Jonathan Mendez's Blog

Google Stripping Referring URL Parameters Will Leave Many Naked

Back in early February Google did a little test. It decided to test an AJAX SERP. This meant Google sent natural search result traffic to sites without any passing identifying parameters except the top-level domain google.com. Message Boards and Blogs lit up immediately. They stopped the test (to 10% of traffic) quickly but in March seemed to try it again. Two weeks ago, Google followed-up with announced change of URL parameters. Some good and some bad. This week Google again seems to be rolling out AJAX SERPs this time more extensively for Firefox users. Something is happening here.

It has become clear that we are all Google’s Mr. Jones. The Google Mothership seems to be leaving and we can choose to get onboard for the data ride (Google Analytics would likely still be able to capture queries and the like) or we can live in a netherworld of insufficient data. With some sites getting 50% or more of their traffic from Google natural search not using GA in this scenario relegates them to a sort of third world of data and renders their subscription-based analytics platforms limp.

There is no question in my mind that Google owns this referrer data though I have heard it argued otherwise from the analytics vendors. The click action takes place in the Google domain and though the link data is generated from publisher content, publishers are under no obligation to have their sites indexed. There is also no question to its value. Huge. It is worth mentioning that much of the URL shorteners now driving an ever growing amount of web traffic pass even less useful referrer parameters to the linked sites.

This is Google's nuclear option to the world of web data. The fallout will be an analytic winter for many. The face of the analytics, SEO, online publishing, testing, targeting and even the public markets will all change. Does the very fact that Google has so much data leverage mean they are likely to use it to their advantage at some point? Would it be so bad to live in a world of (free) GA? They have made great strides with segmentation and continue to add data visualization. Of course there are plenty of reasons ethical, historical and rational that Google must leave their URL passable and parseable. It appears now less likely than ever to happen.

Busy Being Born: Creative Technology & Analytics

Twice in the past week I have had conversations about the creative use of technology. My point was that technology by itself has all the elements necessary for creativity to flourish. Coding is creative. The web has progressed to date only because of those who thought about technology from a creative perspective. It’s something many people don’t appreciate.

However, we’ve now reached a point in the development of the web where the inverse has become just as important. Technology’s use with creative will powerfully change the web experience for people by delivering more relevance and more engaging experiences. Creative is becoming part and parcel of the platforms where it resides and applications that deliver and present it.

Right now testing technology sits at the forefront. It’s been amazing to witness the rise of creative testing over the four years I’ve been speaking about it on the conference circuit. From 0-70% of the audience in 4 years and every one of the major testing players acquired by companies like Omniture, Interwoven, Accenture & Acxiom.

As we move towards a real-time intelligent/dynamic web, content targeting and analytics will play a larger role and get rolled up into creative technology. It’s important to understand at its core creative tech is about two things - rules and results.

Data Driven Design

In the past few weeks two high profile events took place that illuminated the role of technology on creative.

Facebook’s redesign: Whatever you want to say about the design it was driven by data (or FB needs to sell NOW). As Scott Rafer mentioned at SES the design really was about revenue metrics as much as it was copying Twitter. It still amazes me how many creative decisions are not about revenue. Which bring us to…

The departure of Google’s Visual Design Lead Doug Bowman: He could no longer work at a company that made most every design decisions based on testing and revenue data rather than an opined aesthetic. There is a great discussion of that conflict here.

What we can learn from Facebook and Google – two of the most technically savvy organizations on the web. Both are at their core about delivering rules based content. Both use data on revenue generation to drive design. They are the blueprint.

Design Power

For all the Silicon Valley geekery and new found fascination with quants on Madison Avenue there is a giant issue playing out. Design power. You see, as soon as your audience has the right answer the rules of creative change. Design becomes a question of how well you know your audience. To paraphrase Steve Jobs design is not about what it looks like, but how it works. This is not an ad agency strong suit.

The agency problem (and one I’ve experienced once over twice) is that literally and figuratively they can’t afford to test. Testing creates too much conflict (fearful Creative Directors) and inefficiency (training, increased costs & multiple creative). I’m aware that some like WPP are talking the talk but change would require ground up realignment of their workforce, business operations and structure. Even if they tried they may simply be too big and too old to succeed at this.

