Google announced ‘Search, plus your world’ earlier this month which is supposed to be a way of expanding your search results to include more content, especially content specific to you. This meant that they would tap in to what your friends are saying about certain things and make the whole experience more ‘social’. As an idea I think this is brilliant. I would be entirely behind the idea of including results from social media within search results. If I search for a brand it would be great to be able to see what my friends think about this brand straight away without having to research this separately.

The main problem with this new expansion from Google is that this will not be the end result for most people. The results will only show ‘personal results’ from Google products, primarily Google+. This is where the idea falls short. If it were to include results from across all relevant social media it would be perfect. By focusing mainly on Google+ this makes the whole idea a whole lot less appealling to me. These guys have addressed that and created their own algorithm that would focus on results from all across the web, not just Google+ which shows some interesting, and very contrasting results.

However, all is not lost for Google+. Since launching Brand pages brands are becoming more involved in the network and ‘Hangouts’ have even become successful.  The most notable example of this is Barack Obama who is set to ‘hangout’ on the social network and answer questions that people can pose to him through Youtube. People are still clearly using the network and this is a good sign for Google. Maybe if we see it enough people will gradually start using it. Maybe.

The SOPA and PIPA laws pertain to the USA only. Wikipedia’s blackout applies across the English-language parts of the site, in other words affecting countries outside of the US. Explaining its community-made decision, Wikipeda is hoping that the global blackout will highlight similar legislative concerns that are being considered in nations beyond the USA.

Wikipedia presents neutral articles, proudly championing an online community generated and verified encyclopaedia. The blackout is an important decision as there is risk of “seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position”. The idea behind Wikipedia, however, is to collect knowledge and allow people to access that around the world. So Wikipedia’s intention is to protect the freedom of information, ensuring that the educational material presented on the site is available to all.

So, the SOPA and PIPA debates continue!

The economy. Undoubtedly a time of uncertainty for the global economy, coupled with speculation around a breakdown of the Euro zone, this will be a focus on the outlook of 2012. The Advertising Association and Warc, earlier this month, downgraded UK adspend for 2012 to a 3.8% growth from a previous forecast of 4.7%.

That said, 2012 adspend as a whole will be £15.9bn, not something to be sniffed at. And while technology isn’t completely decoupled from the state of the global economy, it does stand in relative strength as an industry. The recent downgrades are most likely to reflect sharp downturns in print and supplements, particularly following closure of New of the World.

Google. No surprise here, but with the search giant owning 90% of the market globally and rolling out over 100 innovations in 2011 alone, we can expect its influence on trends in the next year to be huge.

More critically Google has 98% ownership of the mobile search market worldwide, over the likes of Yahoo! and Bing which have struggled to make even a dent on their competitor. “After years of false predictions, it looks like 2012 really will be the year of the mobile”, says Efficient Frontier CEO David Karnstedt, who’s recent study found mobile search in the US could account for 22% of online adspend next year, a significant increase from 6.5% currently.

Insights. Improved technologies such as Google Analytics and their widespread adoption have meant that consumer insight is easier to access than ever. Analysis of the search funnel, for example, will allow advertisers intelligent multichannel attribution. Minute Steak will ensure to invest in complete multichannel views of customer journeys for all channels. Using this advanced analysis of this data we can implement tailored strategies and improve overall marketing effectiveness.

More savvy users online now rely on social networks, customer reviews, video demonstrations, discount vouchers and apps to influence their purchase decisions. Today’s technologies now need to support a multi-touch presence to engage with and convert customers, providing the insight into behaviours allowing appropriate strategies to be executed.

Customisable Experience. IAB recently reported that over 50% of tablet usage took place between 7 – 12pm, making it the most widely used devise for accessing the internet in late evenings. Associate director of technology at YouGo, Russell Feldman also suggested that 24% of tablet users browse the interest from bed – supporting the IAB’s description of the devise as the ideal “downtime device”.

We’re already seeing newspaper and magazine publications focusing on tablet-specific versions, note the BBC homepage redesign back in September, now created to look and work more effectively from smartphones and tablet devices.

Only 4% of UK population actually own a tablet at the moment. Steve Koenig, director and industry analyst at the CEA describes how 2011 saw consistent growth in tablet sales reaching 207% growth. However forecasts of growth for 2012 have been cut to 59% and 22% for smartphones. Partly this is down to the “customisable experience”, whereby we’re using apps to personalise our devises, and therefore less inclined to make the upgrade. As a resilient market that saw sales drop only 8% worldwide in 2009 following the recession, the CEA still predicts the market to hit $1 trillion next year.

