Until now Google Image Search has been free of any kind of advertising. The company did experiment with the addition of some text ads in image results back in 2006, but abandoned the plan after negative user feedback.

Google calculated then that it is losing an estimated $200m annually by not having text ads in these results pages, and now it may look for a way to recoup this lost income.

According to Marissa Meyer from Google:
“We haven’t found a proper way to monetize image search to date. You may see us roll out an ads-image search in the future, but when we do you’ll know that’s because we found a way that ultimately enhances user happiness with the product.”

Meyer believes that display ads, rather than text, will be more relevant in the context of image search.

Moreover, since the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google now has the technology to integrate visual display ads into image search results.

Some analysts believe that the search engine could make upwards of $1bn in annual revenue from these display ads.

The web measurement firm calculated that the top 100 Google Internet properties sent 36.55% of all online traffic to UK websites in March, an increase on 30.19% in the same month in 2007.

The majority of this traffic comes from either Google UK or Google.com, a combined figure of 31.91%, with other traffic coming from YouTube, Gmail and Google Images.

With so much online traffic going through Google, the effects of the trademark changes could be significant, with many retailers likely to lose traffic and income, especially sites which receive a high amount of visits via their own brand terms.

Hitwise has taken a look at the 100 most searched for brands in both the US and UK over a 12 week period. It found that 91.8% of searches for brand terms finished on the brand owner’s website in the UK, while the same figure for the US was lower, at 84.2%.

If this gap of 7.6% between the two figures is due to the effect of competitors bidding on brand keywords, as has been the case in the US for the past few years, then this gives an idea of the potential consequences for brands in this country.

The example of Expedia seems to back up this theory. In the UK, 95.7% of web users searching for the term ‘expedia’ ended up on one of the travel firm’s websites. For the US, the same figure was 88.6%.

The search engine hopes to make image searches as accurate and relevant as text search by using technology to read the image.

Currently, finding pictures through Google Image Search is currently imperfect, as the search engine has to rely on the text associated with the image, which may often bear no relation to the picture.

Now, Google researchers have devised a new algorithm dubbed Visual Rank that will looks for visual themes across a range of photos, ranking images according to how similar they are to other images that contain the same theme.

This new technology is still at the research stage, though early results are promising – Google tested their new algorithm using images associated with the search engine’s 2,000 most common product searches.

The researchers then compared the top 10 images with the standard Google Image Search results, claiming that the new image search returned 83% less irrelevant results than the current system.

Google is not the first company to develop new image search technology though. Silicon Valley firm Riya developed technology for e-commerce site Like.com that allows users to search for fashion items from related pictures.

In addition, Swedish startup Polar Rose has been working on photo search and facial recognition technology for use on the web.

Click Forensics gathers data from more than 4,000 agencies and advertisers to produce its Click Fraud Index reports.

According to the figures, 16.3% of clicks on paid search ads were fraudulent, a fall from the previous quarter’s figure of 16.6%. However, year on year, the problem is getting worse; the figure for the first quarter of 2007 was 14.8%.

The problem is worse on search engine content networks such as Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network, with the click fraud rate at 27.8%. This is higher than the first quarter last year, when the rate was 21.9%.

Normally, the search engines, especially Google, are dismissive of such click fraud reports, saying that Click Forensics overstates the problem. Google has previously said that the true click fraud rate is less than 2%.

According to Click Forensics’ Tom Cuthbert:

“Yahoo and Google seem to be finally filtering out more of the click fraud and non-converting traffic they used to let through. Removing some of these higher-profile abusers appears to be having an effect on lowering the click fraud rates.”

“If advertisers, publishers and ad networks continue to take proactive steps to filter out this lower quality traffic, the click fraud rate could trend downward even further, and that’s good news for the entire industry.”

Click Forensics announced this month that it would begin to work with Yahoo on the click fraud issue, sharing customer feedback and data with the search engine.

