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We are increasingly moving from a search driven world to a social driven world. If your online marketing spend includes the vast proportion being spent on SEO and SEM, it is time for a rethink. Google’s development of Google Plus in an effort to ‘get social’ (against the behemoth in the social world that is Facebook) is based on a simple fact: that Facebook and social is beginning to dominate traffic on the Internet. And traffic = money. Not just for the big players such as Facebook and Google, but to those these giants serve. That’s you, and your business.
There is no getting round it. We have moved into a new era on the Internet and there are now companies (and not just those who at first glance would seem most suited to the social world) where anywhere from 30% upwards of traffic comes directly from Facebook activity, and not from the search engines. Some companies, according to research published in 2011, are seeing nearly all of their traffic coming from social sites such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc rather than the carefully crafted SERPs.
Whilst it is unlikely that the world is suddenly going to cease using the search engines, and hence the need for SEO will continue, the reality is that social media marketing is becoming THE traffic driver and cannot be ignored.
“We don’t do Twitter or Facebook because we have banned all access to social sites within our business” sounded fairly ludicrous 4 or 5 years ago. But now it sounds more like a death knell for any company taking such a stance.
Ignoring the fact that Facebook is introducing new forms of advertising and using social signals amongst friends and networks to bring advertisers closer to potential customers would be plain daft. Google would seem to be deeply concerned about the Facebook threat to the display advertising market Google has held almost absolute power over this last few years. After all, that’s part of Google’s core business, and any threat to that level of revenue has to be taken seriously.
We are seeing the big advertisers exchanging www.ourdomain.com on TV and print ads, packaging, websites etc with Follow Us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Short status updates are so much easier to manage than redesigns and website updates. There is a level of immediacy about social media which is missing from websites; a layer of personalisation and response that is difficult to ’see’ on your bog standard, old school website. Whilst adding +1, Tweet, Like and other social sharing buttons to content on a website can help to illustrate the popularity, authority and quality of content, it somehow lacks the impact of a status update with 100+ comments, or a tweet that has been ReTweeted multiple times. A website also lacks the reach of social updates and it is easy to see how a simple tweet or status update can go viral, (mainly because of the lack of overlap between every individual’s personal network), at a cost – HR and cash – that is verging on impossible with more ‘traditional’ internet marketing methods.
Google’s Search Plus Your World is a clear indication that social signals are receiving more importance in the algorithms. And hence businesses need to pay more attention to the social space.
Are you still focussed on SEO and SEM? Or has your business decided to put more budget into social? What are your social media marketing plans for 2012?
Adam Symes, senior account director at ClickThrough Marketing, joined senior PPC account executives Meriem Nacer and Samantha Thomas at Google@Manchester last month, as reported in our previous blog post.
But what if you wanted to learn those six things in just 30 seconds? Well, now you can with this handy Infographic…
Google Farmer Update
One of our favourite things about working in online marketing is that there’s always something new to think about. Embracing new technology, expanding our knowledge, keeping up with the ‘new’ and learning from the ‘old’ – these are all essential elements to an effective digital marketing strategy.
That’s why we jumped at the chance to attend last month’s Google@Manchester event – which was led by Google’s director of agency sales, Dominic Allon.
We sent Adam Symes, senior account director at ClickThrough Marketing, along with senior PPC account executives Meriem Nacer and Samantha Thomas, to check out the event and catch up on the latest industry news – direct from Google itself.
They reported back with some intriguing details, and the information that they gleaned from the event confirmed that our innovations in search marketing are very much in tune with Google’s own reports.
That isn’t to say that we didn’t learn anything new, though. So to start 2012 with some fresh industry facts, here are six things we learned from our visit to Google@Manchester – firstly in detail, and then summarised in a ClickThrough Google@ Manchester Infographic:
1. 52% of conversion journeys are multi-click
Shane Cassells, online conversion specialist at Google UK & Ireland, gave a presentation entitled ‘Full Value of Search’, during which he provided some inside information that will be useful for any online retailer. Cassells recommended that the timeout for shopping baskets on eCommerce sites should be extended, and that we should all consider offline sales in our conversion strategies, as it has been shown that 40% of customers will buy offline after researching a product on the internet.
