By Matt Dally, Search Strategist

“Search overload is over.” It was one year ago, on June 1, 2009, that Microsoft re-launched its search engine, previously known as Live Search, and bravely declared it a “decision engine” in a $100 million marketing campaign executed by JWT.

If the campaign didn’t achieve overnight success, it at least made Bing an overnight celebrity. Everybody wanted to know more about it. People tried it. Clients began asking about their rankings in Microsoft’s search engine. And SEOs, in turn, wanted to know how to optimize for Bing. The question was, would people really stop using Google and turn to Bing?

One year later, Bing’s share of searches has crept up from 9% to 13%, according to Nielsen, although this was almost entirely at the expense of Yahoo, whose search algorithm and ads will be replaced by Bing’s by the end of the year, thus giving Microsoft control of another 18% of the market. Rumors persist that Apple will make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, dumping Google as the mobile war between the two companies intensifies. This would be a huge win for Microsoft, but it’s a hell-freezes-over scenario that has yet to materialize. But the fact that Microsoft has bagged one major deal and may be on the verge of another is a sign of how far Bing has come. Can you imagine anyone ever taking rumors of a Live Search-iPhone deal seriously?

Yet despite making progress bit by bit, when you ask the average person about Bing these days, you get a shrug or a “My mom uses it.” There are exceptions. I’ve started using Bing for driving directions, having found Google to be increasingly unreliable since they ditched TeleAtlas and decided to rely on their own data and crowdsourcing for Google Maps. Several of my friends say they like Bing’s Farecast feature for travel planning. But I suspect this is how many people use Bing these days – as an occasional alternative. People just like Google because it works. And people are accustomed to Google’s search results and so view them as the “right” results. When they go to Bing and see sites come up different from what they’re used to, it feels like they’re driving an unfamiliar rental car where all the buttons and switches are in the “wrong” places. And then they go back to Google after their brief Bing vacation.

So perhaps it is more notable what Google has done since Bing launched. They’ve moved their search ads closer to the organic results, incorporated more “instant answers” into results, mixed in real-time updates, and added a left sidebar. As I write this article, Google is even giving users the ability to upload a pretty photo as their Google homepage background – all very Bing-esque, but good luck getting Google to admit it has anything to do with that other search engine.

For the first time in years, Google has stopped gaining search share and faces serious competition. Google is being forced to innovate at a faster pace. Even if you’re not using Bing, Bing has had a significant impact on your search results. Whether Bing can take market share directly from Google will largely depend on its ability to improve its search results and add compelling new features, and whether or not Yahoo can successfully bring visitors back to its portal.

Our bet is that Google keeps its lead, but with a 30% market share forthcoming and new innovations in its pipeline, Bing is something that no search marketer can afford to ignore. Not a bad first year for Microsoft’s reincarnated search engine. Happy birthday, Bing!

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By Stan Wang, Director of Search

The latest news in the SEO world is that Google recently announced that they are including site speed as a factor in their ranking algorithm.  “Site speed” is defined simply as how quickly a website responds to web requests.  Before we talk about the implications of this change let’s go over a few important facts as mentioned by Google:

·         Page relevance is weighted much more heavily

·         The changes were launched “a few weeks back”

·         Fewer than 1% of search queries are affected

·         Currently only applies to English searches on google.com

Now of course the obvious question is - what does this mean for my SEO efforts? 

Borrowing from the Google Search Quality Team’s Principal Engineer, Matt Cutts, the first order of business is: don’t panic.  According to Google, this change has affected a very small percentage of search queries. 

Casual observation would support this attitude as well.  Few if any people even noticed the change when it was rolled out around early March.  Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any unexpected changes in our clients’ rankings at Red Bricks.  With nary a change in search engine results, the time to hit the panic button is not now. 

Google also mentions that relevancy factors are still weighted much more heavily than site speed.  That means things like keyword relevance, site authority, and backlinks -. i.e., all the things a good SEO program has been doing all along - are still the most important factors for ranking.

Does this mean there that nothing should be in done in response to this algorithm change?  Certainly not!  Google uses a multitude of factors to rank pages and it is important to do well in as many of them as possible.  While it is difficult to pinpoint precisely what Google may be looking for in a newly released factor, we can definitely approximate site speeds by looking at the page load times of the top performing sites out there.  The slowest of top performing sites generally have page load times of up to seven seconds.  A good rule of thumb for your website’s pages is to outperform this bottom quartile and have page load times of less than 7 seconds. Ideally, your page load times would be clocked at under 4 seconds.  There are several free page load analysis tools available, including Google Webmaster Tools, Page Speed, and YSlow. 

