Five Reasons Why Losing Keyword Data In Google Is Bad

As announced on the 18th of October, Google will start encrypting keyword query data for logged in users, a change driven by privacy concerns. The implication for marketers is that natural search keyword data will become unavailable within analytics packages.

A current estimate is that 10-20% of data might be lost as searches by non logged in users will not be affected. PPC data will also stay, which may seem a bit hypocritical. Still, as Google’s services gain more registered users, the number of affected queries is likely to grow. This can have its negative effects – here are 5 reasons I think this is a bad move by Google.

1. It Will Discourage On-Site Improvements

In most companies – big or small – it is hard to drive on-site changes. Building new content and landing pages, writing more copy, improving site speed and archistecture, these all require considerable effort to implement. The best way for marketers to push things through is to show results and relate on-site changes to revenue. If SEO becomes less accountable it’ll be harder to show success and thus drive future site improvements. Surely in this scenario everybody loses out.

2. It Will Lessen Interest In SEO

SEO does have a bit of a bad reputation, but many link-building activities are good – reaching out to bloggers, connecting with relevant websites, writing informative press releases and articles etc. Usually it’s the SEO channel that pays for all these and if the budget goes, they will go too.

3. It Will Slow Down The Implementation Of Google+

Why would marketers push the use of G+ if its pick up degrades reporting? Well, at least I’ll keep quiet about those +1 buttons for now. This might slow down the growth of G+, which is a shame as it has good potential for both users and advertisers in the future.

4. The S-Word

Which is (kids, cover your ears) synergy. But as much as I hate its overuse in agency pitches, data from PPC can help SEO and – crucially – vice versa. This may not be a biggie, but losing one source of insight will not help improve paid advertising.

5. It Sets A Bad Precedent

It’s bad for privacy to report on keywords? Well, in that case we should remove all data – including PPC. Google may be opening the doors to privacy advocates to limit reporting even further in the future. We may be able to do SEO with bad-quality keyword reporting – but not PPC!

Summer Travels & Other Distractions

Howdy, dear 14 readers a day – long time, no speak! And it’s all my fault for not writing. Somehow blogging has slipped down the priority list in recent months, for which I apologise.

So to get the ball rolling again, let me show you what I’ve been up to. This summer was great for travelling – first to St Petersburg, Russia, then home to Bulgaria, and finally this week to New York. All of them had their charm in their own way, though I was very impressed by New York (where I forgot to actually take pictures!) You can check out photos from the trips below.

St Petersburg	Bulgaria	New York

Also I’m getting to grips with the workshop I set up a year ago for woodwork. The machines don’t look as scary and the time for making a backgammon set (my first project) was cut from 6 months to 8 hours. Photos of the end results are below, click to enlarge.

Bing Up Their Game With Social Integration

Bing have released a nice little video highlighting their efforts to bring social signals and interactions into search. Check out a tour of the new features by Stephan Weitz, Director at Bing:

With only 10% market share (in the UK), Bing is an excellent position to try new features and experiment. This is sighted by Mark Zuckerberg as one of the reasons Facebook is happy to work with Microsoft – because they’re the underdog that can innovate.

For search marketers, the proposition from Bing can be seen as a handy predictor to what is going to happen with Google. The earlier businesses improve their social propositions and encourage their customers to share and interact, the better these companies will fare as search engine algorithms and features skew towards social.

For Bing itself, this is their chance to up their market share. I had the opportunity to ask Colm Bracken, Group Search Manager at Microsoft, about how they plan to grow their user base and he sighted innovation as key. Colm also added that they have big hopes for their mobile and Xbox products, which will in turn drive up use of Bing. I wish Microsoft luck with this one as a little competition in the UK search market can only be a good thing.

The Elephant In The Room: European e-Privacy Directive

The recent success and widespread use of of remarketing has certainly lead to some annoyance with its smart but creepy banners. Here’s an example from Twitter:

Together with hightened privacy concerns and debates around the policies of Facebook, Google Street View and others, it is hardly surprising that regulations are being proposed. The use of customer behaviour data has been reviewed and our European friends have decided to make cookies strictly opt-in. So as of 25 May, webmasters will will need to obtain prior and explicit consent for using cookies before deploying them on visitors’ machines. Here is an extract from the directive:

“…on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information…about the purposes of cookies… Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment.”

Full text available here.

It is now up to Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to translate this EU piece of law into practical regulations for the UK. They may not be ready in time for 25 May, which is just as well since UK e-commerce seems completely unprepared. We use cookies to store baskets, provide recommendations, track revenue, remarket, MVT, gather analytics, etc. It is almost unimaginable to continue trading successfully without cookies in their current form, not without serious technical changes. Maybe this is why we’re so far ignoring the elephant in the room and sticking our heads in the sand.

