Can you imagine if Google was around in the 50's when television was in its infancy or prior to that when radio came across the airwaves? We all know that Google dominates online advertising with their Google Adwords program (a pay per click program where advertisers/webmasters can create their own ads and bid on placement for their chosen keywords) and their Google AdSense program (a contextual advertising solution to web publishers/site owners that delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. You earn revenue by showing ads that are relevant and targeted to your website's content.).

So I would like to throw this out there. What if Google set their sights on traditional marketing media such as television and print? Hear me out, wouldn't this be an interesting approach? Focus on the Internet and on online advertising, which is how Google makes money Think about this; Google dominates the online ad space so everyone else is playing catch up and just when they are not looking, Google reverts their focus on traditional forms of marketing media such as television and print.

Sound far fetched? Well maybe it's not as "out there" as you think. In fact Google has already began down this path. I have heard various rumours and read countless articles on Google looking to expand its wings into areas such as TV advertising, in newspapers and other print destinations.

Ever heard of Google TV ads? Probably not, but they exist. Google is smart enough to figure out that users spend a lot of time watching TV so improving the relevance of advertising information on that medium is important. The goal of Google TV ads is to:

• Deliver more relevant ads to viewers and provide better reporting for advertisers
• Bring more advertisers to TV and help inventory owners
• Create efficiencies in the existing model

We're not the first to throw out this theory of Google becoming a traditional marketing machine. Earlier this year, the NY Times had an interesting article about Google's ambitions in the advertising world. The article points out that may in the traditional markets may indeed fear Google:

Many in the radio industry are determined to keep Google at arm’s length, suspicious that its technology-based approach will turn their business into a commodity and take away the relationships with advertisers that stations have spent years building.

While analysts and traditionalists will question whether Google will be successful in this arena, you can be sure that if anyone can do it, Google just might be the one entity that can be successful in the television and print advertising space. Google has the ability, the passion, the innovation, the resources and the drive to change the way advertisers market their products via these traditional source. Factor in Google's mission to make the world a more "relevant" one by organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful and you might just have the secret sauce to dominate all forms of advertising.

Google: The Ultimate Answering Machine?

Yet there are those who continue to bash Google and look to exploit the search giant. Google just keeps on innovating and pushing the envelope on the advertising world. Is Google the closest thing that the Web has to an ultimate answering machine? Well this can be debated as there are other such as ASK that are working to provide a tremendous user experience when they search for information. The fact is Google, even as an online advertising pioneer, seeks to ultimately provide the best possible user experience for both the end user and the advertiser.

If Google has indeed set their sites on traditional marketing media, their strategy is an interesting one. Dominate the online advertising space and then go back and look at traditional marketing channels that include newspapers, television and radio. In 10 years, Google may just become the ultimate advertising resource, and for many may indeed become the ultimate answering machine when it comes to advertising.

Original Post: SEO-Space: What if Google Focused on Traditional Media?

Last April, James Lamberti from comScore, Randy Peterson from Procter and Gamble and I (representing SEMPO) grabbed a relatively quiet corner at the New York Hilton to talk about a potential research project. Here was our wish list:

    - a study that tied together online activity to offline purchase behavior

     - a study that identified the impact of search in a category that’s not typically one that would be identified with search marketing

    - a study that would attempt to quantify the leveraged impact of search with brand advocates

Search and CPG: Are You Kidding? 

As you can see, these were pretty lofty targets to shoot for. Choosing the product category was done at that table. What is the last category you would think of as generating significant search activity? Consumer packaged goods. After all, aren’t these either replenishment purchases, where we keep buying the same brand over and over, or a non-considered purchase, where we’re not really concerned with doing much research? Why would we need to turn to a search engine to figure out which toothpaste to buy, or which would be the right chips for Sunday’s ball game? We reasoned that CPG had the “Sinatra” Factor going for it: If search can make it here, it can make it anywhere.  

To be honest, we really didn’t know what to expect, but comScore, together with a lot of help from Yahoo and Procter and Gamble, managed to come up with a workable study design. SEMPO jumped on board as a co-sponsor and we put the study out in the field. This week, with numbers crunched and charts drawn, the results were released is a study labeled the Digital Shelf. After several months of holding our collective breaths, we were about to see if people had already locked CPG brands into their brains, eliminating the need to search for product information. 

