Well, aside from the initial reports that Bing is seeing an increase in market share, there could be an even more important benefit of the new design. Bing might just make more money per search query than Google.

As you may have noticed, Bing uses a three column design for its search results page. Having just returned from Microsoft’s Search Summit, I can confirm that this wasn’t just done on a whim, but very carefully thought out. One of the driving factors for the design, was the ability to give Bing users a vast array of data and refinement options. In essence, Bing gave that left hand navigational column a prime time spot.

So, what happens when you shake-up the design of a search results page? The search engine user breaks that zombie stare they once used to focus purely on the middle column of results. In other words, their eye starts roving. In fact, as User Centric’s eye studies have shown, Bing users–faced with a 3-column design–are much more likely to view the paid ads that run down the right-hand column.

…sponsored links on the right attracted more attention on Bing (~42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (~25% of participants per search). The participants who fixated on these links spent approximately 2.5 seconds looking at the area during transactional searches and 2 seconds during informational searches. These times were similar for the two search engines.

Now, it could just be the novelty factor. More likely, the design of Bing encourages the searcher’s eye to look beyond the typical ten blue links. If this trend holds, advertisers will be delighted at the additional engagement Bing brings to their ads. And that engagement means more money for Microsoft’s coffers!

Read the full story at Marketing Pilgrim

Most business owners that we meet are not aware of Per-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, those who do often have a stigma that PPC is expensive and generally quite useless.

Pay Per Click?

Perform any search on Google and sometimes you see “sponsored listings” on the top and right side, which are the PPC advertisements.  Like its namesake, an advertiser pays Google whenever someone clicks on the ad and gets directed to the advertiser’s website.

For most of our campaigns, we’ve included PPC in our Internet marketing toolset.  It’s not something that you would want to depend on for a steady stream of new visitors (we have organic search or SEO for that) but its still a good source of traffic and fast too, especially if you have a new website.

How it Works

Most PPC campaigns start with the advertiser deciding on a daily budget (you could start for as little as $1 a day if you wanted to).  Rest assured that you will not be charged for anything more than the daily budget you’ve set.  The next thing would be to decide the keywords that you want to advertise for (”pet supplies”, “accounting services”) and place a bid for them.  Your bid price is the amount you will pay each time a user clicks on your ad, up to your daily budget.

An Example:

Suppose your budget is $10 and you bid for “pet supplies” at $1.  Each time a user searches for “pet supplies” on your ad network (Google, Yahoo, etc) your ad will be shown.  It doesn’t matter how many times your ad is shown (the more the merrier of course) since you don’t get charged for it.  If the user is interested in your ad and wants to find out more, he clicks your website.  Then, you will be charged $1 for this referral.  After 10 users have clicked through your ad to your website, your advertising budget for the day will be spent and then your ads will stop showing until the next day.  Oh, and don’t worry about someone clicking your ad for the heck of it.

Since your competitors may be bidding for the same keywords, your bid price will determine the position of your advertisement.  Unlike natural search (non-paid results), our experience is that you don’t need to be in the top 3 positions for best click-through results.  What matters most is a well phrased, good value proposition.

Web Analytics & PPC

Web analytics, or the lack of it, is the single most-common for PPC campaign failure.  There has to be some form of tracking in place to see how ads perform.  Things to track would include the change in traffic before and after the campaign, conversion rates and sales volume.  With analytics, you should be able to tell if your ad spending is bringing you a positive return.  If the ads are performing badly, analytics will also tell you if something is wrong with the ad copy, or if you have to optimise your landing page for more conversions.

Once you have established a correlation between your ad spending and returns, you will be able to adjust your daily budget and forecast the effect it would have on your conversions.

Most of the time, when you hear about PPC campaigns not performing,  it’s due to the lack of tracking and analytics.  A PPC campaign properly deployed can be a very cheap source of targeted leads to your website!

Web analytics exist because resources are scarce.  It is a constant struggle to generate the maximum return out of limited resources, especially time and money.  The point of web analytics, or the practice of website analysis, is to provide a forecast of the potential returns based on dedicating X amount of resources to Internet marketing.

