MediaPost Publications Understanding Content And How It Drives Site Traffic 04/18/2011

MediaPost Publications Understanding Content And How It Drives Site Traffic 04/18/2011

As I discussed in the first of this series of posts on content strategy, marketers increasingly must think about their jobs in terms of major media companies -- producing constantly updating streams of media that engage, inform, entertain and result in widespread sharing among audience networks.  In future posts, we'll get to how these activities can lead to bottom-line-oriented outcomes, but today I'll focus on the various definitions of "content" and why each is important to your strategy.

Proprietary Content 

This category of content is the most important and will form the basis of SEO, social sharing, and lead- and demand-generation objectives.  It's the stuff your teams produce, completely original and owned exclusively by you. It's the stuff you write for blog posts, press releases, e-books, conference presentations, original research and static Web site copy. It also includes your proprietary video, audio, webcasts and animated demonstrations.  This content also includes your information graphics, illustrations and photos. Whether in-house teams produce this stuff or you hire third parties to produce it on your behalf, proprietary content can only be called that if you own all the rights to it.

Central to the development of all proprietary content should be three considerations (there are others, but these are primary):

1.  Your audience, their interests and tastes, and the ways in which they look for subject matter related to your business.

2.  Your keyword strategies and SEO objectives.

3.  Rising and falling memes and how those relate to or can be leveraged in your own content.

Because it is completely original and owned just by you, your proprietary content is the stuff that will be indexed by the search engines; linked to by bloggers, social sharers and the news media; and referenced in places like academic research or conference presentations. It takes priority above all other forms of content.

Syndicated and Third-Party Content

Syndicated or other third-party content can be a great way to augment proprietary content. This might include subscriptions to Getty Images, research from places like Altimeter, Forrester or IDC, and even targeted news feed services from places like Reuters.  Subscriptions may seems expensive but, when compared with the effort to produce enough original, proprietary content on a daily basis, may present an effective alternative that is also authoritative and of very high quality.

Fair-Use Content

Services like Daylife, Moveover and OneSpot make it easy to aggregate, categorize and curate an enormous volume of free, fair-use media from tens of thousands of sources all over the Web. These services also make it possible to present these sources by media type in attractive modules arranged around your proprietary content to bring constantly updating context and perspective from around the Web. These include modules with rivers of headlines, snippets and associated thumbnail photos; photo galleries; video galleries; pull-quotes; timeline graphics; and rivers of topically appropriate social-media feeds from Twitter and others. They can also help large enterprises with multiple content management systems in place to lasso, organize and present their own, proprietary content more efficiently and effectively. 

Movement Marketing 

Though this category of content could be a series of blog posts by itself, I'll summarize it by saying brands increasingly turn to movement marketing as way to effectively engage audiences around issues or ideas both value in common.  Movement marketing enables you to produce content and engagement activities that leverage memes adjacent to your brand -- environmental or green issues, for instance, or breast cancer awareness -- and to appropriate the associated keywords in an authentic way that creates a win for you, for your audience and for the cause you both believe in.  And, it's a great way to capture images of your audience interacting with your brand and its representatives --  to humanize what might otherwise be a completely corporate face. 

In such limited space, I've no doubt left out important ideas here, so please feel free to add your own in the comments space below, or to offer additional clarification and feedback.  In the next post in this series, I'll be discussing my favorite mantra: Produce once, repurpose many!

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MediaPost Publications Stats Point To Google's Year For Mobile, 2011 04/15/2011

MediaPost Publications Stats Point To Google's Year For Mobile, 2011 04/15/2011

Two years from now, if someone googles "when did mobile search and display advertising become a reality for Google," the year "2011" will likely return in the search query. "The mobile Web is growing eight times faster than the desktop Web did 10 years ago," says Karim Temsamani, global head of mobile at Google.  

There are 2 billion people online with 5 billion mobile phones, but not all have smartphones with full-browser capabilities. Not yet, anyway. That will change this year. By the end of 2011, more than half the U.S. market will have full-browser capability to access content, Temsamani says.

Temsamani talked about how smartphones will "change the world" earlier this week at the ThinkMovie event in Hollywood. A little corny, yes -- but Temsamani acknowledges that the convergence of cloud computing and mobile trends will enable advertisers to become more creative. The cloud turns mobile into "super computers" by allowing the mobile devices to concentrate on processing power rather than storage, similar to dumb terminals and mainframes, which I reference in past Search Marketing Daily posts.

