Blog Archive

Archive for July, 2010

New Google Image Search

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Google is rolling out a new layout for image search, and it’s nicely improved. About 7%+ of all searches are for images, and while people are willing to go deeper (considering more results before making a choice), the top results are going to be chosen much more frequently. It’s much more user friendly: with long scrolling pages filled with images and tons of options to narrow your search. I like the mouse-over the best, where it expands the image, with the originating website, size, and format. 

And importantly it has sponsored links. So for home improvement, fashion and hair cuts, photography and portraits, how-to and other very popular types of searches, this can be a fantastic new avenue for advertisers. 

What’s a marketer to do to take advantage of this?

  • Advertise
  • Always name your image appropriately so it can be categorized accurately
  • Determine important searches that could relate to your products and services
  • Make multiple sizes
  • Make multiple colors
  • Line drawings? Clip art?
  • Include a watermark or product name
  • Photograph your product being used

 

Yahoo! and Bing Share Organic Results

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

It’s official. Microsoft announced testing Bing search results in Yahoo! search. (http://bit.ly/ac89Ob) From our Minneapolis office, we confirm the testing is well underway. In a handful of random searches we found exactly the same sites ranking in exactly the same position and displaying exactly the same page titles and meta description lengths. 
 

Previously, Yahoo allowed a few more characters displayed, but now both search engines are cutting page titles at the 65-70 character range, and chopping off descriptions around 165-175 characters.

In terms of the actual size of Bing and Yahoo! indices, the numbers are reported as different– but they are close.

 

New Google Analyze Competition Feature

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Recently Google AdWords released another feature to give you insight into your account’s performance. Its goal: to show you how some of your performance metrics compare to other advertisers Google has determined offer the same goods or services as you.

Per Google:

‘Analyze competition’ examines your account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services you’re advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with your account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows your individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

What it means to you? We think it has great future potential, if it includes more insight into what might help you move up the chain. Useful questions it could help you answer in the future:

  • Have you forgotten major keywords?
  • Are you not bidding enough?
  • What about the Quality Scores of the competition?
  • Is the competition getting more or less business than you as a result of their PPC advertising?

CTR is a pet metric of ours, but beating your competitors’ CTR doesn’t necessarily have much impact on your bottom line. We say it’s business as usual, though high marks in the Analyze Competition feature may give you some nice bragging rights. For now, it’s a nice way to do a reality check on your impressions, clicks, CTR and Avg. Position (the four metrics available in the report).