Integrated solutions need integrated knowledge

Seems like everyone's talking about integration of digital platforms at the moment. However in my experience, far fewer people are actually doing it. We still have Search specialists, Social Media specialists and Mobile specialists. They're not talking to each other enough. These silos exist both within client marketing departments and in the agency world.

But the winds of change are blowing; the big ad agencies 'got' digital some time ago and now they're busy developing their high-level strategic and creative relationships into total 360 communications partnerships. The big media agencies are doing the same. These guys are investing in training, hiring digital experts and building structures to deliver truly integrated solutions, driven, of course, by their clients' needs. One example: Search and Social Media have never been so closely tied together. SEO Press Releases, the benefits of which are still insufficiently understood, will rapidly become standard practice. Everything's moving onto Mobile. (Facebook Deals is already causing huge disruptive waves). Offline isn't going away either, although some spend is certainly being switched. And, as we know, all marketing communications drive searches...

In 2011, the various specialist agencies need to understand each other's roles better and clientside marketers, however many agencies they work with, need to know enough about each marketing 'instrument' to conduct the entire integrated orchestra. No matter how senior and experienced you are, there's never been a better time to learn, even (in fact especially) about something you don't currently do.
It's going to be an interesting year!

PPC: how much will you pay per click? It's all about Quality.

If you know all about Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) you might want to sit this post out (or better, please read and comment; this is Web 2.0 after all.)

Today's big news in the world of tech/digital marketing is the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, which sees Microsoft become Yahoo's search provider while Yahoo's sales team will sell advertising on behalf of both companies. This will, subject to regulatory approval, create a serious rival to Google in the world of search and specifically in the world of PPC.

A random sample of advertised jobs from this week’s UK (digital) marketing press (online and offline) includes the following:

Head of Search Marketing - Top 5 Media Agency
This is a senior management role for a talented SEM professional. It's one at a top 5 media agency, and is responsible for one of the biggest spending Search accounts in the UK. With a focus on PPC, you will also be able to devise strategy across all SEM activity and provide continuity and integration. For this a deep knowledge of Search media will be required, along with vast experience (7 years plus), preferably agency side.

PPC Account Manager - Top Digital Agency
A rare opportunity to join what is widely regarded as the best digital media agency in the UK has arisen - and as such we require a skilled search expert (PPC) to work in an AM role with financial & automotive clients. You will need to have at least 2 years working in a search-focussed role, preferably within a media or search agency working on big budget clients, managing their PPC campaigns on a daily basis.

PPC Manager - Integrated Agency
You will manage all elements of Paid Search, with an objective of enhancing our current client's marketing campaigns to encourage more PPC spend and gain new business for the agency. Responsibilities: Taking campaign briefings from clients Producing paid-search strategy and integrating it with other media activity. Preparation of copy strategy Building of PPC campaigns in Excel. Management of the trafficing process. Ongoing analysis of campaign performance.

(btw if you successfully apply for any of these jobs, you owe me a drink at the next Digital Lounge event in London. Cheers.)

None of these jobs existed ten years ago. It is estimated that PPC now accounts for 60% of total online spend (Revolution, July 2009).

So where did this PPC business spring from? I thought it might be interesting and useful to define exactly what were talking about, to summarize how we got where we are today and then speculate as to what might happen next.

• What is PPC?

To clarify: we are not talking about natural (organic) search (=Search Engine Optimization=SEO) i.e. making our website easy to find by Google/ Yahoo/ Bing. We are talking about paying for a ‘sponsored link’ i.e. a short (normally) text ad looking like a traditional classified ad in a newspaper except it can be clicked on. On the Google results page, it appears either above the search results or down the right hand side, in the section marked 'sponsored links'. When it is clicked on, you (the advertiser) pay Google for each clickthrough to your site.

Google AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for both text and banner ads. (with local, national, and international distribution). Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line plus two content text lines. Image ads can be in one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) defined standard sizes.

So: you’re effectively buying space, but in a different way from the old offline newspaper/ magazine model. For each keyword you select (which you judge to be relevant to your website), exactly where your ad appears depends on the result of an auction, in which all qualifying ads compete for the best places on the Google results page/s. (The amount that you have ‘bid’ is the maximum you are prepared to pay, per click, to get your ad displayed in the best possible position). And you pay £cost per click x number of clicks i.e. you literally PAY PER CLICK. (you can set a maximum total payment after which your ad will not be displayed - or if it is, you won’t pay).

