DigiMinded

Cross-Post: How Google Instant Previews for Ads Can Improve Your Owned and Paid Media

Last week I posted an overview and tips for Google's new Instant Preview for Ads feature over at Great Finds, the official iCrossing blog.

Google Instant Previews has made its way to ads – a logical next step for Google. This new feature will help marketers improve the effectiveness of your owned and paid media by qualifying people who click on ads to visit your site, evaluating your landing page, and even performing competitive analysis.  This blog post tells you how and why.

As in the natural search version, Instant Previews provided a magnifying glass icon that appears next to each ad and page listing. Once a person clicks on the icon, he or she is able to quickly preview the landing page for every ad and evaluate the content.

Head over to Great Finds to continue reading.

'Tis the Season for...Break-Ups?

Ahh, it’s nearly that time of year again. The smells of pine-scented candles and holiday feasts, the sights of lit-up Christmas trees and elaborate Santa decorations, the sounds of mall store cash registers ka-chinging and – sobbing from those were just broken up with because their significant other didn’t want to buy them a Christmas gift? Hmm.

A fascinating little graph from David McCandless’TED Talk has been floating around the internet recently:

This graph indicates the timing of break-ups throughout the year and was calculated by scraping 10,000 Facebook status updates for words like “break up” and “broken up.” A few time periods are immediately obvious:

• Spring Break: The classic breaking up with your significant other prior to a potentially rowdy spring break trip.
• Mondays: There are a number of spikes on Mondays compared to other days – however, this could also mean that break-ups occur over weekends but people are not likely to update their Facebook status until they get online on Monday.
• Christmas: Naturally, the cost of a Christmas gift serves as a good motivator to end a relationship that wasn’t going all that well – with a possible contribution from the family-oriented nature of the holidays and the pressure that induces. It is worth noting that Christmas Day itself has the lowest number of breakups because, thankfully, most people just aren’t that cruel.

All interesting facts, but this data is far from perfect. One of the biggest flaws is that this sample is composed only of users who are willing to broadcast the end of their relationship via Facebook status – which is certainly not everyone. To help round out the picture, I decided to take a look at the internet population’s ultimate confidante, the place we all can go to unload our fears and seek advice: Google.

First off, what do break-up-conscious users search for? The top related queries fall into one of three categories: (1) making the break-up itself as least painful as possible (“how to break up with your boyfriend”), (2) recovering from a broken heart (“how to get over a break up”) and –the most volume of all – (3) getting back with an ex (“how to get your ex boyfriend back”). Far more of the top queries included “girlfriend” than “boyfriend – indicating that women are generally more likely to turn to Google for break-up advice than men.

Is the search pattern different from Facebook? Let’s take a look at 2009:

 

• Like the Facebook data, both the how to break up (blue) and how to get over a break up keywords (red) see a peak 2 weeks prior to Christmas. The volume goes down during Christmas and then experiences another peak around New Year’s.
• None of the queries see the same spring break spike as in Facebook – which could be partly due to demographics. Conceivably users who announce their break-up on Facebook could be more likely to be in high-school or college (with a spring break) than the general search population. The “how to break up with your boyfriend” query does see significant volume throughout the summer and fall, but this same trend is not reflected in the “how to get over a break up” line.
• The trends for “how to get your ex boyfriend back” (orange) differ from the other two queries. In fact, this term sees the greatest search volume during the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the holidays are likely to have you feeling a bit lonely.

While the Google data is not quite as dramatic as Facebook’s, graphs like these indicate the many roles played by the internet in the world of dating – not limited to confidante, relationship wrecker and provider of first date awkwardness.

Since When Do Trademark Disputes = Privacy Violation?

I’m currently in the midst of a multi-part series on the online dating industry, but I couldn’t resist pointing out this one.

Apparently, we’ve taken search-related trademark lawsuits to a whole new level. According to one Wisconsin law firm, a competing firm’s act of bidding on keywords related to their names constitutes a violation of privacy. That’s a new one.

The plaintiff’s argument is centered on a piece of Wisconsin law that “protects individuals from the inappropriate use by others of their names.” According to the law, this includes use for advertising or trade purposes. The firm, Habush Habush & Rottier, insists that the Internet provides no exception to this law. By advertising on the keywords “habush” and “rottier,” the defendant is allegedly violating their privacy.