Apparently Not… 

People went online for CPG information. In fact, to a significantly higher degree than even our most optimistic predictions.  Over a 3 month period, comScore recorded over 150 million visits to CPG websites in four categories: Food Products, Personal Care Products, Baby Products and Household Products. Those are numbers no marketer should ignore. But even more significantly, search drove significant portions of that traffic, from 23% of all visits in Household Products to 60% in Baby Products. It’s not just automotive or travel that drive search traffic. We search for recipes, how to get the stains out of carpets, the most eco-friendly disposable diaper and yes, even the nutritional information for potato chips. We search, a lot! 

And our searching sets us apart as a consumer segment. Searchers tend to be more interested in product information, comparing against competitors and what they need to make a purchase decision. Non-searchers are more interested in special offers and coupons.  

Searchers spend more, about 20% more over all the categories in the study. In fact, in the Baby Care Category alone, people searching for information and eventually purchasing could result in almost $12 billion in sales. 

Search = Opportunity 

But perhaps the most compelling finding was this: people search because they’re comparing alternatives. This means they’re not locked into a brand. They could very well be your competitor’s customer right now. Non-searchers are more likely to go directly to a site because they do have a brand preference. They’re just looking for a bargain on that brand. The study found that 36% of searchers had recently switched their brand, compared to 29% of non-searchers. And, interestingly, searchers are less motivated by price. Only 27% of searchers switched because of price, compared to 38% of non searchers. 

So, the study delivered on our original wish list, and then some. It showed that search is a significant influencing factor in the most unlikely product category of all, the stuff on your pantry shelf or under the sink in your bathroom. In fact, I have yet to see a study done on any product category where search didn’t blow the doors off the competition in it’s effectiveness in connecting with customers. So perhaps the biggest question left unanswered by the study is this: Why all those branding dollars are still going everywhere but search?

Originally published in Mediapost's Search Insider, October 25, 2007   

Roberto in Florida wanted to know how Yahoo Search Assist can be leveraged as part of a search marketing strategy. Well first off, for those of you who don't know what Yahoo Search Assist is, here is a quick review of Yahoo Search Assist.  In essence, Yahoo Search Assist is a real time query suggestion tool that helps users refine search queries so that they can find what they are looking for in "one search".

When Yahoo began their person-powered search engine back in 1994, it was mainly two people's guide to their favorite links on the Web.  When Yahoo launched the new Yahoo! Search on October 1st they included a new feature designed to help users find what they were looking for in one search.  This new feature as you may have guessed is Search Assist.

With the new Yahoo Search, Yahoo became the last of the four major search engines to offer blended search.  Yahoo Search Assist expands on a person's query to suggest additional relevant searches and concepts for the searches they perform.   So how can Yahoo Search Assist be leveraged as an SEO tool?  Well first things first, Search Assist is not meant to be an SEO tool, it is meant to improve the search user experience.  Having said that, there are a few ways that you can leverage the tool as part of your search marketing strategy toolkit.

How You Can Use Yahoo Search Assist as an SEO Tool

1. As a Keyword Analysis Tool - Well in terms of search strategy, Yahoo Search Assist can provide a little insight into phrases that are related to specific user queries.  For example let's say that you perform a search for "las vegas wedding" in Yahoo.  (I'm using this example because I recently got married in Las Vegas…) With Search Assist on you get additional options such as "las vegas weddings, las vegas hotel weddings, las vegas wedding chapels, las vegas wedding packages" etc.  You can scroll the list to find additional phrases.  In addition you can use the "explore concepts" feature to find additional keywords for your campaign.

