In Google’s zeal to become the fastest, most relevant search engine, they’ve gone and crushed the user experience, especially for high volume and often newsworthy search terms.

Below is a SERP for the keyword “Toyota Recall,” the #1 trending keyword in Google today.  The page delivers a news one-box immediately followed by the “latest results box.”

Is pushing the first organic result to the bottom of the viewable page area in the best interest of the user?  I would argue—without a doubt—no.  Google News and Latest Results are entirely separate databases with significantly less refined algorithms.  Google News rewards sites based on criteria such as site authority, novelty of content, breadth of coverage, and user preferences.  It has little or nothing to do with the quality of the article itself.  News sites can have their brief moment in the traffic sun simply by releasing a well-timed article with a decently optimized headline.

With even less credibility, take a look at the “Latest Results.”  Who is FrankRamblings and why the heck am I looking at his tweet? He’s not a journalist nor is he a subject matter expert on cars/Toyota, yet his opinion stands above Toyota’s message in a SERP. The whole point of a freaking search engine is to organize by relevance!

The solution is simple

1. Remove Latest Results- at the very least, remove the Twitter results.  There are no reasonable metrics through which to qualify tweets.  Number of followers or total number of tweets is in no way indicative of quality.  It might be possible to eventually identify nodes of authority through combined social media data, but it’s certainly not possible now.

2. Create one-box quadrants- Why doesn’t Google attempt to quadrant one-boxes for news based results?  Google could display news, latest results, video, and images all within the confines of one quadrant, offering more choice and attractive click-throughs for the customer. Moreover, Google could present news videos the way it displays articles, based on existing paid Youtube Channels. The only reason the solution would be unattractive to Google is if the search giant believes it would distract the user from clicking advertisements.

3. Provider Users with X-Out control- Don’t like a one-box? Simply remove it from your results. This flexibility would give users more choice and control of a SERP in a way that end user data never will.

4. Improve Google News- Google News is exceedingly inefficient at detecting original content.  Instead, it frequently rewards larger news aggregators that have content trade deals with smaller/regional news providers.  Since Google News is authority based and often inept at detecting fresh content, the larger site is frequently rewarded based on its authority.

In short, I think Google would greatly benefit from some landing page testing.  Might I recommend Google Site Optimizer?

By now you’ve probably gotten wind of the KFC ad heard round the world (embedded below). If not the Guardian has a pretty good write up on the facts of the case.
Let me quickly sidestep the racism issue and allow you to make your own decision.

This ad was only meant to run in a specific locality. So the creators theoretically only needed to hold it up against a certain set of social norms and mores within the Australian/New Zealand area. But the ad inevitably found its way to YouTube. Americans with their own set of social norms and mores took one look at the ad and cried fowl (sorry, I had to).

Although we Americans are accustomed to exporting our culture, we rarely see someone else’s culture exported to us, particularly not one that, on the surface, seems so similar even if it is deeply different. The Australian arm of KFC ended up pulling the ads due to the American fury, not Australian. In fact many Australians attempted to defend the ad as light hearted and sports team related. They explained that the stereotypes Americans saw furthered in the ad don’t exist in Australia. Australians also seemed less than happy that Americans could so easily push their own agenda, even through chicken.

There are two major takeaways from this
1. Any ad, no matter how regionally focused, can become global on the Internet. Either putting your brand on the defensive in all parts of the world for serious allegations perhaps unrelated to the ad’s intent, or, when done correctly, can spread your brand’s greatness to the ends of the Earth.
2. Americans (and people in general) attempt to put every piece of marketing into their own context i.e. the audience brings something to the ad, whether it’s knowledge of the predominant teams in a particular sport or several hundred years of oppressive stereotypes.

Getting great results from the Google content network doesn’t have to be difficult, but it can get tricky if you treat it the same way you would a search campaign.  Too often people either just turn on content in a search campaign or duplicate the search campaign as a content targeted campaign.  This often leads to less than optimal results.  In order to avoid creating a content targeted campaign that isn’t setup for success, there are a few easy steps that can be taken which involve using free tools.

The first step relates to your keywords.  In the content network, you can generally use broader keywords than you do for search targeted campaigns and still get great results.  This will allow your campaign to have a greater reach within your target audience.  Finding these broader keywords is simply a matter of using the keyword research tools that are available from the search engines.

Once you have your keywords set, the second step is finding specific sites that are relevant to your campaign and can be targeted through the content network.  A great tool to use is Google Ad Planner.  Ad Planner can be used to find similar audiences to your site and find sites that relate to the keywords in your campaign.

To find sites that relate to the keywords in your campaign, simply add a list of keywords from your campaign into the tool and it will return related sites.  You can then refine the list of sites using a variety of filtering options to find the most relevant sites for your campaign.  You then simply add these sites in as managed placements in your campaign.

