Category Archives: Search Engine Optimization

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 21, 2012

Leave a reply

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • New Ad Status Info Added To AdWords

    Google is providing AdWords users with a new way to figure out whether their ads are approved, or not, and why. The new feature is expected to be especially helpful for folks placing ads in categories restricted by the company’s advertising policies. To view an ad’s status, hover over the speech bubble in the Status [...]

  • The Hidden Lever In Paid Search Optimization

    There have been many articles written about paid search optimization, but there is one piece of the optimization puzzle that continually gets left out. The hidden lever in paid search optimization is prioritization. Prioritizing optimization opportunities is equally as important as doing the optimization itself. I have seen double digit increases in performance and significant [...]

  • 4 Examples Of B2B Content Marketing Executed With SEO Best Practices In Mind

    According to the 2012 MarketingSherpa Search Engine Marketing Report, of all SEO tactics available, “content creation works the best, but takes the most work,” says Kaci Bower, Research Analyst, MECLABS. B2B Internet marketers need new content to enforce and build upon keyword strategies, acquire links, and attract attention in social media. In my experience, effective [...]

  • Why Search Marketers Are Losing Out With Search Retargeting

    Search retargeting finds those individuals who have searched on Google, Yahoo! or Bing for a keyword that matters to your campaign, but who have not visited your site before. Unlike site retargeting that talks only to those people who have abandoned the site without competing an action, search retargeting is for new customer generation. Arguably [...]

  • How A Google Change May Mistakenly Turn Search Traffic Into Referral Traffic

    Google’s about to make a change to how it reports referrer information for those using its Chrome browser. As a result, some analytics programs may begin listing search visitors as if they instead came directly from Google without doing a search, though major packages will probably adjust OK. The change was posted on the Google [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Business Issues

Local, Maps Mobile

Link Building

Searching

SEM Industry

SEO SEM

Social Media

Video, Music Image Search

Web Analytics

Related Topics: SearchCap

About The Author: is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

Connect with the author via:
Email

| Twitter
| Google+
| LinkedIn

SMX - Search Marketing Expo

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/rC0GrA1Hjys/searchcap-the-day-in-search-march-21-2012-116229

Microsoft’s adCenter Improvements Rolling Out Fast And Furiously

Leave a reply

A year and a half ago, changes to Microsoft’s adCenter interface appeared maybe once or twice a quarter. This year, stay tuned for monthly updates bringing everything from Broad Match Modifier, a desktop version for the Mac, a special version for small businesses, and more integrated interactive ads on Bing.

“When we talk about the 2012 spring release, which started in January and will continue through the June timeframe, we’ll get into a monthly cadence of launching capabilities to the market,” David Pann, general manager for Microsoft Advertising’s Search Network told me. “[This will be] both at the advertiser level and in changing relevance algorithms — matching, ranking, pricing, the black box. We’re making these changes giving advertisers more control and greater transparency.”

Following, a few of the enhancements coming up in the next few months:

Broad Match Modifier

Microsoft announced in a blog post today that it is testing this feature. Similar to Google’s Broad Match Modifier, this targeting feature will allow advertisers to create keywords with greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.

AdCenter Express (For Small Businesses)

Similar to AdWords Express, Google’s simplified product aimed at small businesses, Microsoft will roll out a product that automates the process somewhat, aiming to ease and improve the experience for small business marketers, many of whom have plenty of additional responsibilities, in addition to marketing. Too many times, Pann said, small businesses set up campaigns but don’t have time to monitor them closely or tweak them, meaning they often are disappointed by results.

“Not only are they running restaurants or plumbing businesses, we’ve told them they need to be search engine marketing experts,” Pann said.

The new offering will start beta testing later this year and will officially launch at the end of the year or the beginning of next year, according to Pann.

More Rich, Integrated Ads In Bing

“[We're developing] richer kind of ad units that look more like content in context and allow us to help the user to complete a task and engage with an advertiser or merchant. as simply as possible,” said Pann.

As an example of things to come in the next three to six months, Pann pointed to current integrations such as the Open Table reservations functionality, which displays “Reservations” next to search results when users search for a specific restaurant. Hovering over over the word brings up a window where people can select a date, time and number of diners, and then be delivered to a specialized landing page on OpenTable.com.

