the guardian - future of advertising summit

Search Engine Optimisation

Guardian Future of Advertising 2009

What are search engines, why are they important?

search engine optimisation

3Edward Cowell – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Director. Copyright: www.Guava.co.uk

The School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California-Berkeley calculates

…Five exabytes of new information - roughly five billion gigabytes - was created in 2002 alone. Five exabytes is like half a million libraries as big as the Library of Congress print collections.

Almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person, per year: if stored on paper, that would take up about ten metres (30 feet) of books.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003



Yahoo! = 20 billion items in 2005

over 19.2 billion web documents

1.6 billion images

over 50 million audio and video files

Source: 2005 http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000172.html



Google = 50,000,000,000 items?

and we all expect instantaneous results

and growing



New website visitors which come from a search

engine. (Forrester)

73%

What search engines do people use?



Search experiences

Research/Info (Google, Yahoo, BING)

Commercial (Ebay, Amazon, Rightmove)

News (Google News, Technorati, Digg)

Entertainment (YouTube)

Friends (Facebook, BEBO, LinkedIn)



They did use all of these:



But now they mostly use:



HOW MUCH MARKET SHARE (SEARCH REFERRALS)

DO YOU THINK GOOGLE HAS?



Hitwise.co.uk



“People always make the assumption that we're done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5 per cent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything ... some people could call that artificial intelligence.”Larry Page, Google



“Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it

universally accessible and useful.”

Cue scary music & dim lights



The web is getting more densely packed

6% of all web traffic was received by Google

Arbor Networks 2009

So as the way we interact with the world and the media has changed, and continues to change, how has advertising kept pace?



Offline Ad Spend Moving Online

Internet Usage Still Growing New Content

Forms

New Devices



Online > National Newspaper Advertising• UK online spending at £2.016bn• 11.4% of total advertising revenues IAB

2006



Online > TV Advertising

2009



During the first half of 2009, online accounted for

• 23.5 %of overall ad spend within the U.K.• £1.75 billion

• TV advertising accounted for 21.9 % in H1

PricewaterhouseCoopers, IAB U.K. World Advertising Research Centre



The Crunch

• In tough times habits change

• Bargain hunters

• More clicks less conversions

• Browsing not buying



Bargain hunting through the credit crunch saw a surge in coupon and voucher related traffic



Online Lead Generation (B2C) Report 2009

What is search engine optimisation?



“Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings.”

wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO



Search engine optimisation is not considered bad by Google…

…but some search engine optimisation techniques are.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291



Search Engines are evolving

Web technology is evolving

Search engine optimisation is about considering how the two interact.



That differs from

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model…where advertisers only pay when a user actually clicks on an advert to visit the advertiser's website.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click



Pay per click advertising is how Google makes its money.

It pays for the services provided by Google for free that we may sometimes take for granted.



Pay Per Click AdvertsOrganic

In case you were in any doubt

What and why are people investing in search?



HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK UK BUSINESSES SPEND ON

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING?



11% of companies surveyed are spending more than £100,000 annually on search engine optimisation.

UK Search Engine Marketing Report 2009



15% of companies surveyed are spending more than £500,000 annually on paid search.


Measuring Success



John (Nelson) Wanamaker (July 11, 1838 – December 12, 1922) was a much respected and admired United States merchant, religious leader, civic and political figure, considered the father of modern advertising. Wanamaker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.



John (Nelson) Wanamaker

(July 11, 1838 – December 12, 1922) was a much respected and admired United States merchant, religious leader, civic and political figure, considered the father of modern advertising. Wanamaker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.



"I know I waste half the money I spend on advertising, the problem is, I don't know which half."



Digital has been successful because

Modern day web analytics allow us to target advertising messages much more precisely than ever, and to gain comprehensive data on the viewers of ads, website visitors and outcomes of our campaigns.



TV needs to go online

YouTube Insight

Not broadcast – two way dialogue



No one is perfect, but we are getting better

The proportion of companies who are tracking paid search ROI effectively has increased from 33% last year to 45% in 2009.

For SEO, there has been an even bigger increase, from 20% to 35%.




Tracking ROI from SEO

Clicks / visitors

Number of sales

Value of sales

Leads

Position (branding)

Page impressions

Profit margin

Lifetime value

Telephone calls

No tracking

69%

47%

38%

36%

34%

29%

14%

13%

11%

9%




Changes in SEO tracking since 2008




Tracking ROI from Paid Search

Clicks / visitors

Number of sales

Value of sales

Leads

Page impressions

Position (branding)

Profit margin

Lifetime value

Telephone calls

No tracking

61%

53%

43%

37%

22%

19%

21%

19%

14%

13%




Changes in paid search tracking since 2008




Mindshare – a better way of measuring brand coverage



Which is good because…


How does social it fit into all this?



HOW MANY TYPES OF ACTIVITIES CONDUCTED BY YOUR

BUSINESS OR EMPLOYEES WOULD YOU CLASSIFY AS

'SOCIAL‘ ?



It is my belief that…social media is not a fad…

the web is inherently SOCIAL!



and always has been.

• Bulletin Boards (1970s)

• Usenet (1979)

• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) (1988)



• Social Networking

• Social Bookmarking

• RSS

• Blogging

• Micro Blogging

• Forums



Social Networking

• Club Penguin

• Bebo

• MySpace

• FaceBook

• LinkedIN

• SagaZone



Social Bookmarking

Saving, sharing and sometimes voting on things you find interesting.



and then there is



Pause for thought

ON AVERAGE WHAT % OF UPSTREAM TRAFFIC TO

WEBSITES COMES ON FROM SOCIAL MEDIA?



We asked…

Were your organisation's social media campaigns more or less successful than you expected?

Almost half of respondents surveyed don’t know how to assess the success of their social media campaigns.



Didn’t know or didn’t care



60,000 websites, 74 Million Impressions



“Despite predictions that social media will replace search engines as Internet users’ primary method of finding information online, a breakdown of the numbers shows that isn’t the case.”

http://chitika.com/research/2009/social-vs-search/



Social media still generates massive amounts of content

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/05/zoinks-20-hours-of-video-uploaded-every_20.html

20hrs of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute



…and more content



What can you do?

Information divulged by individuals via social media channels will increasingly influence search engine ranking algorithms.

Ironically - Search engines will increasingly be required to organise those channels.

Summary



Summary

Search continues to grow as belt tightening demands more transparent media

SEO seeing the biggest rise in budgets over the past 12 months

Social media can and does support SEO

As the internet grows, search engines will get more, not less important.

Measurement is a cornerstone of digital advertising.



Response

UK Search Marketing Report 2009Almost 900 respondents

Online survey in February and March 2009• 436 company search marketers• 341 supplier respondents

SMEs and Blue Chips

Range of sectors



See Dave in the coffee area or register to download at:

www.guava.co.uk/uksem2009



Accreditations

Google Adwords Qualified Company

Google Enterprise Partners

Google Analytics Partners

Omniture Partners

Guava are members of:• Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) (Search Council)• SEMPO (UK working group)• e-consultancy



www.guava.co.uk

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