1. Virality is not the only measurement of success. Producing consistent videos that garner solid viewership is a big achievement in itself.
2. 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.
3. The concept behind YouTube’s TrueView is giving users a choice but also maximizeing the value for advertisers.
4. Giving users the ability to skip ads acts as an incentive for advertisers to make their content as entertaining as possible.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.

(On shares of your videos) I think that it is a good proxy for, “Are you creating great content that people want to watch and share?”

At the same time if you break down going viral and what it means, it means that people are watching content and they’re deeming it interesting, or deeming it worthy to share with their friends. I think that it is a good proxy for, “Are you creating great content that people want to watch and share?” I think at its heart, it’s a great thing that certain advertisers are able to achieve that, but by no means do I think it’s absolutely necessary.

Eric: What role can organic YouTube search play in helping people get views for their videos? Is that often or frequently a significant component of a publisher’s or advertiser’s success in getting views for their videos?

Lane: Search is a way for a user to explicitly call out the content that they want. If a friend told me about an Audi ad, then I might go seek that out through search. It’s a strong signal of intent, and it’s a strong signal that someone found out about that content in some way.

At the same time we can grow a lot of our viewership with video advertising because we are able to suggest related videos to a user while they are watching another video. So if I’m on the watch page, and I’m watching a video about cars and I see an interesting Audi video, that’s less of a direct signal of intent, but I still get to the video and discover that video in a different way. Organic YouTube search is a very strong signal of intent whereas other forms of discovery may not be as strong.

Eric: If you’re trying to maximize views, you want to use multiple platforms. For example, it makes sense to embed the video on your website. It makes sense to make it friendly to both YouTube and Google search and it makes sense to use the advertising mechanisms like AdWords for video to help boost the total viewership and exposure your video gets.

Lane: Yes, exactly. It’s very similar to a small or medium size business; it’s very similar to creating a website. You create a website and then potentially not many people find it unless you start to promote it through social media or through advertising or lots of other ways. You can think of a video in a very similar way.

Eric: I know there are several different YouTube advertising products. Can you take a moment and define for us what specifically AdWords for a video is that’s distinct from the other products?

Lane: Sure. So AdWords for a video is really focused around our TrueView family of formats. The notion behind TrueView is that both the user experience and the advertiser value are maximized when the user gets a choice.

For example TrueView in-stream allows a skip button, or puts a skip button, on an in-stream ad and doesn’t charge the advertisers until the user finishes the ad or watches it for 30 seconds; whichever comes first. So it gives the user a choice, but it also incentivizes the advertiser to create better content. And that’s the premise behind TrueView, that we want to give users a choice and we want to maximize the value for advertisers. And it turns out it benefits our partners as well because it allows them to retain their audience.

Eric: When exactly do the AdWords for video ads show up in the user’s experience?

Lane: All AdWords for video ads belong to the TrueView family, which means that people have to choose to watch your ad. There are a few ways that viewers will encounter the ad formats. One way is through the YouTube search function – this is a format called TrueView in-search. If I do a search for a movie, for example, I’ll see ads for a movie trailer at the top, denoted with a yellow background and the word “Ad” in the corner.

We also have the TrueView in-stream format, which is a skippable pre-roll video ad that plays before a piece of video content. We have another similar format called TrueView in-slate which gives people the option to watch one of three ads, or see regular commercial breaks throughout the video. This format is only for longer-form content. Then finally we have the TrueView in-display option, where ads appear alongside other YouTube videos as a recommended video.

Eric: We’ve established that success isn’t defined by being viral, but Baljeet published an article that a video doesn’t actually have to be funny to be successful, and I think a lot of people think that’s the case.

Lane: There are all types of content that people can create that is not necessarily funny that can be successful. Some things that come to mind are companies like ModCloth and RevZilla. In these cases, the content is not meant to be funny, it’s meant to educate the audience, or answer a question, or tell the audience something they didn’t know.

So there are all different types of content that can succeed in engaging the user while not necessarily becoming something that they share with 100 friends because they think it’s funny in this case. Modcloth is a great example of a brand that creates a variety of content with a goal of getting users interested in their brand. They also have product videos that they run for people who are already interested in ModCloth, which they embed in product pages on their website.

Eric: Can you expand a bit more on the ModCloth strategy as you see it?

Lane: There are different types of messages that they try to tell when users are at different stages of being interested or buying from ModCloth.

For someone who has never heard of ModCloth before, they use more of a general message that speaks to fashion and emails and essentially doesn’t get very specific, but can be aspirational and can pique a user’s interest.

Whereas once that user may be visiting the site often, or you know is interested in that first ad, then they may show something more specific like a piece of clothing, or they want to show off a pair of shoes, or something like that. So it’s taking that user through a purchase funnel for them.

Eric: How might this differ if the same brand were to do the same thing on TV? Are there elements that tend to make it different, or do you think it would be extremely similar if they would try to do the same thing on TV?

Lane: On TV it’s very difficult, if not impossible to grab that ad off the TV or to share that ad with your friends; whereas for YouTube that’s the natural progression of what users do already. They’re used to grabbing the URL or clicking the share button and sharing it with their friends. So I think that’s a fundamental difference between YouTube and TV.

The second thing is the viewership and the engagement that happens online is greater, and it’s very measurable so an advertiser can measure how many views they got. They can measure that instead of impressions. They can measure the view rate and how much users are watching. So I think that’s an important distinction whereas on TV some of this may be a little less measurable.

Eric: Right, a really advanced YouTube advertiser would be making use of those analytics in an aggressive fashion to figure out what’s working and what’s not to tune their campaign.

Just because a video doesn’t go viral doesn’t mean that sharing isn’t going on. In fact, in the case of ModCloth, which target female fashion, when one woman shares an ad with someone else she might be saying: “Hey doesn’t this look really cool, what do you think?” That is a bit more of an explicit endorsement than might be the case with a video that goes viral.

Lane: That’s one great advantage of YouTube and online videos is that users are very used to sharing and when you have ads that feel like content it feels very natural to share that content and you blur the lines between advertising and content. That’s really what we’ve been advocating our advertisers to do.

“That’s one great advantage of YouTube and online videos is that users are very used to sharing and when you have ads that feel like content it feels very natural to share that content and you blur the lines between advertising and content”.

I think you’re right in that when I share a ModCloth video and I say, “hey check out this piece of apparel,” there are multiple effects going on. One is I’m sharing it with a friend and I’m endorsing it in a way. The other is that the video is a really expressive medium in that case where the user on the other end of that sharing can really get a good sense of that product for example.

That said, there are plenty of viral videos that help brands promotes themselves, perhaps by leading me to have a more favorable opinion of a brand. For example, I may start to think of Audi as a cool brand because I see their paintball duel ad.

Eric: What does Revzilla do?

Lane: They sell motorcycle products: motorcycle jackets, gear, helmets, that type of thing and they do an excellent job of using video.

They use it to answer common questions about things like the fit of their clothes. They use it to showcase products in really meaningful ways. And this kind of goes back to one of your earlier questions about what are the other things that someone can do. With all of that video content, RevZilla has established themselves as an authority on the subject of motorcycle gear.

This is a great goal for small-to-medium sized businesses when they embark on a video campaign – establish themselves as an expert. If you’re choosing between two brands and one has 100 videos all about their products and can speak really well about all the products that they’re selling versus someone who you don’t much insight into, as a consumer, you’re more likely to choose the brand that appears to be the expert.

Eric: It really is content marketing play which can help you build an audience and a following over time, as well as establish relationships with other experts.

Lane: TurboTax does that really well. Right now it’s a timely example because they’ve kicked off a big push for tax season so they’re establishing themselves with all the videos on their channel as the experts on taxes. For example, if you want to know what a “dependent” is, they have a video for that.

Eric: There’s another component to the RevZilla example, which is this notion of driving conversion, right? If somebody wants an instant answer to your question, like how to pick the right product, I imagine that sites that aren’t able to effectively answer questions like that lose sales that RevZilla doesn’t because they have the ability to answer the question on the spot.

Lane: Absolutely. Users are smart and they seek out information. RevZilla is a great example of someone who gives them the information right at the time that they’re making that purchasing decision. So if they’re trying to figure out one element over the other and they can see someone try it on and fit and can see how it works, right when the user is making that decision, you’ve given them the information that they need.

Eric: Can you talk about the analytics you make available?

Lane: There are two graphs and YouTube analytics. One is a relative audience retention and the other is absolute audience retention graph and I think those two graphs are incredible tools to let a creator know how they’re doing relative to other videos that are similar length as well as how they’re doing generally.

The most advanced advertisers will do a lot of testing. They’ll actually 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 actually modify the video based on what they learn. We try to give advertisers and creators, for that matter, all the tools that they need to optimize their viewer retention over time.

Eric: That’s really part of that process of fine tuning the video advertising campaign in each case over time, which is great. Even if you have a video campaign that you’re supplementing with advertising, that’s a great way to do that.

Is it more difficult to make an advertising video be successful rather than just a normally published video?

“If your goal is to answer the biggest frequently asked question on your site, it’s been successful if you get less phone calls asking you” (that question)

Lane: I always tie this back to the goal. If your goal is to answer the biggest frequently asked question on your site, it’s been successful if you get less phone calls asking you your most frequently asked question on the site. If you want to build a big audience and reach people you’ve never reached before and have people share the videos with millions of people and go viral, I think that’s a pretty high bar for success.

But at the same time, in both of these cases, you’re making thoughtful content for a purpose. So if you want something to get shared a lot, you may skew towards doing something like a prank of doing something unexpected, something that surprises the user and makes them want to share that.

Whereas if your goal is to drive a sale of an individual product on a fashion plate, then you’re explicitly trying to give them a different experience. I think it comes back to the goal of the content that you’re producing and being thoughtful about giving the user the right thing to accomplish that goal.

Eric: For many people, the goal of trying to make something viral is the wrong goal, because you might find yourself in a situation where–to use a baseball analogy–if you’re at the plate with two out at the bottom of the ninth and the bases are loaded and it’s a tie game, a single will do very well. You probably shouldn’t be swinging for the fence.

Lane: That’s right. A lot of people are trying to achieve business goals that don’t necessarily equal a viral video.

Eric: Do you have tips for people on how to improve their chances of having a video campaign stand out more or have a better chance at success?

Lane: Absolutely, the first is to start with great content and have that content organized in a thoughtful way on your channel. If I land on your channel as a user set things up so I can easily understand the types of content you have on the channel and if I’m interested in the content you have.

When it comes to the an ad campaign, having a strategy about how you’re promoting that content is key. Are you trying to build awareness across a broad set of users and then re-market a different message to those users? Or are you trying to target users who are further down the purchase funnel?

It comes down to again, what type of business goal you have. Starting with great content, organizing it well on the channel, and putting that all together in campaigns with a thoughtful goal, I think is a 30,000 foot view.

Eric: Thanks Lane!

Lane: Thank you Eric!

About Lane

Lane is a product manager at Google and YouTube. He is the Co-founder of Miracle One Wines & Bluebird Wines. He is a big fan of the interwebs, creating stuff, unique vino and long days outside. You can follow Lane on Twitter.

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.

For 7 of the 9 e-tailers, the bounce rate went up. For e-tailers 1, 3, 5, 6, and 9, the increase in bounce rate was quite dramatic. So this means that these sites should not target gift queries, right? After all, an increase in bounce rate suggests a poor quality experience for the user. Ok, great, let’s stop optimizing these pages for gift queries, they don’t work on our sites!

Not so Fast!

Before we make a rash decision, let’s look at some more data. Here is the conversion rate for gift and non-gift queries for the same 9 e-tail sites:

This tells a very different story. The conversion rate on these queries increased for all 9 e-tail sites. In fact, for 7 of these etailers, conversion went up between 14 and 70%. Wow. Let’s take a look at the data in bar chart format for emphasis:

Bet you’re glad you didn’t change your pages to stop emphasizing gift queries now!

Takeaways

I have 5 conclusions for you:

1. Lower bounce rates do not necessarily mean more conversion. In this case, bounce rate and conversion rise together for this class of queries.

2. We also see that data can be mis-used. No single measurement of user behavior is likely to be sufficient. You need to step back and look at the bigger picture before making decisions. We all understand that intuitively, but this data shows us a great example of one real scenario where you could make a mistake if you are not careful.

3. I believe the reason why these contradictory signals occur is that people who enter gift related queries already have a high degree of intent. Basically, they want to take immediate action. As a result, we see two things happening:

1. If they do not quickly see what they want on the first page, they’re out of there right away. They will be faster to draw a conclusion on whether or not you are going to be able to help them. You might say that they will be more judgmental.
2. Since they are on a mission, if you have the goods they want, or something close enough, they will pull the trigger quickly. No need to go see another site, as you have helped them complete their mission.

