Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Google SSL update and its impact on SEO, SEM and more.

November 8th, 2011

At Reform lively debate and conversation is encouraged as we develop our take on the latest developments in the ever-changing world of digital. Digital marketing is far from black or white (no search-related hat pun intended!), and through these debates we believe that we can better relay our thoughts on both sides of the fence to our clients and colleagues.

This week we’ve been discussing the latest Google SSL update, how Google Analytics now reports some SEO traffic as ‘(not provided)’ and the potential user / privacy issues driving the change.

Here are different takes on this development from two members of our team – one positive, about what Google can do as the innovative leader in this field, the other perhaps more pessimistic about what Google has become.

Niall Madden, Director at Reform says…

The big story here is that when a user logged into Google (Gmail for example) does a search, they are being taken through an encrypted query on Google’s https website, stripping out all the tracking parameters in the process, resulting in that traffic showing in Google Analytics as ‘(not provided)’.

This means that Google, and ONLY Google, know not only what keyword was used, but where the listing ranked in the SERPS (the “cd=” parameter correlates with the SEO rank in all occasions).  Why I hear you ask? Apparently this is due to a concern about protecting the privacy of Google users.

Since the change, if you’re logged in and in the US, you can’t even enter a search query with JavaScript turned off any more (UPDATE – NOV 18 – This is no longer the case, as now we can search with JS off, even when logged in, though some interesting features include one where the sub-links are shrunken into the older link only versions). Combine this with the recent announcement about the algorithm tweak emphasising content freshness (affecting around 35% of results) and there’s a lot of buzz within the SEO industry.

But the big issue is Google Analytics, a free service that’s been great for SEO practitioners over the past few years. Many users started seeing a few SEO visits listed as ‘(not provided)’ in the keyword list, and even a few days ago shrugged it off as overhyped news – since they only saw it affect 1-2% of traffic, people weren’t concerned, life went on.

Then, by last Friday, that 1-2% hit as much as10% on a couple of sites, and people started getting concerned.

There is potentially another layer to this story.

Google recently launched Google Analytics Premier, which it is aggressively pushing to larger scale clients. The introductory price of $150,000 per year provides a service which, according to the brochure will enable you to ‘track more than ever’, ‘own your customer data’ and ‘analyse ALL of your data’.

To me this sounds like music to the ears of clients worried about losing keyword data for 10-20% of SEO traffic to their site, and it has caused many to think that Google might be using this data exclusively like many third party ad providers do theirs.

However, this statement has not been accepted by Google, and their reps and other parties have informed us that this is not currently the case, (so conspiracy theorists can rest, for now). Still, it seems like the logical next step if Google is going to be selling their product, and many people have said that the answers they receive from Google on this subject are vague at best.

Face it, Google has changed. The data is valuable, and they need to generate revenue beyond AdWords. Hey, call me a cynic, but it just seems like the path that Google is taking, regardless of what Google tells me. I mean, really, who’s going to pay $150k when 10-20% of the keyword data is missing!?

And as for user privacy, consumers tend to complain more about targeted advertising, like remarketing perhaps, not SEO results. Ironically for PPC – “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”

So where’s that valued privacy now?

Richard Fergie, Consultant at Reform says…

Yes, you are a cynic. As far as I know, it’s all speculation and conspiracy theory at best.

Firstly, I think it is important to be clear that Google *could* do everything that Niall is talking about; there is no technical barrier to them operating an exclusive web analytics service in this way. My argument is not that Google can’t, but that Google won’t.

What will Google gain from this? If this change increases uptake of their premium analytics product so that it grows to twice the size of Omniture it will increase Google’s revenues by only 2% (based on 2010 figures).

Not the type of return shareholders are looking for.

2% at Google’s scale is still a lot of money but I think this reward is not worth the anti-trust risk for Google. Google are already walking a fine line in the anti-trust courts; I say that using their dominance in search to help them dominate the premium web analytics space will put them so far on the wrong side of the line that the US Government will have to take action.

So what is the real reason why Google have made this change? I genuinely believe that they are doing it to protect user data. Not because they care about user privacy but because user data is being used to compete with Google in the online advertising space.

Google Remarketing is an excellent retargeting solution but it is nowhere near being the best in the space. Giving these ad networks additional data in the form of the user’s search query makes their targeting even more efficient and harder to compete with. Google can reduce the effectiveness of their competition and gain brownie points with organisations who care about user privacy – win/win.

So who is right?