The big statistic to bear in mind, however, is that more than half of conversion journeys involve multiple clicks – whereas nine out of ten PPC conversions are still credited to the final click. As a conversion-focused online marketing agency, this kind of statistic is a nice reminder that we’re doing things properly – understanding that conversion paths are as unique and complex as the people buying your products.
2. Google+ is the fastest growing social media platform in history
Google’s foray into social media has proven to be a powerful marketing tool, with 94% of the top 100 brands already on board. We’ve been keenly watching the progress of Google+ and it will feature significantly in our social media marketing strategy for 2012, as we create and promote Google+ brand pages for our clients.
What Google@Manchester revealed is just how breathtakingly quick the rise of Google+ has been. Despite only being launched in June of last year, Google+ now has more than 40 million members – making its initial growth faster than Facebook, Myspace or Twitter.
To further cement its position as an innovative social networking tool, the portion of the show dedicated to Google+ was delivered as a video conference via the Google+ Hangout feature.
3. Customers are nine times more likely to click on mobile banners
Dr Patrick Dixon, futurist and chairman of Global Change Ltd, delivered a stirring speech called ‘Bringing It All Together: A Look Into the Future’. His scientific approach to marketing had the crowd transfixed – our own Adam Symes described Dixon as “one of the best speakers [he had] ever heard.”
His talk focused on the future of marketing, the emotional effects that marketing has on us and how we can build emotional relationships with our end users – pointing out that 80% of potential customers will lose interest if a process takes longer than 20 seconds. He made enough points to warrant multiple blog posts on this theme alone – but for the sake of brevity, we’ll focus on the intriguing details he offered on mobile marketing.
Dixon pointed out that whilst standard web-based banners typically have a 0.5% clickthrough rate (CTR), mobile banners boast a CTR that is nine times higher. He also mentioned the fact that mobile users are twice more likely to click on a banner after 8pm than earlier in the day. With only 17% of UK businesses offering mobile-optimised websites, but almost half of online consumers using their smartphones or tablets when researching or buying a product, it’s clear that businesses are risking missed opportunities if they ignore the powerful and growing mobile user base.
4. 60% of organic clicks are from top-three search positions
Dr Dixon also shared this search engine results surprise. We’ve always focused on getting top-tier results for our clients in the results pages of Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other leading search providers – what Dixon’s statistic shows is how incredibly important it is to optimise every facet of your business’s webpage. With an increasingly clued-up online user base, appearing in the first page of a Google search just isn’t enough anymore.
5. 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
Another highlight of the event was the ‘Connected TV’ panel, featuring experts from Google, the BBC and IAB (the Internet Advertising Bureau). Here we learned that video-sharing site YouTube is continuing to grow at a phenomenal rate, and how technology manufacturers, agencies and companies can come together to combine the best elements of internet video and traditional television – with the interactivity and customer targeting of the internet, and the quality and reach that television can still offer.
Perhaps the overarching theme that we can glean from this discussion is that YouTube should not be ignored as an online marketing tool. By their nature, Google+ and Facebook offer a quicker, easier and more cost-effective way of communicating directly with customers. However, when a video booms on YouTube, it really booms – few social websites have the potential for viral marketing that YouTube provides. Rest assured, we have some tricks up our sleeve that utilise the video sharing site that started it all.
6. Digital sales grew by 16% in the third quarter of 2011
‘It’s All About You’ was Mark Howe’s contribution to proceedings. The country sales director for Google UK opened the show by discussing the tremendous growth that was been observed in eCommerce in the third quarter of 2011.
This is good news for any business that uses the internet to promote its products, and further proof that consumers are increasingly turning to online purchasing despite the continuingly difficult economic circumstances. With the rise of price comparison websites, and review portals such as Trustpilot – which provide customers with the opportunity to rate online shops according to their experiences – it is more important than ever to ensure that your online business practice and promotional strategy are up-to-date. Dr Patrick Dixon predicted that price comparison websites will destroy businesses within five years if their prices aren’t competitive enough.