Some of these integrations may be exclusive partnerships, such as OpenTable, while others could be part of the auction, judged on bid price and relevancy like any other advertisement — somewhat similar to Google’s product listing ads.

“If you as a consumer, were doing research on a product or thinking about buying it, rather than going to advertiser’s site to complete the transaction,” Pann said. “You could put it into the shopping cart directly from the Bing experience.”

Dynamic Location Extensions and Sitelink Extensions

Advertisers that have multiple locations will be able to set up ads that serve the most relevant result — i.e. the closest location — to consumers. Alongside the standard text ad, the closest business address and an optional phone number can be displayed.

Pann said sitelink extensions, presumably similar to Google’s product, is in a pilot stage now, and will probably roll out widely in the fall.

More Detailed Quality Score Data

Pann says advertisers will soon be able to get data on their quality scores for various match types and for mobile-only targeted ads.

“We’re giving them much more detailed data so they can improve their performance in the marketplace,” he said.

Desktop Tool For The Mac

Yes, Microsoft is developing desktop software to manage adCenter from the Macintosh.

“That’s something we’ve clearly heard from customers and we are going to be able to support that.” said Pann.

Related Topics: Microsoft: adCenter | Microsoft: Bing | Top News

About The Author: is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker.

Connect with the author via:
Email

| Twitter
| Google+
| LinkedIn

SMX - Search Marketing Expo

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/G5DRqRsaCg4/microsofts-adcenter-improvements-rolling-out-fast-and-furiously-116235

Why Search Marketers Are Losing Out With Search Retargeting

Leave a reply

Search retargeting finds those individuals who have searched on Google, Yahoo! or Bing for a keyword that matters to your campaign, but who have not visited your site before. Unlike site retargeting that talks only to those people who have abandoned the site without competing an action, search retargeting is for new customer generation.

Arguably the people with the best skillset to manage a search retargeting program are those skilled in PPC – search retargeting (when done right) is setup and optimized at the individual keyword level, and often a campaign begins by using the terms from an existing PPC account, and so the search marketer is front and centre in the process from the beginning.

In addition, the media that is bought to show the ads is through RTB (Real Time Bidding) from the ad exchanges (AdBrite, AdMeld, GDN etc), which is an auction environment… just like PPC.

(See: ‘Why Search Marketers are The Future Media Planners’)

And when we started Chango we presumed search marketers would be the bulk of our revenue, but interestingly it doesn’t work that way yet because any type of display buying still seems alien to the search marketer. Display media planners are in the game though and currently owning the space.

Why aren’t search marketers getting involved?

Scared Of Being Creative?

The creative unit in search marketing is the PPC ad, limited to 3 lines and a link, and is very different to the visual ‘banner’ units that display planners work with, and because most search marketers don’t have access to creative resources often find it intimidating to get started.

Display ads don’t have to be scary!

Every day online we see some very cool examples of interactive Flash units, homepage takeovers and clever use of video, and this must seem daunting if you haven’t done campaigns like this before. But the reality is that most campaigns can be started with a basic static as unit and improved on from there.

To get started, there are tremendous resources I have come across over the years that can help you cross the divide.

  • Canned Banners (http://cannedbanners.com/)
  • Build Flash ads easily using templates at a very low cost, quickly and easily. Very, very easy and they actually look really good if you spend a few hours working on them.
  • Which Test Won (http://whichtestwon.com/)
  • A great resource to learn quickly what works and doesn’t work in digital creative, and also the importance of lots of testing!
  • Moat (http://www.moat.com/)
  • See instantly what your competitors are running and learn from their efforts and designs.

The golden rule is just get started, get some basic ads produced and start running campaigns.

Measurement

In the search world campaigns are measured on spend, clicks, CTR, CPC and conversions. The display world is similar, but contains an added element of view thru (VT) or post impression (PI) revenue.

Simply put, this occurs when someone sees an ad but doesn’t click on it prior to converting on the site. Search marketers would love this to be the case with their AdWords investment, but just because it can’t be, don’t be closed to it with display!

I believe that counting 100% of the VT revenue is incorrect as some of the audience would have visited that site and converted anyway, but counting 0% is also incorrect as decades of advertising tells us the ads work! Importantly, the budget holders for display mostly believe in VT and so understanding how to work with it is critical.