Only time will tell (though at this moment Google have claimed that the data will currently NOT be added to Google Analytics Premium). In the mean time, this surely provides an opportunity for innovation and development within the SEO industry.

Every business in every industry suffers setbacks at some point, and from an SEO practitioner point of view, this certainly feels like a step backwards for SEOs that analyse keyword data as a key sign of the overall project’s value.

However, workarounds will be developed, new KPIs will emerge, and the industry will continue to grow. This isn’t the first time data has been closed off, and presumably it won’t be the last.

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

Gamification strategies are now a key part of UX and customer engagement – ignore this and your brand will suffer

September 30th, 2011

Social media is a game. Some people (like me) don’t get that at first. Or maybe in the early days social platforms relied very much on early adopters who were happy just making friends (and maybe making out with them) via social. In the last twelve months however, engagement, challenges, rewards badges you can virtually gift etc, have tuned me into the fun. I find myself immersed in a world of fans, followers, circles, news feeds and apps, and all that alongside my Klout perks, beta test invitations and the micro affiliate cash I can get for simply recommending a product or service to my followers. The power that rewards can leverage to an online brand strategy is awesome. See the overnight success of Badgeville, and the adoption of behaviour analytics as a basket of key metrics in the measurement of a brand’s power to engage customer loyalty meaningfully.

Simply organising your social media life, identifying and connecting with the people that matter to you emotionally brings immeasurable pleasure. As does listening and advocating those that you find thought-provoking and that you can learn stuff from, dipping into the musings of others you know it’s good to keep tabs on, and finding those people you perhaps knew long time ago when you had a different set of priorities that now keep you connected to a shared past. This emotional payback through connectivity is an intrinsic motivational driver to the key engagement piece, and is why I argue that, although I can see a world when Facebook is the suburbs with new and innovative social urban conurbations emerging, social experience utilising technologies is here to stay.

Games for Brands, a conference on gamification, is being held in London on the 27th of October and will be the first mover in what is set to become the new social media. A quick skim read of the list of keynote speakers sees representatives of the UK’s major broadcasters, agencies, and games developer communities, as well as the academics and social entrepreneurs. Harnessing the power of gamification and utilising it is going to be exciting and will be another step-changing crossroads in the incredible journey that digital is affording the marcomms sector. Bring it on!

If you would like to discuss your social strategy and the implications and opportunities that gamification represents, please contact Reform.

Blog post by Mary Keane-Dawson, non-executive director 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.

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

Digital snacking – the death of downtime?

August 13th, 2010

Next time you’re in the queue at Starbucks or Tesco, watch people.

If it doesn’t look like they’ll get served in the next few seconds, chances are they’ll start prodding at their phone. Which will be in their hand. Ready. There’s even a phrase “Blackberry jam” that has been coined to describe being stuck at tube station exits behind office workers slowing to a halt as they breathe in that fresh phone signal.  http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blackberry%20Jam.

Increasingly, people don’t do downtime. And this includes me. I’m not proud to admit it, but I find myself digitally snacking in the those oh-so-boring seconds in-between lift floors. Or waiting for the train to pull to a stop. Or while your colleague grabs a drink before a meeting. A watched kettle might never boil, but it’s definitely enough time to read the BBC headlines. I wager that checking facebook has replaced reading a tabloid as the nation’s favourite on the loo pastime (or is that a boy thing?).

I don’t say this is a good thing. It might even be a dreadful malaise, but it’s definitely real. And it’s getting worse/faster. Multi-tasking on iPhone 4.0 means – God forbid – that no longer do we need to stand by idly whilst the Spotify app hogs the foreground. Nope – we can start a track playing and check Twitter. Why has no-one updated anything in the last five minutes?

So what does this mean for marketers?
1. Recognise that mobile is not just a different screen size, but a different occasion, involving different mind states and needs.
2. Think little and often. It could be titbits of information, mini games or a decent facebook page; brands would do well to provide snacks.
3. Speed up. Marketing has always been about getting messages across efficiently, but boy, that really matters now. Halve your copy, and double its punch.
4. Social again comes to the fore. Opening up safari, then going to Google, typing a search and clicking on results is slowwwww. Just gimme the link or a Like button to press already.
5. Or provide alternatives. The world isn’t on its way to hell in a handcart. Downtime is good, and brands that help people to switch off will be more important than ever.

Guest blog: Carl Mesner Lyons is Marketing Director at toptable. He has been in marketing since the 90s and has worked on brands such as Guinness, the Guardian, lastminute.com and Capital Radio. Read more about his take on how brands can get famous and stay relevant at http://www.talkablelikeable.com/.

