Google's New Ad Format: Consumer Surveys?

Yesterday Google launched a new program called Google Consumer Surveys - it is basically taking an expensive thing to do, market research surveys, and making it fast and cheap. Will it last - I am not sure, but it does look exciting at this point.

How it works is simple.

Business and organizations looking to get market research data go to this service, create a micro-survey and decide who they want it to go to, how many responses they want and what questions to ask. Here is the step by step survey creation wizard:

Then when you buy it, results start coming in. Where do the results come from?

These surveys will begin showing up on select publishers web sites such as The Texas Tribune, the Star Tribune and Adweek in the form of a micro-survey box. In fact, many folks saw this happening before the announcement and felt it was a new ad type or AdSense type from Google. I received an email from a friend asking about it and there is a WebmasterWorld thread.

Here is a picture of one that we spotted:

Then as people see these surveys on publisher sites, they answer the questions and the responses go to the survey creator. The results look interesting, for example, Matt Cutts posted on Google+ a survey he ran for 150 as a beta test of the product asking the general US population, Have you heard of 'search engine optimization'?" The results said that only 1 in 5 people (20.4%) in the U.S. have heard of SEO.

Here is a video on how it works:

Now anyone can create market research studies and get flawed results based on how they ask the question. I am not implying that Matt's survey is flawed here, I don't think it is. But trust me, it can lead to issues. Fuzzy math.

Forum discussion at Google+ & WebmasterWorld.

Read More

Google: Want More Organic Traffic? Buy Search Ads

My title is a bit extreme in summarizing the research study Google published namedImpact Of Ranking Of Organic Search Results On The Incrementality Of Search Ads.

In short, Google is saying that having search ads do help with incremental impressions and clicks on your organic search results.

Google said, "on average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental." They also noticed in this study that "on average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic result on the first page of search results."

Here is the abstract of the study:

In an earlier study, we reported that on average 89% of the visits to the advertiser’s site from search ad clicks were incremental. In this research, we examine how the ranking of an advertiser’s organic listings on the search results page affects the incrementality of ad clicks expressed through Incremental Ad Clicks (IAC) and as estimated by Search Ads Pause models. A meta-analysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies highlights the limited opportunity for clicks from organic search results to substitute for ad clicks when the ads are turned off. On average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic search result. We find that having an associated organic search result in rank one does not necessarily mean a low IAC. On average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental, compared to 100% of the ad clicks being incremental in the absence of an associated organic result.

In short, having search ads with top rankings in the organic results does not hurt. In fact, it helps in most cases.

Here is the info graphic Google made out of this study:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Read More

Google Analytics New Social Reports With $$$

A week ago Google announced on the Google Analytics blog a new set of reports named Social reports that enables webmasters and marketers bridge the gap between social media and how those convert to your business metrics, such as conversions, revenues and more.

Google said the goal of these reports are three fold:

• Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions
• Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs

Social Overview Report:

Social Conversions Report:

Social Sources Report:

Social Plugins Report:

Who is part of this? Which networks? Not Twitter or Facebook but these guys are, AllVoices, Badoo, Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Disqus, Echo, Gigya, Google+, Google Groups, Hatena, Livefyre, Meetup, Read It Later, Reddit, Screen Rant, SodaHead, TypePad, VKontakte, and yaplog!.

Forum discussion at Google Analytics Help.

Read More

Google: New Top Level Domains (TLD) Will Not Help Rankings

Yesterday Google's Matt Cutts went out of his way todebunk a story in Marketing Magazine named New top-level domains to trump .com in Google search results.

Adrian Kinderis CEO of ARI Registry Services made the claim as follows:

Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will.

Wow! How can people spread such misinformation (I better be careful, I am sure I said things that weren't true as well). But seriously, this?

I am glad Matt Cutts called him out. Matt wrote:

Sorry, but that's just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don't expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn't bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that's your choice, but you shouldn't register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you'll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.

I hate when I hear people talk about proven SEO methods that they read from some marketing magazine, blog or even places like NY Times and claim it to be true because it was written. Something like this hurts the industry.

One thing, this is a great way for someone to lose his reputation as being an expert in anything. You said something so concret as fact and then a Google representative who knows the algorithm says you are absolutely wrong - well, that has to hurt your reputation.

What makes it worse is that he claims to have been "researching this topic" for about 6 years. Amazing.

Forum discussion at Google+.

Image credit to ShutterStock for sad presentation man.

Read More