The IAB has just released their 2010 search marketing barometer which makes for essential reading if you operate in the digital marketing or search engine marketing arenas.

A total of 144 questionnaires were completed by 91 top brand (chosen as they are were the top advertising spenders for April/May this year).

A summary of the IAB findings are as follows:

1. Integration opportunity – only 28.7% of advertisers said search is fully integrated with the rest of the marketing mix, yet 99% said there is a greater opportunity to integrate and 100% of Search Council agencies felt all of their clients could do more to integrate.
2. Brand building – 78% respondents said search can build brand either directly or as part of the full user journey, reflected by actual use. 70% include brand building as a primary objective of SEO and over 50% for PPC.
3. Budget – 99% of SEO budgets and 90% of PPC budgets will stay the same or increase in 2010 (55% and 43% increase respectively).
4. PPC Activity – Only 14% of respondents DON’T employ a PPC agency; and 72% of respondents are restricted by their PPC budgets.
5. Website effectiveness – only 37% of websites are ‘good’ at achieving objectives, leaving much room for improvement once consumers reach their destination.
6. Advanced testing – 19.4% of respondents carry out A/B testing with 5% carrying out MVT (multi-variate testing); 35% carry out both. 39% of respondents do not carry out testing – so clearly there’s room for improvement.
7. Strong understanding of search? – the majority of respondent claim to understand the main principles of SEO and PPC (only 38.6% feel teams outside of digital also understand the importance of search); but few have enough information about new or advanced tools and data. This would indicate that knowledge is not being filtered to all levels, which is also hindered by an ever changing IT landscape.
8. Efficiency of search – cost, value and resource are clear concerns at the moment, indicating a shift in advertiser attitudes to search where reviewing and optimising activity is currently of greater importance.
9. Finding skills – 37% of respondents said they found it hard to find staff with skills in search marketing; and search qualifications were considered unimportant for 53%.
10. Social Media and mobile – 39% of respondents believe social media will be more important than search in 2015; 49% believe mobile search will overtake desktop search by 2015.

Out of a 357 votes, the following results were found:

The clear trend is that most voters (54%) are carrying out their social media activity in-house with only 18.18% outsourcing it.

An equal number of people reported having no plans for it in the short term and only 9.09% were considering it.

Social Media may well be the zeitgeist of the moment, but has its popularity eclipsed that of search engine optimisation in Google?

We compared two commonly used short tail search terms: social media and SEO (more popular than search engine optimisation in search).

In the UK, SEO is still more popular in search than social media, with consistent year on year growth since 2004.

Late 2007 sees early adopters searching for social media content, but the news reference popularity doesn’t really kick in until the start of 2009.

This year’s trends show that SEO is still more popular in search, but interestingly social media is the clear winner in news reference searches demonstrating its zeitgeist.

I often site Google Alerts as a great competitor benchmarking tool particularly if you’re carrying out SEO campaigns, monitoring buzz for online PR or tracking blog activity. Despite its popularity among digital marketers, its power is rarely unleashed, so let’s look at some typical uses, in this case within a search engine optimisation framework:

1, Brand buzz monitoring

The most obvious use of Google Alerts is to monitor your brand activity.  Google will report on any mentions of your brand across the web. Or  should you want to limit alerts to specific indeces, you can choose to only be alerted if your brand is mentioned with blogs or news for example.

Monitoring brand activity not only enables you to assess where you brand has been mentioned, but also let’s you monitor any possible link building activity or opportunities.

2. Backlink monitoring

A more advanced use of Google Alerts is to enter a Google operator such as inanchor:Emarketeers which will send alerts if the brand name Emarketeers is found in any backlinks (within the actual anchor text) rather than just mentioned within page copy.

The same applies to non-branded search terms. So for example, if I want to track mentions of the keyphrase SEO training within links, I’ll add the command allinanchor:seo training into Google Alerts in order to be alerted of any newly indexed links containing the keyphrase SEO training.

3.  Monitoring of different types of content

By using advanced Google operators, Google Alerts allows an SEO expert to gain insight into how different types of content such as PDF files or Flash is indexed. This is particularly useful for monitoring on-page optimisation of Flash content which in the past may have caused problems as non-indexable content.

By adding the alert lighting design filetype:swf or lighting design filetype:pdf, we can to monitor the content of Flash and PDF files respectively for the keyphrase lighting design.

You might want to limit this to your own site to assess how well Google has indexed your content; if this is the case, the Google Alert would be lighting design filetype:swf site:mysite.com.

4. Competitor analysis for SEO keyphrases

Monitoring competitor use of keyphrases is the obvious use of Google Alerts for search campaigns. I can add the following alerts to keep up to speed on my competitor’s use of certain keyphrases:

“digital marketing” site:competitorsite.com – creates alerts for the  keyphrase digital marketing on my competitor’s site

“digital marketing” -site:mysite.com – prevents me being alerted of digital marketing appearing on my own site

allinachor:digital marketing site:competitorsite.com – create alerts when digital marketing is contained within links on my competitor’s website

5. Monitoring of index inclusion

I often use Google Alerts to inform me of recently indexed content on my own website. For example, to be alerted that this blog post has been indexed by Google, I could add the following alert: google alerts site:emarketeers.com

6. Generating leads through search activity

One delegate attending an SEO training course told me how she used Google Alerts for generating a list of prospects to follow-up.  Her company sold catering supplies to caterers in the Manchester area. She set up Google Alerts for phrases such as “manchester caterer”, “north west catering” and other related terms to be kept informed of prospects in her area.

