MediaVision Blog » Brett Pringle

Bing & Google need market share? Just buy it

Brett Pringle — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:36:34 +0000

Market share is a clear indicator of how well a search engine performs, and affects the overall revenue the company can generate through advertising. Bing has made some strides since its launch in the attempt to challenge the mighty Google and their dominance in the search market – but over the past 2 years Bing has not shown much in terms of market share increases to become a viable competitor to Google – until perhaps now. How do the big players attempt to gain search market share? Buy it…

Google has been known for striking deals with manufacturers such as Dell and Acer to include preloaded Google toolbars, resulting in the use of the Google toolbar in software applications like Adobe Flash, FireFox and their own mobile OS, Android, which has gained mobile market share incredibly with the adoption in the market.

Mobile OS Market Share

Bing on the other hand has also made efforts in this regard, aiming to increase the use of their search engine with a number of preloaded toolbar deals including HP and IBM, as well as software applications like AVG anti virus, Java and the sneaky Windows Priority Update that included the Bing toolbar. Bing’s latest efforts include “stealing” Skype away from Google as well as and their recent deal with Blackberry in May. Earlier this year in February, Microsoft also announced their partnership with Nokia, replacing Symbian for Windows 7 and adding Bing as the default search engine.

Looking at the acquisitions made over the last few years, Microsoft has seen a slow increase in their acquisitions – 2010 showing 0, with silent M&A activity which was labeled small in MS eyes, and therefore not officially announced. The 2011 Yahoo merger led to an increase in overall search market share. Market share for Bing has also seen a slow uptake over the past few years, but shows the biggest increase in the US for early 2011.

Bing US search market share growth

Bing seems to slowly be making the right moves in the market, choosing more wisely where and who to partner with to increase default use of the engine with preloaded toolbars – the same thing Google has been doing for years. So you need more market share in search? Buy it…

Bing & Google need market share? Just buy it

15% off SMX Advanced London May 2011

Brett Pringle — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 08:58:48 +0000

SMX Advanced returns to London this year, 16 & 17 May at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel & Conference Centre London Kensington. SMX Advanced has become one of the leading global search marketing conferences, featuring international speakers sharing their expertise and advice in a number of advanced search marketing sessions. For a brief idea of what you could expect, you can find the London 2010 agenda here.

As an SMX Advanced blog partner, MediaVision are able to offer 15% discount off registration when using the promotional code MEDIAVISION011.

Remember to register early and take advantage of the Early Bird offer, a further discount on registration available until the end of March 2011.

15% off SMX Advanced London May 2011

MediaVision TShirt design contest

Brett Pringle — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:28:42 +0000

It’s been sometime since the last company tshirt was designed for MediaVision. This year we gave all staff an opportunity to get involved and show their creative side by sending in suggestions for a new design. The new tshirts will be printed in time for the end of year xmas function which will be taking place end of November in Langebaan on… wait for it… a houseboat

Now that you are all green with envy, we need to ask for your help in voting for the winning design. You can place your votes in the poll in the sidebar (to your right)

MediaVision TShirt design contest

Google VS Bing conversions & market share

Brett Pringle — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:19:32 +0000

Earlier this year I made my 2010 predictions for search engines mainly Bing & Google challenging the conversions through search. Since then a lot has come to pass, the new Google layout was implemented and was shortly followed by the controversial “Mayday update” and finally Caffeine going live across all Google data centres.

The new Google layout gave rise to concerns of traffic decreases to websites both in through organic and paid results. Whether or not this was the result of the new layout or simply the adjustments Google made in how they crawl and rank websites and pages that occurred during the same period, was uncertain. Simply put, Google’s “copy” of the Bing layout is not working. As we all know in the internet marketing world, copy and paste solutions do not work and Bing is definitely doing something right in search to drive such large scale changes by Google in an effort to keep up in the search race.