The State of Search Marketing Survey – guest comment from Ed Stevenson, MD of Marin Software

May 21st, 2010

Congratulations on your recent State of Search report.  I thought it provided some extremely valuable insight into the big issues facing our industry.

In particular, I was interested in the things that advertisers want to see more of from their agencies. Here’s the full list from the report:

• More insights from performance data, not just impression levels and basic daily reporting
• Better recommendations that can be implemented quickly
• More transparency of data
• More pro-activity overall
• More advice and assistance planning with ATL activity
• Direct access to tools for data without waiting for agency to provide it
• Ability to do more structured testing
• More meaningful (not necessarily more detailed) reporting and analysis
• Better understanding of the client’s company and its products to make PPC campaign changes easier
• More integration between SEO and PPC

What I think shines through here is a growing desire for control: advertisers want more of it; agencies have not always been able to demonstrate they can provide it.

Of course, advertisers have always wanted to know how their search campaigns are performing, but – as the report clearly shows – search spend has increased dramatically both in absolute terms and as a share of the overall marketing mix in recent years. With this growth inevitably comes greater scrutiny and a desire for more intelligence around how search is directly impacting the business.

The report also shows where this appetite for greater control can logically end up – with search being taken in house. Almost a third (32%) of clients are now taking this option and over half considering doing so. Clearly, in some cases this can make very good sense and certainly knowledge of ‘how to do search’ is no longer confined to a small niche of agency specialists – the basics are becoming commoditised.

But I still strongly believe that in many cases agencies can play a vital role in giving an outside perspective and adding creativity to search campaigns that advertisers can benefit from. And in a world where demand for exceptional search talent still outstrips supply, agencies can help clients access the skills of the best people available.  As I’ve written about before on my own blog, I think to succeed agencies need to directly address the issue of control. They need to be more transparent in their reporting. And they need to offer not just information, but insight and intelligence about campaigns and relate that back to the businesses they are serving in a language they understand.

A third of clients already see search as too important to outsource – and they may well be right.  The key to the future of agencies is to develop such a deep understanding of their clients, combined with outstanding creativity, so that an agency relationship no longer feels like outsourcing at all.

Guest blog: Ed Stevenson has worked in the search industry since the early days of AdWords and is now the Managing Director of Marin Software in Europe. Read more about his take on the rapidly expanding world of big search marketing at http://www.bigsearchblog.com.

You can read more about this State of Search Marketing Survey and download the full report here: http://www.reformdigital.com/reform-search-marketing-survey.

Bing & Wolfram Alpha? Research Based Search Engine Results Could Bring That Personal Touch

November 16th, 2009

You may (or may not) have heard last week about Microsoft’s deal with Wolfram Alpha – which has been in talks for the last few months and now allows Bing’s search engine to integrate Wolfram Alpha’s database results (in the US only for now). It should be noted from the start, that Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine itself, but more an information database.

The results will generally be integrated for certain niches, such as health (like nutritional information) and statistics (population, GDP, history, etc), but with a very unbiased and real time approach (with results you can interact with). And perhaps this is not huge news to some people, but it sort of hit me as big news.

It’s better than news of other recent Bing developments, such as how natural results on Bing offer content snippets and related keywords along with dividing the results across the keyword you entered, videos, local listings and several variations – a souped up version of Google’s “universal” project, or even the fact that the first page of results now includes several keyword variables, that results in 20 natural listings on the first page (which is quite a bit longer, but still shorter than the results page of Naver in Korea), because face it, its not new. Same goes for the Bing “XRank” thing they implemented, where users find out how popular the name of someone they entered is. Nothing new there.

So why is this still good news for Bing in my opinion? Because its about time! It’s about time Bing (previously known as MSN, Live, etc) started looking towards a different direction for providing search results. It had been wasting way too much time and probably too much money trying to be like Google in recent years.

FINALLY, Bing may be thinking “long term”, with this acquisition. Maybe it will use this and its Facebook share to give more of a “person to person” feel in results (even the real time Twitter results could help, if they figure out a way to get past the “junk”). Combining Wolfram Alpha with Wikipedia results (which Bing US already integrates under its own site) might help too.

Maybe even add a bit of new colleague Yahoo and their Yahoo Answers offering? Suddenly, instead of a commerial search engine going against commercial search engine, we’ve got one that is taking potentially taking the more “person to person” and “research based Wiki” approach. The one that looked many steps behind for a while now, is starting to look more modern? Strange, but its starting to hint at that.

