2013

Going Viral not Required to Succeed – with YouTube’s Lane Shackleton

4/15/2013 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Key Points

Virality is not the only measurement of success. Producing consistent videos that garner solid viewership is a big achievement in itself.
Organic search is a very strong signal of intent. Viewers can find new, related videos, but this is not as strong of a signal as organic search.
The concept behind YouTube’s TrueView is giving users a choice but also maximizeing the value for advertisers.
Giving users the ability to skip ads acts as an incentive for advertisers to make their content as entertaining as possible.
Content does not have to be hilarious to succeed. Videos that are not meant to be funny but are meant to educate the audience, or answer a question, or tell the audience something they didn’t know can rack up lots of views.
The fundamental difference between advertising on television and YouTube is the ability to share. If a person sees a commercial on TV that they really enjoy, they have to then go to online to share it. Advertising on YouTube also provides vastly more metrics for advertisers.
Volume of videos can make a serious impact on buying decisions. If one brand has 100 products and a video explaining each one, they are much more likely to sell than a competitor with 100 products and no videos.
The most advanced advertisers will do a lot of testing. They’ll put a up a couple of variations of a video, and run each of them as an ad just to get more traffic on them, and then they’ll modify the video based on what they learn.
Measuring success for a video means determining what success means for you. If you’re going for tons of views, a funny prank might work. If you’re aiming to instruct customers, a prank video might not be the best idea, even if it gets a lot of views.

Eric: What do you do at YouTube?

Lane: I’m a product manager on the YouTube monetization team and specifically I work on AdWords for video which is our video promotion tool for advertisers and marketers and people who want to build an audience. I also work on video ad effectiveness which is essentially helping prove to advertisers that they are gaining value from their video ads.

Eric: YouTube has been around for many years and it seems to me that there are a number of people in the industry that believe you have to go viral with a video in a big way to be successful. People believe you need to have a success like Blendtec, or Intuit’s Tax Rap. In your view, is it actually necessary for a video to go viral for a campaign to be successful?

Lane: I think there are lots of ways to be successful without going viral. An example would be the toy company, Rokenbok. They get lots of views on their content and they would consider themselves a success in terms of the video content they are producing, but they are not necessarily getting 50,000 views because everyone is sharing them now.

Filed Under: Google, SEO, video

Misuse of Big Data Can Cost You at the Cash Register

2/25/2013 by Eric Enge 2 Comments

The good folks at BloomReach shared some data with me recently. This data showed how “gift” oriented search queries differ from other types of queries. In the process of reviewing this I realized that it provides an excellent example of how drawing premature conclusions from data can cause you to make bad mistakes.

As background to the source of the data, BloomReach provides a product called BloomSearch that is in use by a large number of e-commerce web sites. The product enables those sites to scalably modify their product pages so that they can capture a lot more long tail search traffic, resulting in significant incremental revenue.

As a result of this, BloomReach has access to lots of information on how these sites perform. Let’s take a look at a sample of the data!

This shows data for 9 anonymous e-tailers. We see the bounce rates shown for 2 different types of queries – “gift” and “non-gift”. BloomReach found that gift queries contain certain obvious terms like “gift” or “present”, or sometimes not so obvious things like “mother’s day flowers” or “Valentine’s Day chocolates”.

Some gift queries occur at the same time every year, while others are unpredictable and ongoing (i.e. birthdays and anniversaries). For example, “housewarming wine basket” is another example of a gift query that was included. “Non-gift” queries represent all other queries.

