Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique used to assure that customers searching for a product or service can easily find a company’s website on search engines such as Google. Just as a physical location is essential for brick-and-mortar stores, search engine rankings are essential in driving walk-in traffic to a website.

How potential or qualified customers find websites for a product or service

1. Direct traffic

A user finds a website by typing the web address directly into a browser or by clicking on a bookmark or an email link. These are typically customers that are familiar with the company and are maybe repeat visitors.

2. Referrals

Users are directed to websites by clicking on a link from another website. For example, linking from a Facebook page to a corporate website would produce referral traffic. Ideally, referrals will be qualified customers possessing a desire to buy products from the website they are referred to.

3. Search engines

Analyze web content and create a ranking of websites that most likely will correspond to keywords that a customer uses to search for information. For example, typing the keywords “search engine optimization” in a Google search will provide a list of websites that provide information or services dealing with SEO.

Generally, a company has more control over direct or referral traffic than over search engine traffic. In addition, direct and referral traffic is influenced more by an organization’s offline marketing. SEO seeks to provide a strategy for improving a website ranking resulting in increased traffic to that website.

Two types of search engine results that appear

1. Pay per click (PPC)

These results are usually prominently displayed on top or on the side of the search results. To attain these listings, companies enroll in services like Google Adwords to budget resources into certain keywords and pay a fee whenever a customer clicks on the link. A well-orchestrated PPC campaign is the quickest way to drive qualified traffic to a website.

2. Organic or natural results

These are the rank-ordered results provided below the PPC results. These results are attained on the merits of the website and are not purchased. However, since most customers will not look at several pages of search results, a high organic placement, preferably in the top three positions, is necessary to succeed in driving qualified traffic to a website.

How search engines rank websites

The criteria used to rank websites in search results vary by the search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the others) which are constantly evolving. Although these criteria are not publicized, general strategies applied consistently over time will increase website rankings. Despite promises offered by some SEO companies, attaining a high search engine ranking will not happen overnight.

Although the exact formulas are not widely publicized, search engines provide high ranks to websites that are relevant, important, trustworthy, authoritative, and popular. Any strategy that seeks to increase these five criteria, will ultimately improve your search engine optimization.

Five non-technical strategies for SEO

1. Improve relevance by writing better web copy

Writing better web copy that focuses on how a product meets customer needs will help to improve your search engine rankings. In addressing the needs of the customer, web copy will naturally be filled with rich keywords. Avoid writing copy specifically designed to increase web rankings. Ultimately a website needs to be written for customers and not web rankings.

2. Improve by increasing the number and quality of inbound links

Search engines look at both the number and the quality of those links when determining rankings. By registering with web directories like DMOZ or getting referral traffic from high traffic sites like Wikipedia, websites can improve site visibility and perceived importance. Companies can increase links to their site by regularly providing new and entertaining content. Providing content including videos, games, and other interactive features that people want to share with their friends is a great way to encourage other websites to link to yours.

3. Become trustworthy by being ethical

Questionable tactics like providing pages with long lists of keywords and little usable content will eventually lead to penalties by search engines. Encouraging trust among customers, just like in brick-and-mortar business, is important in increasing sales and search engine ranking. Provide customers with a contact page and give them the opportunity to comment on products and services received.

4. Become an authority by networking

Develop a reputation as an authority with a product or service by using networking sites such as LinkedIn or by creating blogs and topic relevant articles or whitepapers. Over time customers will begin to associate the company with being an expert on the products and services it offers. Not only will this perceived authority increase traffic to the website, but it will also ultimately increase search rankings.

5. Increase popularity by encouraging repeat visitors

Marketing is a long-term proposition aimed at meeting and satisfying customer need. Satisfying customer need will encourage repeat visitors and repeat visitors will increase traffic. By providing relevant, interactive content that is demanded by customers, the website will become more popular and ranking will increase over time.

When using nontechnical techniques, sound marketing principles will ultimately lead to increased web rankings. If you’re looking for technical SEO strategies you can use Google Webmaster Tools.

Got any strategies you would like to talk about? Share them in the comments.

Oath had been renamed Verizon Media and Yahoo Gemini had switched to the name “Oath Ad Manager” only recently but Verizon (who agreed to the acquisition of Yahoo Inc. in 2016) are clearly trying to consolidate and stabilize the decade-long crumbling of the Yahoo empire. Regardless of the ultimate life expectancy of much of the Yahoo portfolio, the status quo was always on borrowed time.

The key question for agencies and advertisers is, what will it mean in the management of your search advertising?

Impact

The whole handover from Yahoo to Bing Ads is going to be far shorter than version 1.0 of this arrangement, which was implemented around 11 years ago. Only two weeks were allotted from the first blush to full transition, which is now, at the end of March.

The biggest impact here will be in the advertiser workflow. Obviously, you have one less platform but you also have a far better platform set as Bing and Google are very similar now. Bing will, thanks to its increase in traffic data, be able to introduce smart, query-level bidding solutions approximate to Google in a shorter timeframe than before. This will be great news for those seeking efficiency and less time spent on the Bing platform.

From an account management point of view, your year-on-year reviews are going to be more complicated. But you’re also going to have one less budget to forecast. So you win some, you lose some.

Scope

Bing Ads will account for around 35% of search traffic in the US. In international markets where Yahoo is a bigger search engine than Bing, there will be a huge jump.

