Archive for the ‘Search behaviour’ Category

From riots to dinosaurs – how digital continues to amaze me

September 22nd, 2011

I am a student from Birmingham City University, working at Reform on my placement year. A couple of months into my digital year in industry there are few things that have struck me…

When I tell people I am working in digital for my placement year, a common reaction is to imagine a fantasy world, impregnable, with very techy people playing around with code on computers.  I don’t think that could be further from the truth at this moment in time. Digital is becoming more and more crucial to daily life and I for one welcome this.

Social media was recently blamed by many for enabling the London riots. However, I think the key point to remember is that it’s not social media itself that is the problem, its how people use it. For all the Blackberry messenger organised rioting, there were also some fantastic campaigns on Twitter and Facebook which help to restore faith in humanity, focusing on communities cleaning up and coming together.

This is the kind of reassurance that digital can provide, and it even extends to nations. During the earthquakes in Japan, Twitter, Facebook and Skype all helped families to reconnect and confirm the safety of loved ones. Analogue phone lines could not cope with the extreme high levels of people trying to contact each other, but digital platforms enabled contact and granted peace of mind in times of immense trauma.

And what about the power of social media to spread fantastic stories that would not be heard otherwise? The best example in the last few days is the story about one man’s experience with Marks and Spencer’s customer service. In case you haven’t already seen it, one customer who was overcharged for a sandwich was told in response to his complaint that he would receive a gift card in compensation. When he didn’t receive his gift card he asked politely for a hand-drawn picture of a smiley dinosaur to be included with the gift card (presumably as a joke?!). Wonderfully he actually got what he asked for, including a message apologising ‘unfortunately art was never my strong point…’ Check out the picture of the dinosaur – it’s actually quite good!

Digital is connecting more and more with the real world and we get to hear about real people and their experiences so much more than we ever could previously. What I love about the digital industry is that it’s volatile, it’s unpredictable, it’s challenging and it’s here to stay. Another plus is that apparently I’m a computer genius now that I work in digital. (It is worth bearing in mind that this is coming from my mother who is amazed because I know Ctrl+C…).

By Karen Hawey at Reform

The new domain name game

September 12th, 2011

Starting in January 2012, companies will have the opportunity to register new tailored domain names. Traditional naming conventions such as .com and .net will continue to exist, but brands will be able to use other words or phrases, such as their own brand name, as their domain name. For example, Reform.com could use reform.reform and other variations thereof using the .reform structure.

What will the cost for this new domain structure be? There’s an application fee which costs around £180,000, plus an annual running cost around £25,000. So, for many businesses, this kind of investment will prove cost prohibitive.

At Reform we’ll be monitoring what effect, if any, these new naming conventions have on search optimisation best practices. Will Google and other search engines favour one domain name over the other, and if so, could it lead to an unfair advantage in preserving top rankings? This will be an interesting space that we’ll be keeping an eye on for our clients.

Additionally, the new domain naming convention .xxx has been approved by ICANN after eleven years. Although some countries, such as India, have already started banning the new naming convention, brands and individuals now have less than a fifty day window to register to ensure their assets are not used in the adult online industry.

While the benefits of the .xxx domain include heightened parental control, as well as the hope that people will be less likely to unwittingly stumble across adult content, the 15,000 domain names that have been reserved are almost certainly not enough to protect all the people that may be affected. What about everyone else’s reputations?

ICM Registry’s chief executive Stuart Lawley said, “Regardless of what your personal views are on the existence of pornography on the internet, at least .xxx will give people the information they need to make a choice.”

Reform provides a bespoke brand monitoring service that can help you to ensure your brand is not misrepresented. With these new developments, it is more important than ever to invest in the right amount of diligence to protect your brand. Get in touch if you would like to know more.

Blog post by Anthony Dobson, Business Development Executive at Reform

Search engine marketing in Malaysia – International search review issue number 7

August 1st, 2011

Reform has this week published the latest paper in its international search review series. Continuing the focus on markets in Southeast Asia, this instalment looks at the internet and search market of Malaysia.

With internet penetration increasing from 15% in 2000 to 59% in 2009, it’s clear that there has been significant change in this country’s technological outlook over the last decade.

This is another market where Google has consolidated its dominance of the search engine arena, growing its share from 51% in 2008 to 85% in 2011.

