Citi analyst Mark Mahoney has produced a document taking the statistics generated by comScore in one of their many online studies, which indicates that across a range of markets, including the key industries: media, retail, travel, auto, finance and health, the biggest players within these verticals are deriving the larger proportion of their web traffic from Google’s search engine, influenced by their portfolio of PPC Management solutions.

Although it appears from the reports findings that Google’s dominance slipped ever so slightly, according to Mahoney: “Google has gone from delivering 17 percent of all the traffic to the top 30 Websites in 2010 and 2011 to 16 percent in 2012”.  Google has seen it’s ascendancy decrease fairly dramatically within the health sector, their traffic share dropping from 24% in January 2010, to 21% in the same month a year later, and down to 15% in January of this year, according to the data.

Google has long been the top “traffic referrer” and provider of PPC management solutions for some of the worlds biggest websites and across a range of vertical markets, however the report does highlight the significance of Google’s continued reign over other search engine providers, especially in what the report identifies as a “fluid” market; and one which Mahoney concedes is incredibly competitive; with Yahoo and Bing following in the shadow of Google’s dominance over global search and PPC management.

The report assesses the raw data provided by comScore and outlines some of the key trends within US search markets.  Out of 30 of the most traffic heavy sites in the US, Google ranks as the number one provider of traffic for 23 of these, and the report notes that: “by contrast, the #2 (Yahoo!) and #3 (Microsoft) influencers accounted for 11 percent and 6 percent of traffic to the top 30 Websites”.

Both Bing and Yahoo have seen little movement in these verticals from 2010 to 2012, although Yahoo can take some consolation from the fact that they have remained stationary in their position over the years, and given the general “market perception” that Yahoo! is a “deteriorating asset” the stasis in this particular research is perhaps heartening.  Although Mahoney does point out that for Microsoft the figures would prove “something of a negative surprise given signs of Bing Search market share gains”.

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The announcement came via the Twitter advertising blog, which provided an insight into the changes, and how they would affect marketers already using Twitter as a platform to communicate with existing clients, as well as circulating their brand amongst web audiences, utilising digital media marketing in order to extend their reach online:  “we are introducing enhanced profile pages that help marketers create an even more compelling destination on Twitter for their brands” they said.

Enhanced profile pages have been rolled out amongst a limited number of advertising partners and charities, including American Express, Bing and Intel, with the new format being made available to wider audiences over the coming months.

The update retains Twitter’s communication centric focus through succinct and concise messages, with the emphasis being on what people are saying about their business, and how they are saying it.  While businesses are limited to just 140 characters per tweet, the new twitter ‘advertising’ pages provide a number other devices to maximise the exposure of a brand online through digital media marketing, such as larger header images for a brand or business to display their logo:

“Communicating with users isn’t just about what you say. It’s also about how you say it. Now, your profile page does more to help you make an impression with a large header image for displaying your logo, tagline, and any other visuals.”

In addition, Twitter have included more sophisticated devices in order to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google+ (which according to recent reports saw an increase in traffic of 55% in December), providing users with more flexibility to target visitors with specific messages.

“You can also control the message visitors see when they first come to your profile page by promoting a Tweet to the top of your page’s timeline. This Tweet helps you highlight your most engaging and important content and better connect with your target audience [...] this page and the Promoted Tweet are both free of charge and publicly accessible for the whole world to see.”

As digital media marketing continues to proliferate amongst brands and businesses, the race for dominance between the three big hitters will no doubt continue to heat up throughout the year, with 2012 promising to be an interesting year for change amongst the three key social media contenders, as the main Twitter blog post explained: “what we’re announcing today is just the beginning. We now have a framework in place that we will quickly build and iterate upon to help users connect with whatever is meaningful to them.”

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In both 2011 and 2010 Facebook held four of the top ten search queries posted, with the search term ‘facebook’ recorded by Experian Hitwise as the number one most searched term for both years.  The total query volume for all the Facebook terms featured on the top ten list, grew by 33 percent in comparison to last year.

The social media sites preeminence comes as little surprise with the growing popularity of digital media marketing across industries; the world’s most popular social networking site now has over 800 million active users with over 50% logging in to Facebook on a daily basis, it’s not hard to see why marketers have jumped on the proverbial digital media marketing bandwagon.  According to the Hitwise blog post their statistics also revealed exponential growth in the number of people searching for the social networking site in 2011:

“Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 12 percent compared with 2010. When combined, common search terms for Facebook – e.g., facebook and facebook.com – accounted for 3.48 percent of all searches in the United States among the top 50 terms, which represents a 33 percent increase compared with 2010.”

