Search Marketing Insights (Emerging Search Trends)
Twitter Begins a Revenue Model
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
After much speculation and criticism, Twitter announced plans for generating revenue from their 30MM+ user base. The lack of a revenue stream has long been the elephant in the room in discussions about whether Twitter is a fad or the real-deal. It appears that Twitter has attempted to answer that question, so long as marketers buy into the model.
Many brands have claimed their own handles (usernames) on Twitter in an effort to create one-on-one relationships with their customers. Those brands now have the opportunity to purchase “promoted tweets”.
The model is rather simple and closely resembles Google’s ad model. Marketers bid on keywords that trigger their promoted tweets to appear at the top of search results when a user queries that keyword. These tweets are labeled with a small icon labeled “promoted tweet.” Starbucks, Red Bull and Virgin Airlines are among the first advertisers taking part in the CPM-based ad program. In the coming months, Twitter plans to expand this CPM model into an ROI-based pricing model. Take a look at the example below:
Real Time Search
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
Search Engines are jumping on the social network craze. They are using Real-time Search as a first step to utilize these networks. Marketers are scrambling to answer compelling questions about this new addition to engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo!. Most importantly, marketers want to know: how will this change the perception of my brand and how can I capitalize on this momentum?
Bing:
Bing started the real-time search results by creating an exclusive partnership with Twitter, allowing them to produce results based on topic popularity.
Bing’s real time results are not integrated into the main search results pages, where you’ll typically see both natural and paid search results. Instead, they’ve stored real-time search results on a page dedicated to Twitter. A benefit to Bing’s results is the keyword cloud that quickly shows users what the top Twitter topics are at that exact moment. Twitter results are streaming on this page and can be paused. Another value-add from Bing is the fact that they order results based on which tweets are being shared most often. Now, Bing is testing the inclusion of real-time search results within their organic search results.
Search in 2010 and Beyond
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
As 2010 continues, companies will explore more effective ways of managing their online and offline campaigns and target spend to the most productive channels. Many companies will focus on making their campaigns work independently while aligning them with a similar message to yield better results. Learning from each marketing channel, creating efficiencies between them, and integrating their marketing messages will be a core focus for many marketers.
Google Leads the Way in the Media Mix
In 2009, Google announced that it was struggling to attribute online customer activity to offline advertisers. Although the inability to see concrete results has limited Google’s spend on offline campaigns, Google is currently looking for a solution that will help attribute customer activity to both online and offline channels.
Canonical URL Tag Upgrade
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
When Google announced the addition of the canonical tag element to reduce duplicate content on the internet it was met by marketers with both praise and skepticism. The announcement of upgrading the current tag with cross-domain functionality came just eight months after the major search engines agreed to honor the tag.
As a quick review, the canonical tag is added to a Web site’s HTML code. The tag indicates to search engines where they can find the canonical version of the URL and begin indexing only that version. It works similar to a 301 redirect, but only directs the search engine, not the visitor, to the canonical page.
