I believe that categorizing keywords into the finest groupings that make semantic sense is the right way to do it; often I’ll have a category with 2, 10, or perhaps 30 keywords at the most. Later, when some of the categories are turned into actual campaigns, this tight organization and relevance will tend to pay off with higher quality scores.

Since Google Adwords takes into account the relevance of keywords to the creative, obviously grouping very diverse keywords will result in low relevance, so this is why relatively fine categorization is important.

Often, however, I find myself with too many keywords to handle; even as little as 5,000 keywords broken down into 300 categories, for instance, is still not a very manageable set.

In these cases, I like to take the keyword categories and bundle the categories themselves into a *secondary* category that represents the “funnel” stage that the keyword category belongs to.

Marketers are told to think of a customer as being in one of various “funnel” stages at any given time, and even if you’re not systematic about it, you probably already think of brand terms as being “lower funnel” and research-type terms as being “upper funnel”.

Most readers are doubtless familiar with models such as “Attention-Interest-Desire-Action”, and other 4, 5, and 6 stage funnels which are pretty standard fare for marketers.

After performing my initial keyword categorization (sort of into micro-categories), I like to categorize the categories themselves into a total of *ten* funnel stages I’ve developed, which are organized around a “problem/solution” mental model.

In Figure 1, I’ve shown individual keywords belonging to each funnel stage for a variety of B-to-C funnels. Later, Figure 2 presents some B-to-B  examples.

These keywords presented could be actual keywords, but I think they are more appropriately thought of as representing *categories* of keywords:

Figure 1 - Business to Consumer Search Funnel Stages

Ten stages may seem like a lot of detail, but organizing keyword categories into these stages:

1. Forces you to really try to understand searcher’s intent.
2. Gives you a sense of where the holes in your keyword research are from a funnel perspective.
3. Resonates with clients or management and is a great way to discuss and understand a business.

For example, after going through this exercise with one client, to my great surprise, they told me that stage 2 (“Suspicion There May Be a Problem“) was almost the sole focus of their existing marketing.

Their strategy is to pull in searchers looking for help identifying their problem, establishing them early as a trusted brand in the eyes of the searcher.  This client has found that organic and offline conversions then naturally follow. Although very much a one-trick pony approach which I would not recommend for most businesses, it works great in their market.

Below is another version of the funnel with examples that are more B-to-B oriented, for those interested in that perspective;  we’ll now run through the funnel stages, explain the thinking behind each of them, and discuss which stages you should consider addressing in your marketing mix.

Figure 2 - Business to Business Search Funnel Stages

Activity Funnel Relates To

This is a very general field of activity, and will often not be a focus of marketing efforts since the customer may not actually be experiencing a problem yet.

However, display advertising that targets field-focused websites or is demographically targeted may be a useful vehicle from a branding perspective in this stage.

Suspicion That There May Be A Problem

This funnel is focused around the mental model of problem-solving; other mental models may make for useful funnels as well, but I’ve found “problems” to be universally applicable.

In this stage, there may be symptoms described but the customer does not understand the nature of the problem, or perhaps they don’t even understand that the symptoms are a problem at all.

It’s a critical stage where you can have great influence on the direction a potential customer will take; we’ll touch on this more later.

Problem Identified

This is an interesting bucket because you may have some latent versus blatant needs that you can separate out; different types of problems may actually fork off into different funnels.

Looking For Solution Alternatives

In this stage, the prospect is trying to understand the variety of approaches available to them. There are many ways to lose weight for instance; diet, exercise, portions, surgery, and so on.

This is fairly early in the research phase and can be ripe fruit for thought leadership content (great for the SEO channel as well). If you’re really lucky and you’re the only solution to a problem (perhaps you’re in a new market) then this stage may barely even exist and prospects may jump directly from stage 3 to stage 5.

Solution Space Has Been Chosen

In this stage, the prospect has decided on a particular approach for solving the problem (for instance, “dieting” to solve a weight problem).

Complicating Issues

This stage perhaps belongs alongside the funnel, but I usually place it in the middle of the research phase. Many people with problems have complicating issues; diabetes (if they are interested in weight loss), a wheelchair-bound spouse (if they are interested in travel), and so on.

Addressing these complicating issues can be a great way of differentiating your product or service and reducing friction for a final sale.

Researching A Specific Solution

Now the prospect is getting *very* specific about a particular member of the solution space (“Low-Carb Diets” in the case of a Weight Loss/Dieting funnel for instance).

Researching A Specific Brand

At this stage, the prospect is getting very serious and is educating themselves about specific providers.

Remember, brand terms are well known in the industry to convert at a higher rate as generic terms (twice the rate on average in my experience), so addressing this funnel stage should be a critical component of any online marketing effort.

Conversion Imminent

Terms that include phrases like “coupon code”, “pricing”, “cheap”, are akin to flashing red lights with a siren screaming “transaction about to occur!!!”