While the latest statistics from Experian Hitwise demonstrate the increasing popularity of social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (Google’s broadcasting site found itself in second position on the Hitwise poll), which may have firmly established themselves in the consciousness of worldwide users and businesses alike, MySpace’s epic fall from grace was notable by the site’s absence from the top ten search queries of last year; dropping from number 5 in 2010, and the only website that had appeared in the 2010 but not the 2011 listings, apparently displaced by ‘yahoo.com’ making an entry and joining ‘Yahoo’ at number six.

The findings will no doubt add fuel to the Google and Facebook digital media marketing fire, with the search engine giant seeing an increase in the number of searches last year, however according to the Hitwise poll, Google is still lagging behind Zuckerberg’s social site and it’s dominant position:

“YouTube terms accounted for 1.36 percent, representing a 21 percent increase compared with 2010. Google terms (including YouTube) accounted for 1.59 percent – an increase of 27 percent compared with 2010.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook does not appear on the “top lists” published by search engines Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask or AOL, due to the criteria used when collating their lists; when it comes to Google’s at least, their top 10 search queries are based on “rising” search terms, rather than those that prove the most popular overall.

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The research conducted by comScore found that the number of customers searching for contact information in relation to specific services or products has increased, with more people using smart phones to get access to the information they need. The services provided by Search Engine Optimisation companies have long been recognised as an important function in developing the presence of small and local businesses online, and with the increase in users reaching for their laptops or mobile phones in order to research services in their area, or obtaining contact information for local businesses via this medium, the opportunities for SEO within local markets is continuing to expand and develop, as are the services available to business owners.

For a while now the key search engine providers have recognised the importance of supporting smaller businesses.  Many search engine providers have facilitated the increase in this trend of looking up local companies or services online, providing businesses with the capability to post up to date content online and via mobile applications.  Following it’s launch just two years ago, Microsofts rebranded search facility Bing introduced the Business Portal beta in April 2011, which provides a platform for business owners to create and control their own listings online, and for free.  The service was launched in a bid to enable businesses to maximise their exposure in Bing’s search results listings, giving customers access to relevant, up to date content, in their search for local business data.

Once a user successfully completes the relevant security questions, the Bing Business Portal (BBP) can be updated with company information, photos, logos, and even information such as accepted payment methods and parking access.  The difference with the BBP is that owners can create promotions and special offers on Bing’s desktop and mobile applications, all of which can be accessed via searches conducted on Bing’s search facility, and it can all be done for free.

The information published on the portal is designed to improve the relevance and accuracy of listings in Bing’s search results, enhancing matches published, and benefitting local users looking for businesses in their area, or customers researching specific services.  The BBP also provides links to your website, Facebook pages and Twitter account, using SEO principles to increase web traffic to your site or webstore.

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Ciao.co.uk a company owned by Microsoft, was one of the worst affected.  Speculation has arisen about Google’s motivation for rolling out the global changes, following Microsoft’s decision to file a competition case against Google, through the European Commission.  Microsoft claim that Google use their search market dominance in order to limit Microsoft services growth, identifying their practice of: “using technical measures to stop Microsoft’s search engine Bing from indexing content on Google-owned YouTube” as a key point of contention for the company.

The Panda update was implemented by Google specifically to prevent ‘content farms’ from replicating what they classify as “shallow” or “low quality” information.  Generally the data is copied from other sites in a bid to up their number of hits, but with the changes made to their ranking algorithm, Google sought to illiminate the possibility of irrelevant content in search results being listed high up in the rankings.  According to Google’s Scott Huffman:

“People are not just expecting a search engine to return every document that has most of the words typed in a query box.  They want the context understood; there are a lot of nuances hidden within that.”

Prior to the update, a keyword search may have returned a site on page one of Google’s results; but with changes to the ranking algorithm, some sites found they were moved further down in the listings, making them far less likely to be viewed by Google search engine users.  Ciao.co.uk suffered at the hands of the changes implemented globally by Google in early April (following an initial, and successful Stateside trial), due to the fact that they publish comments and reviews that are propagated on other internet sites.

Some experts however have indicated their surprise that a legitimate website such as Ciao, has been affected so drastically by the update.  In an interview with AFP, Huffman went on to dispel the grievances advanced by the likes of Microsoft, citing the fact that on a daily basis, Google will handle more than one billion searches, and identified the notion of limiting a rivals growth by rigging their position in Google’s search results as ridiculous: “If you think of the scale of what we are talking about, it is almost absurd to say we could rig results”.