Without delving into legalese, the defendant fights this absurd claim with some fairly good arguments:

• The law protects a “living person,” not a corporation. This is a big one.
• The appearance of a link to the defendant’s site next to an organic link to the plaintiff’s site is no different legally than the type of advertising placement one would see on a page of the Yellow Pages.
• There is no suggestion in the sponsored link to the defendant’s website or anywhere on the website that the Habush, Habush & Rottier is promoting or endorsing their services.
• The link itself is not stifling legitimate competition or limiting consumer choice; it is simply giving the user an opportunity and choice as to review the defendant’s site in addition to the plaintiff’s.
• The search results for “Habush” and “Rottier” contain a large amount of content unrelated to the law firm, not the least of which is an urban dictionary definition for “to habush” (umm, don’t look that one up at work).

Amusingly, the defendant also pulled a Perry Mason and pointed out a YellowPages.com page where the plaintiff’s ad appeared next to the defendant’s information. Whoops. Now there’s a courtroom circus.

I find this fairly ridiculous in the midst of a number of legitimate personal privacy debates.  Trademark disputes are one thing, but privacy has nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, I’m fairly certain we’ll continue to see more of these creative spins on the same lawsuit type in the future.

Dorthy.com: The Advent of Goal-Based Search?

The time of New Year’s resolutions is upon us. Come January 1, millions of Americans will vow to shrink their waistlines, and my gym will become a haven for the masses of fair-weather gym-goers. Spin classes will start filling up several minutes before start, crowded locker rooms will ensure the intrusion of personal space bubbles, and I will have to start fighting with passion and fury for my elliptical.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

My personal feelings towards New Year’s resolutions aside, a personal goals startup called Dorthy.com just relaunched its site with an interesting concept that could prove useful to 2010 goal-setters.  The site allows you to create “dreampages” for each of your goals, whether it’s “to lose weight”  (Dorthy’s recent New Year’s resolution study reported that 63% of respondents were vowing to shred pounds in 2010) or “Sail around the world.” The dreampage serves as a central location for the planning, sharing and tracking of the goal.

Dorthy (which I forever want to keep spelling as Dorothy – perhaps I watched the Wizard of Oz one time many times as a child) certainly isn’t the first goal-setting website in existence.  However, its primary differentiator is that in addition to providing a place where users can articulate their goals and discuss them with like-minded users, it also provides frequently updated content from search engines around that topic – articles, blog entries, videos, etc. Dorthy claims that 50% of searches on the web are repeated by the same people day-after-day, and they can eliminate the need to keep re-Googling by providing a central location where users can return to find new resources regarding their goal.

Let’s briefly put aside the fact that it’s significantly easier to type a search in my browser toolbar than to go to Dorthy’s site, log in, and navigate to the dreampage in question. Let’s also dismiss that the website is rather clunky in its current alpha version, and that the content on my dreampage for “find a pair of skinny jeans” (screenshot below) wasn’t altogether relevant to my goal (note the video about a guy who puts on a cursed pair of ugly jeans that turn him into a mega-sketchy guy).

What I found most interesting is that Dorthy relies on three fundamental assumptions about search and human behavior:

        1) Goals are fundamentally social. This one comes as no particular surprise – it doesn’t take a psychology degree to understand that talking about one’s goals makes one more likely to achieve them by adding a layer of accountability. Additionally, there’s a classic “gym buddy” concept – when others share in your goal, supporting and motivating each other, the goal becomes easier to accomplish. Dorthy simply takes this community aspect of goals and gives it a home on the web (which, granted, 43 Things and others have been doing for years).

        2) Goals are linked to search. It makes sense the search engines service as a primary starting ground for researching and achieving goals. If I decided I were to run a marathon, I would start by researching training schedules and other aspects on Google. If my goal was to visit Peru, I would also begin my search for travel information, flights and activities on search engines. But the question is – how far in the goal process does this relationship last? Once I’ve already determined my training timeline and found the perfect running gear and my goal race, I’m less likely to be constantly searching for new marathon information

        3) Search behavior can be changed. Ahha, the concept that the good people of Microsoft bet their piggy bank on (a fraction of it, at least). Dorthy relies on the concept that it’s possible to retrain people to stop searching for things on Google and instead log into their website for updated content. Never say never, of course, but this one seems the most far-fetched. The problem is that Google is just too darn easy, and search behavior is too deeply ingrained. Breaking habits is always the marketer’s greatest challenge – not an impossible one, but nothing to sneeze at.

