ADOTAS

With the launch of Apple’s iPad 2 and Amazon’s Kindle, the tablet market continues to expand into a more competitive marketplace, with each new product offering something unique. Despite all the bells and whistles, tablets and smart phones share one feature: web browsing. With so many of these mobile devices getting into the hands of consumers, search marketers should be considering how to better target users of tablets or mobile devices who browse and search the web.

Just as mobile users search differently than laptop and desktop PC users, consumers on tablets have some interesting habits when it comes to how they use the web. An independent study conducted by the Covario Paid Media Services team found that tablet users have a higher level of engagement in online video viewing than smart phone users. The study found that tablet viewers watched videos 28 percent longer than those on desktops and mobile devices. Also, tablet users were more than twice as likely to watch a complete video compared to those on a desktop, and 30 percent more likely than those on other mobile devices.

With such behavioral differences in tablet users, search marketers would be wise to take certain steps when setting up tablet- and smartphone-targeted campaigns.  Here are some best practices to reach and optimize search campaigns for the mobile consumer.

• Set up separate mobile-specific campaigns. This provides more control over bids and budgets, allowing for separate reports to track results. It also enables the use of separate optimization techniques to drive campaign performance.

Separate campaigns provide further opportunity to test alternative messaging strategies for various mobile platforms, with strong calls to action and relevant ad formats.  At my company, Covario, we have found click-to-call and store-locator campaigns to be particularly effective for mobile campaigns.

Google AdWords allows you to target different carriers and devices for mobile.  It also offers associated tracking metrics.

• Develop a mobile keyword list. Similar consumer search behaviors exist between mobile and desktop queries, although mobile skews higher on local queries with cities or ZIP codes. Common misspellings are important considerations in keyword strategies for mobile campaigns, given the smaller screen and/or lack of a keyboard, depending upon the device.

Desktop users are more likely to use long-tail keywords, whereas tablet or smart phone users might feel restricted with a touch-screen keyboard. With more mobile devices offering voice search, consumer behavior will eventually shift towards longer phrases and long-tail keywords when searching. For now, however, keeping keywords short — inclusive of misspellings and local derivatives as appropriate — is crucial to campaign success.

• Create compelling ad text. Creating text relevant to mobile users is critical to boosting click-through rates. Consider including an acknowledgment that the consumer is on a mobile device and an immediate call-to-action, i.e. a click to call. Adding local-specific ad text is also crucial, given that one in three mobile search queries have local intent, according to a study by The Kelsey Group. Local mobile advertising reaches consumers who are close to point-of-sale and ready to purchase.

• Bid and budget for mobile search. Create a separate bid strategy for mobile devices. Mobile devices have limited ad spots available compared to desktop search results. In addition, for display, mobile-optimized sites and mobile apps typically have fewer ad slots to display ads.

With respect to mobile search budgeting, it is vital to deeply understand your target audience and allocate your media budget based on when your audience is searching. Further, as mobile media consumption continues to increase, using analytics to identify and track target consumers is critical to mobile marketing success.

A recent Google study indicates that mobile search compliments desktop search. Time-of-day usage peaks for desktop search during the day when many consumers are behind a computer at work. Mobile search behavior peaks toward the end of day into the evening when consumers are home after work, typically consuming other media. Dayparting search campaigns may be a smart strategy, depending upon the target audience and product/service offering.

• Separately track your mobile performance. Setting up separate campaigns for tablets and smart phones allows you to easily track campaign performance and evaluate the ROI of your mobile programs by device  based on clear campaign metrics. Use the same discipline with mobile campaigns that is typically used with desktop initiatives, by refining keywords, adding negative keywords, using various match types, adjusting bids to reach CPA or ROAS targets, and pausing under-performing ad groups.

• Optimize your mobile site. You will increase conversions and improve the user experience with a mobile-optimized landing page or site. Effective landing pages with the right level of content and strong, clear calls to action are the ticket to successful conversions and mobile campaigns.

The important thing to realize is that mobile search and devices are here to stay and will continue to evolve. The sooner you develop, test and implement a mobile strategy for your search campaigns, the faster you will reap the benefits and rewards.

Google finished November with 65.4 percent of explicit core search queries in the U.S. in November, according to comScore. This was a 0.2 point drop from its 65.6 percent share in October. Yahoo finished with 15.1 percent of the market, down 0.1 percentage point from its 15.2 percent share in October. Microsoft Sites handled 15.0 percent of search queries in November, up 0.2 percentage points from its 14.8 percent share in the previous month.