In a recent article we explored 3 Simple Alternatives to Attribution Modeling that will give you some simple ideas for how to do this. Some of these techniques require the use of an ad server like DoubleClick in order to measure the VT impact, but DoubleClick is very expensive and has large minimums. Check out AdSwerve who have a unique reseller agreement and can offer the same tool for a very small minimum.

Go Innovate!

As the highest performing line item on media plans, search retargeting has cemented itself as a key prospecting tool for marketers. It’s only going to grow in popularity and usage and search marketers should act now, overcome these barriers and grab their share of the program.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Search Display

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/AlpzD3-1l0I/why-search-marketers-are-losing-out-with-search-retargeting-113503

4 Examples Of B2B Content Marketing Executed With SEO Best Practices In Mind

Leave a reply

According to the 2012 MarketingSherpa Search Engine Marketing Report, of all SEO tactics available, “content creation works the best, but takes the most work,” says Kaci Bower, Research Analyst, MECLABS.

B2B Internet marketers need new content to enforce and build upon keyword strategies, acquire links, and attract attention in social media.

Marketingsherpa SEO Tactics and Effectiveness Chart

In my experience, effective SEO-centric content creation requires planning on both the long and short term impact, and a strict attention to detail. With a myriad of responsibilities on the B2B marketer’s plate, it certainly is not uncommon for details to be missed and corners to get cut.

Some of the SEO best practices I see get missed:

  • Optimization of key page elements (HTML titles, meta descriptions, etc)
  • Cross-links between relevant content assets
  • Share-friendly icons and functionality
  • Social media and traditional link building outreach

With a little assistance from Help a Reporter Out, here are four examples of B2B content marketing initiatives, that stand out because of their focus and adherence to SEO strategy as well.

Social Media Combined With SEO In Neolane’s Campaign Management Infographic

Neolane's Campaign Management Infographic

 

Digital marketing software vendor Neolane recently launched an infographic poking fun at a significant challenge campaign management providers face, the ability to overcome the onslaught of spam in online marketing communications. Running through the social media marketing initiative, here are examples of key SEO best practices merged into the process.

  • Application of keyword strategy in traditional SEO page elements (HTML titles, Meta descriptions, body copy, etc).
  • Social media buttons for popular social networking websites at the top and bottom of the post.
  • A specifically “share-friendly” HTML page with social media buttons for similar social media websites (including Pinterest and StumbleUpon) that points users right to the infographic content. This page also contains keyword-specific cross-links to solutions pages and back to the company blog.

Share-Friendly Functionality for Social Media Sites

  • Embed functionality for the infographic on the main blog post and a more share-friendly page.

Delivering Link Communication Through Social Media Assets In The Healthcare Space

Social Media Profile Visibility

Kaysha Kalkofen, co-founder of the St. Louis-based digital marketing agency tSunela, talked to me about their client, Christian Hospital. The hospital engaged tSunela for search engine optimization (SEO) and social media outreach.

In addition to core SEO best practices for keyword optimization and social media asset visibility, Christian Hospital actively maintains a communication to their network through popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and now Google+.

This communications includes announcements of hospital events, workshops and information, as well as content they feel their audience will find of value and hopefully share as well.

It appears to be working thus far. Here is an example of Ragan’s Healthcare Communication News picking up and publicly thanking the organization (linking to their Google+ account) for a valuable piece of content shared.

Link Reference from Health Care News Site

In addition to examples like this one, Christian Hospital has also experienced an increase in website activity since the beginning of their SEO efforts and a more immediate way to respond to patient care concerns through social media monitoring.

Content Marketing SEO In Enterprise Technology Event Coverage

The Wikibon / SiliconANGLE team produce live video coverage of popular enterprise technology events like EMCWorld, Strata Conference, and Hadoop. The end result is a series of video, blog post, and research assets from contributing members of their team.