Since responsive ads (native ads by another name) are in Bing Ads just as they are in Oath/Gemini, your creative will continue to deliver on websites but at a higher volume in a single account.

Search will be easier to control since Oath/Gemini had a different set of options and features, and had very different ad types.

The transition checklist

• Assuming you keep your budgets in place on Yahoo and boost your Bing budgets to cope with the impending traffic influx, you should be fine. No action will be needed on Yahoo since the ads will stop serving automatically.
• Setting up Bing conversion tracking on your website becomes even more of a priority if you haven’t already.
• To counteract the year-on-year comparison issues, just ensure you download all of your Yahoo data, and you should be fine.
• If you’re not particularly familiar with Bing (or are not on it) then this is the time to get to know it much better. And, frankly, if you know Google Ads, it shouldn’t be a stretch. However, there is an excellent Academy site you should look over and, with this Yahoo development, achieving an accreditation has even more value.
• The good news is that if you have yet to use Bing Ads, the process for getting started is way easier than you may imagine. You can simply create a Bing Ads account and then import your Google account wholesale with the least amount of fuss. There are a few elements you’ll need to tweak once the content is imported (such as bidding strategies and bids in general) but you’ll probably find it to be a relatively painless process.

Bing growth

A big takeaway from the last year or so is that Bing is heavily on a growth trajectory. Here are a few data points:

• Since 2015, they have grown US search share from 31% to 34% in 2018 (includes Yahoo/AOL)
• Internationally, Bing has grown at a faster pace (UK: 17% to 20%, FR: 11% to 16%)
• Bing Ads now has access to LinkedIn audiences (currently beta but launching fully soon)
• Bing is an OS-level search engine across not just Windows but increasingly popular Microsoft computing devices, plus Xbox.
• Bing is the voice search engine on Amazon Alexa and the latter’s diversification of Echo and Alexa-compatible devices for presence all over your home and in your car is another crucial factor for the future.
• Bing Ads covering all of Yahoo search ads (and, of course, powering Yahoo organic search) this year is a significant cherry on top of all of this.

Conclusion

Be prepared to work harder on optimizing your Bing accounts and you should see more traffic and sales than ever (especially if you never before waded into the murky Yahoo Gemini waters).

Steve Plimmer is the Head of Account Management US at ESV Digital. He can be found on Twitter @SPlimmer_ESV.

Currently, one third of all time spent online is accounted for by watching video and it is predicted that 80% of all internet traffic will come from video in 2019.

Videos are engaging growing numbers of users and are consequently having an impact on the SERPs. Forrester estimates that the chances of getting a page one spot on Google increases by 53 times with video. This also translates into clicks; video has been seen to boost traffic from organic listings by as much as 157%.

Video is appearing in an increasing range of contexts and the type of video content available to marketers – such as live streaming, 360 and virtual reality (VR) – is diversifying. So how is the way we search for video changing?

YouTube: the video search engine?

YouTube is the second most popular site in the world according to Alexa. It receives around 30m visits per day.

The behavior of its users also proves the stickiness of video content. Visitors on average spend more than 8 minutes on YouTube per day, and each visit takes in an average of over four pages on the site.

However, YouTube’s popularity and high rates of engagement do not mean that all these users are coming to the site and using its search tool to find the content they need. We know enough about YouTube behavior to understand traffic is most likely to enter the site via a link to a certain video (often from Google) and that users frequently navigate on-site by clicking the suggested videos in the sidebar or watching what the service autoplays next.

That said, there is some research out there to highlight how big a search engine YouTube is.

Back in 2017, Moz and Jumpshot looked at (US only) data which split up Google’s properties and included other leading sites (e.g. Amazon) in an effort to better understand search behaviors. Of ten sites, YouTube ranked third for search share with 3.71% of searches. This is lower than Google.com and Google Images, but ahead of Yahoo!, Bing and Facebook.

Video and Google Search

While 3.71% may seem like a relatively small piece of the pie, when we remember the scale of search activity, YouTube certainly holds its own as a property of this type.

And while it is important to understand ranking, visibility and optimization with regard to YouTube’s SERPs, search marketers also need to be aware of the importance of Google. YouTube gets more than 16% of its traffic from search and nearly two out of every hundred clicks on Google’s search results pages goes to a YouTube video.

And we can expect this relationship between the two platforms to get stronger.

Google has owned YouTube for more than 10 years and it’s unsurprising that the clear majority of videos the service includes in its SERPs are hosted there. The search engine is also constantly exploring ways for displaying video results in an increasingly rich and intuitive way.

The above example for the search “how to use a baby bjorn” shows the rich feature video carousel in the top position of the SERPs. As we might expect, all of these results are from YouTube.

[For more analysis of YouTube and Google Video SERPs see Amanda DiSilvestro’s great piece published last autumn.]

Alternative options and alerting Google to video hosted on your own site

It doesn’t take too much time searching for video on Google to see that there are alternatives to YouTube. In the first case, there are a number of direct competitors to the service.

Vimeo, for example, has marked itself out as a quality high definition alternative to other video platforms, even while YouTube et al have made moves to offer HD too. Similarly, Amazon-owned Twitch specializes in live-streaming and is a key destination for millions of gaming fans worldwide. Live-streaming certainly happens elsewhere, but Twitch has succeeded within that niche.