Combined, Yahoo and Microsoft (i.e., Yahoo-Bing) accounted for 30.1 percent of the U.S. explicit core search market in November, up from 30.0 percent in October. Ask Network finished November with 2.9 percent of the search market, unchanged from its share in October. Meanwhile, AOL Inc. finished with 1.6 percent of the market in November, up 0.1 percentage point from its 1.5 percent share in October.

comScore notes that “Explicit Core Search” excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.”

In November, U.S. searchers conducted 17.9 billion explicit core searches, down about 1 percent from the 18.1 billion searches conducted in October. Google accounted for 11.7 billion of these searches. comScore also shared its “Powered By” numbers, which found that 67.6 percent of searches in November carried organic search results from Google, down 67.7 percent in October. Meanwhile, 26.7 percent of searches were powered by Bing, up from 26.1 percent in October.

According to separate numbers from Experian Hitwise, “facebook” was the top overall search term during the four weeks ending Dec. 10, with 3.59 percent of search clicks. “Youtube” was second with 1.14 percent of search clicks, followed by “craigslist” with 0.59 percent, “facebook.com” with 0.46 percent and “ebay” with 0.42 percent.

According to Google Zeitgeist 2011, Rebecca Black was the fastest-rising global query in 2011, followed by Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, “Battlefield 3,” iPhone 5, Adele, Tepco, Steve Jobs and iPad 2.

Back in August, Mashable’s Zeny Huang made a few predictions about how Google+ might trump Facebook, from an advertiser’s perspective, once it unveiled this inevitable feature (citing the benefits of Google’s search opportunities, customization and analytics, and of its ability to learn from Facebook’s successes and mistakes).

Right now, at least, the massive popularity of Google search is a boon for Google+ Pages — stick a plus sign at the beginning of your Google search, and you’ll be directed to any Google+ page pertaining to your search subject. As this function plays out, what do you see Google+ Pages offering that Facebook Pages don’t?

ADOTAS – While we were writing some blogs at SocialNuggets, we thought of adding thumbnails of various tablets. Then started our search on Google and Yahoo! for images of various tablets. What we found was an utter lack of branding in the tablet marketplace — except in the case of Apple.

Here is a chart we produced with thumbnails of various tablets. Can you really recognize any of the tablets? Well, I can only recognize Apple’s iPad and none else. When I asked people who own non-iPad tablets to tell me which thumbnails pointed to their Android based tablets, most of them failed in this exercise.

How About Smartphones?

Just having an Android label to kick start the market was a great idea and it worked for smartphones. However, if you ever see an HTC phone, it does have a clock image that can be differentiated even in the smallest of the thumbnails. BlackBerry has a very unique image that distinguishes it. Samsung doesn’t have a consistent image but with the launch of Galaxy II, it is getting better at it.

So What Happened to Tablets?

Needless to say Apple is the only manufacturer whose iPad tablets have a very differentiating look no matter which angle you look at. For some reason every other tablet (sorry HTC, clock is not enough to differentiate your tablet) manufacturer went with generic Android look except for some minor differences. Even RIM chose the generic look for its Playbook, leaving it no differentiation in appearance.

Oh yes, HP folks probably recognize their blue screen which became the blue screen of death for the device. It seems Amazon has learned that lesson already and has a distinguishing image for itself. This may not be sufficient but will contribute to its success.

Rethinking Product Looks in the Age of Internet

In the age of the Internet, products are typically evaluated online first. If your product doesn’t have a unique look, it will be lost in the crowd and all of your branding exercises will merely go to waste. So before you put out a product in the market, see what its thumbnail looks like on the web when your customers search for it.

ADOTAS

Five reasons why everyone can cry wolf, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin may not care:

1) The Google+ products should be looked at as one entity – Google+ and Google +1 are interconnected

While Google + and Google +1 can live independently of each other, as one entity they are a forced to be reckoned with. Google+ provides users the ability to self-segment, which could prove quite lucrative for advertisers should Google ever provide the ability to serve sponsored links on Google+.

Concurrently, the +1 button platform is one of Google’s fastest growing widgets, with a growing following from advertisers. The marriage of the two occurs when Google injects endorsements from Google+ into sponsored links for brands who have gone ahead and implemented the +1 widget and have been endorsed by those in Google+’s circles.

2) Google +1 for websites is being woven into the fiber of search

For now, Google says that +1 will not affect the current search algorithm.  However, there is a significant impact to advertisers who do implement +1. There is the possibility that these advertisers may achieve incremental gains in CTR, which as a result will help improve ranking and quality score in the long run.

3) Google+ is growing at an exponential rate.

Paul Allen was recently reported to have estimated Google+ at 50 million users.  If this projection is correct, this means that 50 million users are potentially creating circles and segmenting themselves and their personal interests within their chosen circles whether professional, family, sports teams, etc.

4) Brands will win using Google+ and Google +1

Personal recommendations by friends will become the most effective way to advertise and thus  this will affect the new social search paradigm.