So what does the EU want to see from online reatilers? To start with, we will need to update T&Cs and provide detailed information about use of cookies. But obtaining consent from visitors can be a less pleasant experience – as this example on David Naylor’s blog shows :)

While we’re unlikely to ditch cookies completely, it is clear that visitors will need more control. And it could be a case of browsers to the rescue. Having easily accessible controls for blocking individual, first and third-party cookies within the browser could be just the solution to make the European bureaucrats happy. Alternatively, centralised tag management systems like Tagman can help with on-site controls.

To me the whole cookie business is a response to the aggressive comercialisation of the web and people’s reaction against it. But it is not up to the EU to “correct” us. Surely, it will be those companies that strike a good balance (set frequency caps, do not resell data, etc) that will prosper naturally. It is exactly events like the recent Facebook scandals that will correct our ways in the long run. Either that, or Internet users will get used to it all over time. Still, it is not about what I think, but what the DCMS thinks – and that we’ll find out shortly. Keep your eyes peeled, eCommerce chums!

The Shallows

This is sort of a book overview, with emphasis on “sort of”. I am too ignorant on the book’s subject to be a critic, but I can nonetheless connect on a personal level.

It is called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, a Christmas present from a dear friend. The underling theme is technological determinism, the idea that our technologies are not mere tools of which we are complete masters, but to the contrary, we as individuals and societies tailor our lives around technolgy that pops up. The clock encouraged measurement and organisation, the map abstract thinking, books promoted deep contemplative thought, and now the Internet is also altering our minds too. But the depth and nature of these changes were unforeseeable for even the inventor, they came naturally and irreversibly over time. Interesting.

But I found Carr’s history lesson on books even more interesting, together with their progression into the Internet. Very early writing was hard to read, on scrolls, laid out without spacing or punctuation. It was designed to be read aloud – in fact, a Roman emperor was once astonished when he saw one of his advisors read in silence. Around the birth of Christ, bookmaking came along and it helped popularise the written word, as did improvements in grammar and alphabets. Fast forward to the Middle Ages when scholars, in stark contrast to their ancestors, worked in silent libraries, deep in concentrated thought. With Gutenberg, books become available to the masses and spread contemplative reasoning further than ever.

Let’s pause to make a couple of points. One, Carr, claims that this is quite an unnatural process. We as species have evolved to quickly switch our attention, be aware of the surrounding environment and process multiple tasks. Being lost in thought wouldn’t really be a survival technique in prehistoric times. But, point two, this does bring huge advantages, as demonstrated by the great leaps of science and technology during and following the Industrial revolution.

Now welcome to the 21st century with our latest toy, the Internet. The written word comes in shiny new forms – in 140 character chunks on Twitter, hyperlinked on webpages, available in abundance at a touch of a Google search button. The Internet oversatisfies our curiosity and overburdens us with information. We now quickly skim read and heavily multi-task. This, Carr argues, is an entirely natural process – we were evolutionary made for it – but has it harmed our ability to think deeply? The author argues so. Our short attention span means that we cannot concentrate long and well enough to mimic the work process of an old school scientist. Carr also argues that our reliance on machines leads to weaker memory, which together with our shallower thought process makes us less deep, less empathic, less human.

This is how the book ends. At times it felt very relevant to me as I am concious that I only half-process a lot of information. I am not sure if we are all becoming shallower as Carr says, but I certainly felt like I did. This did annoy me, but it wasn’t until I read this well written, if a bit over-the-top, book that it made me think more consciously about my work flow in particular. To which I’ve now made changes!

Carr believes that the Internet does and will continue to change our brains even off-line. But I’m not too sure about that, because I do enjoy the naturally singular focus of human conversation or book reading, for example. Precisely because they are so off-line and unInternet-like. But in any case, there is a lot to be said about information overload and attention spans, so I recommend this book not only for it encourages us to reflect, but because it’s well written and very well researched.

The Farmer Update Is A Mere Reshuffle, Says Blekko Founder

“They shuffled the deck, but all the cards are still the same” is Blekko founder Rich Skrenta’s response to Google’s Farmer Update. I like how anti-Google he is! In his eyes, the new search results have not improved in quality significantly. Despite Google’s updates affecting almost 12% of quries, Rich claims that most changes are minor reshuffles, for example content farms answerbag.com and eHow.com swapping positions 1 and 2 for a particular query.

See the whole interview on YouTube:

The root of the problem, he concludes, is the human trainers that Google employs to manually assess search results and website quality. These guys’ evaluations directly affect Google’s output, but Rich dismisses trainers as lowly paid and poorly qualified and Google’s reliance on them as an inherent weakness. OK, it is Rich’s job to have a go at Google, but do watch the interview for more, there are some interesting ideas.

New Customer Targeting With Display

When it comes to customer aquisition, display may not seem like the obvious medium of choice. Yes, we can target specific placements and demographics, but the ability to dedupe against our existing database is not readily available. We therefore risk overdelivering banners to our existing customers and causing annoyance, as is often the case with remarketing.

