Search: News
Search and Social Media: Mom Power Drives Marketing Results
|
Written By Ruth Nightengale | December 7, 2009 | Share This
|
|
The fact that women are powerful is hardly news, but recent studies suggest that moms may very well represent the National Power Grid for the United States.
In a white paper published by Advertising Age, The Rise of the Real Mom, the Boston Consulting Group states that moms control $4.3 trillion of the $5.9 trillion U.S. consumer spending total, or 73% of household spend. The Shriver Report, issued in October, found that women are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families. And just last week, Google released another study on moms they are calling Four Truths about Moms and Search, created in collaboration with BabyCenter and two different research vendors between October 16 and November 17 of this year.
Search and Social Media: Your Guide to Bing and Google on The Road to Social Media
|
Written By Noah Mallin | October 29, 2009 | Share This
|
|
This week’s article by yours truly in the Huffington Post asks if Google is turning it’s back on its core values by limiting social search to folks with both Google profiles and social media profiles. Earlier in the week, my colleague Mark Pilatowski wondered whether the engines would be able to deal with the spam factor inherent in real-time search.
Before diving into the implications of real time and social search integration to the biggest search engines (excluding YouTube), it’s important to know the basics and the background to what these new deals mean to marketers and the brands who love them. Presented below is everything marketers need to know about the Bing and Google social search deals.
Search and Social: Will the Twitter Firehose Become a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose?
|
Written By Mark Pilatowski | October 22, 2009 | Share This
|
|
As most of you probably know Bing and Google announced that they have finalized agreements with Twitter to begin incorporating Tweets into their search engine results. Everyone seems to be overjoyed and excited about this. Search engines are excited because they get access to the Twitter firehose and they can begin providing real time results in the SERPs. Twitter is happy because they are finally getting paid. Searchers are happy because they can now get real time results for queries that deserve it, like breaking news. Everyone seems to be overjoyed about the possibilities and I myself am very interested to see how this all plays out. I do have one concern and that is how are Bing and Google going to deal with the issue of spam when it comes to real time search via Twitter results?
Search News: Ask Thinks Pink in Non-Profit Partnership
|
Written By Ruth Nightengale | September 14, 2009 | Share This
|
|
Despite the innumerable times the work we do is described as “not curing cancer,” there is now a search engine trying to do just that. Or at least help the cause along. Starting today, Ask.com allows you to personalize your Ask homepage in an effort to educate other users about the fight against breast cancer. While the focus of this partnership between Ask and the non-profit Susan G. Koman for the Cure is attention and education, Ask will also be donating up to 50 cents for each user who selects the Search for the Cure page skin and answers the questions on their branded ad panel at the top of their search page:
The branded panel is interesting in that it incorporates a one-click button to donate, as well as the standard array of social media buttons to let people on sites like Facebook know about your interest in finding a cure for breast cancer. Aside from being for a good cause, this is an innovative way for a search engine to partner with a non-profit in a “takeover” of their homepage, and I expect to see more of this in the future.
Search News: Google’s Move Left Leads to Double-Digit Rise in Clicks
|
Written By Alex Staunton | August 27, 2009 | Share This
|
|
Take this and let’s move it over an inch. It doesn’t sound like much of a change, but for Google, it’s huge. Google recently moved their ads over to the left a skosh, snuggling them closer to the organic results like Nick Cannon and Mariah Carey after a long day of shopping. While the average user probably noticed nothing, we in the search marketing industry have obsessed over what this change might mean for campaigns.
Search Metrics: For Every Query, There is a Season
|
Written By Noah Mallin | August 19, 2009 | Share This
|
|
Seasonality is not a new phenomenon in search marketing - every marketer worth their salt knows that queries for terms like “ski” go up in winter and “suntan” peaks in the summertime. However sometimes seasonal trends are less obvious to the naked eye which is why Google’s Insights For Search (among other tools) can be helpful, allowing users to trace back search volume for particular keywords and to compare the volumes over time for multiple keywords.
Paid Search: CARS Lifts Boats, but Not the Ones with Holes
|
Written By Sean McDonald | August 13, 2009 | Share This
|
|
I have always been fond of truisms - particularly the one that goes “a rising tide lifts all boats.” According to the elves at Wikipedia, this concept “is associated with the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy.” Search marketing is affected by macro-economic shifts just like most other sectors of the economy, and sometimes we are foresighted enough to anticipate the tide coming in.
Search News: Yahoo and Microsoft Deal Begs The Question: Nature or Nurture?
|
Written By Noah Mallin | July 30, 2009 | Share This
|
|
By now I’m assuming you know that Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a groundbreaking 10 year deal that sees Microsoft’s Bing search technology replacing Yahoo’s search engine and Yahoo’s sales team taking the lead on high-end search sales for both channels. This is just the kind of news that sends us into our search geek clubhouse here at Reprise Media, where beers are opened, feet are kicked up, and opinions start flying around the room like mosquitoes in a swamp (apologies to Dan Rather.)
One of the most interesting takes was an offhand comment from Vice President of Media John Chan. While sipping on his 40 he pointed out that for many of our paid search campaigns, campaign performance was noticeably better on Bing than on Yahoo. There are three reasons this might be:
SEO: Optimizing for Bing is a No-Brainer Now
|
Written By Noah Mallin | July 29, 2009 | Share This
|
|
Google’s ubiquity in search is such that many clients feel that a website that is optimized for Google is good to go. Today’s announcement of a search deal between Yahoo and Microsoft ought to put a decisive fork in that thinking. Consider this – the combined share of the market that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will have is nearly 30%. Assuming this holds, businesses simply can’t afford not to optimize towards Bing’s algorithm when it will be powering results for both Bing and Yahoo.
So how different is Bing from Google when it comes to SEO?
Search News: Yahoo Shopping Flops with King of Pop
|
Written By James Song | July 2, 2009 | Share This
|
|
Unless you were living in an undersea cave, you know that “King of Pop” Michael Jackson passed away last week. As has been reported, websites around the world were affected when the story broke around 4:30pm EST. Visitors per minute to new websites worldwide increased 30% and social networking sites such as Twitter experienced network lag and outages due to the thousands of users simultaneously trying to update their status. The phrase “Michael Jackson died” became the highest search query on Google that day, which was so overwhelmed by the query volume that they initially thought they were experiencing a network attack.
This made me wonder about the impact of current events search queries on search marketing campaigns. On Thursday evening I searched ‘Michael Jackson died” on Google and saw a paid search ad in 1st position for Yahoo Shopping: