SEOByLOG

Word To Nielsen: Brand Matters Less Than You Think

by Mark Simon, Monday, July 16, 2007
POOR GOOGLE. JUST WHEN IT looked secure as the great Web colossus, Nielsen/NetRatings changed all the rules.

Last Tuesday, Nielsen/NetRatings, "a global leader in Internet media and market research" (the company's words), announced a key change to its Top Web Brands rankings. Dropping the page view as its chief criterion, Nielsen is now focused far more on the time visitors spend on the site ("total minutes") to measure site engagement.

And for good reason. With the proliferation of Ajax technology -- around in various forms for over a decade, but now something of a new Web norm -- visitors can have deep online experiences without leaving a single page. A gamer can conduct hours of online play, and a rich media consumer can watch endless amounts of video, without ever clicking a link. The more you can do on one page, the less jumping from one page to the next becomes a relevant measurement of brand affinity -- which is why Nielsen has made time spent, not the number of pages looked at, into the new key metric of a Web brand's popularity. That's bad news for search engines, and for Google in particular. The search engine business is one of quickly farming users out to millions of other sites as efficiently as possible, a service that's rich in page views but poor in time spent with the engine. It's a page view play, not an engagement one, which is why Tuesday saw Google drop from Nielsen's No. 1 Web brand down to No. 5.

Is Nielsen's new ranking approach the right move? Yes and no. As a way to understand the value of Web brands, time spent is certainly a metric that's gotten short shrift until now. Even without considering Ajax, it makes sense that users would spend more time on the sites they like more. Which is why time spent on the site is a crucial factor in determining brand affinity.

But what Nielsen is missing lies in what it's looking to rank -- the "Top Web Brands." That's a ranking of brand equity rating. But on the Internet, brand equity only goes halfway for making brands valuable. It's not how powerful your brand is that matters; it's how you leverage that brand to interact with customers.

A large brand affinity relies on striking a common ground among a wide section of the population; millions of people like Coke and Mickey Mouse, and so Coca Cola and Disney are masters of brand equity. But in today's media universe, where the plethora of choice means that everyone is looking for personally tailored results, the keys to winning financially don't just lie in brand equity alone.

Brand attracts the customers, as brand is the packaging that allows users to understand a product and, afterwards, to evangelize it to friends. But in the end, it's personally tailored results that will get users to stick. A good brand pulls people in; a personalized product keeps them coming back.

That, for example, is the genius of the iPod. The little white device is the most popular piece of fashion equipment around, which is a brand experience. But the iPod's function is to deliver whatever specific music its users care to hear -- which is a customized experience. Ditto e-Bay and Amazon, the brands considered the best places for everyone to find whatever they want, and which visitors use to find the specific items they're looking to buy.

The converse is also true. Take MySpace's recent challenges from Facebook. MySpace has fashioned itself into the Web's biggest meet-and-greet; Facebook, meanwhile, has become the place for current and aspiring yuppies to meet the like-minded. By offering a more focused experience, Facebook, the smaller brand, has been able to pose problems for its broad-appeal competitor with the larger brand.

Of course, it's that combination of brand appeal with targeted service that makes for the best of search engines. Everyone who goes to Google.com gets pretty much the same experience: they search for an item and they find it. That makes Google an easily explained, easily packaged brand. But at the same time, the individual results will change from search to search -- or, in Google's ultimate vision, from searcher to searcher. Google (or any good engine) can pull its users in with the brand, and make them into loyal customers with personally tailored results.

Which is why Google remains the king of the Web. It may not be the most treasured brand, and it may not be the place where users spend the most time. But for combining a huge brand following with targeted results, no other business on the Web -- and perhaps no other business in history -- can match it.

Of course Google won't stay on top forever. But for the foreseeable future, its users will be coming back to it for much, much longer than the duration of a page view.

Post your response to the public Search Insider blog.

Mark Simon is vice president of industry relations at Did-it, an agency for search engine marketing and auctioned media management based in New York. You can reach Mark at msimon@did-it.com. 

Search Insider for Monday, July 16, 2007: http://publications.mediapost.com/

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Why a Few Elite Marketers Are Keeping Hush Hush About the eBay Affiliate Program

The top eBay affiliates are quietly earning in excess of one million US dollars a year while other affiliates are happily making $10,000 every month from eBay. These people are among the very few who use eBay in a way that 99% of other users over-look. With such an openly available affiliate program, a need has arisen to look deeper into the subject to see just how this money is being made.