In fact, Akanksha Baid of BloomReach says, “this same phenomenon that we see with gift queries can manifest itself for all queries with strong intent. For example, “products for clogged sinks”, “sinus relief medicine”, or “dresses for a beach wedding” each express a very strong intent. Determining which queries have strong intent and capturing that intent with relevant pages is key to improving conversion rates for e-tailers.”

4. If you weren’t already passionate about landing page optimization, this is one more piece of data that underscores how important it is to invest heavily in that practice. People who are on a mission to buy something appear to make snap decisions. Make sure they see that they can get what they want quickly!

5. This also highlights just how difficult it would be for search engines to use “simple” bounce rate as a ranking signal. By this I mean the traditional Analytics bounce rate, where a user visits only one page before leaving the site. By itself, bounce rate has a lot of drawbacks as a ranking signal.

More sophisticated metrics such as people who return to the SERPs quickly, and then click on a different result make much more sense.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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…
4. 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?
5. 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.
6. 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).
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.

But where it starts to get really fun is here on the right-hand side. You see a post from my friend Geoffrey on Facebook from a couple days ago. I can see Bob Bennison, the Chicago guy who’s often talking about something political. I can scroll down and see lots of different updates from all of my friends on Facebook that talk about Hawaii.

Until recently, we only showed you what my friends Liked, and if they were from there. Now, we’re indexing much more data from Facebook. This includes relevant status updates, comments and photos.

We still get Like and Share data, but because we now get the update and comment data, we amped up the amount of data that we index from Facebook by about a factor of 30, people will see, on average, about five times as many results as they actually would have seen before in the previous experience.

Eric Enge: So previously you were just getting Like and Share data, and now you’re getting a whole lot more?

Stefan: Yes, we were just getting Like and Share data, and some profile data; where you were born, where do you work, those types of things. Now, it’s doing a much better job of using the social footprint that people leave across the web.

While we are doing a much better job of getting users relevant information from their friends, we know they’re not the only piece of the puzzle. The other area that we have focused on, what we termed in the old version, are the “experts.” We’re looking across Klout, Google+, blogs, Twitter, all sorts of social mediums. We’re actually pulling in experts about Hawaii. So here is Ryan Ozawa, who has a 69 Klout score about Hawaii. This is ‘Hawaii Five-0’, the TV show. Here’s Sara Benson, who’s written an Oahu guide and posted it on Google+. Here’s another Hawaii Twitter account.

So now you can see that we’re really scanning across all ranges of social networks where people are leaving their social footprints. We’re breaking down the silos and bringing them all together into that right rail. So it is definitely a big change from what we had before.

Another example we can use is my daughter’s love of Maroon 5. Here on the right, we’ve got the social results.

I’ve got my buddy John who shared a video of the band. There’s also a photo of my daughter with an autographed Maroon 5 guitar that my sister posted. (Somehow Santa knew to bring her the guitar even though she doesn’t play, but she’s going to learn.) Because my sister shared this on Facebook, and the update has the word ‘Maroon 5’ in it and because of my relationship with my sister on Facebook, I’m actually able to see that photo right here in the experience. Pretty slick.

I can see other friends as well. My friend Whitney posted a photo and a comment about Maroon 5. And as I mentioned before, I can scroll down and see their official social networking accounts. Here’s Adam, who’s the lead singer, and here are some questions and answers about Maroon 5. Again, right there inside the experience.

So as you can see, these are all things that never would have made it to the top of a search page, no matter how personalized it would be. Something like this, the official site, is likely to always take precedence over the picture of my daughter on the page. It demonstrates why we think it’s so important to not blend the results, because really, how can anyone decide which of those to rank more highly?

They’re really, fundamentally, two different ranking models. One is ranking using a static rank, or page rank; the left-hand side of the results. On the right side is a whole new notion of social rank;

They’re really, fundamentally, two different ranking models. One is ranking using a static rank, or page rank; the left-hand side of the results. On the right side is a whole new notion of social rank; how we can actually figure out, from the many networks that we have feeds from and scan, what of that data is likely to be the most important thing to show a user for that query.

Eric Enge: So, the web-related signals are not influencing the order of the social results, and the social signals are not influencing the order of the web results?

Stefan: In this experience, that’s absolutely true. That being said, we are looking at social signals to annotate these pages, and honestly, if something is getting a huge number of, say, Tweets, for example, that does factor in to the ranking as far as showing fresher content up top. But it’s very nuanced right now. Generally, those two are fairly separate.

You can see here, for example, that we’ve annotated the domain for Stubhub, showing a friend of mine who Liked Stubhub. It’s also showing me the list of shows. This will boost it in the results because of my location and the fact that Maroon 5 is coming to Seattle in about a month or so.

If I hover over the little thumb, I see my buddy who Likes this domain, and this result was actually boosted in the rank because of the fact that this is talking about a Seattle location, Key Arena. So that actually benefited from two different signals, one a social one and one a geospatial one.

Eric Enge: So what we see there is an example of a social signal causing an annotation and a local signal causing a ranking change.

Stefan: Exactly.

Eric Enge: And something that we’ve all known for a while is that when there are bursts of activity in social media, a related query deserves a freshness impact. This causes something to be seen as news. However, Likes are not being used in a fashion similar to links to re-rank web search results.

The notion of a Like is still a little bit perplexing from a ranking perspective.

Stefan: Not now, no. 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? We tend to not just use a pure Like signal to do ranking. There may be some small boost. Over 1,000 signals are used in ranking, right?

Eric Enge: Yes. So the user’s intent behind a Like is pretty ambiguous.

Stefan: Right.

Eric Enge: Sometimes it’s just telling the person that, hey, I read your article.

Stefan: Exactly.

Eric Enge: I wonder if everybody in America was Liking their 10 favorite things they encountered every day if the Like could be a very rich signal, but I guess it really doesn’t work that way.

Stefan: If you scoped it that distinctly saying that you Like the things that you find interesting every day, that would help the signal. But today, we don’t even know why someone’s Liking something, which is why comments and those types of things are actually a little more interesting.

At least we can use some semantic parsing to see that one person loves Maroon 5, and that someone else dislikes Maroon 5. And that begins to allow us to actually do some more interesting work with the social signal beyond just the binary of Like.

Eric:What about Facebook Shares?

Shares are basically the same as likes – not used a ton for web ranking …

Stefan:Shares are basically the same as likes – not used a ton for web ranking except in velocity (like Twitter).

Eric Enge: Yes, but the key value with your new social search implementation is that you’ve got two modalities of searching, and you’re now allowing those to be presented simultaneously. While you were doing that before, but with the update and comment data your data set increased by 30 times.

Stefan: That’s right. It’s a huge number. It makes it really hard because now there is just so much more data and you can see how fast it gets returned. So it’s a very complex data set to run.

Eric Enge: What are the kinds of queries that will do well in social search? Where is its sweet spot?

Stefan: The types of queries that are going to do well in social search are ones that generally might not have definitive answers. They’re not objective queries. The tallest mountain in the world is clearly Mount Everest. That’s probably not the best candidate for a social search result.

But when you’re talking about queries like “where should I go in Seattle for good food,” or “what’s the best way to get from the Chicago Airport to the Gold Coast,” you are likely going to get the most from returning a person who might know. To go from O’Hare Airport all the way into the city, I can go Uber, I can get a regular taxi, I can rent a car, or I can take a train.

But there are a number of variables that factor into that decision. For example, when do I arrive? Well, if I arrive at midnight then getting a car into the city is not that big a deal because there’s not a lot of traffic. However, if I arrive at 4:00 PM, I would never take a car because it would take an hour and a half, whereas I could hop a train and be there in 20 minutes; so there’s that variable.

There’s also my price sensitivity. Maybe I’m OK to spend a lot or maybe I only want to spend a little on getting in. There are a number of variables that I have to take into account when it comes to getting from the airport to the city. A search result from a standard web algorithm search isn’t likely going to be able to capture and factor in all those variables.

A person, however, who say lives in Chicago or has posted photos of the airport for example or likes a particular car service on the web, might be seen as a person that I know who is likely able to have some insight into that particular question.

Eric Enge: You can also ask follow-up questions, right? The price sensitivity, or the time of day would probably not be specified in an initial search query.

Stefan: Right. Let’s say that I come from a smaller town where the rush hour is really almost non-existent. Let’s use Spokane, Washington as an example, where rush hour is from about 5:00 to 5:05. Because I’m coming from a small town I may never think to ask about time of day whereas if I find somebody who lives in Chicago and I ask them, “Hey, how should I get downtown from the airport?” The first question they’re likely going to ask you is what time you getting there because they know that’s a real factor in that decision making.

It’s honestly an uncharted territory as far as what are the best types of queries for social search.

Stefan: It’s honestly an uncharted territory as far as what are the best types of queries for social search. It may be that in social search that every query should have a person as an answer. So even something like “what’s the height of Mount Everest,” a very definitive, objective query should have human results. I have a friend named Jeff who has actually climbed Everest a few times, so Jeff and his Everest photos might show up as a result of that query I’m doing in Bing.

I might even decide, “Well, shoot, I know Everest is the tallest mountain, but Jeff can actually give me some real detail as to just how tall it is.” Maybe he can tell me how little oxygen there is at that height or I could see pictures of what it looks like from the top of the mountain that he’s climbed a number of times. I’m often surprised by what actually happens when I do those queries and get those social results on the side.

Eric Enge: Can we look at some example queries?

Stefan: Sure, I’ll try “Seattle restaurant” in my co-workers account, Chris, and see what happens. Here’s a very good example of a query where there’s a lot of structured data and a lot of web results. Obviously a very generic kind of query.

Here on the right-hand side, I see an update from one of Chris’ friends that Nell’s is one of the best restaurants in Seattle you never heard of. I tend to agree. It’s a really good restaurant. But he’s actually posted a comment on Facebook linked to the restaurant right there.

If I scroll a little further down, I can see Rebecca who’s actually asked a question, “What are some good vegan restaurants in Seattle?” And what’s cool about this now is I can actually see there are four responses back to that. So I can click on that, and go and look at that.

I now have all these restaurants that that are vegan restaurants from people that have commented on that from all across Facebook.

I can message back and ask her, “Hey, which one did you choose and was it any good?” Something you just aren’t going to get even in the great web search experience that we have here on Bing.

Also, it’s not just my friends. We also talk a lot about the fact that we should be able to find information across all these different silos of social data whether it’s Quora or Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus, some blogs or LinkedIn. There are a number of these vertical social networks that allow us to build a better response to query using all those kind of footprints. Our approach to this is really unique.

We also see an influential food blogger in Seattle named Ann Lee. We know she is influential there are a number of things that we use to determine that. We look at what she posts and how often she writes, then we run a semantic algorithm against that to figure out that she’s influential about food.

I can hover here and see that that’s her Twitter account so that I can click on it and actually see it. These are actual blogs where she’s written about Home Grown Café, Darius Pie, all right here. I am very proud of this result. We also found her blog and pulled through all the reviews that she’s left about Seattle restaurants into this result from her blog.

This module alone 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. That’s something no one else is doing right now and I just think it’s remarkable.

Eric Enge: Excellent. I’m going to guess that entertainment related searches work well, too.

Stefan: This is an interesting one. I did a search for Coldplay. On the right rail it looks like there are some comments from Facebook.

Eric Enge: I see in the social results someone who has been to a concert, which means you can find out from them whether or not they are as good in concert as they are on the records.

There are lots of bands who don’t do as well on stage as others. You’ve got people who are just known for being tremendous performers and so you can ask those kind of questions.

Stefan: I also like Sara Bareilles and I can see that she’s covered a song named Yellow which is an old Coldplay song that I really enjoy. This result of Sara Bareilles and Coldplay would never have been on page one of the web search results. These are things that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered.

We also show Coldplay’s official Twitter account. We pull in the Klout scores so you know that is it really them. Bing is integrating all these different web services in a way that taps into the social graphs.

Eric Enge: That’s awesome stuff. I understand that people can make things not public in Facebook, but there is information that’s already out there that they published under an older set of rules. What are your thoughts on that?

Stefan: On our social sidebar what you’re seeing from your friends is only information or updates that have been granted permission via Facebook. Nothing is shared that is marked private on Facebook.

We know that privacy is a big deal when thinking about social data.