• How exactly does it work?

Google wants:

(a) The user to have the best possible experience. If the user searches for a given keyword (a single word or phrase) they expect to see a series of results, the natural listings and the sponsored links (= paid-for ads), each of which indicates exactly what they will get when they click on it. Followed, after a click, by a website delivering EXACTLY what they are looking for. In this scenario, the user is happy and Google remains their automatic choice for future searches. So Google is happy.

(b) To make money. Google has created this amazingly complex and successful search engine which currently dominates the web and has become synonymous with search, which is itself growing as more and more users spend more and more time online, searching for more and more information, products and services. As a commercial company, Google expects a reward; it has done extremely well out of selling PPC advertising and intends to continue to do so. Indeed Google makes c.95% of its revenues from Search. (i.e. selling ad space on its results pages, and also on Blogs and Google mail/ Gmail). This helps to fund its various other ventures (eg.Google Wave, Maps, Street View, Latitude, YouTube, Android, Chrome, +++) some of which are currently net costs to the organisation i.e. ‘awaiting monetization’…

Google is adamant that (b) doesn’t get in the way of (a).

“We have a fundamental philosophy with which we push these projects-we really want to improve life for people.”

Sergey Brin, co-founder, Google.


But exactly what factors influence where AdWords places your ad?. Where your ad appears and how much you end up paying depends on the result of what has been called a “Generalized second-price auction”. Let’s have a look at the AdWords auction in detail.
Every time a user does a search, the auction is conducted and competing ads allocated to appropriate spots, all before the user sees the results pages. (Yeah. Amazing, I know.)

Your ad will be at the top or down the right-hand-side of the search results.
Google is trying to deliver the best experience for users so they want your site to be relevant to users who are attracted by your ad; they will tend to promote you in position (i.e. higher up) if they believe this is the case.

Crudely: Position = winning bid amount* x quality score#

*How much you bid per click. (the more you are prepared to pay, the higher position your ad will be shown in, starting with the top of results and working down the right hand side from page 1 and then onto the subsequent pages of results.)

#QUALITY SCORE: How relevant/ useful Google perceives your ad/ your site to be.

Note Google doesn't fully reveal how QS is calculated; expert commentators believe QS consists of:
• Historical click-through rate of this ad (and your others, if any!)
• Ad Copy Relevance (to the keyword i.e. how well the ad matches the user’s query)
• Landing Page Quality (loading time, relevant and original content and ease of the navigation of your site).
Note you can specify that you only want traffic from particular countries (e.g. those visiting the .fr or .co.uk or .de site/s) and/ or day/ time of day.

So working on improving your ‘Google quality score’ means you will pay less per click for better positions (getting you cheaper clickthroughs, from people who are specifically looking for your product/ service, which must be good business). Effectively Google is rewarding you for being a good advertiser, which some might find patronising. But hey, remember these guys have 65%+ of all search traffic(!) which some might also say explains a certain bullishness, sometimes bordering on arrogance…

Owing to the complexity of AdWords and other PPC products and the amount of money at stake, some advertisers hire a consultant or specialist agency to manage their PPC campaigns. (see job ads above). Indeed a whole industry has sprung up based on offering PPC expert advice. There are also various proprietary software products assisting with PPC Campaign Management, Bid Optimizing, Reporting and Analytics.

• History of PPC

In February 1998 Jeffrey Brewer of Goto.com, a 25-employee startup company (later Overture, now part of Yahoo!), presented a PPC search engine concept to the TED conference in California. Credit for the concept is generally given to the Idealab and Goto.com founder, Bill Gross (who allegedly ‘borrowed’ it from Yellow Pages).
Google started search engine advertising in December 1999. In October 2000 the AdWords system was introduced, allowing advertisers to create text ads for placement on the Google search engine. However, AdWords only introduced PPC in 2002; until then, ads were charged at ‘cost-per-thousand impressions’. Yahoo advertisements have been PPC-based since their introduction in 1998. So PPC is still a young industry.

