Search Marketing

Business locations have unwittingly joined a world of local social gaming. The use of “check-in” technologies, and buzz around this new kind of social activity has blossomed thanks to the recent growth of sites like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, MyTown and Brightkite. These are just some of the technologies out there that create social utility and a bit of fun around the everyday places we visit.

Through GPS functionality, mobile browsers and apps have empowered consumers to share their daily adventures, longitude by latitude, tweet by tweet, at any given second in time.  For example, Foursquare allows its users to quickly find a location, check in and supply content that is relevant to their geographic location.  For places of business, a user may want to inform his or her social community in real time of his or her location and thoughts about the spot.  This might include a traditional status update, advice or a review of the location itself.

Read the full article »

SearchIgnite, leading search optimization solutions provider and 360i sister company, recently released a whitepaper outlining key trends in retail ad spend in Q4. The company, which manages more than $400 million in paid search annually, drew data from its large pool of sophisticated retail advertisers.

Research showed that multi-channel retailers are increasing their U.S. paid search initiatives despite economic uncertainty, with spend up 7 percent in Q4 ahead of Black Friday. Each of the Big Three engines showed year-over-year spend increases from retailers, but Bing’s 47 percent boost represented the greatest gain. This was likely due to higher average order values (“AOV”) from shoppers converting on Microsoft’s engine.

Here are some of SearchIgnite’s key findings:

• Strong U.S. Retail Spend in First Half of Q4: U.S. search spend from existing retail marketers is up 7% YoY in the first half of Q4 across all major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing).
• Conversion Rates on the Rise: In the first half of Q4, conversion rates were up 17%, a strong increase over this time last year and a hopeful sign that consumer confidence is on the rise.
• Retailers Increase Spend on Bing: U.S. retail marketers dramatically increased their search spend on Bing, up 47% YoY, seeing higher AOV from shoppers on Microsoft’s engine.

The full report is available for download at http://www.searchignite.com/about_research.aspx.

The State of Search – A White Paper from 360i
>>Download the complete report here.

Today, we issued a white paper revealing key trends shaping search marketing strategy and introducing PageShare, a new metric for quantifying the success of a brand’s presence on the search engines. As part of this report, a brand SEO audit calculating approximate PageShare was performed for each of the Top 100 Advertisers in the United States.

Key findings from the report:

What is PageShare?
PageShare is a weighted value assigned to a marketer’s presence for a set of keyword terms in the search engines. It is calculated by analyzing the number of text listings occupied by a marketer across the first three search engine results pages (SERPs) for a respective keyword or keyword set and then assigning a weight to each of the marketer’s listings based on their rank.

PageShare helps transform search engine rankings into a straightforward “shelf space” metric so that marketers know their share of visibility for a given term or set of terms. It is a critical component to any marketer’s digital strategy and overall presence in the search engines.

To read more about PageShare and see how the Top 100 Advertisers stack up, download the complete report here.

One way to effectively mix SEO and PPC: Stay ahead of the curve and utilize new innovations that enable you to weave micro-formats and RSS feeds into search listings.

In an iMedia Connection article published today, Mike Dobbs — Group Director, SEO at 360i — outlines 10 tips for combining SEO & paid search in your digital marketing programs. We’ve provided a brief summary below, but you can read the full article over on iMedia’s Web site.

While search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search are often seen as independent processes by digital marketers, the consumer sees a search results page as a single experience, and research shows that paid and natural search do impact eachother. Here’s a look at 10 key force-multipliers that leverage search results pages to maximize the impact of both your PPC and SEO efforts:

1. Follow proven SEO best practices
There are many standard best practices, but avoiding duplicate content is a vital SEO rule for retailers. Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one webpage. Embracing the “canonical tag” is an elegant solution for avoiding duplicate content.

2. Evaluate your paid search campaign structure against your own site architecture
Following your site’s architecture when setting up your campaigns and ad groups can help reveal untapped opportunities for your paid search efforts. Do you have an ad group for each of your product categories and promotions? Walk through your site map and compare it against your PPC campaign to make sure you cover all the bases.

3. Take a holistic approach to PPC bidding and ad creative
Running paid ads that include timely promotions and a call-to-action alongside natural search results for your brand can actually increase overall click-through rates (CTRs) on natural search listings, providing higher ROI across your search efforts.

Results of a SearchIgnite study showed that natural search clicks were 17 percent higher on days when paid search ads were running, garnering more “free” clicks simply by running paid search ads alongside natural search results. In addition, total conversions and revenue on both paid and natural terms dramatically increased on days when paid search ads were running.

Read the full article »

Yahoo has announced that it will be canceling Yahoo Search Submit Pro (Y!SSP), its fixed-rate cost-per-click program, as of Dec. 31. Also known as “paid inclusion,” this service enables marketers to submit their URLs and page information directly to the Yahoo natural search web index, rather than having Yahoo crawl them via its primary web-indexing technology (known as SLURP). By submitting pages via Y!SSP, marketers have better control over the content that Yahoo searches and displays for their Web site listings.

360i COO John Ragals wrote a column for Ad Age’s Digital Next blog today that outlines the key marketer implications of the Y!SSP cancellation. For those marketers that don’t use Y!SSP, not much changes. Yet the many marketers that do use this service, especially retailers and other e-commerce providers, may need to fine tune or even rethink their Yahoo search strategy. Here’s why:

• The way marketers using Y!SSP optimize for natural search on Yahoo is fundamentally changing. Formerly, marketers using Y!SSP could rely solely on the information sent in their data feeds to be well-optimized on Yahoo. Now, these marketers must look more closely at how they are optimized for Yahoo and ensure that they are incorporating the same data that was previously in their Y!SSP feeds in order to maintain their ranks and timely messaging.
• Marketers will lose out on the benefits of the Y!SSP program. These include: 1) Faster refresh rates as compared to the standard SLURP web crawler, and 2) Greater control over natural search optimization.

Read the full article »

In this week’s MediaPost column, David Berkowitz can run – but he can’t hide – from social media in Los Angeles (image via Flickr).

I swore this would be a vacation. It was so weird taking a cab to JFK and not asking for a receipt, but I was ready to embrace it. Still, a long Labor Day weekend in Los Angeles for a friend’s wedding wound up being shaped continually by social media experiences with brands big and small. Here are some standouts.

Virgin America: There are two reasons I flew Virgin for the first time to get to LA. One was that the groom noted there were good deals on flights from New York. Yet uncharacteristically of me, when I checked that the fare was reasonable, I didn’t look elsewhere — I booked it right away. The buzz surrounding the brand has been a big influence, especially with the countless exposures I’ve had through social media such as the repeated mentions on Rohit Bhargava’s blog. I don’t quite get all the hype, but I’d fly it again if the deal warrants it.

Read the full article »

With the latest Google search announcement of its BETA Caffeine engine, what can marketers expect if Google flips a switch or starts a transition to a newer “next-generation” infrastructure?

Now that Google’s sandbox beta engine has stabilized – it was previously too volatile to run comprehensive and accurate testing – we’ve evaluated rankings for a sample set of 40 retail keywords. We looked at ten major retail brand names (keywords), ten retail head terms (single keywords), ten retail torso terms (two-word phrases) and ten retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases) and compared the search results on the first three pages of both engines (standard Google and “Caffeinated” Google).

40 Retail Keywords Used in the Analysis

Six things stood out to us as notable differences that could impact marketers when Google makes the switch.

Read the full article »