Additionally, the progress of creative technology is in many respects making testing more difficult (but more valuable). As mentioned, moving the needle now is becoming more about targeted content and the dynamic real-time web. Testing informs these rules but this scales at a content delivery/management platform, something Madison Avenue is once again far behind on. In the web's next phase technology needs to be your Chief Strategy Officer and the data collected from your audience needs to be your Creative Director.

Creative Distribution

The irony is that there really isn’t anything more creative than testing. Testing allows creativity to flourish within a company. I call it creative distribution. Getting more creative variation in front of more people to measure results is a good thing – always!

Testing democratizes the creative process. Good ideas can come from anywhere. Testing also allows the ultimate creative license. Radical ideas can have a place right beside the status quo. Often those radical ideas are the ones that get the best results. While other times it may something as simple as the color of a button that matters.

Most importantly testing allows you to learn and get better as a creative. Measurement lets you know how good you really are as a creative. Business is competitive – why shouldn’t creative be as well? Maybe one day we’ll see a league of optimizers where we keep track of their stats on an ROI basis. Maybe even Rotoptimization.

Results

Testing, targeting, data and analytics have continued to pick up speed in the digital world with the explosion of PPC and continued velocity towards a “pay-per” economy. There is no going back. This is exactly what the web’s “services” model should be and it remains the web’s economic destiny -- many would say we’re already there.

Those of us working on developing creative technology are now in a period of tremendous innovation. Our Newport 65 is upon us and we're going electric. As with everything creative there will always be people with rigid ideas of what creative is and whom they look to for creative ideas. There will also be another group of people. People who just get better results. People busy being born, not dying.

SES Presentation: Search Becomes the Display OS

75% of the audience was agencies and amazingly 80% of those people were running both Search and Display campaigns. As my fellow presenter Scott Rafer has noted on more than one occasion the falling cost of Display can bring back better returns than search. Believe it! I saw it myself three times this week for clients. As I alluded to in the session, no one is more prepared to manage campaigns with multiple segmentations, heavy analytics and performance required better than search advertisers. Our time is now.

Search Becomes the Display OS

View more presentations from jonathanmendez.

Google Will Own Realtime Search by Indexing, Filtering and Ranking Tweets Better than Twitter

The conventional thinking now is that Twitter’s search will spell trouble for Google. I believe that it will be Google that will be the first to filter tweets and deliver useful, relevant results sets. This seems so obvious yet I have not seen anyone write about it yet. Maybe the Twitterati is high on their own supply.

Why is Twitter different than any other pub? Its technology is not core search but personal messaging and content. It is Google that spells trouble for Twitter as the value of the content generated via Twitter will be sucked into Google just as any other publisher. Of course, GOOG will then monetize that content in a way Twitter will not be able to do either -- same as every other publisher relying on ad supported models.

This is happening already. In the past week or so Google has starting to index tweets in its natural results set. There is little doubt this will continue to gain velocity and that there is a team at Google working on tweaking algos for RTS and Twitter content. There is enough data in Twitter to do whatever Google needs to do with it to incorporate tweets as relevant search results.

Google will do a great job of filtering the noise out of Twitter, determining authority and providing useful RTS. This is their core competency! Also, let’s face it, real-time search is not really real-time. There is a latency to Twitter, a latency to Tweetdeck a latency to Google. And the ultimate value as anyone who has done a twitter search can attest is not in the recency, the value is in relevance. But make no mistake about it, Google will have no problem indexing and ranking tweets within seconds.

I also believe as soon as people see Twitter results in the Google SERP there will be little reason to go to Twitter to search. Most users are on third party interfaces anyway and Google is omnipresent in most toolbars. Don’t underestimate the Google habit for search.

I previously assessed the value of Twitter and Real-Time Search (RTS) from a user perspective. From a technical perspective as with all other search results there needs to be authority, filters and results sets. I believe Google can already do this better than Twitter. Competing with Google in search is not where Twitter should be headed unless they are prepared for the nuclear option, robots.txt Twitter.

Speaking and Clinic at SES New York

Next week Search Engine Strategies rolls into my home turf and I’ll be involved in a couple of ways.

On Tuesday March 24th in the Expo Hall I will running an audience based clinic.