• What’s going to happen?

Historically, Google hasn’t always got everything right. In November 2006, Google bought privately held YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock and still shows few signs of monetizing it. Remember Google Click-to-Call? It was a service provided by Google which allowed users to call advertisers from Google search results pages. Users entered their phone number, Google called them back and connected them to the advertiser, with call charges paid by Google. It was discontinued in 2007. There are ongoing challenges to Google in the areas of privacy/ consumer data retention. Street View has attracted significant opposition in this regard.

Google has, however carved out a massively powerful position in the world of search. Google can’t afford to lose this dominance; its business model is currently largely dependent on it. Indeed AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product and main source of revenue (estimated at $21 billion in 2008). We may be assured that Messrs Schmidt, Page and Brin (the triumvirate running the company) are very interested in how well AdWords is doing.

Equally Microsoft will not accept its current small share of the lucrative search market. Its new search engine, Bing, and the much vaunted deal with Yahoo! (acquisition of the Yahoo! Search business would give Microsoft almost 30% of the US Search market) are evidence that Microsoft is going to take the fight to Google. Of course search advertising revenues depend primarily on where the users are searching and here Google currently has a position of massive strength. Even if Bing is a superior product (i.e. a true ‘discovery engine’) Google has strong user loyalty and inertia; suggesting that Bing needs to deliver a SIGNIFICANTLY better user experience to gain trial and change searchers’ habits.

Meanwhile Google is, understandably, not sitting idly by while Bing attacks its market share (after all “disloyalty is only one click away” as Google CEO Eric Schmidt is fond of saying). Google Squared is a response to the launch of Bing; Wolfram Alpha is positioning itself as ‘a computational knowledge engine that draws on multiple sources to answer user queries directly’ and Ask.com has rebranded itself (again). People are suggesting that Twitter's increasing use for ‘real time search’ is a threat to the search engines. Then there’s mobile search with its unique requirements and (currently) restrictions. Much is at stake here. Exciting times.

As with most things in digital marketing, we can measure what’s giving us best results and work to improve our overall ROI. You (or your PPC agency) should be asking: how much are we paying per click against which keyword and what do those clickers then go on to do i.e. how much is the click actually worth to us, the advertiser? Certain keywords will be very popular, (e.g. ‘lowest cost mobile phones’) so that bids required to get your ads shown in high ranking positions will need to be high. Maybe you can do better by bidding on niche keywords? What about your ad copy? Is it persuasive, descriptive and relevant to your site? And what happens after they click through? Test various landing pages, tracking the results. Measure and optimise your PPC ads. Continuous evaluation and improvement should be the strategy. TEST, TEST and TEST!

So if your boss asks you “how much do we pay per click?” the answer should probably be something like: “much less than we would be spending if we weren’t watching the metrics so closely and optimising every aspect of our campaigns so carefully, but still more than I would like.”

PPC will keep evolving. Specifically everyone involved with PPC should be watching Bing and the new Microsoft search partnership with Yahoo. Although the market shares of the various competing search engines are certain to change, the discipline of Pay per Click Advertising looks set to grow in importance within the world of digital marketing.

And oh yes; remember to work on that Quality Score...

SEO: "seek, and ye shall find." (Luke 11)

Anyone remember WebCrawler? Infoseek? HotBot? AltaVista? Lycos? As long as we’ve had search engines, we’ve had SEO (= search engine optimisation). And as Microsoft announces a UK roadshow to launch its new search platform, Bing, as a serious rival to Google, SEO is firmly established as part of the digital marketing landscape.

Indeed SEO or 'natural search' is a whole separate industry these days. It can be defined as: helping site owners to optimise their ranking in Google and other search engines when users search by certain relevant “keywords”.

The evolving role of the practice of SEO is currently a hot topic in digital marketing circles. Some are even suggesting its days are numbered as the search engines (especially Google) get wise to sharp practices to manipulate rankings.

To clarify: we are not talking here about paid search (= pay per click) e.g. Google AdWords, where one ‘buys’ keywords (via a bidding process) and Google displays one’s clickable text-only ad as a sponsored link in the Google Results page. (see the results at the top and right hand side of the Google Results Page.) The 'opposite' of paid search is organic or natural search which is the subject of this post.