A move toward consumers increasingly using mobile devices will foster the need for more video. Fifty-eight percent of people accessing YouTube on mobile devices remain on the site more than 20 minutes engaging with content, Temsamani says.

On Thursday, Susan Wojcicki, Google VP of advertising, told analysts and reporters during Google's Q1 2011 earnings call that AdMob, the display network Google acquired last year, has more than 150 million iOS and Android devices making requests per month. That's 50% more in the past four months, which provides insight into the speed with which mobile display advertising is growing.

Many Google advertisers have begun to run mobile-only campaigns, rather than bundling it with desktop campaigns, Wojcicki explains. They have mobile landing pages and campaigns that incorporate location. "For example, how far away is the advertiser from where you are standing right now?" she says. "These custom-made stations, again, get us to the perfect ad on mobile, since users also want to have location, or they want to have a phone number."

Google has also seen click-to-call take off, with more than 500,000 advertisers using this feature. As a result, the mobile-only campaigns are seeing an increase of 11.5% when they run a mobile-only campaign as opposed to a bundled mobile-desktop.

In a research note published Friday morning, Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster wrote: "As search matures, Google's fast growing businesses like Android and mobile advertising, display, and YouTube are still not big enough to meaningfully pull overall growth rates higher. We do believe new CEO Larry Page could become a catalyst for growth by aggressively investing in new products and/or acquisitions that could fuel growth, but expect compressed margins during at least the next three quarters."

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MediaPost Publications Searches And Paid Search Budgets On Rise 04/14/2011

MediaPost Publications Searches And Paid Search Budgets On Rise 04/14/2011

Google bounced back in March, gaining U.S. search market share, according to comScore. Some view it as a sign the search giant has begun to regain its footing after weeding out irrelevant search results and finally getting regulatory approval to close on its $700 million offer to buy ITA Software, a travel data company.

As consumers head into the season of summer travel, the ITA acquisition will become more valuable to Google and marketers who market travel-related goods. While the search industry should expect to see incremental gains in paid search during the coming months, comScore notes Google took 65.7% market share in March, up from 65.4%, reversing two consecutive months of slight declines.

Good news for Google, but the Mountain View, Calif. tech company wasn't the only engine to gain share. Bing's market share rose 11.8% to 13.9% in the month, gaining the highest sequential gain after rolling out a travel flight predictor for prices.

Google and Bing took share at the expense of Yahoo. The sites for the Sunnyvale, Calif., company ranked No. 2, but its share of the search market slid to 15.7% from 16.1%. Combined, Bing and Yahoo took 29.7% of the search market share, according to comScore. Microsoft Bing now powers the backend search feature for Yahoo's sites. Ask Network accounted for 3.1% of searches, followed by AOL with 1.6%.

Those searching for information on engines in March drove up sequential volume by 10% to 16.94 billion explicit core searches, which exclude contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results. Google Sites ranked No. 1 with 11.1 billion searches; followed by Yahoo with 2.7 billion; Microsoft, 2.4 billion; Ask, 520 million; and AOL, 272 million.

In the United States, Google Sites accounted for 64.1% of total core search queries; followed by Yahoo with 18%; Microsoft, 13.6%; Ask Network, 2.8%; and AOL, 1.4%, according to comScore.

In a research report Covario will release later today, the search engine marketing firm provides insight into paid search buying trends. For the past two quarters the company has been suggesting its high-tech clients increase their budgets for paid search. Two-thirds of the increase in spending in the fourth quarter in 2010 and the first quarter in 2011 will combat a 4% rise in cost per clicks (CPCs) on major search engines globally, particularly on Google, which experienced a 6% rise in CPCs between Q4 2010 and Q1 2011.

Click-through rates, however, varied per search engine. CTRs on Google and Yahoo rose to 2.9% and 1.8%, respectively, in Q1 2011, from 2.5% and 1.4% in the prior quarter. Bing fell in Q1 2011 to 2.5% from 2.8%.