The good news is that the majority of sites require no immediate action., Page load times are easy to measure, and having a faster website offers benefits beyond helping search engine rankings.  As is typical for Google, they will monitor this change on google.com before rolling it out internationally. 

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By Scott Neslund, CEO

When you look across the media landscape you see many significant changes. DVR household penetration has topped 40% giving more consumers the ability to shift television viewing to a time of their choice and skip commercial advertising. Sites like Hulu give consumers even more control over when and where to watch video content. The print industry is in massive transformation as many local newspapers went bankrupt last year and the New York Times put a stake in the ground by deciding to charge consumers for their digital content. E-readers are moving from one of kind with the Kindle to a sea of choices including Apple’s perceived Holy Grail with the iPad.

Social networking has taken the communications industry by storm as Facebook visitors grew to over 300 million and the crowd on Twitter seems to be topping out around 60 million at the moment. And probably one of the most telling statistics indicating how much consumers have embraced the digital environment is that holiday shopping online increased 5% to over $27 billion in sales last year while brick and mortar sales saw declines. Even struggling retailers like Sears have discovered that their best hope for revenue growth is online and launched an aggressive plan to save the company by building an e-tailing effort that captures 40 million visitors each month.

All of these sweeping changes in consumer media behavior and technological advances emphasize the importance of search in advertising. With expanding choices at their fingertips consumers will continue to exercise more and more control over their information and entertainment options. Any business that hopes to grow in the next decade will need to know to capitalize on search behavior in order to have a winning business plan.

“Serving 23 Billion Each Month and Growing”: ComScore announced that U.S. consumers conducted 23 billion searches in December, a 22% increase over the same month last year. Worldwide the number of conducted searches was 131 billion, a 46% increase. Media behavior like this can’t be ignored and it shows how routine search behavior has become among consumers.

For advertisers to thrive in this new world order where consumers are in control and search for what they want or need versus simply reacting to messages that are placed in front of them, they will need to know how to do the following:

· Understand how their total media investment drives consumer search behavior. SEO and PPC are not the only ways to drive search online. Television, print, OOH and all media including WOM influence how consumers search.

· Optimize based on insights and analytics: Each web traffic report has the potential to show advertisers better ways to improve search results and add value to the business. Advertisers must have the right tools, processes and people to take advantage of this data.

· Engage consumers with creativity and relevance. Simply driving consumers to a specific site is not enough. The information needs to be relevant, interesting and in many cases creative so that consumers want to interact with the advertising.

The power of search marketing delivers all of this for advertisers and gives them a significant opportunity to build their business at a time when the media landscape is changing racially. Agencies for the future realize this and agencies that don’t will find themselves managing decline for the next decade.

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By Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist

As any other marketing channel, search engine optimization must be taken to a new level for international campaigns in order to properly optimize a site across one or many international websites. A cookie cutter approach to internationalization may work in some cases, but without a proper foundation of international SEO, this will most likely lead to an array of SEO issues further on.

Stay Consistent

Setting the ground work for sub-domains or separate domains requires consistency across all international sites as mixing and matching can often lead to confusion and tracking problems. Even then, prepare for potential problems in advance where some domain names may already have been purchased or where specific countries (such as China) prefer acquiring a domain hosted within that country.

Consider who controls each international SEO area in order to avoid problems with delegation of authority. At the same time, establish some baselines of allowed practices so that inconsistencies are not brought to light negatively such as Google Japan’s use of paid blogs that violated Google’s own SEO guidelines.

Provide Flexibility

A strict policy guideline or best practice for international SEO will quickly fail as Google does not dominate every market, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Even Google’s algorithm is not universal where certain tactics long-since forgotten in the United States is alive and well abroad.

Avoid Duplicating Duplications

More than likely the main domestic website already includes numerous amounts of duplicate content that is in the pipeline to be fixed. Keep in mind that those issues will be compounded if not planned for out of the gate for international campaigns. Search engines will be particularly confused which website to rank in which country if content is exactly the same across the US, the UK, Ireland, etc. Create new content and custom-tailor it to the specific geographic area.

Translate

Even with English as language of commerce, many countries primary online language is something other than English. Many countries in Europe have more than two languages as the national language, so be prepared to have multiple same-country websites in multiple languages in order to satisfy both the user and the search engines for searchers’ preferences. Furthermore, find a good translation for your business name and products in order to avoid horrible conversions such as when Chevy went into the Mexico car market with a brand product called Nova (translated as “no go”).