Marketers don’t necessarily need to upload video to YouTube or other similar sites in order to be ranked in Google’s SERPs. With suitable on-page markup and sitemaps, video can be hosted on your own site and Google will have a good chance (though nothing is guaranteed!) at indexing this content for relevant searches. Of course, these videos need to be well-optimized with regard to their title, description and thumbnail too. [There’s more information about on-site video optimization here.]

Social video

When researching competitors to YouTube, we should also look at social media platforms; how video content is being shared by marketers and brands within their feeds, and how users are finding video on these platforms.

Back in February, HubSpot published some interesting data looking into how social channels are increasingly becoming destinations for video across selected markets.

While YouTube is clearly seen to be the dominant place to watch video online, Facebook is showing signs of catching up. This is particularly the case in the Latin American markets, where Facebook reaches more than 300m people.

Like Google, Facebook is responding to the desire its users have for watching video. This is reflected when searching on the service, with playable content being very clickable and dominant when making searches, and users also being able to filter video results. Around 1.5bn searches occur on Facebook every day.

The service is also increasingly keen to promote live video content, as well as emerging types of rich video content such as 360 and VR with its Facebook360 arm.

The challenge for Facebook regarding how it delivers content to users via its site search function, is that it needs to balance content uploaded from within the friend networks of its users, with other public posts – and of course it’s keen to favor the former. It is also a closed ecosystem, and will only crawl content that has been shared within the platform.

This is great opportunity for marketers, though. They can work to create video content that is tailored for, and visible in, the Facebook newsfeed. But this content also needs to be searchable within the platform by ensuring key phrases are used in posts. It is a relatively uncompetitive ecosystem in that regard – especially compared with YouTube and Google.

Predictions for the future of video search

Video and search is a fascinating area. It’s fair to say that looking at YouTube, Google and Facebook is just scraping the surface when speculating how the landscape is likely to change.

Social platforms are undoubtedly seeing more video content hit their feeds. This is coming from the users themselves, but also from the brands and marketers wanting to engage with them. It is so important for social media channels to have engaged users, so it’s understandable that they want to promote the use of video in that context.

Additionally, we know that YouTube and Google depend on each other – and we can expect they will continue to do so. Even when social channels can start matching YouTube for video viewer numbers, it is always going to be difficult for videos shared via social channels to compete with YouTube in Google’s SERPs. The same goes for alternative video platforms and even perfectly optimized on-site video with great markup. YouTube always seems to have the edge in Google, and it looks set to stay that way for the time being.

But technologies and behaviors do change. One way Google is forced to make non-YouTube video content visible is when users are searching for a niche – such as the Live TV game streaming found on Twitch or HD content found on Vimeo. Users may well begin circumventing searching for video content on Google/YouTube altogether should Facebook and other social platforms really succeed in being ‘the platform’ for 360 and VR video content.

With new video technologies always emerging, and with 5G and the Internet of Things just around the corner, web properties that can be the first to really succeed in pushing other types of video content before YouTube will see searchers come to them first. YouTube, with the help of Google, may continue to dominate, but it can’t be all things to all people in the world of video.

Luke Richards is a Search Engine Watch columnist.

But that kind of tracking might not always be welcome, especially when it means that you have ads following you around the internet from a site where you bought a gift for a friend once, or for pregnancy products months after you’ve given birth. Or maybe you just don’t like your data being collected and used in this way.

Luckily, there is a way to get rid of them, as long as you know where to look.

Note that these methods won’t stop Google, Bing et al from showing you ads altogether, but they will keep them from using your profile information and online activity to target ads at you.

Google

First, navigate to myaccount.google.com, which can also be accessed from the Google homepage by selecting the little ‘grid’ icon in the corner next to ‘Images’, and selecting My Account.

Under ‘Personal info and privacy’, select ‘Ads settings’, then ‘Manage ads settings’ to get to the main ads dashboard.

To turn interest-based ad targeting off completely, toggle ‘Ads personalization’ from ON to OFF. If you don’t want to turn ad targeting off altogether, but want to fine-tune it, you can uncheck certain options from the ‘Your topics’ checklist lower down, until only the relevant topics are left.

To permanently save your opt-out preference, there is a link right at the bottom of the page which allows you to install the DoubleClick opt-out plugin. This will keep your opt-out status for that browser even if you later clear all cookies.

You can go one further than this and disable ad personalization for the Google ads you see when you’re signed out and across other online ad networks that work with Google. To do this, select ‘Visit AdChoices’ at the bottom of the page. This will take you to a new page that displays a list of different companies and whether they are currently delivering ads based on your interests.

You can then toggle individual companies on or off, or to disable ad tracking for all companies, scroll down and a dialog box will appear with the option to ‘Turn off all companies’. (You will need to have Javascript enabled in order for the page to work properly).

There is one other way that you can disable ad personalization on Google, if you’re a user of Google Chrome. Navigate to your browser settings (accessed by selecting the three vertical dots icon in the top-right corner of your screen) and select ‘Show advanced settings…’

Under ‘Privacy’, select ‘Send a “Do Not Track” request with your browsing traffic’. The effect this has will depend on whether a website responds to the request, and how it is interpreted, but some websites will respond by showing ads which aren’t related to your browsing history.