Filed Under: Search Engine Algorithms, SEO

Graph Search & Social Search With Bing’s Stefan Weitz

2/18/2013 by Eric Enge 2 Comments

Key Points

Initially when Bing launched social search, they wanted to carve out a distinct space for the social results. Later on it became clear that these worlds were blending together and it made less and less sense to keep them in a separate space.
Bing is now indexing 30 times more data from Facebook than they had previously. On average, people will see about 5 times more results than before.
While Bing is doing a much better job of harnessing user’s relevant friend information, they are also focusing on relevant “expert” information as well; influential bloggers, subject matter experts…
Even though search and social results are blending, they are still kept separate because really, how can anyone decide which of those to rank more highly?
The notion of a Like is still a little bit perplexing from a ranking perspective. What does a Like mean for a page? Does the user like the design, the content, or maybe just the picture? Bing tends not to just use a pure Like signal to do ranking.
Shares are basically the same as Likes – not used a ton for web ranking except in velocity (like the way Twitter is used for discovering news).
It’s an uncharted territory as far as what are the best types of queries for social search. It may be that in social search every query should have a person as an answer. Even something like, “what’s the height of Mount Everest,” a very definitive, objective query should have human results.
Bing’s social search has combined together four different services and applied a layer of machine intelligence on top and applied a layer of semantic knowledge on top of that to deliver that one result; something no one else is doing right now.
When someone changes privacy settings or deletes a post from Facebook, Bing gets that update in real time. The result is then purged from their results in minutes not hours or days.
The social pieces in the Facebook experience were all developed by Facebook. Bing uses their own algorithm on the social search data for their social search results. It is completely independent of what Facebook does with Graph Search, even though it operates on the same data set.
When you search on Bing, it gives you the web results plus all the different updates that come from the Facebook social graph. On Facebook it really pivots more around the person and their interests.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Let’s talk about Bing and Social Search!

Stefan: Initially when we launched social search, we really wanted to carve out a distinct space for the social results. That was done partially from a user experience standpoint to identify the fact that we think social results are often very different than web results. The web results are what the web knows about your query; the social results are what people know about your query.

As we really got into it, it became clear that a lot of times these worlds were blending together and it made less and less sense to actually keep them separated off in that carved-out space. They are still separate in the new experience, but it’s much more in line with the overall experience than it was before.

Let me show you what that looks like. If I try something simple, like Hawaii, what we get are the web results on the left-hand side. In the middle, you get our snapshot, which pulls in data and services from across the web. You can see people who were born in Hawaii, who their governor is, celebrities who are from there, all sorts of different things.

Filed Under: interviews, Microsoft, SEO, Social Web

Mobile Integration with comScore’s Diran Hafiz

1/15/2013 by Eric Enge Leave a Comment

Key Points

The adoption rate of mobile devices is off the charts. There are about 120 million smart phone devices in the United States and between 40 to 45 million tablets.
The Television and Video Game industries are offering increasing amounts of supplemental content optimized for mobile devices broadly to encourage multi-screen engagement and specifically to encourage social interaction and the discovery of secret content or levels.
As mobile technology works through its growing pains, many publishers have to choose between having a really great robust app experience versus a really good browser experience.
Responsive web design is a great concept, but not many sites, other than the major brands can take advantage of it. Often times, you will get a “Plain Jane” mobile experience because it’s the same site getting translated across a number of devices.
An average user downloads approximately 50 apps during the course of their 2 year phone contract, but they tend to use only 7 to 10 applications regularly.
Many users want to spend more time with apps because the user experience is much more fluid than a browser. However, when it comes to making the all important conversion, whether it’s submitting personal information or not, people feel a lot more comfortable going through the browser.
Apps that take advantage of cross-platform functionality are finding much greater success than those that don’t.
Google and Bing’s mobile search results are more action than description driven. There are a lot more quick links that are available versus the more general, broad descriptions.
In many cases, the conversion actually happens offline. Users have learned to engage with mobile search in this way, and there has been a tremendous growth in requests for data on a hyper-local level.
There is a huge intersection between mobile and social media and all the other formats of media that exist and create an overall advertisers brand. Brands need to view mobile as part of a converged effort in order to make their brand standout.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: What are your thoughts about the mobile market?

Diran: The adoption rate, obviously, is off the charts. We have about 120 million smart phone devices in use here in the United States. This took about 10 years to reach. Tablet devices have grown much faster than that. We are at 40 to 45 million devices in just two to two and a half years.

