Archive - November, 2009

Search Marketing can Build Brand

November 22, 2009 in Branding, Search Marketing with 0 Comments

On Friday E-Consultancy released a summary of search marketing stats that included some of the results published by Google earlier in the month regarding search and its ability to effectively build brands.

The findings are quite interesting:

  • A Search impression alone creates 23% more brand preference for Heineken than the whole Heineken campaign without search. A search click creates 69% more brand preference.
  • The fact that search was able to affect a brand metric like brand preference shows the ability for search to move consumers further into the purchase funnel, beyond just awareness

Google have put up a video on Youtube that goes through a few of the details.

This isn’t new, back in 2007 Comscore wrote about how search can be more than just a direct response medium, after looking at the consumer packaged goods industry, finding not only that 47% of food product sites were found through search (of course this will include users who use Google like an address bar or for primary navigation), but that those who searched and used a site actually spent more on that category.

I think 2010 will be key to getting this right, harmonising direct response and brand, as well as traditional and online channels will be key, the marketers who get this right could take a competitive advantage.


Domino’s Pizza Coupon Strategy

November 21, 2009 in User Journey with 0 Comments

In a world of last click wins the coupon sites have been having a field day recently. As us shoppers land on the checkout page and are confronted by that oh so tempting ‘do you have a discount code’ box we all ‘Ctrl t’ to open a new tab, hit Google and enter the search phrase that has ‘brand term’ followed by ‘coupon’ in it.

As you can see below the search volume for Domino’s Pizza Coupons has grown significantly.

dominos pizza codes

dominos pizza codes

I would argue that when I’m ordering a pizza and have got all the way to the checkout page I’m pretty much going to buy that pizza, but the coupon affiliate will get their commission if I hop out and grab a coupon code.

Domino’s are the first e-retailer I’ve seen who have taken some action to try and stop this.

They now have a box next to the ‘enter a coupon code’ that pretty much says, don’t waste your time searching for a code to get a bit of discount, just click here and choose something free, such as Garlic Bread.

This means you don’t need to search for a coupon, just get some free stuff.

I think it’s a pretty good idea and it would be interesting to see the long term effect of such a strategy.

Ad Sitelinks the new Google Ad Extension

November 8, 2009 in Google AdWords with 0 Comments

Yet again Google add a new extension to their paid search offering – Ad Sitelinks. Sitelinks for natural search results have been around for sometime, they usually appear for brand terms or results that are absolutely the ‘best answer’, they appear as up to 8 links under the result, like this

Google Sitelinks for Natural Search

Google Sitelinks for Natural Search

Not so long ago Google widened the scheme to include single line Sitelinks that also appeared for results on generic keywords and on results that are not just position 1, such as this:

Single Line Sitelinks

Single Line Sitelinks

This site appears 7th for the keyword but has single line Sitelinks. Generally Sitelinks are about stability of the position and age of the domain.

Google Ad Sitelinks

In the last week Google has launched Sitelinks for Ads, so paid adverts on Google can now show Sitelinks. They look like this:

Ad Sitelinks Google

Ad Sitelinks Google

How do you get Ad Sitelinks?

How are they generated? Firstly you need to modify your AdWords campaign and here is Google’s instructions:

  1. Log into your AdWords account
  2. Click on the Campaign Settings tab and go to the “Show additional links to my site” section under “Ad extensions”
  3. List the names and URLs of up to 10 internal links (prioritizing the most important links first)
  4. Click “Save” when you’ve finished adding your links
  5. If a user search triggers your ad to run with Ad Sitelinks, our system may include up to four of your additional links on your ad, along with the main landing page link

What Triggers Ad Sitelinks?

Well, similar to natural search Sitelinks and Google has this to say on how they are triggered:

  • Your ad should have the first position above the search results
  • Your ad should have a very high quality score
  • Your Ad Sitelinks URLs must direct users to pages that are part of your main website, and allow users to navigate freely

Actually I don’t think anything other than a brand term would trigger them.

Key Point for Integrated Search Strategies

What’s important is that you need to be position 1, for those sites that have reduced brand position in AdWords because natural search picks up the slack may have to revisit that strategy. Previously advertisers have carried out extensive positional tests where competitors bid on their brand term to find the optimal position for their advert, for some this has been as low as 4 or 5, this may need to change.

What’s the Cost?

All links within the advert are charged at the same rate, so if you are paying £0.10 per click and Ad Sitelinks appear you will pay £0.10 no matter which of your links is clicked.

Youtube Removes Nofollow

November 8, 2009 in Blog, SEO with 3 Comments

Back in March I added a video on my test video blog regarding the overuse of the ‘nofollow’ tag by social media sites. Just to recap, the ‘nofollow’ tag is a way to link to another site without passing Pagerank. If the ‘nofollow’ tag is used on a link then Google doesn’t use that link in it’s link graph.

There are basically two uses of the ‘nofollow’ tag, firstly to stop sending Pagerank to pages you don’t want Google to value, such as login pages and privacy (although this has now slightly changed, see below) and secondly to stop Pagerank being passed to sites you don’t vouch for. If you want a better understanding check out this post on Search Engine Journal.

The first point (using nofollow on internal pages) was somewhat overused as SEO practitioners used this to ‘sculpt’ Pagerank (PR) within their site. If they had a page with PR5 and it has 10 links on the page they could use ‘nofollow’ on 9 of them and squeeze as much PR to the remaining link.

However, Google decided to stop this practice and now the PR is still divided by the number of links on the page, even if some are nofollow’d, a better explanation of this can be found here by Matt Cutts (Google).

Back in March my argument was that Social Media sites should not use the ‘nofollow’ tag on links to your blog from your profile page, it’s your profile page and you can vouch for the blog. Some sites weren’t using ‘nofollow’, best known would be LinkedIn, but some did, including Twitter and Youtube.

This meant that my Youtube profile had a link to my video blog that was nofollow’d. This for me isn’t a fair use of the tag, thousands of people link to their social media profiles, passing pagerank to those sites and get nothing back in return, my Twitter page is PR5.

Now Youtube have removed the nofollow tag, links to your website from your profile page now pass Pagerank. This brings a whole new perspective to how you utilise your Youtube channel. For instance I’m subscribed to my friends channel at Youtube, his profile page is PR3, because I’m subscribed my profile is linked from his, in turn my profile is linked to my video blog. Pagerank starts to get passed on because the links mentioned are all followed.

Youtube Removes Nofollow

Youtube Removes Nofollow

This means that Youtube has stopped being a passive part of link building/SEO and moved into a direct contributor to your link profile. The down side could be if this gets abused.

For me it’s really pleasing to see a Google web property leading the way, my question is of course when will Twitter follow?