2. Long-Tail Optimization Tool - Using Search Assist can help you optimize for long-tail key phrases that you may have otherwise overlooked.  Search assist may provide you with alternatives to popular "head" phrases that you may have no hope for ranking for.  Why not focus on the long-tail and improve conversions with long-tail optimization.  (Conversion rates tend to be better with long-tail optimization, you simply don't receive as much traffic.)
3. Understanding the User - Search Assist can help you understand your search user as you can learn more about how and what users are searching for.  While it's unlikely that Search Assist factors in seasonality, you can get a better understanding of phrases that users may be using to find information.  After all search and thus SEO should be all about the user.  As Yahoo stated when they launched Search Assist, "One thing we've learned since launching our own algorithmic search engine back in 2004 is that at the end of the day, people really don't want to search; they want to get things done."  It's all about giving the user what they want. 

So here are three ways that Yahoo Search Assist can be leveraged as a tool for your search marketing efforts.  I hope that answers your question Roberto.  Keep them coming.

So you were all excited when you first discovered Facebook Groups and noticed that all the cool kids had their own group so you quickly jumped on the bandwagon to create one for yourself.  You went through the process of creating an enticing title/description, selected the perfect logo and then proceeded to invite all your friends to join…but now what???

First of all, I don't think Facebook Groups work for everyone and if you're creating one from a business perspective it is important to understand the purpose of the group.  They work similar to blogs and forums in that you can use them to communicate with members in the community as well help increase awareness of products, news and services in your organization/industry.  Below are a few items that you should consider addressing to help prolong the life of your Facebook Group:

• Growing the Community: It's important that you can continue to grow the number of members in your community for a couple of reasons. First of all, mentally, it gives other group members the confidence that your group is of interest.  Secondly, more members usually means more eyeballs viewing your content and more perspectives in the discussion.
• Fresh and Relevant Content: As with any blog or information portal on the web, users will come back if the content stays fresh and is relevant to their business needs.  I try to post relevant links to PDFs, case studies or posts regularly and this is useful in providing content for my members as well as promoting content from other industry sources.  Besides textual content, consider uploading images for your members to view - if you're in travel post hot destinations or discounts, if you're in entertainment post brochures or advertisement, if you're in search marketing post cool landing page or conference pictures.
• Promote Discussion: It's difficult to get your members to initiate conversation, however since you are quite familiar with your vertical it allows you to get the conversation rolling with questions related to hot topics.  Discussion boards are an excellent way to share ideas and get multiple perspectives on a given topic.
• Leverage the Community:  If you have a community that is truly engaged with your group (i.e.: they actively participate in discussions, communicate with you offline, post links/images video) then you can leverage the community by promoting new whitepapers, events and industry news; this can be done with mass messaging to the entire group.  You can also segment the delivery of the content based on the members' geographic location or type of organization.   However, I do recommend you don't abuse this power because an information overload could lead to members leaving the group.

The social media strategy using Facebook Groups is still in its very early stages, therefore it's important to experiment with different tactics and share the results on ones which have and have not been successful.

Feed subscribers are quite possibly your most loyal readers therefore it's important to grow your subscriber community as much as possible. With Google's purchase of FeedBurner as well as their own proprietary subscriber calculating technology don't be surprised to see feed subscribers becoming a variable in Google's ranking algorithm. In today's post we'll talk about how to increase your feed subscribers with some very simple tips.

1. Prominent, Accessible and Ease of Use: Make your subscription buttons available on all pages and place them above the fold. Using technology like FeedBurner you can get a sense of your subscribers' favorite feed services and begin making subscribing to those services even easier.
2. Repeat in Footer: Something that has worked well for me is adding the subscription option to the footer of each individual post. What this does is remind visitors to subscribe after reading one of my posts.
3. Subscribe by Email: Depending on what industry you're in adding an option to subscribe by email can dramatically increase your subscribers. Many authors of travel sites have noticed that email is even more popular than feed readers.
4. Add Option in Emails: In FeedBurner you can also publicize your feed's content by placing a widget in outgoing emails. Through this widget people can also subscribe to your feed.

