Archive for July, 2007
According to a recent review of business to consumer sales in the content, the UK is among the dominant forces for Online Marketing in Europe. The European B2C E-Commerce study was compiled by aggregating eMarketer figures with those from international marketing and communications researchers.
Figures published by the European B2C E-Commerce study showed that the UK, France and Germany accounted for 72% of all sales made via the Internet in Europe, however Eastern Europe was expected to figure more prominantly as uptake of online takes hold across the continent.
Jeffrey Grau, a senior eMarketer analyst, was quoted as saying: “By 2011, the combined market share of the three major B2C e-commerce markets … will drop slightly as smaller, second-tier markets provide a new wave of growth.
Further out on the horizon, a third wave of growth will centre on eastern European countries as they begin embracing e-commerce.”
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July 31st, 2007
I read two thought provoking articles, one by Gord Hotchkiss on a Mediapost article, and the other an article called 2020 Foresight taken from ‘The Drum’. Whilst both articles were inherintely different, both had the issue of search evolvement at their heart.
Both though had vastly differing perspectives. In particular the 2020 Foresight article highlighted in my opinion many of the issues which still surround Search Marketing. The article, taken from the recent Manchester Media Forum, includes regional/national experts including Nigel Dean of O2, Chris O’Donnell of Kinetic, Mick Style of Mediaedge and Andy Jeal of Mediavest.
It was Andy Jeal’s views in particular that I found most suprising. In particular when tackling the issue of convergence, Jeal is quoted as saying: “I think the growth of search engines will slow - particularly when people realise that in many ways these search engines simply act as telephones”. Specifically he believes TV advertising still had a role in encouraging people to search for particular brands in the first instance. He went on to say “We have a lot of research that shows that DRTV campaigns are just as effective now as they ever were, despite the fact that fewer people are picking up the phone immediately after the ads are shown. What they tend to do is wait until their programme has finished, and then they’ll Google the brand to get in touch” and “We know this s happening as DRTV commercials are shown in bursts of activity and these Google searches co-incide with the ads being shown”.
Whilst I think Andy Jeal talks a lot of sense, I do have to disagree with some of his thoughts above, in particular his views on the growth or non-growth of search engines in the future. With convergence technologies such as IPTV gathering pace, surely the vehicle for delivery on such campaigns (ie TV adverts) is likely to reduce in the future and more innovative solutions are going to become more mainstream. He has also mentioned search engines being the vehicle by which many of these consumers are finding these brands, instead of picking up the phone, which leads me to ask. If they arent using the phone, and the arent using search engines (and consumers generally find it hard to remember URL’s), just what vehicle is going to be used to capture these potential consumers, and surely this is going to fuel further growth in search engine use?
Whilst I personally don’t believe that the search engine landscape will stay as it is now, search as a channel can only but continue increasing, however search as it is now, i would suggest would have evolved considerably by 2020, driven by alternative ad delivery (perhaps such as Video), and vertical specific search engines. At the end of the day, consumers need guidance, and the comparison with a telephone, seems somewhat misguided, perhaps more like a telephone book would be more apt?
However I will counter the above comments with some points that Gord Hotchkiss mentioned during his article on ‘Search Engines Innovate, Why Not SEMs?’. During the article, Gord highlighted the fact that Search Engines had focussed heavily on improving both the level and volume of their services and solutions over the last couple of years, however Online Marketing in general is struggling to keep pace
“Whether its personalization, universal results, Web 2.0 functionality or mobile, our search experience is about to change drastically. Search will become more relevant, more functional, more ubiquitous and more integrated. It will come with us (via our mobile devices) more often and in more useful ways. It will expand our entertainment options. It will change forever our local shopping trips. And it will all happen quickly.”
“The question is, what does this do for search marketing? In a recent conversation, I was asked where the major innovation in the search marketing space was coming from. This was prefaced by the remark that when a well-known industry analyst was asked the same question, they (I’ll keep the gender neutral, as there really aren’t that many industry analysts out there) said there was almost no innovation coming from search marketers. They were “living off the fat.” My first inclination was to jump to the defense of the industry, but this proved harder than I thought.