3:00pm Expo Hall: CPA Optimization Station
With advertising dollars more accountable than ever optimizing your Cost Per Acquisition or Cost per Action (CPA) has never been more important. Take advantage of this rare opportunity to sit with Jonathan Mendez as he finds ways to improve your ROI. Jonathan will perform strategic evaluations and provide actionable insights on the consumer touch-points in your conversion path - keywords, ads, landing pages and registration/checkout. Jonathan will also offer test ideas for use with Multivariate & A/B testing and advice on how to use emerging marketing technologies to further improve your results.

On Wednesday March 25th I am very excited to usher in something close to my heart; the first search engine conference session exploring the rise of search-based strategies, technologies, analytics and performance moving at high velocity into the world of display.

2:15pm Advertising Track: Search Becomes the Display OS
Search advertising, the onetime bastard stepchild of internet marketing which only five years ago barely existed, is now poised to double the spend of display advertising in 2009 (eMarketer). With the continued decline in Display performance, some people believe the only thing that will save Display advertising is making it more like Search. This session explores these leading edge ideas, technology and provides some early case studies the effectiveness of making Search the Operating System for Display. We will provide case study examples of the above and the amazing results achieved and ads that are not only search applications themselves but that can be purchased and targeted based on the keyword.

Moderator: Gregg Stewart, Senior Vice President, Interactive, TMP Directional Marketing
Speakers:
Jonathan Mendez, Founder & CEO, RAMP Digital
Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery
Amit Kumar, VP Product , Dapper

Let me know if you’ll be there. I would love to connect at the show with anyone working on interesting things.

Interviewed by Aaron Wall at SEO Book

Aaron Wall is a legend in SEO and his site SEO Book gets about 1 million uniques a month so I was really psyched when he asked to interview me. Aaron asked some really thought provoking questions and we covered everything from my career path, to what I’m working on now, to the future of search and digital advertising. It was a pleasure to do and I hope you find some of the stuff I had to say interesting. Thanks Aaron!

Interview with Jonathan Mendez

Search Becomes the Display Operating System

I first wrote about the idea of search strategies working in display to deliver more relevant ads two years ago. In the ensuing two years as followers of this blog know I’ve become passionate about the opportunity to build creative technology that makes display ads more relevant. One advantage I have working on these solutions is that I’m an outsider. I don’t think the way people in the display world think. I’m wired differently. I am and will always be a search guy.

That mindset helps because search is more than a channel. Search is the way people use the web. People don’t just fire up a browser without a goal in mind. We are all taking actions on the web based on our goal. Information we notice and content we experience along our goal path may change our goals, but it does not change the two basic natures of how we use the web – recovery and discovery.

Therein lies the key functional distinction between display and search. Search (as an app on the platform) is weaved into the web and the way we use it. Display is not. Display is layered on top of the web. This is why despite twelve years and countless millions of investment it has never performed. Frankly, it was doomed from the get-go. It never was a web service but rather built to be its own parallel platform (ehem, “Platform A”). The problem inherent with that is the medium is itself a platform. Ads will never control this medium. Here the medium (users) should control the ads.

These ideas formed the basis of RAMP - to shrink dynamic landing pages and serve them to people based on any number of rules - effectively reverse engineering the search experience into display's near limitless inventory and producing higher ROI through lower display CPM than search CPC. One year later we are doing all of this with some amazing technologies supporting these endeavors. We are creating display ads to be off ramps to existing goal paths and on ramps to changed goals. We are using keywords to define the ad that is shown and allowing users to maintain control over the content experience within the ad much the same way one would use a SERP.

That brings me to this:

"The increasing marginal returns of search advertising are now doing more than taking market share from display advertising, they are en route becoming display advertising's operating principle."

I read this from Scott Rafer (Founder of MyBlogLog, Mashery & Lookery) this past October. It encapsulated my own thinking and at the same time made me think the ideas I was working on with RAMP were part of something much larger and something that it was time to talk about.

So when it came time to pitch session ideas to SES New York I contacted them and led off my pitch with Scott’s quote. They immediately agreed to add this session, give it primetime slot on the agenda and kept Scott’s quote in the summary.

I’m psyched that Search Becomes the Display OS will be the first conference session explaining and exploring the many ways search strategies, technology and innovation are making advertising more relevant, creating better experiences for people and delivering increased performance for advertisers and publishers.

So on March 25th at 2:15pm I hope you’ll join me in New York when Scott Rafer, Amit Kumar (former lead of Yahoo Search Monkey now VP Product for Dapper) and Bob Dillon VP of Product Marketing at Yahoo help usher in a new era of technology, functionality, relevance and performance in display.