Localise the Language

Even if your website is launching in another English-speaking country, this does not mean that the same spelling, words, or meanings are going to equate. Optimizing a website for a common spelling in the US and exporting that to the UK may result in one’s SEO being optimized for a misspelling. The same goes for any other languages (Spain vs. Venezuela vs. Mexico vs. Columbia, etc.) and optimizing a website on the wrong keyword phrase or spelling can result in a perceived poor quality from both visitors and search engines.

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By Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist & Resident Analytics Guru

What would we do without Web Analytics? They provide the data necessary to make performance marketing possible. This allows for more efficient campaign optimization and higher ROI for businesses large and small. For most marketers, however, getting to that point is not an easy process. Most marketers will jump through hoops in order to pull the data they need to analyze, and merely end up with results which are confusing or difficult to interpret.

Web Analytics has evolved from log server files and stat counters into software packages whch provide a wealth of valuable data about website usage.. As such, Web Analytics as a practice began mostly as an arm of web development and developed in importance to the point that most companies now require an additional division to understand online profitability. However, the fundamentals of Web Analytics software which were originally built for website audits have yet to fully escape their roots in web development.

When one launches one of the well-known Web Analytics software packages today, whether it be Omniture, Google Analytics, or Coremetrics, the question that drives the user is usually “How is my website doing?” rather than “How are my online marketing campaigns doing?” These Web Analytics packages are structured by the process one would use to audit specific pages or searches, and how they are performing concerning website usability.

This is not to downplay the importance of these kinds of views and metrics, but rather to point out that Web Analytics should play a larger role in online marketing, rather than merely providing information about a website’s usage. There are changes afoot within Web Analytics that are providing deeper, more insightful, and more useful information to online marketers.An example of this is Coremetrics’ user-interface tagging or Google Analytics’ new ‘Analytics Insight’ section.

Yet, Web Analytics packages truly need to go through a full restructuring in order to avoid feeling like an add-on of an add-on, charging by the number of users or by the number of reports one creates. When an online marketer logs in to a Web Analytics interface, the first thing available should provide an overall view of performance by marketing channel, allowing any online marketer to dive into their own data and gain insights into their specialty without having to navigate through multiple areas in order to get data that is relevant to them.

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New service offers complex, comprehensive performance assessment and monitoring solutions.

San Francisco, CA – November 3, 2009 – Red Bricks Media, a full-service digital marketing agency, announced its new Analytics & Insights practice. Offerings will help clients better utilize marketing and website data to make more intelligent business decisions.

In order to meet the increasing and varied demands of digital marketers, Analytics & Insights will provide solutions that are both highly customized and platform independent. From defining analytics requirements to ad-hoc report development to generating robust data visualizations, the new service focuses on providing the data needed to make informed marketing decisions on budget and resource allocations.

“While a lot of agencies offer one-size-fits-all reports, our solutions focus on determining exactly what drives the success and failures of our clients’ digital marketing campaigns,” said CEO Elliott Easterling. “Whether we are analyzing the performance of a single channel or pulling together complex information from multiple campaigns, our goal is to provide custom, data-driven recommendations that will improve performance.”

The first offerings within the new practice will address the core elements digital marketers need to get analytics configured and intelligence uncovered:

• Analytics Platform Implementation Consulting
• Customized Reporting Solutions
• Deep Dive Analyses
• Cross-Platform Analysis Tools

For more complete information please visit www.redbricksmedia.com.

About Red Bricks Media:

Red Bricks Media is a full-service global marketing agency headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Hong Kong. Since 2003, they have offered services in search engine marketing, interactive media planning, email campaign management, creative, web design, and social media marketing. Their client list includes top brands like Microsoft, Hearst Magazines, THQ and the Los Angeles Times. To learn more about Red Bricks Media’s Web Analytics practice, please contact sales@redbricksmedia.com.

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By Andrew Leinicke, Senior Director and Joe Van Remortel, Vice President

Chances are good that your search engine marketing program is an underachiever. The growing complexity of search engine marketing can often result in higher costs and lower conversions. If your paid search campaigns have not accounted for the 20-25 variables that influence results they are likely candidates for reassessment.

Deciphering the root causes of search engine marketing performance is not easy. In fact, many seasoned search engine marketers miss opportunities for campaign improvement because they stray away from core performance-enhancing principles and fail to migrate campaigns through the dynamics of efficiency and volume.