Bing

In order to turn off personalized ad tracking on Bing, you need to opt out of customized ads on all Microsoft sites and partners (such as AOL). To do this, go to choice.microsoft.com or from the Bing homepage, select ‘Settings’ from the hamburger menu in the corner, then More > Personalization and select the link to the Personalization Settings Page. Under ‘Other privacy settings’, select ‘Advertising Preferences’.

From there, you can toggle ‘Personalized ads in this browser’ to OFF, and if you’re signed into your Microsoft account, you can also turn off ‘Personalized ads wherever I use my Microsoft account’.

You can also opt out of personalized ads from other companies served by Microsoft, by selecting ‘Do you want personalized ads from other companies?’ under ‘More choices’.

On this page, as with Google, you can opt out of ad tracking for individual companies listed, or select ‘Choose all companies’ at the bottom to opt out of personalized ads for all participating companies.

Yahoo!

To opt out of ad tracking on Yahoo!, go to the Yahoo! Ad Interest Manager or on the Yahoo! homepage, select ‘About our ads’ (in very small light grey text in between ‘Privacy’ and ‘Help’) and then under ‘What choices do I have?’ select ‘Manage interest-based advertising categories, or opt-out of all categories, from Yahoo.’

On the Yahoo! Ad Interest Manager, under ‘Your advertising choices’ there are two tabs, one for across the web and one for Yahoo! sites, widgets and apps. Select ‘Opt out’ for either tab to opt out of ads.

The first list below contains the most popular search engines currently available, ordered by most to least popular in the US. The ranking is according to eBiz, it’s in order of estimated unique monthly visitors and is accurate as of August 2016.

The second list is a global overview of most popular search engines, according to Net Market Share, which is ranked in order of market share and is again accurate as of August 2016.

As opposed to our previous list of search engine alternatives to Google, this list will concentrate purely on informational searches rather than say… Gifs or copyright free images.

US

1) Google

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 1.6 billion
Alexa Rank: 1

Why should you use it?

With 72.48% of the world’s market share of search, as a marketer you don’t really have a choice not to use it for both paid and organic reach.

As an every day user, for all of our cynicism and occasionally flippant references to The Circle, you have to admit Google is utterly indispensable in your every day life. For every interference (the constant curtailing of organic results) there are 10 triumphs… Google Maps, Gmail, the terrifying relevance of Knowledge Graph, the killing of payday loan ads, AMP…

Where the heck would we all be without the… yes, I’m going to say it… search giant.

2) Bing

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 400 million
Alexa Rank: 22

Why should you use it?

As I said in earlier in the year in the aforementioned ‘alternatives to Google’ post, there are some great reasons to choose Bing:

• Bing’s video search is significantly better than Google’s.
• Bing often gives twice as many autocomplete suggestions than Google does.
• Bing has a great linkfromdomain:[site name] feature that highlights the best ranked outgoing links from that site, helping you figure out which other sites your chosen site links to the most.

3) Yahoo

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 300 million
Alexa Rank: n/a

Why should you use it?

Well that’s all a but up in the air at the moment, as Verizon has just purchased Yahoo for $4.8 billion dollars and is planning on merging it with AoL.

Yahoo will continue to operate independently pending regulatory approval of the deal, which is expected to be completed by early 2017. After this, all of Yahoo’s news, finance and sports platforms will be added to AOL’s media assets, which include The Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

4) Ask

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 245 million
Alexa Rank: 31

Why should you use it?

Despite Google’s determination to be the ultimate font of all knowledge on its own SERP, Ask is still good for specific question related searches, with results centring on Q&A related matches.

And hey, sometimes it’s nice to get help from a butler.

5) Aol Search

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 125 million
Alexa Rank: n/a

Why should you use it?

As mentioned above, the AOL you know and possibly love may become a different beast once Verizon Communications merges it with Yahoo.

Let’s remember simpler times…

6) Wow

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 100 million
Alexa Rank: 767

Why should you use it?

Because it works more like a news site then a search engine, which is handy if you want everything in one place. There is a strong lean towards news and celebrity based articles rather than pure Wikipedia-style information, but the handy links to related social channels and wiki pages are useful.

7) WebCrawler

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 65 million
Alexa Rank: 674

Why should you use it?

WebCrawler has a far clearer delineation between paid search ads and organic results. It also seems to feature far more natural ’blue links’ than Google.

8) MyWebSearch

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 60 million
Alexa Rank: 405

Why should you use it?

Uh… don’t.

According to the Malware Wikia, MyWebSearch is a spyware and search toolbar program that allows the user to query various popular search engines and comes bundled with an exhausting suite of ‘goodies’ such as such as Smiley Central, Webfetti, Cursor Mania, My Mail Stationary, My Mail Signature, My Mail Stamps, FunBuddyIcons… the fun goes on and on.

Most damningly of all though, Malware Wikia reports that despite it not carrying any malware attributes, an independent repair lab has classified the toolbar as a nuisance because of “slowdowns in return for features that are already built into many modern web browsers.”

9) Infospace

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 24 million
Alexa Rank: 2,110

Why should you use it?

You may be using it already… InfoSpace is a “provider of white label search and monetization solutions” and it also operates its own branded search sites, including the meta search engine Dogpile, as well as Zoo.com and WebCrawler (as mentioned above.)

10) Info.com

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 13.5 million
Alexa Rank: 1,938

Why should you use it?