The increase in internet penetration (16,902,600 internet users as of June 2009) has occurred in spite of the fact that the quality of the broadband in Malaysia is still rated as ‘poor’. This, combined with a growing number of increasingly sophisticated mobile devices, has led analysts to believe that mobile search will become ever more important in this market.

Advances in mobile technologies can also be looked to as the facilitators for the phenomenal popularity of social media sites in Malaysia. This is a country that has Facebook penetration of 88.4%, and which accounts for .47% of Twitter’s world voice.

Since 2009 the number of Malaysian web users using social media to keep in touch with family has increased to 71%.

To find out more about the search market landscape in Malaysia, download a copy of the review – and let us know any comments or feedback that you might have. You can also download past issues of the International Search Review to see what we discovered about Chinese internet development and the Russian search behaviour evolution amongst other things.

Contact us and we’ll send you the next issue of our International Search Review before anyone else.

Blog post by Juliette van Rooyen, Consultant at Reform.

What are we excited about for 2011?

January 5th, 2011

Now that the holidays are quickly becoming a distant memory we wanted to take a look back at changes in TV, mobile and social media in 2010 and consider what exciting changes are in store for 2011.

In May Google announced that it had partnered with Sony and Logitech to bring a new product to our television screens. Called Google TV the idea is to allow “users access [to] all of their usual TV channels as well as a world of internet and cloud-based information and applications… all from the comfort of their own living room and with the same simplicity as browsing the web.”¹ Initially hailed as a major innovation in how we will interact with our TVs, Google TV has so far struggled to secure access to content from major US TV Networks and has received less than positive response to the initial software offering.  Despite these setbacks the ability for consumers to access web content via their TV will become a reality in the near future and could offer advertisers a unique opportunity to gain access to TV consumers in a new, distinctive and more trackable way in 2011.

Social media has also grown in influence amongst advertisers in 2010.  Although many major brands have had a presence on Facebook and You Tube for some time, the past year has seen a shift in how these sites are used by brands to interact with its consumers.  FMCG & retail brands in particular have begun to drive advertising toward their Facebook pages as a means of increasing the number of likes.  These pages can then be used to offer exclusive offers to customers that have already showed an active interest in the product. As we head into 2011 it is likely that advertisers will continue to embrace social media as a means of both reaching out to current customers as well as connecting with future shoppers not only via Facebook pages but also through advertising directly on Facebook via Ad Serving Units, the utilisation of in-application advertising and beyond.

It is often said that it is the first and last thing you interact with during your day but the mobile has come a long way since the days of simple calls and texts. Over the past year advertisers have begun to embrace the mobile by increasing their focus on building applications and mobile friendly websites for their customers.  Although this is a good start, the consumer is likely to demand that their smart phone enable them to do most, if not all, of the things their PC does in the near future.  With an estimated  $1.5 billion in sales worldwide made via the mobile on eBay alone in 2010 it is clear that businesses will not only need to have the capability to handle mobile e-commerce but also to ensure that their mobile advertising, including mobile search & display are a priority in 2011. ²

With so much innovation in the industry and so many new channels for advertisers to test and explore, 2011 is sure to be another busy year. Keeping up with changes in TV, mobile, & social media will be crutial to ensure continued customer retention & business growth.

1)    http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20100520_googletv.html
2)    http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/ebay-shows-where-mobile-shopping-is-hot/

Blog post by Mike Jennings, Director at Reform

Search analytics helps us to know our customers that little bit better

November 19th, 2010

Most businesses are interested in who their customers are and curious about where they come from. However brilliant their product or service, there remains a wonderful undercurrent of insecurity. Why are people buying what I sell?

Traditionally this insecurity has been addressed by market research firms. Research is then passed to business analysts, who review these surveys and other data. These techniques have value, but also fall down in a couple of key areas. Firstly – it may seem obvious – but market researchers can only work with the responses they receive. This may not represent a realistic client base, leaving them to extrapolate results to draw conclusions.

For potential customers, research and internal data is going to be even less representative. A holiday letting business may know that many of its customers come from a cluster of postcodes but does not know where potential customers from the same postcodes go on holiday or why. It would have an even poorer view of the holiday aspirations of people outside of the postcodes where most of its business originates.

With the shift to ecommerce the situation has improved, as more customer data is captured by businesses generally. Online surveys help too, as they mean a business can get a better grasp of customer motivation. But sadly this still does not solve the riddle of the non customer. Well, not unless you step into the world of Search.

