from SearchEngineLand.com

Google Instant rolled out September 8th to much fanfare and ballyhoo. The search marketing industry has been abuzz ever since with speculation about the impacts on both paid and natural search.

Our firm has taken a pretty close look at the initial impact on paid search performance and we want to share our findings with you folks.

Methodology

We studied Google AdWords data from the period prior to the launch of Instant and compared it to the first week-plus following the launch for a wide range of clients. Our client base is heavily retail, so those in other sectors may have different findings.

We looked at the impacts both in aggregate and by advertiser to see if averages hid meaningful shifts. We looked exclusively at data from competitive, non-brand search terms.

We tried to answer the following questions:

• What impact has Google Instant had on impressions and clicks on paid search ads overall?
• Does Instant create a greater emphasis on ads served at the top of the page and diminish the traffic on ads served closer to the bottom of the page? Some speculated that Instant would bias users against scrolling and effectively increase the incentive for higher positioning.
• Does Instant help or hurt the long tail of paid search? Some have wondered if watching the results change as you type would encourage users to keep typing as results get more and more targeted, or on the contrary encourage more to stop early and click on the first mildly relevant link.
• Does Instant help or hurt conversion rates? The stated goal of the product is to get people where they want to go faster. Does it also help them find more relevant ads?
• Does Instant impact some types of keywords more than others?

Findings

Question #1: Overall traffic. Initially following the Google Instant launch we did see a small spike in Google impressions and clicks, both from week to week and relative to our traffic levels on Bing and Yahoo. It should be noted that part of the week to week increase benefited from favorable comps to a slow Labor Day weekend, while, even at it’s peak following the launch, Google’s traffic share just slightly cracked two percentage points above its 30 day average.

We’re not sure whether the media coverage around the Instant launch delivered a genuine lift in impressions and even click traffic or whether this blip is more related to roll-out glitches. Clearly whether Instant will garner Google even greater market share, or will ultimately be little more than an update to the suggest function remains to be seen.

Question #2: Top vs. bottom.

We haven’t seen a large shift in traffic composition between ads at the top of the page and those at the bottom for most advertisers.

We looked at a handful of our larger accounts and measured the baseline fraction of traffic that comes in from ads in the top 3 positions to see if that fraction has materially increased.

As the chart shows, the median shifts aren’t zero, but they aren’t huge either. The median advertiser saw a slight dip in the number of ads in the top 3 positions—likely unrelated to Google Instant—but a slight increase in the fraction of click traffic those high positioned ads represent. Very interestingly, the fraction of orders increased slightly more than the fraction of clicks, possibly indicating improved conversion; it is not crazy to suggest that the people who stop typing early to select an ad do so precisely because they’ve read the ad more carefully than the average searcher has done historically.

On the flip side, have we seen a relative decrease in the importance of ads in position 8 through 12? It bears mentioning that since these already account for a fairly small portion of the traffic for most advertisers, the percentage changes are easier to influence materially. For example, if these low positioned ads usually account for 5% of traffic and that drops to 4%, that shows up as a 20% decline in the table below.

Understanding the spikiness of this data set (particularly the order counts), this data isn’t alarming either.

Question #3: Head vs. tail. This is a bit more interesting. Here we picked an arbitrary number of clicks as defining a “head” term, and looked to see whether these head terms had become more or less important as a percentage of the whole.

The first observation is that the number of keywords meeting the definition of a head term increased for most advertisers. That could simply be a seasonal increase in traffic, but in two-thirds of the cases studied the increase in head ads was greater than could be explained by sheer traffic volume.

These ads did drive a larger fraction of the total clicks and sales for most advertisers in the week after Google Instant launched, but given the increase in the number of ads, this by itself doesn’t mean the tail has been significantly diminished.

Question #4: Conversion rates. Early, early indications are that conversion rates for head and tail may have improved as a result. Not ready to proclaim victory on this front just yet, and we’re not talking about a large change, but we’re seeing some indications that this could create a bit of a virtuous cycle.

Question #5: Keyword-level effects. While there may not be a sea-change in overall performance, there are some interesting keyword-level effects that can be tremendously important for some advertisers.

For example, we’ve noticed a huge shift with respect to treatment of singulars and plurals, with the more popular of the two seeming to become the default. For advertisers with tremendous volumes of business tied to a handful of terms, this can be a very big deal.

For several advertisers, ads running on competitor’s trademarks and domain names seem to have dropped off the map. This may be an Instant effect, or possibly a change to Quality Score algorithms. We haven’t studied this comprehensively enough to guess whether this is universal.

We’ve also noticed some odd effects on keywords that have other completely unrelated meanings. As an example: if you type in “toothpaste” all the results are geared towards “toothpaste for dinner” with no ads showing. This is true even after you’ve typed the whole word with a space after it. When you hit “enter” the ads for toothpaste appear.

The reverse of this is what Glenn Edelman of Wine Enthusiast refers to as “short typing.” You’re looking for “Wine Enthusiast” and you get to “Wine En” and see the results you want. You reflexively hit enter and Google now brings back results for “wine en” which turn out to be different. We’re not sure this is a large enough effect to worry about, but if it is, please refer to it as “short typing” and credit Glenn!