While the intention of these Acts is to “stop the flow of revenue to rogue websites and ensures that the profits from American innovations go to American innovators.” Opposition has likened the resulting censorship to that of Iran and the Chinese Great Firewall based on technologies that block domains. The broad approach of the bill would mean that all content, good and bad, would be censored. Additionally, any holder of Intellectual Property can demand payment providers and network operators to stop access to infringing sites within 5 days.

The sites affected are the likes of Facebook and Youtube, which in terms of advertising are still in their very early stages. The fear is that content and innovation will be quashed, as these sites could be deemed to be “dedicated to the theft of US property.  In other words, user-generated content will mean that these sites could be liable. If this is the case then the advertising opportunities here would be taken away. Not only is this a sizeable chunk of online spend, but also as the most recent area, it is one of the fastest growing.

Aside from the obvious arguments about freedom of speech and expression, another interesting one for advertisers will be in areas like the Google Display Network. I may wish to advertise a product alongside relevant content on a blog. If these bills are too vague there is a risk of interpretation that may mean my advertising is blocked. The consequences of this for the industry as a whole could lead to vast restrictions on how and where advertising is used.

The internet is still a young medium and the pace of technological change breeds strong creativity. Even if the extreme example becomes reality I think that the industry is dynamic enough to handle the change and produce other ways to make up for it. As the internet has grown, users have become accustomed to uploading content as they please. Taking that away from them does not mean that they will stop sharing content. There will merely be other channels that will become the means for content distribution, and the upside to this is that those new channels will become the new channels for advertisers too.

Over the year Google has increased the number of sitelinks appended to PPC from 4 to 6. This has been beneficial from my point of view for two reasons. My clients are able to take advantage of more space on the page as well as giving consumers more options to navigate to different parts of clients’ sites.

Apparent more recently, the Natural results now include what we are unofficially terming “mega-sitelinks”. When a user types in a specific company name or brand the usual PPC ads appear at the top of the page. The Natural results show as before, however with the addition of sitelinks. While we have been seeing more SEO sitelinks within the Natural listings, the new format shows up to 12 sitelinks.

As you can see from the above example, the brand in question is positively dominating the whole of the results. In this example there is competition on the PPC side, which means that the Paid box at the top of the page is larger than on other searches. This combines with the SEO listings in such a way that there is actually only one Natural result on my screen.

This raises the question about competition. Yes, Google now allows bidding on competitor brand terms, this was in an effort to keep competition healthy.  As a user, about 75% of what I am seeing on the page is from one company. This is potentially a set-back for Affiliates or resellers, making it a lot harder for them to appear above the fold.

At the moment, this is only something that we are seeing on company names. There is one grey area though, and that is for companies that have generic words as their name. I searched for “watch shop”, unaware that this was indeed a company’s name.

Google will have to be careful here with the intent behind the search. It is fair enough to show me a whole page of results dedicated to a brand search, but it is only the Paid Search in this example that offers me a variety of watch outlets.

On a more positive note, additional sitelinks on branded searches allow the consumer more choice, and options to go directly to the right part of the site without having to use navigation. From that perspective, search becomes faster and easier, this should result in a happier consumer.

• How do I better understand my web-site performance?

Understanding the performance of your web-site is critical to optimising your online revenue.  Google Analytics is a free tracking solution that can provide you with key metrics if it is implement correctly.  Ensure that your site is tagged correctly, e-commerce tracking is implemented and goals and events set-up.  If you have these key factors in place you can tag online activity and monitor results from one platform including the linking of your AdWords Account.

• I’ve get lots of traffic, but customers aren’t buying?

This could mean that the wrong traffic is being directed to your site or alternatively you may find your site needs to be reviewed.  If your web-site is not clear and easy to use, any budget applied to driving the right traffic will not generate the potential return.  It is important to get people that aren’t familiar with your web-site to provide feedback and test, test, test.

• How can I increase online sales aside from increasing marketing budget?

Following on from the previous point, it is essential to plan ongoing testing and optimisation on your web-site and marketing activity.  Ensuring that activity is integrated and consistent messaging is displayed throughout the customer journey will reassure the user.  This supported by directing them to the most relevant landing page with clear product information and an easy to use purchase process will enhance your ROI.

• Most search traffic is generated through my brand?

The first step is to look at search query processes and identify if a series of generic searches occurred before a purchase on brand.  Secondly you need to develop a search strategy that focuses on driving generic traffic to your site as these searches will often be made by new customers.  Reviewing your top selling products, USPs and Google Analytics reports will enable you to identify the generic terms that are most likely to lead to sales.  In many cases generic rankings can be costly and it can be worth testing generics in paid search before committing to a longer term natural strategy.

• How do I devise a social strategy?