Accounting for Ad Spend

If you advertise in a magazine today, one of the first things that you check with the publisher is circulation numbers.  You want to know how many readers the magazine has every month, as that will be an indicator of the potential number of readers your ad can reach.  You will want to know the demographics of the readers and if they fall within your target group.  After the ad has been published you will try to track the response to it, maybe in the form of a cut-out coupon or monitoring sales levels.  After the whole exercise, you will decide if the ad has generated a return and whether it is worthwhile to continue advertising (in effect, utilizing limited resources).

Web Analytics = Accounting for Websites

Most websites in Singapore are not designed for accountability, simply because business owners are not aware of web analytics and the benefits it offers.  This results in websites built on purely aesthetic factors for the purpose of having an online presence.  Since no form of analysis is carried out on such websites, it is not possible to gather information on visitors, their preferences and their online behavior.  This leads to 2 undesirable outcomes.

1) You do not know what you are doing wrong on your website.  Are certain elements on your website causing you to lose potential customers?  Are you directing your resources at elements that do not perform? To be able to rectify any problems, we first have to recognize them.

2) You do not know which elements are converting visitors to customers.  Maybe visitors are coming back for your weekly column, maybe because of the promotion through your newsletter, maybe..  By identifying (instead of guessing) the factors that contribute to your success, you can allocate more resources to it and replicate its success consistently.

A Brief Web Analytics Walkthrough

1) We start by providing clients with an idea of the demand of their services online.  Like the readership of a magazine, we find out the number of potential customers our Internet marketing efforts can reach.  This is also reflective of the number of searches performed in a month for a particular service or product.

2) An initial analysis of the website will show us how it compares to its peers, its standing in the industry, and its online market share.

3) Based on the initial analysis, an Internet marketing plan is drafted and targets are set in actual numbers (number of repeat visitors, search ranking etc).

4) Modifications are made according to the marketing plan.

5) Weekly/monthly reports are generated and used to determine if targets have been met.  Using Key Perfomance Indicators (KPIs), we are able to tell why targets were met/not met.

6) We update the marketing plan according to our latest findings and set new targets.  Improvements are made to the website, giving visitors more of what they like.  Elements that are affecting performance are removed or rectified. Keeping visitors happy eventually turn them into paying customers.

7) Repeat

Start tracking the performance of not just your website, but all of your Internet marketing initiatives today and you will be amazed by the amount of insights it can offer.  In a world of homogenized products, business intelligence is the key factor to beating the competition!

Want to gain a competitive edge?  Read more about our web analytics solutions.

Last week we talked about the mechanics of search engines and how they work.  Whenever a search is performed, the search engine will go through its list of indexed sites, fetch and display these sites (or pages) in the form of search listings.  This week, we share more about how search engines decide which pages to list, and in what order to list them.

Search Engine Spiders & Page Indexing

Remember that before a search engine can display your webpage it has to have a record of it.  Search engines send out an automated program known as a spider or a bot, that goes to a website and starts to make a copy of all the content on the site.  Once it has gotten enough information, it brings these results back to the search engine for indexing.  Within this information, there are links to other sites, and the spider will then follow these links to the new websites and index them.  This means that if you place a link to your website from another site that is already in a search engine’s cache (or records), your site will get indexed faster.   Read more about getting your site indexed in Google.

The architecture of your website is very crucial to indexing.  Each trip that a spider makes to your site, it has a limit of how much time to spend there and how much content it can copy.  If your website uses Flash or other non spider-friendly elements, the spider may not be able to index your site.  For this reason, when we design websites, we make sure that the site is both user-friendly, and visible to search engines.

How Search Engines Decide if Your Content is Relevant

Once you have your pages indexed, search engines will display your pages as results when a user searches for a relevant term.  The search engine is a computer and it has no way of reading the content on your page.  What it does however is make use of a mathematical formula ( that takes into account hundreds, if not thousands of factors on your page) to determine a “relevance score”.  All the webpages that meet a basic score are then displayed as results in descending order.  These formulas or algorithms vary from search engine to search engine, and they are closely guarded secrets.  Imagine if people know what factors went into these formulas, they would be able to “beat the system” and probably abuse it for personal gains (hey, we’re only human).

While we don’t know exactly what all these factors, we do make calculated guesses at what some of them are.   All this guesswork eventually evolved into a practice known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  It is a proven fact that websites that are optimized for search are more visible to search engines and perform better in search results.