A study by Explido Webmarketing, clearly shows the affect of the new Google layout, and from the above heatmap(before and after) especially within sponsored results, positions 4-10 in paid clearly show a decline in clicks. Unfortunate side effect or intentional move on Google’s part to increase revenue from AdWords with advertisers increasing bidding to compete for top ad positions?

In February Nielsen reported Bing’s US market share reaching 12.5%, a record for the search engine compared to previous years, while Google still dominates the overall market share. Bing still has a long way to go to in terms of market share, however with the engine beginning to power Yahoo results as well, it seems Google may still have to keep a close eye on Bing.

The question is one again, are you optimising for Bing and taking advantage of their increased market share and higher conversions?

Google VS Bing conversions & market share

Tracking SEM more effectively

Brett Pringle — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:34:59 +0000

New Google Analytics filters and methods pop up all the time from various sources. Sometimes the simplest of filters or tweaks within your analytics that are all that is needed to help you track your SEM more effectively and streamline your process. So, you have setup a large SEO campaign, traffic increases can be seen and all seems to be well, but are you refining your strategy effectively over time to ultimately show that much needed ROI figure?

Organic Search

Ranking reports are good and well, however, we all know that the SERPS change daily, even hourly and running ranking reports every day is simply a waste of time. If you are using Google Analytics, you are able to track your search phrase rankings (positions) in analytics that result in clicks and the traffic your site receives. This information will help you decide which search phrases and “pages” require additional work as well as fine tune your optimised pages for your “money” phrases.

Do you have a members or login area within your site? You may want to track members VS non members within your analytics. You can do this using the Google Analytics setVar method, which you can use to “label” members visiting your site (seen within the user defined section in analytics).

Remember to only add this line of code in your GA tracking script to one page within the member area that will be seen by all members. This will help track performance of non member traffic to the site through informational or transactional queries (even navigational).

Paid Search

You should have goals setup within your Google analytics profile. Import your analytics goals into your AdWords account and use the conversion metric to help refine your AdWords campaigns. This can be found under the Reporting section in AdWords and then the “conversions” screen.

Do you know what search phrases resulted in your AdWords ad clicks? If you are running phrase or broad match types for your PPC campaigns create a new analytics website profile and apply term filter to this profile. This will help you to track the actual PPC search phrases that resulted in the clicks for your campaigns.

Conversions & Goal Tracking

Is your website ecommerce enabled? Enable ecommerce tracking within your analytics profile and update the GA tracking script on your receipt page. Track ROI off any marketing campaigns that may be running such as email marketing right through to SEO & PPC. Simple enough, however you would be surprised by how many ecommerce sites are not using ecommerce tracking within analytics.

Run an ecommerce site with the ecommerce tracking enabled and create successful/failed transaction goals to help with conversion analysis and data to help improve the purchase funnel. Are buyers falling out the funnel when selecting payment options or typing the card details incorrectly?

Not running an ecommerce website but you still want to track the most valuable pages on your site? Assign a value to your analytics goals, allowing you to use the $index value within analytics reports to monitor the top earning pages or those pages that should be performing better than they currently are.

Don’t have a specific URI to use for goals? This may be the case for downloads or click events such as mailto scripts. Track these with custom onClick tracking:

This can be used to track contact using mailto, or for those with blogs wanting to track comments as goals, then use the onClick tracker on the post comment button. As the script is customisable and will appear as a URI within your analytics content report, you are also able to use this URI to set up goals in analytics.

Keep your data clean

Always keep a backup analytics website profile. When creating filters it is usually best to apply new filters to a new website profile. If anything goes wrong, you have a backup profile to fallback on.

Exclude your internal traffic and website owner traffic using exclude filters for specific IP address ranges. No point including your own visits within your analytics reports.

WordPress users create an exclude filter for your page/post previews, get rid of those pesky preview=true occurrences within you analytics content drilldown reports.