I realized I haven’t seen a lot of innovation lately. Certainly, the engines themselves are innovating. And I’m seeing innovation in adjacent areas (Web analytics, competitive intelligence). But I’m not seeing a lot happen in the search-marketing space. After a raft of proprietary bid management tools hit a few years ago, there’s been little happening to move the industry forward. In fact, I’ve noticed a lot of SEM heads buried in the sand. We are not encouraging change; we are actively fighting it.”
I can’t help but agree with him. Whilst I would add, there are a number of search evalgelists out there who sit at the forefront of the industry, there are all too many who dont, who still reside in a time where metatags ruled the world.
I will finish with some final words from Gords article, which I think some up the state of Online and Offline Advertising perfectly
“The change that’s happening in the search space is reflective of the change that is happening throughout marketing and advertising. It’s the continuing evolution of a much more efficient marketplace, where connections between customers and vendors are made tremendously more effective through access to information on both sides.
The traditional uncertainty of advertising is being leeched out of the system, due, in large part, to the tremendous effectiveness of search. And as search becomes more relevant and useful, it will make those connections more reliable, less intrusive and more successful for both parties. The opportunity is there for search marketers to help advertisers successfully negotiate this more efficient marketplace. It remains to be seen if we’re up for the challenge.”
To read the full article from Gord on the Search Insider Blog, please click here
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July 27th, 2007
According to a recent report by Click Forensics, pay-per-click click fraud reached a rate of 15% for the second quarter of 2007. The Click Forensics report taken from the Click Fraud Index;Â which monitors and reports on data gathered from the Click Fraud Networkâ„¢, which more than 4,000 online advertisers and agencies have joined; showed the following trends:
- Average Click Fraud rate on Search Engine Content Networks was 25.6% including Google Adsene and Yahoo Publisher Network. This was up from 21.9% in Q1 2007 and 19.2 in Q4 2006
- Traffic from botnets doubled between Quarter 1 and Quarter 2 2007. According to Robert Hanson, CEO of SecTheory - “”We’re not surprised to see the industry average click fraud rate climb this quarter as a result of botnet activity,” and “Our clients are well aware that botnet activity is on the rise and that botnets are being used for a variety of online fraud activities, including click fraud.
- The greatest percentage of PPC click fraud occurred from North America, China (3.2%), France (5.1%) and Australia (3%)
- The overall industry average click fraud rate was 15.8 percent for Q2 2007. This is an increase from 14.1 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.8 percent for Q1 2007.
To read the full Click Forensics release, click here
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July 23rd, 2007
Thought I would join in with the fun being had by other reknowned industry experts such as Andrew Girdwood (from BigMouthMedia), by entering the ‘whose joining forces with who’ debate. According to a report on the Guardian website, ITV is close to signing a deal with Google to provide search services across the ITV.com website.
The deal would see Google replace Yahoo as the preferred search provider once the new website is complete, which has been earmarked as the end of July (a relaunch which is rumoured to be costing around £20 Million and is attempting to monetise the site beyond the traditional display and sponsorship advertising.
The deal is interesting for UK Search Engine Marketing as it could pave the way for further partnerships such as branded channels on Google owned Youtube (similar to the deal between the BBC and Youtube in March)
ITV is in the process of completing a staged rollout of the new ITV.com website, with simulcasts already available, and a 30-day catch up and archive video-streaming service will be activated on a week-by-week basis.
Neither ITV nor Google were available for comment on the potential partnership.
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July 23rd, 2007
Hot on the heels of my previous post “Google Takes the Robots Meta Tag Further“ comes news that Google has now added the ability to manipulate robots without a Robots Meta Tag or a robots.txt file. How? and what use can this possibly serve?
How? Is through the headers of a web page, and why? is because you may want to prevent Google from indexing documents such as PDF, XLS and DOC files served directly from your website.