Regardless of whether Dorthy.com succeeds are not, it serves as another example of the growing connectivity of the internet. Search and social are being more greatly intertwined – there are countless examples of this, from sharing resources on Facebook to real-time Twitter results on Google’s search results page. Whatever developments come next, 2010 is almost certain to be a fascinating year.

It’s a great time to be in the digital world, folks.

I Love Me Some Search Options

Oh Google, how could you do this to me? I was already addicted to you and your endless data. I already spoke to you more times per week than my mother and all my friends combined. I already couldn’t imagine my life without your bold primary colors gracing my computer screen. And then you had to go and make my life even….easier?
 
Those statements may be a tad dramatic, but two weeks after the launch of Google Search Options I can officially say that I’m hooked. Approximately one month ago I began my search for Halong Bay overnight cruises, which proved to be tricky. Like most tourist attractions in Vietnam there are endless scam artists and copycat companies, so I wanted to find a reputable operator with positive traveler experiences. I found myself scanning the Google SERP for only the domains of travel forums I recognized, e.g. Travelfish and Thorn Tree.  Given that I have about as much patience as a 2-year-old, this took more time than I desire d. I also became frustrated as I kept coming across posts that were 4 years old – clearly out of date given the dynamic nature of Vietnam’s tourism industry. I could have gone to Advanced Search to further refine my search, but instead I decided to give up for the time being.

Enter Search Options. This time after searching for “halong bay cruises” I was able to easily display results from only forums that were posted in the past year. In a much shorter period of time I ended up with a list of 3 reputable cruise operators within my price range based on traveler experience. Wham, bam, thank you Google.

Now, Search Options is far from perfect. I would prefer to see more result types than just Videos, Forums and Reviews. Forums and Reviews support the research end of the buying cycle, but what about users who are close to the time of purchase? What about coupon sites? Shopping sites?  Now, not all of these would make sense in the context of searches (particularly ones around people and Wikipedia articles). But, Google could do something similar to Bing  (though not as spammy) and use related search data to provide relevant categories. Additionally, I would prefer to have a date option between past week and past year (you’re missing 51 weeks in there, Google).

Regardless of its imperfections, I tip my hat to The Big G for this feature – namely because it shows real insight into the way consumers make decisions. Users react very differently to separate types of media – particularly in the area of trust. A Forrester report indicated that 60% of consumers trust product ratings and reviews from other consumers, while only 21% trust forum posts.  A separate Nielsen study echoed this with 61% of consumers trusting reviews, while only 34% indicated trust of search engine ads. Depending on the nature of the search query, it makes perfect sense that a user is often looking for specific types of websites – and Google just made it that much easier to find them.

I’d love to see more features along these lines from Google and other engines. While search is not broken, there is still significant room for improvement of the user experience. Search features should always be firmly rooted in an understanding of the way users behave and the type of information they seek. It’s certainly been an exciting couple of weeks for search given the announcements at Google I/O and Searchology – what could be next?

Insights for Search Proves to Be...Insightful

My current MUNI reading is “Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why It Matters” by Bill Tancer, and it’s already made its way into my Top Reads for Marketers list. Tancer, who is the general manager of global research at Hitwise, states that you can tell a great deal about who people are and what they’re thinking about by looking at trends in search volume. This thesis falls in line with my own experimentation using Google’s Insights for Search tool.  For example, below is a graph of the search term “economy” from 2005 through this October. The graph is relatively smooth over the first 3 years and then spikes in the past two months, reaching its peak in October. Sounds quite consistent with the trends we've seen in the public media, doesn't it?

If we can use search volume to measure what issues people are thinking about, it also stands to reason that we can gain insights about product trends. Next, let’s look at a graph comparing “dvd” to “youtube.” One would think that the graph would show an inverse correlation, as more people are getting their video fix from sites like YouTube instead of buying DVDs. And that’s exactly what it looks like.  In the chart below the blue line represents “dvd,” while “youtube” is shown by the red line. The search term “dvd,” while still showing regular peaks during the holidays, has gradually declined throughout the period. The term “youtube,” however, has shown a remarkably linear increase in popularity. In October, “dvd” reached its lowest relative search volume index (19) as “youtube” was at its highest point (100). Once again, Google search volume seems to provide a relatively accurate depiction of external trends.

These examples are only a small representation of the ways in which tools such as this one can be used. If we can learn to understand the vast amount of search volume data available to us we will be able to gain much deeper insight into our consumers: who they are, what they are thinking about, what products they are searching for and which brands they prefer.  What does Insights for Search say about your brands and products?