    

Increasing Feed Subscribers: Additional Resources

• The Blog Studio: How to Increase Subscribers by 50% in 30 Days
• Pro Blogger: 11 Ways to Find New RSS Subscribers for Your Blog
• Daily SEO Blog: Increase the number of subscribers to your blog overnight
• Copy Blogger: 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
• Rob Malon: Decrease Bounce Rate - Increase Subscribers and Visit Time
• Internet Marketing Students: How To Increase Blog Subscribers
• Jimmy Thakkar: Techniques to increase subscribers for BLOG
• Ades Blog: Increase your RSS subscriber count with FeedSmith
• Garry Conn: How To Increase RSS Feedburner Subscribers
• Jonh TP: Tips To Increase Your Blog Subscribers

Well it's been a while since we posted something on mobile marketing.  Then we received a question from Dave in Illinois who wanted to know if there were any good mobile marketing resource available out there.  We have a couple of mobile marketing resources that we visit from time to time.  A great place to start is with the Mobile Marketing Association's global website.

Five Great Mobile Marketing Resources

1. Mobile Marketing Association's Global Website -Includes everything from publications and stats to latest case studies.  The Mobile Marketing Association is a global organization with 400 members representing over twenty countries. MMA members include agencies, advertisers, hand held device manufacturers, carriers and operators, retailers, software providers and service providers, as well as any company focused on the potential of marketing via mobile devices.
2. Mobile Marketing Magazine - Great blog dedicated to mobile marketing that includes tips such as mobile marketing dos and don'ts and defintions of mobile marketing.
3. Mobile SEO Guide - from Andy Hagans. Includes mobile SEO best practices and information on getting spidered and indexed by "mobile search engines".
4. Musings of a Mobile Marketer - Fun blog authored by Helen Keegan founder of mobile marketing agency Beepmarketing.
5. MarketingVOX on mobile marketing and wireless marketing - Includes information on everything from mobile phones, PDAs, wifi, tablets, SMS, imode and more.

Thanks for the question Dave.  We hope this helps. 

If you have an SEO, SEM, Analytics question or the like, drop us a line and you may just receive a response in a future post here on ASK Enquiro.

Last week, I explored the disconnect between how advertisers define Nirvana; the ability to control consumer and persuade them at will by inundating them with advertising, and what consumers dream for; authentic and reliable information on needed products and services. There are costs associated with both sides, the cost of advertising, and the cost of consumer research. Max Kalehoff, from Nielsen Online, pointed out another cost, the nuisance cost to the consumer of wading through earlobe deep sea of irrelevant and uninvited advertising: zapped TV commercials, blaring billboards, glaring signage, email spam, ubiquitous interstitials and pop ups, preloads…or one of the zillions of other ways advertisers choose to scream at you.

So, with this highly inefficient, annoying and disconnected marketplace, there has to be a better way, right? Well, Marc Singer and John Hagel III think so. They call it the infomediary, a concept introduced in their 1999 book, Net Worth. It’s well worth the read. The one thing that struck me is that in the entire book, the word “Google” is not mentioned once. This is not really surprising, given the publication date, but for reasons that will soon become clear, the irony was not lost on me. 

How to Spot an Infomediary 

Here’s the basic foundation of the infomediary. Acting on behalf of the client when they’re looking to make a purchase, the infomediary takes previously gathered personal information, as well as information volunteered by the client, and searches for the best match with vendors. The client can choose to remain anonymous, saving themselves from an onslaught of advertising. Or, if the client agrees, the infomediary will pass their name along to a qualified vendor, and for this privilege, the vendor will pay the prospect. In essence, the infomediary plays the role of marketing matchmaker. 

There are a number of offshoots of this basic premise. The infomediary supplies privacy tools to the clients, marketing intelligence to the vendors, the opportunity to bargain as a group for lower prices on regular consumable products, and it also acts as an aggregator of consumer power. In effect, the infomediary takes over control of the client relationship, inserting themselves squarely between the consumer and the vendor, with the ultimate goal of protecting the consumer. This is a decidedly customer-centric model. 

But it’s in the basic concept of gathering information about a client and using that to ensure a good match with a vendor that one begins to speculate about Google’s ambitions to fill this role. In essence, at a rudimentary level, Google is already fulfilling some of the role of the infomediary. Certainly if you factor personalization into the equation, we move a big step closer to Singer and Hagel’s concept.  

