Search Sense

As an agency with its roots in search, we are very aware of the capabilities of the major engines across all aspects of search but also their growing offerings in display. In fact, we have tremendous success by buying on a CPC basis through Google for our clients, especially in North America.

There is an ongoing discussion within the industry and within our agency as to the direction media buying will take.

On one hand, the growth of Google et al in this sector is likely to increase CPC and even CPA traffic, something that will happen exponentially with the acquisition of DoubleClick and the launch of Google Ad Manager.

However, from another perspective, ‘good’ publishers are in a position of strength and can choose the way in which they sell the first 60-80% of their inventory. What they do with the remaining 20-40% is up to them, but we don’t necessarily want to focus on buying this remnant inventory anyway.

Last week though a major publisher took a big step in one of these directions; ESPN.com has announced it is cancelling its arrangements with its media house and also the ad networks it does business with. Instead they are moving more to a direct model selling what is likely to be more premium custom packages.

Google et al will continue to grow in this sector, but if publishers like this decide not to fuel the ad networks growth then we won’t be seeing an entire CPC marketplace anytime soon.

And it makes sense for publishers to do this. They own the product and if ad networks continue to grow they will hold too much of the power and could lower the overall effective CPM rate that a publisher can achieve.

Google’s latest innovations in the way it displays search results in its natural listings has huge implications for user experience and the way we create websites.

‘Sitelinks’ emerged late last year. They are the links that appear under the number 1 search listing that enable you to click directly on a main navigational link that resides on the destination site - think of them as shortcuts. OK, so this helps us get from A-B better and extends the brand’s success at capturing search real estate - effectively pushing other sites lower down the results page.

This example for Woolworths illustrates the natural search navigation at work:

A good overview of Sitelinks can be found on the Google Webmastercentral blog here.

More recently Google has started presenting a ’secondary search’ box within the natural results. This allows people to search all pages that Google has from a site without leaving the search engine. Which means that the much of the huge usability investment you may have made can be by-passed in a click…

The implications are more clear than ever. Search friendly site design means taking into account the whole user journey, from search through to action. This extends the idea of usability from optimising e.g. a shopping cart process into the way people navigate through brand networks.

Now x this by every device and interface Google will interact with people in 3 years time. Wow.

Once we accept that we have lost control of the ‘home page’, and that every page on our site can now reside somewhere else before the click,we can start to put search at the heart of our creative planning. not an original idea, but one that I will keep repeating until someone tells me I am insane, and then I will not believe them.

I really like this post from the Logic + Emotion blog by David Armano that discusses the growing link between offline and online engagement (or touch points) with brands.

This chimes with an approach that I think really helps to communicate to clients how the modern web works. Put simply, we are finding ways to explain interaction to our clients, and there is no reason why the rules of interaction should be any different online than they are offline. Using offline behaviours as metaphors to help businesses understand their online behaviours sets the conversation very firmly in the context of people and not promotion. Put simply, forget that you are a business for a minute and think about treating people how you would want to be treated yourself.

As David’s post says, when it comes to brand interactions, the two worlds are already becoming indistinguishable. Already it is nigh on impossible to pin someone’s brand perception to one particular interaction or channel. However, as he also says in the post, brands themselves aren’t necessarily joining up these experiences. That’s the first challenge. The second is doing it in a way that works for people first and foremost.

Our What is Social Media?: now available in Chinese thanks to three strangers who met via a social network and went on to create an eBook publishing platform.

In September last year Jia Liu, an MA student of marketing in Boston put out a call on an incredible communtiy site Yeeyan.com for people to collaborate on a project to translate the eBook into Chinese. Zhifeng Sun from Shanghai and Xinyu Mao from Qingdao answered and over about a month they created a Chinese version of the What is Social Media?, complete with illustrations of Chinese blogs and social networks where it was appropriate.

So far there have been 2,000 downloads and following the project the three have created an eBook publishing venture/platform called Innobook and have published five freely available eBooks, by authors including Seth Godin and Richard Adler.

The translation and adaption of the eBook is possible for anyone in any language without permission from Spannerworks because we released it under a Creative Commons licence.

Everyone on the team that worked on the eBook are delighted to see it spread even further. It’s also added extra impetus to our work on its sequel - watch this space…

Before I begin I have a confession - I am a Google fan through-and-through. It’s natural results have become the benchmark of the search industry. The results are relevant, it’s intuitive and quick to use and I can’t find a better alternative. But I am also a fan of Wikipedia and Knol worries me.

It’s a no-brainer right? Let’s monetise, sorry ‘organise’, the world’s information.

Since the phenomenal success of the most effective new advertising system for a century, Google Adwords, search engines have been monetising every bit of real estate they can lay their hands on. Yahoo! decided that it’s ‘natural’ results could be bought by advertisers using it’s ‘feed’ system, and everyone tried placing CPC adverts in a variety of locations. Natural results in Google, however, have been left largely untouched and advert-free.

Hmm, well Google does place news, images and videos (via youtube) within the search results - all of which have differing degrees of Adwords penetration. Late last week our friends at Mountain View added a new way of getting into their own search results via Knol. Details as yet are thin on the ground, but we know that select authors are being invited to write articles within their area of expertise ‘to find a way to help people share their knowledge‘… Sounds like a more ivory tower like version of Wikipedia to me.. But with Adwords, and close to the top of the natural results guaranteed?

The guys are Techcrunch are debating this under the heading ‘Google knol a step too far?’ It’s worth a look.

Personally I think that Google will make Knol earn it’s place in natural results fairly but at a cost to commercially orientated websites, many of which have been forced to invest more into the Adwords campaigns over the past few years as a result of algorithm tweaks…

The process of organising the world’s information just got a bit more lucrative, I think.