This car was parked around the corner from SES Hamburg. It's far too funky not to photo and blog about!
I've uploaded a host of bigmouthmedia-centric photos for the bigmouthmedia Flickr account (see how that works?) for everyone to admire.
A sponsorship lasts the length of the event but a Universal Search rich photograph of the sponsorship lasts forever!
Ah; managed to find a power supply here in the huge Spanish conference centre and get some juice back in my laptop batteries - enough for a spot more live blogging.
Next up is the Target Global session. We've Matias Perel and Rand Fishkin speaking. Rand has sunglasses on his head and a beard - must be Spanish.
Do you know what... Matias looks a lot like Massimo Burgio. I wonder if there's been a last minute speaker change. Yep. No Matias.
Targeting US/English Language Regions
Rand promises less corny American jokes. Awww.
We kick off with Hitwise's market share graph they did for Search Engine Land. The one that shows Google with a huge 67.9% blue pie slice of the US market. Poor old Yahoo and Microsoft with just slivers. If I squint... oh, I think I can see... it's Ask.com.
Now the Hitwise chart for the UK. It's worse here; they have 73% with Google UK and 14% with Google.com. Yeah. Do the maths.
If you look at Western Europe - it's Google, ebay and Yandex. Hmm. Yandex? I wonder if someone in Moscow is currently sulking that they've just been lumped in with Western Europe.
In Canada Google has a 90% market share. Ouch.
In Oz and New Zealand - 90% Google too. That leaves Yahoo and nineMSN with about 5% each. Rand points out that Yahoo and MSN have their TV partnerships (7 for Yahoo and 9 for MSN).
Israel... go on, guess the number... yeah. It's 90%.
So! Is there anywhere Google doesn't rule?
China - Baidu 55%, Google 21.7% and Yahoo 7.2% Rand notes that when he was in China you could search at Google but get your results back in Baidu. The government was forcing the ISPs to do this... easy to see why Google might struggle.
Russia - Yandex 47.5%, Ramber... rumours that Yandex's share is much higher.
Japan - Yahoo, Google and MSN in that order. Searching is very vertical so lots of traffic goes straight to, for example, shopping pages.
Korea - Naver 72%, Duam 11% and Yahoo with 6%. Rand reckons the future of social search might be echoed here. When you type a query into Naver, before you see the SERPs, you get UGC answers.
Czech - Seznam 62%, Google 24%, Centrum 5%, Atlas 3% and Jyxo 0.5%
Also something about Estonia - but I blinked.
Rand says search engines look at the geographic location of your IP address. They look at the geographic association of your domain extension. He notes that .com, .org, .net have become English language centric.
The registrar information is also used. He says Danny's a hippy. On-page address information is also used.
Language can be used too but can be frustrating. Take Spanish, for example, there are a lot of people in the US and Latin America who write in Spanish and then Google assumes they're targeting Spanish users.
Rand toys with the idea of targeting SEOMoz to just Spanish traffic. :)
Ah... on to the challenge of targeting two or more countries via Google's WMC. It's true that you can't do it on one domain but you can register two folders (or more) and geo-target them.
Why doesn't Google use the Dublin Core meta tags for language/country targeting? Not enough sites use them.
What's important for Google?
- trusted domains
- trusted links; Rand reckons 1 or 2 trusted links can be more useful than 500 other links
- the dreaded sandbox; Rand reckons we'll see more of this in languages Google's not so confident in
What's important for Baidu?
- phone up Baidu and buy the organic traffic
- lots of traffic is multimedia centric
What's important for Yandex?
- similar to Google but less influence on domain trust
- rumours that you can ring up and buy changes...
What's important for Naver
- be social; get the community to write about you
What's important for Yahoo Japan
- it uses Yahoo search technology
- some focus on domain authority
- some focus on keyword use
- slightly easier to game
What's important in local engines (Seznam, etc)
- talk to a locals
Targeting the US
- competition levels very high; with the exception of some UK results
- best spam detection
- best spammers
- lots of link evaluation; lots of links discounted
The US population expects a high level of user experience. You need to do well here in order to get those editorial citation links. This is why blogging is popular.