Spending a lot of time building out variations in this funnel section is usually well rewarded. Google Suggest is a great place to find ways that potential customers are raising their hands in these ways.

Post Conversion

Often, a neglected funnel stage, this is where you will find customers searching for things like “repairs”, “replacement parts”, “add-ons”, “upgrades”, “warranties”, and “support”.

You may or may not have offerings that address concerns in this funnel stage, but it’s important to think about them.

If you’re a travel company, trip insurance may not be something your customers will actively seek out often, and paid search campaigns targeting that concept may not be worthwhile.

If, however, your paid search keyword research turns up the concept, and you then prompt your company to put together some sort of revenue-sharing deal with a trip insurance provider to integrate their product into your cart, I would say the time spent researching funnel stage #10 was well worth it.

Which Stages Should You Target?

As most articles you’ve read on this topic probably state, you should target all of them. This is not very helpful advice though – often in marketing we have to prioritize our efforts.

If I absolutely had to prioritize the top ones to focus on initially, I would say #9, #8, #5, and #2 in that order.

Funnel Stages #8 and #9, “RESEARCHING A SPECIFIC BRAND” and “CONVERSION IMMINENT” are self-evidently critical; how are you going to leverage this great funnel if you don’t catch potential customer at the end of it?

I am, however, a big believer in avoiding cannibalization from organic search conversions, so my preference is to consider targeting competitor brand terms  before I would work on cannibalizing my own.

Funnel Stage #5, “SOLUTION SPACE HAS BEEN CHOSEN” is square in the middle of the research phase, and catches customers who are partially educated on the problem and are still early enough in the funnel to nudge in your direction.

Funnel Stage #2, “SUSPICION THERE MAY BE A PROBLEM” is important because it’s an opportunity for you to disturb the prospect’s equilibrium, a critical step in any sales process.

Much like Don Draper stated in his famous “Carousel” pitch about the term “new”, with problem defining keywords, you “create an itch, and simply put your product in there as a sort of ‘calamine lotion’”. Funnel step #2 is essentially the “itch” stage.

This stage, where the potential customer suspects but does not yet fully understand that they may have a problem, is a powerful leverage point for influencing searchers in your direction. Think of searchers as meteors, heading for earth – a slight nudge much earlier in their trajectory can have as much influence as a strong shove later in the funnel.

Conclusion

Very fine categorization of keywords can be helpful in ascertaining customer intent, organizing your efforts, and suggesting actual paid search campaigns you might run.

I have found these ten funnel stages in particular are a convenient and useful way for me to organize very large numbers of refined categories of keywords, derive insights from them, and create campaigns targeting various phases of the sales funnel.

If anyone has any other useful mental models for constructing a funnel besides the “problem/solution” approach I’ve presented here, or any thoughts on which funnel stages to prioritize and how – by all means, comment below.

I was talking to Lehmbeck about mobile search trends and what kinds of consumer response he was seeing to various campaigns. Lehmbeck gave me some unpublished, internal data that I’m now sharing in this post. He said that mobile paid search “looks like much like search advertising did in 2001.”

15 to 25 Percent Mobile Paid Search Traffic

Between 15 percent and 25 percent of paid search traffic is now coming from mobile devices according to Lehmbeck. He adds however, “In local-heavy categories, such as dining, auto services and entertainment this number jumps to 50 percent or more.” He says that with the rise of smartphones “consumer engagement [with mobile search] has gone through the roof.”

Lehmbeck points out that online-only retailers are also starting to use mobile to nab in-store shoppers. “As mobile queries grow and these brands start to create highly optimized mobile experiences, this trend will only continue.” Lehmbeck told me that traffic to e-commerce sites via mobile is somewhat lower than the average (5 percent to 15 percent) but that some e-commerce sellers are seeing a “great ROAS” (return on ad spent).

Much “More Attuned to Location” in Ad Copy

Mobile consumers are “much more attuned to location in ad copy” than online search users according to Lehmbeck. “When a user searches with implied local intent, ads that leverage geographic indication tend to perform better.” Searches like “garden supplies” or “furniture store” are in this category.

Explained Lehmbeck, “We have seen some very strong results for ads that reference location or local offers, especially those that do it in an intelligent way (e.g. “Your Garden Superstore – Take 20% Off in Our Los Angeles Locations This Weekend” or “Locate Your New Sofa – Over 15 Furniture Galleries in Los Angeles to Serve You”).” These ads see 50 percent greater engagement than ads do not indicate where to buy or what specific offers are available in their area.”

Offline Conversions Boost Sales 5 to 10X

I’ve written in the past about the offline impact of paid search. It’s rarely tracked and so the true ROI of many campaigns is probably quite a bit higher than what is being calculated. Lehmbeck told me, “In some rare but very interesting cases [paid search marketers] are tracking it down to the offer level in conjunction with our platform and they have seen 5 – 10X sales when accounting for in-store conversions.”