You can also use Google Ad Planner to find sites that have a similar audience to your site.  To do this, you enter in your domain and it will return demographic data for you site as well as other sites visited by visitors who come to your site.  This will allow you to then use the tool to find sites that have similar audiences to your site.  These can then also be targeted as managed placements in your campaign.

Lastly, you should make use of your web analytics data to find relevant sites to target through the content network.  Go through your list of top referring sites and see which ones are driving high quality traffic.  Put a list of together of those that are driving great traffic and then see if you can target them specifically through the content network.

Once you’ve gone through these simple steps, you’ll be ready to launch your content targeted campaign.  Once the campaign has launched, you’ll have to make sure you’re very vigilant in optimizing the performance of the campaign in order to maximize your results.

Over at eMarketer they have an interview with Michael Donnelly, Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola.

Two particular things struck me as interesting:

First, Donnelly says, “I recently completed an analysis of the top five global brands and it showed that they’re primarily talking about themselves, while we’re primarily enabling people to talk about our brand.”

As Donnelly says, talking about themselves is working for some of those brands, but his is a much different, and much riskier option. It gives the detractors a place to vent their hatred, promote their own stuff, or place your brand name next to curse words on your home page like the skittles twitter home page debacle (3rd section) back in March. But on the flip side, if you approach it properly you can cultivate a devoted, authentic following that loves your product, tells everyone else about it, and, most importantly, are believed. This can be a difficult environment to set up though as a fully successful campaign requires steady navigation through the rough waters and a captain who’s in sync with his/her crew.

Coke’s latest foray is a fascinating, if not fairly self-serving, campaign.  It’s called the Expedition 206 and will send three user chosen Happiness Ambassadors around the globe into the 206 “countries” (The United States, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and even Atlanta, GA are all separate “countries”) where Coke operates, looking for what makes people happy. The concept is a novel one, but the nomenclature and the locations make me feel that these “Happiness Ambassadors” won’t be much more than globe trotting corporate shills.

**Begin Rant** An ambassador represents the ideals and culture of their native country, right? So a Happiness Ambassador has theoretically already found the answer to what makes people happy and it ain’t Pepsi. The journey can then only be to take a picture of people being made “happy.”  And if Coke really cared about the question why not send them to parts of the world that Coke doesn’t operate in? Why pay to send these people around the world in the first place unless you’re doing it for one giant publicity stunt?!? Oh, wait… I get it…  **End Rant**

Second, he talks about trying to bring together all of the different social channels, “It’s conceivable that people use YouTube for their videos and Flickr for their photos and Facebook for their social networking. We are trying to figure out how we tie all that together.”

Having everything in one location would make it easier to better quantify and analyze what they have, but it’s also interesting that an outside company, particularly one the size of Coke is interested in bringing all of those diverse channels together into a single location.

I wonder if this sort of desire from large companies will lead to a comprehensive dashboard or more of an aggregation approach (pulls together content rather than info), either internally within a company or as a separate service with a common login etc. Facebook already allows for much of the user functionality, but being a closed network it cannot provide everything YouTube and Flickr does. Could Facebook’s increasing encroachment on making user data publicly available be a step in this direction, to attempt to provide the best of both worlds: for users a one stop sharing platform and for marketers/advertisers a one stop selling platform? Or will the populace resist, wanting instead to keep their digital life compartmentalized and using a service like OpenID to ease the login load?

Have you ever really taken a hard look at where your Yahoo PPC traffic is really coming from?  Recently I was working on a web analytics project for a client and was doing a deep dive into their referring sites.  I noticed a number of sites that were driving a fairly high number of visits, but none of them were converting.  I dug deeper and began to notice some strange abnormalities.

These sites appeared to be some of the “made for adsense” type sites that only have ads.  They had some navigation and a search box, but everything always led to ads.  I could see that all the traffic coming from these sites had PPC tracking strings so I figured it was from the Google content network.

Google AdWords, however, wasn’t reporting any clicks from any of these domains.  I was a bit perplexed and so I went back to take a closer look at the tracking stings.  I was very surprised to see that they were from Yahoo.  The reason why I was so surprised was that the client isn’t running on the Yahoo content network.

I figured somehow the content network had been turned on by mistake, but that was not the case.  I kept poking around Yahoo and to my surprise found a Referrer report (which apparently is new as of the middle of October).  There I could see all the sites that Yahoo apparently deems to be “search” partners when in fact the only available content on the site are Yahoo ads.

In a few campaigns well over 50% of the monthly budget had come from these so called “search” partners with zero conversions.  These domains are now blocked, but that doesn’t mean the client or I am happy.

There will need to be follow-up calls with Yahoo to figure out how these sites can possibly be regarded as “search” partners.  In addition Yahoo only allows you to block 500 domains, so what is the client supposed to do once they reach that threshold?

Many questions still need to be answered, but I would strongly suggest doing a deep analysis using your web analytics data to see where exactly Yahoo is showing your ads.