It used to be that people were slow to adopt new technology that required some initial set up or to use something completely new, but I think the iPhone changed that, and the iPad did it for the tablet market.

In terms of usage and consumer behavior, people are much more comfortable with these devices. It used to be that people were slow to adopt new technology that required some initial set up or to use something completely new, but I think the iPhone changed that, and the iPad did it for the tablet market. People are much more comfortable spending most of their time attached to these devices.

It’s a very personal thing. People like the customizability and personalization of these devices. That’s a big part of the reason why Android gets a lot of popular attention. Not only is there a broad range of devices to choose from but Android users also have more choices in home screen customization and what widgets they can use, whereas iPhones are a lot more rigid with their grid layout.

On a cultural level, people are making shifts in their behavior, whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, in order to incorporate this mobile lifestyle. I don’t think a lot of research has actually been done to understand the long term effects for what this means for consumers. We are seeing a lot of changes and are going to continue to see them with the advent of new technology, new platforms, and faster Internet. It’s going to continuously evolve at an even quicker rate.

Eric Enge: Is part of the reason for the rapid growth of the tablet market due to smartphone’s relatively small screen size?

Diran: It could be, as tablets are in between devices. The smartphone is something that people have with them all the time and is portable to the point where it can slip into their pocket; a smaller screen actually has a benefit. However, we are also seeing a trend of the size of smartphone’s screens increasing. The Galaxy Note 2 that came out recently has a 5.5 inch screen which isn’t that much smaller than the 7 inch iPad Mini or the Galaxy Nexus 7. The line between tablets and smartphones is becoming increasingly blurry. Some of that growth is probably related to the screen size because you did have the 10 inch iPad type of tablets, but now you are getting the wide screen devices in the 7 inch tablets that are quickly outpacing the sales of the previous generation of tablets.

While there may have been some correlation between screen sizes in terms of adoption that is being blurred very quickly. People who have smart phones tend to also buy tablets. About 25% of Smartphone users also own tablet devices.

Tablets and smartphones are being used in different ways. People on their phones are messaging, using them as a way to connect to the Internet and to be social. Tablet devices also have many of these capabilities, minus the phone bit, but people are using them a lot more in their down time at home. They use tablets to read books, to consume media and content, and as a second or even third screen to their television.

Filed Under: mobile, SEO

Two Exercises for a Simple, Real-Life Mobile SEO Audit

1/3/2013 by BrysonM 4 Comments

Mercedes made headlines recently with their revamped mobile site. The good news is that they were able to increase mobile traffic 85% year to date, and 170% over last year. The bad news is that when I looked at their revamped site it was evident that they didn’t account for SEO as part of the redesign, and could have driven mobile traffic up much more if they had. Recently in Search Engine Land I explained that mobile SEO is not a myth. To further prove that it exists I’m going to go through a basic mobile SEO audit for Mercedes’ new site, to demonstrate how one brand failed to take advantage of mobile search traffic by thinking about how mobility affects search behavior and site architecture. Hopefully this exercise will help the rest of you avoid the same mistakes.

Basic [brand + "mobile"] Search in Mobile

When I audit a mobile site, one of the first things that I’ll do is search on the phrase “[insert brand name here] mobile site” in order to see if a brand can be found for navigational mobile queries. In this case we’ll use “Mercedes mobile site”, which according to the Google Adwords Keyword tool gets about 1,300 searches per month in Google.

Entering these keywords in Google should return the m.mbusa.com site, since the query is navigational and there’s little competition. However, when I entered the query, no such web site was found.

In fact, the first result was Mercedes.mobi, which was the only thing that looked like an official site on the page. The rest of the articles had to do with the recent site redesign.

Doing a site: search in Google, it became evident that the site was not listed for the navigational query because it was not eligible for that query—that the site developers had neutered it by nofollowing the site with robots.txt.