According to stats from web measurement firm Hitwise, the top 500 retailers received more traffic from search than in the previous year. 72% of firms received more search traffic in 2007 when compared with 2006.

Also, 13% of Internet Retailer’s top 500 list received half or more of their total traffic from search engines, compared with 10% in 2006.

Heather Dougherty of Hitwise says the figures show the value of search engine marketing:
“Search engine-oriented traffic is becoming increasingly more important for retailers as consumer use of search engines continues to rise. Some retailers may be missing out on potential sales and valuable information about consumer intent if they are ignoring this marketing channel.”

Overall in 2007, search engines were responsible for 25% of traffic to websites in Hitwise’s shopping and classifieds category, the same percentage as in the previous year.

Other stats from the report:

• Online-only retailers receive most traffic from search – 37% in 2007, up 6% on 2006.
• Catalogue sites come second in terms of search traffic on 32%, compared with 30% in 2006.
• Traffic from search engines to consumer brands rose by 15% to 31% in 2007.
• Retail chains received 28% of their traffic from search in 2006, this rose to 30% last year.

These findings come from an iProspect ‘Blended Search Results Study’, conducted by Jupiter Research.

According to this study, almost 70% of web users said they normally click on a link in the first page of results, while 92% chose a website from the first three pages.

The survey suggests that searchers are becoming more impatient, as fewer users are willing to click on results past the first three pages – 8% in 2008 compared with 19% in 2002.

This doesn’t mean that web users will abandon searches if they don’t find what they want, as most will change either the search term, or the search engine after looking at the results.

Over 90% will change the search term if they can’t find what they are looking for in the first three search results pages. 23% are more impatient though, and will start another search after looking at the first page.

This is good news for those retailers and other websites which rank well in the organic listings, and highlights the need for an effective SEO strategy.

In 2008, search engine optimisation (SEO) accounted for around 18% of all search ad spending.

Who is the SEO Rapper? According to his own YouTube channel:

“I am a God fearing, success driven, sportsaholic, internet addict, lyricist, proud father of 3 who loves entertaining friends. I enjoy everything from good music, good food, great church service and web surfing.”

We have linked to a couple of the videos below, but have a look at http://youtube.com/user/m0serious if you get a moment as it is definitely worth educating yourself with poetry such as:

“…research all your keywords and your phrases
they all sound good but they may not be a factor
several ways to check and I prefer word tracker
very vague phrases should get denied
longtail keyphrases are more qualified
check the cpc, that’s the cost per click
make a judgement call, is is worth that hit
if it is then keep it
if its not then delete it…”

Pure genius for which we claim absolutely no credit. Over to you Poetic Prophet…

Paid Search 101 rap:

Link Building 101 rap:

Social Media Addiction rap:

The test is expected to last around two weeks and will be limited to roughly 3% of Yahoo search queries. It is specifically for Google’s AdSense for Search service, so Yahoo would be acting as one of the Web publishers that carry PPC text ads from Google.

Yahoo was keen to stress that the announcement does not mean that it has a long term agreement with Google:

“Yahoo!’s board of directors is exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, including exploration of potential commercial business arrangements.”

“The Company noted that the testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo! will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result. The Company further stated that it would not comment on the nature or timing of any potential relationship.”

The trial may suggest that Yahoo is looking at alternatives to a merger with Microsoft, which is still waiting for an answer offer its bid for the company.

Microsoft, however, seems worried about the potential prospect of a Yahoo-Google partnership. According to Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith:

“Any definitive agreement between Yahoo and Google would consolidate over 90 percent of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo.”

This means that registered trademarks can now be bid on by competitors, whereas previously they could only show ads for trademarked terms with other words in the search query.

This open bidding for keywords has been Google policy in North America since 2004, and its introduction into the UK will cause a stir by potentially inflating the cost of brand name keywords, which have been a source of cheap traffic for many brands.