Searching with a small ‘s’ has been a fundamental human characteristic since time immemorial. The advent of search engines, however, has dramatically broadened our ability to find even the most esoteric products, services or solutions to our problems. But if you look at search engines from a different perspective, they become a business analytics nirvana.

In the right hands and with the right technology a company can now answer questions like: “What search terms led this customer to buy my service?” They can even see how many people were searching for the same thing – giving their market share for that particular search – and how available their service was compared to competitors, by using systems like AdIntel to measure share of voice.

There is virtually no limit to the quantitative data that is available through effective search analytics. What makes this all the more interesting is a more recent ability to overlay qualitative analysis on the results. Historically a buyer was good, and someone who did not buy was bad. But now we can analyse things like the lifetime value of a client to improve our understanding. And by ‘listening’ to social media traffic, (and other user generated content), positive and negative attitudes can be interwoven with quantitative data that tracks the movement of consumers around the net.

Given that the internet both sells directly and informs consumers for offline purchases, the opportunities for satisfying the curiosity of businesses grow larger every day. Not only can we tell you where your customer came from and why, but we can also suggest why they did not go to your competitor. Tidy?

Blog post by James Kilpatrick, non-Executive Director of Reform

You’ll like this – not a lot – but you’ll like it

October 21st, 2010

Week two in the Strictly Come Dancing house. Hmmm, there’s a chance I’m mixing my reality TV show metaphors there, but the point is another week has gone by, and Strictly Come Dancing has lost a little bit of magic as Paul Daniels ‘danced’ his last dance on Saturday night. In this, the second installment of our Strictly Come Searching investigation, I’ve come across an interesting inverse correlation between search volume and social media coverage for the Strictly celebrities.

The chart below was put together by social media monitors Brandwatch, who are observing social media coverage of our Strictly Come Dancing stars this year. They have developed an index measuring not only the volume of conversations going on, but also the sentiment in those conversations, be it positive or negative.

The snapshot above, ranked by volume, shows that this week most people are talking about Anne Widdecombe, Goldie and Paul Daniels, with Tina O’Brien and Felicity Kendal way down at the bottom. However, we have put the chart below together from Bing search volume data, showing the number of searches performed over the last 7 days for the Strictly celebrity names. In terms of search volume, Tina O’Brien and Felicity Kendal are way ahead of the pack this week, and Goldie is at the bottom of the list.

This is a truly interesting insight into the online behaviour of Strictly Come Dancing fans! The celebrities that are being talked about the most on the web are not the ones that people are searching for the most.

Tina O’Brien’s position at the top in terms of search volume could be put down to people searching to see why she didn’t dance on Saturday night (chicken pox in case you weren’t one of the people searching). Also, the appearance of Paul Daniels and Goldie near the top in terms of social media coverage must be due to people dissecting their exits from the show. I’m sure that not many people would argue with the suggestion that Anne Widdecombe has been the real star of the show so far in this series, so the buzz around her name is also quite easily explained. It has been suggested by the water cooler here at Reform that more people might be searching for Felicity Kendal and Pamela Stephenson because they don’t know much about them as yet – a generation of people online that missed out on The Good Life. If that is the case, then it might also explain why not as many people are talking about them – they are the enigmas of the show, people are still searching for information about them.

As a final note for this week, I stuck my neck above the parapet in last week’s blog and suggested that Kara Tointon would win Strictly this year. This data only cements my opinion further as people are searching for her AND talking about her. Time will tell!

UPDATE: We were right in 2010, but lets see how 2011′s Strictly Come Searching challenge fares.

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Search Consultant at Reform

Strictly Come Searching

October 15th, 2010

Summer is over. Autumn is here. But it’s ok, because Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor are back on our screens, and with them comes the countdown to Christmas. I know it’s far too early to be talking about Christmas, but with 14 Contestants on Strictly you know that at the very most there are 14 weeks to go – less, probably, knowing how the producers like the odd double elimination or three-way ‘dance off’ towards the end. It is the Saturday night equivalent of an advent calendar… with glitter balls.

Everybody talks about it. ‘OMG did you see Anne Widdecombe?!’… ‘Did you hear that she’s farting through training?’… ‘Gavin Henson’s abs. That’s all’… ‘Paul Daniels – definitely more tragic than magic, but Debbie McGee is still cute as a button!’ Here at Reform it is no different, and the conversation recently turned to how we could combine our excitement over all things Strictly with our expertise in the world of search. So, over the next few months we will be doing a series of blogs – Strictly Come Searching if you will (see what we did there?!).