Some SEO Techniques Include:

• Search Engine-Friendly Architecture – Where special programming rules and methods are used to build websites, making it easier for spiders to visit them and collect data
• Backlink Building – Having more websites pointing to yours will increase the chances of your content getting indexed.  Google has also officially mentioned that the number of backlinks to your site is a factor in its algorithm.
• Content Generation – The amount of content on your website and the frequency with it is updated also plays a big part.  Imagine that you are an avid book reader.  Wouldn’t you like to go to a huge store where they stock titles every week compared to small shop that hardly changes its displays?

Overdoing It = Spam

Before you get all psyched up and start posting your links everywhere, most search engines are coming down quite hard on websites that take a shady approach to SEO.  Remember that search engines are all about relevance amd if they start to notice an unnatural growth trend in your website’s backlinks or content generation (especially duplication), you might run the risk of getting your listings removed altogether (Google’s notorious for this).

As with all things online, think about SEO techniques and how they can benefit your users eventually.  As long as you think along those lines, you’ll do fine.

To do great, contact the professionals today

There was a rich but snobbish kid in my class who always brought the latest toys to school.  He would only let his appointed friends play with them, so at a young age I experienced the dilemma of selling out or sticking to your beliefs.  Then I grew up and there was Google.

It’s a love-hate situation with the world’s most popular search engine.  if you played by its rules, and played them well, Google (or the other search engines for the matter) could become the most powerful ally in your Internet marketing campaign.  Go all James Dean on it and you’ll find yourself losing precious traffic or in worse scenarios, getting delisted in the search engine results.

How Google Changed the Search Landscape

Prior to 1996, search engines like everything else, ran on the universal fuel of human motivation: Money.  As long as you paid enough money, you were guaranteed of a favorable position in search results listing.  Then Google came along and told the world that they were abolishing paid listings in favor of relevance.  This made sense for Google’s continued survival, since no one would want to use a search engine that delivers only advertisements instead of the content that they were searching for.  Since then Google has been at it’s never-ending  process of refining its search algorithm to deliver faster and more accurate results.

How Search Engines Work

A search engine is like a library, but instead of looking through the shelves for the book you have in mind, you have to go to the librarian and tell her what you are looking for.  She goes through her records to see if the library has a copy of the book and if it does, retrieves it for you.

You might go to the library researching on a particular topic without having a specific book in mind.  In this case the librarian will show you a list of all the related books they have on record.  You then decide which book to choose.

In both cases, the librarian can only offer you a book that exists in her record.  Similarly, a search engine can only display results (websites) that it has on record, or indexed.

Indexing

You’ve written a new book and want to offer a copy of it to the library so that more people can get to read it.

1) Your publisher tells you to wait for a few months, and the library will magically have a record of it (hilarious isn’t he).

2) You leave the book on the library doorstep and hopes that the librarian sees it first thing in the morning.

3) You fill in a submission form and hand it and the book over to the librarian.

Method 3 seems the most probable way of getting your book into the record.  Then again both Methods 2 and 3 depend on the librarian.  Maybe she’s trying to clear the backlog from last week, so your book will have to wait.  Maybe you made an error in the submission form and she cannot process it. Maybe baby.

You notice that the as long as you book is not in the record, no borrower will have access to it.  Now don’t you wish the librarian was a personal friend?

Then Comes the Nightmare of Search Rankings

Your book is finally in the record!  You camp near the counter waiting for a borrower to come and request for your book.  Since it is relatively new and unknown, no one would be asking for it by name (yes, in that same argument no one searches for you on the Internet by your company’s name).  A borrower comes to the counter and asks for books on the topic you have written.  He takes the first 3 books in the records.  Neither of them is the one you wrote.  This happens 10 other times for the rest of the day.

You storm up and demand an explanation from the librarian and she explains that the books on the list are sorted by their popularity and relevance. Great. Now you don’t only have to be an expert in your field, you would have to be popular before anyone even reads your book.  Hey, didn’t you write your book in hope of becoming popular in the first place?!

Just as you are about to give up, a bright light catches your eye..

To Be Continued..

Next Week: Search Engines: Friend or Foe (Pt 2)

Just as the librarian is only human, a search engine is only a program.  Come back same time next week and we’ll show you how to manipulate human emotions and numerical sequences to your own ends.

