It seems like Yahoo! may have finally given up trying to beat Google with the announcement that they are running a two week trial displaying Google AdSense listings alongside their search results in the US (more detail).  The initial trial will include the results displaying on no more than 3% of search queries submitted and will only be seen by Yahoo! US users.  Yahoo! claim the move is is part of an “exploration of strategic alternatives to maximise stockholder value”, i.e. make them more money.  Microsoft have already expressed their own concerns that should a future deal be struck this would take Google past the 90% market share mark and raise further competition concerns.

It concerns me what a future deal could mean for the search market as the it effectively means a consolidation of the market as opposed to the fragmentation we had seen coming over the past 2 years.  This simplifies the process and doesn’t necessarily bode too well for search marketing agencies.  From Yahoo’s perspective it may come down to purely monetary figures.  If they have decided that they are not going to get very far with challenging Google in the paid search market then displaying AdSense results would allow them to significantly reduce their staffing levels and technology costs.  Although it wont be nice for those people that end up getting the boot, the boardroom wont be concerned if the figures stack up.

It does make you wonder what sort of deal has been brokered for the trial and the possibilities beyond though.  A typical AdSense partner might be earning 40% of the click revenue generated but Yahoo! aren’t you standard partner! Could Google be willing to let Yahoo! keep all of the revenue for the sake of market share?

So Google have finally done it.  Sacrificed their morals on trademark protection in the name of more revenue by opening up all brand terms, whether registered trademarks or not, to anybody who chooses to bid on them.  This has been their system in the US and Canada for a while now and their arguement is that it provides a better user experience by offering the searcher companies which provide the same product or service as the one whose trademark they have searched for.  The changes will come into play on May 5th and from this point any advertiser will be free to bid for any brand terms they choose.  Fittingly this is a bank holiday in the UK and so the mayhem which will undoubtedly unfold will do so when the majority of industry representatives are away from work!  If you remember what happened when Google made changes to their minimum bid system (and it all went t*ts up!) it makes you wonder whether this date has been set intentionally by the big G.

So cue brands bidding on other brands, hiking the prices out of spite and affiliates of a field day.  But will this be the case?  No doubt initially companies will begin to bid on their competitors terms thus raising the price the brand owner has to pay.  But how will the quality score deal with this? Well you would like to think the competition will have to pay hefty minimum CPCs to even list in the first place given that their websites will have no relevancy at all to the keyword.  But will the big boys care about this?  They will probably be more concerned with stealing their competitors traffic and be willing to pay the price. 

Theoretically they wont be able to include the trademarked term in their creative but that doesn’t account for DKI which, no matter what Google suggest, isn’t going to change any time soon to combat this.  Therefore a clever search engine marketeer will get round this quite easily.

What do I think will happen?  Brand CPC’s increase, affiliates have a field day, the overall cost of PPC increases, and then when it all dies down it is back to business as usual and people forget the day brand protection was in place.  The trick is for companies to have a plan of action for May 5th, to know how they are going to deal with their affiliates, to develop and stance on competitors terms and closely monitor the first couple of weeks after this change comes into place.  Then to reassess and get on with the business of generating leads from paid search, after all we are all at the mercy of Google anyway, so why bother trying to fight it!

Ive finally gotten round to having a little think about the big news story of the week, Microsoft tabling a bid of $44.6 Billion in cash and stock to buy its rival Yahoo.  There has been no official comment from Yahoo on the reports but I thought Id document my thoughts on the impace this could have.

The portal market

Yahoo and MSN are the two big players in the portal market, the one stop shop for all you web needs, search engine, web mail, news feed, weather reports, all in one place.  This is where Microsoft will gain a massive advantage and pretty much gain complete dominance.  Aside from the ISP sites, which gain their visitors through having a default homepage setting in the ISP setup process, Microsoft will have a dominance in this field comparable to Google’s in the search market (more of that in a minute!).  So what does this mean to MSN? Well instantly they will take on board the lions share of the portal advertising revenues around the world.  Yahoo has built an advertising model which is highly lucrative and brings in a huge amount of revenue each year, utilising the latest behavioural targeting technology to keep online advertising moving forward.  MSN obviously has its own advertising model and ideas on how the market is going to advance but they will automatically boost their ad revenues with the purchase.  It also sets them up well for the predicted rise in online ad spend over the next few years, from $40 billion to $80 billion if you believe the predictions, dominance in a market this size is a mouth watering prospect.

