Social media "shares" impact search results

Recent industry studies indicate that search engine rankings are measurably affected by social media activity. The undeniable fact is that search and social media are growing ever more intertwined, but according to eMarketer, about 70% of top brands don’t manage their Facebook page to account for its impact on search at all.

Google, the search giant, is continuing to make significant investments in social media. Last month Google bought PostRank, a social media analytics tool. And then they launched the Google+ (Google Plus) social network which has become the fastest growing social networking site ever.

Facebook, the current king of social networking, understanding the power of its domain within search results, recently teamed up with a search engine optimization (SEO) research firm and issued a white paper on “social SEO.” Among the findings in the whitepaper were that businesses, even those that practice optimization on their websites or blogs, don’t put much effort toward making their Twitter, Facebook or YouTube pages search engine friendly.

It’s clear that a strong social component is seeping into search engine algorithms. Facebook “likes,” Twitter “re-tweets,” and Google “Plus-1′s” are all indicative of good social media engagement and are favored by search engines.

Many companies continue to treat the areas of search and social media as distinctly separate online marketing initiatives, but those that recognize the importance of this converging space of search and social media are adopting a more holistic online marketing strategy.

Photo via sofiabudapest

Social media marketing – such as on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – has been perceived by many businesses as a stand-alone effort, one that could be executed in a separate silo from search engine optimization (SEO). But as SEOmoz examined the top 30 ranking results for over 10,000 Google searches performed late last month they found a significant correlation between links which were shared on Facebook and higher Google rankings.

SEOmoz was careful to point out that the study did not indicate causation; it merely highlights the correlation that may indicate the direct influence Facebook sharing has on Google rankings. As the researchers pointed out, however, Google’s public statements about the influence of social media on search rankings do support the idea of causation. As with everything related to Google’s search ranking algorithm, the Facebook/Google relationship is not as simple as “more Shares = better ranking”. For example, Google has indicated that there is some consideration of “author authority” – a key-influencer’s Facebook share may be measured and weighted more heavily in search rankings.

It is clear that social media (Facebook, specifically) will continue to have a growing impact on search engine results, which only further solidifies the argument that businesses should at least consider the social media giant as a part of their online marketing strategy.

Photo via ChannelShip; Chart via SEOmoz.org

Your Consumers Are Easier to Spot Online

Behavioral Targeting (BT) – the practice of directing advertising at users whose online activities suggest an interest in a specific product or service – is one of the hottest trends in online advertising today. User interest can be gauged using existing technologies that track a user’s activity online, over time. This information can be used by marketers (like you) for a customized online advertising campaign targeted at the individual users who are most likely to be interested in your ads.

Tracking technologies include: third party cookies, flash cookies, and beacons (little text files that are downloaded onto a user’s hard drive), upon visiting a site, which then track search queries, pages visits, ad clicks, and purchases.

You may be familiar with Amazon.com’s on-site Behavioral Targeting, which, based on tracking your searches and purchases, will recommend other related or complementary items that may interest you. Behavioral Targeting advertising takes it a step further, applying the same concept to the entire Internet.

Here’s a basic example: a site that offers insurance rate comparisons – say, Insurance.com – will allow an ad network to track who is looking for a home insurance policy on their website. After the user has left Insurance.com, the next time they browse the web, a service like AngiesList.com (which targets homeowners) may be able to use the ad network’s data to display targeted ads to that consumer, promoting their own service (based on the assumption that someone who needs home insurance also needs the types of homeowner services AngiesList offers). These ads could could even follow the user when they continue browsing onto other websites, including social and search sites.

The behaviorally targeted ads appear just like normal ads, but they are displayed based on a user’s previous activity – not just the context or content of the page they are currently viewing (which is how most ads on the internet are displayed today).

Predictions from eMarketer (as presented by AdWeek) are that behavioral targeting will continue to see steady year-over-year growth in adoption among advertisers (see chart).

As you might expect, advertisers often pay a premium for Behavioral Targeting. Per the WSJ, Behavioral Targeting ads are approximately double the average cost of untargeted ads. But marketers are willing to pay more for advertising that results in higher click-through, conversion rates, and ROI.

What About User Privacy?

There is quite a bit of on-going discussion about Behavioral Targeting’s impact upon users, specifically, privacy concerns for consumers. See the five- part series in the WSJ that ran in July/August, 2010. The issue garnered a great amount of media and federal attention once Google began to offer Behavioral Targeting advertising back in March of 2009 (after Google completed the purchase of Doubleclick, the technology leader in Behavioral Targeting).