Did you attend the Google@Manchester event? If so, what were your highlights?
Apple’s iPhone 4S launched last week and whilst it may seem little different on the outside, there is one feature of definite interest to search marketers. It is called SIRI and it is voice recognition software that may finally prove VR has come of age.
This is not just your “Phone Home” type voice command system, but seems to rely quite heavily on the development of AI (Artificial Intelligence) since Apple bought SRI. The software is sufficiently advanced to be able to complete several different processes in order to carry out a task, and Apple dedicated enough of the 4S launch to show that SIRI is important to Apple in future.
Let’s move beyond the basics of reminding you to order flowers for your wife and adding your anniversary date to your calendar though, and look at what this might mean for voice search.
For many people, computers are still an issue. The rise in smartphone usage and iPad/tablet sales even amongst the non-techies has highlighted that the days of the desktop, keyboard and mouse are probably numbered. Mainly because they are just too complicated for your average person. Ditto search engines.
Each month, the rankings regularly report top level domains in the most searched upon terms, implying that far too many people still cannot use search properly nor effectively. Whilst typing “google.com” into Bing may not seem a major issue, the implication is that even the most simplified browser with a location bar will not prevent enough people in the world searching for a domain they already know.
Imagine if you cut out all the faff of typing, Boolean operators, narrowing down a search by typing endless terms in to Google etc, and instead….
Well, instead you speak your search query into your phone. With AI, there is no reason why, over time, your phone cannot learn to recognise the type of queries which you most frequently make and tie these into the likely search result(s) you are looking for. This type of cognitive and responsive technology has been the end goal of AI for many years.
Could search queries using voice on a mobile phone take traffic away from a text based search service such as Google? One can only assume so, although the tie-ins with Wolfram Alpha, Yelp and Wikipedia point to a slightly different search audience (research more than consumer) at present.
If you have not yet designed a mobile friendly website for your business yet, nor made sure you feature on local search for mobiles, and also aren’t au fait with where mobile devices are heading, this would seem to be the time to take on board that mobile quite simply is not going away.
This means taking a new look at how you provide the information that you want to be easily found by your potential customers. If you sell raincoats and umbrellas and there is a convention in town, with a huge number of people asking SIRI about the local weather for tomorrow, wouldn’t you like to show up as an advert for the shop in the road behind the conference centre when they ask the weather forecast for tomorrow? Or is it just easier to go and hawk them on the street when the rain clouds open in the morning?!
There may be few occasions when Wolfram Alpha is yet the best search engine (it is a knowledge and computational engine after all) for the mass of consumers online, but if I could ask my phone exactly how many centimetres it is between here and my A Level Maths student’s school, I’d be delighted when it returned 1.643 x 10^7!
The more likely scenario though is that as people use more and more apps to get the answers they seek eg comparison apps to find the best price for an item whilst shopping in town, the use of the search engines for such research will inevitably dwindle. And it may be here that SIRI really begins to take a bite from search traffic. And it may be in this change from desktop searching to on the move questioning that we should be pointing our attention.
The annual Talk Like a Pirate Day is upon us again – 19th September.
It’s the 16th year of the event and although the official website is showing its age, it is still worth a visit if you haven’t yet lost your sea legs.
So, how is the web’s love of everything Pirate holding up year on year?
Wouldn’t it be great if we could find out…
Funnily enough, we now have a lot more visibility on long-term search trends thanks to Google Trends, and it’s archive now contains seven years of data to give a true picture of the growth (and sadly, the fall) of the popularity in Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Talk Like a Pirate Day - Global Search Trends from Google Trends
As you can see from the above chart, Talk Like a Pirate Day peaked in 2006 (in terms of search volume). That’s back when MySpace was bigger than Facebook, and Tony Blair still had a year left in Number 10.
What is interesting is that although some online trends are real flash-in-the-pan – it has taken six years for the web to really begin to tire of this (admittedly very fun) day of Pirate-i-ness. And that’s possibly one reason why – if something only happens once a year, it takes far longer for people to tire of it – and there will still be some people online who have yet to discover this day dedicated to all things Piratey.