Though they will be able to bid on trademarked keywords, competitors will not be able to use the terms in either their anchor text or the text snippets under the paid search ads.

The implications of the new policy include a potential shift in policy towards affiliates, many of which have previously been restricted from bidding on brand names.

Now, companies may allow affiliates to bid on these terms so that a competitor’s adverts can be displaced by affiliates’ ads. 

Yahoo has always allowed bidding on trademarks in the UK, as long as the landing page has some content which is relevant to that keyword.

Yahoo was sued recently by a company for allowing competitors to bid on its trademark, but the search engine won the case, thus setting a precedent for Google’s new policy, though further legal challenges may well be possible after this new development.

One thing is certain though: this new keyword bidding policy will be sure to generate a huge amount of additional income for Google in the UK and Ireland. 

The search engine’s share of the market rose from 58.5% to 59.2% in February; while rivals Microsoft and Yahoo saw their figures drop slightly.

Yahoo’s share slipped to 21.6 percent, from 22.2 percent a month earlier, while Microsoft’s share slipped to 9.6 percent from 9.8 percent.

AOL is clinging to a 4.9 percent share, while Ask saw its share rise slightly to 4.6 percent from 4.5 percent in January.

UK figures for February are unavailable, but Hitwise stats from January give the search engine a massive 90% market share in this country.

Meanwhile, comScore also reported that clicks on Google’s paid search ads declined between January and February, the first time that this has happened three months in a row.

Google’s paid click rate did grow, by 3.1% in February, compared to the same month last year, but this is modest compared to the 40% growth rate of just over six months ago.

The search engine did outperform it rivals though, with the average paid click growth rate of 0.9%. The figures have concerned the markets though, with the value of shares falling after the news.

Some changes made by Google may have been responsible for these paid search numbers. Google said recently that it has been removing ads that generate low click through rates or that direct users to low quality Web sites.

The deal was opposed by Yahoo and Microsoft due to concerns about the dominance it would give Google in the online ad space, and a new survey from Attributor seems to confirm these fears.

Attributor analyzed 68 million domains for their ad-server crawls and compared it with unique user data from Compete.com.

It found that Google controls 35% of the ad server market, while DoubleClick has a 34% market share, giving the combined online ad firm more than 69% of the market. Yahoo is way behind on 11.5%, with MSN on 9.8%.

Other stats from the survey:

• DoubleClick has 48% share of sites with 1m or more unique visitors per month, while Google enjoys a 71.38% share of sites with less than 100,000 unique visitors per month.
• Attributor also looked at stats for content distribution. For every article it tracked, there were an average of 20 copies published. 57% of copies do not contain links back to the author, and 64% of copies have ads on them. Most copies are published on sites with less than 1 million unique visitors.

At the moment, these video ads are appearing for tech related terms like ‘smart phone’ or ‘laptop’. The video ads aren’t automatically displayed though – searchers will need to click a ‘watch commercial’ link to play the video.

Google says that an advertiser will pay if a users clicks to watch a video, rather than clicking through to their website: 

“Advertisers pay on a CPC basis where any click counts. Meaning, if a user clicks on the URL link that counts as a click or if a user clicks to play the video (via the plus box) that also counts as a click. An advertiser only pays for one click. The ads will run through the normal auction.”

Google’s Marissa Meyer told the New Google’s Marissa Meyer told the New York Times that normal text ads would not work as well for some results after the introduction of universal search.

She believes that searchers eyes will automatically move towards video and image results in the natural search listings, so text ads may not be so effective.

According to Meyer:

“With universal search, something is getting shaken up a bit on the bottom part of the page. The ads on the top part of the page should match.”

“People who advertise a movie want to show a trailer. Why shouldn’t they have the same format we use for search results and have a little plus box that says watch the trailer?”

No confirmed date for trials in the UK but we suspect that it won’t be too long…

This new search tool is displayed in the search results pages for a number of well known retailers and publishers. By using the tool, Google users perform a keyword search within a website without leaving the search engine.

