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

Managing False & Malicious Online Reviews

With Yelp’s recent IPO, we thought it would be helpful to remind brands how to best manage their reputations on online review sites.  Your search engine marketing efforts are becoming increasingly dependent on what your participants say about your brand online.  Participant reviews—on Yelp, Google Places, and Citysearch—now occupy prominent positions on the search engine results pages (SERPs), especially for searches with local intent.  Whether a new-to-file customer walks through your door often depends on a review they read through a search engine.  The problem is that many of these reviews are fake.  For instance, a recent Cornell University study found that about half of all online hotel reviews are fake.  These fake reviews could be positive.  But they could also be negative—perhaps posted by a competitor looking to disparage your reputation.  And, according to B2B Magazine, one negative online review could cost you thirty new customers.

Savvy marketing strategies are often best suited to manage false and malicious reviews.  Managing reviews starts with engaging in a two-way conversation with your reviewers—both critics and fans.  This requires (1) monitoring, (2) reporting malicious reviews and (3) participating in the online conversation about your brand.

(1) Monitor

You can’t manage online reviews unless you’re monitoring them.  Every brand should designate resources—either in marketing, customer relations or public relations—to monitoring online brand reputation.  For larger brands, this may require social listening tools or conversation analysis capabilities. 

• Claim your business listings on Yelp, Google Places and other review sites so that you’re able to monitor more easily
• Monitor the conversation around your brand in real-time.  Time matters; every minute that a false and malicious review sits on your review page could cost you business.

(2) Report

It’s always worth it to report false and malicious reviews to the search engine or review site.  If the review looks like spam, the site may remove it.  To report a review in Google Places:

• Go to the “Report a Problem Link” at the bottom of your Place Page
• Place Page owners can then submit a form to Google indicating that the review contains incorrect information or spam 

(3) Participate

Performics Weekly Digital Research Recap

Posted by Cristina Lucero & Christina Mannarino, Performics Research & Insights Team

United States

Channel Insights

Mobile

-A completely redesigned Google Search App for Windows 7.5 phones (Google)

• Windows Phone owners can access the Google Search App, available in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Some of the features include:

1. Google Autocomplete: As you type in your search, autocomplete offers search predictions that often match your intended search term making search entry easier and faster.
2. Voice Search: With the voice feature, you can avoid typing all together. Simply press the microphone and begin speaking your query.
3. My Location: With your permission, Google can use your device location to provide nearby results easily and accurately. For instance, a search for “coffee shops” quickly displays the nearest places you can go to for a cup of coffee.

• Read the full Google Blog post

Social

-Facebook Warns Brands that Scale in Social Won't Come For Free (Facebook)

• To reach a sizable share of your fan base, you'll need some paid "stories"
• To encourage paid ads, Facebook unveiled a tool, Reach Generator, that will let marketers buy all the reach they want

1. The pitch is that just 16% of fans currently see organic content posted by brands: Most of it is weeded out by Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm, designed to enhance users' experience by putting only the most relevant content in their news feeds. 
2. Using the paid ad tool could increase a brand's exposure percentage to 75%

• Read the full AdAge article

Search

Mobile Search Trends and Best Practices (February 2012)

The Latest Mobile Search Trends and Best Practices February 2012

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Applying Paid Search Optimization Techniques Beyond the Search Engine Results Page

Posted by Craig Greenfield, SVP, Performance Innovation

This blog was orginally posted on emarketing & commerce

In 2010, Forrester’s The Future of Search Marketing report predicted that “search marketing will become an umbrella term that applies to using any targeted media to help an advertiser get found.” Forrester was right. It’s now clear that search isn’t limited to being just a channel.  Search is the science of understanding intent and acting on it to efficiently connect people to your brand—no matter if that connection is made on a search engine, social networking site, display network, affiliate network or other emerging medium. To foster these connections, search engine marketing best practices can be extended well beyond the search engine results page.

First, I’ll consider how traditional paid search techniques can be applied to display advertising to drive new-to-file customers. Like search, biddable display provides advertisers with targeting capabilities to find the right customer at the right price.  While search marketers create segmentation via keywords to find the right audience, display marketers create segmentation via data sources. For example, during back-to-school season this past year, one of Performics’ apparel retailer clients sought to efficiently boost year-over-year daily sales though performance display. Like we do with search campaigns, we restructured the retailer’s display campaign at a more granular level (31 different ads in 2011 versus 6 ads in 2010) to support product/offer testing.  The restructure revealed deeper audience insights, helping us buy only the impressions we wanted (i.e. the right placements at the right price). We also increased relevance through site retargeting (i.e. serving display ads to people who visited the advertiser’s website but didn’t take action). These strategies resulted in a 211 percent year-over-year increase in average daily sales at a 120 percent return on investment.

Search Plus Your World’s Impact on Paid Search & SEO

Topic: Google’s incorporation of social and personal content to the SERP
Opportunity: Achieve prominent search visibility through Google+ presence
Channels Impacted: Organic search, paid search, social

Google recently began rolling out its new “Search, Plus Your World” features to the search engine results page (SERP).  The update introduced two new features that significantly impact paid search marketing and SEO:

1. People and Pages: The SERP now prominently features the Google+ Pages of both people and brands—for branded and generic queries—even when the searcher isn’t logged in
2. Personal Results: When logged in, the Google SERP now shows the searcher’s personal photos and posts from Google+ and Picasa.  Personal results include the searcher’s own content, as well as content shared with the searcher.  This new content is exclusive to the searcher, so everyone’s SERP is different.