Disruptive Influences 

There are a number of dramatically disruptive possibilities in the infomediary model: 

• It forces advertisers to surrender all pretense of control over the consumer. Persuasion becomes a non issue. The touch point with the consumer is stripped of hype, ensuring that product information is authentic and factual.

• It gives the aggregated consumer voice a level of power never seen before. Before, the marketplace was vendor centric: here’s what we offer, here’s how we offer it, here’s what we charge. The consumer’s choice was restricted to “take it or leave it’. Now, the balance shifts to the consumer: here’s what we want, here’s how we want it, here’s what we want to pay. Provide it or we’ll find someone else who can.

• By gaining control of the customer relationship, it forces companies to focus on two other core processes, either product innovation and commercialization, or infrastructure management, excelling in producing and distributing a product

Something’s Rotten in the State of Advertising 

There are a number of other seismic shifts in the landscape that come out of the infomediary model, but Net Worth weighs in at over 300 pages, and I have a bare 700 to 800 words for this column. The sum of it all is that the infomediary model, or some variation of it, dramatically changes the rules of the marketing game. A terribly inefficient marketplace has evolved in the past century, with some very wobbly power structures. The communication disconnect is almost laughable in its dysfunction. Advertisers spend more and more, hoping to penetrate a barricade set up by increasing militant consumers. It’s literally a war, with strategies to match. The only hint of concession to the increasing power of the consumer has been search, and that has been done reluctantly. Remember Einstein’s definition of insanity? “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. 

If you look at the characteristics of an infomediary laid out by Singer and Hagel, Google has many of them in place already, and certainly has the resources to assemble the rest.  The one piece that’s missing, and this is the critical one, is a purely customer-centric approach. For all Google’s focus on the user experience, their advertising models are still primarily driven by advertisers, not consumers. But for the model to work, the consumer has to have complete trust in the infomediary and be willing to share their personal information. As we’ve seen with the initial pushback to personalization, there’s still a healthy degree of suspicion on the part of users that Google will use personal information for their benefit and not the advertiser’s.

Originally published in Mediapost's Search Insider, October 18, 2007  

Ever wondered how contextual relevancy affects your bottom line in your online marketing campaigns?  Of course you have, in fact many if not all online marketers have wondered this at some point.  With one of our latest research projects (in sponsorship with Google (GOOG), we took 100 subjects, all of which were high-level B2B purchasers and segmented them into four testing cells. 

From here, each participant read one of two articles and was exposed to a contextaully relevant or non-relevant graphic ad.  Enquiro then asked participants a series of questions to gauge brand, messaging and advertising recall and effectiveness.

To see what happened, download the whitepaper on Displaying Advertising - Does Contextual Relevancy Make a Difference?

Here is a sample of some of the findings:

So to answer the question, do contextually relevant B2B ads provide a bigger lift to your bottom line?  Our findings suggest that Contextually Relevant B2B Ads can lift purchasing intent 40% higher than their B2C counterparts.

It’s not easy being a consumer. Current estimates indicate that the average urban dweller is exposed to between 3000 and 5000 advertising messages every day. That means, settling on the middle number, that every waking hour (sleep seems to be our only reprieve, and I hear they’re working on that) you’re presented with an ad every 14.4 seconds. That’s every 14.4 seconds, every minute of every day you’re alive. The frequency of this advertising barrage has doubled in the past 30 years. 

“Are We There Yet?” 

So, let’s imagine that your 5 year old child interrupted you every 14 and a half seconds with “Moooommmm…” or “Daaaaddd…”. If we use my patience limits as a baseline here, that mean’s you’d last about 1.3 minutes before you went ballistic. The difference, of course, is that we’re genetically hardwired to pay attention to our children, much as we might try not to sometimes. With advertising, we’ve been conditioned to ignore it. 

But what happens when we really want to buy something? Suddenly, we’re looking for information, and we spend a lot of time doing so. At least, that’s true for some purchases. Take a computer, for instance. It’s not unusual to spend 10 to 15 hours researching a computer purchase, from the minute you decide you need one to the minute you tear open the box in your home. That’s not including the many hours needed to get your “plug and play” box actually playing after plugging.  

