Performics Performance Marketing Blog: SEM, SEO, Social & Display

Search Happenings

Posted by JC Longbottom, Marketing Analyst

From the Engines:

·         Inside AdWords’ Top 10 posts of 2008.

Other Topics of Interest:

·         comScore: YouTube tops Yahoo! and MSN in November searchers.

·         Google not liable for fraudulent PPC ads.

·         8 ways a client can help their paid search campaign succeed.

·         Amazon has best holiday shopping season ever.

Some Fun Stuff:

·         Shepherd controls flock with wolf picture.

Search Happenings

Posted by JC Longbottom, Marketing Analyst

From the Engines:

·         Google’s countdown to 2009.

·         Yahoo!: Getting the most from paid search in the bad economy.

Other Topics of Interest:

·         eMarketer: 2009 search predictions.

·         Google Maps now has YouTube videos.

·         Google ramps up Search Suggest.

Some Fun Stuff:

·         You’d better not park…

·         Santa bitten by a bobcat.

Holiday Sales Starting to Slow

Posted by: Chris Costello, Senior Manager, Digital Research

 

When we last left our holiday season already in progress, a strong surge in sales on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday had us speculating about how early returns would affect the shopping dynamic  throughout the rest of December:  Were shoppers “front-loading” their purchases?  Would year-over-year increases sustain through the whole of the season?

Yes.  And no.  Below is the revised chart of sales per advertiser by day, time-aligned to Thanksgiving.  While Cyber Monday proper showed 43 percent growth over last year, what we call “Cyber Monday 2” (12/8/2008) only showed 17 percent  growth, and “Cyber Monday 3” (12/15/2008) actually declined relative to last year.  While I expected the growth to drop in the middle of next week, my gut was that it would have started from around 30 percent on Monday to 15 percent by midweek; however, the curve ended up lower.

 

   

How will Google SearchWiki Affect SEO?

Posted by Sam Battin, Natural Search Strategist

SearchWiki, implemented on Google in November, allows the customization of Google search results pages.  With SearchWiki, users can re-rank or delete sites, add new sites to their searches, or even post public comments on sites in their searches.  Like many Google initiatives, SearchWiki was launched with little fanfare, no promises, and the potential to fundamentally change how people use the Web.

If you are logged-in to Google, your search results page will show three new buttons:

 
Using these three buttons will change the results of future Google queries only for you, and no one else, and only when you are logged-in.  To see the comments other users have written about a site, you must scroll to the bottom of the page and click:

Search Happenings

Posted by JC Longbottom, Marketing Analyst

From the Engines:

·         Live Search: getting the right links.

·         New AdWords options for iPhone and G1.

·         AdWords now allows hard liquor ads.

Other Topics of Interest:

·         9 myths of landing page quality score.

·         The importance of rankings in local listings.

·         EU considering plan to bring broadband to rural areas using satellites.

Some Fun Stuff:

·         Joe the Plumber plugs book.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday- Charting Uncharted Waters

Posted by Chris Costello, Senior Manager, Digital Research

 

First, as this is my first blog byline, an introduction.  My name is Chris Costello, known in these parts as “Coz” due to a proliferation of employees named Chris when I started at Performics, and I head up the research team at the company.  If you’re wondering who slipped two Van Halen references into a search trend report that addressed Yahoo’s “Panama” platform a couple of years ago, that was me.

 

Second, we just released some data on our retail clients’ performance on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and I figured I’d take this opportunity to add some context around it.  The big headline, and the part that actually surprised me quite a bit, is that Black Friday outperformed the “first” Cyber Monday.  We pulled data going back six years, and this is the first time that’s ever happened.  As if that weren’t enough, that first Cyber Monday – we’re on record as saying every Monday between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a Cyber Monday – also grew substantially over last year.  Forty-three percent, to be exact.

 

The New and Improved Yahoo! Content Match

Posted by Erica Beck, Search Analyst (Paid Search)

Yahoo! announced the new and improved content match in October 2008.  Although the interface has not changed, the technology behind it has improved dramatically. According to the Yahoo! Blog, “The new technology not only attempts to understand what the content is on a page, but also, who is viewing it, which helps you get your ad in front of the right customer. Content Match now combines a better understanding of web page and ad content with insights from users’ geographic and behavioral profiles.”

How Does This Affect YOUR Programs?

1. Improve relevancy of searches and the ads that they are served 

2. As a result of improved relevancy advertisers should also see a significant boost in click-through rate

3. Yahoo! Content Network has also been expanded for increased reach for advertisers

SES Keynote Live Blog: Lawrence Lessig: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy

Posted by: Dan Malachowski, Product Marketing Manager (Natural Search)

Lawrence Lessig:
How we can win the battle against IP extremism from his book “Remix.”  The Internet needs a freedom that we depend upon and it is threatened by copyright lawyers.

Starts With Three Stories
(1) A long time ago, the elite spoke Latin and ordinary people spoke normal languages, so masses ignored the elite.

(2) John Philip Sousa was not a fan of the new “talking machine” because he thought it would cause young people to stop singing together.  He feared we would lose the capacity of this read-write creativity.  The “talking machine” culture would be read-only, a culture that is top down where the vocal cords of ordinary people are lost.

(3) 1919 US launched Prohibition with the ideal to clean-up America.  By 1929, people began to realize this was failing.  Government used wiretapping to entrap criminals.  Was the government allowed to wiretap without a warning?  The Supreme Court turned to the Fourth Amendment (freedom from unreasonable searches).  Justice Taft said that the amendment was meant to stop trespassing, not wiretapping.  Louis Brandeis dissented saying that the Fourth Amendment was meant to protect privacy and the job of the Court should be to translate old protections into a new context.  By 1933, there were increasing costs on the war against bootleggers with low benefits from the war (alcohol still everywhere).  So the government ended the war on Prohibition by repealing the idea of using war to fight alcohol dependence.

Search Happenings

Posted by JC Longbottom, Marketing Analyst

From the Engines:

·         Yahoo! top searches of 2008.

·         Ask.com top searches of 2008.

·         AOL top searches of 2008.

·         Truveo top video searches.

·         Top Cyber Monday Google product searches.

·         Fastest rising Google searches of ’08.

Other Topics of Interest:

·         Hitwise: 1 and 10 brand searches lead away from the brand site.

·         Comscore: October search rankings.

·         Turn to SEO in a bad economy.

·         Downturn spurs innovation in search.

·         The benefits of call tracking for local search.

·         Hitwise Cyber Monday snapshot.

Some Fun Stuff:

·         Eight years later a ring is returned to its owner after spending time in a fish belly.  So far, no word of hobbits, Gollum, or other Middle Earth phenomena.

·         What’s with Allentown? An unlikely law suit and regrettable kitchen view.

Video Search 2008: Year in Review

Posted by Dan Malachowski, Product Marketing Manager (Natural Search)

In his December Search Engine Land video byline, Eric Papczun takes a look back at the video search headlines of 2008, including YouTube’s domination of universal search, new advertising models for YouTube, the rise of Hulu, Google’s new speech-to-text translation technology, and mobile video.

Read Eric’s full Video Search 2008 byline.