Tracking SEM more effectively

Avoid downplaying brand reputation management

Brett Pringle — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:42:46 +0000

The online landscape has changed so much this year, social media is the new buzz word, and the search market is not just about links, content or even paid search. The recession has also brought about renewed focus on conversions; it’s not just about traffic and rankings as it was a few years ago for many marketers. Social media has led companies to pay more attention to their brand presence / reputation online as they’ve seen how social media networks and the power of twitter can damage a brand and effect sales from a business perspective right down to personal brand. Are you really monitoring your brands / identity online effectively? Or are you still just listening or lurking?

Proactive VS Reactive

Monitoring your brand online and responding when there are potential problems is a fairly reactive approach, however, it can also be proactive if actions are taken to ensure you are not just listening but engaging your target audience.

Think of your brand reputation management tool as a plugin or addition to your current analytics package. Reputation management tools bring metrics such as influence and even sentiment into the mix. These, together with your analytics metrics, start to offer more insight into your online footprint and brand/site performance. So, why can’t monitoring your brand online be proactive? With the tools available we are able to see the sources of brand discussion and feedback, so why would this be any different to reviewing the performance of your traffic sources or referrals within your analytics package and creating a strategy to improve results?

Engagement

This is the opportunity for anyone to take a more proactive approach to the management of their brand online. To draw a comparison, the same approach used by offline sales reps who call clients each month to keep in touch, make sure they are happy, and see if there is perhaps anything that they may need (proactive), can also be applied to monitoring your brand online. You are able to take a more proactive approach and engage directly with your potential or current clients online. Build it and they will come no longer works, competition grows on a weekly, even daily basis, and online every bit counts. Engage directly with consumers online, nurture client relationships and understand your target market demographics. Should you be spending more time on Twitter, FaceBook, or LinkedIn, or any other site where your brand is being discussed? Always keep in mind, taking action for your brand online is like walking a tightrope, always make informed decisions.

Proactively looking at the information and taking action will result in happy clients/buyers (even potential new clients/buyers) and, ultimately, increased sales or even recurring sales. Why should the online market be so different to the traditional sales market?

Search trends change, Search engine algorithms change but happy clients/brand loyalists are bound to stay.

Avoid downplaying brand reputation management

Cra… pardon, “outdated” Link Building techniques

Brett Pringle — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:17:08 +0000

With all the various articles on how “SEO is evil” or “SEO doesn’t work” etc etc news that crop up occasionally (especially Jill Whalen’s “Most of SEO is boondoggle” article) I’ve had the urge to rip apart the monthly promotional/link building tactics some SEO companies still pitch to clients, especially when they make a big fuss about these crap stupid “outdated” link building techniques, which mislead clients (looking at a competitor’s proposal to a client right now and shaking my head) and any newbies entering the SEM market.

For example:

Search Engine Submissions

Firstly, we cannot really call this a link building technique; I’m not sure what to call this activity at all besides completely outdated and useless. We have 4 (perhaps 3 soon) top search engines in our market, excluding the likes of Baidu in China (and a few others in foreign markets), so why on earth would anyone need to submit a website to any other search engines when the overall market share is dominated by currently 4 search engines? Any SEM worth his or her salt knows there is no need for this (please do a little bit of research into how the search engines crawl and index web pages). If you are still promoting this kind of activity as part of your service or to clients, let’s meet outside in 10 minutes, I’ll be bringing a spade to knock some sense into you.

Article Distribution

I’m specifically referring to the mass submission of the same content piece to a large number of ezine article sites. Have you ever really seen an increase in rankings for your targeted phrases that you can isolate as resulting from ezine submissions (and be truly honest with yourself)? Have you ever spent time working on a well thought out author bio instead of just whacking in the links? I need to add a bit of clarification here as well, mass submissions don’t work. If you’re using submissions with the intent of achieving rankings, you’re barking up the wrong tree. But if you’re getting some traffic off a unique article that’s served with a bit of creative flair you may be onto something.