Lembeck counsels marketers to “build out better mobile experiences and get a deeper sense of what the right metrics are for understanding the true ROI of mobile ad spend.” Indeed, recent data from Marin Software showed higher CTRs for smartphones but much lower conversions than for PC search campaigns. However that’s likely because mobile search conversions weren’t being tracked offline.

DataPop CEO Jason Lehmbeck will be presenting on the iConvert panel at SMX Advanced in Seattle next month.

“We’re changing the design layout of our hotel, flight, credit card and bank account results, which help users complete actions such as booking flights quickly and easily,” a Google spokesperson told us in a statement. “We’ve always disclosed that Google may be paid when a user completes such an action; we want to be clear and consistent in how we do that.”

The New Look

The comparison units appear in the US when people do these types of searches:

• Flight search
• Hotel search
• Financial product search for checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards or certificates of deposits

In the UK, the units only appear for financial products, specifically for current accounts, savings accounts and credit cards.

Again, the units aren’t new. They’ve existed for over a year for some products. They’re simply getting a new format. Below is an example of the old-style look, which some may still see now:

Here’s an example of how they are changing to over the coming days:

In the new format, the background color that’s used for Google’s traditional AdWords units is gone. The comparison units also carry a “Sponsored” disclaimer rather than an “Ads” one, as with AdWords ads. This seems part of Google’s positioning the new units as something different than ads.

Not Ads, Not Organic Listings But A “Third Kind Of Thing”

Indeed, even though Google’s called these “comparison ads” in the past, it pushed back on that label for them now. What are they called? We’ve yet to get a formal name for them. In talking with us about them today, Google referred to the units as a “third type of thing” — not organic listings, and not ads but something in between.

Clicking on the comparison link will take users to a results page in the relevant vertical search product, be it Google Hotel Finder, Google Flight Search or Google Advisor.

The distinction between these and ads, Google told us, was that advertisers control the keywords, the copy and the links in AdWords. In the results generated by the comparison units, Google decides what listings get displayed and how they get displayed, based on aggregate data that advertisers provide. In most cases, Google gets paid for leads it sends.

While the comparison ads site is still up and shows the program as in beta, participation isn’t open to any advertiser as with AdWords, not does it seem likely to be.

Google says those who want to be in the flight area, or the hotel area or in the financial products area will either already be approached by the right team in Google or know the team to contact. In short, if you don’t know the right place to talk to, apparently you aren’t the right company for these types of ads.

Organic, Paid Placement & Paid Inclusion Listings

This “third Kind of thing” will sound familiar to veteran search marketers. It’s paid inclusion. For those new to the concept, a refresher.

For the most part, Google (as well as Bing) has two different types of search listings. The first are “editorial” or “natural” or “organic” listings, the “main” listings that people tend to think of as the search engine’s results. Google doesn’t charge for people to show up in this space. Its search algorithms try to determine the most relevant sites to list for any particular search.

There are also paid listings, the listing powered by AdWords, where advertisers bid against each other to appear above or to the right of the organic listings. Because these ads grew out of advertisers trying to gain prominent placement, they’ve historically been called “paid placement” ads, even though with Google, advertisers can’t guarantee that their ads will rank well for any particular term, even if they’re willing to pay the most. An ad algorithm takes payment along with overall relevancy into account.

Paid inclusion was once a popular way that the major search engines like Yahoo or Bing’s predecessor MSN Search charged sites to help increase the odds they might perform well within organic search results.

You couldn’t buy a top ranking, but you could pay to ensure more of your pages were gathered up or revisited on a regular basis. It was kind of like buying more tickets for a lottery. You aren’t guaranteed to win, but you can buy more chances.

Google was long the major search engine that stood against paid inclusion, even calling out against paid inclusion as part of its 2004 IPO filing. Microsoft and Ask, feeling the pressure, dropped their paid inclusion programs that year. Yahoo — the last holdout — dropped its program in 2009.

So what’s up with paid inclusion happening at Google, which fought against it before?

Paid Inclusion In The Vertical Space

It’s important to note that paid inclusion is not happening in Google’s main web search results. At the time Google fought against paid inclusion, that was largely where it was happening. Since then, paid inclusion has moved into the province of smaller specialty search engines, where it remains common. Other search engines in vertical spaces, like Kayak.com and Mint.com, include data from companies with which they have financial relationships. Even Bing does this.

Google has come close to paid inclusion in the past with some mixture of sponsored listings in things like shopping and local results, but in talking today with the company, it seems it may be closer to this for some newer search products than ever before, if it’s not already there. I’d argue that it is.

To be clear, Google may have “free” information listed in any of these areas because of data feeds it pulls in or some crawling it does of the web. But it was clear the intention for these products is really to be building a way to compare between services from companies that Google has a commercial relationship with. That’s a fairly big departure from Google’s traditional search products. Google News, for example, doesn’t only feature newspapers that purchase inclusion. Nor does Google Shopping only list merchants that pay to be considered.