Why does SEO matter? Look at the facts: 90% of all web sessions start with a search engine (Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask Jeeves etc.) This figure has been increasing year on year as more and more people give up on bookmarking sites (far less actually remembering urls!) and rely on Google to find the site for them. So if you have a website, and someone 'Googles' the thing you sell, you want to appear (or be ‘ranked’) near the top of the listings and certainly on the first page. If you are not, people may never find your site and you won’t be very successful. In fact you risk being invisible, lonely and broke (to misquote Cory Doctorow). Received wisdom is that 62% of searchers click on a result within the first page of results, and approx 28% of all searchers click on results within page 2 or 3. Readers of a mathematical bent will notice that this leaves only 10% i.e. hardly anyone looks beyond page 3. (This raises the question: how many pages of search results do users really require? - which could be the topic of another blog post or indeed a session at an SEO conference!)

One more fact: Google handles between 75% and 86% (UK: Hitwise April 2009) of all search traffic depending on which country you look at; so for the purposes of this post when we say “Google” we mean “Search Engine”. Unhealthy? Maybe, but realistic currently.

Suppose I have a website which sells Golf equipment. Keywords of interest to me might be: Golf equipment, Golf gear, Golf accessories, Golf clubs, Golf bags, Golf clothes, Golf apparel etc etc.

I might wish to consider optimising my site for any or all of these “keywords” (which are often than not more than one actual word). One can achieve high rankings more easily for niche keywords: If you search Google for “Golf Equipment” you will get about 37,700,000 results. (in 0.25 seconds!) At 10 results per page that gives us approx 3,770,000 pages of results. If however one lives in the West Midlands of England and is looking for a professional to stuff your dead cat, and you search by “Taxidermists in Wolverhampton” one gets only 16,900 results but this is still 1,690 pages. Only a few sites make it onto page 1 and many excellent sites languish invisibly on page 500+.

So SEO is, these days, a major digital marketing discipline; but is it legitimate? i.e. both ethical and good business?

Let’s just have a look at the agendas of the various parties involved:

• Google: wants its search engine to be good at its job; i.e. it wants as many users as possible to have the best possible experience; i.e. to find a selection of suitable sites as quickly and as painlessly as possible. It particularly wants to direct users to site/s with well written and presented content that best deliver what they were looking for; in pursuit of this it tries to interpret their intention (which is not always exactly what they type in to the Google search box). If it succeeds, it will attract more traffic and make more money out of AdWords (its pay- per-click product).

• The Site owner: wants high ranking in search results whenever a user types in a keyword which it deems relevant to its business; i.e. they want to maximize quality and quantity of traffic to their site.

• The SEO consultancy/ professional: wants to do a good job for the Site owner i.e. get the site up the Google rankings, driving more traffic, pleasing the client and thus getting more optimization briefs and making more money.

Good site design and legitimate SEO helps everyone: users who search by a given keyword find a relevant site which delivers what they were looking for and provides a good experience. The SEO professional and the design/build agency should work together to make the site visible to search engines which pleases them since they are helping their customers (=searchers). The Google spiders (or crawlers) look at millions of web pages and assess their relevance to a particular search (yes, it’s amazing I know). It’s absolutely OK to help them by a little judicious signposting (like putting up a sign in the street outside your shop; effectively the site is ‘putting its best foot forward’) . Also, if you can get plenty of inbound links (i.e. other sites publishing links to your site) Google likes this: it suggests your site must be of high quality. It’s OK to solicit these links (e.g. if you are a florist, you might ask local chocolate shops if they want to link to your site). So far so good.

The problems occur when SEO practitioners and/ or site owner Webmasters attempt to deceive the search engine spiders (and therefore ultimately the user) by employing a range of techniques to manipulate the Google rankings (including any or all of: spamdexing, cloaking, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, invisible text, deals with link farms +++).