So we have set in motion some data collection which we will be delving into each week and as the data set grows we will examine, analyse and to a certain extent poke fun at what we find. This week as a starter for ten we have looked at Bing UK search volume data collected from Microsoft AdIntelltigence. We looked at the celebrity dancers’ names and tracked the search volume for each person over the past week, the past month and the year to see what we could find.

My assumption had been that the pre-Strictly search volumes of the celebrities would vary slightly dependent on their level of fame – for example, I had assumed more people would have been searching for Michelle Williams, Destiny’s Child singer and Grammy Award winner, than would perhaps have been searching for one of our home grown stars. Well, it’s clear that I had failed to grasp just how important soaps are to us in the UK. More people searched for the beautiful Kara Tointon on Bing in the last 12 months than searched for the rest of the contestants put together. The only other celebrities that stand out on the chart of the last year are Patsy Kensit, Tina O’Brien and, to a lesser extent, Scott Maslan. Go Holby, Corrie and Eastenders!

So, seeing that some of our soap stars have a pre-Strictly advantage, I took a look at the search volume data for the seven days surrounding the first live show after which the first celebrity would be voted off. We still see that Kara is out in the lead, though people searching for Felicity Kendal on Saturday night shot up from nowhere. Searches for Jimi Mistry, Scott Maslan, and Anne Widdecombe all shot up by over 1000%, with Pamela Stephenson not too far behind with a percentage increase of over 800%. Bizarrely, the numbers of people searching for Michelle Williams on Saturday night actually dropped 70%, but as you would expect everyone else saw a peak in interest.

For most of the celebrities the number of people searching for their name spikes on the Saturday night, then falls immediately on the Sunday – though Tina O’Brian, Matt Baker and (once again) Kara Tointon out-perform the rest of the ensemble here by actually seeing search volume increase into Sunday.

So what kinds of conclusions can be drawn or statements can be made from these results. Is it possible to predict who will be voted off and who will last in the show based on what we can see here? Are the people searching for the celebrities the same people that pick up the phone and vote to keep their favourites in the show? Well, time will tell. The phone vote in Strictly only accounts for half of a celebrity’s overall score, so however popular they may be, if they are a terrible dancer then that will put them more at risk of being sent home.

Goldie and Peter Shilton – the two celebrities that faced the axe on Sunday night having been in the bottom two after the judges and viewers votes were tallied up – made up two of the bottom four celebrities in terms of the number of searches performed on the Saturday night. Neither of them had set the world alight with their dancing performance. To put it politely.

Matt Baker and Michelle Williams made up the other two in the bottom four in terms of search volume on the night of the live show. Perhaps they are at risk of early departure if their standard of dancing drops off. Having said that we can see that searches for Matt have increased in the week following the live show, so maybe he is in a safer place – particularly as his former life as a gymnast has developed in him a keen level of timing and grace.

This is of course all just speculation , and it will be interesting to see if over time any more interesting patterns come to light. In terms of conclusions for this week… making a wild statement based on search volume (and a little bit on her dancing), Kara Tointon is going to win Strictly Come Dancing 2010. You heard it here first.

UPDATE: Find out who’s going to win Strictly Come Dancing in 2011

Blog post by Penny Anderson, Search Consultant at Reform

Google Instant Creates a New Type of Query: Incomplete Match, AKA Short Tail Search

September 12th, 2010

As you may have read over the last week – be it on Amanda’s blog post or the general buzz on the web – Google Instant search was heralded, hated, mocked, loved, loathed, etc. In fact the only common opinion was that everyone had an opinion!

Now that the dust has settled, the new feature exceeds the initial shock value. No, SEO results didn’t change (although they did get pushed down a bit and number one rankings may have even more value now), and PPC impressions won’t go through the roof due to their being a set amount of time of three seconds needed for the result to display in instant search (but they will go up, as people look at their query and refine further before even clicking anything). And is Google is trying to make users customise their searches in a way that their ads can appear across a greater percentage of search queries – perhaps also forcing an increase in keyword query totals for certain queries, and reducing them for others? That remains to be seen.

So what have we discovered so far? Well, you can now get traffic for keywords you do not even rank for!

What? Yes, Google Instant has brought about a new type of search query. We have had brand search queries, market sector queries, generics and local search queries, along with the ever evolving “long tail” of search that has been an industry buzz word for years.