Covario analysis point to Google Instant as the culprit slightly driving up CPCs, whereas Bing and Yahoo have caused a short-term increase in spending, and therefore an increase in CPCs, as advertisers reallocate budgets and re-optimize programs. In China, Baidu CPCs continue to rise as a result of reduced competition in China as Google's market share dwindles.

With larger paid search budget coming online, advertisers have little choice but to invest in relatively more expensive "generic search terms" to build top of funnel search impressions, according to the Covario report. 

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MediaPost Publications The Call for Smarter Search Analytics 04/13/2011

MediaPost Publications The Call for Smarter Search Analytics 04/13/2011

Search marketing and data analytics have always been connected at the hip. Even during the early days of search, part of the attractiveness of the channel was its transparency. It quashed the old adage that marketers don't know which 50% of their investments are worthwhile. Search represented this new advertising vehicle that demonstrated ROI really clearly -- and enabled smart analysts to drive incrementally higher returns if they acted properly in response to that data.

As search matured and more advertisers and organizations entered the fray, an environment of hyper-competitiveness for desirable clicks emerged. That competition spawned hundreds (perhaps thousands) of star-tup companies that sought to develop analytics technologies aimed at bringing greater visibility to search marketing performance and the mechanics behind managing programs properly.

Yet, despite the profound impact these technologies have had on the industry, many SEMs still rely on basic technologies like Microsoft Excel to help manage sophisticated programs. This is primarily the result of a fragmented marketplace for the search analytics buyer, one where needs often go unmet.

Driven in part by frustration, I decided to list four of my top (missing) features that would make for great additions within a definitive search analytics toolset. A couple of these features do exist within modern platforms, but don't get the universal appreciation they deserve. Other features are ones I would happily pay for access to, if they existed.

All you aspiring software entrepreneurs, take note:

Query Mining

Search query mining is one of the most under-appreciated elements to best practice paid search program management. Query mining is the process of identifying raw queries which were mapped to keywords within the search auction, and then extracting long tail derivatives and negative keywords to be explicitly introduced across the programs to enhance overall performance. This is an essential tactic for advertisers who rely on broad match keyword portfolios or are launching new programs.

Think of query mining as a way to help eliminate the unqualified noise, while enhancing the keyword portfolio with more precise phrase and exact match keyword targets.  

Search Attribution

The entire attribution category is hot right now, and for good reason. With billions being poured into digital advertising, it's becoming crucial to understand the entire range of influences and touches that ultimately result in a transaction. Legacy attribution models like last-click no longer cut it, yet we've been forced into accepting many such methods for attributing conversion by the analytics tools.

Rather than solve for the more complex multichannel attribution, search attribution is focused on the range of keyword queries that eventually motivated our audiences to take action. This is important for two reasons:

1)    Properly crediting early touch keywords for playing an influential role during the fact-finding phase; 

2)    Understanding consumer behavior as search queries are refined, even absent a click-through against the original query.

Keep in mind too that Google will serve carry-over ads from the original query to subsequent ones under the guise of "session-based broad match." Smarter search analytics would enable the advertiser to better understand where and why prospective customers refined their queries.

Audience Demographics

There are times when we know we need to pursue very broad keywords, despite having limited insight into whether those terms reach our intended audiences. A very timely example from one of our clients is for the keyword "cloud computing." We know that term belongs in our portfolio, we just don't know whether the clicks we are receiving against it are from those we were hoping to communicate with in the first place.

Understanding search-referred audience demographics mitigates that problem, and would allow for more meaningful messaging to be authored which would speak in a relevant way to discrete audiences. That discrete messaging may mean we have to set aside click-through rate and Quality Score as potential program KPIs, but it should yield higher engagement and conversion rates in the trade off.

Organic Search Rank at the Time of the Click

The solution to the ongoing debate around the utility of traditional keyword rank reports would be "rank at the time of the click." This metric would address the many factors known to influence natural search positioning across the results pages: personalized search, regional biases, new +1 results. SEOs could leverage that intelligence to make smarter re-optimization decisions, based on resultant on-site behavior patterns.

For example, if my site consistently lands within the top three positions yet engagement and conversion are both low, then perhaps I should pursue different keyword targets. Conversely, for keywords that drive high engagement and conversion, it may be possible to improve my position across the SERPs and receive higher volumes of traffic.

