Search marketing: March 2008 Archives

It's the end of the quarter today, so I've been looking at some very broad-brush metrics for this blog.

Bearing in mind that this is now officially the most unpopular UK marketing blog, the numbers are understandably low.  All the same, visitors who come via search results consistently spend less time on my site, visit less pages and have the highest tendency to visit one page only compared to traffic referred by other sites or coming via direct navigation.

Not that I mean to demonize search - just to qualify the feeling I sometimes get that people regard search marketing as the only show in town when it comes to traffic generation.

Of course, whilst search may lack a little in terms of quality, it's delivering more traffic than any other source. And if I ever want to climb those important Ad Age Power 150 rankings, it is traffic that I need!

Not the kind of headline you get to write every day. 

Out-law.com reports that Yahoo! has won a lawsuit brought against them for trademark infringement by Mr Spicy, a "London-based catering business".

On the face of it, it doesn't sound like Victor Wilson, the owner of Mr Spicy, had much of a case - Sainsbury's were bidding on the term 'spicy', which was broad-matching against 'Mr Spicy'.

The judge also suggested that there wouldn't have been a problem if Sainsbury's had actually been bidding on 'Mr Spicy' - or at least I think this is what he is saying here:

"There can be no objection to Yahoo, if this is what they want to do, to solicit from third parties the use by those third parties, in return for payment, of a keyword 'Mr Spicy' if they are going to attach 'Mr Spicy' to goods and services different from those protected in Mr Wilson's case."

The case was dismissed as being 'totally without merit'.

 

Interesting announcement on the Google Adwords blog about a forthcoming enhancement to Quality Score: Google will soon take landing page load time into account when assessing the quality of a page.

On the face of it, this is fair enough - slow load time contributes to a pretty poor user experience. And this is not a new discovery - here is Jakob Nielsen talking about 'The Need for Speed' way back in 1997:

"Every Web usability study I have conducted since 1994 has shown the same thing: users beg us to speed up page downloads. In the beginning, my reaction was along the lines of "let's just give them better design and they will be happy to wait for it". I have since become a reformed sinner since even my skull is not thick enough to withstand consistent user pleas year after year."

But - now that over 90% of the UK's internet connections are broadband - isn't Google fighting yesterday's battle here?

Well access speeds are certainly speeding up - but so is our appetite for richer content. For instance, YouTube is now experimenting with higher resolution videos - better for the user, but yet another drain on bandwidth.

And ironically one of the biggest drags on page load time seems to be the ability of adservers to deliver banner ads onto pages.  In fact Google singles out interstitial ads as a particular problem in its blog.

So there's a cynical argument that if you choose to cram your landing page with banner advertising, Google will charge you more for traffic to that page.

But I'd turn it the other way round - Google is incentivizing you to create relevant landing pages that load quickly.  By all means put richer content like video onto landing pages (and we've had some great results by doing just that) - but make sure the video is user-initiated rather than adding to the initial page load time.