Rand says he's not a monkey.
Here's a big question; Why am I ranking well in one enigne but not others?
Here are Rand's answers;
- different weighting of links
- different crawling/indexing index - Google is more robust; Yahoo & MSN are more flaky
- different keyword usage limits - easy to go overboard on Google
- different ways to measure 'valuable vs thin content'
- sometimes historical issues with the domain or IP address can cause problems
Getting Local Results from Anywhere in the World
- Rand shares the &GL=<country> trick with the audience
- ie; &GL=US or &GL=DE (for Google)
- for Yahoo; simply go to the country specific domain
And that's a wrap! Now onto the questions.
... oh. Wait. Massimo's talking about SEMPO again.
Oohkay; let's see if I need the translation headsets for this one. Next up I believe we are talking about targeting Italy and the Netherlands. Speaking we have Lennert de Rijk (Netherlands) and Massimo Burgio (Italy). The panel is going to try and take questions on the German market too.
The Netherlands
Ah yes; Lennert is speaking in English. Good man. +5 points already. He's Dutch and works in Spain. He's the Managing Director and cofounder of Onetomarket Spain. I wonder how many languages he speaks?
Let's see if his presentation on the Netherlands is as good as Joost's was for SES New York! Ha. :)
The Netherlands are 2nd in the world for broadband penetration. The Dutch spend about 6.4 hours online a week.
He doesn't understand the costing structure of telephone/internet usage in the Spain. The Spannish pay x4 more and have worse quality. He suggests that this is one of the reasons why internet shopping is larger in the Netherlands than in Spain (If you're not European; Spain is a large country and the Netherlands is not).
Ah! A picture of a cow. This is to remind us that agencies should have a global mindset but must act locally. All of the major players in the Netherlands are local - although iProspect just bought one of the market leaders.
Don't use Kelkoo. He says. He recommends using "ormaspdsfsdfsdffdf" or "asmdsfhdsfsdsdf" instead. Okay; I can't quite pronounce or spell the sites he recommends.
Also TradeDoubler, he says, aren't really getting into the Netherlands. Lennert says that TradeDoubler simply doesn't have the knowledge or marketshare to work as an affiliate network in the Netherlands (If you're not European; TradeDoubler is a large pan-Europen affiliate network).
Lennert describes the Dutch market as immature. It's growing quickly and expected to keep on growing.
Here's a fact for you; elderly people use the net more often than young people in the Netherlands. This is due to the demographic situation where there are simply loads of 65+ people and that they have the time and money to spend online.
Last year, on average, Dutch users would spent at least 500 euros online.
This is interesting; the leading vertical of spend in the Netherlands is travel and Lennert's included 'insurance' in that group. There doesn't seem to be a finance vertical of note.
This is a similar picture to the UK. In recent years we've seen the pure plays shops get their act together for online and start to take marketshare back from aggregators and affiliates.
Top sites in the Netherlands; Google.nl, Startpagina.nl, Marktplaats.nl, Live.com, Msn.com, Postbank.nl, nl.wikipedia and then hyves. Hyves is a popular social network in northern europe/the nordics.
Startpagina et al are the always popular 'starting pages' who simply refuse to go away in the Netherlands. Lennert urges us to be careful with the Startpagina clones as they're nothing more than link farm clones which mess up your link profiles and which have started to suffer drops in Google.
Some Dutch basics;
- use .nl domains
- host locally
- get local links
- be as aggressive as you need to be (Andrew's note; there's a Faith No More song about that)
The Dutch home shopping organisation (thuiswinkel.org) is important. It has 750 members and 100 business partners. It represents 80% of the Dutch home-shopping market. Oh... wait, I think Lennert has a connection to these guys.
Lennert would like us to remember that the Netherlands are neither Belgium or Germany. Yes; the Netherlands and Belgium have a language in common but the culture is very different.
Are there any other search engines after Google? Nah. Not really.
