Luke Hubbard

Today, I read a great article on the advantages of Microsoft’s new search engine Bing:  Google VS Bing User Centric Eye Tracking Study.

The main advantage that Bing has over Google is its 3 column format. Because the first column on the left contains useful information, users tend to notice the sister column on the right, the ads. Here’s the eye tracking study image, which shows Bing on the left and Google on the right…
 

Specifically, notice the right side of both images. Bing (left) had more users reading the ads than Google (right).

All in all, I think eye tracking studies have limited purpose. Yes, they show the movement of the eyes, but they fail to take into account what the user is actually thinking. For instance, even if users always notice Bing ads, it doesn’t mean that those users will find them helpful. In fact, users may only be noticing the ads because Bing is new and they are trying to figure it all out. If Bing fails to provide a solid user experience and quality search results, then it will not gain any traction against the other search engines.

Microsoft is spending considerable advertising dollars on promoting Bing.com, and they hope it will be a Google killer. Unfortunately, I just don’t see it happening as the search engine doesn’t seem to have any huge advantage over Google or Yahoo. Also, I don’t see any better results than what MSN or Live.com provided.

So far, I see no improvement in Microsoft’s search algorithm. If I want to find information, and find it fast, I will continue to use Google and Yahoo.

Yes, it’s true, Yahoo has a keyword match type that may as well be a mystery to most of the SEM world. It’s called the canonical match.

Princeton defines canonical as: reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality.

Canonical mapping is what differentiates Yahoo’s standard match type from Google and MSN’s exact keyword match. Yahoo’s standard match type includes the keyword in your account plus all of the canonical forms of that word.

Canonical versions of the keyword include basic misspells, plurals, and the keyword + noise words like “a” or “the.” Google and MSN’s exact keyword match type include only one form of the keyword advertised. To show for plurals or misspells under Google and MSN’s exact match, you must upload every single version of the keyword that you want.

Consider the following example for the keyword “tool.”

Google’s exact match maps to: tool

Yahoo’s standard match maps to: tool, tools, the tool, a tool, for tool, about tool… and possibly many other versions of the keyword and misspells

Therefore, Yahoo’s standard match is actually more like Google and MSN’s phrase match type, and Yahoo really doesn’t offer an exact match type at all!

On a side note, Yahoo’s advanced match type is very much like Google and MSN’s broad match, which includes the keyword plus anything the system thinks is closely related to the keyword. For instance, the keyword “tool” might map to: tool, keyword tool, Google tool, SEM tool, and many other relevant versions of the keyword.

There is no way to turn the canonical mapping off and unfortunately, Yahoo doesn’t allow advertisers any exposure into the canonical mapping technology before keywords are uploaded.

The basic problem, however, with the canonical mapping is that you can unknowingly upload keyword duplicates into your account several times via different adgroups. For instance, if you upload the keyword “tool” into one adgroup, but upload “tools” into another adgroup, you will in result have the keyword duplicated in your account. This may not seem like a huge issue at first glance, but if you are trying to account for the exact ROI of a keyword or ensure accurate budgets for each campaign, the canonical match can start to pose major problems.

For instance, let’s say you’re trying to figure out your top 10 keywords in order to develop a sophisticated bidding strategy. You may have no idea which keyword is actually doing best, but according to your reports, it appears that the keywords have very different performance. To you, the words appear to have different statistics and you think they have different ROIs. To the Yahoo system, the words appear to be the same and the advertising platform shows results based on what it thinks is the higher quality keyword.

My advice is to have your Yahoo account representative “dedup” or “deduplicate” your entire keyword list before uploading it into your account.

Back when Yahoo used Overture as their advertising platform, the canonical match was considered a competitive advantage since it was a more sophisticated way of thinking about keyword mapping. Now, Yahoo is discretely tearing apart canonical mapping in order to make their system more like Google and MSN.

Here’s the most important part of this article: Watch out for your Yahoo account keyword volume! If you lose significant volume off of a keyword that was formerly driving impressions & clicks, it may be because Yahoo has unmapped keywords from its former canonical match. You may need to create a keyword expansion to gain your volume back. (And let’s keep our fingers crossed that advanced match is helping cover what could be lost volume).

Yahoo appears to be quietly implementing a fix before advertisers begin to notice the flaw in their Panama system. Let’s hope this blog posting doesn’t reach too many people for their sake.

If you are new to search engine marketing (SEM), you may be asking “Which Search Engine should I launch first?” or “Which search engine will have the best ROI?”

If you’re a relatively small advertiser, meaning you’re not working with an advertising agency, then set-up your accounts in this order: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com. If you are working with an advertising agency, they’ll probably launch all 4 at once and you have nothing to worry about.

Google Adwords
First, sign-up for Google Adwords as it has the easiest system to use. Search engine marketing is extremely complex, but Google has done the best job so far in making it easy for small advertisers to get an account up and running. Adwords has the largest market share of all the search engines and also has the most refined algorithm.

Because Google is the friendliest system to use, and because it has the largest market share, there is more competition for high rankings and possibly higher Cost-per-Clicks (CPCs) for your ads. All in all, don’t let this hinder you from signing up as Google does an excellent job at showing ads to a relevant audience. Some of your keyword CPCs may be slightly higher on Google, but they’ll be to a targeted audience and hopefully provide a solid ROI.

The last reason to launch with Google first is Google’s free Analytics tool and tracking capabilities. For all you numbers geeks out there, you’ll absolutely love drowning yourself in data. Google gives you as little or as much data as you want so have fun digging deep into the numbers for hours on end.

Note that by signing up on Google and staying opted in to their partner search listings, your ads will automatically show on AOL and Ask.com.

Yahoo Search Marketing
Second, launch on Yahoo as it provides solid results and has a user friendly system named “Panama.” Yahoo is second to Google in market share and has also done an excellent job at refining their algorithm to show relevant advertising results. An optimized Yahoo campaign will provide fantastic marketing for your company.

MSN Microsoft Adcenter
You’d think that Microsoft would have dominated the search marketing space by now, but unfortunately their market share has consistently lagged behind Google and Yahoo. MSN will provide you will far less volume that Google and Yahoo, but will usually provide a stronger ROI. The reason is simple; there is less competition on MSN and lower CPCs. Keep in mind that MSN’s system isn’t quite as easy to use as Google or Yahoo. Also, don’t expect to get massive results from this engine as the search volume simply isn’t there.

Ask Sponsored Listings
The last engine to launch is Ask.com. The main reason is simply because if you launch on Google and opt into their partner network, you’ll automatically show on Ask.com. Ask provides a solid experience for consumers, but their advertising platform is not uniform to the other three search engines. A beginner will find the system more difficult to use. Also, the ROI results are often strong, but come in last place compared to the other search engines in general.

On a final note, keep in mind that SEM in general will be your most efficient advertising medium. If you are a small company with limited dollars to spend in advertising, I say go first to SEM.

Wondering where to go to submit your website to the search engines?

To have your website crawled by the search engine spiders, so that it begins to show up in search engine results, simply go to each of the links below. Each link will ask you to submit your site URL such as http://www.lukehubbard.com

Note that the following three search engines make up over 90% of all search engine traffic. Do NOT get ripped off and pay someone to submit your site to all the thousands of small search engines. If your site is well optimized and offers value, it will begin to show up in those search engines anyway. In fact, if you have a fantastic site, you don’t even need to submit it to the links below as chances are that the search engines will find you anyway. However, if you’re a new site and want to ensure that you’ll get found by the search engine crawlers, then go to each of the links below.

Submit URL to Google

Add site to Yahoo

Submit site to MSN