The most important first step is to complete an audit of the social landscape.  This will enable you to understand where and how your customers engage online and the activity of your competitors.  This process ensures you avoid social for social sake and instead develop a strategy that is in-line with how your customers wish to interact with your brand.  It is essential to provide a reason for your customers to engage with your social activity and dedicate time internally to produce targeted and relevant content.

The above provides an overview of the types of discussions had on the day.  Many of the businesses asking these questions were experiencing great success online, but acknowledged that they often didn’t have time to review reports and performance in the detail that they would like.  In these cases a simple online health check can be an effective way of ensuring that the basics are in place and marketing budgets are being utilised as effectively as possible.

If you’d like help with a health check or any of the above issues sound familiar, please feel free to contact us and we’d be happy to provide further advice on your digital strategies.

An example of a website using content well is the Woodlands Junior School in Tonbridge, Kent which also appears as primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk in the search results.  Their site is absolutely packed with content and they rank for some really generic terms that many businesses compete to appear for at considerable expense.

Here are some examples of what they rank for:

Easter – Position 2

Electricity – Position 3

Christmas – Position 4

The British Royal Family- Position 5

Houses – Position 7

Science – Position 9

Pubs – Position 9

If you click through to the pages that appear for these terms you’ll see that they’re incredibly targeted and are both content and image rich.  The overall look and feel of the site isn’t great, in fact, it’s just very simple.  There are usually over 500 words of content, often as high as 1000 words of content on the page and this is broken down into clearly titled headings to make the information more digestible.

The content is all unique, nothing has been copied from other sources, it’s interesting to read despite being aimed at a young audience and links to relevant pages throughout the text.

Recent Google updates such as the Panda updates have really taken their toll on sites which are thin on content or which farm out articles designed for link building purposes.

What’s the impact for our clients?

We can’t stress enough the importance of good, quality content and regularly updating the text on the website.  This shouldn’t be done for the sake of it though.  Many companies have hoards of excellent content that sits on the site but hides in inaccessible parts of the site, making this accessible to search engines can make a big difference.

If you’d like more information on how the Panda Updates affect your site or how to improve your content, please get in touch.

For that exact reason, nobody cared for Buzz, and as such it failed…miserably. Google, not taking failure lightly, went back to the drawing board, and a year and a half later, Google+ was launched.

Google+ is the newest addition the arsenal of social profiles that every online- socialite needs to have. At this point in time, only a select few have been given access to a limited field trial of Google+, but so far reviews seem positive, a much improved attempt at a ‘social network’ after the failures of past.

What Does Google+ Offer?

Google+ is based around the idea of networks, as any social networking platform should be, but unlike the complex privacy settings of Facebook, Google+ works around the concept of ‘friendship circles’. This is where Google’s attempt outshines Facebook. Your network is grouped into these ‘circles’ as you choose to group them, so you’ll have a ‘circle’ for Friends, one for Work Colleagues, one for your Family etc etc. Using a drag and drop interface, it is simple to drag and drop from your Gmail address book, and start a network within seconds, and the same goes for sharing content. Just select a ‘circle’, upload the content, and only your connections within that circle will be able to see it.

Google is always trying to make the user experience as tailored as possible. Sparks is a search/recommendation tool, that allows you to input “stuff you’re interested in”, and rather like Stumble-Upon, recommends content it thinks you might be in to.

Huddle is Google’s answer to BlackBerry Messenger, ‘mobile group texting by Google’… enough said. Although, you are limited to messaging one of your ‘circles’, which could result in the need for hundreds of different friendship groups.

Finally, there’s ‘Hangout’. As a rival to the new Facebook/Skype collaboration, Hangout is an attempt by Google to force impromptu video chat. The one major benefit is that you can use it for multiple person video calls, which has potential benefits to the conference call market, but I personally can’t really see the benefits of awkward video chat with that guy you met at the pub two years ago, or ‘hanging-out’ as Google refers to it.

Google vs. Facebook

Facebook is a well-established network with well over 500 million active users. Today, across the globe, Facebook is the first thing users check in the morning, and the last thing they check each night, and with the addition of Facebook for mobile, it is possible to be online every minute in-between. Subsequently, it’s a hard market for Google to crack, but Google+ is a great attempt, and only time will tell if it is to be successful.

Google+ For Businesses

At this stage, Google+ is openly “optimising for the consumer experience”, which in simple terms means it’s designed for friends to share with friends. However, Christian Olsen (a product manager at Google+) assures us that functionality for businesses and brands to interact with the masses is in the pipeline. At which point, a Google+ business page will be another valuable vector for consumer engagement.

Minute Steak manage Sage Pay’s natural search and social monitoring activity.