Many innovative search engines have come and gone over the years, but the main reason many of these failed were that they simply lacked the budget to get seen, let alone have competitive results. Microsoft’s Bing at least has the budget part checked off.

But how about this Bing, forget about profit for a while. Let Google concentrate more and more on its increasingly aggressive marketing model (by this I mean, behind the scenes and how AdWords teams are concentrating on generating client spend. Not conversions, not traffic. Spend.) Take some more time behind the scenes and develop a more “personal” based search offering. Do it right and become a research based medium – and traffic might come back over (more than the single digit percentage share you have right now).

Then, when you’ve established a new type of user experience, turn up the profitability a little – in order to cover increasing resource and overall company management. This sort of approach worked like a charm for someone else, um, what were they called? Oh well, I guess this isn’t 100% new either.

Anyway, here are some reference points (saved as screenshots for non US users).

1) Wikipedia Content being served under Bing.com URL

2) Screenshot of a long page in Bing’s results for “auto insurance” featuring several keyword variables

Do I think Bing’s improved in the past couple of months? Yeah, but I also think it’s got a long way to go. Still, it’s finally looking in a different direction though, and thats a start.

UPDATE: You can integrate WA results on Google too, but only if you install this Firefox plugin – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12006

Blog post by Niall Madden, SEO Director of Reform

Our Trip to Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East 2009 in New York

October 12th, 2009

We all packed our bags and hit the bright lights of New York.  Actually, no, not really….. We have someone here in our New York office, and we sent him out to SMX 2009 at the Javits Center last week. 

There were many things to be seen at SMX East.  Perhaps more so than in the London equivalent.  Here is what we saw plenty of. . .
 
Out of the booths, or tables, stands, whatever you want to call them, it felt like HALF of them were about tracking solutions of either website traffic stats, or how to track, analyse, or manage Google / Yahoo / Bing PPC campaigns in one place, with an interface that’s user-friendly and generates the “right” customised reports.

The good side was that some of them had effective ways of separating what the user actually queried versus the ad campaigns keyword bid, and displayed useful figures such as your keywords “impression share” – which could help refine campaigns and increase returns further.  However, most of these applications made the same mistake – they were programmed in Dollars and Cents.  So no Pounds and Pence, and no Euros, makes it a lot harder for the more international sites to use at this point.
 
So I’d say one of the biggest disappointments was the lack of international influence.  Almost everything was very US market focused, with maybe versions coming out later for the UK market (once we asked).  Which is a shame, as some of them looked very promising, quite competitively priced, and ran quite smoothly.  Of course, things always look nicer in the showroom!

And going to the other end of the spectrum, “local search” was almost silent.  There was some buzz and several conferences about optimising via the Web 2.0 tools, a la Twitter, YouTube, etc.  But most of the buzz was around tracking and general SEO.      

There were a fair few “SEO Interfaces” – as perhaps more companies are looking for a more template approach to SEO.  Yet, it’s the “same old” in most cases.  Your Yahoo site explorer links, your Google PR, your Alexa page rank, and various other things you can find online and aren’t even the most reliable sources in some instances.  Then there are others that just over-analyse rankings and keyword density to the point where clients get obsessed with both!  And that’s not how SEO works in the first place.

Too many places trying to define it a certain way, and maybe that’s influenced by client marketing teams and needs.  If there was a template mechanism for measuring SEO accurately, it would be a hit for sure.  However, reality is, you cannot template SEO.  Every tool I’ve seen has promise, but then if you try it with three sites that you either own or have access to the data of – it will usually be way off with at least one of the three.  And that’s a horrendous rate for any marketing tool.  That’s why we give every website a customised approach.

As for my attendance, I was there on day two (Tuesday), as it was more SEO geared and had a “link building” conference.  However, for those that actively deal with link building, there was nothing new here.  The usual “does Google detect link buying” (only meters away from companies that buy/sell links for search marketing purposes!) – and the usual complaints from sites that are making quite basic mistakes.  As for link buying, it has at least becoming more internationally focused itself.  By that we mean, for the sites that want to dabble in buying links, link brokers now have a more international reach.  Since Google’s algorithm has a lot to do with link strength and location, it’s always a touchy subject.  Here at Reform, we make sure all sites know what they’re getting involved in before even considering such routes, and what the pros and cons are.

More details from SMX East 2009 can be seen at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020841.html
(which has live blog transcripts of every other session at SMX east too).