Info.com aggregates results from the indexed web AND social media channels. It monitors real-time social conversations and according to them, it delivers “newsworthy, trending, and popular results before they hit the indexed web.” These streams are classified into structured topics which provides additional context and insight.

Bonus: 11) DuckDuckGo

Honourable mention to DuckDuckGo, the new kid on the block that doesn’t store your personal information, which has managed to accrue 13 million unique monthly visitors and is currently the 11th most popular search engine in the US.

Worldwide

Here’s the marketshare worldwide for search engines…

1) Google – 72.48%
2) Bing – 10.39%
3) Yahoo – 7.78%
4) Baidu – 7.14%
5) Ask – 0.22%
6) AOL – 0.15%
7) Excite – 0.01%

This week we begin with a bounty of up-to-date search marketing stats, then we end with some bizarre Google searches and a quiz. A perfect Friday round-up I’d say. Maybe I can find a cat gif somewhere too. No promises though!

Google search spending growth has slowed to 22% as CPCs fall 9%

We have a bumper load of search marketing stats from Merkle this week, all of which plot the various search trends of Q2 2016.

The full report covers paid search, organic search, social media, display advertising, and comparison shopping engines, but for now here’s a handful of the most interesting revelations…

• Advertiser spending on Google paid search grew 22% Y/Y in Q2 2016, a slight deceleration from 25% growth in Q1.
• Click growth increased slightly to 34%, but CPCs fell 9%.
• Spending growth for Google text ads slowed to 10% Y/Y as CPC growth for brand keywords fell from 10% in Q1 to 0% in Q2.
• Google Shopping Ad spending growth rose to 43% as an influx of partner traffic bolstered total click volume.
• Organic search visits fell 7% Y/Y in Q2, down from 11% Y/Y growth a year earlier, as organic listings face increased competition from paid search ads, particularly on mobile.
• Mobile’s share of organic search visits rose to 46%, but that still lags behind the 53% of paid search clicks that mobile produces.

Social media ad spend up nearly 50% fuelled by mobile and dynamic product ads

Spend on social advertising has increased by 47% year-on-year (YoY) in Q2 2016, with social ads attracting a 21% higher cost-per-click (CPC) according to the latest global data from Kenshoo.

Growth continues to be driven by mobile, which accounts for 64% of spend, with retailers’ Dynamic Product Ads on Facebook and Instagram, as well as video, playing an increasing role in paid social.

Budgets directed to mobile search ads and Product Listing Ads (PLAs) climbed 63% and 71%, respectively, leading to a rise in overall search advertising spend of 10% YoY.

Paid search spend increased by 4% in Q2 2016

AdGooroo released its quarterly paid search report which examines all US Google desktop text ad activity on the top 50,000 keywords across 14 of Google’s industry categories in Q2 2016 vs. Q1.

Here are some of the findings:

• Paid search spend increased by 4%
• Total impressions and clicks dropped by 19% and 3%, respectively
• The average cost per click increased by 8% quarter-over-quarter, while the average clickthrough rate increased by 18%
• The number of advertisers decreased from Q1 to Q2 in all 14 categories, dropping by a total of 12%

Google brings programmatic to native ads

As Al Roberts reported this week, Google announced that DoubleClick publishers can make all or some of their web and app native ad inventory available through the service, and advertisers can purchase that inventory programmatically through DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Al goes on to report:

“DoubleClick native programmatic asks advertisers to supply creative components, such as headline and body text, and DoubleClick automatically formats the content for the publisher’s site and the device the viewer is using. The native ad units come in two flavors: a traditional banner slot and a responsive fluid ad slot.”

There are more than 200 publishers already signed up to offer programmatic native ads through DoubleClick.

Verizon acquires Yahoo’s operating business for $4.8 billion

As Sophia Loras reported this week, Verizon has agreed to acquire Yahoo’s operating business in a $4.8 billion cash deal, sealing the fate of one of the internet’s pioneers.

Under the deal Verizon will amalgamate Yahoo’s search, email, video, mobile, digital and advertising assets with it’s AOL entity. Verizon acquired AOL in a $4.4 billion deal last year to enhance its programmatic offerings.

Marissa Mayer, chief executive officer of Yahoo stated:

“As one of the largest wireless and cable companies in the world, Verizon opens the door to extensive distribution opportunities. With more than 100 million wireless customers, a shared view of the importance of mobile and video ad tech, a deep content focus through AOL, Verizon brings clear synergies to the table.”

Google AdWords unveils three new mobile ad innovations

According to a Google blog post, three new mobile ad features will begin rolling out in AdWords to all advertisers this week.

Expanded text ads

These are optimized for the screen sizes of the most popular smartphones and feature two headlines, each with 30 characters, and one long 80-character description line. That’s nearly 50% more ad text for you to highlight your products and services.

Responsive ads for display

Google will now help you build your own responsive ads for display. Just provide a 25-character or 90-character headline, a 90-character description, an image, and a URL, and Google will design ads that fit perfectly across more than two million apps and websites on the Google Display Network.

Set device bid adjustments

New device bid adjustments allow you to maintain the efficiency of managing a consolidated campaign that reaches consumers across devices while giving you more control to set individual bid adjustments for each device type — mobile devices, computers, and tablets.

