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The Assisted Conversion

In many sports the role of the ‘assist’ has become increasingly important in the analysis of player performance. What can online marketers learn from this? What is an assist? An assist is a contribution by a player in a ball game that helps another player score a goal. Normally an assist can be awarded to the player who gave the last pass to the goal scorer. FIFA goes one step further and says an assist can also be awarded to the last-but-two holder of the ball, provided his or her action had decisive importance for the goal. Since the 1994 World Cup it has become common practice to keep records of assists. This has partly been done for the benefit of US fans whose avid stats-taking is a major contributor to their enjoyment of most sports. The United States Major League Soccer began awarding their MLS Scoring Champion Award based... Read full article

Top stories June 2009

Microsoft launches Bing supported by $100m advertising drive The big news this month is that Microsoft launched its new search engine, Bing, on 28 May, its fourth new engine in five years and a replacement for last year’s Live Search. The company described it as ‘specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines’ but said it would begin to move beyond this experience with ‘a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions.’ Microsoft has also unveiled its intentions of setting up a high-profile UK agency and advertiser roadshow, in a clear bid to persuade UK brands to invest in Bing. Senior Bing champions will attend the company’s annual search summit in London on 18 June 2009, and begin the process of convincing its clients that Bing can be a serious contender for Google. The Microsoft Advertiser Roadshow will go out... Read full article

Google updates its US ad text trademark policy

On Friday 15 May Google announced a change to its US ad text trademark policy. In effect, this new policy will allow advertisers to use trademarks in ad copy and will take effect from the 15 June. According to Google the change will benefit both users and advertisers by reducing the number of generic ads on their US network. Google state that advertisers will be able to produce more targeted ads that will offer users more relevant information whilst respecting the interests of trademark owners. Offering users more relevant information is all well and good but will trademarks really be safe in the hands of advertisers? After the initial move on the trademark policy back in May 2008, the evidence suggests that many large brands saw their competitors taking advantage of the relaxed policy - almost abusing the use of other brands in some cases. - a significant loss in... Read full article

Search wars - Round 2?

Is Microsoft’s launch strategy for its new search engine ‘Bing’ going to allow it to encroach on Google’s market share? That’s the big question. Rumour has it that Microsoft has $100m for its marketing campaign, but Comscore stats for the last 6 months in the US, show market share as being largely static with Google being considerably ahead, and Microsoft significantly behind, so there will be a long way to go to catch up. They might need a bigger boat. The above graph shows the uplift in search activity on Google for the term ‘ask jeeves’ in April which coincides with the re-launch and the bringing back of jeeves the butler, so advertising does work in terms of raising awareness of a search engine, but whether that growth is sustainable after the advertising stops remains to be seen. ‘Build a better search engine’ as a strategy is unlikely to work,... Read full article

My thoughts on Wolfram Alpha

Whilst I can see what Wolfram Alpha is trying to achieve, (both enviable and interesting), it isn’t really that impressive when the search mechanism is restricted to selected databases and feeds. The general approach is sound – using structured data from vetted sources to build a searchable knowledge base with a computational edge. However, semantic search will make this something that can be very easily replicated and therefore will mean that other search engines can emulate and surpass Wolfram’s approach without even having to build the functionality beyond processing semantic tags. To be fair, Wolfram Alpha isn’t claiming to rival Google. So, not a ‘Google killer’ as has been reported, but a useful experiment in information retrieval. If you search for ‘expenses scandal’ Wolfram returns no results, whereas Google returns 4 million. When people search they want answers, but often the answers can’t be found in vetted sources, so semantic... Read full article

Greenlight scoops another IDM award!

I’m very proud to announce that Greenlight’s paid search expertise and creativity have been recognised nationally for our work with Radisson Edwardian! Last Thursday I attended the IDM gala dinner at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington and was delighted to receive our award in the digital category for best use of Search Engine Marketing from the lovely Sally Gunnell OBE. This is the third year in a row that Greenlight has won an IDM award and it’s all down to the hard work of the entire team who pulled together to make this happen. Radisson Edwardian has also been a joy to work with, which always helps produce great results. With our intensive paid search campaign, we managed to generate a £44 return for every £1 invested. This year we have actively continued to work with Radisson and have extended our remit to include targeting worldwide markets, raising awareness... Read full article

'No follow' Links are PageRank “Black Holes” – Maybe

Update: Subsequent to this post being written Matt Cutts has confirmed that the change to the handling of nofollow described below is real, and that in fact it has been treated this way for over a year. This week is awash with bloggable news, but within SEO circles the most “buzzy” has been Google’s apparent shift in its treatment of nofollow, a story originally broken on Search Engine Land. In this post I want to demystify what nofollow actually is and what the implications of the change really are. I’ll caveat that by saying that I’ll deal strictly with the theoretical assigning of PageRank or, more generically, “link equity”, to pages within a site based on linking relationships between those pages. “Nofollow”, for the uninitiated, is a value of the HTML rel attribute that can be applied to a link preventing search engines from crawling the target of that link.... Read full article

Farecast could be Bing's best point of leverage

I've always liked the Farecast interface. It gives that feeling of true flexibility of refining your choices without you having to keep going back and endlessly redo your searches. It is one of those few great examples of professional and expert power, put in the hands of the consumer by new web technologies. The fact that it also lets you compare your results with other agent sites like Expedia is a boon too, because the consumer always wants to know what they could be getting elsewhere, and showing them, which no doubt will lead to a commission should they take that route, works out for everyone involved. Integrating it into Bing's search results is a very nice touch, too, and puts it squarely ahead of Google on travel integration, and makes the Google SERPS seem almost vanilla by comparison. This will increase the reach of these powerful, yet underused services... Read full article