Wikibon / SiliconANGLE Content Marketing Assets from Event Coverage

  • Blog posts contain cross-links back to video and event coverage.
  • Video assets contain social media sharing elements and embed functionality
  • Assets written and produced are consolidated in one curated content page (below), which can more easily be distributed for outreach to bloggers and site owners.
    Article Curating all Content Marketing Assets from Event
  • The screenshot below represents a nice win from a link building perspective: a link on a highly visible page within an HP product site.
    Link from HP.com home HP ProLiant Gen8 Announcement

Vocus: Maximizing The Value Of A Content Marketing Asset

The team at Vocus did their part to wrap tactical SEO initiatives around the launch of their Expert Guide to Online Content Marketing white paper. While the PDF itself is not a great example of a content format optimized for search, careful application of SEO strategy was applied to help ensure organic search engine visibility.

  • First, Vocus created an SEO friendly landing page which incorporated clear conversion action, social media sharing functionality, a summary of key information for the user.
    White Paper Landing Page
  • The team published blog posts in 3 phases to make it more digestible, and created associated video to support the guide, and linking to the full PDF in each posting. Assets were distributed through applicable social media assets as well.
    Vocus Blog Post and Video Example

From Stacey Acevero and Scott Benson of Vocus, with respect to using direct PDF links in blog posts, “we’re tracking each click on the PDF link as an ‘event’ in Google Analytics and also counting this as a traditional “PDF download” – much like a lead generation lead, but without the user information. It was a basis for measuring the posts success, not a true lead.”

From the social media perspective, “not only are people sharing our post socially, but this piece is directly responsible for as many as 79 new Twitter followers and 101 Facebook Likes – each of these “goals” has [a defined] value to our company.”

Final Thoughts

The above examples are meant to provide tactical tie-ins between SEO best practices and specific B2B content marketing initiatives. This is not an evaluation of any of these organizations’ overall B2B SEO strategy. While these examples provide B2B marketers with a short list of factors in the content creation process that help enhance SEO, make sure to adapt those used as reference to your own organizations needs and priorities.

Good luck in your content creation and marketing efforts and make sure that SEO remains a key focal point in all of these endeavors as well.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/kfA2xCI6MEU/4-examples-of-b2b-content-marketing-executed-with-seo-best-practices-in-mind-115063

The Hidden Lever In Paid Search Optimization

Leave a reply

There have been many articles written about paid search optimization, but there is one piece of the optimization puzzle that continually gets left out. The hidden lever in paid search optimization is prioritization.

Prioritizing optimization opportunities is equally as important as doing the optimization itself. I have seen double digit increases in performance and significant time savings in every program that has implemented a prioritization process, even if they were previously using a fixed schedule for optimization. There is so much work to do on a paid search account that someone could easily spend all of their time making changes that don’t really have an impact.

Doing a regular prioritization audit makes sure that the initiatives with the highest impact get done first and get the most attention. It does take additional thought and effort to prioritize your optimization, but it is well worth it in the end. Here is a four step process I use to perform an optimization audit:

  1. Identify all possible optimization levers
  2. Measure your program against heartbeat metrics for each lever
  3. Scope out the levers that show promise
  4. Prioritize the final list of scoped opportunities

1. Identifying All Possible Optimization Levers

An “optimization lever” is any part of a paid search campaign that we can change to affect performance. The three main groups of optimization levers for paid search are the content, the budgets, and the targeting. All paid search optimization that I have encountered fall into these three areas.

The graphic below shows these three groups along with the levers within each group. If you have used additional levers that fall outside of these groups I would love to hear about them.

2. Measure Your Program Against Heartbeat Metrics For Each Lever

After determining the list of possible levers to optimize, the next step is to do a quick diagnosis of where the biggest opportunities might reside. I do this by choosing a heartbeat metric for each lever and then setting a standard for what is acceptable for that metric.

The heartbeat metric may not be the only metric that is relevant for that lever, but it should be deeper than the overall goal for the program and have diagnostic power to determine how a program is doing in that area.

For example, revenue would not be a good diagnostic metric for any of the levers because it is generally an overall goal that is affected by all pieces of the program. CTR would be a good diagnostic measure for ad copy because it is fairly specific to how well the ad copy is doing.

After defining a heartbeat metric, then we must define a standard for that metric. These standards can be industry standards, or can be a standard agreed upon within your organization. The last step in this part of the process is to compare your campaign’s heartbeat metric against the standards that have been established.

