Greenlight's Magazine: Spring Edition

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ARTICLE

Contents

What will it take for brands to embrace the new reality of Search?

Interflora’s recent run in with Google gets Greenlight’s SEO Director, Adam Bunn, questioning the ‘state of link building’.

10

The Impact of Facebook ‘Home’

How can we get the most from mobile advertising?

Integrated Search &Digital Strategies

328

Article by Paul Byrne

6

feature articles

4

Magazine Contents

Get in touch to discuss your site’s specific performance | www.greenlightdigital.com | +44 (0)20 7253 7000

3 Overview

4 Article - Exactly what willit take for brands to embrace the new reality of Search?

by Adam Bunn

6 Article - How can we get the most from mobile advertising?

by Hannah Kimuyu

8 Article - Integrated Search & Digital Strategies

by Paul Byrne

10 Article - The impact of Facebook ‘Home’

by Sam Haseltine

13 Back Cover

Sam Haseltine explor es the potential to be unloc ke by your br and with F acebook ‘Home’ .

As I write this it’s been almost a month since Interflora’s recovery from the landmark Google penalty caused almost certainly by a large number of paid advertorials and potentially by a number of other link building techniques. Interflora had suffered a milder penalty in 2012 from which it had recovered, but then continued to link build against Google’s guidelines thus in-curring a rarely seen level of wrath from the web spam team that saw them lose rankings not only for all of their generic and long tail que-ries but also their brand – an almost unheard of level of severity for a link based penalty. It seems an opportune time to put down some of my thoughts on the “state of link building”, current and future.

Linking without linkingAs social media becomes the de facto way of expressing appreciation for a piece of content, naturally given links are becoming vanishingly

rare. Frankly, why would you bother when you can press a

“share” or “like” button and be done with it?

Meanwhile there is a flight of SEO’s to the few remaining link building

“techniques” that are collectively deemed “safe”, however misin-formed they may be.

Various forms of semantic markup that allow content to reference its source without an explicit link may also prove important in the future. Google’s proprietary authorship markup is widely hyped but is just one example of a burgeoning pool of schema and microformatting options for content providers.

Make no mistake: search engineswill have to use these “non-link”link signals more in the future. After all, they are companies that have historically leant on links as a signal, but are now faced with a

shrinking pool of those links, a greater and greater percentage of which are manipulated (if you think about it for long enough you almost start to feel sorry for them).

Mixed messages from GoogleFor marketers, things are getting confused by Google’s apparent mixed messages on various types of link, caused by their increasingly prominent television advertising for the Chrome browser and the connected “ecosys-tem” of Google services. In a classic case of the left hand not talking to the right, paid advertorials, sponsored posts and product reviews have all received apparent endorsements by Google on the one hand while various penalties, warnings and guidelines tell a completely different story.

“Google’s hypocrisy is bound to raise ire & confusion in equal measure.”Take product reviews. The basic ap-proach here is to identify a number of bloggers in your industry with a desirable following and send them free products to review. From there angles vary, from the obviously unnatural “in return for me sending you this I expect a link to this page with this anchor text” to “here’s a product, do what you will”. The former line is explicitly named and shamed in Google’s webmaster guide-lines, and the shades of grey in the middle have various degrees of risk. A highly trumped campaign by Interflora resulted in many product review style blog posts, many of which had links to Interflora that might have been deemed unnatural (note that nobody except Google, including probably Interflora themselves, knows exactly which links if any contributed to their penalty aside from the paid advertori-

Feature Article

Exactly what will it take for brands to embrace the

new reality of search?

FEATURE ARTICLE

Interflora’s recent run in with Google gets Greenlight’s SEO

Director, Adam Bunn, questioning the ‘state of link building’.


als that are about as open and shut a case as it’s possible to get).

Meanwhile, the current Google Chrome above the line campaign you may have seen on TV recently (http://youtu.be/E0qDrRJT4zE) fea-tures the story of Cambridge Satch-els, a start up company that sends products to fashion bloggers as part of its online marketing strategy. In the ad this results in YouTube video reviews, but Google certainly runs the risk of being seen to explicitly sanction sending products to blog-gers in return for promotion, includ-ing by extension links. In reality of course, Chrome’s marketing team just aren’t talking to Matt Cutts and his web spam team, proof of which came when a paid advertorial and a number of sponsored blog posts for Chrome went live on the day that Interflora was banned including followable links to various Google pages. At the time of writing, Google seems to have removed the specific posts that were widely reported on but others still remain, including its links (search for “this blog is part of a series sponsored by Chromebooks” in quotes to unearth some). This hypocrisy is bound to raise ire and confusion in equal measure.