And this wish-list item isn't far-fetched either: Google is already passing this information in its referral string when the search engine user is logged into a Google account.

Though search analytics technologies have certainly advanced over the years, many more innovations are needed in order for SEMs to forever set aside the spreadsheet. These four are my biggies. I'd love to hear yours.

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MediaPost Publications Will YouTube Become The First Search Destination? 04/13/2011

MediaPost Publications Will YouTube Become The First Search Destination? 04/13/2011

At the Google ThinkMovie event in Hollywood, Calif. on Tuesday, the Mountain View, Calif. tech company released research. Debra Schwartz, Google analyst, presented it. I touched on some of this in the two pieces published Wednesday in Online Media Daily, but I'd like to elaborate on one specific finding I believe is relevant for a variety of industries -- not just movies.

The section of the report I want to address discusses engaging audiences beyond the category of movie to broaden relationships with consumers through each title. It reads: "Consumers with a moderate level of awareness of new movie releases oftentimes search for terms like 'movies,' 'new movie releases,' and 'new trailers'." Despite the abundance of generic movie search terms, the trend to search on these words grew at a 22% compounded annual growth rate from 2006 to 2009. In 2010, Google witnessed a 3% decline for generic movie search terms.

Although generic search terms fell in 2010, searches for specific movie trailers rose. In fact, searches for specific movies grew 51%. This means that consumers show less interest in learning about a variety of available movies and seek out specific movie titles and trailers. Perhaps they see an advertising campaign on a billboard or on television, and then turn to the search engines or YouTube to see a clip or read a review. It's not unlike strategies for other brands.

Google data suggests that the increase in search volume on brand trailer terms equals 2.4 times the decrease in the volume of generic movie terms. While searches for generic movie terms continued to drop on google.com in 2010, they rose 27% on YouTube.

Will YouTube become the first choice for consumers searching on specific information? The company will need to streamline its distribution channel to make content easier to find. At least that's what movie studio executives hope will happen. And an impromptu dialog between Malik Ducard, director of content partnerships at Google, during his presentation and a couple of event attendees might lead some to believe it's in the works.

YouTube now represents 15% of search volume for generic movie terms across Google properties -- up from 11 in the prior year, according to Google internal data. Overall, there are 2 billion daily playbacks on YouTube, according to Shiva Rajaraman, group product manager at YouTube. On every Tuesday when there's a new episode of "Glee," YouTube sees a spike in searches related to the music associated with that show, he told ThinkMovie attendees.

Rajaraman said YouTube has become a starting point to discover content. There are 400 Twitter tweets per minute containing a link to a YouTube video, and 500 million daily views of videos off YouTube sites. He pointed to an interview with Lady Gaga at Google's headquarters and her ability to market her brand by simply being herself. The singer's YouTube channel has more than 20 million monthly unique views, more than any television show. Some collections of videos for other YouTube authors have more monthly unique views than the Super Bowl. It's about capturing trends and creating relevant content.

A dashboard on YouTube can help identify trends. The dashboard will sort information by most-shared or most-viewed videos, as well as location, gender, and age groups. The trends dashboard could help to identify interests and intent. For those who want the answer to yesterday's question: I'm digital movie content presented at the Google ThinkMovie event in Tinseltown. Happy analyzing!

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MediaPost Publications Handling Duplicate Content Issues 04/12/2011

MediaPost Publications Handling Duplicate Content Issues 04/12/2011

I was working on a client's newly relaunched site recently when I ran into a potential duplicate content issue. Specifically, the client's site had incorporated an additional version of content specially formatted for printing. This version included a "no index, no follow" meta tag. Seems like the correct thing to do, right? Wrong.

Why No Index, No Follow Is The Wrong Choice

No Index, No Follow is an appropriate meta tag to use when: a) you want to prevent search engine indexing of a Web page and b) you want to prevent the links on a page from being followed by the search engine robots. Because the page isn't indexed by engines, any link "juice" from inbound links from other websites that point to the print-formatted version pages is essentially lost forever. But there's a better way...

The Canonical Tag Is a Better Choice

In the case of duplicate content, canonical tags are nearly always (if not always) the better choice. Launched two years ago by Google, the canonical tag allows you to tell search engines, including both Google and Bing, which page you prefer to rank for the given content. The real beauty, though, of the canonical tag, is that that it passes the "link juice" from the duplicate version to the preferred page version.