How do you get a Dutch person (or user?) to love you? Be unique, Lennert says. (Slide shows Dutch beauty blowing a kiss (lucky kiss)).
Hyves has 4 million users. 2 million of these people are Dutch. That's 2 billion page views.
NuJij has 1 million users. That's about 4 million page views.
74% of the Dutch are on at least one social network.
Right. That's Lennert finished. Now for Massimo!
Italy
Before he starts - I bet Massimo plugs SEMPO Italy.
Win. Massimo's plugging SEMPO Italy.
... still plugging SEMPO.
Right. Now on to Italy.
Italy take 2
Google is big there. They're the market leader with Yahoo and MSN coming second. After that we've got Virgilio (an Italian directory) and Alice.
There are big publisher portals - kataweb group, RCS and RAI.
However, despite these big publishers and alternative portals there is only really AdSense and AdWords.
Panama is slowly gaining a little more traction but have very far to go.
MIVA disappeared from Italy. Facebook offers some PPC alternatives. Massimo doesn't recommend trying Facebook just for PPC campaigns... got to use it for social media strategies instead.
Massimo says that the interactive agencies in Italy have rushed to embrace Web 2.0 stuff but have forgotten their SEO basics on the way. There are some in-house SEO teams in Italy but they have neither the training nor the resources.
The Italian search agencies are working very well. Massimo thinks the agency fee is a problem, though, as the Italian clients don't really want to pay that. He says he adores Google Italy but hates the way they simply act as sales people. There are only six people in Google Italy, they're only sales people and can't solve your problems (reading between the lines; Google Italy are promising to run SEM campaigns for clients directly and Massimo doesn't rate their ability).
Turns out there are Googlers in the room. Massimo changes slide. :) (Actually Massimo ; there's an Italian Googler in the room and within throwing distance - if I shout duck then duck!)
The evolution of search in Italy;
- from SEO all the way through to SMO
- SERP rankings - blogs + social media (says Massimo)
- universal search = social search
- PPC = lead acquisition
Social media is of increasing importance in Italy. We're also seen an increase in Web TV and mobile ready users (thanks to the iPhone once again).
Germany
Thomas Bindl can't make it so we're going to adhoc...
Germany's internet market is more advanced than Spain. The Travel and Retail verticals in particular are much larger.
Some popular German social networks
- JUX.de
- StayFriends
- SevenLoad
- MyVideo
- Mister Wong
- StudiVZ
Tomy says Mister Wong is good for links as the site doesn't use nofollow. Er... I think they added nofollow some months ago. Tomy did warn the audience that he hadn't been active in Germany for a few months though and so that makes sense.
Alex (surname?) works for a search agency active in both Germany and Spain. He's here to walk us through some search campaign differences.
- Germany is more saturated than Spain; this effects the bid costs
- You can't transplant a campaign from one European country to another; you must localise
- Germany is more sober than Spain. German creatives need to be more technical.
- In Spain, Alex's agency uses 'flashy' landing pages designed to capture the users' attention
- In Germany, Alex's agency uses more conservative landing pages
- When data harvesting; in Spain you can ask for it, get it and know everything about the user - in Germany no one knows their national ID number
- It takes more effort to persuade a German to part with their money
- Spanish customers are easier to keep happy. If you can show a Spanish client you're doing well - then they'll keep the PPC campaign going.
Thanks guys! I'll not live blog any of the questions and answers and keep them exclusive to the conference instead.
Right. I've found some (weak) wi-fi and a set of translation headphones (currently buzzing in my ear) so I'm going to see whether I can do some live blogging from SMX Madrid.
It's 1 o'clock Madrdid time and next up is Eric Tholome from Google. He's the Group Product Manager, Applications there and I think he's going to be talking about open social. The title of the presentation is "The Programmable Social Web". He looks to have at least 7 slides - which is loads for a Googler in a search conference.
Google are also presenting in the other room but I can't get translation for that. Sorry Luisella!
Okay... so far Tomy's speaking in Spanish. No translation!
