Archive for 'Opinion'

Mar05

Gord Hotchkiss

1

Steve Ballmer and the Future of Search Revenues

Steve Ballmer is an enthusiastic guy. As he climbed on stage with Danny Sullivan at SMX West, everyone was wondering how long it would be before he cranked up the volume and slipped into his typical Ballmeresque bombastic delivery. Steve didn’t disappoint. A few minutes into the interview, with Sullivan probing about Microsoft’s aspirations around search, Ballmer was yelling “Sell..Danny, Don’t Yell!” (ironic in the extreme) and roughhousing with poor Danny like a good natured football coach having a little fun with the class math geek. I half expected Steve to give Sullivan a noogie.
I suspect there will be [...]

Feb25

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Search and Decisiveness

The last two columns (column 1 | column 2) explored decisiveness within a very defined scope: college students picking courses. I did that through an interesting study conducted by Wesleyan University, which used eye tracking to capture the eye movements of decisive and indecisive people.
In reading the study, my mind went back seven years to one of the first research studies Enquiro ever did (and still our most popular download) – Inside the Mind of the Searcher. In it, we observed the behaviors of 24 individuals as they used search engines to carry out tasks. It was the first qualitative [...]

Feb19

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Maximizers vs Satisficers: Why it’s Tough to Decide

In last week’s column, I introduced the study (article with link to the full study at the end) from Wesleyan University about how decisiveness played out for a group of 54 university students as they chose their courses. The student’s eye movements were tracked as they looked at a course comparison matrix.
Weighing all the Options vs Saying No
In the previous column, I talked about two different strategies: a compensatory one where we weigh all the options and the non-compensatory one where we start eliminating candidates based on the criterion most important to us. Indecisive people tend to start with [...]

Feb11

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Decisiveness and Search: Two Different Strategies

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz speculates that we all might be happier if we had fewer options in life. Our consumer-based society continually pumps out more and more options, forcing us into making more and more decisions. Schwartz convincingly draws a parallel between decisiveness and happiness. The less time we spend making decisions, the more we’ll be satisfied with our lives.
A new study out of Wesleyan University explores the actual cognitive mechanisms of decisiveness. This has direct implications for search marketers because every time we use a search engine, we’re forced to make decisions. In fact, every online [...]

Feb10

Jody Nimetz

2

Taking the Confusion Out of Attribution

So we get a number of questions about attribution. What is attribution? Which attribution model should we be using? Is there an ideal attribution model? What is a typical attribution model look like? How accurate is one attribution model vs. another?
Before I go on, I would like to say that I am by no means an expert on attribution. The purpose of this article is to really open up a dialogue and help take some of the confusion out of attribution as it pertains to marketing specifically online marketing.  People have been trying to figure out attribution for years and [...]

Feb07

Ian Everdell

0

The Google Experience During The Super Bowl

Google just ran a Super Bowl ad, something Eric Schmidt said in a tweet yesterday means that Hell has frozen over. Regardless of the current atmospheric conditions in the underworld, one of the more subtle things about the Google ad that caught my attention was a mention in the Google blog that, “our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact.”
Google and its proponents have always made a point of emphasizing the user experience of search – that’s why the Google start page isn’t covered in widgets [...]

Jan29

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Undecided about Bing: The Decision Engine

Okay, I admit it. Bing is starting to show some glimmering signs of promise. But I still have concerns. Big concerns.
I had the chance to chat with Stefan Weitz recently about where Microsoft wanted to take Bing and it’s hard not to get swept up in Stefan’s evangelism. Microsoft is trying to do some very impressive things with search: parse the ambiguity out of our language, stitch together disparate fragments of content into a whole that’s useful to the user and present all this in a results format that informs and assists without requiring extensive tweaking on the part of [...]

Jan21

Gord Hotchkiss

0

A Frog in Boiling Water: Is the Fortune 500 Client All They’re Cracked up to Be?

P&G’s new CEO, Bob McDonald was asked, in a recent interview with Ad Age, what keeps him up at night:
The biggest thing is the parable of the frog in the boiling water. That’s why today, of the Fortune 50 from 1955, only nine of those companies still exist. P&G is one of them. I want P&G to be on that list 172 years from now, because that means we’re touching and improving more lives. The only thing that can kick us off that list is complacency or inability to learn new things or unwillingness to change.
The Allure of the [...]

Jan15

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Everyone’s a Critic – The Splinters of our Discontent

I had a bout of inbox convergence today. Just as I was speculating what this week’s search insider might cover, two separate emails surrounded a juicy little topic and delivered it to me on a platter. First, a post from Ad Age about how marketers are reluctant to use online conversations as a source of customer feedback:
“Listening” ostensibly has become the rage in consumer research, but the Advertising Research Foundation is finding that many marketers view what would seem one of the digital age’s biggest gifts to marketers — the torrent of unsolicited consumer opinion — as more of an [...]

Jan07

Gord Hotchkiss

0

The World’s Intentions at our Fingertips

We’ve made Google a verb. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means we have a better indication of prospect intent than ever before. Google (or any search engine) becomes the connector between our intent and relevant online destinations. John Battelle called Google the Database of Intentions and predicted that it would become hugely important. Battelle’s call was right on the money, but we still haven’t felt the full import of it. Our tapping into our zeitgeist (defined as the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era) is usually restricted to a facetious review of the [...]

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