Does your website have a 3rd party ad server that loads slower than John Goodman at an all-you-can–eat buffet?

If so, you might be in for a rude awakening when it comes to search rankings. Today, Google announced that it has added a new tool to Google Webmaster Tools: Site Performance. This information should be largely viewed as a precursor to the inevitable: sites with slow load times will be buried in search engine results pages.

Google’s mantra for websites has always been simple: do right by your user. Making your user wait 30-45 seconds so they can view an intrusive interstitial or banner is definitely not doing right by your user.

The pressure isn’t just on publishers—accountability is going to be placed firmly on the ad servers such as Point Roll and Double Click that can have the potential to greatly inhibit site load times. What’s the point of an ad server if it’s crashing your traffic?

Li Evans will tell you terrifying tales of ghosts that go blog in the night.  She and her co-panelist, Andy Beal (CEO of Trackur), will discuss Ghost blogging/tweeting/content production (i.e. where the person/entity that wrote the content is not the person/entity that has the byline like an agency writing your blog posts for you).  Is it ethical?  Does the audience care who creates the content as long as it’s great content? Find out the answers to these and much more in the panel Ghost Blogging, Tweeting, Content Production – Ethical? Does It Matter? at SES Chicago at 4:30pm on Monday December 7^th, 2009.

Li Evans will be part of a panel at SES Chicago discussing Images & Optimization.  The panel will cover everything from image search to geo-tags to accessibility issues to alt attributes to file sizes to image-specific search engines.  So don’t miss this section of the Blended Search Results track at 1:45pm on Monday, December 7th 2009

The first words you hear at a conference, particularly at one you’ve never been to before, can really set the tone for the whole week.

Now “technically” the “first” words spoken at SES Chicago will be by “keynote” speaker Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, unless you decide to blatantly disregard him. (You could cover your ears and loudly sing songs by 80s hair bands.  “I”M THE ONE WHO WANTS TO BE WITH YOOOOOOOOU!  DEEP INSIDE I HOPE YO-”  Well maybe that’s not the best idea, because A. it’d be disrespectful to Mr. Jarvis B. you’ll lose your last remaining shreds of dignity and C. you might as well have just slept in.) But if you happen to take the Search Fundamentals Track then the first words you hear will be from our very own Li Evans as she introduces the session Introduction to Search Engine Marketing.

Ok, so maybe she won’t be the first one you’ll hear, but she’ll have “waited on a line of greens and blues, just to be the next to be with you.”

Rock on, Mr. Big. Rock on.

If you’re planning to attend SES Chicago, and you haven’t quite clicked on that register button, STOP! WAIT! HOLD ON!  because if you enter this little discount code 20SERE you’ll save yourself 20% on an SES Chicago conference pass (that’s over $350 on a platinum pass).

And if you’re going you should check out our session on Bringing PPC In-house.  We’ll be co-presenting with American Public University System (APUS) and discussing how we successfully helped them bring their PPC in-house.  Or stop in and see our sponsored session Social Media Strategy & ROI Measurement where we’ll discuss how to build a Social Media Strategy working backwards from a solid measurement framework.

Also catch our Director of Social Media, Li Evans, as she introduces the session Introduction to Search Engine Marketing, as she speaks on Images and Optimization and as she discusses Ghost Blogging, Tweeting, Content Production – Ethical? Does it Matter?

Below are more details on our In-house and Social Media Measurement sessions:

Bringing PPC In-House
While a PPC campaign can be a more cost-effective operation if executed in-house, the complexities of staffing and managing an in-house PPC program can be more challenging than you might think. In this session, we’ll discuss how to create the right combination of people, tools and resources for maximum efficiency and success. Determining when it makes sense to in-source your PPC, developing an effective bid strategy, and selecting suitable ad tracking software are just some of the key factors to be discussed.

Moderator:
Paul Elliott, Partner, Rosetta

Speakers:
Nathan Linnell, Director of Analytics, Serengeti Communications
Hee So, Senior Internet Marketing Coordinator, American Public University System

Social Media Strategy & ROI Measurement
According to Forrester, Social Media will be the fastest growing interactive marketing technique over the next 5 years and account for the third largest spend category. Unfortunately, most marketers struggle with how to measure Social Media and demonstrate its effectiveness. This leads to difficulty securing budget for the channel, which in turn leads to weak or inconsistent strategy.

In this session, you’ll learn how to create a successful Social Media strategy, working backwards from a solid measurement framework. We’ll show you what to measure and how to measure it, and share our secrets on high-ROI Social Media.

In the meantime, download our white paper on Social Media measurement at http://www.serengeticommunications.com/measuring-sm.

Speakers:
Nathan Linnell, Director of Analytics, Serengeti Communications
Nan Dawkins, Founder and CEO , Serengeti Communications
Liana Evans, Director of Social Media, Serengeti Communications