Google Hotel Finder, launched last year, appears to be a hotel search engine similar to how Google has a search engine for finding images or videos or web pages. But unlike those other search engines, from talking with Google, it seems most if not all the content in Google Hotel Finder is for companies that it has a commercial relationship with or hopes to have one with — a commercial relationship meaning Google gets paid for leads.

Google Flight Search which also launched last year seems the same situation. Google was unclear about whether businesses were listed for free within the area or why some airlines had booking options or not, if that was only for those with commercial arrangements.

As for Google Advisor which rolled up various financial product searching tools last year, individual sections, such as the credit card area, currently say that Google isn’t paid for offers shown. Yet this area powers the comparison units in Google that are expressly noted as sponsored. Google told us the wording in Google Advisor is being updated, after we pointed out this mismatch.

Will More Paid Inclusion Come To Google?

Even though paid inclusion is fairly commonplace in the vertical space, it still feels somewhat surprising for Google to be doing it. Having a search tool for financial products using paid inclusion even goes directly against what Google’s founders said they disliked back in 2004, as part of the IPO filing’s “Don’t Be Evil” section:

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.

It makes me wonder if future Google vertical search products will go down this route. I’ll be following-up more with Google about this in the near future.

Pamela Parker contributed to this story. 

Related Articles

• Yahoo To Drop Paid Inclusion Program
• Open Letter To Google: Do The Right Thing, Divest Yourself Of Performics
• Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines?
• Google Blurs The Line Between Paid & Unpaid Results Again
• Bing’s Travel Search & Kayak Favoritism Angers No One, While Google’s Gets Headline Attention From WSJ
• Google Goes Big For Financial Comparison Shopping, Launches “Google Advisor”
• Search For Hotels With Google Hotel Finder
• Google Travel Search Takes Flight With First ITA Travel Product

There isn’t a need to tie promotional activities back to branding metrics, or tricky-to-quantify engagement on the site (“Do we want more page views, or do less views mean the site delivered on the first try?”)

Thanks to that clarity, store owners keep a close eye on their data, and have probably seen mobile devices show-up on their radar a lot more than they used to. Combine that with the buzz around smartphones, and the idea of a store app quickly becomes a topic at the conference room table.

And rightly so. Smartphone users are a highly motivated crowd, and for the time being they represent an audience that is somewhat more upscale. But a smartphone can’t deliver more than the eye can absorb on a 3-4 inch screen, so usability becomes a paramount concern.

Hence the appeal of an app: nothing delivers content with the ease of use and instant response that a native app can provide.

Apps Drive Sales, But What Drives Downloads?

So an app becomes the centerpiece of your new mobile marketing strategy. But is it the whole strategy? To have your app make a dent in sales, you need to get it into people’s hands. There are lots of ways to accomplish that, but simply making a great app and releasing it in the App Store won’t do the trick.

And so it’s time to go back to your metrics – they may be trying to tell you something. Are your new customers coming from search? And is that activity centered around product searches – items you stock that they want? For many store owners, the answer to both questions is yes.

If that’s the case, then you have a great channel for promoting your app, staring you in the face: a mobile-optimized website.

For a lot of companies, having an app and a mobile site might seem like an unnecessary duplication of effort. But when you look at customer acquisition, you can see the value of having your site become a more effective tool for getting first time customers to 1) buy from their phone and 2) download your app for that second purchase.

Or even for the first purchase: if you show customers know that you have a product in stock, plus other products they may be interested in, the positive experience may persuade them to download right now.

Keeping Your Mobile Website Focused

How do we produce a cost-effective mobile site when dollars are already being spent to develop an app? The key here is to focus on the mission at hand: acquiring customers through product search.

Again, back to your metrics: your incoming traffic is probably driven by a handful of top products. So the process of building a mobile store doesn’t have to be a heroic effort to replicate your 1o,000 SKU inventory. Focus on the top 100 products, and use mobile SEO to make those pages perform well in searches for those product names.

Key Features For Mobile SEO

• Mention the product name in your HTML page titles (as you probably do on your desktop website.) But keep it short: Google Mobile only gives you 55 characters to work with (versus 70 for desktop.)
• Re-process your product images to get the files down to the smallest possible size. 50kb JPEGS are an attainable goal if you’re careful with the compression. Google looks at download speed, and factors it into search results.
• Conversely, resist the urge to downsize your product copy. Try to package it as bulleted lists to make it more digestible on a small screen. But don’t leave out details that contains keywords that your customers might use.

Image compression software can help optimize your site for mobile SEO, producing high-quality images that download quickly.

Then decide what the next step should be. Should “Buy Now” be your call-to-action? Should it be “Download Our App”? Or maybe a button for each?