But it is exactly features built for Google Remarketing that can offer a solution. The new Audiences tab is an extremely powerful tool. You can tag any particular pages on your site and drop cookies to users who visit them. Over time this will build you lists of cookies that can be added or subtracted from each other and can have different cookie lengths from 1 day to 540 days. All of this data can be used to tailor your display activity.

So how can we use Google’s remarketing lists to target new customers with display? Simples! First, tag up everything – all your web pages and your emails too – and let this list build up. Next, create GDN campaigns and negatively target this list. This will in fact exclude existing visitors, not customers, but then non-converting visitors should be part of your separate remarketing campaign anyway.

I’ve had good results with this tactic, getting three times the new customer rate than standard display campaigns. It really helps to focus your acquisition effort.

Make The Most Out Of The Weather

We need to look no further than last Christmas to see the link between weather and online retail. Not many have explored this relationship (though there are some nice branding campaigns) in detail, but luckily my good friend Simon has – and he’s agreed to guest blog and shed some light on this misty topic. So without further ado, let’s hand it over to him:

The esteemed Julian Moskov, multi-talented online marketer, photographer and to a lesser extent footballer invited me to promote a project I have been working on fusing our beloved weather and online retail, otherwise known as Weatherlytics. A simple aim which is ”To highlight the growing trend weather can play for online retailers as part of their digital marketing strategy”

Regular followers of my blog, www.weatherlytics.co.uk will notice how I have identified specific case studies on if using the weather as part of your online sales strategy, you can maximise a specific product promotion and even better help to differentiate your strategy awar from your competition.

Key online channels can benefit from abnormal and seasonal weather changes and I’ve put together some of my own thoughts on how an affiliate marketing channel can be maximised through understanding weather patterns…

Different weather parameters can play host to a number of fluctuations in online user habits as well as types of products that are sold dependent on a season (summer, winter etc) or if it is hot, cold, raining or snowy – a recent article in the Guardian referred to how Google is now beginning to embed key weather insights into a PPC strategy using Google Adwords.

I digress…so, you’ve completed some research on the weather but how can this be used within your affiliate program?

Communicate directly with your affiliates – ensure affiliates are up to speed with the latest promotions and offers that are weather impacted. Affiliates should be seen as an extended sales force who are reaching out to their own online community to promote your product offering

• Search Affiliates (PPC) – Have you thought about communicating to your search based (PPC) affiliates to tailor their campaigns through geo-location? e.g. should the UK be experiencing rainfall in the south west and snow in the north east, different products which reflect an uplift in sales based on these different weather can be promoted through a PPC campaign.

• Product Feed – Do you have a product feed available through your program for affiliates to download? Have you thought about segmenting your feed into different weather related categories e.g. Products associated with Rain, Sunshine, Snow?

• Affiliate Commission Incentives – Categorise your products whose sales are impacted by specific weather patterns – e.g. outdoor clothing during the winter months. Look to offer an incentive to your affiliates to push these types of products e.g. think about an additional commission tier for “winter clothing”?

Further reading on this specific subject (as well as latest news and thoughts) can be found at my blog – www.weatherlytics.co.uk or www.twitter.com/weatherlytics

3 Ways To Keep Your PPC Agency In Check

A bit of a patronising title I know, but this post is about considering additional metrics. This is particularly important for agency relationships where extra transparency and new angles can only be of benefit. Even if a campaign is going well and all the usual graphs are pointing up, there may be more to the account that can be discussed. There is always something to improve.

Below are three not-very-common metrics that I think help to build a better picture of the state of a PPC account. They’re not meant to replace the all-important Sales and ROI stats, but rather to add a bit of extra detail about the state of things.

1. Impression share. This report shows if your ads are being shown to everybody who searches for relevant keywords. You may be losing impression share due to two factors – position (your bids are too low) or budget (your daily budgets are too low.) It is a good metric to keep an eye on. You can read more about it in my blog post on impression share reporting.

2. Number of keywords that generated a sale. This is an excellent stat to judge how well your keyword set and long tail has been developed. You can also count the total number of ad groups that generated a sale, which would give a measure of how granular and segmented the account’s structure is.

3. Quality score. This is Google’s method of determining how relevant an ad is. In this blog post I’ve described how all keywords’ score can be collated and used to create a simple average quality score figure that you can keep an eye on.

The Top Product Searches This Christmas Were…

It’s over! Christmas is behind us. The sky-high conversion rates are back down to Earthly levels, budgets have shrunk to numbers we can read without counting the zeros and calm and sanity has been restored in offices across the land. So what were the biggest hits this Christmas?

Here is a top 10 list of search volumes on Cyber Sunday:

Although Lego have done well to claim the top spot, Apple emerge yet again as the big winners with so many of their products in high demand. In fact, gadgets and electronics in general were the most sought after cateogry. They were followed closely by fashion and clothing, while consoles, games and toys took the third place.

(Data by Hitwise.)