What’s the lesson for marketers? Well, creating “event days” have long been a mainstay of marketers, where they seek to “own” a day each year for their brand. In recent years, many brands have decided to launch their own music festivals and sporting events (e.g. Innocent Fruitstock, Ben & Jerrys Double Scoop Sundae and Red Bull X Fighters) to create an evergreen marketing vehicle that chimes with a particular demographic. They can create fantastic PR, generate oodles of unique content and provide opportunities to develop “money can’t buy” giveaways for consumers.
And what about the benefit in recurring events for online marketers? This chart from MajesticSEO for talklikeapirate.com show that even 16 years after launch the site still manages to gain links in the months surrounding the annual event, which can be very valuable as many of these will come from reputable and authoritative news sites reporting on the event on the day itself.
MajesticSEO - talklikeapirate.com
If you have run a one-off online event that has gone well, consider whether it can be repeated again – don’t assume that you target market has grown tired of it – or even that they all heard about it the first time around!
So, I hope ye enjoyed Talk Like a Pirate Day, ‘n I look fore t’ seein’ ye soon!
BTW – Have a go at Talking Like a Pirate yourself with this handy translation tool!
Interesting questions being asked in the blogosphere. Obviously, Google + has drawn a lot of attention since its launch, but already people are discussing its demise.
Cynic that I am, it is hard not to wonder whether the mass exodus from Facebook to Google + and the breaking of the FB habit, was an intended or unintended consequence of G+. For instance, from checking FB every day, for both clients and personal reasons, I actually find that on a weekly basis, I now *only* remember that FB exists because of the need to check client sites. On a personal basis, the vast majority of posts to the FB wall are automated anyway from other social media posts such as Stumbleupon, Twitter, Delicious etc.
Do I check Facebook hourly any longer? No. Do you?
It is interesting how far behind the major brands are with actuality, in that now nearly every TV advert has a facebook.com/thisisus URL rather than a website URL. But have your audience moved away from FB? Have you invested a vast number in Facebook marketing only to find that the numbers are falling away?
Google + has only just worked out verified accounts i.e. those for people who wander the internet under pseudonyms, handles etc. Business accounts have not yet been rolled out and to be honest, you would not choose to invest marketing budget in Google + if you were a brand anyway. Not yet, anyway as there is far too much work for our Mountain friends to do yet.
Google + may leave a legacy of Hangouts – the only thing I personally feel right now stands out from G+ – but it is being surpassed by sites such as Subjot.com on a daily basis. Circles lose quite spectacularly to Subjot right now. Probably because the subject structure is given to you whereas no-one can tell you what to name any circle you choose to put friends in.
Infinite choices on the Internet are not good.
What comes next? Well, the first thing has to be that everyone is now exhausted with trying out new things, new places to check in, update a status, share, or rabbit about the inanities of their day. Enough now!
Whatever comes next that will pick up an audience has to be a game changer, not a rehash of what has gone before. In a way, that may be why Google + has failed so far. It was too “samey.” There was no mould breaking. It just became another drain on your time.
It could have been amazing, but with hindsight, maybe Google and Facebook were so busy trying to do outdo each other, they forgot the customer/ user experience. They forgot us!
If Google had only launched Hangouts, as a stand alone option, it would have taken off. Interestingly, Hangouts can now be started within Youtube and it surely will not be long before you can start, record and broadcast a Hangout with minimal fuss. THAT will be a winner.
As part of the big picture of Google +, and particularly for marketers and brnads, little else, right now from Google + seems to stand out sufficiently to detract marketing budget from any of the other equally outdated resources that the Board love.
Yet, Stumbleupon drives 50% of social media traffic according to the latest stats – how much social bookmarking are *you* doing???
Thought Facebook Places might be a serious contender to Foursquare and Gowalla for location marketing? Think again.