We strongly encourage everyone to do a keyword level report from the period before Google Instant launched and compare it to a similar report for the period after. Use a vlookup to match the traffic volume on the keyword after, to the traffic volume on the top keywords before and vice-versa. The results are fascinating!

Conclusions

At this point, we don’t see cause for massive alarm for most advertisers in paid search. I’d love to see more data from the SEO community to see if the impact is more pronounced there.

As always, your mileage may vary, so dig under the hood and see what you see!

Many thanks to Mark Ballard, RKG’s Senior Research Analyst who helped me research and write this post.

A recent patent application from Yahoo explores ways that a search engine might consider the amount of time it takes different types of pages to render and other issues involving how quickly pages respond to a visits in ranking, classifying and crawling those pages.

Latency is a big fancy word that simply means the amount of time between when something was started and when you can see its effects. It’s a word that shows up very frequently in the Yahoo patent filing. It’s a word worth learning a little more about, especially when it comes to web sites, how people use them, and how a search engine might track that use.

A search engine may look at a wide range of information to make decisions about whether or not it will visit and index pages on the Web, how it might rank those pages in search results, and how it may classify those pages.

It’s likely that a search engine will consider at a wide range of informational signals. Those can include the content that appears on web pages, links and the text within links that point to and from pages, information about how people use specific web pages, and other information about pages and the sites that they appear upon.

A search engine might also look at how quickly pages load and render in a browser, how much people might tolerate when pages load slowly, and how good an experience web sites might deliver to their visitors.

When a search engine ranks pages in search results, it will explore signals that indicate how relevant those pages are to queries that might be used to find them, such as the use of words upon those pages that appear in those queries. A search engine may also look at signals that indicate the quality of the web pages that it might list within those search results.

A measure like PageRank is supposed to be an indication of quality rather than relevance, because it looks at the number and “importance” of links pointing to a page to try to determine how important a page might be. There are other quality signals that a search engine may use. Some examples might include things such as the amount of text upon a page, how readable that text is, if the page contains broken links, and possibly hundreds of other factors.

A search engine wants to return pages in search results that are both relevant and high quality.

Another set of signals or factors that a search engine may use involves how people interact with pages that they find on the web. These can include which pages people select in search results when they see them in search results for a specific query, how much time people might spend on a page they’ve selected before they return to the search engine, how far down a page they might scroll, whether they bookmark or save a page, and others.

User Experience Characteristics

The patent filing considers much more than just how quickly pages load into a browser, and it may influence more than just the rankings of pages.

It tells us about an information integration system that can be used with search engines, job portals, shopping search sites, travel search sites, RSS applications, and other types of pages, and how it might look at those in at least three different ways:

Access – How quickly it takes to access a page or other kind of document when sending a request to retrieve a page or document. Measuring access might mean looking at performance characteristics associated with a page such as server performance, and file performance. It might consider how quickly a page might load for visitors at different connection speeds, such as broadband and dialup. A search engine crawling program might simulate connections at different speeds to measure how quickly a page loads for visitors coming to a page through dialup or broadband connections.

Rendering – How quickly a page starts showing up within a browser (and it might emulate a number of different types of browsers), how a page loads in a browser, and how long it might take for the full page, or at least the part of the page above the fold to load in a browser. It contemplates that on some sites, some large pages might be set up so that even though they contain a lot of content, the content at the top of the page renders quickly so that a visitor doesn’t have to wait very long to start reading and viewing the content on the page.

It may also consider such things as “differences in complexity, size, number of files, user interface mechanisms, embedded sections (e.g., advertisements, audio content, video content, security features, etc), and/or the like,” to understand how a page renders, and how good of a user experience that might be.

User Experience – How do people actually use web sites, and how do they react to different access and rendering issues on different sites?

Different people might have different levels of patience in waiting for a site to load and render in a browser, and they might be willing to wait longer for some types of sites to load and render than others. For example, someone might be willing to wait longer for a page to show up that is associated with their bank account, than a for a “more generic” type of page.

Examples of other “user related performance characteristics” could include how visitors to pages react to things such as:

• Pages that fail to download or render within an acceptable period of time,
• Pages that automatically play video or audio content,
• Pages that include pop-up or pop-under advertisements,
• Pages that in some other way add further delays due to additional file downloading, additional processing, etc. These might include things such as Javascript, Flash, Embedded or externally links objects, and Plugins

How Measuring Latency and User Experience Might be Used

The inventors behind the patent application point to at least three uses that a search engine may have for measuring the performance of a web site based upon access, rendering, and user experience. They are ranking, classification, and crawling.

Ranking – The information collected about user experience characteristics could be used to possibly filter, promote, or demote web documents to improved desired user experiences.

Classification – The user experience information might be used to classify pages in some way. The layout of a page might indicate that a site might contain certain types of content related to certain types of sites. The patent application tells us:

For example, finance-related websites often display streaming data of the stock market, news websites also often stream content, and certain types of web pages might use frames or tables which may be useful in classifying the web document.