Previous Posts on Bringing Search to Display:

Intelligent Web: Where Search & Display Advertising Meet

Display Becomes Us

Real Behavioral Targeting Focuses on Intent

Behavioral Targeting is Not Just Banners

Advanced Landing Pages - SMX West

For years, first with javascript testing and content targeting tools and now adding APIs and semantic technology, I have maintained that landing pages are the most advanced forms of digital marketing -- the ultimate marriage of technology with creative.

So it was great to finally get an “advanced” landing pages session on the schedule this year at SMX. I guess advanced landing pages have arrived. I enjoyed seeing the interest in the crowd and also how the other presenters defined what an advanced page is.  Here is my definition.

Advanced Landing Pages

View more presentations from jonathanmendez. (tags: api semantic)

Misguided Notions: A Study of Value Creation in Real-Time Search

This past week has seen a ton of hype that real-time search is different. That the content creation and behaviors expressed and implied are fundamentally new and exclusive to places like Twitter and mining this data has incredible potential. Having spent a decade in search and the last four years working with dynamic content, APIs and what is now being called real time web I want to add some much needed perspective.

Getting Up to Speed

Real-time web did not start with social updates. Representative State Transfer or REST has been a key component of social media from the start of blogging to sites like Flickr and now to the cloud with services like Amazon S3. Cross platform synchronization (e.g. mobile, XMPP) is also not new. Many of these web services have had this ability for sometime. Certainly there is a slow boil with the opening of structured web of data, but technically there is nothing new here.

The “real-time” threat to Google has also been mentioned more than once. As far as search, nothing going on somehow surpasses Google’s ability to index it in real-time (milliseconds). I have personally seen my blog posts indexed immediately and presented on SERPs. The idea that Twitter has some magical real-time stack that Google should be concerned about it is quite simply laughable.

While I’m on the subject of GOOG an important real-time aspect to Google that has gone overlooked in all the chatter is their advertising platform. AdWords is a dynamic marketplace with numerous synchronous and asynchronous real-time rules. Last fall Google moved to real-time quality score calculations meaning these computations are taking place at the time of the query, based on the query.  Let’s be clear, Google has a real time advertising optimization platform for content that works insanely well. It is to date the ultimate achievement in real-time web and search. Nothing comes close. Positioning them as a laggard is naive. In fact if you want to know the real web of sentiment you might be best off looking at keywords and bid history.

The Question:

Now that we put aside the technical and competitive aspects the question remains, what is the value of real-time search? The answer must be looked for not from the perspective of content creation (new content is always being added to the web) but in how and why people search. Does “real-time” data to sentiment and opinion provide increased relevancy, new relevancy or changes behavior in a way that’s different or more beneficial. Keep in mind, these numbers are not about how many people will search for real-time data they are about how many queries conceivably could benefit.

Methodology:

My guide through searcher behavior is the landmark 2004 research “Understanding Goals is Web Search” by Daniel Rose and Danny Levinson that built off the seminal work “Taxonomy of Web Search” by Andrei Broder. Broder came up with the original trichotomy of web search “types”: navigational, informational, and transactional that Rose and Levinson expanded upon. To this day their work remains search’s de facto query classification system.

I also used Rose & Levinson’s percentage classifications* as a baseline for overall query percentage. They are generally regarded as accurate if not low on the navigational data.

To get an idea of representative percentages of queries that would benefit from real-time data contribution within each category I incorporated my own research on both in AdWords and Google Trends for query volumes looking at about 100 queries with real time relevance (e.g. “what’s on tv right now”) vs. those without. Lastly, I added my years of experience in search data and behavior to extrapolate the results. Also, the benefit number assumes result sets that simply don’t exist yet and as such these percentages are forward looking.

Was this scientific? No. Do I think the numbers are pretty accurate? Yes.

