I haven’t seen Google Ads like this before.

These aren’t geotargeted Ads triggered by the keyword “Terralever.”  These ads are different.

Right above the top Ad there’s a heading that says “Related to bluemedia”.  That’s new to me.  I took a quick glance at the AdWords blog and didn’t see any mention of how “Related to” ads would show up.  A few Google searches later and I resigned to the fact that this must be a Google experiment as sometimes the Ads appear and sometimes they don’t.  But, there’s a bigger question here.

What’s making these ads show up?

The “Related to…” leads me to believe this is likely based on social ties between our two companies.  I can think of a few ways that Google could conclude that Terralever is related bluemedia: Our two companies follow each other on Twitter, individuals from each company link to one other on LinkedIn, each company is a Fan of the other’s Facebook Page, and so on.

Just one more reason to buy AdWords ads?

Either way, this example is pretty innocent.  We don’t compete for business with bluemedia.  We do, however, communicate and (occasionally) collaborate with competitors in our local community and beyond.  If this is a sign of a new trigger for Google displaying AdWords ads, should we tighten down our social ties, or jump in and advertise, too?  My guess, assuming this experiment goes live permanently, is that Google hopes we just buck up and buy some ads ourselves.

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Facebook and its data

Facebook’s value lies in the data it has regarding individuals and how the relate to one another. As it stands now, Facebook has incredibly deep information regarding how people connect to one another, what their individual and common interests are, and to a far lesser degree, how they connect to information on the larger Internet.

Google and its data

Google has a set of information which is in many ways the antithesis of what Facebook has. Google has spent years perfecting the task of providing users of their search engine with the most relevant possible search results based on an incredibly complex algorithm that gauges the latent value of content which heavily relies on how that content is regarded from elsewhere on the web.

Facebook, people and information

Where Facebook is headed toward they don’t need to be so concerned about understanding people-to-people connections (as they’ve got that one covered), but instead they are being more conscious about how individuals relate to information. Facebook’s goal was recently stated by Ethan Beard, Director Facebook Developer Network, in his Le Web ‘09 Keynote speech: (‘We’ refers to Facebook in this context)

“Platform started in 2007, and this platform is our future. We don’t aspire to only be a website. We aspire to be a technology people use to connect with the things they care about, wherever they are.”

Google and a more social search

Google understands that their relationship with users and information is far more personal than it was at its inception. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, says the following about the perfect search engine:

“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

As social has rapidly made advances towards providing users more qualitative information through the gauging its relative importance, Google has followed suit, and one of the ways in which it has changed was unveiled in October last year. Called Google Social Search, it was a baby-step towards providing more socially-relevant content based upon what Google knew about the person searching.

A Google Social Search example

Today, I tripped across a new flavor of Social Search when showing a colleague an example from that presentation about social and search that I made last week. Here’s the example: I searched on “Facebook Connect,” a technology which allows developers to leverage some of Facebook’s potential on other web sites.

The results I got, for the most part, were what I’d come to expect. However, at the bottom of the page, there was a new section called “Results from people in your social media circle for facebook connect” (followed by the obligatory Google “BETA” designation).

The two results that are listed beneath that heading are from friends whom I’m connected through on Twitter, and each piece of information that was supplied is an individual Tweet regarding Facebook Connect.

How’d Google provide those results?

I do Google searches at least a few times a day to see if anything has changed, and this is the first time I’ve seen this type of social result. I did find an article published on the Official Google Blog that was posted last week that mentions new changes, just not this specific instance.

By clicking on the “My social circle” and “My social content” links beside the BETA results, I learned that Google gathered this information for me as I was logged in to Google with an email address for which I have also created a Google Public Profile. It was that profile provided the breadcrumbs for Google to know of my connections to Jay Baer and Justin Copeland.

How Google explains Social Search:

Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better.

As things continue to heat up between in the search-and-social landscape it should be interesting to see what both Facebook and Google declare to be the best way to connect people with information and provide it in a way that is useful to the end-user.

Who is poised to be the best provider of information in the social age? Facebook, Google, or neither?