By adding some simple stoplight formatting to the chart below we get a quick first impression of where we should look deeper with our optimization efforts.

3. Scope Out The Levers That Show Promise

Even after a heartbeat chart has been established, we are not quite to the point of having a prioritized list because we are missing a few essential pieces of information. We have an idea of where our problem areas are, but we don’t know how much impact pulling this lever will have or how much effort it will take.

To get these additional pieces of information we have to dig deeper and scope out the potential. This scoping process will be slightly different for each lever, but for now let’s look at landing page relevancy.

To get an initial scope, we can look at all of the landing pages in our campaign and include additional relevant metrics to determine how many tests we may need to run and what the impact may be.

Based on the data in the chart below we might determine that we should run landing pages tests on landing pages A and D.  We know from past experience that doing one landing page test takes about two days of effort to set up and one day to report out the results. So doing two tests will take us about six days’ worth of work. We are also able to estimate from looking at this data that if we improve the conversion rate on either page, then we will see a substantial increase in total revenue in our campaign.

A similar process can be used for other levers, but will require different metrics and different reports.

4. Prioritize The Final List Of Scoped Opportunities

Finally, we are ready to put together a list of prioritized optimization projects. This is simply putting together a chart of the scoped opportunities ranked by their potential impact and how much effort it will take.

You can see in the chart below that the landing page tests we identified should be the third priority because although it will have a high impact, it will take substantially more effort to accomplish than some of the other high impact optimizations.

The hidden part of this optimization process is not a secret campaign setting that magically makes programs perform better, it is the process of prioritizing all of the optimization based on overall impact. Not only does it improve performance because we are focusing on the highest impact initiatives, but it also saves time on wasted effort, and allows us to schedule optimization at separate times so that we can track the impact of each one.

Over time, investing in regular optimization priority audits increases campaign performance at least as much as the optimizations themselves do.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: In House Search Marketing

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/dCUbklBKq1w/the-hidden-lever-in-paid-search-optimization-115127

New Ad Status Info Added To AdWords

Leave a reply

Google is providing AdWords users with a new way to figure out whether their ads are approved, or not, and why. The new feature is expected to be especially helpful for folks placing ads in categories restricted by the company’s advertising policies.

To view an ad’s status, hover over the speech bubble in the Status column of the Ads tab that is next to the ad you want to diagnose. The status will pop up with default keywords and geographic targeting pre-populated. If you want to check the status of other keyword/target combinations, those can be edited in the pop-up.

The new functionality, like the ad preview and diagnosis tool, is part of a push at Google to provide advertisers with additional insights into problems with their ads.

Related Topics: Google: AdWords

About The Author: is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker.

Connect with the author via:
Email

| Twitter
| Google+
| LinkedIn

SMX - Search Marketing Expo

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/tob-dgbJkqg/new-ad-status-info-added-to-adwords-116207

Wikipedia Appears On Google’s Page One Only 46% Of Time, Study Shows

Leave a reply

google-wikipedia-logosWikipedia doesn’t pwn Google nearly as much as the SEO industry thinks it does.

In fact, according to a new Conductor study, Wikipedia showed up on the first page of Google’s search results only 46 percent of the time in a study using 2,000 unique keywords.

Conductor used one thousand informational keywords (like “lyrics” and “bridal shower ideas”) and another thousand transactional keywords (like “headphones” and “where to find wall stencils”) in its study; as you’d expect, Wikipedia has much more visibility on informational searches than transactional — 60 percent for the former and only 34 percent for the latter. And overall, Wikipedia ranked one page one for 46 percent of the keywords.

wikipedia-google-study-1

Conductor’s study also found that Wikipedia doesn’t rank on page one or two for about 29 percent of the keywords it studied (see right column above).

Wikipedia: Still A Ranking Powerhouse

Even if those numbers are lower than you expected them to be, Wikipedia is still a ranking powerhouse. Conductor’s research shows that, when Wikipedia does show up on page one of Google’s search results, it’s in the top three spots 65 percent of the time (see right pie chart below).

wikipedia-google-study-2

Conductor’s study comes on the heels of a separate study last month suggesting that Wikipedia ranked highly on Google UK for 99 percent of all searches — a study that I suggested was flawed because it relied only one one-word searches. (And, in fact, Conductor’s study shows Wikipedia ranking on page one about 80 percent of the time for those keywords.)