The search market

This is where it gets really interesting.  Microsft has struggled to gain a foothold in the search market since it launched its own PPC model in 2006 and I forecasted in a previous post (Microsoft sets its sights on 40% market share) that a purchase may be on the cards if they were to achieve their targets.  The purchase of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), if part of the deal, would possibly take their market share into the double figures in the paid search arena.  Their system is good at present, the quality of their traffic is good, its just the volume they have been missing.  YSM would help boost this and make them a legitimate number 2 in this arena and they undoubtedly have the fire power to make dents in Google’s dominance (see their response here).  It does raise the question, what does this mean to search agencies?  the market which was due to fragment with the launch of wikia search, AOL breaking out in the US, Ask hinting at the same, is now significantly consolidated if this deal does actually go through.  Does this make SEM simpler? Not really but it could be perceived that way, a post for another time I think.

How do they manage it?

This will be interesting, does Yahoo become Microsoft branded?  or is it just another property of the technology giant?  Does it become Microhoo? Yasoft? Mahoo? or does it become Yahoo - a Microsoft company? and more importantly for internet marketers do they keep the two infrastructures separate, the advertising interfaces, the search algorithms, the display advertising models.  This is what will be the key determinant of what this means to the industry and what it means to digital agencies.

Whether the deal goes through remains to be seen, when it goes through is another question yet to be answered. What is undeniable is that it is going to influence the online advertising market significantly, in what way, remains to be seen.

The personalisation of search results is well documented and evidence of its arrival is clear to see particularly in the Google results. I have blogged in the past about the differing search results based on search history, the listings of site visits and also the use of IP information as a targeting tool.

But what does this all mean to advertisers? What impact is this going to have on your search marketing activity?

Position Variances

If the search engines are going to begin giving prominence to previously visited sites then you can expect variance in positions with then search engine results. For a user who has visited your site before you could be ranked top where as to a new user you could be lower down the results. This effectively is the same model as is used in the PPC listings with the metric click through rate (CTR) however this would occur at the individual level rather than the keyword.

If this begins to occur it will create confusion with advertisers as you will there will be no accurate measure of what position you are actually ranking in. This will make the performance metric of position redundant.

We are seeing this already in the PPC market with one user seeing an ad in a completely different position to another based on their search history. This makes managing a campaign much more complicated and needs to be fully considered when devising strategies.

Advance Targeting

On the positive note, this could, if used intelligently, allow advertisers to target their natural search campaigns to their key demographic. Although the basics of SEO will be needed to achieve a decent position in the first place once this is in place effective use of creative and website copy could lead to a increased performance for a particular segment and so increased positions. This will be dependant on the extent personalisation takes effect and will need a very clever implementation but should be possible.

I’m sure there will be more effects which come about as a result of the continued personalisation of results with in the search engines but for now these are the key two. What this space, it’s going to get increasingly complicated!

Not rocket science but puts forward some interesting points. This is what I have believed and have told clients for a while. There is no sense in managing PPC and SEO as seperate entities when they are formed from the same model. Also this becomes even more prevelant as the paid search engines all revert to a qulity scoring system which accounts for landing pages in the same way as the natural search algorithms.