5) My favorite (and not-directly-related-to-search) feature is the live-stream hangouts, which have the potential to reach thousands.

Most recently, Google was able to demonstrate the power of the hangout with two very prominent political figures, the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. The experience which occurred last week between the two figures might be one of the greatest ways technology has recently been leveraged.

Well… not quite. But Santa will be here in less than three months, which leads me to ask, “Is everything prepared for the SEO side of the season?” No? Then it’s high time!

Today, we’ll deal with how to approach predictable and recurring events from an SEO point-of-view. Even if it’s a little late to implement a few of these measures for this Christmas, we can be sure that it will all happen again next year anyway. And the same goes for the Easter Bunny, Valentine’s Day, Oktoberfest, school holidays, etc…

So, ‘Predictive SEO’ for Predictable Events – What’s the Point?

More Traffic, More Sales – But How Do You Make It Happen?

First up in our overview: the seven sensible steps for successfully planning “predictive SEO.”

1. Early Planning

Now is not the time to leap without looking first. If you are already thinking about how you want to earn your Christmas money at the start of fall then you’re on the right track. To be successful, we need to consider the following info and conditions:

• Who’s involved?
• How much effort should we expend and what’s our budget?
• What are our deadlines?
• Are there conditions that need to be clarified? (e.g. particular marketing campaigns, newsletters, claims etc.)
• What experience have we gained from previous years?
• And, of course, what are the right keywords?

2. Target Analysis

Which (sub)pages should we focus on and develop? Existing sites that already have good Google rankings for a keyword are ideal. If you have already found several pages from your own domain that rank well for a keyword then you should forward them to the target page via a 301 redirect or at least with a clear keyword link.

A skillfully deployed canonical tag is particularly useful for dealing with pages that are similar to each other. These pages are easiest to find when you are already monitoring your domain keywords via Searchmetrics Suite.

Who will be your strongest competition? It won’t necessarily be the pages that currently hold the best positions for the desired keywords. It’s worth your while to look back a few months using the Searchmetrics Tools Keyword Research. Who ranked well for ‘Christmas’ around December 19th 2010? You can see how the site looked back then using archive.org. All of this is useful for competitor analysis…

3. Building (or Refreshing) Appropriate Content

Just like users, search engines want to find the most current content for a specific date. For this reason, selected pages should be updated at least twice: A couple of days or weeks before the event (“St. Nicholas update”?) to remind Google that something is happening, and then once more just before the targeted date. And of course, it is always helpful to keep the page up-to-date on a daily basis throughout the ‘active’ phase of the campaign. Content is freshness is king…

In building content, you should also also be careful not to forget universal search. Are there any images or videos available? You can always rely on fresh results with news, but that only works when you’re already a publisher. For most sites, this isn’t really an option.

4. Link Structure

The linking of current content and (internal as well as external) backlinks is always a rewarding strategy and new content is always a good reason to direct link structures to target pages.

Of course, the old rule of ‘the more links, the better’ still generally applies. The refined version simply states that you should make sure the links are as varied as possible and come from thematically relevant areas. Either way, you can’t ignore homepage links. Ideally, of course, it is always best to include ‘Specials’ in navigation bars along with text from relevant pages.

5. Powerful Buzz for the Big Day

Timing is critical. It’s not just about getting as many tweets, likes or blogposts as possible – it’s about getting the most in the shortest amount of time and, above all, at the right time! For this, we can refer to the methods that we are already familiar with –  i.e. competitions, press releases, Google News, mail-outs and social media.

With that said, the success or failure of the entire project depends on planning. But good planning is nothing without communication. Ideally, you should already have a good name among the various market players. If you do, then it’s worth your while to notify journalists by mail or phone. And don’t forget – bloggers are people too and  generally appreciate being contacted directly.

6. Clean the page up again

As always, once the shopping season has passed – that is between Christmas and the New Year – you should make sure to collect and archive the relevant pages. This should be done properly and with more than just a few links so that no one will accidentally land on old content in the New Year.

Besides this, all specially set links and canonical tags should be reset and rebuilt with the next campaign in mind. You may also need to rebuild navigation menus. Yup, that’s right – everything has to be taken care of.

7. Analysis and Documentation

What worked? What didn’t? At the end of the holiday season, you should collect all the preparations, planning, used pages, links and buzz tools etc. in one file and save it somewhere. There are two reasons for this. First, it will be within easy reach at the end of next summer, and second, it won’t be long until April and Easter roll around.

And how exactly do you include link-building in all of this?

At the beginning of this post, I promised to talk a little about this topic. The early realization that Christmas is on its way is particularly useful if extra links are built in time. But, how do we do this exactly?