Performance Enhancing Principles

The upshot is that marketers can boost the performance of their search engine marketing and PPC campaigns by 30%-50% or more by acting on four fundamental tenets of PPC advertising.

1. Simplify the Inherent Complexity of Search Engine Marketing

Search engine algorithms, policies and functionality are in a continuous state of evolution. And with 20-25 variables (such as match type, messaging relevancy, bid strategy) influencing search campaign performance, your PPC program becomes a complex, dynamic system that requires insightful management. Success is earned through finding the unique set of performance variables that drive efficiency and volume.

2. Iterative Campaign Management Influences Performance

There is no magic wand to wave over a search campaign to generate immediate, breakthrough success. A common pitfall in search engine marketing is an over-reliance on technology and automation. Automation can create process efficiencies, but too often campaigns are auto-piloted right into mediocrity, as the value of insightful human intellect is discounted. Cultivating new opportunities are what sophisticated PPC strategists do. Keyword universe segmentation as well as testing and landing page optimization are never complete.

 3. Messaging Relavancy is a Critical Performance Factor

In the beginning, there was keyword research: a means to build a semantic foundation for your PPC campaign. Visitor quality and conversion rates are directly correlated to the consistency of the relationship among keywords, queries, ads and landing pages. Thus, “messaging relevancy” greatly influences conversions, ROI and quality score. Get control of your messaging relevancy and you will go a long way to improving performance. 

4. Focus on Relative Value to Optimize Yields

Don’t become mesmerized by the most obvious metrics. Develop a portfolio of high-yield campaigns based not on click-through rates, but on customer value generation. Measure and optimize the highest order campaign metrics—customer acquisition, revenue, cost savings to make true ROI optimization decisions. Investigate relative campaign performance at the adgroup level, and then apply a performance-tiering approach to restructure the campaign to give you more control over feeding the winners and starving the losers.

Efficiency-Volume Matrix

When working with existing campaigns, Red Bricks Media applies these methods through the looking glass of our Four Quadrant PPC Analysis™. This approach is designed to identify the core drivers of PPC success and develop strategies based on the advertiser’s industry and location on the Four Quadrant diagnostic grid. Our Four Quadrant methodology assesses PPC campaigns along two critical dimensions: efficiency (cost) and volume (conversions). All PPC campaigns strive to be in Quadrant 1 in the matrix below—a state of maximized volume and efficiency. Our diagnosis places each campaign in one of the four quadrants. Depending on its location in the matrix and campaign parameters, we prescribe a specific set of strategies and tactics aimed at migrating campaigns to Quadrant 1.  

For example, in the matrix above, a company in a highly competitive, mature sector—consumer banking, mobile phone services, or retail — is likely to have PPC campaigns constrained in Quadrant 4.  

As depicted, our approach uncovers the key performance drivers and inhibitors, and then conceives an improvement program built on moving the campaign to Quadrant 1, with expanded volume and improved efficiencies. One must first analyze past and current performance data in light of current inventory and CPC rates in order to properly locate a campaign on the grid. Experiential knowledge of PPC campaigns and rigorous testing and optimization scenarios expose the success drivers and inhibitors that power the migration to greater levels of success.

The benefits of this approach can be significant. In a recent case when Red Bricks Media adopted an existing search program for an entertainment client, we applied the methods described above. The program had been deemed optimized, but, in fact, was languishing in Quadrant 3. Within six months, the Red Bricks Media team reduced the cost-per-click from $1.24 to $0.19, while more than tripling campaign volume. In order to achieve such results under the old campaign regime, our client would have been required to invest an additional $2.8 million. That is found money.

Search engine marketing isn’t getting more simple, but rather more complex. The way to penetrate that complexity—and simplify campaign management—is to focus on the four principles described above. Structuring that analysis within the Four Quadrant model enables campaign strategists to identify a powerful set of performance-enhancing strategies and tactics that can turn the underachieving campaign into an overachieving success.

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by Andy Leinicke, Paid Search Media Director

Yesterday, Yahoo announced a new partnership with MSN that is designed to give both parties greater leverage in the competition for share of the global search market. The announcement came in the form of a blog post at Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo’s colorful corporate blog. Get the full story from Yahoo’s point of view here. Also, here is a video of Carol Bartz’s personal description:

Carol Bartz on Yahoo/Microsoft Deal

The partnership is simply a deal, not a change in the corporate structure of either entity. But it is a big deal. The term of the agreement is ten years and there is significant revenue and resource share involved. TechCrunch described the gist of the arrangement well in its post:

Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

The deal does not affect either Yahoo or MSN display advertising businesses.