Yes, Co-managed PPC And SEO Campaigns Work

by Rob Garner, Wednesday, March 28, 2007
IN LATE February we released our Search Synergy Report, which demonstrates that there is indeed a lift in search campaigns that have both a paid and natural search component. These findings support similar studies presented by SEO-PR and Yahoo/Nielsen ReelResearch on the exponential benefits of and lift from holistically managed search campaigns.
The study sought to answer the following question: “Does running a natural search campaign and a paid search campaign together create more value than running them in a non-integrated manner?” In the end, the evidence revealed that the answer to this question is an overwhelming yes.
Among the findings, the report shows:
A causal relationship between paid and natural was confirmed, and the results were significantly positive. These happy results came when running paid and natural search in a cohesive, integrated manner, particularly when visibility was maximized for a particular keyword in both the paid and natural sections of a search engine results page. We also confirmed other eye-tracking and holistic research studies that reveal the dynamic interplay between paid and natural results on the search engine results pages, and that search is not an either/or proposition.
One plus one equals three. Not only did the research show that positive results increased (to the effect of appearing twice) but there was also extra lift from the additional visibility.
Running natural and paid search together (versus running them alone) in an integrated manner will drive superior results for branding and lead generation. When appearing in both natural and paid search for the same keyword impression, clicks lifted 92 percent, actions lifted 45percent, orders lifted 45 percent, page views lifted 44 percent, visitors increased by 41 percent, and time on site increased by 40 percent.
Natural search optimization is one of the strongest tactics for increasing paid search performance. Imagine that your paid copy is so tweaked so that it can be tweaked no more; your call-to-action has been massaged to entice clicks that exceed industry standards; and your sophisticated ROI measurement tools show that position 2.4 is the sweet spot for the highest conversion rate. So where do you go from there? The research indicates that while natural presence creates overall click lift, it can also create overall paid search lift. If your paid terms are converting, then a tactic for increasing those high converting clicks is increasing natural search visibility.
So how do these findings impact holistic search strategies?
Look to high performance keywords in paid search, and begin optimizing for these terms in natural search. If all copy and paid rank optimization has been maxed out for conversion performance, the next logical step is to increase visibility on the natural SERP for that keyword to attain additional click share. Impressions are relatively finite, so increasing page visibility in natural search is a sensible way to maximize the potential for high-converting terms.
Look for high performance keywords in your natural results, and ensure that these terms are added to paid campaigns. If you want to get more of a good thing, maximize your visibility on the page for that term, including adding the term to paid results. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to bid aggressively to maximize visibility and conversions. Get in the paid game for high converting terms, and find your ROI comfort zone, whether it’s at no.1, no.3 or no.6.
Increase natural presence; decrease paid spend. For certain types of ROI goals, particularly those running on leaner margins, it may be very sensible to reduce PPC bids once high natural visibility is achieved. If you are bottoming out in paid search every month, and lack a significant natural presence, it would be worthwhile to add a significant natural search component, and then tweak positions in PPC accordingly to effectively increase ROI.
Consider defensive brand term strategies. Note that neglecting holistic strategies could let high-performance clicks go somewhere else. In other words, being exclusively in paid search or natural search means that there is some click attrition. The best way to reduce click attrition is to be as highly visible in the SERP as possible, and your two basic choices are paid and natural placements.
Consider addressing multiple search intentions between paid and natural listings: If you find that paid search generates more ROI at the point of conversion and is generally more commercial in presentation, this could be countered with more informational content ranking highly in natural results. Brand visibility is attained in both areas of the page, but the discerning searcher would have two content options from the same query that meets multiple intentions at varying stages of the “funnel” process.

In a recent bizreport article travelocity’s CMO Jeffrey Glueck made the observation that in PPC “most of your profits come from buying your own brand term”. No kidding! This is a basic principle of search marketing and one which is a constant area of discussion between agencies and clients. In a market such as travel where competition is high and price is everything building a strong brand is essential to your success. Glueck goes on to say he is “dismissive” of the approach of buying a large range of generic terms in a PPC campaign. I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this dismissal and say that in my experience of managing travel campaigns it is essential to hold whole range of generic spcific and brand terms in your campaign. Due to the price sensitivity of the travel market search engine user go through a number fo research stages before deciding upon a purchase, they will research different countries, followed by regions of a country and then hotels within a region before finally searching out the cheapest price for their chosen destination. In the final comparison stage they are likely to take note of the cheapest site they find during their search before returning through a brand search. Hence it is importnat to have a presence at each stage of the buying process in order to have a chance of getting the sale. Full article is below, make your own mind up!

article here

Although this is an interesting articale about the differences in the approach taken to PPC and SEO I feel that it is a little naive to treat the two as seperate entities. They have obvious similarities and by treating them as one channel (search) there is a lot that can be gained. Cross over of learnings is significant and by managing them closely together with a holistic approach brings the best out of each.