A-B testing will provide the best answer for your particular audience. Either way, you’ve got that mobile user in your store, looking at your inventory, and getting to know you – probably for the first time.

With a coordinated strategy in place, your mobile website can help drive new buyers to download your app, increasing its reach and building a mobile customer base that will come back again and again.

Let’s take the raw sales performance first. Below is a chart which looks at the rate of growth of the US, UK and then the rest of the world. You can see that the dramatic peak of two quarters ago (mainly from the international markets) has disappeared and things have returned to steady growth rates around the 30% year on year level.

International Stabilises But Growth Rates Declining

A 30% growth rate is great in anyone’s book — but we tend to forget that this isn’t just a Google figure, this is a reflection of growth in the market as traditional forms of advertising fade on the vine and online takes off. Google has done a lot to help it along, but the market has generally been going dramatically in that direction.

As the chart below shows, the market for search outside the US and UK now exceeds at least $23 billion.

Google has at least 80% of that, which we’ll dig into in a few moments, but the two biggest global competitors (non-US, non-UK) are Baidu and Yandex who between them earn around 16% of the total market share.

The Global Search Market Outside The US And UK

The last two quarters of more “muted” growth have seen the huge rate of increase in spending from Google on people and advertising dipping also. Which was the chicken and which was the egg? I guess we’ll never know the answer to that.

What we can say is that the Larry Page inspired shift upwards in gears, has settled, albeit at a higher level. The spend on advertising and staff hasn’t abated, it just hasn’t accelerated to the same degree it did last year.

Google Growth Rates In Headcount & Sales Dramatically Slow

One feature of Google’s last quarter’s report was a drop in the value of clicks at the same time as the number of clicks increased. The Web conference to explain the company’s financial performance this quarter pointed much more at clicks in the mobile sector being part of the cause.

Thanks to the huge rise in Android and a strong increase in mobile advertising, Google has seen a significant rise in the number of mobile clicks on its ads.

The problem is, the value of the resulting clicks is much lower as the chart below seems to show. In fact, the average cost of a click now is less than it was in 2008, according to Google’s own figures extrapolated in the chart.

This is good news for advertisers for sure, but does mean if that’s not the pattern you’re seeing, you may need to think about which types of ad to buy? Might this be a time to consider adding mobile to your portfolio of activity?

Average Value Per Google Click Drops To 2008 Levels

If we correlate the clicks volume to rising revenue divided by the US, International and the rest of the world, if you check out the trends in the red circle below, it does seem that click volume might be putting revenues under pressure.

US revenue is following its normal cyclical pattern of a decline in the first quarter of the year, but looking behind the figures, this decline is actually slightly more than usual.

Mobile ads, and the US decline might all be linked to the lower value of clicks.

Regional Revenues Correlated To Click Volumes

Perhaps more influential on the Google’s psyche and strategy is the concept of a falling global market share outside the US and UK. Our figures show that from quarter 1 2009 to now, Google may have lost as much as 8% market share.

This doesn’t mean that Google isn’t getting people to use it or to use search, but it might mean there’s much more competition for online marketing bucks than there was just a couple of years ago.

These figures are based on publicly declared reports, but they are nonetheless difficult to calculate as all businesses have multiple sources of revenue.

However, just suppose that Google was looking at a similar pattern internally, how would you change your strategy?

I think you’d try spending more on advertising, recruit more people to push the Google message home, focus only those developments that could help take your business forwards competitively and you’d try launching products that trod on the toes of your budget stealing competitors (Facebook?) — namely something like Google+.

Does this sound familiar? Oh this might be a good time to change the share structure to protect your control for the future too — while you still can!

Google Global Market Share Outside UK And US - Estimated

Covario, which serves mostly high-tech clients, says paid search in the Americas grew 15% in the first quarter, while Adobe’s Efficient Frontier, which serves clients in a variety of verticals, says it saw a 16% year-over-year increase in the U.S.. Meanwhile, the retail-heavy and U.S.-focused Rimm Kaufman Group (RKG) says search spend rose 30 percent as compared to the 2011 period.

All three companies recently released reports that give insight into how paid search did in the last quarter, and predict what spending might look like for the rest of the year to come.

Cost-per-click rates on Google continued to decline, according to Efficient Frontier. The company says Google CPCs fell by 5 percent year-over-year, and was down from the fourth quarter, as well. Still, by increasing clicks overall, the company has managed to hang onto its market share. It probably helps that Yahoo-Bing CPCs increased by 18% year-over-year, giving the Search Alliance less of an ROI advantage. According to Rimm Kaufman, Google CPCs fell 7% year-over-year in Q1, while CPCs on Yahoo-Bing rose 15% as compared to the year-ago period.

Image via Adobe's Efficient Frontier

Though Efficient Frontier said cost-per-click pricing was down in the automotive and finance sectors, the company found that CPCs dropped most precipitously (by 17%) in the retail sector.