People and Pages: Search Implications

Since Google+ Pages for Businesses launched, we’ve advocated that having a branded Google+ Page is essential for your search campaigns (see Why Your Brand Needs a Google+ Business Page Now).  We noted that the primary reason to create a Google+ Page was to aid your SEO efforts.  For instance, social content from brands is increasing achieving prominent visibility on the Google SERP, especially for branded searches.  We told brands to expect to see their Google+ Business Pages in the top organic results for branded keywords very soon.  What we didn’t expect was the prominence that Google would give Google+ Business Pages.  For instance, the below search for “fashion” gives H&M’s Google+ Page visibility equivalent to a position-1 paid-search bid, even when the searcher is not signed in:

Retailers Spent 58% More on Paid Search this Holiday vs. Last, Driving 53% More Clicks

Posted by Ryan Hornacek, Analyst, Strategy & Analytics

The biggest paid search story of holiday 2011 was that Performics’ aggregate group of retailer clients made early-season investments that led to incremental clicks throughout the entire season.  Every holiday, we see retailers increasing paid search spend earlier and earlier.  Early investments allowed our retailers to level off spend later in the season, but maintain large YoY click increases during the critical holiday weeks.  This was most apparent in the final week before the ground shipping cutoffs (Week 11 on the below chart), where clicks were up 52% YoY but spend was only up 26%.  The effect of early investment also showed in CPCs during the three critical weeks following Thanksgiving (Weeks 9, 10 and 11 on the below chart).  CPCs during this time period were consistently lower than last year (a 3-week average YoY decline of 10%).

In total, Performics’ retailer clients spent 58% more on paid search in Q4 2011 vs. Q4 2010, driving 53% more clicks YoY.  Despite the large increase in spend, CPCs finished the quarter just 5% higher.

We closed out the year with a post-Christmas uptick in clicks as a result of increased spend.  Clicks were up 51% in the week following Christmas (Week 13 on the below chart), while spend was up 64% YoY.  The last-minute spending push caused a slight bump in CPCs, which were up 8% for the week.  However, in the final days of the year, CPCs finally fell back to their pre-Thanksgiving levels.

Holiday Online Sales Wrap-Up

Posted by Cristina Lucero, Research Associate

For the holiday season-to-date, $35.3 billion has been spent online, marking a 15% increase versus the corresponding days last year (comScore).  The most recent week (ending Dec. 25) witnessed $2.8 billion in spending, an increase of 16% versus the same week last year.  Peak online holiday spending occurred on Nov. 28th (Cyber Monday); according to comScore, “online retail sales topped $1.25 billion that day—the heaviest online shopping day in history.”

Mobile’s Influence on Holiday Foreshadows a Huge Mobile 2012

Posted by Cristina Lucero, Research Associate

Traffic from mobile devices accounted for 18.3% of overall Web traffic on Christmas Day according to an IBM survey (up from only 8.4% a year ago).  Of total mobile traffic, 7% came from iPads, 6.4% from iPhones and 5% from Android smartphones.  In terms of Christmas Day online sales, 14.4% came from mobile devices, up from 5.3% on Christmas Day 2010. 

Mobile device activations also shot up on Christmas Day, indicating that many people received tablets and smartphones as gifts this year.  Android and iOS device activations averaged around 1.5 million per day in December versus 6.8 million activations on Christmas Day alone (Flurry).  And of course, new devices need new apps—prior to Christmas day, December app sales were steady around 1.8 million a day, but on Christmas Day, app downloads jumped 125% to 242 million (Flurry):

Last-Minute Holiday Shopping Trends

Posted by Cristina Lucero, Research Associate

As holiday approaches, shoppers will become heavily reliant on discounts and sales to help with last-minute holiday gifts.  A PriceGrabber survey found that 41% of shoppers plan to shop between Dec. 21 and Dec. 24.  In fact, 43% said that they believe the best discounts can be found during that time period; another 43% indicated that they’re too busy to finish their holiday shopping earlier; 26% admitted to procrastinating; 22% think last-minute shopping is fun; and 10% are waiting for year-end work bonuses.

Other last-minute shopping trends include:

• To date, the average person has completed 46.5% of their shopping.  At the same time last year, the average person had completed 49.5% of their shopping.  (BIGresearch).
• 80% of U.S. shoppers plan to buy gift cards this season (NRF)
• 9% of shoppers will wait until January to purchase holiday gifts.  By gender, 11% of men say they’ll wait until January to buy gifts vs. 8% of women.  (PriceGrabber).
• 27% of shoppers indicated that they plan to shop for last-minute gifts on sites like Groupon and LivingSocial (PriceGrabber)

The Year of Free Shipping

Posted by Cristina Lucero, Research Associate

According to comScore, over the last two weeks, more than 63% of all online purchases were accompanied by free shipping—that’s up roughly 10 percentage points over the same period last year.  In previous years, 47% of shoppers said they would abandon an online purchase if they discovered at checkout that shipping wasn’t free (comScore).  Because free shipping has become a priority for many online shoppers, “Free Shipping Day” was created to encourage online shopping without accruing additional shipping costs.  This year, Free Shipping Day was Friday, Dec. 16 and more than 2,000 merchants offered free shipping with delivery by Christmas Eve in the contiguous United States.  According to comScore, Free Shipping Day saw shoppers spend $1.072 billion online, a 14% YoY increase.