5Get in touch to discuss your site’s specific performance | www.greenlightdigital.com | +44 (0)20 7253 7000

In March Matt Cutts told us to expect a “very large” Penguin update at some point this year. Penguin is the closest thing to an algorithmic version of a member of the web spam team, dishing out ranking

“filters” that feel like link penalties, thus far to a very small number of sites (to date Penguin updates have

typically affected less than 0.5% of search results). It’s difficult to say what constitutes “very large” but I think it is now quite obvious (despite Chrome’s best efforts) that in general Google expects market-ers to be going cold turkey on link

“building” and doing things properly. At the moment this has resulted in a lot of noise about content market-ing.

Unfortunately I am not convinced that many people really get what this means. I recently attended a content strategy conference full of people whose jobs revolved purely around content. The thing that struck me most clearly was that the concept of assigning value to content was seen as weirdly alien. In particular, in a session dedicated exactly to this topic, the speaker had to explain what ROI meant and

felt the need to speak to the del-egates like a room of primary school pupils. For someone coming from an online marketing background it w as faintly condescending and frankly bizarre.

I have written often in the Greenlight magazine of the need to blend the various strands of on- and off-line marketing into compelling campaigns and I’m more convinced than ever now that success will come from mashing creativity together with the science of numbers driven market-ing – call it content marketing if you like. Perhaps the Interflora case and the threat of a looming super algo-rithm update will turn out to be the tipping point that convinces brands to embrace the new reality we find ourselves in.

The 2013 Google Super Algorithm Update

By Adam Bunn, Director of SEO, Greenlight

It took mobile advertising almost three years (‘…2009/10/11 will be the year of mobile’) to make a serious impression until we hit 2011 when we saw mobile traffic represent almost 38% of online traffic for retail, and on average 18% for other sectors. Mobile advertising is cheaper, with cost per clicks still coming in at half the price of desktop and is more cost effective, delivering almost twice the average basket value and double the conversion rate. This is also illustrated in our most recent Sector Reports where we now report the different trends in

mobile versus desktop growth; the evidence clearly shows the num-ber of mobile searches is catching up with desktop queries. So what’s the problem, why are most adver-tisers still only dipping their toes into mobile advertising?

12 to 18 months ago site experi-ence was definitely an issue, with many advertisers not even bother-ing to develop a mobile friendly site, never mind considering the various different device sizes. However with responsive website design, advertisers don’t need to worry about whether it’s worth

investing in a separate mobile friendly site. Even Google states that responsive web design is its recommended mobile configura-tion, and even goes so far as to refer to responsive web design as the industry best practice. To explain why, responsive design sites have one URL and the same HTML, regardless of device, which makes it easier and more efficient for Google to crawl, de-mand, and organise content.

Google prefers responsive web design because content that lives on one website and one URL is

Feature Article

MOBILE ADVERTISINGWhy haven’t we fully

embraced it yet?

by Hannah Kimuyu

With just two months until launch, Greenlight’s Director of Paid Media Hannah Kimuyu explores the benefits that Enhanced Campaigns will offer for mobile.



much easier for users to share, interact with and link to, than content that lives on a separate mobile site.

So that’s the site taken care of, however does size really matter because let’s not forget mobile advertising isn’t just about the typ-ical mobile handset, we also have to consider tablet devices into this mix as well. A recent study by YuMe revealed “…that consumer media consumption on mobile de-vices is influenced by environment and context, not just screen size”. The study revealed that consumers are increasingly screen agnostic when it comes to consuming con-tent. By device, 38% of respon-dents accessed entertainment content on their smartphone; 34% on their laptop, and 28% on their tablets. The study proceeded to advise advertisers to throw away their “…screen-by-screen media planning rule books” and to focus on a multi-screen strategy.

This advice is also echoed by Google, who has gone as far as

overhauling its whole advertis-ing channel (the first time since its inception), putting mobile first and announcing the ‘re-launch’ of its Enhanced Campaigns in June 2013.

Enhanced Campaigns is all about ‘…making ads simpler in the contextual world we live in today, yet providing the right reporting and platform to work with’. [Kesh Patel, Strategic Partnership lead for Google’s local channel sales division]

For mobile specifically the three real benefits include -1. Ad Placement Focusing your budget on the context that mat-ters, including time of day, proxim-ity, and type of device.

2. Ad Copy Refocusing your bid-ding strategy and messaging to reflect the different contextual situations, allowing the adver-tiser to be more consistent and automated.