Oh! Success. The translation software is perfect for Eric... no wait, he's speaking in English! Score. :)
Wow. A patchwork of 10,000 gadgets! These logo swarm slides get bigger for each conference. Who had the time to put this together?
Eric talks about phase 0. Destination websites. Web 1.0.
Then there's phase 1. Users creating their own sites by taking content form one site (RSS) and building their own pages with it. For example; iGoogle.
Phase 2. People start taking applications (rather than just content) from one source and building their own stuff with them. For example, iGoogle evolves from just being RSS modles to showing apps.
Phase 3. Containers - those sites who can host gadgets - start to appear everywhere. For example; combining a real estate gagdet with a map gadget.
Phase 4. The applications evolve into 'creative applications' - really clever and impressive looking ones. For example; IM Google gadgets or Starbuck's interactive map gadget or Honda's sponsorship of Fall Out Boy through the gadget ad. (P.S. Google are keen to push gadget ads)
Eric notes that the web has become an eco system for gadgets.
Under a slide called "Everyone's Writing Code" Eric shows a curve going up that takes data from iGoogle. It shows that they've now got about 20,000+ gadgets and 100,000 sites acting as containers for gadgets. The curve goes up as it plots gadget numbers against time.
Guess what - there's a longtail of gadgets too. Google data; 50% of traffic comes from outside the top 125 gadgets (that's taken from a base of 500 gadgets).
Woot! Google uses a slide that shows a dinosaur, then an asteroid and then a mammal; here comes the evolution of the web speach (I hope he mentions the Flying Spaghetti Monster intelligent design theory too - just to balance things).
Ah... yes; the shift to the browser being the next operating system of choice (I think I can hear someone in Microsoft HQ weeping).
So... roll in OpenSocial. Why is it important? Google says the web is better if the web is social. Eric notes how annoying it was to always have to re-add your friend data whenever you started a new site. He admits that Facebook has been very important. OpenSocial is here to let many social sites have access to not only a gadget eco-system but also to this common set of social data.
Eric stresses that Google doesn't want all the social sites to merge. They want OpenSocial bridge the gap between networks.
OpenSocial allows more applications to be developed. Rather than spend time writing conversion code so aps can run on different sites - the time can be spent writing more aps. It also means that more websites can run more aps. The result? More users will be able to experience the joy of applications.
OpenSocial is not GoogleSocial. It's very much, Eric says, a partner driven project. MySpace and Yahoo, for example, are partners. (Hey; if I was Google I might look into advertising on MySpace and Yahoo... oh... wait. Um.)
PayPal's in OpenSocial. NewsGator. CurrentTV. - Wah. He had a slide of small print that listed lots of OpenSocial partners. I hope I had time to cherry pick three good examples.
There are 5 categories of OpenSocial API
1) People and Friends (access friend info via API)
2) Activities (what friends are doing API)
3) Persistance (Store and share API)
4) Gadgets core (utilities)
5) Gadgets Feature-Specific (interface utlities; flash, for example)
What is Shindig? An apache license container which allows you to serve OpenSocial applications. It takes a little work but not that much. It's open source. Ning is a champion example.
Google are introducing REST APIs for OpenSocial - coming later, working on now - becase not everyone has a JavaScript enviorment.
Eric won't go into more details here but the REST APIs will also allow OpenSocial to go mobile.
So, what about Friend Connect? This helps every site provide some social features with just a snippet of code. In the past you had to use something like Shindig which, of course, meant you had to do some programming. Friend Connect makes its easier to get started with OpenSocial - you just need a few snippets of code from Friend Connect.
Once on Friend Conect you can;
- user registration
- invitations
- members gallery
- message posting
- reviews
- OpenSOcial applications
So, a possible summary here is that Friend Connect is here to help encourage OpenSocial adoption.
What do users get from Friend Connect?
- log in with existing credentials
- see who among their friends are already registered at the site
- invite friends from other social networks
Eric uses the Ingrid Michaelson example. She's a singer and not a coder. Just a few snippets of code from her friends at Friend Connect allows her to enhance her site. We can see that Eric (who uses a Calvin icon!) is logged in to her site and that Ingrid has added the iLike application to her site.