To use the new X-Robots-Tag directive all you need to do is create a HTTP header in your script that serves the document. In PHP this would be like so:
<?php header(’X-Robots-Tag: unavailable_after: 25-Dec-2007 13:00:00 GMT’) ?>
The X-Robots-Tag also appears to support all the same commands as the standard robots meta tag (noIndex,noFollow,etc).
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July 19th, 2007
Following on from our previous article The Robots Meta Tag Explained which highlighted how the meta robots tag has evolved from a simple, almost boolean, command to a far more complex and flexible meta tool. It is interesting to see Google pushing this tool yet further with the addition of an UNAVAILABLE_AFTER meta tag.
The ‘unavailable_after’ meta tag is primarily designed for those website owners who have time sensitive web pages such as promotional offers. And in using this tag a webmaster can tell Google that a page should expire from the search results at a specific date and time.
As an example, if E-Gain was to run a Christmas SEO UK promotion we could add the following meta tag to our seo uk page.
<meta name=”GOOGLEBOT” content=”unavailable_after: 25-Dec-2007 13:00:00 GMT” />
This would instruct Google to stop indexing the Christmas promotion page at 1pm on Christmas day although, according to Dan Crow of Google, this would take around 24hrs to take effect.
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July 18th, 2007
The total time spent on a website by a visitor is the best indicator of the success of online marketing attempts, it has been claimed in the much talked about plans by Neilson/Netratings this week. This is a significant shift away from the current preferred method of measurement, namely site visitors.
The change in focus comes in response to innovative website designs which incorporate dynamically updated content on the fly (ie Ajax) , rather than navigating through a site, as was the norm in Web1.0.
Director of product marketing for the NetView service Scott Ross was quoted as saying that the new index “ensures fair measurement of websites using rich internet applications and streaming media” as well as highlighting other benefits “also of web environments that have never been well-served by the page view, such as online gaming”.
The rise in use of technologies such as Ajax, has certainly created an issue for Neilsen/Netratings iin terms of effective measurement of site use. As Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim has already highlighted, a number of next generation browsers allow tabbed navigation and as such the validity of such figures could be severely offset by users who keep the page open for extended periods of time, for example I personally have a tab with a Google window open 95% of the time.
However with a lack of suitable alternatives for measurement within many of todays analytics solutions, I can understand to a certain degree the decision, however short sighted in my opinion it may be. Maybe this is more of an issue for the Analytics sector as a whole rather than just Neilsen individually.
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July 13th, 2007
I read a lot of people jumping on the linkbait bandwagon, with a favourite being ‘SEO isn’t rocket science - Did-it’ and more recently AudioBooksforFree(ABFF). Whilst I personally would at least give some thought to Dave Pasternacks viewpoints regarding his SEO isnt rocket science post, the ABFF press release printed recently in Silicon Republic really couldn’t have been further away from the truth.
In particular the opening paragraph which went as follows:
“AudioBooksForFree.com (ABFF) claims to have been consistently occupying top Google and most other search engines’ positions on internet searches using the terms “audiobooks”, “audio books”, “audiobook” or “audio book” without using any SEO whatsoever for the past six years. The company said it has never paid Google a cent.”
Could these so-called experts possibly be referring to Paid Search. Even more worrying
“We look with puzzlement on the burgeoning search optimisation industry that has sprung up in the last few years,” commented Ruslan G Fedorovsky, ABFF’s UK CEO. “Unfortunately many top blue-chip executives hardly realise what kind of deadly dangers they allow their online businesses to be subjected to by search optimisation techniques without any guarantees of tangible or provable benefits.”
I would suggest employing a search engine optimisation specialist (not one of the fly by night operators) would actually stop you from being banned. I would suggest you would not give a wouldn’t generally leave a plan unaided to fly, much like it helps to have a pilot in charge of your web strategy in order to ensure that the site maintains focus.
To be fair, i will give Ruslan his due in the article
“I would say that the most important policy regarding search optimisation is never allowing your programmers to try any kind of SEO at all. - about the only good point made during the whole article.
My advice to ABFF, in particular to Ruslan G Fedorovsky (their UK CEO), stick to audio books, you obviously know your stuff, and leave the SEO to those that do know what they are on about.
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July 9th, 2007