3. Reporting Being able to measure the joint impact of where an ad shows up and what it says e.g. mea-suring app downloads, offers, and click-to-call etc. (Also Google’s first attempt at joining the dots between different devices).

However the developments of Enhanced Campaigns also bring a few challenges, mainly the forced inclusion and impending higher cost per clicks. The higher cost per clicks will of course be a real issue to those advertisers who have enjoyed the cheap, cost effective world of mobile advertising to date. With brand cost per clicks on the rise and the increase in CPC’s from free shopping becoming a paid format, some may find it all a bit overwhelming to take in.

That said mobile advertising is here to stay and with Google laying out a more sophisticated approach to targeting the user, increased CPC’s aside, mobile advertising is an avenue we at Greenlight are excited about.

by Hannah Kimuyu, Director of Paid Media, Greenlight

So with two months to go before Enhanced Campaigns are fully launched, let’s all embrace mobile advertising once & for all.

Given the trend so far it can only get better!

A fully Integrated digital search strategy is a difficult thing to achieve but is a must for all digital marketers in a com-petitive multi-channel and multi-device marketplace.

The search space has continued to evolve at a rapid pace over the last two to three years with the paid and organic spaces constantly blurring. This can be clearly seen with the likes of Google Shop-ping becoming part of the paid space and aspects such as mega/ enhanced sitelinks appearing in Paid Search ads. The addition of Google Plus and so many search-ers now being signed into Google

has also fundamentally changed the Google SERPs. These recent changes along with the introduc-tion of universal search, a number of years ago, has highlighted the need for truly integrated search strategies.

Marketers need to start using the large amounts of data they have at hand, to see where there is crossover between their organic terms and their paid presence. Clear testing plans need to be developed, incorporating metrics such as traffic, rank, position, conversion data and the volume around keywords. A huge amount of advertisers’ budgets are poten-

Feature Article



tially wasted on keywords they do not need to bid on.

However an Integrated Search based strategy is not simply about whether you should bid for certain keywords or not, it needs to be broader than that and pull in areas such as PR, Social Media and content creation. When plan-ning an Integrated campaign, you should ask: what are our plans for video content, blogger outreach, alignment with above the line marketing plans etc? And how can these elements affect our search presence?This should then lead you to con-sider how to step away from con-sidering just search and construct not just an Integrated Search strategy but the elements involved in developing an Integrated digital strategy. This can lead to answer-ing harder questions, rather than whether you should be bidding on certain keywords or not.

A truly integrated strategy moves away from looking at keywords and asks what the business’s goals are and how they can be achieved in the digital sphere. It suggests that to be fully integrated, a com-pany’s marketing team needs to be wholly aligned. Having siloed individual specialists manag-

ing PPC and SEO separately (all fighting for different budget and different channel targets) is not the most efficient or integrated way to manage your strategy.

This siloed approach needs to change and needs to be driven from the top, businesses need to become ‘Digital First’ companies. C-level employees need to realise that to deliver an integrated strategy, all departments need to be aligned to work towards the business’s goals.

This may require a number of changes

• How does reporting change if the basis for that reporting is last click?

• How will integration fundamen-tally affect the business’s fore-casts?

• How will attribution affect the companies channel/ marketing plan?

• How to remunerate our agency if we are no longer looking at a single channel?

• How will this affect contracts, targets and business planning moving forward?

Over the past few months we have worked with one of our financial clients to integrate

their strategy, making several changes:

• Contract was reviewed so it no longer focused on a single channel

• Targets were changed to become target focused

• All forecasting changed to suit one integrated model

• Billing changed to be based on time rather than percentage of media spend

The above changes can be a dif-ficult one for clients to stomach as it can go to the heart of how their business might be run, how the business has reported its perfor-mance in the past, even as granu-lar as someone’s job specification.

Whatever your view, integration is a necessary change required in today’s digital world. To really embrace it, a business needs to be ambitious and courageous.

Businesses must be able to recognise the changes that need to be made and have the vision to see the benefits a truly integrated strategy and company can deliver.

by Paul byrne, DIGITal accounT DIrecTor, GreenlIGhT.

Greenlight’s Sam Haseltine analyses the impact that Facebook’s new product will have for brands .