Results:

Key: Query Type (Overall query %)* Real-Time Data Benefit %

Informational Queries: My goal is to learn something by reading or viewing (61%) 14%

·      Directed: I want to learn something in particular about my topic (7%) 2%

·      Undirected: I want to learn anything/everything about my topic (22%) 5%

·      Advice: I want to get advice, ideas, suggestions, or instructions (5%) 2%

·      Locate: My goal is to find out whether/where some real world service or product can be obtained (24%) 5%

·      List: My goal is to get a list of plausible suggested web sites each of which might be candidates for helping me achieve some underlying, unspecified goal (2%) <0.5% 

Resource Queries My goal is to obtain a resource (not information) available on the web (25%) 5%

·      Download: My goal is to download a resource that must be on my computer or other device to be useful (5%) <0.5%

·      Entertain: My goal is to be entertained simply by viewing items available on the result page (6%) 2%

·      Interact: My goal is to interact with a resource using another service I find on the web (6%) 2%

·      Obtain: My goal is to obtain a resource that does not require a computer to use. I'm not obtaining it to learn some information, but because I want to use the resource itself (8%) <0.5%

Navigational Queries: My goal is to go to specific known website that I already have in mind. The only reason I'm searching is that it's more convenient than typing the URL, or perhaps I don't know the URL. (14%) <0.5%

Analysis:

Overall I feel the query numbers for real-time benefit (about 19% of all queries) are optimistic. I have made some very large assumptions both about the ability to index and query real-time data in a manner that is useful and about the changes in people wanting or needing to query this data once knowing that it is available. Also, I did not want to discount any category as being useless even though it is hard to see at the present time how navigational or resource>obtain queries stand to benefit from real-time data. In every instance I gave the benefit of the doubt to real-time.

The technology to present real-time data as helpful to queries has not yet emerged. Even so, while it real-time updates might be helpful for a small percentage of queries it is not even close to being more helpful in any one category. That’s the biggest problem for real-time search.

The largest percentage is not surprisingly informational queries. If Twitter search can become anything it would be more a discovery engine than a search engine -- more Craigslist, Wikipedia or Yelp than Google. It is after all a publishing and communications platform. Put another way, people search on the NY Times for opinions, sentiment and news of the day but that does not make the NY Times a search engine.

Conclusion:

The underlying value of temporal content correlates to benefit it provides to the searcher at that moment of attention. Those ‘real-time’ moments are fleeting and once they are gone the value of the content disappears with it. Thus to have substantive value you need millions of fleeting moments, all the time, that can best be helped by understanding what is happening right now. That’s an interesting idea but it is simply not the way people search. Understanding the way people search the opposite actually holds true. The greatest value rests in content that retains usefulness or importance the longest. In fact, that’s one idea that transcends search. Though with the vigor that Google is scanning books, maybe not for long.

Also for search to work properly there must be a level of authority associated with the results set. I just don’t see how to filter through this noise in real-time. Even trying to do so begins to destroy the value of an open real-time system where the benefit of "right now" matters more than "who."

It’s great to imagine what can be possible with the web but we’re not going to build anything that changes human nature, only stuff that amplifies it. Certainly Twitter does that incredibly well, just not in a way that benefits most searchers.

Speaking & Pushing the Envelope at SMX West

I’m going back to Cali. Next week I’ll be in SF/SV with my primary purpose speaking and attending SMX West in Santa Clara. 

Day one I’ll be on the panel Up Close with You Tube. What’s an optimization guy doing on this panel? Well it is not because of my fascination and bullish outlook with all things YouTube. It is not because of my thoughts two years ago that SEMs are best suited to manage ads on what is essentially a video search engine. Nor is it the fact that this post on optimizing youtube tags is the most visited page on my blog due to my #1 ranking in Google for “youtube tags.” It is because I’ll be presenting a case study on how a RAMP client used YouTube as the base platform for a cross-media marketing campaign. Matt Liu, Product Manager for YouTube is also on the panel and I am very interested to hear Google’s thoughts on how to do well with YouTube. 

Day two for me is all about my beloved landing pages. At lunch I’ll be hosting a “meet and eat” table on landing page optimization so if you’re going to the show please come by and I’ll be happy to break some bread while attempting to answer your questions on A/B testing strategy, MVT technology, results confidence, or any other vexing LPO question you might have. 

After lunch I’ll be speaking on Advanced Landing Page Strategies. I’m excited about this session dedicated to looking beyond the idea of the landing page as a static experience that overlays A/B & MVT testing and looks at the landing page experience through the window and impact of real-time web technologies that create dynamic experiences. This is a profound change. I’ll be providing an overview of the technologies (APIs, javascript, semantic) and strategies (segmentation, targeting) that can be used to create these more relevant experiences. 

Looking forward to some warmer weather too. Let me know if you’re going to be there and want to meet up.