Covario also noted a drop in CPCs, saying they declined 3% from Q4 ’11. The company’s analysts believe search engine algorithm changes are behind the decline and predict pricing will stabilize in the second half of the year.

The biggest trend noted by Efficient Frontier is paid search on smartphones and tablets. The company says spend on mobile devices in the U.S. represented 7.7% of all search spend in the first quarter, mostly driven by growth in spending on tablets. Tablet spend has grown from nearly zero in May of 2011 to 4.25% of all search ad spend by March of 2012. Spend on tablets is now greater than that on smartphones. The company predicts that overall mobile device spend will account for 15 to 20 percent of search spend by the end of this year.

Part of what’s driving the move to tablets especially is that conversions on tablets exceeds that of desktop devices, yet CPCs on tablets continue to be lower.

Image via Adobe's Efficient Frontier

Rimm Kaufman said it saw mobile traffic share at just under 14% at the end of the first quarter, which was nearly double 2011 levels. Tablets represented nearly 8% of paid search clicks and 57% of mobile clicks.

Image via Rimm Kaufman Group

Image by Rimm Kaufman Group

Google was the deliverer of much of that mobile traffic, and it continues to be the dominant player overall. The company commanded 78% market share in Q1, according to Covario. Spend on Google was up 1% from the typically-busy Q4 period, and up 23% over the year-ago period. The Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance showed 2% growth from the fourth quarter, but it’s still down 20% from the first quarter of 2011 and has 13% market share. Baidu, the leading player in China, grew 4% from last quarter and 142% year-over-year. The company rakes in 9% of global paid search spending.

Of the three companies, only Covario and Efficient Frontier made predictions about the rest of the year. Covario forecasts 18 to 22% annualized growth globally in 2012, while the Adobe unit only gives a U.S. number, saying growth will come in between 10 to 15 percent this year.

“Let’s say this is your first day at Urbanspoon and I show you the following data. We’ve just launched an A/B test of that I’d like you to evaluate. [The example can be almost anything you want to test different results for – from almost any search element, PPC campaigns, email subject lines etc. In this case, I’m using a PPC example.] Imagine you are running two different ads on a campaign with 50 kewords. We’ve been running Ad A for a while and have 17,235 impressions and 272 clicks. I started running Ad B last week and that has received 41 clicks on 2,253 impressions. What would you do?”

I’m looking for an answer that goes beyond demonstration of pre-algebra skills and rudimentary familiarity with a calculator.

Obvious answers include splitting up 50 keywords into different groups, looking down stream to see differences in conversion rates, and technical answers around quality score. But what I’m really looking for is a theoretical understanding of statistics and the interplay between sample sizes, variability and confidence intervals.

Answers to the above theoretical question usually fall into one of three buckets:

1. I’d run as more Ad B’s so our impressions are equal and then compare the click through rates.  #FAIL
2. I’d run the Ads longer, you need at least 3 weeks of data to make a decision.  #FAIL
3. Ad B is better b/c the click through rate is higher.  #FAIL “and thanks for taking the time to talk with me, our HR department will be in touch . . .”

Turns out, you don’t need to have an equal number of impressions or a set amount of time to run this analysis. It’s actually a fairly simple concept that can ultimately then be mathematically defined:

The greater the difference between your A and B samples (drawn randomly from the same pool) the smaller the size your test needs to be in order to confidently assert that one performs better than another. Example – if we wanted to test if men were taller than women and we measured 100 men and 100 women  and the men averaged 7 feet tall and the women averaged 4 feet tall, you’d be fairly confident saying that men are taller than women.

Conversely, if the difference was 3 inches instead of 3 feet, you’d probably want to measure more men and women before confidently asserting men are taller than women.

In fact, it’s possible that your sample was misleading – as a population women are really taller than men, but your sample didn’t bear that out. This level of confidence can be mathematically expressed as a percentage – I’m 95% certain that A is better than B. (Meaning there is a 5% chance, or 1 out of every 20 times where you’ll unwittingly pick the underperformer.) The greater the level of confidence you want, the larger the sample size you need.

All of this can be calculated with innumerable free online tools. Larger sophisticated systems like Adwords and big ESPs build this statistical testing in to their testing methodology – but it’s easy for do-it-yourselfers too.

I like a tool called AB Tester, which allows you to measure up to three alternatives compared to a benchmark:

In the results above, I’ve done the analysis for our question . . . The “Confidence” column tells me there’s a 79.19% chance that B is better than our control A.

Watch how this Confidence grows when we add a zero to each column – keeping the CTR the same but increasing the sample size:

By increasing the size of the test tenfold, now there’s only 0.5% that A is really better than B.

Let’s go from theoretical to real. Here are results from an email test we did for our Hawaiian getaway promotion to Ludobites 9. (It’s over now, sorry.)