Despite Mark Zuckerberg describ-ing his company as a “mobile first social network”, up until now Face-book’s mobile offering has been largely fragmented and unreliable; a main Facebook application, with separate apps to improve features such as messaging, managing brand pages, photographing and even poking. Although Zuckerberg has regularly assured consumers that “it’s not the right strategy for us...to build a phone”, anticipation had built prior to its most recent summoning of press to its Cuper-tino base, around what its latest mobile release would involve. They announced Facebook ‘Home’.

‘Home’ is not a standalone ap-plication, rather it’s a launcher for Android which adds a complete integration layer on top of the Android OS. Users will witness a complete overhaul of their phone’s UI (user interface) and Facebook is promising three standout features: Cover Feed, Chat Heads and App Launcher to place people, rather than applications, at the centre of its mobile experience.

Although its intention is to place people at the forefront of mobile devices rather than applications, it appears that with ‘Home’, Face-book is placing additional empha-sis on quality of relationships and content (not too dissimilar to the way Google rolled out Panda and Penguin updates to add additional weight to the quality of a link back

Feature Article

The Impact of Facebook ‘Home’

What could Facebook’s new

product mean for your brand?



2. Focus on building a better relationship

with your customers

By investing in the relationship with the

people who use your Facebook page, you’ll

be building a foundation of trust that will

bring your fans to a place where they’re

more receptive to your content; a place

you’ll need to be in if you don’t want your

fans to grow tired of seeing your content on

their phone ‘Home’ screen.

3. Promoted Content

How Facebook intends to use Home for

promoted content is yet to be announced,

although Adam Mosseri, Facebook Product

Director, says “We’re designing a lot of really

high-quality ad units for Cover Feed.” At this

stage I would anticipate it to involve the op-

portunity for brands to pay a premium rate,

above that for promoted posts, to reach their

existing fan base through Home. Unless this

happens, we can confidently say that Home

will become nothing more than opt-in spam.

to your site when organising SERPs). Facebook’s mechanism for doing so is fronted by a dynamic home and lock screen (Cover Feed), populated by imagery and content from users friends and the pages they have liked. Without the quality of this content being to a high standard, users of the Android launcher may quickly be turned off. Unless their network is populated exclu-sively by professional photogra-phers, it’s highly likely their home screens will become inundated with pixelated images of their friends’ babies and food.

Equally, users of ‘Home’ may find themselves scrutinising the qual-ity of relationships they maintain within Facebook (between friends and brands). Once the relation-ships become the focal point of a device you use as often as your phone, it may soon become apparent that there are many connections that just don’t war-rant the exposure ‘Home’ could give them.

What could Home mean for brands?

Zuckerberg has already expressed his

intention to use Home as an opportunity

for brands to purchase premium advertis-

ing real estate. The potential for this

assumes the success of Home and uptake

by Android users. However, what impact

does it have for brands?

1. Focus on quality content

Your brand’s latest update could find itself

front and centre, in the palm of your cus-

tomers hands when they glance at your

phone. With this in mind, the quality (res-

olution, visual appeal, lighting etc) needs

to be better than it’s ever been if you’re to

stand out and grab your customers atten-

tion. On the contrary, if the quality is poor,

you will not only be losing an opportunity

but also may find yourself losing fans and

engagement levels dropping.

What other opportunities could Home introduce?

Inadvertently it’s possible that Facebook has heralded in a new dawn of opportunity for brands. And it doesn’t involve Facebook ‘Home’.

Currently the Android ‘launcher’ marketplace is relatively small; instead consumers opting to trust and use the built in UI. With this in mind and, again, assuming the success of ‘Home’, it could raise awareness and drive adoption of the launcher marketplace. With more consumers realising the

potential of a Launcher, this could open the door for brands to take a leaf out of Facebook’s book and build their own. I know, for one, that if a brand, company, band or sports team were to build an app that afforded me the opportunity to have a mobile experience centred on them, I’d be keen to take it up, especially if it was West Ham United F.C.

Facebook ‘Home’ is new, and there’s more to it than just the Cover Feed. Chat Heads, for example, allows messaging to take place in an overlay on top of other applications so you never have to stop what you’re doing to chat. Equally, the Cover Feed can be turned off. However, once you take

that away and reduce the launcher to just Chat Heads and App Launcher (which is just a menu), what’s really left for users to get excited about?

Regardless of whether Facebook ‘Home’ is popular, brands should still be improving the quality of their content and investing in fan relationships. By getting this right, companies’ Facebook pages and content will become a far richer experience for users. And if Home proves popular, they’ll be in a great place to leverage what it potentially has to offer.

by Sam Haseltine, Social Media Strategist, Greenlight

www.greenlightdigital.com

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Greenlight's Magazine: Spring Edition