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

Participatory Search: Bing’s Social Search Enhancements & Advertiser Implications

BACKGROUND

Bing threw the latest punch this week in its ongoing battle against Google to socialize search.  On Bing, searchers who sync their Facebook accounts can now see personalized search results based on their friends’ opinions.  Bing’s enhancements—which come on the heels of Google’s launch of the +1 Button—showcase Microsoft’s powerful partnership with Facebook.  Bing’s search engine results page (SERP) now highlights “Liked” results from people in the searcher’s Facebook network.  For instance, the below search for “Threadless” shows that three of the searcher’s friends “Like” Threadless:

 
 
Bing is also using “Likes” as a ranking signal for natural search results, pushing sites “Liked” by the searcher’s friends higher in the natural results.  Thus, each searcher can see different, highly-personalized results.  Even if a searcher doesn’t have friends who have “Liked” results for a particular query, Bing will surface collective Facebook opinions from the entire Web.  Other enhancements include the Bing Travel Wish List, which allows people to compare trips with Facebook friends; and Shared Shopping Lists, which allow people to build, compare and discuss shopping lists with Facebook friends.

IMPLICATIONS FOR ADVERTISERS

Both Bing and Google have been squarely focused on socializing the SERP to make it more relevant.  When a searcher sees that other searchers—particularly their friends—have “Liked” a certain result, that result is perceived as more relevant and will garner more clicks.  Everyday, people are exposed to an overwhelming flow of advertisements.  The social SERP is unique in that it allows searchers to break through the clutter.  Highly-relevant search results—those recommended by friends—float to the top and stand out with friends’ pictures and the Facebook “thumb” symbol.  It’s easier for a searcher to find exactly what he’s looking for with some help from his friends. 

SEO Opinion Round-Up: Recent News

Posted by Sam Battin, Senior Natural Search Specialist

This week we'll be presenting you with links to interesting stories about recent goings-on with Google.

Our first story is about how Google apparently lifted Overstock's ban for trying to game Google by buying links from college sites.  If nothing else, it shows how quick Google can change their results when it feels like it:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110426-092709

Next, we found out that Google and Bing have whitelists.  In other words, Google has stopped pretending that its results are entirely the result of algorithms.  This may explain why some sites which appear to be doing everything wrong are still getting high ranks, or it may mean that you have to optimize more:

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-have-whitelistsexception-lists-for-algorithms-67732

Google did a study on smartphones, and it released the results on April 26, 2011.  The article is here; if you read it you'll see that the results seem to suggest that smartphone marketing will be the biggest thing ever, like bigger than sliced bread AND red bricks put together.  The following article, however, takes a closer look at the results Google posted and asks the question "Do you really expect us to believe all that?"  This is read-worthy because of the clever way it challenges the assumptions of the study:

http://www.broadstuff.com/archives/2497-How-dumb-are-smartphone-users.html

Mobile-Minded Search Strategies

Part 3 of a series on mobile/local marketing

Posted by Daina Middleton, CEO

In my last post, “Get Local Fast & Effectively with Mobile Search,” I outlined a few benefits of embracing mobile paid search now. These include booming growth projections for mobile search, growth of mobile as a portion of overall paid search and mobile paid search as an easy entry to mobile marketing, and word is spreading quickly.

Performics’ 2011 Mobile Insights Study released earlier this year showed overwhelming participant satisfaction with and adoption of mobile search. Seventy-five percent of respondents said mobile search makes their lives easier, while 63 percent said access to mobile search has changed the way they gather information. Not surprisingly, marketers are starting to take note and according to the latest SEMPO State of Search Report, fourteen percent more companies considered the rise of the mobile Internet to be highly significant or significant in 2011, compared to 2010.

 

In March, mobile paid search grew to at least ten percent of impressions for all paid search campaigns managed by Performics. This double-digit threshold often marks the tipping point at which new technologies gain more widespread adoption; so marketers shouldn’t expect the growth of mobile paid search to slow down any time soon.

Top 5 Insights from Digital Hollywood (Advanced Analytics & Contextual Media Panel)

On May 6th, Performics CEO Daina Middleton moderated a panel at Digital Hollywood on Advanced Analytics and Contextual Media.  Panelists included:

• Jeff Smith, SVP, Marketing and Client Services, Vizu Corp
• Andrew Lerner, Co-Founder, Trust Metrics
• Nick Pahade, CEO, TRAFFIQ
• David Kopp, SVP Adv & Network Services, Healthline Networks
• Michael Benedek, President, Data Division, AlmondNet
• Shaukat Shamim, CEO and Co-Founder, Buysight

We’ve aggregated the top 5 insights that came out of the panel.  Enjoy!