In my article about the previous study, I suggested a different methodology — one that used a variety of keywords from single words (“headphones”) to lengthy phrases (“who built the statue of liberty”). Conductor explains that it used that methodology and, at the suggestion of Search Engine Land columnist Shari Thurow, divided the keywords into transactional and navigational. Conductor says it also examined a group of navigational keywords but Wikipedia wasn’t visible for those terms, so it excluded them from the full study.

Next, we need a similar study run on Bing’s search results so we can compare which search engine actually likes Wikipedia more. (hint, hint, Conductor…)

If you missed the link above, you can read more about the study on Conductor’s blog.

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Search Engines: Wikipedia | Stats: General | Top News

About The Author: is Search Engine Land’s Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus.

Connect with the author via:
Email

| Twitter
| Google+
| LinkedIn

SMX - Search Marketing Expo

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/iapmQUizl1Y/wikipedia-appears-on-googles-page-one-only-46-of-time-study-shows-116060

SMX Advanced Agenda Now Available – Register Today & Save!

Leave a reply

smx-logo-128

The Search Marketing Expo – SMX Advanced agenda is now posted! Check out the agenda and register before super early bird rates expire at the end of Saturday.

Fluent in search marketing? SMX Advanced is for you. This year’s agenda is packed with expert-level tips to drive traffic, increase conversions and boost ROI. Session topics include:

  • Surviving Personalization with Bing Google
  • Fire But Don’t Forget: Getting the Most Out of Retargeting From The Pros
  • iSEM: Doing Mobile Search Ads Right
  • Breaking The Speed Limit: Faster Sites Win!
  • iConvert: Landing Pages Conversion In A Smartphone Mobile World
  • YouA Keynote With Google’s Matt Cutts

Join us June 5-6 at the Bell Harbor International Convention Center in Seattle. At $1495 for an All Access pass, you’ll get all of the sessions, keynotes, networking activities and special events that make SMX conferences famous.

Super early bird rates expire this Saturday, March 24. Register today to secure your spot and the lowest rates offered!

Interested in sending your team? Save an additional 15-25% with our group registration packages.

Want to continue the learning? Choose from six in-depth workshops running on June 7th. Sign up now, spots are limited!

Helpful SMX Advanced links:

Related Topics: SEM Industry: Conferences | SMX SMN Alerts | Top News

About The Author: is a news and information site covering search engine marketing, searching issues and the search engine industry. Special site announcements and occasional sponsor messages are posted by Search Engine Land.

Connect with the author via:
Email

SMX - Search Marketing Expo

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/twm_nT3XK4U/smx-advanced-agenda-now-available-register-today-save-116069

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 20, 2012

Leave a reply

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • Wikipedia Appears On Google’s Page One Only 46% Of Time, Study Shows

    Wikipedia doesn’t pwn Google nearly as much as the SEO industry thinks it does. In fact, according to a new Conductor study, Wikipedia showed up on the first page of Google’s search results only 46 percent of the time in a study using 2,000 unique keywords. Conductor used one thousand informational keywords (like “lyrics” and [...]

  • AdCenter Best Practices for Agencies – Webcast on Thursday

    Search Marketing Now will host a webcast this Thursday, March 22 at 1 PM EDT. “AdCenter Best Practices for Agencies” will feature Allan Chuate, Regional Manager Search Strategy, Yahoo!, who will discuss the essentials of improving the efficiency of your clients’ ppc campaigns in AdCenter. He’ll share tips and tricks for AdCenter best practices. The [...]

  • Comparison Engine FindTheBest Debuts Local Classifieds

    Structured data comparison engine FindTheBest has evolved impressively since its launch in August 2010. The site has become progressively richer and more usable. It has expanded into more categories. And, as of today, that includes local classified listings in jobs, cars and rental housing. FindTheBest is a kind of “anti-search engine” and the brainchild of [...]

  • How Microsoft Removes “Junk” From Bing Search Results

    Dr. Richard Qian from Bing’s core search team wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Bing Search Quality Insights: Reducing Junk. This is part of Bing’s ongoing effort to provide search quality insights on how Bing works. Bing here explains how they handle removing bad links from the Bing search results, and [...]