We know that privacy is a big deal when thinking about social data. We also comb through Twitter, which by definition is public unless you lock down your account. The same is true with blogs, obviously they’re public unless for some reason you’ve got a password on it.

We’re really just mining public social data.

We’re really just mining public social data. Now we get feeds in many cases to make it more efficient so we get the Twitter fire hose, for example, in real time so it’s much more efficient than say crawling. And we get other feeds from Klout for example. That said, the privacy angle is certainly something we’re always thinking about.

Eric Enge: I think people have identified concerns because of the content being exposed in a much more efficient manner. Being able to search this content makes it much easier to find this type of data. For example, I saw something that somebody wrote about a dissident group in China being found through Facebook. It probably could have been done before, but I guess the reality is that it was easier to find because of the search capability.

Stefan: You’re right. We’re certainly making it easier to tap into that social data set However, if someone’s post is public and it has surfaced here, the user can delete it. For example, if Lisa doesn’t like that this particular link surfaced in Facebook, it’s simple for her to go in and either delete it or change the privacy settings on that particular update.

We have that relationship with Facebook, when she changes privacy settings or when she deletes the post from Facebook, we get that update in real time. So the next time you run a query, you wouldn’t see it. Because of the privacy sensitivity that we have, it’s as real time as you can get. The result is then purged from our results in minutes not hours or days.

Eric Enge: I guess it’s incumbent on participants in social media networks to realize that it’s a public environment. If you write it, people can find it, and you need to understand that as you interact on these networks.

Stefan: I think people are getting more knowledgeable about privacy settings. I think they are becoming either more comfortable with things being shared or they’re being more careful about what they are sharing. This space is changing quickly and networks are rising and falling so quickly, that it’s tough for the average person to keep up on all this stuff. But I think if you are going to engage in it, then you need to make sure you understand both the benefits and the responsibilities that come with social data.

Eric Enge: Did Bing play a role in advising or working with Facebook on their Graph Search or did you focus primarily on integrating it into Bing itself?

Stefan: We’ve focused primarily on the latter and how we take that Social Graph data and make it part of Bing. The Facebook Graph Search was something they worked on by themselves. Part of the reason is that it’s a very different problem. When you think about what Facebook graphs are doing, it’s searching structured data. Let’s look at search for a user on Facebook. You can see what musicians that she listens to. Now we get to see all the musicians that see has actually liked across Facebook. Then you can refine that search.

If I am more curious about what movies she liked, I can search on that instead. In essence you can see what they’re really doing which is great. It is allowing you to tap into that structured set of data that they have about that account so they know that this account likes these certain things.

Or, you can search on Superman, the movie, which is, coming out soon.

If you want to go and do a web search, you can just go down here and boom, hit that and then you’re off to the races using Bing’s technology to actually conduct a web search. There are the web search results for Superman right inside of Facebook and this is all powered by Bing.

So that’s the Bing contribution, if you will, to Graph Search. But overall the social pieces in the Facebook experience were all developed by Facebook.

Eric Enge: Does Bing implement its own algorithm on the social data from Facebook for its social search results?

We use our own algorithm on the social search data for our social search results.

Stefan: We use our own algorithm on the social search data for our social search results. It is completely independent of what Facebook does with Graph Search, even though it operates on the same data set. We had to develop an entirely new method on the right rail to rank social search results. Things that have more updates, likes or comments tend to rank more highly for the same thing as ones that don’t.

Eric Enge: So you are doing your own ranking of the social search content?

Stefan: Yes, very different. Facebook is showing something totally different. When you search for Coldplay on Bing, we give 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. They are two very different methods of retrieval.

Eric Enge: Thanks Stefan!

Stefan: You are most welcome!

About Stefan

Stefan Weitz is a Director of Search at Microsoft and is charged with working with people and organizations across the industry to promote and improve Search technologies. While focused on Microsoft’s product line, he works across the industry to understand searcher behavior and in his role as an evangelist for Search, gathers and distills feedback to drive product improvements. Prior to Search, Stefan led the strategy to develop the next generation MSN portal platform and developed Microsoft’s muni WiFi strategy, leading the charge to blanket free WiFi access across metropolitan cities. A 13-year Microsoft veteran, he has worked in various groups including Windows Server, Security, and IT. Stefan is a huge gadget “junkie” and can often be found in electronics shops across the world looking for the elusive perfect piece of tech. You can follow Stefan on Twitter.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Apps that take advantage of cross-platform functionality are finding much greater success than those that don’t.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.

Eric Enge: An increasing number of television shows are offering supplemental content on the web these days.

Diran: Absolutely. That has caught on very quickly. People are staying and watching the television shows that they want, and they are watching it at the time that it is being shown on their television, instead of watching via their DVR recorded episodes. They are watching it when it is being televised so that they can interact on their third screen devices and be a part of the conversation on their social media stream.

Eric Enge: It’s a brilliant play by the TV networks, because now you get the person to sit down and actually stay in front of their TV during the commercials.

Diran: Yes, absolutely. The biggest proponent of this is the video game industry. You have certain previews and offline content that can be watched on your PC but, in order to get the full experience you have to connect to your game console, and follow along with the app that is provided for that game on your mobile device. A great example of this is Halo which is very popular with the Xbox console. They have an app for both tablets and smartphones. In order to get the full experience and download and unlock some of the secret levels within the game, the gamer must interact with the app and then play it on the console that ties back to the whole multi-screen engagement.

They are working really hard to create this hub of entertainment for their customer’s living rooms. This allows the publisher, Microsoft in this case, to measure the engagement of that content with ads that are within their live tile interface. I think we’re very quickly getting to a place where we’re going to see much more of that multi-screen engagement happen in many more creative ways. We are only seeing it in its earliest stage.

Eric Enge: Right. And what about the mobile option by web publishers?

Diran: There are always questions about how much of their content do they need to revamp and recode in order to fit all these different device screen sizes. Unfortunately, a lot of folks still have to choose between having a really great robust app experience versus a really good browser experience. It is important to have presence in both. There is research out there that allows you to look at and understand which channel is best suited for a particular brand or vertical etc., in terms of an app versus WAP approach for these smaller screen devices.

Eric Enge: Right. There are still a lot of publishers who are not even addressing mobile at all in my experience. This is in spite of the fact that many sites are reporting that between 20% and 30% of their traffic is coming from mobile devices.