Behind this entire strategy lies the recognition that you are likely not the only one who wants to profit from Christmas and the New Year. And, if you look at the above list again, you might notice a particularly labor intensive point – namely, the creation of relevant content.

For example, there will be thousands of pages trying to write about Christmas gift trends but only a few of these will identify and reveal these trends. Others will then link to these posts – heavily. Anyone who isn’t already the size of Otto.de or Amazon can make a press release about these kinds of gift trends. Perhaps you can group a few trend studies together and provide high-value analysis for the very people who should be linking to you – other site operators.

Or another example: has anyone collected the dates of all the regional Christmas Markets together in one attractive map? This takes a bit of effort but costs less than many other link-building projects.

Or yet another example: what are the rights and obligations for exchanging gifts purchased online? Or, or, or… Most importantly, a topic should already be ‘deep’ enough to warrant a link after a quick look.

This will give the impression of a credible source and create a certain social media buzz that will hopefully grab the target audience (i.e. the blogger or web editor) with attractive tables and graphs. The more original, professional and comprehensive the content is, the easier this will be.

The most important condition is timing. Any of these examples above should already be available by the time others are in the content design and planning phases for their pages. So, pay attention:  if you’re looking forward to finding a few link gifts under the tree this year, then you have to think about Christmas before your competitors.

If you haven’t noticed, Google and other search engines tend to display more than simple links on the initial search results pages – according to research by Conductor, on about 80% of keyword searches videos, news and shopping results tend to appear, creating a blend of multimedia results that many SEOs aren’t taking full advantage of. The update allows Searchlight users to track assets such as branded videos, products for sale and news mentions — as well as their competitors’ — across these blended search pages, as well as tools for optimizing pixel position and general brand presence.

In addition, Conductor announced the ability to employ SEO programs such as Traffic Explorer and Visibility Explorer within the Searchlight platform, enabling clients to instantly leverage garnered SEO insight. Finally, the company also announced a major international expansion of Searchlight, introducing the ability to track and optimize keywords across various search engines in the G20 countries from a single platform.

The sold-out C3 Conference will host discussions on the issues that the Searchlight improvements are addressing and feature presentations by Crispin Sheridan, global enterprise and testing lead for SAP; Dave Lloyd, head of global SEO strategy for Adobe Systems; and Maura Ginty, senior manager of strategic research and strategy at Autodesk.

ADOTAS -

If you haven’t seen one, the LUMAscape is a PowerPoint slide gone into hyperspeed and designed to illustrate the complex landscape of digital marketing. Mastered by Terence Kawaja from the LUMA Partners, the LUMAscapes have been designed for different areas of digital marketing such as display, search, mobile, social, video, commerce and gaming.

They seemingly cannot fit another company name on them without opting for agate type. It is inevitable that someone will close a presentation with a LUMAscape, leaving the audience to draw the stated or inferred conclusion that the digital marketing business is too crowded to avoid serious consolidation.

Let me cut to the chase—I love LUMAscapes. I love what they represent to me, which is the exact opposite of the oft-alluded-to consolidation. To me, a crowded slide with hundreds of companies all filling some kind of possibility in digital marketing is about as cool as the Sistine Chapel. It is a representation of how much room there actually is for innovation and value in the digital marketing business.

That’s not to say there won’t be some companies in this business that have a hard time finding their value proposition right now. It’s not to say that there won’t be some consolidation, especially if the economy stays flat. I would also argue, however, that not only is there room in the LUMAscape for more companies, there will be more companies expanding and starting up in the digital marketing space.

And the trends we’ve seen since the first LUMAscape was introduced in 2010 proves this with more and more logos being added to each revision and more areas are being mapped out.

I like the idea of talking about the LUMAscape from a different angle. Rather than talk about a consolidation of companies, it’s better to look at it from the angle of consolidation of tactics, especially when it comes to buying display media. For example, if Google acquired all 300 companies on the display slide, it wouldn’t change anything as there would still be 300 different ways to buy display media from different divisions of Google.

There has already been a consolidation of tactics in search as all SEM interfaces have campaigns, ad groups, keywords and text ads with 135 character ad units. What if other parts of the business adopted that simplified approach? What would be the universal way that people choose to target audiences?  By job title?  By income level?  By who they are linked to on a social network?  Or by the search term?

Obviously (and I admit my bias), I would argue that it is the search term that will become the De facto targeting method for display. However, my point is that we should look at the LUMAscape as a means for enacting a simplification of tactics over the proposed consolidation of companies.

So when you see one of those LUMAscapes over the next few weeks, I encourage you to look at the open spaces. Be impressed with the amount of companies that have taken digital marketing so far, so fast. Think more about the consolidation of tactics and what a universal approach would look like when it comes to audience buying and data driven advertising.