Highlights brought to you by Search Lately @SMGSearchUK this week include:
Search Alliance Rolls Into town New Smartphone Research in Jan 2012 Google Search Quality Update Google’s Panda Update: One Year On Google Gets Cleverer?
Browse last week’s Search Lately for more details and initial reaction from industry experts on recent hot topics.
Search Alliance Rolls Into town As we head into March we step yet another bit closer to the highly anticipated Search Alliance. This will mean search traffic on Yahoo and Bing will be managed from one user interface: Microsoft adCenter. It is yet to be seen what impact this will have on advertiser bids and the quality of traffic that will ultimately be delivered, however the merger will now account for 6% of UK search traffic. Whilst it won’t produce a significant amount of volume to have an immediate impact on Google, it will become a much more viable addition to generate incremental traffic. In the short term it is advised that advertisers pay close attention to account structure and campaign budgets, as well as check that appropriate negatives are in place during the transitional period to ensure any elevated CPCs are kept under control. In the long run advertisers will benefit from the merger as technological advances from Bing combine with the extra reach provided by Yahoo, delivering a more sophisticated offering. Advertisers should pay more attention to this outlet and ensure they are fully aware of all the tools at their disposal in Microsoft adCenter. The transition is not scheduled to be fully complete until the end of April, but expect volumes and costs to start being affected over the course of the next couple of months.
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Kevin Ting
Expert Views on Search Alliance: econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9140-the-bing-and-yahoo-search-alliance-the-experts-view Useful feature guidelines: www.searchalliance.com/feature-comparison/account-setup Top tips to prepare for Search Alliance: searchenginewatch.com/article/2141774/7-Steps-to-Prepare-For-the-Search-
Alliance-in-the-UK
New Smartphone Research in Jan 2012 – 28th Feb Google has carried out the “Our Mobile Planet: Global Smartphone Users” research in January 2012 with Ipsos. The research has revealed findings on mobile consumer behaviour in six countries - USA, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Japan. Consumers love their smartphones. Now businesses must fall in love with mobile. Here are the highlights for the findings in UK:
54% of smartphone users watched TV while engaging with their smartphone. 55% of smartphone users are searching because of an ad they’ve seen offline or in a store. 96% of smartphone users have used a search engine on mobile. 81% of smartphone Internet users search at least once a week. 84% of smartphone owners use their smartphones to look for information about local businesses or services, and 78% take action afterwards such as calling or visiting the business. 30% of smartphone Internet users have made a purchase on their smartphone, and more than 50% of those who’ve made a mobile purchase do so at least on a monthly basis. 37% of UK smartphones Internet users have bought something online.
– Blair Liu More details: googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-smartphone-research-one-quarterof.html googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2012/02/consumers-love-their-smartphonesnow.html
Google Search Quality Update – 27th Feb Google has made 40 changes in February to improve search quality. Improvements are made across a number of systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. You can find the full change list in the blog. Some of the quality update includes:
More coverage for related searches. This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will
appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. This improvement adjusts a signal Google uses to try and identify duplicate snippets. Google was applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so it has stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. Google has adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now it generates relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. Google has adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
– Blair Liu More details: insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html
Google’s Panda Update: One Year On – 24th Feb Unbelievably, it’s been a year since Google launched the first of many Panda Updates. February 2011 saw the launch of Panda and the idea was to filter out low quality content from its search results, giving people behind the websites who put thought and effort into what they post a chance to rank for relevant search terms. Google said that 12% of US searches were impacted. It was from April 2011 that the UK started to be affected by the Panda rollouts, when version 2.0 was launched for all English speaking countries as well as English queries from non-English speaking countries. Throughout the year, there were a total of 10 Panda updates launched and Google are continuing to work on this in order to provide users with the most relevant and highest quality results for their queries. Search Engine Roundtable ran a Panda Poll asking if users recovered from Panda and only 13% claim to have fully recovered whilst 29% claim to have recovered some ground but not as positive as they used to be before Panda. A massive 58% claim to have not recovered at all!
2012 is sure to see another year full of Panda updates, and the push on original, good quality content is most likely going to continue to increase so it’s important to be prepared and have a strategy in place for this.
– Jimisha Lakhani More details: searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-112805
Google Gets Cleverer? Among recent developments at Google user queries will now return more data relevant listings by sourcing information from sites such as hollyscoop.com, ticketmaster.com and ticketliquidator.com. Google will now pull relevant data from online websites to provide results related to a user’s search query that it feels you may want to see. The example below highlights the look and feel of this new feature, as it pulls data from various sources to provide upcoming events related to the band called “The Black Keys”. – Kevin Ting
More details: thenextweb.com/google/2012/02/24/google-adds-concert-listings-to-searchresults-for-musical-acts/