Diran: There are a plenty of sites which say that but there are just as many that do not offer an optimized mobile experience. This is part of the struggle that the industry in general is facing. There are just so many little factors to take into consideration when building for mobile. This leads to some delay in adoption by publishers.

Eric Enge: What are your thoughts on responsive web design?

Diran: It’s critical in a lot of different ways for content providers as many brands need a flexible format for web design. There are few publishers out there, other than the big brands, who 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. It’s not a dynamic experience, and it does not respond to screen sizes or abilities of your phone.

There are a lot of services out there that build websites and put together something plain, whether they call it HTML5 or Java, that doesn’t matter. The point is that there is not a lot that is actually being built to clearly represent the brand message in a clean, functional and dynamic way. We see this all the time, when we work with advertisers and brands in terms of tagging their sites for benchmarking and things like that. There are so many different variables that either don’t work, are broken, or cannot be fixed because of these legacy issues that have been in place for a number of years.

Eric Enge: The alternative to responsive web design is to have a couple of predefined canned experiences: one which you might call a small screen experience and one a larger screen experience. I see a lot of people moving towards this.

Diran: I would say that that’s the most common approach out there. People detect the user agent and if the device has a smaller screen size, they offer a page that has very basic content and functionality depending on whether you’re coming from a tablet or a phone. It’s not differentiating between the type of tablet, the screen size, the OS, or anything like that. They’re just creating content that is one-size-fits-all.

I think this is where many of the brand level advertisers are missing out on a lot of opportunities. It also makes sense for certain brands that have too many sub brands to build websites for. If you’re not a P&G and you don’t have tons of money to invest into that sort of infrastructure, what do you do when you have to represent 4 or 5 different brands at the same time?

It’s especially true when we look at pure content providers and pure publishers, especially if we look at the newspaper and magazine industries who are slowly starting to transform their overall content to digital and to adopt a lot of these template based formats rather than anything that is responsive.

Eric Enge: Let’s talk a bit about apps.

Diran: The big trend for apps is that there are just so many of them out there. At a high level, the download rate of apps is increasing fairly quickly, but what is interesting is whether or not that usage or the download of apps is translating to real world usage. We see that an average user downloads approximately 50 apps or so during the course of their phone which is about a 2 year contract, but they tend to use only 7 to 10 applications regularly. The other 40 or so apps remain dormant on their phones.

If you look at retail which happens to be one of those industries where mobile is a really big piece of a pie, we just had a black Friday and several Mondays prior that blew everything away in terms of number of purchases made. When we think about Amazon, we think about the biggest player in retail. They have very robust applications that are available on all mobile platforms, but when you ask people whether they are using the application, most people will say they are using the browser version or the PC version to make those purchases rather than the app.

We do a lot of research to understand that particular level of usage and to determine what are the barriers to purchase in an application are, and to find new ways to make an application easier to use for a consumer. We see lots of data showing people wanting to spend more time in an application because the user experience is much more fluid than a browser. However, when it comes to making that all important conversion, whether it’s submitting personal information or not, people feel a lot more comfortable going through the browser. This is especially true in the larger screen devices.

Eric Enge: If you are going to have an app, there has to be some value added to it being an app experience as opposed to a web experience, right?

Diran: Absolutely. Unless you have a very specific motivation for the user to come back to the application, the application just sits on the phone. So it is on us, as marketers, to help the advertisers and brands become able to create an experience that is compelling not only the first time, but also the second, third, etc., in order for app usage to grow. I just don’t think that we have seen enough of that. There are obviously apps that are doing phenomenally well. But then again, for every app that does really well, there are probably ten out there that don’t.

Eric Enge: What is it about the app environment that offers an advantage to the publisher?

Diran: Google has a very specific tap strategy in terms of creating functional, usable, fast and reliable applications for their ecosystems. For example, there are apps for Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Plus, Google Chat, Google Voice, etc. This enables them to be not only completely visible on their Android platform, but also on a cross platform level, which is a great strategy.

Microsoft is only recently starting to publish apps that are cross-platform, usable in other respects than just delivering plain content. If you think about the way Microsoft has gone about building an app structure, you’ll see the reason why their market share, visibility and brand has dropped, whereas Google’s visibility and market share continue to expand from a publisher point of view.

The Microsoft experience is useful because it is a great way to understand how not to do certain things. If you look at one of their most functional applications, Skydrive, which is their equivalent of Google Drive, you’ll see that it has been around for a number of years but is only now getting some of the attention on a cross-platform level. Another example is OneNote, a really cool note taking application, which not a lot of people are using cross-platform because Evernote has had monopoly on that.

Eric Enge: Any insight into how much people are using apps versus websites and how that’s grown over time?

Diran: No real hard core numbers, but I think on the top line when we measure the total Internet, we have about 101 million total unique visitors to the top 100 properties that are browser specific, whereas the number of app users is about 103 million that have usage across the top 100 properties. This was for the month of October 2012.

Eric Enge: The kinds of things people search for on mobile devices is different from what you see in regular searches, isn’t it?

Diran: Absolutely. The question for mobile devices is more about function and location; it’s a gateway to accomplishing a task. People are much savvier these days in terms of continuing searches on their PC devices and refining that search on their mobile devices. If we look at mobile search pages, both Google and Bing’s mobile search results are more action driven. There are a lot more quick links that are available versus the more general, broad descriptions.

One barrier is that we don’t know when a user is continuing the same search on their PC versus their tablet device versus their smart phone. It is difficult to create a picture without invading any privacy in terms of understanding what it is that users want to do in terms of search.

Eric Enge: Expanding on the local aspect of this, if I’m in the car, and I’m hungry and I type pizza, the result I want is the pizza shop closest to where I am at this moment.

Diran: Right, absolutely. In mobile search there is a transactional mindset, and in your example, the goal is to get someone to make a call or show up at the pizza shop to spend some money. 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.

Eric Enge: The advertising environment on a Smartphone device is very limited. It seems like you have to be one of the top two results, right?

Diran: Absolutely. Again, this is due to the screen size which is a big limitation. People are not going to take more than a few seconds to review the top results and they are definitely not going to go to page 2, 3, or 4 to find what they are looking for.

Eric Enge: Any closing thoughts for us?

Diran: We are definitely in a very interesting phase of our lives in general. Mobile is great to talk about, but the most important thing is to realize that mobile doesn’t exist by itself. There is a huge intersection between mobile and social media and of all the other different formats of media that exist and create an overall advertiser’s brand. Brands should not just talk about mobile as a silo. Instead they need to view it as part of a converged effort in order to make their brand standout.