There have been enough rumbling about privacy concerns that the advertising industry has been moved to self-regulate user privacy, or risk facing government regulation from the Federal Trade Commission.  Google responded by making an effort to be more transparent than their competitors, allowing users to see what interests are being tracked (something that others claimed would be too difficult to do) and including an opt-out option. The latter has now become the industry norm. Along with Google, opt-outs are provided by Yahoo and Microsoft, among many other ad providers and networks.

Online advertisers understand the urgency of self-regulating, per Media Post’s Behavioral Insider:

The coalition of advertising associations (AAA, ANA, BBB, DMA and IAB) is about to deploy the long-promised set of standardized “Power I” icons that will accompany many ads and eventually Web sites. Better Advertising is being tasked with implementing the back-end verification system that will ensure the tracking technologies advertisers and publishers use are obeying the self-regulatory guidelines and offering consumers the ability to opt out easily.

If the industry’s self-regulation is successful in keeping the FTC at bay, behavioral targeting will continue to be an increasingly powerful online marketing tool for advertisers (and web publishers).

Photo credit: Echoforsberg

http://flickr.com/myklroventine/

It’s well known that social media is enjoying unprecedented popularity, but Facebook’s recent success in launching its own unique social version of search (where sites are ranked by ‘likes,’ not links), has forced search engine providers to respond more aggressively to this now direct threat to their own core businesses. Social media has always struggled to find a way to transform their communities into a viable revenue stream. Search appears to be their pathway to profitability.

You’ll want to be knowledgeable about this trend—search engines behaving more like social media communities—as it may impact your digital marketing strategy. Be aware that their goal is to secure your advertising dollars, but this is great news for advertisers all around as healthy competition is usually to their/your benefit. We’re likely to see new search features and services (improving the user experience, attracting and retaining more users) and possibly better ad pricing – especially if the Google monopoly on search is weakened.

Facebook, given its half a billion users, is a real contender. June 2010 statistics, from Internet metrics firm comScore, showed them beating Ask.com, and dogging the heels of AOL, for overall search activity. While they are far behind Google, the market leader, it is important to note that Facebook is growing and gaining market share. There has been steady growth, every month, since they redid their homepage (in February) to promote their search offering to users.

Bing may be the only search engine of the top five (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask) sitting pretty, since they have partnered with Facebook and Twitter to gain access to social media generated content/rankings to use in Bing searches. They are likely to benefit, as well, from any of Facebook’s jousts to topple Google. A loss for Google will likely be a gain for Bing.

Fortune magazine’s August 16^th, 2010 cover story, “Is Google Over?” discussed the impact of this new development. The article suggested that search engines are on their way to being replaced by social media gathering places such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (this also appears to be the motivation behind the hotly rumored Google Me project, Google’s answer to Facebook, and Google’s recent investment in social gaming).

Ask.com is evidentially addressing some of the same concerns with their new, revamped Ask.com site released as beta in late July. Answers will be provided by an Ask.com ‘community’ of real people, rather than the standard search engine links. Right now access is invitation only, but it’s worth checking out.

Just this past month Bing gained more of a percentage of market share than any of the other major search engines – up more than 22% from July, according to Nielsen. With Google’s perennial firm grasp on the #1 spot, this leaves Yahoo! and Bing to duke it out for numero dos…and Bing is gaining ground fast.

Until now, if you were thinking about expanding your search engine marketing campaign beyond Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) was the natural consideration; Bing (Microsoft Ad Center) not as much. But Bing just became a whole lot more appealing.

There’s a minimum amount of overhead required to start up and manage a search marketing campaign…and for some industries Microsoft’s search engines (MSN and Live Search) have traditionally not offered enough eyeballs to justify the time required to manage an ad campain on their platform. But as it gets closer to matching the number of searches on Yahoo!, Bing becomes more appealing to advertisers, and ad prices across all three of the top search engines could become a bit more competitive.

Nobody is suggesting that anyone is going to knock Google off its throne any time soon – it’s got to knock Yahoo out of the #2 spot first. Uh, wait, it already did…for a day. Since Bing is replacing Microsoft’s previous search engine (Live), it’s not exactly starting from scratch. Live’s 7% share of the search market is now Bing’s, which gives Bing a bit of a running start. Add to that all the fanfare surrounding Bing’s launch, and it actually surpassed Yahoo to take over the #2 spot for a day earlier this month.

So, why should you care?

For years businesses marketing themselves online have really only focused on “the rule of Google.” In other words, when you built a new website, you did it with Google’s guidelines in mind. Yahoo and MSN – afterthoughts. When you launched a new pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign, you did it on Google’s AdWords system first. Yahoo and MSN – maybe later. A true challenger to Google would change the way businesses are marketed online. It would add complexity, as search engine marketers try to abide by the guidelines of two major search engines; and it could also create opportunity for those looking to launch more cost effective PPC campaigns.