Whilst it ought to have stood a chance in the geolocation marketing stakes, Facebook rolled out Places as an afterthought, a feature with no thinking behind it. And now it has gone. In the hullabaloo of yet more privacy changes on Facebook to affect all users, Places has been consigned to the pile of tried and failed apps.
It would be interesting to look at why certain features ‘fit’ in a social network, and why users prefer other features to remain in a dedicated space. For instance, it is unlikely that everyone will start making voice calls within Facebook rather than using already established solutions such as mobile, Skype or the good old landline. Even Ebay has not really resolved that one although it was a logical fit to allow buyers and sellers to communicate via Skype.
Those who use geolocation, for whatever reason, have a preferred tool for the job. Facebook was not it. And never could be without becoming increasingly good at delivering what the dedicated solutions had found to be the big wins – badges, tips, photos, event location, crowdsourced and unique awards, discounts etc.
It will be interesting to note during 2012 how far down the social graph Facebook sinks. Already, it is feeling like it has lost its edge. And for that, you should probably blame Google+. Not that Google+ is going to fill in the space, more the space has moved.
Facebook has suddenly taken on a MySpace tumbleweed type feel, and once sites such as this lose the interest of users, there is rarely a way back up.
Which geolocation tool do you use, and why? Is it to inform friends of your whereabouts? To track down deals? To meet people you share common interests with, or FOAF? (Remember that?!)
Or are you as a marketer far less interested in any time of check ins than you were 12 months ago? In which case, what is piquing your interest right now? Tell us more……
This story has been doing the rounds for a while but it seems that Facebook is taking on both the Apple App store and Google’s Market in the mobile and smartphone marketplace, and the launch may be imminent.
Technically, the problem for Facebook has been a lack of presence in the mobile space ie no specific app for iPhones and iPads that would then allow them to capitalise on mobile spending eg in-game and in-app purchases. All revenue went to the handset OS manufacturers – that is, Google and Apple, with Facebook missing out on its share. The big problem has been the use of Flash in games and apps on FB (which does not work on iPhones) and the lack of a mobile app to add an FB ’skin’ to in order to suit iPhone users. This would then help them spend their money through Facebook credits.
It seems that a project at Facebook called Spartan may have been set up to resolve this issue for FB and that the end is nigh! However, FB has taken Spartan down an interesting route by basing the solution on HTML5 and hence within Apple’s very own browser – Safari, which is resident on every iPhone and iPad.
Facebook Credits – the virtual currency which FB insisted all virtual goods must be sold for earlier this year – is the key to the potential success of this strategy, and for anyone who is in the virtual goods market, FB’s entrance in to this market place gives yet another route to customers. Developing a community of apps that will operate from within Facebook could unlock revenue streams that FB has to date been unable to access and take them beyond advertising being the major source of revenue.
Obviously, we do not all sell virtual goods such as items for farms, or cheese for Mousehunting, but there are major brands who have jumped on to the virtual goods bandwagon in order to create new revenue streams and markets, and it is a growing market. Offering a free game that then requires money to be spent to advance is a not so novel branding mechanism now, and it seems that brand loyal consumers are as willing to spend hard earned cash in this way as to buy an actual product.
One can see how this virtual goods element could become important to brands and businesses, especially those who have realised the income potential within the social and mobile worlds. We are already seeing mobile payments for actual goods coming into play and for those who want to make micro payments for goods in vending machines etc, having all of this accessible from within a single FB Credit account may prove attractive.
However, it goes far beyond this in that FB has a keen community of developers already, and challenging the apps market without losing the 30% share has been one of the problems facing those who are ensconced in the FB space.
HTML5 may prove to be a further death knell for Flash, which has been the bane of Apple for quite some time, although it has kept app developers on their toes working around it. The Android success may have something to do with its ability to work with Flash, but it is hard to ignore the popularity of the iPad and think that Facebook are being a tad canny in going out to the browser for the solution rather than struggling within the OS.
Companies looking to keep ahead of their competitors would do well to hold a brainstorm about virtual goods over the coming months……
In my post last month I talked about the increasing need to focus on social media optimisation (SMO). Part of this activity is finding ways to make your content more shareable.