This can be seen on Google searches for major retailers such as Tesco and Argos, as well as publishers including the Times Online and The Guardian.

Google says it has introduced this feature to help searchers and, depending on the quality of websites’ internal search systems, this may well be a better method of searching at times.

One other benefit for Google is that it keeps searchers on the site for longer, generates more page impressions for the search engine and thus allows them to serve more paid search ads.

Not all publishers and retailers are happy about this new development from Google as it takes away page impressions and therefore potential ad revenues, and means web users are spending less time on their sites.

In addition, some of the paid search ads displayed in the ‘search within search’ results are often for competing websites, so retailers are concerned that the new feature may guide users to another website.

It seems that website owners have the option of removing this new feature. A Google spokeswoman said that the company has received such requests from retailers, and it seems Amazon was one of those.

This exceeded earlier predictions of $11.5 billion, and represents large rise on 2006’s figure of $9.4bn.

These are preliminary results from the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) 2007 State of the Market Survey, in which most marketers say that they will continue to increase the amount they spend on search marketing.

The search market seems to be growing as a result of marketers shifting spending from offline advertising, particularly magazines, newspapers and direct mail.

According to Kevin Lee from SEMPO’s research committee:

“I’m surprised we’re not seeing as big a shift from TV. Search is getting more budget from offline media that are usually used to narrow-cast, instead of TV and radio, which are broadcast media.” 

“As search becomes more recognized as something that brand advertisers can use, I’d expect to see more TV and radio dollars shift as well.”

Other figures from the preliminary report include:

• North American spending on search engine marketing is now projected to grow to $25.2bn in 2011, up from SEMPO’s $18.6bn forecast of a year ago.
• Paid search accounted for 87.4% of 2007 spending; organic SEO, 10.5%; paid inclusion, .07%, and technology investment, 1.4%.
• Google AdWords is still the most popular search advertising program, but both Google and Yahoo sponsored search spending has decreased from a year ago.

We would agree with Kevin Lee - as budgets will innevitably face some ‘trimming’ over the coming months, it will be the big broadcast advertising spend that will be under greatest threat. The accountability / ROI that is possible from search engine marketing must surely be a more attractive option if you are under pressure to demonstrate the effectiveness of marketing spend?

The deal was first announced in April 2007, but it has now taken almost a year for the merger to pass the scrutiny of the regulatory bodies.

The US Federal Trade Commission approved the deal three months ago, while the European Commission said this week that the deal would not restrict competition or be harmful to consumers.

Microsoft and other critics of the deal had attempted to get authorities to look at the potential implications of the merger for internet users’ privacy.

Privacy groups expressed concerns that the merger would allow Google to use its own data about web users’ search activities with DoubleClick information on the website that person uses. 

The move marks a significant entry into the online display ad market for the search engine. According to the Google blog:
“Advertisers and publishers who work with us have long asked that we complement our search and content-based text advertising with display advertising capabilities.”

“DoubleClick gives Google the leading platform for display advertising, enabling us to rapidly bring advances to the market in technology and infrastructure.”

The confirmation of this merger may also have implications for Yahoo and Microsoft. The threat of Google dominating the online ad market may inspire the two to reach an agreement over a merger.

Quality score is used by the search engine which influences a particular ad’s position on the Google network, as well as minimum bids for keywords.

Other factors already taken into account are keyword relevance, the historical clickthrough rates of a particular keyword, as well as landing page quality.

Now it seems that publishers with faster loading websites will be given preference. The change will be introduced over the next few weeks, and publisher will then be given a month to make improvements to their page load times.

According to the AdWords Blog, there are two main reasons for the changes:

“First, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business.”

“Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.”

The AdWords Blog advises webmasters to speed up load times by reducing the size of webpages, using fewer redirects and using fewer, and more compressed, images.

Last week, car insurance aggregator Gocompare.com was dropped from the number one slot for the term ‘car insurance’, and sent to the relative obscurity of page six of Google.