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The updates include Search Options and enhanced search results featuring microformats for content such as reviews. Google provided a brief video introducing new functionality:

Search Options

Search Options allows the user to quickly refine search results by providing additional context to the search being made.  After making a query, a user has several options to further clarify or modify their search results, including:

• Refining results to videos, forums or reviews
• Specifying the time frame from which to display results
• The ability to augment search results with images from the sites returned
• Lengthening the amount of copy shown for each result
• Showing related search phrases
• Displaying related topics to the subject searched upon (“Wonder Wheel”)
• Viewing results on a timeline

The options above are available when viewing “all results.”  As criteria are applied, the user’s scenario changes.  For example, if the searcher specifies video results only, the options change, removing criteria which is not relevant, but adding other opportunities, like the ability to specify the duration of the videos displayed.

Search Result, Snippets and Microformats

In search results, Google is now also returning different information depending upon the the context of the information searched upon.  In Google’s words:

We call the set of information we return with each result a “snippet,” and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These “rich snippets” extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing.

The example which Google provides shows a restaurant search in which the results display star ratings of a result right in the search result listing (as opposed to needing to go to a review site).  Snippets fundamentally change the function of search results.  How and what information to display regarding a particular topic or result is unclear, but what is clear is that this will be a feature which continually evolves.  Google’s blog posting continues to explain the role of Google and the community in defining the feature:

We can’t provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google’s search results stays high.

These new enhancements to Google Search are highly significant; the most significant changes since Universal Search was introduced.

The impact to the Google searcher are clear: Search just got better.  What impact will this have on the SEO community?

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From the Google Analytics blog post announcing the availability of the API:

A Google Analytics API has long been one of our most widely anticipated features. Today we’re pleased to announce that the Google Analytics Data Export API beta is now publicly available to all Analytics users!

What’s so exciting about an API? The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with their own business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. Individuals and business owners will have opportunities to access their Google Analytics information in a variety of new ways.

The post continues on to provide sample ideas, tips on how to get started, and real-world applications.

• The Google Analytics API blog post
• Google Analytics Export Data API information for developers

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Hi,

We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network.  As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.  To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009.  Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

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In the promotion of a new site feature, Google Japan was spamming its own index by using a well known pay-per-post company called CyberBuzz.

Google Japan did make mention of their marketing practices and violation of Google’s search guidelines in doing so on the Google Japan blog.

Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

That’s where the story sounded like it would end, but CyberBuzz then followed up by saying that they are not a pay-per-post company and that allegations otherwise are false.

While its possible there may be a misunderstanding, Google once again pointed the finger at… Google.  Viewing the cached version of CyberBuzz’s FAQ’s showed that they had changed as the pay-per-post allegations surfaced.   What went missing from CyberBuzz’s pages?  According to a Japanese blogger, it was the following:

Q: How much money can we get as a reward?
A: From a couple hundred yen to thousands of yen ($1-$100 USD) depending on the campaign and your Buzz-level (akky: like karma points)

Q: What do I have to do to get a reward?

A: (snip) Registered members are paid when they write up a blog entry related to the product/service.

I came across this on the Asiajin blog. Start reading here, then follow the related posts: Asiajin – Google Japan Buys Dirty Pay-per-Post Links.

Techcrunch, CNet, and WebProNews also have good coverage.

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If you haven’t read my first post on Google Alerts and you’re not familiar with the tool, you’ll want to start by reading that post.  Assuming you’ve used Google Alerts before, you just need to be aware of a few things to start using Alerts to monitor what sites link to your website.

The method uses a well known variant of Google’s traditional keyword search: the ability to place “link:” before a URL in a standard Google search query to learn what sites Google credits with linking to another website.  Here’s an example of what sites Google recognizes as sites linking to this website (the Google Search launches in a new window): link:http://www.onlinemarketingperformance.com.

Now, all we need to do is use that exact same method and setup a Google Alert which will notify us when it finds a link to our site.  Here’s what that looks like:

Am I that unpopular?

Wait, we’re not done yet.  Let’s back up a step and look at what Google returned for the number of links to my site.

Google reported that there’s approximately 31 links to my site. That’s a bit disheartening. I know there are more than that. What gives? First, it’s widely accepted that Google does not accurately report how many links it is aware of. I’m not going to debate that point or pontificate why that might be. However, the obvious thing to do (to me) would be to just see where Google notes it has seen my URL posted. I’d imagine that more often than not there would also be a link to my site.

Mentions of my URL seem as though they’d be accompanied by links

Let’s try a standard Google search on my domain.  I’m going to also remove the “http://” and the “www.” as I’m not sure how others might represent my URL.  So, my search would be for “onlinemarketingperformance.com” (with the quotes-without them Google will return partial matches, even with spaces and dashes).  Here’s that result:

This time Google says there are almost a thousand mentions of my domain name.  And, by clicking through and reviewing the results, it’s clear a strong majority of those mentions also provide a link to my website.