Research suggests that sharing amongst friends, families and other “tribes” is becoming more important.
ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest recently released a study. The study focuses on ShareThis’ database of sharing activity for it’s widget in March 2011.
Social sharing now produces an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic and 31 percent of referral traffic to sites from search and social. Search is around twice as big.
It’s a big sample; 7 billion shares, 300 million users across the top 1,000 publishers. So remember – it’s more typical of new sites than most businesses selling products and services online.
The details of what is clicked when shared shared shows that Facebook accounts for 38 percent email and Twitter are both second with 17 percent each:
So what are the implications for non publishing businesses?
1. If you don’t have blog, customer magazine or similar “content hub”, then you will be missing out on introducing others to your brand via the network of people who know you already.
2. Having a defined content strategy to define the right content to engage and how to promote is needed to underpin your content hub.
3. Since sharing signals are now used by Google and Bing for ranking as I explained in my previous column, so you are also missing out on the potential ranking boost.
4. Email sharing is still important and often more personal, so don’t exclude this!
5. Encouraging sharing of other product and service content is also important.
6. You can encourage sharing after purchase too.
7. There are many free tools like AddThis.com and ShareThis.com which make it easy to integrate sharing on your site. Paid solutions to consider include Gigya and Janrain.
8. Many of these tools provide “social sign-on” which integrate with a users social network account to make it easier to share.
The addition of the +K feature on Klout has seen a flurry of activity on the social networks as everyone rushes to court favour with customers and contacts by scoring a +K for specific topics as requested by the recipient. “K farms” is the term being currently used, and one wonders how these farms will fare compared to all the other farms which have been stomped on over the years for artificially raising rankings etc.
But getting involved in dubious techniques such as offering to add a +K to your loyal customers’ Klout scores, despite it being the hot trend amongst social media folk, would seem unwise.
Do you have Klout?
However, the lack of involvement by the big brands in many aspects of social media activity highlights an ongoing problem for brands, corporates and businesses.
How to use social media or so-me to engage with customers, build brand and reputation and see that necessary evil – return on investment.
The problem is that learning about your audience by conducting conversations with them is a time-consuming affair. The ROI is not always clear, although the benefits of such engagement may be more apparent when metrics such as influence, reputation, authority, and the increase in social signals are considered. However, these are ‘nebulous’ metrics which are often difficult to assign £ signs to.
The problem for businesses is comprehending that a lack of engagement will have a far more negative effect on reputation etc that can carry a sting in the tail for a long time. If you switch consumers off by failing to engage at all, it is likely that the negative association with your brand in consumers’ minds will continue into the future, however much advertising and marketing budget you throw at the problem.
There are some clear examples of brands failing to engage at any level, who just seemed to have misunderstood entirely what so-me is about. The clue really is in the name!
Social media is not a one way mechanism, and it most definitely is not about broadcasting and then failing to listen. Monologues are not social! Establishing a dialogue with those you are targeting is vital; yet it seems to be one of the major problems that companies are struggling to come to terms with.
One of the red herrings that has caused this problem is “the need for followers”. Yes, you need followers, and numbers may keep the management happy. However, if this is at the cost of building customer relationships and creating quality dialogues, then it is a crash and burn technique. However large your social media team, there is a limit to how many conversations can be successfully carried on.
Whilst the vast majority may be one-time conversations eg “How do I get a refund on this faulty product?”, there will be other conversations where you are building a relationship that will help turn a single purchaser customer into a loyal evangelist of your brand. It is those dialogues which are possibly most important as they permit you to enjoy the benefits of customer retention vs customer acquisition.
The K Farms episode should highlight for all brands and companies the importance of developing strategies which can make the most of short-lived trends, where appropriate, whilst focussing on long-term engagement using the right tool for the jobs the company needs to undertake to succeed.
Empire Avenue
Whether it is Twitter, a Tumblr blog, social bookmarks, or adding +Ks to your followers as a goodwill gesture, it is important to realise that each action you carry out will build on those of the past and it is necessary to consistently add to those actions on a daily or at least weekly basis to maintain the conversations.
