Google Sitelinks has become a strategy for companies looking to protect brand-related keywords against retailers or competitors attempting to outbid them for online traffic and terms. Target consumers with paid-search sponsored listings allow companies to segment campaigns and direct traffic to landing pages that could drive up sales. Advertisers in the past had to struggle with trying to determine the one hyperlink to add under the company's name. Sitelinks emerged from beta in November. Now companies have four choices to drive paid-search campaigns. Some marketers complain that Sitelinks, which only applies to brand search terms. drives up costs by making brands pay more for their own traffic. Advertisers pay per click based on a variety of attributes, including quality score. Sources say branded keywords in campaigns must generate 18% or better click-through rates to use Sitelinks, as well as outrank its nearest competitor by an undetermined margin. Companies need to have "extremely high" quality scores and serve up results in the top position, which represents the best results for that search query, confirms a Google spokesperson. Ice.com ranks among the top brand search terms. So when Adam Muscott, director of marketing at Ice.com, launches the online jeweler's Mother's Day promotion in April, one of the four Sitelinks under the company's sponsored listing will drive traffic to the campaign's landing page. One Sitelink will take consumers to a guide that provides help on finding mom the perfect gift. The others will provide a direct jump to specific pages in the promotion. Louis-Dominic Parizeau, SEM specialist at Ice.com, says Ice.com's click-through rates double when using Sitelinks brand terms, such as "Ice Jewelry" or "Ice Rings." Similar to Ice.com, Michael Behrens, vice president of online marketing at WebMetro, San Dimas, Calif., believes the benefits from Sitelinks outweigh the cost. In fact, WebMetro supports a financial advertiser that gets more than 5,000 clicks per month from brand-related search terms. And while the unnamed client experienced a 30% increase in traffic, the cost for the campaign declined. Others have gained, too. Lexington Law, which drives tens of thousands of searches on its brand name, often struggles with up to three competitors bidding on its branded search terms -- trying to divert traffic to their own site, according to Behrens. Behrens says the amount of traffic lost due to competition bidding is minimized with Sitelinks by increasing visibility, differentiating the ad, and capturing the branded clicks. "We saw a 24% increase in click-through rates and a 30% drop in cost per click in the first month with four Sitelinks," Behrens says, pointing to Lexington Law. "This advertiser drove more traffic for less total ad dollars." Above all, the ability to control links and landing pages from those links within a Google ad creates "incredible" value for the brand, according to Josh Aston, director of online marketing at Progrexion Marketing, which supports the Lexington Law Firm account. "It really allows us to capitalize on trends that may occur within our industry and specific to the brand," Aston says. "Otherwise you have that nasty limit of just one landing page per ad click."
Let's face it: Facebook is a privacy disaster. From the Beacon disaster to Zuckerberg brazenly declaring that nobody wants privacy anymore (and that's why we're now supplying all your data to search engines), FB has led the pack in consistently compromising the integrity of our data. The company's latest move, announced last week, involves Facebook's occasional "need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit" -- again using Facebook'ssignature move of making changes opt-out rather than opt-in. Oddly, nobody seems to care. User numbers continue to skyrocket -- the more than 400 million members dwarfing the mere 73,000 folks who have signed on to the "Facebook, stop invading my privacy!" petition. The masses continue to share billions of photos, blog posts, notes and events with each other every month. Back in January, Zuckerberg explained that the company's ever-decreasing privacy protection was in recognition of its need to "always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it." A couple of people cried foul. The ACLU is taking note. But we'll continue to use Facebook, no matter how badly its purveyors treat us, because that's where everyone else is. Nobody wants to be the first to try to start a new party in an empty room. So does this mean actual beginners -- companies that don't yet have hundreds of millions of active users -- can have the same kind of mind, one that doesn't care about flouting people's privacy? Don't bet on it. When it comes to new products, we're hypocrites who will gladly take the moral high ground. Take Buzz. Google's ill-fated offering was never going to get traction, attempting as it did to skip straight to the early majority and circumvent the normal laws of consumer uptake. We haven't collectively invested trillions of hours in it; we haven't collectively recorded the past