Wigston, United Kingdom, July 10, 2007 --(PR.com)-- eBay currently pays its top affiliates more than $1,000,000 a year and many others are earning upwards of $10,000 a month just by promoting items which are listed on eBay. When you consider the benefits of using the eBay affiliate program, it is hard to understand why other online marketers and eBay users don't use the affiliate program that eBay offers them.

Some of the obvious benefits include;

- No need to buy or stock inventory.
- No customer service worries, no shipping problems or refund hassles.
- No negative feedback to worry about
- No eBay fees

And the size of eBay, as a company and marketplace, shows no signs of slowing down either. For the past eleven years, on average, 38 new members have registered on eBay every single minute of every day, meaning that eBay now has 222 million registered users selling everything you can imagine, including a jet plane for $4.9 million

With an affiliate program of such proportions, it is near impossible not to find something that you can promote as an affiliate, but maybe it is due to the lack of publicity which causes many people to over-look the eBay affiliate program. It is clear that people want to know how to do something, how to do it the easiest way possible and in the shortest time.

Since 2004, Michael Sherriff, propriteor of L M Marketing, has studied the eBay affiliate program and when realizing the problems faced by most people who wanted to learn how to use the eBay affiliate program, released 'Auction Affiliate Secrets', http://auctionaffiliatesecrets.com

Michael Sherriff said, "What a lot of people don't realize is that eBay actually provides a great number of niche markets and even sub niches". He continued, "Rather than trying to promote every possible item on eBay as an affiliate, affiliates are much better positioned to make money by concentrating on a niche instead. By breaking down the eBay market of categories, anyone can quickly drill down and find a niche topic that matches their own interests and it is this method of using the eBay affiliate program which makes it so easy to understand and use.

Upon its release, Dave Bromley of UKAuctionLine.co.uk said, "As someone who spends much of his working life dealing with subjects related to eBay I could not understand how I missed this obvious goldmine. I can tell you within minutes of finishing the book I was making changes to some of my web sites and have already started making money from the ideas in eBay Affiliate Secrets".

The eBay affiliate program can be used by anyone after creating a free account via Commission Junction who administer the program for eBay. Inc. With a global acceptance, geographical location is not a barrier.

Contact Michael Sherriff for more insights into this topic. Email: Michael@auctionaffiliatesecrets.com Other helpful information regarding the ebook mentioned here, can be found at: http://auctionaffiliatesecrets.com/press/

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Contact Information
L M Marketing
Michael Sherriff
+44 (0)7903765351
Michael@michelsherriff.com
http://michaelsherriff.com

Free Ebay Auction Ads Script Download Offered

The first search engine site that we know of to use the power of the AuctionAds system has just released a free version of their search page for web site and blog owners to use on their own site. The single page script uses PHP and need no programming skill or additional software to be used.

Site owners can give their visitors the option of using the script to search ebay ads for what they want, if they are looking for something that the site owner and not used in the keyword targeting. Sometimes you are at a web site on a specific topic and you see something that makes you thing of something else that is unrelated to what the site offers. Rather than have the site visitors leave your site, they can do a search right away while they are still thinking about it.

The script is offered as is with no warranties of any kind, but considerate, respectful questions will be answered as much as possible.

Ebay Auction Ads Search Engine

Searches for Apple iPhone Spike in Weeks Prior to Launch

June 29, 2007 - comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study on US search activity related to the Apple iPhone, revealing that Americans have conducted an average of 274,000 iPhone-related searches per week since the beginning of the year.  iPhone-related search activity is defined as all searches containing any derivation of the term "iPhone."

January iPhone Announcement and June Advertising Campaign Cause Spikes in US Search Activity

Product-specific search activity can provide an important gauge of consumer demand.  comScore's study of iPhone-related search activity since the beginning of the year revealed some interesting insights into consumer demand and interest surrounding the iPhone.

When the product was first announced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Macworld on January 9, iPhone-related search activity jumped to more than 1.1 million searches during the week ending January 14.  From February through May, the number of weekly searches ranged between 80,000 and 200,000, which still represented very high levels of search activity for an individual product.  By comparison, even during the post-announcement period the number of iPhone-related searches was comparable with the number of searches for Motorola's "Razr," a well-established and popular cell phone already available to consumers.