The first data column is sends, then delivered, then opens, then clicks. Assume we want to test three different content types to three different cities (now admittedly this is not a random sample – maybe people in San Francisco respond differently to content . . . )

Take the data from the 3/6 send and plug it in to A/B Tester. Note I’m comparing the CTR from Opened emails to isolate content as an impact to click through rate. Also note that while the sample sizes are similar, they don’t have to be the same.

My best performer here is the San Francisco content at a 5.5% CTR. I use that as a control and plug the other two into AB Tester:

This tells me there’s a 3.3% likelihood that the LA content might really outperform the winner (San Francisco). Additionally, there’s a 23.5% chance Seattle content is better than our “winner”. More testing necessary . . . .

Social Media Examiner announced the results of its fourth annual survey, which this year had replies from more than 3,800 social media marketers around the world.

When asked what other marketing channels they use, search engine optimization (SEO) was the No. 2 response behind e-mail marketing. Paid search — or “online ads” as the survey called it — was far down the list at number six. Sixty-five percent of social media marketers say they use SEO, compared to only 38 percent who use paid search advertising.

B2B social marketers were slightly more likely to do SEO (67 percent) than their B2C counterparts (62 percent).

Going forward, 68 percent of respondents said they’re planning to increase their SEO efforts — a number that’s down slightly from 71 percent in 2011. Only nine percent this year said they have no plans to use SEO.

Only 43 percent of the social media marketers surveyed say they’re planning to increase their use of PPC advertising.

As you’d expect, Facebook was the No. 1 social networking site with 92 percent adoption. Google+ was a distant sixth, but most respondents say they’re planning to use Google+ more in the future. I’ve written up more about that aspect of the study on Marketing Land: Survey: Only 40 Percent Of Marketers Are Using Google+, But Many Plan To Change That.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

Leveraging multinational markup while clearing up in-site duplicate content and avoiding multinational homepage calamities is no easy matter to coordinate for big site SEO.

Bringing all of those strategies to bear, and then also attempting to integrate a mobile site strategy would seem, on the face of it, to be a difficult task.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Mobile Sites, Feature Phones & The Smartphone Revolution

We are fortunate to be living through a time of radical change for mobile website optimisation.

Every year since 2003-2004, I’ve heard well respected industry figures declaim the ‘Year of Mobile’, only to be sorely disappointed when it comes down to looking at where their client’s online revenue is being generated (with the notable exception of gaming, of course).

The last couple of years have seen mobile-derived revenue finally push on to the point where we are genuinely on the cusp of smartphones (and of course tablets) taking centre stage.

This is especially true for retailers. And you can multiply that sentiment by 10 for multinational brand retailers.

So why now?

If you’ve ever tried to make a purchase through a feature phone (AKA: a ‘dumb’ phone), then you’ll know the answer.

Smartphones and tablets provide a genuinely convenient and pleasurable shopping experience, whether via applications or HTML5, or simply thanks to clever adaptive CSS styling.

They also allow big sites to avoid the common SEO pitfalls of deploying a specially created ‘Mobile’ website intended for feature forms. To demonstrate my point, step forward UK hardware supplier B&Q, owners of the SEO friendly domain ‘diy.com’.

The Pitfalls Of Mobile Content Duplication

Using our site operators we can drill through B&Q’s domain to spot the issue created by their current mobile deployment.

We can see that for a domain with 937,000 indexed pages initially listed in Google’s cache, a chunk of 50,000 are caused by the entirely duplicate m.diy.com subdomain: their mobile website.

(Of course, a rather larger chunk of 108,000 are caused by their ‘Asset Bank’ feature: if you’re reading B&Q, please do check out the clearing up website duplication tips I linked to earlier.)

We can also see that because the mobile site is cached in Google’s main index, they will return pages like this and this for users searching on desktop computers, creating extremely bad brand experiences and the cause of massive bounce rate issues which have a knock on effect on the domain’s SEO value as a whole.

A B&Q mobile page indexed in Google's main SERPs.

Effectively, the poor performance of the mobile pages will damage the performance of the ‘main’ website pages. So rather than providing value by being useful for feature phone users (who tend not to make a purchase via their phones anyway), they in fact detract value and lower sales.

So why has this happened and what’s the solution?

B&Q have done the right thing: they are catering to their customers regardless of their browsing device. This is a good thing.

Unfortunately, they have not followed Google’s advice for registering mobile only pages in their mobile search engine. And so, they have ended up creating issues and failing to reach their intended audience.

By listing their mobile URLS in a Mobile sitemap.xml, and using (and declaring!) a mobile markup standard such as XHTML MP 1.2, cHTML or WML 1.3, B&Q could disambiguate their mobile content from their destop-intended pages and Google would reflect that in their indexing.

For a belt and braces approach (always preferred if you ask me!), using the robots.txt to restrict access to the m.diy.com subdomain to mobile user-agents only (for example Googlebot-mobile) would prevent the poor brand experience and SEO duplication issues in their tracks.