The big “if” is about whether Bing can live up to the hype. Microsoft, despite its deep pockets, has a history of hits and misses. But early reports indicate that it may have a winner with Bing. And well, just like Google, you can use Bing as a verb, too.

Beware that ever-tempting top search engine ranking guarantee. If you’re getting e-mails from internet marketing firms guaranteeing that they can get your website into the top positions on major search engines for $199 – file them away in your “too good to be true” folder.

It’s not that you can’t get ranked #1 on Google – almost anyone can get top rankings for some keyword. That’s why the important question to ask is “for which keyword are you guaranteeing me top rankings?”

For example, it takes a lot more work to get ranked for the search term “toy trains” than it does to get ranked for “die-cast model train sets.” It’s easier still to get ranked for a more specific term like “Union Pacific Limited Edition Die Cast Train Set.” But compared to the first term, virtually nobody is searching for those latter more specific phrases. What good is a #1 ranking for a term nobody’s searching?

So, while someone might be able to guarantee you a top ranking for an obscure keyword or term, but obscure keywords are of little or no value to you. The goal of achieving top search engine rankings is to drive visitors to your website. Getting ranked #1 for a worthless search term gets you no closer to that goal, but someone might still try to charge you for the service of getting you there.

Here’s a tip that will help you filter through a lot of the noise: reputable search engine optimization (SEO) specialists don’t use spam e-mail marketing tactics. So you can toss those e-mails right off the bat!

To make the most efficient use of your time, don’t try to over-think your keyword bids and ad variations before you have activated the campaign. It’s an exercise in futility to try to predict how users will react to your campaign (assuming you haven’t run a similar campaign previously). You could spend a ton of valuable time asking questions like “is this the right bid amount for this keyword?”, “is this keyword really right for this campaign?”, “should I use quotes or brackets on these keywords?”, and “which ad variation is better?” – but all that time is often much better spent, at least initially, growing your keyword list or actually creating ad variations. You can answer all your detailed questions later, by analyzing the numbers that the AdWords system (and your web Analytics system) provide.

In the beginning you should just throw it all out there and see what sticks. Then you can spend your time analyzing and tweaking the keywords and ad variations that generate interest (impressions, clicks or conversions). That way, if you have 15 keywords (out of 1,000) and 2 ads (out of 20) that are generating interest, you only have to spend your time tweaking and tracking those those 15 keywords and 2 ads (creating additional related keywords and ad variations, of course). Otherwise, answering all the questions from the paragraph above before you launch your campaign (for all the hundreds or thousands of keywords and dozens of ads in your campaign) could mean you’d be doing too much analysis on parts of the campaign that will ultimately net zero results anyway.

Take it easy on yourself, and worry about the big things first (growing your keyword list and creating ad variations) – then hone your campaign with the information you get from AdWords and analytics. It may take a day, a week, or a month to get the data you need (depending on the volume of your campaign). But an approach like this will save you loads of work. And since time is money, you’ll be one step closer to getting a positive return on your AdWords investment!

The download ran seamlessly and Chrome was up and running within a couple minutes. I immediately noticed how uncluttered and streamlined the page layout is, and compared to the multiple toolbars I have installed in Firefox and Internet Explorer, it was refreshing. That said, I have some of those toolbars for a reason, and I never realized how much I look at a website’s Google Page Rank until the Google Toolbar was no longer there. I’m sure Chrome is going to have the option to add toolbars in future releases, but meanwhile I find them hard to do without.

Google Chrome does actually seem to navigate quicker around some web pages (and with the slow DSL speed at my house, this is greatly appreciated), and their tab feature has some unique qualities that I like as well. For instance, when you open a new tab the following appears: hyperlinked screen shots of your nine most visited pages, recently bookmarked pages, and box where you can search your browsing history.

Since the browser is so new, there are some websites that are not fully functional in Chrome – which is not surprising since there are still some websites that are not fully functional in Firefox too. I am sure that once Google Chrome usage starts to increase, more features and updates will be released with features we didn’t know we even wanted but will instantly love (if my previous experience with Google is anything to go by).

OpenX (previously OpenAds), developers of another popular free ad server, recently made their concerns known. But in doing so they cleverly painted a picture of Google as Big Brother…placing doubt in the minds of readers about Google’s master plan. Normally I shrug this kind of stuff off, but their point resonated with me. It is in Google’s best interest to determine what margins are being earned on their web publishers’ properties – and reduce that margin to the lowest the market will bear.

Did it stop me from signing up for a test drive of Google Ad Manager? No. But will I think twice before managing all my ads with a Google product? Absolutely.

Side note: As conversionrater.com accurately points out, free has its price, and some businesses are looking for more than just a low price point. And just as Google Analytics shook up the analytics world (didn’t kill it, like some expected), Ad Manager will probably do the same. Competition can be a very good thing.