Is search in travel becoming more navigation and less discovery?
Heather from HitWise released a very interesting graph, showing a six percent increase in travel brand searches. She suggests that loyalty is growing among travel searches as a result search is increasingly being used as a navigational tool.
Brands have now established themselves in the space, especially comparison brands like Expedia and Lastminute.com – partly helped by search engines also having evolved to favour big brands. The inevitability of both link based and user driven algorithms leading to the rich get richer.
I think there’s something else equally as significant at play – Travel choice is something that is hugely influenced by the conversations in the network (TripAdvisor anyone?) – So, we may be seeing the influence of social media on the research and discovery phase in travel, which would naturally increase the navigational use of search.
“Basically search engines rule the web” says Jakob Nielsen
On a recent interview with the BBC, the usability guru, reveals some interesting findings about today’s web user.
He says today user is much more ruthless and selfish, pointing to the single minded behaviour when going online to complete a task. They don’t want promotions, widgets and content designed to distract them from the task at hand.
All this seems to point to a more sophisticated user, who’s increasingly going online to complete a specific task, and unlike in the past where they were expecting to ‘discover’ how to do it, today they ‘know’ exactly how to do it.
The most important finding which is no big surprise to any search marketer is the way people get to the information they seek. Only 25% of people go via the home page – the vast majority get straight there from a search engine.
The general takeaway for me is that most websites are still built by shopkeepers – all ‘front’ and every effort to control that customer journey. User centricity or rather user driven approach to usability is a long way from our regular web experience.
Google position 4 testing – User data
For several weeks now Google results have been in a constant flux – or at least a lot more than usual. Most of the fluctuations have been too erratic to identify any common pattern. But there is something about position 4 reported by several webmaster and SEO forums which I’ve been able to confirm.
In the Financial services sector at least, I’m seeing Google placing different sites at position 4 for anything from a few hours to a day. These are usually sites that are normally outside the top ten, and in one case outside the top 30.
Position 4 is usually reserved for News results – almost like a place holder, and now it looks like Google may be using it to test user reaction for sites Google want to know more about.
It was inevitable that Google would increase reliance on user data – in areas like Financial services, especially car insurance, where it would be very difficult to differentiate based on the usual on-page and link factors – user data seem to be the only logical evolution.
I believe all this is not entirely new, the reason for the success of aggregators can be credited largely to how sticky they are. A Good aggregator can command a conversion rate of 30-50% which makes them very sticky, when you think how long it takes to fill out a insurance/mortgage quote form.
But position 4 testing is definitely something relatively new. The next few weeks should tell us how/if they use this test data.
TV advertising to seed an online experience
I was at an IAB Auto’s conference and heard a great talk by a copy man writing for Mercedes – He went on to talk about the traditional marketing split especially around new car launches – which is to spend most of the budget on TV which is designed to blanket bomb as wider audience as possible, with the idea of hitting a few targets. And spend any remaining budget on PR to prolong the ad campaign. You can get a reasonable estimate of the number TV miss by looking at the adoption of TiVo’s ad disabler.
Add to this the diminishing numbers of eyeballs for television compared to that of online, and you may be thinking I’m about to point out the bleeding obvious.
But, I’m not really interested in the move from TV to online. Well I am, but, this conversation is already maturing and the data is all there for everyone to see.
I’m more interested in how TV could be used to seed an online experience- a push pull approach that’s more effective and makes much more economic sense.
Returning back to my short pseudo scientific study of the Kevin Bacon YouTube phenomenon [YouTube has since removed that video], where Graham Norton’s TV program increased the number of views for that particular Kevin Bacon video by 600+ overnight - and then WOM increased it by another 30,00 views over the following week – it was clear that the diffusion of the information through online and offline WOM plaid the bigger role in spreading the video. But, TV definitely plaid its part in getting the ball rolling.
More importantly this was not an expensive TV ad, but a mention on a TV program which was targeted at an audience that was more likely to find it funny and have friends who also shared their sense of humour.
If we translate this to TV advertising – let’s not spend all the marketing budget on the TV ad experience, which most people are not going to see it and out of those that do, few will act on it. Instead use TV as a cheap trigger to a more satisfying online experience. Kind of make TV not the main course which is a very expensive main course, but a targeted entrée – that’s cheaper to produce and aired on a cheaper slot which is more focussed to an audience that’s more likely to watch it and spread the message.
Spend the lion’s share of the budget on hte product and creating a useful engaging online experience which is more likely to spread and gain attention for a longer period.
Google display ads on image search
Accordign to a Bloomberg interview with Marissa Mayer, Google is considering running display ads on image searches. They tried txt ads with little success but images seems an obvious move.
With Google universal on natural listings, recent tests on video adwords, and hte introduction of display into image search the days of the text link may really be numbered
SEO is Dead again
One of my favourite search people ShoeMoney says SEO has no future and once again the SEO crowd goes wild. The last time this happened was when Jason Calacanis announced the death of Google - with the emergence of social search engines.
When you listen to Shoe’s argument, I think it’s a strong one and for many of us an obvious conclusion if you take the traditional view of SEO. His point is that many of the tactics deployed by traditional SEO can no longer give you the same benefits, and in time the on-page and off-page SEO will have less and less of an affect.
Recently I wrote a paper on the short term mistake of link buying or rather optimising for users not search engines – as I came to the same conclusion some time ago. The point is why does Google need to keep looking at links and keywords to identify a relevant site that provides good user experience, when they can get user data which tells the real story. Good search rankings will be the outcome of getting everything else right and providing a relevant experience for the user.
Hulu comes back to YouTube
The News Corp alternative Hulu has republish their video on YouTube. This was a project set-up as a competitor to YouTube - part of the idea being, pulling their content from YouTube would somehow make youtube less attractive. No big surprise that they just didn’t get the traffic.
The Web 2.0 Social VRM impact on Insurance and Financial Services
Both Jeff Jarvis and Jeremiah Owyang are discussing the merits of social, web 2.0, VRM concepts in the context of financial services. This is something very close to my heart and while the discussion has attracted some heavyweight attention from the likes of Seth Godin, I’m feeling lucky.
I’ve been convinced for some time that all financial services will be transformed to some degree by the network.
I’m not convinced by Jeff’s argument that insurance is somehow immune to the network because of the inherent fraud and mistrust in this industry. Yes it exists when both sides stand to gain so much, but in a co-operative system only one side can gain. And that person is up against a network of highly connected individuals who collectively has something to lose. Getting caught cheating the community is a much worse than losing to a corporation.
Regulations governing financial products are considered another nail in the coffin to a co-operative utopia. But, much of the regulations governing Financial Services have evolved to protect both customer and profits. How will things change in a non profit scenario where regulation are there to protect the one entity?
Even if the insurance industry will not benefit from the network inputs driving MyStarbucks, I can see Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) principals embedding into the insurance industry very easily. OK it’s not going to be ani-insurance or necessarily replace insurance companies as we know em. But enabling the customer to control their data and allowing multiple quotes from a single data feed has obvious advantages. Insurance aggregators currently fill this space, but they take their cut which doesn’t particularly help providers compete on price – one of the biggest drivers in motor insurance.
As I was saying on 2008-04-26
- Oh my head - What happended lnight? Coffee kicking in - Sun is calling - Love Brighton.aaaaaahh #
As I was saying on 2008-04-24
- Yahoo! opens everything including search platform - But I really am too tired to care tonight. #
- Fedup with trying to follow all of you on different platforms - sending invites to join FriendFeed #
- Gutted can’t go to the VRM meeting this evening. Family calls #
- The Economist have their PageRank reduced for selling links. tut tut #
- # #