A Modern Mobile Website

However, if you are contemplating building a mobile site today, then I’d suggest you do none of these things, and instead break out a bit of CSS3.

By indicating the ‘media’ value for your stylesheets using CSS3 mediaqueries, you can pass different stylesheets based on the width of the browser used. For example, a value of “max-device-width:480px” would mean the contents are only used for the most common smartphone browser width.

You could be as granular as you like and provide small and full-size tablet width layouts, or indeed provide a unique layout for very wide monitor widths for more high value boutique brands looking to make a splash when visited by higher net worth individuals. The possibilities are extensive.

So detecting the user-agent (your browser, for example) display width is a snap, and serving different styling to a well structured XHTML (or, even better, HTML5) page means to can use exactly the same content – and therefore URLs – for your desktop or mobile devices. So, no duplication.

With HTML5′s additional strength as a surrogate phone/table app replacement, building to this specification allows extremely valuable future linkbait promotion of features without the additional expense of specific device application development.

We use that approach on QueryClick’s company website, so try it out in different devices (and of course feel free to copy out the code for your own purposes, I’d be pleased to hear what you make of it) and see how it scales from mobile, through to desktop all with just a small change in the CSS.

Mobile marketing must seem that way to a lot of companies, and as a result, far too many of them are sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, there are a few vendors out there offering a shortcut to the mobile Web:  a turnkey publishing platform that allows a marketer to quickly deploy mobile landing pages.

The question is: how effective are these pages in the context of mobile search?

The Case For Mobile Landing Pages

Turnkey landing pages are usually considered because of special circumstance:

• Budget. When most dollars get spent to support desktop sites, the remainder may not actually be enough to support a full-blown mobile effort.
• Direct response campaigns. Sometimes a media campaign concept drives the need for mobile landing pages to catch the resulting traffic. QR codes at trade show booths, mobile offers sent via text, and even plain-old PPC ads can drive the need for a quickly-built mobile site.

The systems available to deploy mobile landing pages change every month. So rather than single-out a single platform and dissect its features, let’s look at the factors you’ll want to keep in mind when evaluating and using these services.

Laying A Foundation

The first thing you’ll want to investigate is whether or not these landing pages can be read by a search engine. Here are a few features to look at closely:

• Dynamic Pages. Some turnkey systems use dynamic pages to quickly create pages that can respond to campaigns or even individual ads. Dynamic pages include lots of parameters in their URLs, and can cause problems for mobile search, just as they do in the desktop world.
• On-Page Coding. Mobile landing pages sometimes use special coding to create a seamless app-like experience. I’ve talked about JQuery Mobile in the past, and there are other frameworks such as XUI, JQTouch, not to mention plain-vanilla JavaScript. These schemes don’t get a 100% thumbs-up or thumbs-down – it depends on how they are used. The key is to ensure that your landing pages are actually composed of distinct pages, instead of a single downloadable page with a chameleon-like ability to alter its content.
• Navigation. If your turnkey site is built to catch campaign traffic, it may just be a collection of free-standing landing pages, with links to connect them to each other. If that’s the case, you won’t benefit from the SEO support these pages would lend to each other. Furthermore, without nav links, you may lose a connection back to the home page, which typically has the strongest SEO scoring.
• Flash. Flash is not usually employed on these sites (thank you Steve Jobs) so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Getting There From Here

Looking at all the points above, you might get the impression that optimizing your mobile landing pages will be an end in itself. And it partially is: you’ll be living with them for a while, so it’s worthwhile to see what sort of SEO performance can be extracted from it.

But you can also take a broader view. If the turnkey site and its campaigns are successful, it’s likely that more mobile projects will follow, including the creation of a more comprehensive “official” mobile website.

With that in mind, your turnkey site can be considered a precursor, one that can be used to lay a foundation for the construction of a future brand presence.

A bit of preparation can help to make that happen:

• Domain Name.  Try to anticipate the URL that will be used for your future mobile site. If you can start using that URL today, you’ll create a footprint that will help search engines discover your next website more quickly. Conversely, you should talk to your vendor if they suggest a URL based on *their* domain name, because you may lose access to it when you transition to your next mobile website.
• Recyclable URLs. What works at the site level also works at the page level. Choosing locations for landing pages that will echo the page locations of a future website will also help smooth the transition. Granted, it’s hard to predict what your future site will look like, but for basic pages like “About Us” or pages promoting on your bread-and-butter product lines, some predictions can be made.

Your short-term mobile landing pages (left) may not have as much content as your future mobile website (right.) But the more they resemble each other in structure, the better your mobile SEO will be down the road.

Altogether, mobile landing pages are a great tactic for getting yourself into the mobile space. And with advance planning, that short-term success can be leveraged into an asset that can feed into successive projects, creating a win-win for both mobile search and your time-to-market.