Reciprocal Links

Oh boy, where to start? How many high quality, authority websites do we see nowadays that have a “links” page with an insane amount of links, ranging from fairly relevant to ‘what were you smoking when you decided those sites were relevant’. There has been a dramatic decrease in the number of websites that still participate in reciprocal link exchanges. We know the value of this type of exchange is less than sourcing one-way relevant links (and I’m not referring to 3-way link exchanges here The quality of links from reciprocal linking is just plain terrible and the sheer volume needed to achieve any form of ranking to drive traffic is insane. You keep your 10 000 low quality reciprocal links; I’ll keep my 5 or so high quality one-way links.

Directory Submissions

There are a few directories (paid directories that is) that can play a role in your link building strategy; however, submitting to any directory you find in the hopes of gaining links to help with rankings is a lost cause. Not sure what I’m on about? In 2007 SEOmoz did a great write up on directory links and penalties. Don’t forget the role of anchor text in your link work, and then take a few minutes to let that sink in before you jump back into your directory submissions.

There are so many new and creative ways of sourcing links for websites. Those still stuck in the past with outdated tactics really need to take a step back and rethink their approach and the value they are actually offering clients. Each time these “link building techniques” get pitched to clients, SEO’s are not educating clients but misinforming them, and contributing to the SEO industry’s lingering bad rep.

There are many other “outdated” link tactics out there, so leave a comment with your point of view or just rant. For those members of the mob with the pitchforks and torches my home address is…. Sorry, my mobile battery is running low… not sure if you got all that

Cra… pardon, “outdated” Link Building techniques

Starting a fresh Adwords PPC account – unlinking re-linking

Brett Pringle — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:04:09 +0000

In the past we’ve had moments where it has been easy for us to contact Google account managers to do the unlinking and linking for us, however we recently had to get this organised while our account manager had gone AWOL.

It’s been ages since I’ve worked on AdWords myself (hands on, besides the training I do), and I’ve spent the last few weeks getting back onto the bicycle and stuck in again. In most cases it is easier to work on a project from the beginning VS coming in at the end and having to figure out what the goal/strategy was for an account setup.

There are a number of reasons for starting a new fresh PPC/AdWords account for clients, such as:

The number of deleted campaigns/ad groups that still appear in the account become a visual account management nightmare (it would be great if there was some overriding feature that would allow you to remove those deleted campaigns from the account completely, like a recycle bin function… “are you sure you wish to permanently delete these items?”)

You didn’t take note of your quality score for your keywords, which may have resulted in you being banned from using them within your PPC account and that may be a problem in some cases where the phrases are necessary to your campaigns.

So, now you want to create your new AdWords PPC account, however, you need to ensure that your analytics will be linked correctly (without having to create a new analytics account). Who? What? Where? How much? Pardon? Perhaps I was too specific with the searches I did to try find a starting point for me to work from, in which case it might be a good idea to dust the cobwebs off, and start again.

So, for any of you out there looking for a quick guide (without worrying about possibly breaking something that is currently working), here it is.

Create a new Google account and setup your new PPC AdWords campaigns/ad groups as needed within your account

NB - Ensure that you have admin access across both Google Accounts (the same Google account can access both PPC accounts)!

Now it’s time to get analytics linked. You need to have them linked to ensure that traffic is tagged correctly, otherwise you will not be able to track CPC traffic; it will be logged under direct traffic to the site or under organic traffic. We have seen CPC added to organic traffic referrals on some clients, while others have mentioned GA logs the traffic under direct referrals.

To start with, you need to log in to the existing AdWords account. Go to you analytics tab and Edit Account Settings (Unlink account).

Log in to the newly created PPC AdWords account, go to the analytics tab and select the option “I already have a GA account”, continue and then select the related analytics account from the dropdown menu supplied (data is supplied from G Admin account linked to the new Google Account).

And you’re done! Be sure to double check your analytics settings tab for the website profile associated with your Google AdWords account (this is done through Google Analytics settings for the associated website profile) to ensure that the cost data have been applied for accurate reporting.

Starting a fresh Adwords PPC account – unlinking re-linking

SEO Spending on the Up and Up!

