According to Google’s software engineer, Matt Cutts – Google plans to shortly roll out a new filter that will treat sub-folders and sub-domains of a site equally. According to SE Roundtable (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015621.html), at a recent PubCon conference in Las Vegas, Matt stated that very soon things will change and a domain will be limited to 2 total URL’s within any set of search results.
So what does this mean for webmasters? Since sub-domains up until this point have been treated as individual domains, site owners had the ability to easily game the system and index an endless amount of sub-domains in Google to dominate a bunch of rankings. Google’s latest effort to put an end to this, will most likely have a significant impact on websites using these tactics. In addition though, some legit sites are likely to hurt from this change, as certain sites who let’s say had 3-4 of their own listings within top 10 search results will now be limited to just 2, therefore losing some of the traffic.
Whether or not this new algorithm will cause relevancy issues is under question, but the filter should surely put an end to black hat SEO’s taking advantage of the current situation, especially those in the more competitive areas of the business.
In a meeting with our Google team this week, one of our contacts introduced us to iGoogle. Although I was aware of it, I never really went as far as to try it out. However, out of curiosity today, I went to check it out quickly, and before I knew it 15 minutes went by with me playing around with my page, as well as some of the 'gadgets' I can add to it.
iGoogle allows you to personalize your Google homepage, spicing it up from just the plain white background. It allows you to customize your page with news, local weather, YouTube clips, and lets you 'add stuff'; gadgets that you may want to interact with when visiting the page. Our rep let us know one of his favorite gadgets was Pacman - and much to my surprise, you can play Frogger and Duck Hunt too!
Much to my surprise, some of these gadgets are being used as ad units - which Google is currently calling 'gadget ads'. These gadgets are being described as 'websites within websites'; users can post and share gadgets anywhere, engaging users around your brand. Gadget ads are comprised of 'applications incorporating data feeds, maps, images, audio, video, flash, HTML, or JavaScript in a single creative'.
Now that I've actually seen these gadgets and interacted with some of them myself, I'm curious to see how they work in an ad campaign!
Google announced this week that CPC site targeting is currently out of Beta, and available to all advertisers. They also announced that they will now call what was formerly known as Site Targeting, "Placement Targeting".
According to Google, "With the launch of CPC bidding, you can not only pick the placements where your ads appear, but you can also select the bidding option that best matches your clients' needs. For instance, if the purpose of your client's placement-targeted campaign is to increase sales, leads, sign-ups, or other conversion-oriented metrics, you can select CPC bidding and pay per click. Alternatively, if you want to maximize impressions and increase brand awareness among your client's target audience, you can select CPM bidding."
It would be great with the launch of these announcements, Google could also provide case studies that demonstrate the impact/performance of CPC placement targeting vs. CPM for a particular advertiser. The data must be available and is usually the first question I have when a Google feature comes out of Beta.
Currently, the search engine allows advertisers to convert their CPM placement targeting campaigns to CPC with a quick change to their campaign settings. Although not yet available through the API or compatible with Adwords Editor, Google hopes to integrate these within the coming months.
In response to a recent Online Spin article: "Shaping or Breaking Brands", the author talks about how online reviews can make or shape clients brands. Mulcahy writes:
"... According to a recent survey by Deloitte's Consumer Products Group, consumers are turning to online reviews in large numbers. And guess what, those reviews have been found to have a serious impact on purchase.
Findings show that 62% of consumers read consumer-written product reviews on the Internet. Out of that group, more than 8 in 10 say they have been directly influenced by the reviews. Influence, of course, is twofold: consumers are either influenced to buy the product they were researching, or switch to another brand."
This note brought to mind an e-commerce campaign I managed, whose majority of PPC revenue was generated through brand terms (no surprise). In digging a little further into some click path data, a decent percentage of users started out in the search engines typing the brand term (let's say in Google), then went on to type in a non-branded term across several shopping engines, *then* came back to Google on the brand term again and purchased. This wasn't just one event... it was one of many.
The analysis was exciting to see (to prove the value of brand terms- yay!) but also scary, as it showed many users were not loyal to the brand. Luckily, they had a lot of good reviews. As Deloitte's survey points out, having reviews available on your site (and on the shopping engines) can influence users to (with good reviews) positively impact your brand.
