Search Engine Marketing Blog

Searches of iPhone users are longer and more diverse than those of computer-based searches. According to Google's research search behavior of iPhone users, many of the searches are longer than 3 words and more diverse than other mobile devices. Many searches are not only longer than other phones but also than typical computer searches.

According to Google, typical mobile searches tend to average around 2.5 words and be centered around the Adult and Entertainment niches, but this trend has changed.

Google jokingly calls this phenomenon "bar-bet" searches: you are out with your friends debating some obscure piece of trivia and you pull out an iPhone to look up the answer.

The guys in Google have devised a metric for quantifying the variability of a user's search intentions across time. It looks like this:

"This variability metric, entro-percent, is a normalized entropy metric which compares the number of search tasks issued by a user to the number of categories those search tasks fall under. This user-variability for conventional mobile web search is much lower than for computer-based search, confirming the hypothesis that mobile web users query over a much less diverse set of topics. The surprising news is that iPhone users, on the other hand, had a higher variability than computer based users, indicating their information needs are more diverse! This shows that the challenges posed by a phone's form factor can be outweighed by its 'always on, always in your pocket' benefits", say the guys and madams at the Google Research Blog.

You can also read their Full Paper (PDF) of their research on this topic.

Click Forensics has launched a new version of its traffic quality management platform. Click Forensics is a Traffic Quality Management company which deals with scoring, auditing, and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community.

In the new version, you can see these improvements:

• Click Forensics Site Score - This feature ranks visitors based on their propensity to convert. You will see sources of traffic tagged with individual Click Forensics Site Scores. Ad networks that look at this score can more effectively filter and route traffic for highest monetization. They can also provide the best Return On Investment (ROI) for online advertisers.
• Adaptive Intelligence - Adapts varying traffic profiles among different ad networks, advertisers, and publishers. Provides the capability to adjust rules and thresholds to produce traffic quality scores that better reflect propensity to convert for each specific client.
• Machine Learning - This machine adapts and tunes itself in real-time to detect new sources of good and bad traffic as they emerge. Based on traffic quality thresholds set by clients, filtering decisions can be made instantly.
• Enhanced Anomaly Detection - This can distinguish new complex click types - machine or human - even from the same computer. Did you think about Javascript programs? They are included!

"Monitoring and processing billions of clicks across the industry's top ad networks, online publishers, search engines and advertiser web sites means we have one of the best vantage points for identifying what does and doesn't work in online advertising," said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. "Our new platform helps customers pinpoint and increase the flow of highly-convertible traffic in real-time, which ultimately improves the results of their online campaigns."

As you may have noticed, we have made some changes on this blog. First of all, you will see much less ads, mainly inside the text. We have received some suggestions from you to remove those ads since they affect the readability. And you know what? You were right! So now you can enjoy our posts with no disturbing ads in between the lines.

The second major change we have made to the blog is in the comments section. Before, you had to be signed up and logged in to comment on our posts. We have removed those limitations. Now the blog is open for comments from everyone... but machines. We have added a captcha to be sure you are a human. As you know, spam is a serious problem for blogs, so we hope you understand the need for this soft requirement. Now, when you comment you will see your comment posted immediately after you typed it in. No moderation, no waiting time.

We in FullTraffic see communication with our users a key for success, both for you and for us. A freer to comment blog will make this communication more fluent and fun for everyone!

Finally, we have added Twitter to the social media sites to where you can submit the posts of your interest. So if you find any of our posts could interest your followers, tweet it! And don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

We are sure that these improvements will affect positively the performance of this blog, and as a consequence, an improvement of the services we provide you. So now go and leave a comment!

Google Labs has launched a new handy feature. It is a search box that appears on the left-hand navigation of your Gmail.

This will let you search information without having to tab out and opening another search box.

If you want to know how this will help in your daily life, then read Adam de Boor from the Gmail blog:

"I used to have a problem. People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I'd have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I'd have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply. Sometimes I'd get distracted and forget to go back to Gmail, and I'd have to go through it all again when I remembered what I'd been doing."

When you add it (through the Gmail Labs settings), you will see something like this:

You can then choose to drop the result you want into chat or an email. As explain by Adam, "What's in the menu depends on what you're doing in Gmail:

• If you're reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
• If you're writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
• If you're chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
• You can also always compose a new message to send the search result".

So there you have it. Enjoy!

Google has launched a new gadget that could complement the traffic you get from FullTraffic. It is called "Get Answers" and it works as a social feature for Google Friend Connect.

With this new feature, users can ask questions to website's community, answer questions asked by other community members and vote answers. This provides community interaction and engagement to websites. Automatic answers by Google are seen as well.

So where's the traffic driving? Well, when you become a member to any website, other community members can see your profile and visit your website.

This member engagement has the extra benefit that site owners can get feedback for their content, so they can revise it according to the expectations of their community. Of course they have total control over the content of the feature, so for example they can delete questions and answers.

As a webmaster, you can add this gadget to your site in very few and easy steps. You need to have a Google account, upload two files to the server of your website, and then get the code to paste in to your website.

The new Google Video design brings some cool updates. Now you can see the search results on the left column while the related video on the right column. You can also see the video directly from there; however, you can go to the original site and see it from there. This last option does not take you to the main page where the video came from but directly to the video hosted there.

We have searched the word "SEO" and this is how the results are shown:

When we click on the firs result (Matt Cutts's "Some SEO Myths"), this is what we see:

However, some users are critic with this update. Alex Chitu, from GoogleSystem, said:

"The new interface has a lot of flaws: the video player moves as you scroll down, the list of related videos is not always visible, Google Video no longer displays ratings and there's a lot of unused space".