So, I’ll add that search as another Google Alert.  Here’s my final link (and URL mention) monitoring with Google Alerts:

That’s it.  I’m all setup to monitor links to my site.  Of course, I’ll occasionally be alerted when there is a mention of my URL that doesn’t have a link, but that’s fine.  I’d prefer to know than not know.

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In the book The Search author John Battelle describes Google as “a database of intentions.” If you prescribe to that classification, the Google tools I’m going to employ will provide some interesting insight into shopper intentions and how that information can be leveraged.  The first tool I’m going to use is Google Insights for Search.  Insights for Search is another Google Experiment, this time one that allows one to peer inside the volume of keyword (or phrase) searches over time and geographical regions.  Let’s see what we can learn.

What can Google tell us about Valentine’s Day shopping?

Our hypothesis will be that people are still shopping online, but they’re likely looking to get a bargain.  The hypothesis ins’t a stroke of genius, but the devil is in the details.  If we’re going to launch a campaign or put some copy on our homepage regarding our holiday deals, let’s use words that resonate with online shoppers.  Further, since we’re theoretically doing this exercise the week before the holiday, Pay-per-Click is a definite medium we would target.  We’d want to know not only what keywords we might want to focus on for our ads to display, but also what keywords to place in generalized ads to get Internet searcher’s attention.

Let’s take a look at the frequency of terms being searched upon in the United States over the past couple of years using Insights for Search.  The search phrases I’m going to take a look at are:

• Valentine’s Day
• Valentine’s Day roses
• Cheap Valentine’s Day gift
• Valentine’s Day specials
• Valentine’s deals
• Valentine’s discount

Search volume for “Valentine’s Day”

Let’s start by looking up a generalized term about the holiday to use as a baseline for interest overall around the topic over time.  The graph below shows search volume for “Valentine’s Day” from January of 2007 until February of 2009 in the United States.  To be sure we’re focused on shopping, we’ve restricted our inquiry to the “Shopping” category.   The February ‘09 data for this year, term and region is reported to the current week, but we’ll focus on the week before the holiday for all of our analysis.

• 2007: 60
• 2008: 48
• 2009: 53
  

Before we move forward, let’s be clear about what these numbers mean. The numbers on the graph do not allow us to understand the total number of searches for this term in the United States. I’ll let Google tell you what the numbers mean as opposed to paraphrasing:

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100; each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. The numbers next to the search terms above the graph are summaries, or totals.

If I check the points on the graph, last week’s number (the week before Valentine’s Day) registers 60. The week before Valentine’s Day in ‘08 is lower, at 48, and that week in ‘07 clocked in at 53.  This shows an increase in the volume of shopping related searches for “Valentine’s Day” for the week before Valentine’s Day this year in the United States as compare to the previous two years.

For the purpose of this exercise, I’m also going to scale data to a 100 point scale when our results fail to do so to make comparisons easier.  Here’s what that will look like for the aforementioned data:

• 2007: 60 (100)
• 2008: 48 (80)
• 2009: 53 (88)

As above, when data is extrapolated to a 100 point scale I’ll include it in parenthesis.  Graph data will not be changed.

Not following the trend

So, we’ve established that the volume of searches for Valentine’s Day gifts the week before the holiday has increased considerably in comparison to the two previous years.  To help illustrate our point regarding the discount terms, I’m going to run an example non-discounted term: “Valentine’s Day roses.”

Search volume for “Valentine’s Day roses”

Below is our result.  Search volume is fairly close to 2008 levels, both of which years are lower than 2007.

• 2007: 62 (100)
• 2008: 43 (69)
• 2009: 42 (68)

So, what about the thrifty shopper?

Moving on to bargain hunting, let’s run the same time period but try some phrases that would show people searching with the intent of finding discounted Valentine’s Day gifts. After trying a few phrases and seeing volume increases that were generally aligned with the increase in searches for “Valentine’s Day,” I found several that also showed strong upticks, specifically around the idea of getting a bargain.

Search volume for “Cheap Valentine’s Day gift”

This first graph is for “Cheap Valentine’s Day gift.” For the weeks preceding Valentine’s day, 2007’s interest level is at 40, 2008’s is 36, and 2009 holds the top end (100). So, while shopping-related searches have increased for the term “Valentine’s Day,” searches for those looking for a cheap Valentine’s Day gift have also increased, but to a much more significant degree.

