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For a long time now, the utopia for online dis­play adver­tis­ing has been to be as tar­geted and as cost-effective as search adver­tis­ing in order to claw back adver­tis­ing dol­lars. The jour­ney has been slow, ad net­works ini­tially helped scale online dis­play adver­tis­ing and pro­vided lay­ers of tar­get­ing tech­nolo­gies to make the cam­paigns more effec­tive. How­ever, pric­ing was based on arti­fi­cial flat fees and seg­ments that had been pre-set within the lim­its of indi­vid­ual ad net­works.

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This week saw the launch of Google’s lat­est devel­op­ment to lever­age the social graph for their search results. While the com­pany has used social cues from Twit­ter and Flickr for more than a year to improve organic rank­ings, they are now cre­at­ing their own rec­om­men­da­tion func­tion and extend­ing it to both paid search and organic search.

The fea­ture is sim­ply called “plus one”. If you’re famil­iar with Face­book adverts and likes, the con­cept is not very dif­fer­ent. When users are logged into Google, they will be able to rate indi­vid­ual search results and adverts by click­ing the “plus one” sym­bol. Their friends will then see the endorse­ment.

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This week I had the oppor­tu­nity to speak at Search Engine Strate­gies Lon­don on the topic of search remar­ket­ing. If you’re unfa­mil­iar with the topic, it’s the idea of being able to show rel­e­vant ads to audi­ences that have vis­ited your site but not taken the desired action.

For exam­ple: let’s say you’re run­ning a B2B lead cam­paign, and you’re pulling in heaps of traf­fic to your web­site from search, email and dis­play adver­tis­ing. If you’re lucky, per­haps 5–15% of those peo­ple (and that’s pretty darn good) will fill in your lead form and press the sub­mit but­ton.

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In 2010 we saw plenty of inno­va­tion from the search engines and social net­works, but what’s in store for 2011? I expect the inno­va­tion to con­tinue with a fur­ther push into real-time dis­play, AdWords automa­tion and, ulti­mately, less focus on key­words and more on mar­ket­ing objectives.

Keyword-less search mar­ket­ing and Google Boost

Google is hard at work gain­ing more adver­tis­ers by low­er­ing the bar­rier (i.e. cost) for AdWords self-service. Over the years we’ve seen new mod­els such as cost-per-lead for com­par­i­son — and prod­uct list­ing —  ads. These, in my view, are only the first few steps into the keyword-less search mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence.

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They say the busier you are, the less you get done! Novem­ber has proved to be a busy month with loads of announce­ments from the likes of Sam­sung, Apple, Face­book, Sony, Google… the list goes on. This week’s DC is all about pro­duc­tiv­ity (at work and home), so don your specs, and read on.

F-mail

First a Hol­ly­wood block­buster, then the world! Face­book has stepped up to chal­lenge Google and Yahoo with it’s ‘not an email client’ email client. Face­book is giv­ing its 0.5 bil­lion users an ‘@facebook.com’ not-an-email-address address, and launched a sin­gle por­tal for SMS-ing, tweet­ing and email­ing through the Face­book frame­work.

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With a long his­tory in B2B mar­ket­ing, we’ve devel­oped a thor­ough under­stand­ing of how to approach this sec­tor in most mar­ket­ing dis­ci­plines. And paid search is no dif­fer­ent. A cou­ple of weeks back we flew over to Oslo to share some of our insights at the largest search mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence in the Nordics. Below are the slides from our pre­sen­ta­tion. Enjoy.

Search Mar­ket­ing for Busi­ness to Business

By now you’ve prob­a­bly heard of or even tried out Google’s lat­est search inno­va­tion — Google Instant. The new fea­ture lever­ages Google’s deep search insights and data crunch­ing abil­i­ties to try pre­dict what users are search­ing for and serve results even before they’ve fin­ished writ­ing. As users are typ­ing their query Google is con­stantly refresh­ing the web­site with pre­dicted results.

While it has just been rolled out in the UK and US to users logged into Google this week, and so empir­i­cal data is scarce, there are at least two early indi­ca­tions to how this will impact search mar­ket­ing:

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Search is some­times referred to as the “data­base of intent”. The rea­son is sim­ple – never before have prospects so clearly told adver­tis­ers what they want before they arrive at the site. The trick is to max­imise this opportunity.

The con­cept of deep-linking isn’t spe­cific to search. It applies to all online mar­ket­ing activ­ity, such as dis­play, email and social. The dif­fer­ence how­ever, is that the search phrase is an addi­tional data point that should be used to seg­ment and effec­tively fun­nel the user towards desired action.

Con­sider the site struc­ture below for a moment:

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Just a quick post to point to an inter­est­ing arti­cle by Nate Elliott at For­rester that looks at tag­ging video to gain a high page rank­ing for organic blended results on Google.

This will cer­tainly be a case of get it while it’s hot. Once every­one is doing it, things will get a whole bunch tougher again.

Way back at the begin­ning of the year in my un-predictions, I sug­gested that:

Social search (eg Wink and Stum­ble­Upon) will become ever more appeal­ing to many peo­ple who already trust their net­works more than any old school search engine.

Well, while nei­ther Wink nor Stum­ble­Upon have made huge inroads, the lat­est announce­ment from Wikia (the peo­ple broadly kinda, sorta behind Wikipedia) could be very interesting.

Essen­tially, Wikia is look­ing to cre­ate an open source user-driven social search offer­ing (there’s some kind of vicious acronym in there some­where). They have recently acquired dis­trib­uted web crawler Grub which uses users’ PC idle time to crawl the web. And, of course, Wikia knows a thing or two about har­ness­ing user-driven con­tent. Which could all lead to some­thing pretty inter­est­ing.

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