Google are making sure users stay in control of their data. Privacy is important. That's a key point to remember as Friend Connect and OpenSocial lets visitors use one set of data to log into lots of places.
Ah... OpenSocial is not just for friends. There's an Enterprise potential which Google reckons is largely untapped. Business partners can interact. Eric asks us to imagine a sales person on OpenSocial (actually, Eric, I can... not sure I want sales people stalking me on OpenSocial...)
Let's look at some business sites in the OpenSocial partnership; LinkedIn, SalesForce, Viadeo, Xing and Orcale. Not bad, huh?
Eric's wrapping up with some resource URLs. You can find the Google ones easily so here's Shindig; incubator.apache.org/shindig.
Thanks Eric!
At my European case study track at SES, Jaron Schaechter, a co-speaker and German entrepreneur suggested that the UK, Germany and Netherlands were at "SEO 2006".
I respect Jaron's opinions. He's a smart man. I disagree with this assessment, though.
He wasn't alone though. A number of the US visitors - the first time visitors to London SES - noted how high level some of the presentations were. It's something that Nan Dawkins and I had a chat about in the small Hilton bar afterwards.
SES London tends to be composed of Search people - agencies, freelancers and in-house teams. It's increasingly rare to find any 'clients'. That's the been the trend for a while. As a result of this the native UK speakers do not tend to show off their good stuff. Much of Search - especially SEO - is about your IP and agencies tend to guard that. None of the UK agencies who spoke even hinted at the advanced or thorough analysis they do.
It's also worth noting that a large number of the speakers had flown in from the US. Even these speakers kept their presentations very basic and very top level. Are they behind the rest of the US? No! Where they wrong to keep things simple? No. That's the culture of SES London. Just as a side note; I thought SES really benefited this year from having a fresh bunch of speakers. I think Kevin Ryan, Mike Grehan and team should be thanked for that one.
We have a US office. We have three UK offices. Two German offices. I know these markets well and the techniques are all equal. Do you think the Germans don't read Search Engine Watch or Search Engine Land? They do. Of course they do.
In fact, European Search Marketers tend to have more experience in dealing with multi-lingual and multi-currency campaigns.
There is a difference in traditional media in Germany and the Netherlands when it comes to Search though. It's far easier to get interest from Trade Press journalists in the UK and US than it is in mainland Europe - but that's changing.
Search Engine Strategies made a lot of progress this year. I was pleased I went. I was pleased we didn't send any sales people. Given the progress made I'm sure the SES London team will begin to address the issue of the "top level culture" if it is even an issue for them at all.
Well. I'm back from Technology for Marketing. It was busier than last year - much. 40% more people through the gates and since we just had a small corner of Earls Court it seemed even busier.
Normally, people would always ask first about search engine optimisation when they get to our stand but on the first day we had a lot of interest in affiliate marketing instead. Why? Although TFM was busier this year would say that 80% of the companies there were on the larger side of SME and were either looking to beef up their sales offering in anticipation of a tougher market (an economic down turn) or where actually doing very well and were looking to step up to the next level.
On the second day many of the questions focused on social media. This was partly due, I think, to my speach starting early. I was talking about Social Media in Europe and its pitfalls. The little conference area filled up 10 minutes before start time, the organisers didn't want to let any more people in and so I was urged to start. I'm sorry for the people who were turned away! I'll see whether or not I can upload the presentation.
I ended with a fairly risky (I thought) case study which explored some of the ethical issues around 'social media marketing' and how we've tried to navigate them to the best of our abilities.
... and on another note, there's the Big Balls Media discovery!
Elsewhere in Earls Court was Confex. Confex is an expo for 'event marketing' and it just so happened that one of the companies in attendance was called 'Big Balls Media'. How perfect is that?
The strapline for this year's Internet World is "Content is King". I wonder if the Search Community will be quick enough to use that little phrase before other marketing types do. (humour)
They've announced their keynote speakers