In the case of my client, the canonical tag would have been a better choice for the print-formatted page versions. Why? Unfortunately, the current "No Index, No Follow" meta simply sends engines the message not to index that information on that page or follow the links on that page, so it can act as a brick wall to a search engine robot when it is indexing the site. The canonical tag, however, communicates to the engine robots to instead rank a different version of the page. Also, if anyone links to the print-formatted version, the link juice would be passed to the preferred page instead of being lost completely with "No Index, No Follow."

Duplicate Content - It's More Common Than You Might Think

Don't think you're at risk for duplicate content? Here's a list of common situations where I regularly find duplicate site content when examining website structure:

Ecommerce catalog category pages 

Print-formatted version of pages 

Content that needs to be reused in several areas of a website 

Any pages with sorting options

So examine your site(s) and consider using the canonical tag for your duplicate content issues. It's often a better option for duplicate content issues, retaining more innate value than the "No Index, No Follow" meta tag. 

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MediaPost Publications Why Content Strategy Matters In Search Marketing 04/11/2011

MediaPost Publications Why Content Strategy Matters In Search Marketing 04/11/2011

Much has been written about search engine optimization and how it is search marketers can leverage what is known (and unknown) about the underlying algorithms at work within Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to get at better ranks in search results.  As much has been written about keywords and keyword strategy. 

What isn't discussed enough, at least from my perspective, is the need to go beyond keyword lists and strategies to get at a long-term, thoughtful content strategy. 

The truth of the matter is, you can't have really good SEO without really good content (in all its forms).  Another truth is that, increasingly, marketing departments have got to start acting like media empires - to be their own News Corp, for instance - in order to effectively meet marketing objectives. 

Why? Because audiences are now always-on and engaged with as many as four screens at a time. Because audiences turn to what they view as "authorities" all over the Web to guide their own behaviors and decisions.  And because audiences get their news, information and entertainment from more sources than ever before. 

  

I was reminded of this most vividly recently when my partner and I were sitting at opposite ends of a sectional we have in our media room at home, and arrayed between us were: 

2 iPhone 4s1 MacBook Pro (work-issued)1 iPad 11 iPad 21 Apple TV remote

1 "universal" remote controlling the 42" TV and DVR

In the other room was the central command of our little computational empire, an iMac. Putting aside our obvious Apple fanboydom (we're both Bay Area natives and were raised on Apples, so that's a good excuse, right?) what is remarkable is thatwe are no longer some fringe, geek element indulging gadget fetishes. Households all over the world have collections of similar gadgets, all delivering a constant stream of fresh content -- and engagement. 

Put simply, marketing strategy must evolve quickly to take this cultural shift into account.

Like media companies, then, marketers must adopt engagement strategies that rely on content and ideas that are always fresh; always updating and engaging; and always delivering on brand ideals and promises.

In other words, marketers should be increasingly concerned with producing the digital equivalents of newspapers, TV and radio programming, movies, magazines, games and books, to a name a few.  Whether published in the forms of emails or micro-sites, tweets or Facebook Pages, YouTube videos or Scribd publications, blog posts or podcasts, all are forms of content. And all of it should be guided by unifying ideas, values and -- importantly -- strategies that tie back to a company's business objectives. 

Some marketers are wisely getting into the engagement game by changing the marketing game.  They are adopting keyword strategies that drive content strategies and vice-versa; they're unifying marketing outputs; and they're meeting audiences where they're at before extending invitations to come over to a company Web site for a visit. And they're using tactics like movement marketing to align brand values with consumer values to tackle issues or ideas both hold in common, creating what I call the win-win-win of marketing (think the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer or the buy one, give one campaign at Tom's Shoes). These marketers know that when you engage your audience with great content, audiences work harder to find you when they need you. 

So, content strategy is key.  Over the next 14 weeks, I'll be laying out what I view are the elements of effective content strategy and the ways in which good strategy can improve not only a search marketing effort, but every aspect of an integrated marketing program.  And I'll be highlighting examples of marketers who are doing content strategy well throughout the series.  If you're one, let me know. 

As always, I'll be interested in and guided by your feedback.

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