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Microsoft have vehemently denied any attempt to copy their rivals, suggesting that the accusation is simply a result of Google’s ‘spy-novelesque stunts’. While Google have now removed the fake pages which they planted to catch their rivals out, the company is adamant that Bing have violated the code of ethics surrounding search returns. A spokesperson for Google stated that Bing’s beahviour constituted cheating, and it was unethical. The issue originally came to light when Google spelling errors were replicated faithfully on Bing’s pages. Spokesperson Amit Singhal commented: “A search for ‘hiybbprqug’ on Bing returned a page about seating at a theatre in Los Angeles. As far as we know the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page.”

“We noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency. Microsoft is gathering data on what people search for on Google, via either Internet Explorer or the Bing Search toolbar. Some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results – a cheap imitation.”

Danny Sullivan, a search engine expert, stated: “On the one hand you could say it’s incredibly clever. Why not mine what people are selecting as the top results on Google as a signal? Every search engine has its own ‘search voice’, a unique set of search results that it provides, based on its collection of documents and its own particular method of ranking those. I think Bing should develop its own search voice without using Google’s as a tuning fork.”

“Wider issues include how Google went about setting up its honeypot trap to ensnare Bing, and whether it was just a clever way to distract from current discussions about its search quality. Do Internet Explorer users know that they might be helping Bing in the way Google alleges? Technically, yes. Explicitly, absolutely not.”

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The recent gains made by Microsoft in the search engine market will have given them a much needed boost before the announcement of the makeover. The new look Bing search will be looking to help its users complete their tasks more quickly and efficiently.

At a recent search engine strategies conference in New York Microsoft gave an early look at some of the planned changes. Since its launch, Microsoft have updated Bing a number of times, changing the design and connectivity of the search engine, but this latest revamp will be the most significant yet.

One of the most visible changes is the re-location of the ‘Quick Tabs’ from the left hand side of the screen to a new slot at the top of the page that will create an easier to use one click system.

Microsoft have also added ‘FourSquare’ location based social networking information to the also recently added maps App located in Bing Maps, this is believed to work in a similar fashion to Twitter’s new geo-location software.

Microsoft’s overall aim in this spring clean of Bing is to deliver more functionality to the search engine, they will be incorporating real-time data which will be made available via their partnership with Twitter (also announced this month.)

This recent update underlines Microsoft’s intentions and it does not look as though they are set to stop there, they announced that more updates are planned for spring.

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If you’re in this camp then allow me to have one last crack at persuading you otherwise with one good reason why you need to think of each as a new campaign and tailor your approach to match… Demographics.

The splits in terms of search engine use in the UK are pretty well known. Google have around 85 – 90% of the market, Yahoo come in around 5% and Bing fluctuate erratically below that. However, the mistake comes in believing that the pie is split along the same lines in terms of demographics. It isn’t.

A couple of examples of what I’m talking about…

Youth – For some reason, the average age of yahoo’s users has historically tended to be a bit younger than Gopogle’s. So if, for example, you sell products and have a certain selection that you think is going to appeal to younger consumers then it might be an idea to push those products more enthusiastically on Yahoo. By the same token, you may find that the results you get from saga holidays isn’t quite as good.

Experience – Many Internet Explorer users have Bing as their default search engine to begin with. Whereas experienced internet users will more often than not change the default settings to Yahoo, or (more likely) to Google the less experienced won’t. Ergo the users of Bing may contain be the less experienced users – perhaps not the venue for your ‘integrated IT business solution.’

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Firstly, you have to consider the kind of money that Microsoft is pouring into Bing at the minute. The world’s biggest software company are notorious for very aggressive marketing, that kind of a push is going to lead to a spike in anyone’s numbers.

Secondly, the numbers of Bing users are still so low in comparison to the number of overall Internet users that an increase of 169% on one individual part of the system, whilst impressive, is not exactly worth what it might appear at first glance.

And finally, I don’t want to say that I don’t trust statistics from Microsoft but… Well, actually, no I don’t trust statistics from Microsoft. The final straw for me was when it was reported that Bing was clicking on its own ads, thereby polluting advertisers’ stats. It’s even possible that these Bing figures are the result of something similar.

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The frustrating thing for the likes of us is that whilst the client might not actually be billed for these clicks (we only have Microsoft’s word for that by the way) the data is still distorted by these automatic click-throughs. With Google Adwords this might not matter so much as there are so many impressions and clicks to be had, however when we’re talking about a group of users so comparatively small as MSN’s then one impression or one click can seriously hamper your data.

Recent studies had shown Bing to have better CTRs and conversion rates than adwords, though this information has to call that into question.

Exactly why MSN is doing this is, so far, a mystery. It might be that they’re testing the system or simply trying to up the CTRs though at this stage I can only guess.

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