And the new type of search query? You heard it here first: “short tail” search. Or perhaps “incomplete match”!

Already, since the launch of Google Instant, some US sites have reported a slight growth in “incomplete keywords”. For example, one of the top volume driving keywords for our client Angel Investment Network in the last few days has been “angel inve”. Yes, by then, the main site was top of the results. And the user, well I guess the user couldn’t be bothered to type “angel investment”, saw the result they wanted and clicked away! Still, this example is quite relevant. But what about an example where the word the user intended to type is quite competitively different…

Let’s say am looking for “photography”, but by the time I get to “Pho” I see Photobucket ranked 1st – it sounds relevant to me, and I click it (as it’s a site about photo sharing, and yes while if you read the details it may not be the right site for me, first impressions are big, the site name seems relevant, and most users are impatient – so I click away).

However, this is a site that does not rank for the term “photography” yet it got a semi-relevant click that now tells the user “OK, we’re not about photography, but if you ever want to share photos online, now you know where to go”. So photobucket.com can now steal potential clicks for a term they didn’t even compete well for! And there are several other examples of this I’m sure. The whole ability to click via an incomplete keyword query opens up a new dimension to how we study keyword targeting. And that is what we call, the “short tail” or the “incomplete match” (if you have a preference, do let us know!) keywords of search.

If you’re still new to Google Instant, check out Google’s explanation of how Instant Search works here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-impact-on-search-queries.html

Blog post by Niall Madden, Search Director of Reform

Google Instant: the PR coup of the year?

September 9th, 2010

The Search industry waited with baited breath as to what Google’s big announcement would be this week.

Matt Cutts, Google’s search community ‘idol’ was excitedly tweeting, galvanising the search geeks across the globe.

And then the announcement came: the launch of Google Instant (to continue with the coffee theme, following Caffeine?)

Well! All I can say is that Google’s PR team are really good at creating an almighty hype over something very minor: the auto-completion of your search query.

Google reckons Google Instant will give us all 5 seconds of our lives back – per search. So that’s something, I guess!

So that’s it really. After all the hype prior to the big launch, it’s just a functional / usability improvement. Nothing particularly strategic or impactful on Google’s index.

Google Instant is potentially controversial in that this is perhaps another example of Google trying to second guess or pre-empt what users may – or may not – be searching for. One step too far in terms of Google’s sphere of influence? Those trusting souls paying little attention to their typing may find that they end up with a completely different set of unrelated results.  It will be interesting to read the subsequent industry opinions on this subject in the coming weeks.

But for now, I think this article on Telegraph.co.uk best sums up Google’s announcement this week…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7991057/Google-Instant-the-technology-anti-climax-of-the-decade.html

“Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly,” said the boffins from Mountain View in their blog post announcing Google Instant”

- if this is the kind of insight that Google’s boffins are paid to come up with, I’m definitely in the wrong job!

Blog post by Amanda Davie, Managing Director of Reform

You’ve got the most beautiful and intelligent and relevant online brand presence – but nobody knows you’re there…

September 3rd, 2010

I am constant amazed that some of the most intelligent people I know believe in the power of Google to such an extent, that they even credit it with the ability to discern between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Google does have it’s own in-built ‘quality control’ i.e. human beings looking at stuff, but the algorithm and spiders are as yet unable to make any genuine decisions about whose online web presence is more relevant and interesting to you, the user.

Take my personal example. My household is what’s technically known as ‘in market’ for a replacement for our five year old 4×4. However, recently I have become increasingly concerned about our carbon footprint, and feel that any new car that we buy needs to be as environmentally friendly (as well as comfortable, fuel efficient, able to take the six of us plus suitcases, have an iPod stand, fully adjustable seats and as many safety features that you can shake a stick at) as possible.

However my primary criteria, before any of the others, is the new car’s environmental credentials. How can my current marque know this, unless I go out of my way to tell them? Online car brands that want my business need to have a presence when I am looking for information on environmental cars of course, but I don’t want a ppc ad for my local dealer – its annoying and irrelevant. I want quality information that is going to persuade me that their marque are ticking all my new eco-friendly boxes, as well as tickling my brand loyalty mojo… In a nutshell, they need a ppc, seo and social content dissemination strategy that makes sure all that beautiful, interesting and intelligent stuff they have online is findable – and better still, they have to make sure that it can find me.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-Executive Director of Reform

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