Eric Enge: Thank you Diran!

Diran: Absolutely, thank you!

About Diran

Diran Hafiz is the Mobile Sales Director at comScore, a global leader in digital marketing intelligence. Diran manages key strategic relationships with client-direct advertisers, premium content partners as well as global advertising holding companies. As a media technologist and self-proclaimed geek, Diran believes that marketers and advertisers share a socio-economic and cultural responsibility to create brand messaging that is integrity-driven, and as a result, focuses on the growth and integration of digital marketing methodologies to maximize brand value and impact.

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.

Here is a look at the Robots.txt file for the site:

Two clear, and common, problems become evident:

A) Multiple sites competing for the same keywords

A site appears for the navigational keyword, but it’s not the site they just redesigned. It’s very likely that Mercedes would prefer that their best performing, most relevant site appears in search results, and Mercedes.mobi likely isn’t it.

To remedy this, some brand manager at Mercedes would have to decide which mobile site she wants to appear, and that site would then be optimized for search. If it’s not Mercedes.mobi, then we would focus our optimization efforts on m.mbusa.com

To be fair, this problem exists with the desktop site as well, as both mbusa.com and Mercedes-benz.com/en are often competing for the same keywords, even if Mercedes-Benz.com and mbusa.com theoretically have different audiences. This is a mobile-specific problem, however, because Mercedes also has this dotmobi indexed, which compounds the problem with the mobile-specific domain.

B) One site excluded from search entirely

The most pressing problem is the exclusion with robots.txt, which happens more often with mobile sites than you might think. Often the developers or well-meaning but uninformed SEOs will exclude the site with robots.txt in order to ensure that the site is not seen as duplicate content by Google. However, this is unnecessary, as I’ve been saying for a few years now, and as Google has confirmed in their recent mobile search guidelines. If mobile URLs are used, it’s only necessary to add switchboard tags to the mobile and desktop sites to let Google know which site is preferred for mobile searchers. If you’re not familiar with switchboard tags, Google explained them in their recent smartphone guidelines:

Annotation in the HTML

On the desktop page, add:

and on the mobile page, the required annotation should be:

This rel=”canonical” tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

Using this method, sites can ensure Google shows the mobile site to mobile searchers and the desktop site to desktop users, and not have to worry about split link equity.

As it is the m.mbusa.com site is a non-sequitur when it comes to Google mobile search traffic, as the only hope it has for getting traffic from Google is redirecting from the desktop URL. Adding the switchboard tags removes the redirect, puts the m.mbusa.com URL in search results (which might give them a slight boost in CTR), and improves the user experience from search overall.

2. Align Site Architecture with Mobile Search Behavior

The next exercise is simple: comparing mobile and desktop searches for the brand and nonbrand terms, and comparing those to the site architecture of the site being audited.

All of this is moot for Mercedes, since the entire mobile site has been nofollwed, but we can still do the exercise as a hypothetical, for when the indexing problem is fixed.

The first thing that we want to do is look at their brand keywords to ensure the concepts people are looking for on mobile devices related to the brand are prominent (or at least represented somewhere) on the site.

For this you can use the Google keyword tool, and enter just the brand name.

Download both the “All mobile devices” report and the “Desktops and laptops” reports. Use Excel’s Vlookup function to map the information into a report that looks like this:

Note that for this example I’ve only pulled U.S. search volume for mobile and desktop keywords with over 1,000 searches each but for your purposes the long tail may be valuable.

Once we have this report we can look for keywords that both have a lot of volume from mobile devices and have more than 30% of the total available search volume between mobile and desktop (represented in green). A couple of things stand out for me when scanning the list:

A) There are a few concepts with a lot of volume from mobile devices that aren’t represented on m.mbusa.com. For example, Mercedes AMG has a lot of search volume from mobile devices, and a lot relative to the total; but the site is on a separate domain: Mercedes-amg.com. There is a mobile version of that site, but it might as well be a desktop site considering how it looks when the phone is oriented vertically.

What’s more, there is a page on m.mbusa.com devoted to this model of Mercedes, but it doesn’t resolve.

Not supported yet? Or not still supported? Either way it’s a bad user experience, and something that is unlikely to rank for these contextually relevant, high volume terms.

AMG isn’t the only concept for which there is search volume but no content. The most egregious is probably the car types, represented by the keyword [Mercedes suv]. There are no category pages representing all of the SUVs that Mercedes has, nor coupes, sports cars, etc. This is because the site is using a transcoder that crawls a site and builds reformatted versions of the pages automatically, and they can’t reformat a page that doesn’t exist.

If you’re not familiar with transcoders, many brands choose mobile solutions that transcode desktop pages because they don’t require internal resources or a lot of budget to implement, but they can have many disadvantages when it comes to SEO. The biggest disadvantage with most is that they only transcode desktop pages and can’t add pages that make sense for the mobile paradigm, or pages that don’t exist on the desktop site.

Because the car type pages on the desktop site use hashtags in the URLs they are inaccessible to spiders, and can’t be indexed as individual pages. There are workarounds, like SWF address, for making these URLs accessible with this technology, or Mercedes could choose to redesign the site with static URLs.

Either way they’re missing out on a big opportunity, as our initial research has shown that those in the market for a new vehicle who don’t yet know what brand they’re looking for mostly search by car type. We categorized the non-brand keywords and put them in a pivot table to get a better sense of the opportunity available, and discovered that the lion’s share of the search volume comes from car types.

There are also many searches for mobile wallpaper, which Mercedes has on their Mercedes.mobi site but not on m.mbusa.com.

When we look at the search volume for mobile wallpaper, and mobile wallpaper for cars, it’s clearly the one concept that is relevant to the brand that searchers are looking for on mobile devices much more than desktops; but it’s not included at all on this site.

It’s difficult to be visible for a query if you don’t have content that’s relevant to it, so for this client we would recommend building out specific pages for relevant car types and characteristics of those car types, as well as combining the Mercedes.mobi site with the m.mbusa.com site (including the wallpaper) in order to better align their site’s information architecture with what consumers are actually looking for.

B) The second part of this that struck me as odd is that when we look at local search terms the volume doesn’t appear to support such prominent placement on the homepage.