1. When it comes to digital marketing, Hollywood is progressive: Hollywood is investing in targeting, CRM, rich media, interactive media, search and social.  For instance, movie studios now have the ability to buy top-position Google paid search ads that promote trailers within the ad (screenshot below).  The only thing holding Hollywood back is the short shelf-life of its products.

 

Social SERPs: Social Media’s Growing Influence on Search Engine Results Pages

This blog was first posted on Social Media Marketing Magazine

by Dana Todd, Vice President of Performance Innovation at Performics

In “ancient” times (circa 1999-2009), traditional search engines were a one-stop shop for people to search, find, consider, and purchase things online. Then social media emerged. Facebook—with the help of Twitter, Foursquare, and others—enabled people to search, find, consider, and purchase things online with a little help from their friends. Now people spend more time on Facebook than on Google. According to comScore, Facebook drove ten percent of all Internet pageviews in 2010.

Google and Bing are keenly aware of this new reality. To keep their users, they’ve recently adapted by layering social on search. And to stay relevant, they must continue to make search engine results pages (SERPs) more social. Google and Bing have started by incorporating various social aspects into their SERPs—from reviews in Google Place pages to tweets in real-time search to embedded user-generated YouTube videos. Google’s new +1 button enables searchers to “+1″ (or “like”) search results, so that other searchers, like their friends, can see that a result was helpful. Similarly, Microsoft has partnered with Facebook to incorporate Facebook “likes” into Bing SERPs.

The effort to socialize search has resulted in SERPs that are controlled by 1) the brand owners and 2) the consumers—more appropriately called the “participants”—and by extension, their networks. In ancient times, brand owners exercised the most control over their brand’s SERP goodwill. Today, brand owners still control the SERP’s paid search ads (“paid content”) and can employ SEO tactics to boost digital asset visibility (“owned content”). But the participant has the most control over the SERP’s “earned content”—opinions, reviews, recommendations, social chatter, and videos.

Link Building in the Age of Mobile & Instapaper

Posted by Paul Williams, Senior Specialist, SEO

The mobile era grows increasingly closer as 2011 carries on. Most of our clients have seen over 1,000% increases in mobile visitors to their sites (via both paid and natural entrances), and several now see 5-7% of visitors as strictly accessing their sites from a mobile browser.

As more users adopt mobile devices—and the habits in using them—the closer we get to a collision course with users' behavior around linking and social sharing. For anyone who's been around for the past decade, you've seen "weblogs" evolve into "blogs," and slowly but surely segue into some of the most important places on the Internet to find, explore, and peruse news and information. Bloggers also contribute immensely to online discourse and provide meaningful curation of links with valuable context.

In fact, many bloggers are the Internet's best link builders. Whether they're using footnotes, descriptive anchor text, hyperlinking a reference in-line, or simply doing the "via" reference, bloggers are good at reporting original sources of quotes, articles, images, etc. Since most blogs and bloggers write within the context of an interest (like technology or sports), these links become even more valuable if their destinations are related to the blog’s interest. But what happens when these influential bloggers move their writing and publishing to mobile devices? And what happens when they consider several of their readers' reading habits—several of which are relegated to "read later" services like Instapaper? (If you’re unfamiliar with “read later” services, they provide the ability to run a bookmarklet across browsers and devices that lets you save an article’s text for future reading.) The seeming conveniences of the mobile age actually become issues for link building.

Conveniences Become Inconveniences

Let's take a simple example to demonstrate this problem. Let's say that as a result of readers' consumption habits—using mobile devices on spotty networks to access and read articles, saving articles for later via Instapaper—some bloggers who are commenting or linking to an article of interest are more likely to reference its printout version. They're prone to do this as a nicety and a convenience because:

• Print versions load faster (no ads, no unnecessary navigation links, images, etc.)
• Print versions typically eliminate pagination that occurs on many newspaper sites by displaying the full article
• Print versions make it easier for Instapaper's bookmarklet (or any other “read later” service) to accurately parse (even though it's darn good as-is)