  • 5 Ways To Get The Best Links For New Websites

    Confession: I almost slapped Ryan Jones the other week at SMX West. “I don’t have to build links,” he said. “We put out a new product or announcement, and bam: There’s 10,000 links.” Unfortunately, he’s right — even if the slap would have been justified. If you do SEO for a big brand, like Ryan, [...]

  • Is Apple Is About To Launch A New Global Search Engine?

    Did the headline catch your eye? I really wanted a teaser headline for this post which would entice people to read and discover the details of a new global search engine — but for that message, a teaser alone just wasn’t credible. But when I added the word “Apple” to the headline, it completely changed [...]

  • Google’s First Day Of Spring Logo

    Today is the first day of Spring in many parts of the world and to celebrate, Google has a special Spring Equinox logo. This logo’s design was by Marimekko a Finnish company. It obviously resembles the Google logo but has various flowers, birds, animals and insects to symbolize the Spring season. Bing and Dogpile also [...]

  • The Social Search Revolution: 8 Social SEO Strategies To Start Using Right Now

    Google’s searchbots have long relied on humans to endorse relevant and useful links. Recently, however, Google upped the human ante by introducing Google Social Search. Google recognizes that one personal endorsement from someone we know easily outranks endorsements from 10,000 strangers. The same applies for a trusted authority: a blogging link shared by Darren Rowse [...]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications Portal Features

Business Issues

Local, Maps Mobile

Searching

SEO SEM

Video, Music Image Search

Web Analytics

Related Topics: SearchCap

About The Author: is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

Connect with the author via:
Email

| Twitter
| Google+
| LinkedIn

SMX - Search Marketing Expo

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/9o-uGwIoHqo/searchcap-the-day-in-search-march-20-2012-116082

How A Google Change May Mistakenly Turn Search Traffic Into Referral Traffic

Leave a reply

google analytics iconGoogle’s about to make a change to how it reports referrer information for those using its Chrome browser. As a result, some analytics programs may begin listing search visitors as if they instead came directly from Google without doing a search, though major packages will probably adjust OK.

The change was posted on the Google Webmaster Central blog yesterday, and it took some follow up to really understand what’s happening. Come along, and I’ll explain more.

Google Blocking Referrers

Referrers are sort of a Caller ID for web browsers. They tell a web site where someone came from. For example, if you click on a link from one page to visit the next, the page you were on is passed along as referrer information that can be seen using web analytics tools. Sometimes this is also called “referer” information, due to a long-ago misspelling around the referrer standard. “Referral” is also sometimes used.

Last October, Google began blocking referrer information from being passed along by those searching on its search engine, if they were signed-in and using a secure connection.

Google said the change was made to better protect privacy. It turned out to be a precursor to preventing “eavesdropping” of especially private searches that might happen as part of Search Plus Your World.

However, despite saying the move was to protect privacy, Google went out of its way to continue passing along referrer data to paid advertisers. Other loopholes also remain. The move is incredibly hypocritical. See the articles at the end of this story to understand more about the blocking and the hypocrisy in greater depth

If Google is already withholding search term data for signed-in users, then what else could it really pull back? How about reporting even if a search happened.

Beginning in April, Google’s going to begin using the referrer meta tag to report what it calls a “simplified” referrer. The tag will let it override the real referrer that would go out, even what’s left of that referrer after search terms have been stripped.

How The Referrer Meta Tag Turns Searches Into Referrals

Consider a search for “hotels.” If you do that search and click on one of the top listings, say for Travelocity, the actual URL you’re going to looks like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=trct=jq=hotelssource=webcd=1
ved=0CJABEBYwAAurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.travelocity.com%2FHotels
ei=EftoT6eRLaKxiQK5uYGSBwusg=AFQjCNHw3v58SOrf2HWCsE6AraxFouCmJQ

The URL doesn’t lead directly to the site. Instead, it redirects through Google itself, in a way that Google can record what’s in the URL to better track the click.

I’ve bolded how Google embeds in the URL information that someone searched for the word “hotels” and clicked on the first listing in the results, which in turn took them to the page at Travelocity, also shown in bold.