• 2007: 40
• 2008: 36
• 2009: 100

Let’s look for more terms and see if we can find higher variances while still reflecting intent.

Search volume: “Valentine’s Day specials”

Another term I thought that might indicate an intention to find a deal was the phrase “Valentine’s Day specials.” Again, the result shows the same trend.

• 2007: 31 (62)
• 2008: 28 (56)
• 2009: 50 (100)

Search volume: “Valentine’s deals”

Bingo. “Deals” seems to be a word that people are using far more when shopping for Valentine’s Day this year and looking for a bargain.  Do note that I dropped “Days” from the phrase as I wasn’t getting results, but felt “Valentine’s” would be enough of a qualifier.  Take a look:

• 2007: 19
• 2008: 29
• 2009: 100

Search volume: “Valentine’s discount”

“Valentine’s discount,” the last phrase I’m including, follows suit with a considerable uptick.

• 2007: 41
• 2008: 42
• 2009: 100

Do we have any actionable data yet?

Not really.  We still need more information to paint the full picture.  If we were going to use this information to understand linguistics and what words were being used more frequently when shopping online for Valentine’s Day compared to previous years, this data is helpful.  But, we really need to get a better idea of how much search volume we’re talking about.

If a phrase was searched on three times during the week before Valentine’s Day in 2008 and 10 times the week before Valentine’s Day this year, we’d see a huge volume increase year-over-year, but creating a marketing campaign based upon that information wouldn’t be the wisest move.

In my next post I’ll take what I’ve learned so far and leverage another of Google’s tools to show how this information could be used to make online marketing decisions.

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Alerts searches just about anything you can think of on the web including News, Video, Blogs, and of course its massive index of the web.

You can setup Google Alerts with or without being logged in to Google.  I suggest that you do it when logged into Google as management of your Alerts is far easier.  So, step zero is to login to Google Alerts; let’s assume you’ve done that.  If you have no Alerts, this is what you’ll see… a blank slate:

Monitoring brand mentions with Google Alerts

1. The text says it all, You don’t have any Google Alerts.  Try creating one.  Go ahead and click on “creating one.”
2. I’m going to set these up to monitor mentions of Terralever, so I’ll put “Terralever” in for the “Search terms” column.  Unless you want to monitor Terralever, go ahead an enter a brand or term you’re interested in.
3. For “type” I want to know everything, so I’ll leave it set to “Comprehensive” so it will check all sources.  Single options include “News,” “Blogs,” “Web,” “Video,” and “Groups.”
4. I am going to have Google email me as soon as it has something to report, so for the next two settings I’m selecting “Email” for “Deliver to” and “How often” to “as-it-happens.”
5. Finally, click the “Create Alert” button and our work is done.  This is what you should see:

Using the same technique above you can monitor mentions of a brand, its competitors, products, industry terms… anything you want to monitor.

Before you create an army of Alerts, realize that there’s a lot of information out there and it is entirely possible to get pummeled with Alert notifications.  Depending upon how many brands I’m working with and how many keywords I’m monitoring I might receive an unruly number of emails a day from Google.  You can make it manageable, however.

Preventing Google Alert Overload

1. One is to set the delivery to “Feed.”  When you go that route Google provides a link to the feed so you can subscribe to it with a feed reader.
2. Another option is to set the delivery frequency to “daily” so for each Alert you receive a daily summary.
3. You should also ensure that the terms you are receiving Alerts on aren’t too general.
4. One last option is to create a rule in your email client to route all emails that come from Google Alerts to a specific folder.

Enjoy!

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Last night I had the opportunity to present to the Social Media Club here in Phoenix.  The topic was search engine optimization and search engine marketing.  As opposed to having a deck of tactical recommendations I instead chose to talk about how I approach search engines in the work we do for our clients at Terralever.

Beyond SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) I covered a bit about Local Search as well as a few facets of Google that I keep an eye on.  Without the presentation, I’m not sure how valuable these slides will be (there was a lot that was spoken that’s not captured in the slides).  However, anyone is welcome to download the presentation for reference or their own usage.

I do ask that if you utilize any of the cited data in the presentation that you credit its source (not me-the source of the data/study stated on the slide).  If you have any questions about the presentation, or you attended last night and had a question or comment, please do contact me!

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