Tips” will be out of date, and the answer to “Hands up everyone who cares about what Yahoo does” is more or less no-one. In terms of something that matters, this will increase interest in ranking well in Bing and, at least outside of Australia, there will be more competition within Adcenter.

Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing

The merging of two Pay Per Click market places will increase internal competition. With more participants in the market and a reduction in available inventory, the cost of traffic will increase. Account management will be more efficient with this consolidation, and the volume of available traffic will increase too.

However, we won’t see this locally, as bidding for Australian traffic through Bing and Yahoo! is done via Yahoo! Search Marketing (Formally Overture, formally Goto, etc). What we will get instead, based on information to date, is an eventual change in the platform we use.

Why People will care more about rank in Bing

With Microsoft powering Yahoo!’s search results a good rank in Bing will mean even more traffic. Most decisions on how to allocate SEO resources are influenced by reported search queries and Google’s domminance within this metric. As a result, a lot of SEO activity online is focused on building for Google. It is seen as the only engine worth building for, as it will return the most for the investment of resources. With a ranking in Bing about to appear for more queries, and the deal generating more awareness, this may drive more interest and activity.

Still more to come

There has been a lot written, and some very in-depth, on this deal over the last week. There are going to be even more blog posts and press releases to follow. The fate of Yahoo!’s other search products has not been revealed yet, and there are other areas that still need to be clarified. One thing that can be taken for granted now is that a lot of people are going to be auditing the size of their brand and industry’s query space, and the rankings of their sites in Bing.

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Bing in Australia, a few weeks on

June 27, 2009 in Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | No comments

Bing has been live in for a few weeks now, and it is time to look back and see what has changed. In short, not much. I have noticed a small dip followed by a spike in traffic on a mature site I work with. The dip in traffic was matched by a drop in terms for which the site was visible. I can only assume that the increase in traffic is due to both the increased attention Microsoft has drawn to their new search engine, and an increase in the terms that the site has appeared for.

Interest in Bing

On another domain I have noticed that terms related to Bing and Bing.com.au have produced a little traffic. This is only to be expected due to the increased interest in the search engine.

SERP reshuffle

One thing that I noticed that is worth watching are changes in the order of sites on the Search Engine Results Pages. For a few of the terms that I have been watching, the top three or four results have remained fairly fixed since lauch. However there has been a bit of movement amoungst the mid-page results. This was even evident on terms where the level of SEO activity can be assumed to be low, and with static sites.

Bing and the Search takeaway

It is simple; there is a lot to be learned right now in how the Search Engine Results Pages have been changing for low competition terms. For now, the changes on these kinds of SERPs are more likely the result of spider and algorithmic activity rather than general updates or targeted optimisation.

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Search, SERPs & Bing.com.au

June 6, 2009 in Advertising, Online, Search, Search Engines by Anthony | No comments

There have been a number of changes hitting the Internet since May in search. Google has released a number of new tools, and there are now approximately one and a half new search engines. This post is about the new half a search engine.

Bing.com
The search engine kind-of-formally-known-as-but-not-the-same-as Live.com has finally arrived, and it is now called Bing.com. There has already been a lot written so far, and some very good articles covering everything from usability through to SEO. I am not going to try to replicate what has been said else where, just add my own observations.

Bing.com vs Bing.com.au
For a number of searches there seems to be a few differences between the main and the geographically localised indexes. When I did a few brand searches, I found that Bing.com.au was returning a different SERP than Bing.com. The most dramatic difference was where a new site was not listed at all in the localised version, while it was visible in the main, for both a search on the site’s name and using the ‘site:’operator . Site descriptive text appeared to vary across the two versions of Bing.com too. With our own sites, this indicated a difference in the age of the information that Bing.com was displaying. There were also a few interesting things observed regarding the treatment of hash tags in site links.

Bing.com ads & additions
Bing.com’s launch is being supported by a monstrous media budget, and will shake things up a little in the search landscape. I personally do not think this will change things too fundamentally. This is no real reason not to keep an eye on it though, as things can always change, and to completely ignore Microsoft’s search engine means that you are ignoring a significant slice of the market. In terms of search, I think it is going to be interesting to watch the localised indexes once they integrate newer information and watch the effect that this has on the SERPS.

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