Top 20 craziest Google queries

As reported this week by Search Engine Journal, Digitaloft has collected data on the most bizarre searches undertaken on Google and the findings should probably be cause for some concern…

1. Am I pregnant? (90,500 monthly searches)
2. How do I get home? (49,500 monthly searches)
3. Are aliens real? (49,500 monthly searches)
4. Does farting burn calories? (49,500 monthly searches)
5. When will I die? (49,500 monthly searches)
6. Why do men have nipples? (22,200 monthly searches)
7. Do penguins have knees? (18,100 monthly searches)
8. Why are we here? (8,100 monthly searches)
9. Is the tooth fairy real? (8,100 monthly searches)
10. Do pigs sweat? (8,100 monthly searches)
11. Does my bum look 40? (8,100 monthly searches)
12. Is the world flat? (5,400 monthly searches)
13. Am I a psycho? (5,400 monthly searches)
14. Why won’t my car start? (4,400 monthly searches)
15. Do men have periods? (3,600 monthly searches)
16. Do worms have eyes? (2,900 monthly searches)
17. Can a man get pregnant? (2,900 monthly searches)
18. What happens if you drink blood? (880 monthly searches)
19. Can I marry my cousin? (880 monthly searches)
20. Why does my boss hate me? (170 monthly searches)

Take our fabulous SEO quiz…

Go on, it’s Friday, and it kinda looks like your doing work right?

How well do you know these 25 SEO abbreviations?
[interaction id=”579630eeeaef76d5244bce59″]

And here’s your reward for a job well done…

Of particular note are the revelations that:

• Google search spending growth has slowed to 22% as CPCs fall 9%
• Desktop PLA growth rate jumps while mobile growth is strong but slowing
• Shopping Ads traffic from Google image search and Yahoo surges
• Google’s expanded text ads have had only a modest impact

The full report (registration needed) covers the latest trends in paid search, organic search, social media, display advertising, and comparison shopping engines, so let’s cherry-pick some of the highlights…

Paid Search

• Advertiser spending on Google paid search grew 22% Y/Y in Q2 2016, a slight deceleration from 25% growth in Q1.
• Click growth increased slightly to 34%, but CPCs fell 9%.
• Spending growth for Google text ads slowed to 10% Y/Y as CPC growth for brand keywords fell from 10% in Q1 to 0% in Q2.
• Google Shopping Ad spending growth rose to 43% as an influx of partner traffic bolstered total click volume.
• Combined spending on Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini search ads fell 17% Y/Y as click declines continued to worsen.
• Bing Product Ad spending fell for the first time since the format’s launch, likely the result of Yahoo moving to show more Google PLAs.
• Phones and tablets produced 53% of all paid search clicks in Q2, the same rate as a quarter earlier, but up 12 points from a year earlier. Google’s share of clicks from mobile increased slightly to just over 57%

Organic Search & Social

• Organic search visits fell 7% Y/Y in Q2, down from 11% Y/Y growth a year earlier, as organic listings face increased competition from paid search ads, particularly on mobile.
• Mobile’s share of organic search visits rose to 46%, but that still lags behind the 53% of paid search clicks that mobile produces, as well as the 47% share that mobile produced for organic search a year ago.
• Google produced 86% of all organic search visits in the US and 90% of mobile organic search visits.
• Google’s share of mobile organic search has increased by nearly two points in the past year.
• Social media sites accounted for 2.8% of site visits in Q2 2016, with Facebook producing 63% of all site visits driven by social media.

Comparison Shopping Engines

• The eBay Commerce Network commanded a majority of advertisers’ comparison shopping engine (CSE) spending for the first time in Q2. Along with Connexity, the two dominant CSE platforms accounted for 97% of all CSE ad spending.
• Advertiser revenue produced by eBay Commerce Network and Connexity listings grew by 33% and 23% Y/Y respectively; however, the two platforms combined for less than 10% of the revenue produced by Google Shopping Ads, among advertisers participating in all three platforms.

Display Advertising

• Total display advertising spending grew 62% Y/Y, driven by very strong results from Facebook, where Merkle advertisers increased their investment by 121% Y/Y.
• Retargeting accounted for 62% of all display spending in Q2.
• The Google Display Network (GDN) also delivered spending growth, with advertisers seeing its share of total Google ad spending increase to 12%.

Under the deal Verizon will amalgamate Yahoo’s search, email, video, mobile, digital and advertising assets with it’s AOL entity. Verizon acquired AOL in a $4.4 billion deal last year to enhance its programmatic offerings.

The current deal does not include Yahoo’s shares in the Alibaba Group Holdings, or its shares in Yahoo Japan. These assets, along with other minority investments will continue to be held by Yahoo under a new, yet to be announced name. This will become a registered, publicly traded investment company.

“Yahoo is a company that has changed the world, and will continue to do so through this combination with Verizon and AOL,” said Marissa Mayer, chief executive officer, Yahoo.

In an open letter to Yahoo fans, Mayer said the sale was not only an important step in Yahoo’s plan to free up shareholder value, but a great opportunity for it to build further distribution and accelerate its work in mobile, video, native advertising, and social.

“As one of the largest wireless and cable companies in the world, Verizon opens the door to extensive distribution opportunities. With more than 100 million wireless customers, a shared view of the importance of mobile and video ad tech, a deep content focus through AOL, Verizon brings clear synergies to the table,” she said.

Mayer added that Yahoo’s products and brand would be central to achieving Verizon’s ambitious goal of growing its global audience to 2 billion users and reaching $20 billion in revenue from its mobile-media business by 2020.