As Apple's major iPhone advertising campaign touched off in June, search activity once again spiked with 704,000 iPhone-related searches for the week ending June 10, followed by 727,000 during the week ending June 17, and finally peaking with 1.2 million for the week ending June 24.

"The iPhone launch is likely to be one of the biggest product launches in history, and the activity we're seeing online clearly reflects widespread consumer interest," said James Lamberti, senior vice president of search solutions at comScore.  "This study also helps underscore the significant role search plays in both online and offline retail, since many of those researching the product online will be lining up at the bricks-and-mortar retailers to purchase their new iPhones."

iPhone Searchers Interested in Price, Release Date

Through June 24, nearly 6.9 million searches were conducted that included the term "iPhone."  Of those searches conducted, more than half (3.7 million) were for "iPhone," while nearly one in ten (638,000) were for "Apple iPhone." The most common related topics were price ("iPhone Price" with 217,000 searches and "Apple iPhone Price" with 57,000 searches) and release date ("iPhone Release Date" with 87,000 searches and "Apple iPhone Release Date" with 26,000 searches).

Top Click-Thru Destinations from iPhone-Related Searches
Week Ending Jan. 7, 2007 - Week Ending Jun. 24, 2007
Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch

Search Term                     Searches(000)   Share of Searches
Total iPhone-Related Searches   6,860           100.0%
iPhone                          3,722            54.3%
Apple iPhone                      638            9.3%
iPhone Price                      217            3.2%
iPhone Release Date                     87               1.3%
Apple iPhone Price                     57                0.8%
iPhones                            41           0.6%
iPhone Cingular                        36                0.5%
New Apple iPhone                34               0.5%
Apple iPhone Mobile Phone       26               0.4%
Apple iPhone Release Date         26             0.4%

iPhone-Related Searches Generate 2 Million Click-Thrus to Apple.com

iPhone-related searches generated more than 7.8 million click-thrus to Web sites since the beginning of the year, led by Apple.com with 2.3 million.  Other top click-thru destinations include top gadget blogs Engadget.com (288,000 click-thrus) and Gizmodo.com (272,000 click-thrus).  Meanwhile, the Web sites for AT&T and Cingular, which have the exclusive carrier rights to the iPhone, generated 151,000 and 124,000 click-thrus, respectively.

Top Click-Thru Destinations from iPhone-Related Searches
Week Ending Jan. 7, 2007 - Week Ending Jun. 24, 2007
Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch

Web Domain      Click-Thrus (000)       Share of Click-Thrus

Total iPhone-Related
Search Click-Thrus      7,873           100.0%
Apple.com                  2,363                30.0%
Engadget.com                 288                3.7%
Gizmodo.com                  272                3.5%
Blogspot.com            217             2.8%
Google.com                 199          2.5%
ATT.com            151          1.9%
Cingular.com                124         1.6%
YouTube.com                113          1.4%
EverythingiPhone.com   89               1.1%
CNET.com                 85             1.1%

Added Mr.  Lamberti, "In a previous study conducted by comScore, we found that product-related searches in the consumer electronics category can result in conversion rates as high as 25 percent within 90 days of the search - when one examines buying that occurs across all channels.  Achieving such a high conversion rate may ultimately prove difficult with a new product, but if that assumption were to hold true it could yield as much as $1 billion in search-driven iPhone sales when factoring in the $500 to $600 price tag."

About comScore
comScore, Inc. is a global leader in measuring the digital world.  This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.  comScore panelists also participate in survey research that captures and integrates their attitudes and intentions.

Through its proprietary technology, comScore measures what matters across a broad spectrum of behavior and attitudes.  comScore analysts apply this deep knowledge of customers and competitors to help clients design powerful marketing strategies and tactics that deliver superior ROI.  comScore services are used by more than 700 clients, including global leaders such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Verizon, Best Buy, The Newspaper Association of America, Tribune Interactive, ESPN, Fox Sports, Nestlé, MBNA, Starcom USA, Universal McCann, the United States Postal Service, Merck and Expedia.  For more information, please visit www.comscore.com.

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