When we look at the home page we see that the primary navigation consists of three calls to action: select a vehicle, find a dealer and special offers.

Now it could be that these were selected for reasons other than search behavior, but from the keywords that we’ve seen local information is not as important to this audience as it is to mobile searchers in general. In fact, if we look at the branded keywords above, the few local keywords that appear (Mercedes benz Houston, fletcher jones Mercedes, Mercedes Benz Chicago, Mercedes Benz of buckhead, Mercedes Benz dallas, etc.) actually have less search volume from mobile devices than the average. I don’t know if I would remove it from the homepage, but at least make car types more prominent, as they’re currently absent from the site.

The Results

In performing these two exercises we can see clearly that Mercedes needs help on the mobile SEO front. Based on the initial audit we would recommend the following (in order of priority):

1. Allow Google to crawl m.mbusa.com by changing robots.txt file of the site

2. Implement switchboard tags in the short term to allow Google to understand the relationship between mobile and desktop pages

3. Consolidate duplicate content on Mercedes.mobi and m.mbusa.com with canonical tags or redirects.

4. Address information architecture of the desktop site, as it’s preventing traffic from the desktop and mobile site by excluding certain pages like category pages for car types and characteristics.

5. Address microsites that are duplicating content both for mobile and desktop properties.

6. In the long term we would recommend either using responsive web design for one site, or ideally a hybrid of responsive and mobile only pages so that we can continue to offer things like mobile wallpaper that are important for loyalty marketing and branding. The search behavior is different enough to warrant a few mobile pages, but probably not an entire site.

If this were an actual mobile SEO audit it would be much longer and more in-depth; but I wanted to present a limited version here for this reason:

Mobility changes the SEO game. Whether you have a mobile or responsive site there are issues with search behavior, site architecture and link building that SEOs need to address now if they are going to do their jobs fully in a world where one out of every seven people on the planet own a smartphone. This is one example of how I might do it for a client. Hopefully you have your own ideas and we can have a discussion that will advance the practice, as we’ve done with traditional SEO for more than ten years. But the last thing we can do is ignore it, because these problems aren’t going to detect and resolve themselves.

Hopefully this simple audit helps you do actual mobile SEO on your own sites. If you have questions, feel free to ask in the comments, or on my blog.

Disclosure: Resolution Media does some paid search for Mercedes Benz, but has not been engaged for SEO.

Eric Enge: Hi. I’m Eric Enge, CEO and founder of Stone Temple Consulting. I’m here today with Greg Jarboe, co-founder and president of SEO-PR and author of the book, “YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day,” and we’re going to have some fun talking about some things that people don’t really necessarily know about success in video marketing, and YouTube in particular.

Greg Jarboe: You want me to give away the secret sauce?

Eric Enge: I do.

Greg Jarboe: Oh, man. OK.

Eric Enge: (Said with a smile) I mean, I invited you to our facilities for that explicit purpose. So, let’s dig in. You were telling me just a moment ago about this guy – I apologize, I forget his name – that has this really unique spin on marketing on YouTube. Why don’t you tell me that story?

Greg Jarboe: The guy is named Ray William Johnson, and if you don’t know Ray, that’s OK, you should find out about Ray. Part of the reason why I use Ray as an example in the courses that I teach at Rutgers, for example, is Ray made a million dollars last year in selling advertising on YouTube next to his channel.

Eric Enge: That sounds like a pretty interesting sum of money, and I think you mentioned to me that he had this really unusual insight into how he got people to respond to the ads.

Greg Jarboe: Right. So, Ray has done a number of things right. First of all, he’s funny enough that people watch his videos (and let me put the emphasis on “funny enough.”) They’re also interested in subscribing to his channel partly because he does two new, original videos a week on Tuesdays and Fridays, and he’s got 5.8 million subscribers.

Eric Enge: Wow.

Greg Jarboe: People who say, “Please send me an e-mail the next time one of Ray’s new videos goes up,” so that’s a following. And then what Ray figured out ahead of everybody else is that if people were watching his videos, laughing at his humor, and then going on and doing something else, Ray would remain a poor, starving comedian for the rest of his career. So Ray’s innovation, the one that I show in the classes that I teach that wakes the students up, it’s like, “Say what? He did what?” is Ray has got a couple of things in the middle of each video called “Cool Transition.”

So he does a video that is broken into three parts. And between part one and two, and part two and three, there’s this quote, “cool transition,” and the cool transition is anything but. It’s actually quite boring. It’s actually quite monotonous. It’s actually quite predictable. It’s the part of the video where you start glancing around and seeing what other things are there.

Eric Enge: Right.

Greg Jarboe: And oh, by the way, among the other things that are there are advertisers, and it’s either next to his video, or underneath his video, wherever they have decided to advertise. And what Ray discovered is that when he was slightly boring for a couple of seconds, people would glance around, the click-through rate on the ads next to his videos or superimposed on the bottom of his videos, would go up, and Ray would make more money.

So, as he explained it, it’s like, “If they’re all rolling on the floor laughing, I stay in the poor house.”

Eric Enge: Right.

Greg Jarboe: “If I’m slightly boring… If there’s a speed bump in-between the episodes, where they glance around, that’s money I can take to the bank.”

Eric Enge: So this is where we pause for a second to be boring so people will click on the ads. Oh, wait. I’m actually not running any ads for this video.

Greg Jarboe: Why not? You know, in the old days it used to take a certain threshold before you could become a YouTube partner. It was hard to do.

These days, all you have to do is fill out a form. YouTube is really interested in monetizing more and more of the videos. You could become a YouTube partner this afternoon.

Eric Enge: There you go. That’s great. So the insight, if you are trying to make your money by advertising on YouTube, is to allow the opportunity for the person to get distracted, because if your content is continuously compelling from end-to-end, they don’t click.

Greg Jarboe: That’s right. And so it’s like the equivalent of the bathroom break in television.

Eric Enge: Right.

Greg Jarboe: You’ve got to give people a moment to come up for air, look around, and that is a programming discovery I don’t think most people understand.

Eric Enge: That’s awesome. Well, great. Thanks, Greg. I appreciate the opportunity to get that great tip from you, and we’ll shoot another video real soon.

Greg Jarboe: OK.

About Greg

Greg Jarboe is the president and co-founder of SEO-PR and author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day. He is also one of the 25 most successful online marketing gurus profiled in Michael Miller’s “Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus”, published by Wiley in 2008.