This update comes after Google removed the video upload option, thus leaving YouTube as its only service to upload videos. Google Video works only for video search.

Crisis claims for creativity, and creativity is especially helpful for small businesses. Google and Yahoo are preparing to launch free ads campaigns to this market. If they concrete it, this will probably give an interesting boost to sales. This is extremely important for economy these days.

Google has announced it will offer small businesses a free Google AdWords campaign to the value of $75. While the giant company labeled the campaign its own "small business stimulus", some say that it is actually in response to rumors that Yahoo! is set to launch a similar campaign, called the Yahoo Big Bang.

Google's campaign will launch over the next few weeks, and businesses will be able to apply before 30 June on Google's website.

Google general manager of Australia and New Zealand, Karim Temsamani, said to SmartCompany that Google is keen to help small businesses through the downturn.

"It's really important at a time when more and more Australians are looking for their information online, that businesses understand the power of search as a medium to provide them with very efficient, low cost ability to reach users."

He added that while Google is investing in new products such as the Android operating system, there is also a wide-spread company move towards primary revenue-generating products such as AdWords.

"Clearly search is a very important part of Google's products, and we're putting resources into that and making sure people are using Google products in search. Search is a very key product for us, and we will continue to invest in it."

According to Temsamani, the campaign will allow businesses to track which key-words are generating the most leads. With this information on hand, they will be able to develop that work while discarding others.

"It requires very little upfront cost and provides companies an ability to manage them on a continuous basis," he says.

However, SEO expert Chris Thomas says that while AdWords is generally effective, a Google campaign does not deliver guaranteed success: "Two things can happen here. One is that businesses can jump on AdWords and set it up really badly, and screw up their $75. The second is that they can throw the ad up and business goes really well".

So the success of the campaign depends on how well businesses manage their AdWords, and if they continue to spend more money on keywords that deliver return-on-investment.

"I've got a client in the not-for-profit space, and since we started their AdWords campaign he's seen a ROI increase of over 4000%. That's their most stunning success rate”. "The point with AdWords is not how much you spend, but how much you make on the return. The more you spend on good keywords the more you will make. So don't set a limit; you figure out how much business it brings in. For Google this is a good move".

Google has updated their keyword suggestion tool. Now it shows you local search volume in addition to global search volume. New design contains two columns, one for local and one for global.

The local column shows search volume data "specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu". Instead, the global column "includes traffic in all countries and languages and is specific to your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu".

Usually the local column has more search volume than the global, an advantage you could use to promote your local enterprise. For example, you can build local campaigns and focus your keyword research to be specific to your country. Meanwhile, "local" means country and not region, but we should give the feature some weeks to develop - it will probably give us surprises!

Sitelinks that appear under the main result on Google often look like this:

These multiple lines ordered in a sort of board are disappearing, since Google made them showing as one single line. This is because Google is allowing non-first results to have sitelinks, and that spreads the ads results:

This is much less confusing and more comfortable to the users.

If you want to prevent a link from showing up in the sitelinks for any of your results, you can do so (for 90 day intervals) at Google Webmaster Tools.

Viral video has demonstrated to be an excellent marketing tool. Some brands have made a very interesting use of it, from marketing a product to brand positioning. But, what happens if a viral video turns to negative? Here is a top five of damaging brand videos. All of them are, of course, unintentional, however they had a great impact on the brands.

1. Domino's Pizza (April 2009): These Domino's bored employees do whatever we costumers could suspect about big food chains. Michael Setzer's cheese-up-nose has generated him and his friend Kristy Hammonds to be both arrested and charged with food tampering, a felony in North Carolina. But Domino's may have charged with a heavy burden on its reputation:

2. Cathay Pacific (February 2009): A woman who missed the boarding call for her flight to San Francisco at Hong Kong International Airport became hysterical, tried to rush the gate to the plane (that hadn't yet departure), and collapsed to the floor when the airline employees didn't allow her to board the aircraft. An employee of Cathay Pacific Airways recorded the event on a cellphone and shared it. The video has accumulated over 5.5 million views. The airline apologized to the woman and it said the employee has been disciplined. They also offered her an upgrade to business class for the next flight. Will it compensate the brand reputation's damage?

3. New York City Police Department (May 2008): This is already a classic. A New York City cop, 22-year-old Patrick Pogan, shoved bicyclist Christopher Long off the road during a Critical Mass demonstration ride. He later falsely charged Long with attempted assault, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, which were later dropped by Manhattan's attorney. Pogan had also argued that Long "deliberately steered his bicycle into the officer, causing both of them to fall to the ground". But that lie was uncovered by a tourist's video recording. Pogan resigned in Februrary 2009.

4. Kentucky Fried Chicken/Taco Bell (February 2007): A Manhattan KFC/Taco Bell franchise was known by locals to be overrun by rats during off hours. You can imagine the impact of the local Fox News affiliate's two-minute report. But can you imagine that impact when it reached YouTube? Up to now, the video reached 1,081,202 views. The images you are to see are quite disgusting, so you are warned.

5. Kramer (November 2006): Was it necessary, Kramer? Comedian Michael Richards, best known as Kramer from Jerry Seinfeld's TV show, lost his cool with a heckler during a live stand-up performance. Many members of the audience walked out after Richards' bizarrely racist tirade. The video was seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers, and it was replayed to millions more on TV, doing the hardest damage to the comedian's career. Richards tried to explain himself to Dave Letterman, but in the end he acknowledged that he had a lot of "personal work" to do.