The Cost of Consumer Research 

Of course, we generally don’t put a cost on our time, but let’s say an hour of your time is worth about $40 (an average rate for someone making $75,000 per year). That means that $1000 box of electronics cost you an additional $600, just in time spent to pick the right box. 

The Internet is not making this any easier. Yes, as consumers, we’re armed with more sources of information, but we spend a lot of time sorting out sense from nonsense. The explosion of information sources, both the good and the bad, mean we’re spending more time thinking about what we should buy. A study by ScanAlert found that that across many ecommerce categories, the average time to buy has increased by almost 79% in the past two years. Now, this was just the duration from first visit to purchase in the actual online store. It doesn’t include any consumer research before visiting the store. But I think we’re safe to assume that there would be a corresponding increase in the amount of online consumer “tire kicking”.  

It’s No Picnic for Advertisers Either 

Before you feel too sorry for yourself, let me tell you, it’s not easy being an advertiser either.  How do we get past the filters? How do we stand out from the other 3999 messages you’ll hear today? 

To recycle some research I did for a previous column (because research is a terrible thing to waste), the Ontario Tourism Board ran newspaper ads in Toronto targeting people looking to vacation in the province. The ad cost (at posted rate card rates) about $54,000. Even with an exceptional response rate, that ad might sneak though the filters of 1700 or so people and actually catch their attention. This works out to an average cost of about $32 per introduction, or, to put it another way, $32 to tear a hole through that advertising barricade you’ve been building. 

Got a Minute? I’ll make it Worth Your While

So, if advertisers are willing to pay to get your attention, why not cut out the middle man and pay you directly? Why should the Toronto Star get all that money, when you’re the person the advertiser wants to talk to? What if every one of those 4000 advertisers who are going to try to get your attention today (Consuummmerrr…Consummmerrr!) paid you a dollar to listen to what they have to say? You’d do okay financially, to the tune of about $1.46 million a year. Of course, your brain would explode after the first hour.

The concept is not as far fetched as it seems. In fact, in 1999 John Hagel III and Marc Singer, both principals with McKinsey and Company, wrote a book called Net Worth that explores this very premise (along with a number of others) as a potential online business model. It introduced the concept of an infomediary. The book reads like a detailed business plan, and as such, some of those details have been passed by in the last 8 years since publication, but the basic premise still addresses a significant disconnect in today’s advertising marketplace. Next week, I lay out the foundation of infomediaries and look at how some of our favorite search players seem to be inching their way towards Hagel and Singer’s proposal. 

We now return you to your regular commercial onslaught.

Originally published in Mediapost's Search Insider, October 11, 2007  

Last week we gathered some useful link for Optimizing Images for Search Engines and this week we discovered some great resources for Optimizing Video for Search Engines. With Google introducing Universal Search earlier this year (and other engines closely following behind), search results are more and more likely to have video results integrated within natural search listings. Titles, Descriptions, Ratings, Average watch duration and Views are all factors contributing to the likelihood of videos (from YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, Yahoo Video) found within search results. Check out the sites below for detailed tactics on how to leverage videos in your online campaign:

• Search Engine Watch: Optimizing Video for Search Engines
• ASK Enquiro: How Can I Optimize My Videos?
• Matt Cutts: optimize for search engines or users Google video
• More Matt Cutts: SEO Answers on Google Video
• Lancer Media: Optimize Videos For Search Engines
• Antezeta: 8 Ways to Optimize Video and Multimedia for Top Search Engine Visibility
• Digg: Optimizing Video Content for Search Engines
• Search Marketing Standard: Optimizing Your Video Pages in 10 Easy Steps
• Top Rank Blog: Optimizing for Video Search Engines
• Fatham SEO: SEO, Video Search Engine Optimization
• Persona Non Gravy: Optimizing Video for Natural Search
• Reel SEO: Basic Tips for Optimizing Video content for Search Engines
• Aus SEO: Optimizing Video for Search Engines
• Rise Rep: Optimizing Video Content for Search Engines
• 10 Golden Rules Blog: Optimizing Multimedia Files for "Blended or Universal Search"

Top 10 Video Competitors - From Compete.com