SNAPSHOT:

• Search revenues are projected to triple to $44.5B over the next 5 years (Piper Jaffray). Google is already positioned to capture a significant majority of those revenues.
• But Search only represents ~50% of all online advertising revenue (current & projected)
• This deal is about positioning Google to go after the other 50% of revenue projected to come from non-Search ads

PROJECTED GO-TO MARKET STRATEGY:

Google is most likely going to bolt the DoubleClick ad server platform and ad network on to their existing AdWords system over time. By doing so, Google will open up a lot of additional graphic/rich media/video ad inventory for AdWords, addressing a big hole in their current offering. While they’ve had the ability to serve up banners and video ads for a while, non-text ads currently account for only a tiny slice of their overall inventory and revenue. When this happens, Google will not only be serving those ads – they’ll be selling that inventory.Why? Because Google’s huge network of 500,000 advertisers will help publishers monetize that inventory better than they can themselves. And if Google needs to partially subsidize some of those high-value publishers by paying guaranteed CPM’s for some time, they can do that. They certainly have the cash. And that will quickly become a moot point as the big brand advertisers (and their agencies) who are currently buying that inventory directly at high CPM’s will realize they’ll need to buy that inventory via Google or risk losing it to a higher bidder.

They will probably continue to offer the DoubleClick ad server product as a standalone product for quite some time so as not to alienate existing advertisers/agencies or publishers, but the real goal will be to make participation in their marketplace a no-brainer for everyone by offering better distribution and accountability for advertisers and better monetization for publishers. As Google gains more advertisers and publishers, the holdouts will have a harder time resisting the gravitational pull.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR:

Advertisers - Win
Online advertising gets more efficient. With Google as the primary hub and marketplace, advertisers get to deal with one entity and cut one check for most of their online advertising. Managing those campaigns will be very complex, but will still be much more straightforward than dealing with individual publishers with different pricing and deal structures.

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If we’ve learned nothing else during our years of usability and conversion practice, it’s this:

No matter how knowledgeable your opinion, users will still surprise you.

That’s what testing is for - to validate theories and uncover reactions that can’t be anticipated. In the world of measuring actual results, there’s no room for ego, sentimentality, or politics. Not, at least, if you wish to get the most benefit possible from your testing.

Just because you like how your landing page looks doesn’t mean it will convert well. Just because your friend designed it, or your boss decreed its content, doesn’t mean it will be effective.

And, as we’ve found out time and again, even an expert’s opinion can’t argue with testing results.

Case: Which Page to Use As a Landing Page?

We were in the process of setting up a new Paid Search campaign for our client Blurb, who provides a very cool service - they help you self-publish your own, high-quality book. Since developing custom landing pages wouldn’t be possible for them until later in the year, in the meantime we planned to direct traffic to the best possible existing site page.

For search terms that were specific to a certain book type, such as “create photo book” or “publish cookbook”, page selection was obvious. When we got to the very general terms like “book software” and “print book”, however, we were initially torn between two existing pages; the home page, and a “start your book” page.

The Blurb home page, we felt, offered a better user experience for someone whose query was on a very general search term because it introduces the site’s concept more clearly. Here it is:

The ’start a book’ page, on the other hand, was much lighter on explanations and background information, but laid out a very clear actionable path for the user. Here’s that page:

Our initial vote? Unanimously for the home page. We felt the visitors would need more questions answered before moving forward.

The test results? The conversion rate for the “start you book” page was 4X better than the home page. Turned out the visitors didn’t really need all that background information after all!

What Makes a Real Expert

The lesson from the trenches is this: turn your back on the temptation to go with an opinion, no matter how informed or ‘expert’ it may be. Test your assumptions, and be prepared to see unexpected results. Listen to the results, and adjust your strategy accordingly. THAT’s what being an expert is really all about.

With all that’s going on with advanced link building techniques, what’s to become of our old friend the Web Directory? That tried and true guide to the World Wide Web. The organizer of cyberspace chaos. The human touch in an algorithmic world. OK…that’s enough. The time of the traditional human-edited Web Directory has passed (it actually passed quite some time ago). DMOZ is still in hibernation (from which it may never return). Yahoo! has removed directory links from its search results and homepage (it doesn’t get much clearer than that). And, Microsoft is rumored to be pulling the plug on its bCentral small business directory.

The human-edited Directory has simply gone the way of the floppy disk. The concept has been rendered obsolete by improvements to algorithmic search and the emergence of social bookmarking and tagging sites that provide users with more relevant and reliable guidance. The only "directory-style" sites that may still have a bright future are those that have maintained strict editorial control and do not allow direct submissions of content by site owners (which, by the way, means no payments from the site owners).

You can see the decline of the directory by simply taking a look at many of them. Designs typically look like they were frozen in 1997 (with a few exceptions). Some don’t even bother to promote their directories to visitors anymore and instead direct visitors to Google’s search results or Ad Sense advertisements. The directory is simply there behind the scenes to be crawled by search engine bots.

So let me get to the question at hand. Should we still look to directories to promote our sites? Yes and no (you saw that coming didn’t you?).

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If you’ve ever presented the results of your SEO or SEM efforts to a client of yours then this scenario will be familiar:

You spend hours (or days) compiling the data. You conduct your analysis, create your graphs and package it up. It’s been a great month and you make sure to convey that in your email, though the charts speak for themselves. You send it off.

Questions like these are the ones that come back:

"What does this chart mean?"
"Why did our numbers go down here?"
"What caused this increase?"

Now, if you’re fortunate enough to have clients who actually read your reports, consider yourself lucky. An informed client is more likely to be a champion for you and your future efforts than one who never opens your attachments.

However, that also means you have a responsibility to anticipate your client’s questions and take the necessary steps to make your metrics meaningful.

How to do this? While there are many paths to the creation of meaning, below are 3 Must-Have Rules for any SEO or SEM report:

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We tend to think of usability as a good thing, a helpful light in the murky wilderness. After all, usability is all about the user, right? Helping smooth the user’s path, and making things easier?
Isn’t it?

Sadly, this is not necessarily so. Like any other tool, usability can also be turned to evil.

It, too, has a dark side. (cue diabolical laughter)

In this series, I’ll be pulling in examples of usability twisted to serve not the user but some other nefarious plan - usually the bottom line. We’ll look at what the user expected or wanted to do, how evil usability is likely to trip them up, and what we can learn from it.

The Case of the Surprising Download Button

The afternoon began simply enough. A client of ours needed to send us a very large file for a rush project, but his email account’s size limit wouldn’t allow it through. Rather than wait for a CD via snailmail or teaching him how to use FTP, I told him to try one of my favorite little free tools, YouSendIt.com.

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