7. Tracking activity of syndicated content

If you syndicate content such as articles (to article submission sites), online PR (to PR syndication services) or blogs (to blog aggregators), Google Alerts will let you monitor exactly where your content has been syndicated.

Create alerts containing the article, press release or blog post names to be informed of how they have been indexed across the web or more specifically within the blogosphere.

8. Check for plagiarism and duplicate content

This is a trickier call as any of your content could in theory be plagiarised. However if you are particularly paranoid about theft of certain content e.g. blog articles you have been slaving over, use Google Alerts to warn you of content theft.

This is particularly relevant to SEO as duplicate content can cause index exclusion.

He also introduces his newer project “Universe” which turns current events into constellations of words.

Both projects illustrate that our differences – be they cultural, monetary, political, sexual or geographical – are actually not so diverse as we share the same feelings, issues, concerns, doubts or celebrations.

“We Feel Fine” is not only triumphant in consolidating the web’s emotions via unfiltered and passively observed content, but it also contains beautiful interfaces that translate chaos into coherence.

Enjoy…

An interesting blog post by Joshua Odmark on Search Engine Journal came under my radar today regarding Amazon’s refusal to pay commissions on sales from shortened URLs posted by their affiliates on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

The nub of the article was that shortened Amazon affiliate links (e.g. using services such as TinyURL) published on Twitter and Facebook were not compensated by Amazon after sales had been made as a result of clicks from those links.

Zero Commissions from Social Media Sites
Whilst Amazon recorded sales being made (Amazon affiliates can track sales using real-time reporting), the commissions were zero.

Basically Amazon are relying on their Ts and Cs stating that a link has to be from “your site” in order to be eligible for commission.

What does this say about how Amazon affiliates should use social media to promote their affilate sites or links? Well, basically it scuppers those plans. As Joshua points out, whilst it may not be considered dirty tricks from Amazon, it doesn’t bode well if many other affiliate programmes were to follow suit.

First SEO now Social Media?
Amazon affiliates have in the past been hit hard in SERPs with the Google duplicate content filter, especially those screenscraping content using Amazon Web Services. (For the record I’m not necessarily endoring that!). So, this is another kick in the teeth.

Google’s Ok with Shortened URLs. Why Not Amazon?
Now, Matt Cutts of Google states that any URL shortening service that uses the correct 301 (permanent) redirect protocol will still be followed by the Google bot and will be recognised as a backlink despite the different domain name, so arguably why can’t Amazon follow suit and recognise that social media is here to stay and that shortened affiliate links will be found plastered all over social sites whether they like it or not?

In this world there are few evangelists out there. Most of us conform to the pack mentality and will be happy to follow than to lead.

Well, the same findings apply to Twitter. According to Purewire, who operate TweetGrade, 80% of accounts on Twitter have less than 10 followers. And 30% of Twitter accounts have absolutely no followers!

Our two theories are as follows:

1. People who set up Twitter accounts use it to follow others as the investment in “Tweet time” is too burdensome; or maybe they have nothing to say!
2. People have set up accounts to see what the fuss is all about; they either leave it at that or simply don’t get it!

TechCrunch reported that Twitter had 32 million visitors in April this year. Even with an average site conversion rate of let’s say 5-10% (I would imagine it’ll be higher given Twitter’s brand equity), that’s a lot of new Twitter accounts.

Interestingly, the number of accounts following zero people amounted to 24.4% which backs up our second theory that people set up accounts because they feel they need to jump on the bandwagon.

The other question is how many of these accounts are active Twitterers? TechCrunch cited a Harvard BusinessSchool study purporting that the top 10% of Twitterers produce more than 90 percent of all Tweets. Ah the 80-20 rule surfaces again.

If you look at the world of UGC and social participation online, most users tend to be reactive rather than proactive. We are generally more comfortable responding to a blog than publishing our own thoughts and potentially putting our necks on the line. And in that sense, the above figures are hardly surprising.

Ben McConnell, co-author of the Church of the Customer blog refers to “one-percenters”. The 1% are the core “value creators of a democratized community”. If you look at contributors to social media content such as Twitter, approximately 1% of the online community create content whereas 10% are contributors. The majority however do not contribute and only digest the content; the latter group being the “followers” not the “followed”.

Having said that, when it comes to who is or isn’t influential it isn’t always a numbers game. Individuals with a large number of Twitter followers can be thought of as being potential influencers as their Tweets are broadcast to a large audience. However, this does not necessarily mean that they are authoritative. Authority is associated with opinions, trend-setting and speaking your mind.

I feel another blog article coming on….