Ever since Search was invented, unscrupulous SEO experts (known as ‘black hat’ operators) have been trying to manipulate it, i.e. to get people to visit sites under false pretences, taking them to sites which were not what they were looking for; the result being an unfair advantage to the site owner and/or confused/ dissatisfied visitors, a scenario which benefits no-one except the black hat guys! If they succeed, they achieve an inappropriately high Google ranking and ultimately can even take the user to a site that wasn’t what they were looking for. Of course it isn’t always as cut and dried as this: in many cases, the user would be equally satisfied by any one of a number of search results, and techniques may be used which give a good site a ‘helping hand’ in the listings. There are grey areas: like how many times can one legitimately include a given keyword in one’s content: 3 times in a page makes the site relevant, three times in a sentence looks sinister and may lead to Google penalizing or even delisting your site.

Of course, there is one obvious question which we haven’t addressed here (space doesn’t allow): who decides which SEO techniques are OK and which are ‘black hat’? which can get your site demoted in the listings or even banned? Of course currently it’s Google who decides. 'Baddies' clearly operate in this space so some sanctions are necessary; but should a single company (even our buddies at Google) be given so much power?

Effectively the black hat SEO specialists are engaged in an ever-shifting battle of wits with the search engines and the (secret) Google algorithm is certainly much more sophisticated at picking up dubious SEO techniques than it was 10 years ago. eg. stuffing in loads of invisible keywords used to be much more prevalent (and effective!). Even legitimate SEO has evolved with the Search Engines. Metatags (invisible to users but viewed by the spiders) used to be very important; less so today. Indeed, if you read a book on SEO dated before 2004 (say) I respectfully suggest you may be wasting your time!

As part of an ongoing mission to fight spam and improve user experience, Google is apparently implementing a series of changes to the algorithm (it doesn't announce these). In the future, as Google moves towards behaviour/ intent based search, it is possible that each person who conducts a search for a particular term will get different results based on their interests, search history and even their location. As a result, SEO will need to evolve. One possibility is that link building will become far less important in the future of SEO because Google will determine the ‘value’ (= relevance) of a website based on how visitors engage with it. This would imply that the ultimate goal of site owners should be to provide compelling content that entices visitors to read, share, bookmark, and so on.

Another possibility is that search engines will in future provide user-controlled rankings. Users might have the chance to vote for sites they like and sites will get ranked based on such votes. (The model would be similar to Digg and Reddit). Of course, search engines will need to ensure that votes are genuine in order to prevent black hat SEO specialists from manipulating the results.

Google and the other search engines are raising the bar in SEO. Initially, this will make it harder for SEO professionals but the end result must be good. Spammers and 'black hat's will have more difficulty succeeding in their unscrupulous efforts and search engine users will be provided with content that is more relevant.

As always, the aim of webmasters and SEO professionals should be to appeal to humans not machines. Your site should certainly be optimized (to give you a fighting chance in the competitive marketplace) but your priority should always be to meet human needs and provide solutions. Considering the direction that SEO is going, human actions and behaviour will ultimately determine rankings. Your SEO success will depend on your ability to engage people through great content and shrewd social media marketing. This is as it should be.

The internet has transformed our lives: at work, at home and increasingly on the move. The Web is becoming richer and more complex every day. To cope with the mind boggling amount of data it offers, we need increasingly sophisticated tools to make sense of it: to 'organise the world’s information'. Unscrupulous operators will always try to manipulate the search engine spiders (or crawlers) to gain a higher ranking but they must be prevented from doing this; it’s in the public interest, as well as that of Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Live Search/ Bing and not least genuine SEO professionals, that the user can find the 'right' site as rapidly as possible every time.

If one believes that Advertising (assisted by agents as 'paid advocates') i.e. promoting the benefits of a product or service to the target audience by all appropriate media, is a legitimate activity in a free society, then it follows that SEO is OK and indeed desirable: it helps honest merchants reach their willing audiences. Indeed, Google doesn’t want to kill SEO; and even if it ceases to be such a dominant player in the search world, other search engines are likely to want to work with ‘honest’ SEO professionals rather than against them.

So current rumours of the imminent death of SEO are much exaggerated. As long as search engines publish free lists of ‘relevant’ sites, SEO will exist. Naturally (sorry) like everything in the digital world, SEO will need to evolve and adapt. It will do so. Intent and behaviour-based search will grow. Social search (e.g. via Twitter) will enable users to ask questions to aggregated groups of real people in real time. Not so easy for site owners to optimize! Watch this space.