“Joining forces with AOL and Verizon will help us achieve tremendous scale on mobile. Imagine the distribution challenges we will solve, the scale we will achieve, the products we will build, and the advertisers we will reach now with Mavens – it’s incredibly compelling,” Mayer said.

Mavens (mobile, video, native and social) has been a core pillar of Yahoo’s revival strategy since it was launched in 2011. In 2015, Yahoo’s Mavens business was worth $1.6 billion of GAAP revenue.

Verizon is the United States’ biggest wireless telecommunications company and its acquisition of Yahoo demonstrates its intentions to push ahead into the mobile and Internet spaces. A Verizon-AOL-Yahoo union could in theory provide a third credible player in the online ad space behind Google and Facebook, as forecast by eMarketer in the graphic below.

*Source: eMarketer

Yahoo claims it has a global audience of more than 1 billion monthly active users, including 600 million monthly active mobile users. Its email services globally have approximately 225 million monthly active users. AOL says its mobile advertising network also has a reach of roughly 600 million users. Combine this data with that of Verizon’s more than 100 million wireless subscribers and the company has an even stronger offering to take to advertisers.

From a content point of view, Yahoo’s popular news, finance and sports platforms will be added to AOL’s media assets, which include The Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

Yahoo will continue to operate independently pending regulatory approval of the deal, which is expected to be completed by early 2017. Marni Walden, EVP and president, product innovation and new businesses organization, Verizon, will lead the integration of the AOL-Yahoo business, although Mayer is expected to stay on until the transaction is finalized.

“Our mission at AOL is to build brands people love, and we will continue to invest in and grow them. Yahoo has been a long-time investor in premium content and created some of the most beloved consumer brands in key categories like sports, news and finance,” said Tim Armstrong, chief executive officer, AOL.

“We have enormous respect for what Yahoo has accomplished: this transaction is about unleashing Yahoo’s full potential, building upon our collective synergies, and strengthening and accelerating that growth. Combining Verizon, AOL and Yahoo will create a new powerful competitive rival in mobile media, and an open, scaled alternative offering for advertisers and publishers,” he said.

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo. During the ’90s it diversified from a search directory into a web portal incorporating email, search and real-time media.

*Featured image: Yahoo / Flickr

This week we have loads of paid search stats and research and news on the latest madcap tinkering by Google.

Paid search: John Lewis and Amazon spend the most on UK home décor

They must have lovely homes. If you can get round all the boxes and fork-lifts.

AdGooroo has published data on paid search advertising for the home décor category in the United Kingdom, examining 500 top, non-branded home décor keywords on Google between January 2015-January 2016.

Here are the stats:

• 4,892 advertisers spent £45.5 million during the period.
• Department store chain John Lewis led all advertisers with £920,000 spent, followed by Argos (£884,000) and Amazon (£867,000)
• Amazon led all advertisers in clicks with 2 million during the period, just edging out John Lewis’s 1.99 million clicks
• An average of 93 advertisers sponsored each of the top 20 keywords and 83 advertisers sponsored each of the 500 home décor keywords studied

Summer vacation/Mother’s Day search stats from Yahoo

The last time I mentioned Mother’s Day coming soon, it brought about a panic on one side of the Atlantic. And now it’s time to do the same for the other side…

• Mother’s Day is coming soon! And to celebrate Yahoo has released a report on consumer search insights revealing important trends about Mother’s Day shopping and summer travel plans. Let’s hope they also ordered some nice flowers too.
• 1 in 6 shoppers plan to spend more money on this year’s gift, and they are open to trying new brands in order to find the perfect gift.
• 52% of shoppers surveyed said that they will likely compare prices from multiple retailers on the same products before making a purchase.
• DIY presents are becoming more popular. More than 15 million searches about Mother’s Day showed that consumers search search for “images,” “quotes,” “poems,” “cards,” and other creative ideas.
• Online advertising was the top source for influencing family vacations and online ads are more influential than TV ads. When asked what motivated their travel decisions, more than 50% of family travellers said that online ads influenced them, while only 28% cited TV ads.
• The most commonly used phrases searched in conjunction with summer vacation were beach, lake, park, island, and water. Specific destinations that were commonly searched include Colorado, France, Alaska, Maine, and Tahoe.
• So far this year, the highest concentration of people searching “summer vacation” on Yahoo came from Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

50% of adults are unable to recognise ads in Google search results

As Graham Charlton reported this week, according to Ofcom half of all search engine using adults do not recognise ads.

For the study, the respondents were shown a picture of the SERPs for ‘walking boots’ (please note this study took place in 2015)…

The 1,328 survey respondents then had to select the results they thought were ‘paid for’. 60% identified them as paid links, while 49% identified them only as paid ads

Ofcom also split the results out between newer and more established internet user and found that newer users were less likely to identify that the results with the yellow ad label were indeed paid results.

Google paid search positions #1 and #4 may lead to the highest CTR

As reported in MediaPost this week, Adobe has discovered that the cost per click for paid search ads served in the fourth position may produce the best outcome, with low cost-per-clicks but high click-through-rates.

CPCs rose slightly for the first and second paid search positions (6% and 7% up respectively) but fell for third and fourth (10% and 8%).

CTRs rose for all except the second position. First position was up 13%. Third: 2% and fourth: 18%.