Our Yahoo representative assured me today that although this partnership has been finalized between Yahoo and MSN, the U.S. Government still needs to approve it. For advertisers, that means day-to-day operations won’t change at all for at least five months. Even when the deal is finalized, Yahoo estimates that an additional five to six months will be necessary to integrate technology and staffing in a way that will be material to Yahoo and Bing advertisers.

In our opinion, this deal could be a great combination of MSN’s engineering ability with Yahoo’s responsive and experienced client service and sales team. SEM management isn’t going to change in the short term but hopefully SERP advertising will improve through these networks in the coming years.

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This office is an extension of the performance marketing agency’s global presence.

Los Angeles, CA – April 1st, 2009 – Interactive marketing agency Red Bricks Media recently unveiled a new office in Los Angeles.

This new office is a natural move for the agency, whose client list includes several Los Angeles-based clients including the Los Angeles Times, a popular video content network, and a major motion picture studio.

The Los Angeles location is a strategic outpost for Red Bricks Media because of its proximity to major players in the media and entertainment space. “A key initiative for 2008 was to strengthen our focus on media and entertainment companies, and we’ve had tremendous success adding new clients in this vertical,” explained Ed Kim, Red Bricks Media’s CEO. “Our performance focus is still refreshingly different from other agencies here and has been readily embraced in the LA market. This office, combined with our recently opened office in Taipei, is part of our ongoing national and global expansion plan for 2009.”

The office will be staffed by employees transferring from the San Francisco office, including management team member and Media Supervisor Becca Vittetoe. Vittetoe is an experienced media professional who has managed integrated media campaigns for Fortune 1000 clients.

Regarding her new role, Vittetoe said, “I’m very excited to lead our first office in Southern California. We believe that being close to our clients there will make us stronger business partners and will also give us an opportunity to form new strategic partnerships.”

The new office is located in West Los Angeles in a red brick building.

About Red Bricks Media

Red Bricks Media is a global integrated marketing agency specializing in search engine marketing, interactive media planning, email campaign management, award-winning creative services and emerging forms of media including buzz and mobile marketing. We take a performance-driven approach to our campaigns and measure our success by our clients’ successes. Red Bricks Media is an independent agency headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Hong Kong, Taipei and Los Angeles, creating world-class advertising programs for top brands like Microsoft Higher Education, Hearst Magazines, THQ, and the Los Angeles Times. Visit www.redbricksmedia.com to find out why Red Bricks Media is one of the fastest-growing agencies in the country.

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by Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist

Since its introduction in 1996, Flash has become one of the most widely-used platforms on the Internet for web animations, web design, and website development. Though its use is not search engine friendly (with only the recent ability from Google to index links within Flash), the benefits of Flash have propelled its use around the globe. However, there is a dark side of Flash that you should know about: Flash can potentially run third-party scripts that gather your website’s information without your knowledge.

Last November Google announced that Google Analytics can track Flash by placing its code within the Flash file. This was received with great excitement as it allowed Flash websites to track their own Flash files, videos, and actions that were not captured as effectively as a regular HTML website. This announcement, however, spawned the troubling potential for malicious developers to run black hat analytics scripts through Flash that could effectively track a third party’s web data without their direct knowledge.

At Red Bricks Media, we ran a test to determine the seriousness of this threat. Through our test we determined that anytime a user uploads or embeds a third-party video, pixel, or graphic made from Flash, the data from that page can be transmitted into the same third-party’s Google Analytics or an analytics package built solely for the purpose of gathering black hat analytics competitive intelligence data.

People will embed scripts into their websites to become an affiliate partner, to run ads, or to display their latest movie RSS feed without reading any privacy notes, terms of service, or end user license agreements. Many of these Flash files can come in innocuous forms such as a common VeriSign Seal used by ecommerce websites (please note that VeriSign is not doing anything black hat). The openness of the web and the benefits that are given through online advertising are often abused by black hat tactics, so it’s important to be careful about which scripts you include on your website.

As a general rule, if you are thinking about embedding third-party Flash files or code, only place code from places you trust. Furthermore, we strongly suggest that you have your developers read the privacy notes and use data packet sniffing to determine just what these files are possibly sending out. Your data is a valuable asset in the competitive online world; do not let other sites have access to it without your explicit understanding or agreement.

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