Every week, I read another warning from search marketers about various algorithm changes in the engines. Although these changes can have very little impact on some of our PPC campaigns, they can cause more pain in others.
Google's expanded broad match has been a big topic for a while now. Among all the algorithm changes search marketers have to deal with, issues with expanded broad matching seem to have caused the most problems, and often some of the most challenging.
Earlier this year, one of my campaigns suddenly started to decline in efficiency, as early as the end of January/early Feb (without making any drastic changes to the account). After digging into some data, I noticed that the majority of the decline was coming from rising CPC's in Adwords. When looking into it further with Google, I learned they rolled out a more "robust" expanded broad match at that time and knew right away this was effecting my ads. Sure enough, although I had very targeted creative in my campaign, certain keywords were triggering ads that did not match up with some of the specific search queries users were typing in (many of which weren't even in my keyword list).
Google's recommendation was to change all of my broad match types to either exact or phrase and add more negatives to the account. At first I was skeptical (and a bit freaked out), as I was concerned my traffic volume would significantly decrease. However, after changing match types and conducting a couple rounds of keyword research to capture all the important variations - the campaign was performing better than ever. After a couple of months, volume picked right back up to where it was before the change, with larger returns. Nowadays, I'm more aware of assessing the vertical, as well as keyword variations that "could" trigger my ads, when considering launching terms on broad match.
Another challenge - the recent algorithm change for achieving top positions above Google search results, which rolled out in August. With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, Google will now consider your maximum CPC bid (which you control) for achieving top placement - http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=72975. Before this change rolled out, I didn't expect this to effect our campaigns much. However (sigh), at the beginning of August, one of our accounts experienced some ups and downs, predominantly due to increased CPC's on a handful of our most competitive terms. Sure enough, these terms were victims of the new change; we quickly put forth a new bidding strategy for these terms in an effort to combat the issue, and the campaign is performing efficiently again.
These are just a couple of the algorithm challenges search marketers have to constantly keep up with on a day to day basis. Although these changes can be challenging and more often frustrating, it keeps us on our toes... and keeps our jobs interesting!
While most online marketers are fully aware of the advantages and disadvantages of sponsored search marketing, many are still unaware of Google’s push to become a comprehensive media outlet. Google is now offering Radio, Television and Newspaper advertising all managed through their auction based platform.
Google Audio:
Advertisers will now be able to take advantage of radio advertising with similar ease that they are able to run Pay per Click ads on the Google search network. A recent agreement with Clear Channel will make hundreds of station formats in most major radio markets available to the both large and small advertisers who wish to take advantage of the power and relative cost efficiency of radio advertising.
A few benefits that justify looking further in to Google Audio:
· Large selection of city specific and format targeting · Auction-based or fixed-cost pricing – the advertiser decides what they can and can’t afford based on their own goals · Easy-to-use, do-it-yourself Google interface · Access to quality production shops to help create commercials
This is a new project that is still playing out, but given Google’s resources, one can comfortably bet that the Audio product will give traditional media agencies a run for their money.
This morning, Viacom announced that it is suing YouTube and Google for "massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom's entertainment properties". In today's press release, Viacom is seeking $1 Billion in damages claiming that thousands of clips have been freely available on YouTube with over 1.5 billion video plays.
Viacom has released the following statement regarding the filing:
"YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden - and high cost - of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement."
Recently, a court issued a restraining order against Google and ordered the Silicon Valley search giant to remove personal identifiable content from its cache system. This order was derived from content accidentally posted online, identifying citizens of Johnstn county North Carolina.
The actual web page which contained the data has been updated and the personally identifiable data has been removed. However, a search on the Google engine shows that data still available and easily displayed in the cache of the web page. Some of the data includes social security numbers, cell phone numbers and other like data.
The moving party was fearful for possible identity theft with such information in the public domain. The information had been posted for six (6) weeks on the county’s web site, but once it was discovered, the data was promptly removed.
Google in no-way disputed the court order and was working at the time of the hearing to remove the data. However, in today’s litigious society some people are just so quick to pull the trigger on civil litigation and not give the preverbal deer in the cross hairs a chance to fix the problem.
According to Matt Cutts blog, on February 5, 2007, a web site owner can now view all of the backlinks that Google has indexed to their web site. This can still not be seen by using the link:site.com command, but the Google’s webmaster console does allow those with access to a specific account to view the backlinks that Google sees.