Brett Pringle — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:20:53 +0000

So, the year is half way through which is as good a time as any to review the predictions that were made at the beginning of the year. There were predictions that SEO services, email marketing and social media were going to be the most popular forms of Internet marketing for 2009, and they were predicted to show the most growth.

So what has transpired through the 09?

Ad agencies and clients alike are suffering through the recession. A recent survey conducted by Reardon Smith Whittaker (RSW) entitled “Client-Agency Economic Outlook Survey” reveals that the economy has had a negative effect on 87% of ad agencies and 91% of their clients. The survey also revealed that during the first half of the year, 55% of clients decreased their spending by 6% or more. In addition, 35% of clients said that they expect to slash budgets by a further 6% during the second half of the year.

With the tough economic climate, we have indeed seen an increase in spending on SEO, e-mail marketing and social media, as well as a decline in spending on the more traditional advertising media of radio, print and television. The figures can be seen in the table below (Source: Reardon Smith Whittaker (RSW), table found at emarketer.com).

The same survey also showed that a full third of clients have increased their commitment to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Google’s view of SEO

SEO has been embraced by Google, and why not? Google’s algorithm is designed to find and rank the pages to help best fit the users search query. And the better the search results, the more visitors will use Google and the more revenue Google will generate (from AdWords).

Some very helpful SEO resources come from Google itself. The resources include Google’s Search Engine Optimisation starter guide, and as of 5 June 2009, is available in over 40 languages. Some Google insiders also provide tips through their blogs; the most famous Google insider giving tips on SEO is Matt Cutts, who is currently head of Google’s Webspam team. Matt’s blog posts and YouTube videos are very popular and he is often quoted by top SEO news sites.

With more marketing dollars being spent on Internet marketing, and in particular SEO, e-mail marketing and social media, the future looks bright for Internet marketers.

SEO Spending on the Up and Up!

Bing is Making a Splash on the Web

Brett Pringle — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:31:50 +0000

Microsoft’s Bing is actually doing really well at the moment, despite predictions of a fate similar to that of Microsoft Live. The search engine is being described as a decision engine. Statistics from Hitwise in the UK, as well as the USA/Canada region, have indicated that Bing is making waves. It is catching up to Yahoo! and reactions from techies and average users alike are mostly positive.

Having said that, will Bing be a passing fad or will it actually make inroads in Microsoft’s titanic battle with Google, and what, if anything, will this mean for SEO or DEO – “Decision Engine Optimisation” for Bing?
All of Bing’s features are only available in the US at the moment, which is a pity for the rest of us who will have to wait a bit longer to see what all the fuss is about.

What are some of the positives?

First let me state that Bing is not just a rebranding of Microsoft Live. It is actually a search engine, excuse me … a decision engine with some novel features and in some aspects is actually better than Google, as opposed to almost as good as Google.
Bing’s image and video search functions are awesome and better than Google’s at present. Bing’s image search features include sorting by image size and layout, as well as illustration versus picture. The travel engine has also been favourably received.

What does it mean for the search industry?

SEO or DEO for Bing differs in some key areas in comparison with Google.

Stephen Kersey of Bizzia provides some answers as to what Bing values:

-Domain age: Domain age is very important to Bing. If Bing catches on, some marketers may choose to purchase older domains.
-Titles: Bing values good titles that provide a good description of the contents of that particular page.
-Outbound links: This one is generally a big no-no for SEO’s for fear that PR will be negatively affected; search engines typically focus on inbound links.

Should I change my SEM strategy?

It is far too early make any changes to your SEM strategy. Google is still miles ahead of Bing and it is not worth making any drastic changes just yet. However, it should be on the periphery of every SEO’s vision.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Balmer is aware that Bing is not going to make giant inroads overnight, and says, “It’s going to take us a while; it’s a five-year task”.

So, make a note in your diary and check on Bing’s progress. Things may start changing in a year or two -you never know, it could

Bing is Making a Splash on the Web