six years of our lives on it. Although we might, in a fit of irony, join a Facebook group to protest Facebook's disrespectful behavior, we'll out and out sueGoogle for Buzz. And that's Google. Buzz is still on my Gmail (although David Berkowitz is singlehandedly filling the feed) and the impact of the failure is insignificant in the grander scheme of the search giant. Remember Phorm? Two years ago, that company's behavioral targeting platform got shut down before it ever got off the ground. Sure, the offering infringed on privacy -- but I doubt it would come out worse than Facebook in a blind comparison. Last week, Phorm CEO Ken Ertegrul announced that it's launching commercial operations in Brazil. Although Ertegrul speaks of "the many lessons learnt from experiences in other markets," the announcement doesn't clarify whether the Brazilian service will be opt-out or opt-in, which is of course the crux of the problem. If it's opt-out, watch out, Phorm. You can be cut loose at the drop of a hat. 73,000 complaining members might not be much to Facebook, but they'd likely be enough to dissolve the tenuous bonds of a nascent partnership in Brazil. What's the lesson? You can get away with whatever egregious privacy violations you like -- as long as you're already entrenched in the market. If you're a newbie, though, tread softly or you'll never get off the ground. What are your thoughts on privacy, and, more importantly, do you change your behavior accordingly? Let me know in the comments or @kcolbin.
Do you remember a time when elementary school report cards included information like "Student plays well with others"? I do, and I mostly got high marks in that department (math, on the other hand, not so much.) While at the OMMA Global Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, I got to chat with fellow Search Insider Aaron Goldman about his upcoming new book, "Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google." He was intrigued by my last column, in which I chronicled some of my experiences with the new iPhone app called Siri, a digital personal assistant. Our conversation then turned toward one of my favorite subjects: the unfolding era of the API (application programming interfaces) and, more broadly, increasing openness across the Web. That the era of the API coincides with the arrival, at long last, of the mobile revolution, only adds to my intense fascination with the phenomenon. (As you might imagine, date night at my house can be scintillating.) But why should search marketers care? Quite simply, because APIs are at work reshaping the ways in which we understand search today, and will challenge our profession to stretch, grow and change significantly in the coming years. APIs are an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software, similar to the way a user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers (so says Wikipedia.) APIs are implemented by applications, libraries and operating systems to determine the vocabulary and calling conventions the programmer should employ to use their services. As we emerge from a Web economy based on links -- that is, the primary reliance on links for everything from measuring a Web site's popularity for the purposes of ranking indexed information in search engine results, to links as the primary means of navigating around the Internet -- we are moving more and more toward an API Web economy. Real-time information flows via APIs from Twitter and Facebook into Google and Bing search results. APIs make it possible to source products and services from multiple locations to generate results within purpose-built apps, again all in real time. Users can demand information, act on that information, complete transactions and then move on to the next thing, all witout having to jump from one site to the next and the mishegoss that goes with it (log in, click around, enter credit card information, enter shipping information, etc., etc., etc.). Even PayPal is opening up its system to third-party developers for seamless commerce, by enabling the integration of digital transactions into every app. This could slowly eliminate the need for credit cards, invoices, accounts payable and receivable departments (at least as we currently understand them) -- even cash itself. In the first three months of PayPal's new program, 15,000 developers signed up. Apple's SDKs for the iPhone and new iPad are screaming successes. Google's Android system is even more open, and thousands of apps are being built every month. Each of these enable the creation of apps that are tapping into APIs all over the Web, to fundamentally alter commerce, entertainment - and search. For those with Web sites that are still closed to the outside, it's time to think about whether or not an API strategy is right for your company. The era of insisting that users come to a destination site to source and secure information, products or services, is already passing. Users now demand that we go where they want us to be: exactly when they want it. And the only way to do that is, start playing nicely with others.