The key to every shopper’s decision to buy is in the shopping experience and how they connect to your products. Look beyond the design of your website and consider the relevance of your products and promotions, your product arrangement, the helpfulness of information, the ‘ambience’ or ‘pace’ of shopping in your store, and the level of personalised service that you provide. This is all part of online merchandising — so with all these areas to consider where should you begin?

Start with some simple tracking on your website to identify which products are already working well on your website and which pages need improvement. With relative ease you can measure product performance by comparing the product page’s traffic volume to its conversion rate. This allows you to quickly identify your:

• Top selling products (high traffic, high conversion)
• Products with opportunities for promotion (low traffic, high conversion)
• Product pages that require optimisation (high traffic, low conversion)
• Products to consider replacing (low traffic, low conversion)

Next, fine-tune the performance of your online store with some tried-and-tested techniques. Here are a few that can help to improve the shopper experience and get more people buying from your store:

1. Remove obstacles

Make it easier for your customers to buy by organising your navigation to match your shopper’s needs. Luxury fashion retailer Net-A-Porter does this well by providing categories that follow the thought process of their customer segments. Also, allowing shoppers to browse products visually — one of the most powerful tools for fashion e-tailers in particular— can be the difference between an informed purchase from your store and uncertainty leading them elsewhere. Visual browsing includes multiple viewpoints of the product, detailed and full size image zoom, colour or fabric swatches and the product shown on models or forms. Net-A-Porter also cross-sells cleverly, by recommending only relevant and coordinated products to complete stylish outfits.

2. Empower your shoppers

For most shoppers, being able to customise your shopping experience or even personalise a product, can turn an average purchase into a memorable one. IKEA UK goes beyond the realm of ‘online catalogue’ by using a combination of lifestyle scenery and animation to make products come to life (more so than in-store). Their website allows customers to interact with furniture in almost the same way as you would in-store – wandering from room to room, collecting ideas, getting a closer look and picking up essential product information on the spot.  The audio/visual demonstrations (see TV and media solutions for example) are pleasantly surprising and are an entertaining way to picture how the product fits in with your lifestyle. Taking this a step further, IKEA UK enables shoppers to virtually assemble a furniture collection to suit their needs using their personal planning tool. The shopper’s decisions are then conveniently saved to a shopping list, making it simpler than ever to complete their purchase in-store or online.

3. Consider other content formats

Anyone selling high involvement or high value products knows that expert levels of service are essential to address a shopper’s every concern. This is where formats other than just written content can help. GuitarGuitar, the UK’s largest guitar store, finds a great way to translate their in-store guitar purchasing experience into one suitable for their e-commerce website. They use high definition video format to provide online shoppers with expert instrument demonstrations. Not only is this equivalent to the specialist level of service shoppers receive in-store, it rivals it — by giving online shoppers access to very detailed product information, with the flexibility to spend as much time as they need to get to know the instruments.

Sage Pay is the UK’s largest independent provider of online payment services. It provides simple, secure and fast online payment processing, merchant accounts, online fraud prevention and PCI DSS certification services for over 30,000 businesses of all sizes.

I started by performing a search on each engine on the word “steak”. One thing I have noticed in recent months is that the Google results incorporate the page number that they are on. This allows you to scroll down the page without having to click for the next set of results at the bottom of every page. Bing image search has had this continual scroll functionality for a while, but does not include pages. Personally, I find that the page break helps to keep the page feeling less cluttered. The Bing results are nicely arranged within their own individual boxes though, so that keeps it feeling quite neat.

Moving on to Google’s update, the options on the left-hand side of the page now include “Sort by subject” as well as the default option “Sort by relevance”. Clicking on this option changes the page to rows of subjects with a few example images on each row. Hovering over the row or subject title then provides the user with an option to click to view more of the same.

This is all quite logical, until I click on one of the subject options. I tried clicking on the “sirloin steak” subject row and my query now read as “sirloin steak” in the search box above the images. Bing does this too but the initial results remain clickable as the subjects appear as a clickable tab across the top of the results.

This is where the Bing and Google difference was highlighted. Google funnels the user into a more specific query, but then was unable to provide subjects relating to “sirloin steak”. At this point the user has to click the back button or start the search again. The Bing layout felt a lot clearer and gave example related searches at every stage. The tab above the results meant that at any point in my search I could click back to other categories as well as related searches.

Google released the subject search option with a view to allowing searches based on descriptions. Using the term “London domed church” and hoping to come across Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Google did not disappoint. There were only eight images on the subject page; however six of these were of St. Paul’s. The Bing results were numerous and more varied, yet all still relevant to the actual search query in some respect.

So which engine is better? It depends what you are looking for. It would seem that Google’s “subject search” does work best when identifying objects based on a description. When Google released this image search update, that was their intention. Yet this is only one way that people use search. If searching for the perfect image based on one query, Bing image search provides more options for choosing related images.