Live from Search Engine Strategies: Vertical Creep
|
Written By Reprise Media | August 8, 2005 | Share This
|
|
Reprise Media Director of Marketing, Anthony Iaffaldano, reports from the Search Engine Strategies Show in San Jose, August 8 - 11.
Back in 2001, the first vertical search services started to show up on Google as a series of “tabs.” And Danny Sullivan was trying to figure out how these services could expand without turning the Google homepage into something resembling a Nascar vehicle.
The answer? Invisible tabs - the idea that search engines would be able to predict what kind of content advertisers were “really” after, and serve the most appropriate vertical search information available.
In practical terms, this means that if someone is searching for “George Bush”, engines should show information on the president such as a biography, pictures & news headlines. For product searches, like OneBox, Yahoo’s got their Shortcuts, Ask Jeeves addeed SmartSearch, and MSN, which simply calls this vertical search Answers
More and more vertical search data is finding its way (or “creeping” onto the typical reply page. This panel was focused on exploring that trend, and explaining its impact on marketers.
First up was Greg Jarboe, President of SEOPR Greg gave an overview of the vertical trend, showing all the different ways in which the engines are customizing their results pages, delivering maps, pictures, local results, product information and news headlines when they’re relevant to a searcher.
Perhaps the most interesting moment in Greg’s presentation was when he polled the audience, asking how many people were currently optimizing their search efforts against these vertical channels. Very few hands went up, indicating that there might be an opportunity for marketers to really get a leg up on their competitors with a little bit of focus.
The engines route a fairly major amount of traffic to their own vertical search tools. Google and Yahoo! were almost equal, at 7 and 8% respectively. MSN and Ask Jeeves lagged behind, sending 4% and 2% of their traffic. Another indicator that a lot of traffic is being pushed to vertical search channels - it’s a real opportunity for marketers and it’s not going away.
Next up was Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro who reviewed their Eyetracking study, which examines where a user’s eye travels on search results pages.(In this case, they were measuring Google specifically)
So how do Google’s OneBox vertical search results change user behavior?
- Anything that appears at the top of a results page is almost definitely going to get scanned by the user
- Users are more apt to spend time looking at vertical results when their intent is less well defined (broader queries). But they’re twice as likely to actually act when they know what they want
- Men are more likely to click on Google’s OneBox results than women
- Less educated viewers are more likely to scan the page, but better educated visitors are more likely to click
- Similar discrepancies exist among age groups - the young are likely to scan, but older users actually click more often
OK, so users notice these widgets. But is that a factor of them being more useful, or just being at the top of the page? According to Gord, it’s the latter - it seems to be that people will scan over anything that appears above the first few organic results - making that real estate very invaluable to advertisers looking to brand or otherwise stick out in search
Next up was Brian Mark from ToolBarn.com, a specialty retailer dealing in power tools. Unfortunately, much of Brian’s presentation was unreadable, thanks to the conference laptops, which are all still running Windows 2000. (I feel your pain, Brian… a few of our animations in this morning’s Contextual session were off as well.) What we were able to see of Brian’s presentation showed a niche retailer realizing that search has become more than just “10 blue links” and taking advantage of shopping vertical search to expand their presence and provide more targeted, better converting traffic. Smart approach, and valuable learning for all the marketers in the room
The last presentation was from Mihir Shah, Director of Product Management at Yahoo! and the self-proclaimed “guy responsible for vertical creep at Yahoo!. Mihir offered a few compelling reasons why vertical creep is a good thing all around:
- Vertical Search can deliver answers in the results themselves: Yahoo integrates maps, sports scores, local results and even weather directly into their results page.
- Vertical Search also provides users with a preview of deeper content available in other channels. Think about a list of news headlines, or 3 or 4 sample pictures served directly on a results page
- Vertical Search enables deep linking to relevant content - when these widgets are built out they can offer a way to feature multiple links to relevant content (like in the George Bush example from the beginning of this post)
- And, Vertical Search can enhance the relevance and freshness of a page. By drawing from smaller, more frequently updated indices like blog search, news search and so on, search engines can quickly change their results sets to reflect the current world.
Topics: Search: Vertical |