Crawling – When a search engine has a list of URLs to visit that it hasn’t seen before, or that it might revisit to check for new content, it might consider a number of different things in determining which to look at first. The user experience information might help making some decisions to look at certain content on pages that a search engine might not have considered before.

A search engine may simulate the amount of time it takes to connect to a page, the way and amount of time a page renders in a browser, and how people react to those times to influence how a page is ranked, classified, and how much of the page is crawled and indexed – including embedded material on a page such as javascript or flash content.

This was an interesting article posts on Forbes.com about the true measure of social networking from a business perspective.

Are social networking “tools” good for business or just a giant time suck?
Ian Boyd, creative director of Cosmic Planet, a digital creative studio in San Francisco’s Presidio, said his office calls it “Social Notworking,” because while he believes he needs to use Twitter and Facebook to stay in the mix, he’s never gotten a single customer out of it. Just as important, Boyd says, while he’s spending all that time networking, he’s “not working.” Where Web 2.0 does come in handy, Boyd concedes, is in helping existing clients stay up on his company’s activities.

Boyd’s comments came at one of a series of Money Matters Town Halls put on by Intuit , with sessions for consumers and small businesses. I attended the afternoon session, moderated by small-business columnist Gene Marks and Intuit CEO Brad Smith, and attended by 14 San Francisco Bay Area business owners, with between zero and 20 employees each. Their technology skills and usage varied widely, but they shared several key viewpoints.

For one thing, they all said that their primary source of new business was word of mouth and personal referrals. And while Smith described social networking as “word of mouth with a megaphone,” the attendees all made clear distinctions between real-world referrals and ones made through online social networks.

It wasn’t that they weren’t sophisticated about online options. Almost all of the attendees’ companies have Web sites, and an impressive two-thirds said they’d updated those sites in the last week.

Caryl Lyons, the manager of events management company Roar Events, for example, uses Twitter to post comments about hotels she visits, but keeps Facebook for personal use. Her tweets automatically update her Facebook status, but Facebook updates don’t show up on Twitter. She’s also on LinkedIn, though that takes up less of her attention.

Does all her social networking actually make a difference? “I think it does,” she said. “The people that follow me have an interest in hotels and events, and they get good information.”

Caanan Meagher, who owns pedicab company KwickCart in Silicon Valley, says his drivers use Facebook to let potential customers know they’ll be at local events, and even make prebookings using the service.

Even longtime painting contractor Bob Watten (Watten Painting), who doesn’t think he’ll find clients online, keeps a presence on LinkedIn.

That’s the key, said Marks: “Go where your customers are.”

Or where your prospective workers are. Cheryl Fields Tyler, who runs Blue Beyond Consulting, an eight-person management consulting firm, uses LinkedIn to source associates, employees or contractors to match clients’ particular needs. But others prefer to use more personal methods to fill out their small, close-knit staffs.

Marks added that technology also makes it possible to hire contractors, and even full-time employees, who work in remote locations. That can often save big money compared with local workers, and it can put you in position to hire the person you really want rather than the person who happens to be close by.

E-mail marketing was perhaps the most popular online marketing method. Patty Styka, whose Elegant Lagoon Cruises runs an electric-boat charter service in Foster City, Calif., said she regularly posts announcements on Yelp and Smalltown, while Lulu Lopez, relies on e-mail marketing to promote her Italian restaurant (Campanella, in Newark, Calif.), sending missives promoting wine pairings, birthday and holiday celebrations, and even just regular old follow-ups and thank-yous. Cosmic Planet’s Boyd has done a number of HTML e-mail campaigns for his clients and is now looking into doing e-mail marketing for his own business. But as Marks pointed out, doing your own e-mail marketing takes a lot of time, from writing the e-mails to working with the address database.

But search advertising doesn’t seem to be popular at all. Restaurant owner Lopez used Google AdWords but stopped when she didn’t see results. “I’m spending money and not getting anything back.” Yet the business owners weren’t holding on to print media either: Only one or two were advertising in the Yellow Pages.

All of the business owners complained that the economic situation has made it more difficult to get paid on time, if at all. Smith suggested that one solution is to accept credit/debit cards, even for business-to-business transactions–the 3% to 4% fees are a small price to pay to get your money right away. But Marks cautioned businesses to use a separate bank account for the cards, lest the banks swipe cash to cover a disputed payment.

Finally, on a positive note, 80% of the attendees said they plan to boost marketing spending this year. Sure, it’s a small, unscientific sample, but it seems like a recession-busting sign to me. Even more amazing, Watten said he expects to get additional painting work based on federal stimulus money!

from B toB

Mountain View, Calif.—Search company Google has lifted its ban on the use of trademarked brand terms in advertising text on its search-results page. Previously, the company had forbidden trademarked term usage unless permitted by the trademark holder itself.

The change means that resellers will be permitted by Google to include in their AdWords text the names of the trademarked products they sell. For example, Staples now would be permitted to place ads that contain such terms as “Apple” or “HP,” or Sports Authority could use the term “Nike.”

To date, both Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search have been more liberal in allowing the use of trademarked terms in search ad copy, which can tend to produce less generic, more focused search results. Google’s new policy will become effective June 15.