Its big mistake was to attempt to boost its search engine rankings by buying paid links and reviews, increasing the number of links into the site. This enabled the relatively new car insurance aggregator to reach the top of the natural search rankings.

The company achieved this in just over a year, which may well have raised alarm bells at Google, as such a rapid rise in the rankings is unusual, especially for such a competitive search term.

A similar penalty was imposed on Moneysupermarket.com last year, while the most recent victim of Google’s penalty has been Kwik Fit.

Kwik Fit is better known for tyres and brake pads than car insurance, but it has recently moved into the market, and was hovering between pages one and two of Google for the term ‘car insurance’ before being punished by Google for buying paid links.

Now Kwik Fit has moved down to page 5 on Google for the term, so it seems this strategy has not paid off for the company.

Google’s penalties can have a serious effect on web traffic – a recent Hitwise article showed that traffic to Gocompare.com from this search term had fallen by 87% in the weeks after the penalty.

It is likely that there are more brands using these SEO tactics, something which Google is keen to weed out, so we can expect more such penalties in the coming months.

Users of Yahoo Search will then have the option of switching on these enhanced listings, and will see these results when the publisher’s site comes up on a search.

These plug-ins will provide additional information in the search results pages, such as further links into a website, images, ratings, reviews and video.

One of the first examples is US local search site Yelp. Yahoo users who have enabled this plug-in will see links to Yelp’s reviews, photographs, and address information for various restaurants and local facilities.

According to Yahoo Search’s Amit Kumar, the ordering of search results will not be altered by these plug-ins:
“This is not a paid relationship; it’s all about relevance”

Users of Yahoo will be able to enable and disable these plug-ins from the results, as well as forward them to friends and contacts.

The search engine will not promote or feature plug-ins that have advertising, or are irrelevant to searchers. Yahoo will provide publishers with the tools to create plug-ins. These new enhanced listings are expected to start appearing in search results in the next few months.

Users of Yahoo will be able to enable and disable these plug-ins from the results, as well as forward them to friends and contacts.

Certainly an interesting development, but whether this will be enough to lure more users over from Google is the key question and, as a web publisher, you have to question whether it will be worth the effort in creating the plug ins with such a small market share of the searches performed each day.

Overall, 10.5bn searches were conducted on the major search engines in January, an increase of 8.9% compared with December.

Google remains the clear leader, with users conducting 6.1bn searches with the company, while its search market share increased slightly, by 0.1% compared to the previous month. 58.5% of searches were conducted on Google in January. 

Once again, Yahoo was a distant second, with 2.3bn queries on its search engine. The volume of searches was 9% higher than in December, but its overall search market share dropped by 0.7% to 22.2%.

MSN is way behind in third place, so it’s easy to see why Microsoft would want to acquire Yahoo’s search operation, though this would still leave them well behind Google in term of market share.

US users conducted around 1bn searches on MSN – slightly higher than in December, though its overall market share remains at 9.8%.

Both AOL and Ask.com managed to improve their market share marginally. AOL accounted for 514m searches, which equates to 4.9% of the market, while Ask handled 475m search queries – a 4.5% share.

The video version of AdSense allows advertisers to buy text ads which run along the bottom 20% of the screen when videos are playing. This is supposed to be a less intrusive format than pre-roll video ads.

Since Google acquired YouTube in 2006, the search engine giant has been looking for a way to monetise the site, and online video in general.

According to the official Google blog:
“Unique to AdSense for video are text overlay ads contextually targeted to a combination of signals in your videos and on your site. With these overlay ads, the user’s experience is not interrupted; users determine how much they want to interact with the ad.”

Google’s will give advertiser two options for its video ads – either banner ads which will run at the top of the video player, and overlays which will be inserted over videos as they are playing.

These ads will be matched to the content of both the webpage hosting the ads, and the video on which they will appear.