So… how you going to optimise PPC ads for fourth position? Bearing in mind Google doesn’t always show a fourth paid search ad. Well I’ll leave you to that quandary and go put the kettle on.

Google’s In-Depth Articles disappeared, and are now back again

You may not have been aware of this but there’s an in-depth articles feature in Google that helps you surface longer more evergreen articles.

Well there was until a couple of weeks ago when it mysteriously vanished, leading to much speculation as to whether it had been axed or not.

Only that’s all for nothing now, as it’s suddenly back again. Leading to new speculation that the whole thing was just a bug/glitch/mistake.

Now although this reads as a total non-event, your takeaway from this should be NEVER EVER take anything in search for granted, because Google will not only manually change an algorithm on purpose but occasionally lean on a keyboard and delete something vital by accident.

I’ve been working specifically with the Search Product Ads unit, which appears on Yahoo.com search results properties with feed driven product ad units.

You might be saying, “Wait, those were there before!” and you would be right. What’s changed is now those ads can now be served by Yahoo from Yahoo submitted feeds through a Yahoo Gemini Merchant Center.

Previously, that inventory had primarily come from the Bing partnership that was renegotiated earlier in 2015. As a result, the amount of traffic being served from Bing Ads started to shift, especially as it pertained to mobile, of which most of the product ads are to come from Yahoo Product Ads or their partners, which does include the deal they also signed with Google in October 2015.

Things to beware of

Yahoo has begun to take advantage of this Google deal, serving Google Product Listing Ads and Bing Ads Product Ads on some Yahoo.com desktop SERPs as a part of the search partner network, as well as testing text ads with extensions from Google in the sidebar results.

Which means that if you are advertising on Google and Bing currently there’s a good chance, particularly in desktop results, that your ads are showing on Yahoo.com SERPs in a multitude of variations of product and text ads from all three engines.

Additionally:

• If you don’t have a Yahoo account representative, you may not be able to get started yet, otherwise, you’ll need to email the support team and wait for enablement
• You’ll want to make sure the category that you want to advertise in is ‘open’ first
• To submit a feed, you need a Dropbox account set up by Yahoo or Fetch
• The feed specs for Yahoo mimics Google very closely, you should be able to utilize almost the exact same feed
• There is not an offline editor and you can create campaigns by hand through the bulk import process, or
• You could utilize your existing Google AdWords account structure and import as is into the account
• If you have a small to mid-size budget and pressed for time to manage, consider simplifying or collapsing a few of the product groups or campaigns (don’t send your entire Google account)
• Not all third party tools support this feature yet, so if you have a bid management tool, check to make sure that they’re up and running
• Billing is the same, if within an up and running Yahoo Gemini account

What we’ve seen so far

There’s definitely some ‘wait and see’ going on right now in terms of adoption rates of the program in the industry and I would expect that in your day to day, you’re already running up against a time constraint to launch and possibly budget issues as well.

I’ve also run into a couple of industry friends that have had trouble launching, due to account enablement or open categories. I would recommend that if you can’t do your entire catalog, choosing asearch engines few test campaigns where you have solid volume on Google or Bing in which to capture that traffic that lives between the two search engines.

I’ve also observed that it also matters what category or categories your catalog is in. Apparel was one of the earliest launched categories during the beta and has a lot of strength in terms of volume of impressions and clicks, where as other categories, like Food & Beverage aren’t really built out yet.

Other strong categories that may make Yahoo Product Ads worth it for you now are Electronics, Sporting Goods, Health & Beauty and Home & Garden. If you’re in a smaller niche like Pet Supplies or Luggage, don’t expect volume and performance that competes with Google or Bing.

During an early beta test for a large retailer for one vertical that contained at least a hundred thousand SKUs and a healthy sized budget that was in the apparel category, we saw return for the campaigns at a promising six times, but with an overall volume (impressions and clicks) that was smaller than Bing Ads Product Ads during the test period.

In total from beta launch to when the feature was opened up publically, the CPC has averaged out to .25 with some further tweaking planned, now that more optimization options are available than there were during the beta.

Most of the estimates I’ve been seeing for specific categories have had high impressions, low CTR, but also a low CPC (under .50 cents), very reminiscent of early content network stats.

What we need

I understand the low adoption rate right now for Yahoo Product Ads – it’s new, there’s a lot of cloudiness around Google and Bing’s involvement and whenever that happens, the wait and see attitude comes out. But I do have a wish list of features needed to really convince clients and other paid search industry folks to give this new ad unit a try:

• Easily accessible estimates or ranges for categories, around impressions or clicks (anything to help determine what the potential opportunity might be)
• Case studies on return, CPC or even engagement metrics like new to file visitors, lift in organic or assisted conversions
• Easier account start up, no rep needed and feed submittal directly through the Merchant Center
• Offline editor
• Ad scheduling by hour of the day and day of the week capabilities

Clearly, Yahoo is just getting started in the product ads space and with their heavy investments in mobile and acquisitions like Polyvore and Brightroll, logically there is a lot of potential for advertisers needing to capture new eyeballs, especially with the depreciation of some of the comparison shopping channels for more niche discovery shopping markets.

However, the addition of both Google and Bing ad units to the Yahoo.com SERPs makes it harder to justify the management and cost of a third platform, which means that the wait and see is going to continue for now.