If this search is done when someone is signed-in using a secure connection, Google drops the search term portion. It basically looks like this:

http://www.google.com/url?q=url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.travelocity.com%2FHotels

An analytics program can tell that a search happened by seeing the “q=” part in the URL, but the actual term itself has been stripped out by Google. So while Google Analytics can’t report what the search words were (and thus says “not provided”), it still can tell that a search happened.

The new change takes out everything but the start of the referrer. Do a search on Google.com using Chrome, and this is all that will be reported:

https://google.com

Because there’s no indicator that a search happened, an analytics program may interpret that people have come from a link on Google.com rather than doing a search there. This means that search traffic would mistakenly get recorded as what’s called “referral” traffic.

Search Traffic Vs. Referral Traffic

To understand better, here’s my traffic breakdown to my personal blog Daggle from yesterday. This is from Google Analytics:

You see that 76% of my traffic was from search, people who did some type of recognized search and visited my site. Google Analytics doesn’t know the actual search terms for nearly a third of these visits (yeah, wow, right?). See how “not provided” makes up 35% of all keywords in the lower chart? But Google Analytics still knows that they were searches, so they get counted into the overall search total.

After that, about 14% of traffic is from referrals, people who clicked on a link from one site that lead to my own. Another 10% of traffic is direct, people who either directly entered the URL of one of my pages into their web browser or who came to my site without any referrer information being reported (which isn’t necessarily direct traffic, but it gets counted that way).

With the change, Google Analytics or other analytics program would count some of my search visits as if they are referral visits, unless they adjusts for this. The slice of search traffic would start to drop, even though my search traffic could potentially be going up.

Google Analytics Will Adjust, Other Vendors Being Told

If you use Google Analytics, Google says there’s no reason to panic. Google Analytics is supposed to figure out how to count things correctly. The same may be true for other vendors, by the time this happens. Google told us:

We’re using the meta referrer standard which allows us to choose the origin and still send a referrer to http sites from https search results (without going through a redirect on an http host).

Google Analytics will also adjust for this change, and we’re in the process of reaching out to a number of other analytics vendors to notify them about this in advance.

Only Impacts Chrome Really A Time Saver?

The change will only happen for those using Google Chrome, as that’s the only browser that supports the meta referrer tag, Google told us. As for why bother doing this at all, the blog post says:

This results in a faster time to result and more streamlined experience for the user.

I’m a bit doubtful about the savings. It’s not like Google is stopping the actual click tracking that it does. Everything you click on still gets redirected, which causes a tiny delay. The meta referrer tag only means that those using the Chrome browser will pass along a shorter URL for where they came from.

Surely that’s not saving much time? I asked Google how much this really speeds things up:

We don’t have data to share right now. However, this does allow the user’s browser to avoid making an extra connection to http://www.google.com (which the browser may not have already established since the search was on https://www.google.com/).

I’m still confused about why the browser would make an extra connection back to Google after someone has left, because of anything to do with passing along referrer data. I’ll check on that.

Pleading Again For More Data In Google Webmaster Central

Overall, there’s probably no reason to panic, if you use a major analytics provider. But it’s something you should check on. It’s also an unpleasant reminder that Google keeps messing with the referrer data that it provides to publishers in a way that messes up their trending.

Google’s answer to all these changes is that people should make use of Google Webmaster Central to pull in missing search data. But that data only goes back 30 days. That does nothing to restore the trends that have been destroyed since withholding began.

I’ll repeat what I said earlier this year about all this:

I think Google should do more than 60 days. I think it should be providing continuous reporting and holding that data historically on behalf of sites, if it’s going to block referrers. Google is already destroying historical benchmarks that publishers have maintained. Google’s already allowed data to be lost for those publishers, because they didn’t begin to go in each day and download the latest information.

So far, all Google’s done is provide an Python script to make downloading easier. That’s not enough. Google should provide historical data, covering a big chunk of the terms that a site receives. It’s the right thing to do, and it should have been done already.

See the articles below for further background about the blocking:

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Analytics | Top News

About The Author: is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

Connect with the author via:
Email

| Twitter
| Google+
| LinkedIn

SMX - Search Marketing Expo

Article source: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/IzppNCvaekU/google-change-may-turn-search-traffic-into-referral-traffic-116085