SEO Vs. PPC: The Heavyweight Battle Of Internet Marketing

SO, YOU’RE ASKING yourself the question online marketers are asking themselves today. Where should I spend most of my time, money, and efforts — SEO or PPC? The battle has begun.
The conflict begins with too many choices. It’s easy to feel lost when new forms of online advertising are constantly emerging. So, where do you start? You hear about social media networks, pay-per-call, blogs and innumerable others as they develop into bigger markets, but do any of these choices make sense? Here’s the reality - no matter how many other avenues pop up, the engines still maintain the largest market share of all searches online. It is there that you’d be wisest to invest your money.
Round 1 – Time. When considering which form of Internet marketing to choose, your biggest determinants should be time and efficiency. Depending on how time-sensitive your objective is, it is important to know that the quickest way to drive traffic is through PPC (pay-per-click). You build your campaign, and with the click of a button, you’re getting traffic. Changes are immediate, and you have control. SEO (search engine optimization) is quite the opposite, although certainly worth the effort. A couple of things to keep in mind — it is very important to be patient. Due to the dynamic nature of the engines, time projections are difficult to make. You make a change, and it often takes months to see results. Also, you need to keep in mind that optimizing your Web site is an ongoing effort. As the nature of search engine algorithms, your site might need “adjustments.” But the end result — the possibility of increasing your site’s natural rankings and getting a high volume of free traffic — is well worth the time spent
Round 2 – Money. You often hear people saying that “SEO is so expensive!” But is it really? Let’s compare it to PPC. Granted, SEO often requires a considerable upfront investment, but consider the payoff. An optimization professional recommends (and often makes) changes that are intended to increase a site’s natural rankings — which translates into free traffic. Although you can control your site’s rankings via PPC, you will always have to pay for them, which most often ends up being many times more expensive than the SEO investment. Anyone can start a PPC campaign, but the challenge is getting your site ranked in the first pages of the engines. Having the first spot or even the 5th or 6th in Google for your keywords is like having a huge billboard in the middle of Times Square. The traffic is intense and the exposure is priceless! We can say the same about a great ranking on a PPC campaign, but remember one thing — you will always have to pay for it. Free clicks in sponsored search? Never.
Round 3 – Effort We know SEO takes more time and effort than creating and maintaining a PPC campaign. Yet, it’s important to recognize that a considerable effort is required with both. Optimizing a Web site is like trying to climb to the top of a mountain. Once you start, you can’t stop until you reach the top. You work for hours at a time on optimization, with your goal in sight, and then rest while the engine crawlers find and assess your improvements. You see the results of those changes via movement of your site’s natural rankings, and then start up the mountain, again. The creation of a PPC campaign takes only a few steps — but to make it successful, consistent maintenance is required. Rather than investing hours of work at once with down time in between, PPC requires almost daily attention and maintenance. It may look simple from the outside, but there are so many small things can make a huge difference in the success of a campaign. This is the rivalry of the Internet marketing world and getting more and more intense. Who’s watching? We all are.
Each tactic, whether it is SEO or PPC, has its positives and negatives. Consider the following:
1 - Business Growth. SEO and PPC have opened the doors to small business and fueled fast- growing enterprises. A company can make a name for itself in no time if it pays enough per keyword to be in Google’s top ranked positions or has a better optimized Web site than its competitors. For e-commerce clients, this has been an incredible way to market and sell their products. Think about how much renting a locale can cost a business per month and how much traffic will actually go into your store. Now, think about the traffic that exists online, in which you can target either by city, state, region, or country, and how much more affordable it can be!
2 - Brand Awareness. When launching an Internet marketing campaign, you’re not only marketing your product or service but acting on a form of public relations. Many PR firms are reaching out to Internet marketing firms to help their client’s efforts. When deciding whether or not PPC is viable, consider both the cost per click, and the number of people who will see your ad (whether or not they clicked). It’s free exposure, and what’s better?
3 – Traffic. Traffic will make or break your online business. If you’re not generating traffic, you’re not generating sales. The engines can deliver the highest volume of traffic if positioned in the top rankings. You already know this! Now, the important factor is driving qualified traffic to your Web site. This all comes down to the SEO and PPC determinants, such as choosing the right keywords, ads and other elements that are driving the traffic you want to ensure your online efforts are successful. One major factor of failing campaigns is insufficient research. Research is crucial to creating a winning campaign to compete in a growing market.
It’s time to start considering which type of marketing will best suit the needs of your business. If you’re still debating whether it’s the right time to get serious about marketing online, consider that your competition is most likely making their presence felt there already.

hello and welcome to world of search. Here I will be posting and commenting on articles from across the globe which relate to search engine marketing. All views contained in this blog are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employer. If you disagree or have a major greivance with anything I have siad then feel free to contact me on the link provided.