A few years ago, it was difficult to justify building a website and using it as an effective marketing tool for your business.  Internet usage wasn’t as widely adopted as it is now, and the web had not established itself as a channel for sourcing products and services.   Then as web development services got cheaper over time, many business owners decided that spending money to develop a website didn’t even require justification.  It was just an affordable, one-off, sunk cost.  Things got worse when more others decided to develop a website for their company simply because “every company has one nowadays”.

This year, with the looming recession (are we there yet?), many businesses will review the cost of maintaining their assets; including websites, and start asking for some accountability.  The lucky ones will stumble upon the fact that a website today can become an extremely powerful weapon.

Search engines (Google in particular) has dramatically changed the purchasing pattern of the under-30s.  Do you still keep a copy of the yellow-pages and thumb through it when you want to look for a service or product?  The younger crowd prefers to let their fingers do the walking on their computers and mobile devices.  With search engines constantly improving to deliver faster and more relevant results, this phenomenon is definitely here to stay. Unconvinced about this demographic and its purchasing power?  Think about why the recent election went in Obama’s favor and what percentage of the voters fall into this category.  Today, these are just kids and young adults new to workforce, but very soon, they will become the major decision makers, and guess how are they going to get their information from and where do they network?

What this means is that while the rest of your competitors are still focusing on the brick and mortar (i like to call it 3D) aspects of their business, you should start to place more emphasis on your web assets.  Use online marketing channels and tools like social networks and PPC advertising to get your brand out to as many people as possible.  These methods are relatively cheap and perfoming such activities can actually help to fully utilize any spare resources especially in manpower.  A year of regular presence-building activities will set you far ahead of your competitor when they decide to market themselves online.

The number of repeat visitors is a key metric used to measure the quality and performance of your website. Each repeat visit signifies a user’s interest in your website and it’s offerings. Repeat visitors are more ready to be converted to clients, it is no wonder businesses are willing to invest time and money to identify that factors that encourage repeat visits.

This week, we are going to share some insights that may be helpful to your business in generating repeated visits.

Why Online Businesses Love Repeat Visitors

• Signal of Intent/Interest
  Having a steady stream of repeat visitors signifies that people are interested in what you have to offer. Having acknowledged this interest , businesses can devise ways to convert these interested parties into customers. (e.g. Web-promotions to entice these visitors to take action)
• Lead Nurturing
  Some products and services have longer conversion cycles. A visitor who stumbles upon your product may not convert immediately, he may take weeks or months to decide on a purchase. During this time, your website and content can play a big part in engaging him until his purchase.
• Cost Effective
  Studies have shown that it is cheaper for businesses to focus their marketing efforts on repeat visitors than it is to acquire new ones.
• Free Marketing
  A repeat visitor is more likely to recommend your products and services to friends. In turn, these new visitors will place your products and services in high-regard, since they came from a “trusted source”.

How To Encourage Repeated Visits

• Fresh Content
  The concept behind the Internet is Information, and that is the same reason why visitors will come back again and again. Successful websites update their content very frequently because they know that their visitors are hungry for quality information.
• Share your Expertise
  Your visitors value expertise and will return as long as you are ready to share it.
• Make Commitments
  Some websites have a section (i.e. articles or blog) that is updated at regular intervals. Having a weekly or monthly column (and sticking to the schedule!) will express your intention of providing quality information to your visitors regularly, and in time, they reciprocate with repeat visits.
• Providing Means to Interact
  A “Contact Us” form is a simple way to provide a level of interaction for your visitors. Once visitors are aware that it is a 2-way channel they will start to respond to your content and offer invaluable insights. In some cases, interaction can even help to create brand loyalty. More developed interaction platforms include forums or messaging systems for registered users.
• Pro-active Engagement
  If your visitors are not coming back, make them! Email Marketing is a good way to provide snippets of information from your website to your visitors. Even your email signature can be used to inform your contacts of news and updates.
• Web Visibility
  Optimize your website and content for the Search Engines. Being highly visible across many networks and partner sites makes it easier for visitors to find you. A professionally designed website inspires faith in potential clients and provides them with a smooth browsing experience.

While there are still a lot of methods you can use, this list should start you on the path to attracting repeat visitors to your website, hence increasing your online revenue!