Global Search Engine Marketing & Social Media News And Analysis » Immanuel Simonsen

Yandex Announces Partnership with Leading Online Payment Provider

Immanuel Simonsen — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:42:02 +0000

Today, Yandex.Money announced a partnership with Skrill, one of Europe’s leading online payment providers. For online stores that have Russia and CIS on their radar this is good news, as it essentially allows for quicker and easier access to the region’s exponentially growing ecommerce sector.

Yandex.Money is Russia’s most well-known electronic payment service, according to TNS, and is already used by some of the internet’s most popular services, such as Facebook, Skype and McAfee.

You can read the press release in full here.

ISS London Fireside Chat With Yandex Co-Founder & CTO Ilya Segalovich – Transcript

Immanuel Simonsen — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:31:54 +0000

In this week’s much anticipated keynote at ISS London, Chris Sherman and Andy Atkins-Krüger were talking to co-founder and CTO of Yandex, Ilya Segalovich, about everything from user privacy to search personalisation and Yandex’s international operations and ambitions.

Here’s a modified (and summarised) transcript of the fireside chat.

What Makes Yandex Different From Other Search Engines?

Ilya: We try not to focus so much on what makes us different from others, but rather how we can improve the user experience and add value to our customers’ lives.

There seems to be a fairly widespread perception that Yandex is purely a Russian copy of Google? What is Yandex doing to overcome that perception?

Ilya: It’s important for me to stress that the perception inside CIS (former Soviet Republics) is very different compared to what it is outside the region. In Russia we don’t have to prove that we’re innovative leaders, much like Google don’t have to prove anything in most of the world’s countries where they’re the dominating force.

We’ve been the leading player for years in Russia and operate the number one search, shopping, news and payment platform – just to name some of our popular services. The environment, however, is changing within Russia and is becoming much more competitive. For many years we barely had any competition. But this is drastically changing now, with new platform and browser providers proliferating.

Yandex’s superb handling of the Russian language is less of a differentiating factor today than it used to be – how do you now differentiate yourself from Google in Russia?

Ilya: Geo-targeting is something we’ve put a lot of effort into. If you search from Moscow and we return a result from say Vladivostok, it’s just as irrelevant as a Brazilian result with shipping only to Brazil would be to a user in Portugal (editor’s note: reference to a prior geo-targeting example by Andy Atkins-Krüger). We’ve done a classification by region, which was a major differentiator when it was first introduced, as this was done some time before Google started serving geo-localised search results in Russia. On average we have 3-5 local results in the SERP for a query with local intent.

But in general, and in line with what I said earlier, we always try to start with the true needs of the user and improve his/her experience. For example, since 1997 we have had links to other search engines at the bottom of our search engine result pages. Why? For the sheer reason that users benefit from it. If they don’t find what they’re looking for on Yandex, maybe Google or Bing can provide it.

You’ve also recently started personalising results – please tell us about that?

Ilya: We found that hyper personalised results are not what users want. Some degree of personalisation, though, did improve relevance and CTR, but only when personalisation was moderated.

Our personalisation algorithm primarily relies on a user’s search history. To put it differently, we’ll take into account what a user has searched for in the past, what his/her interests are etc. and serve up personalised results accordingly.

Can users switch off personalisation or regulate the ‘degree’ of personalisation?

Ilya: Yes, they can. But no one really does.

Online user privacy has become an increasingly contentious topic over the past few years. Who owns the data? Users or search engines?

Ilya: It’s a very interesting question – kind of a philosophical question. Or a moral question, if you will.

However, it’s not particularly clear to me what we define as data? Is the search query considered user data, for example? What exactly is tagged as data, and what is not?

As a search engine, we can choose to say that all the data belongs to us. Having said that, I think users should be able to deal with their own data. Your search history and clicks should belong to you. That’s an ethical standpoint. For example, we recently introduced the possibility for users to export their search data to another search engine, e.g. from Yandex to Google.

What’s Yandex’s approach to investments & acquisitions?

Ilya: Acquiring teams with experience, e.g. small start-ups, is an important piece in the puzzle in terms of staying innovative and competitive. We particularly need to invest in areas like machine translation and voice recognition, however, our investments are not always related to search but include many other areas where we see future potential.

What does Yandex do to help search marketers outside of Russia?

Ilya: We’ve seen an increasing number of advertisers from abroad showing interest in Russia. As a result, we’ve developed English interfaces for all of our key tools. We’ve opened an office in Switzerland to reach out to European advertisers. We’ve also set up offices in the US and Turkey.

Mobile clearly has become an important battlefield – where is Yandex going?

Ilya: Smartphone penetration is still relatively modest in Russia, though it has to be said that we are starting to see a lot more transactions from these devices.

We have a set of highly popular applications, for example Yandex.Maps which is the top maps app in Russia. We’re also aware that the user experience is very different on mobile devices. Of course, because of the significantly reduced screen size, usability becomes an area that needs rethinking. A good mobile browser, mobile interface and overall web experience therefore are top priorities for us. You don’t want to pinch and zoom for every bit of information you’re looking for. Yandex.Shell for Android, which is an intuitive interface that makes it easy to customise your various screens on Android devices, is one such example of our efforts into mobile interfaces.

Let’s look internationally for a moment. You launched in Turkey recently. How is that venture going? What are you doing to conquer that market?

Ilya: The idea was; if there’s a monopoly where a single player commands 97% to 98% of the entire market — in this case Google — there’s room for a good alternative. And while our impact in the market is not happening at the speed we initially was hoping for, we are seeing marked increases in returning Turkish users to the Yandex search platform, indicating that we’re gradually making inroads.

We have small successes in many areas in Turkey, and awareness is gradually building. More importantly perhaps, we have learned A LOT from our Turkey experience; from tackling the complex Turkish language, the first language outside of the Cyrillic region, to growing our understanding of what it takes to successfully enter a foreign market.

But for us to go somewhere, there has to be business in it. Potentially we could do 20 different languages. But how do we monetise it? There simply has to be a business purpose for us to follow through internationally.

As you begin to move more aggressively internationally, what’s your strategy for competitors striking back at you in the markets you’re entering?

Ilya: For us it’s exciting. We don’t have any fear of the competition. In fact, we welcome it. From a user perspective, competition is always positive as it inevitably raises the bar.

Do you look towards Baidu and what they do? Could China be a potential destination?

Ilya: Well, I like Baidu’s Box Computing as a concept. But China is a separate case. Things are very different there. Censorship, government protection, user behaviour, etc.. It’s not really a destination that’s appearing on our radar at the moment.

The Rising Global Ambitions Of China’s Tech Giants

Immanuel Simonsen — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:11:16 +0000

With a population that exceeds 1.3 billion, you’d think Chinese businesses have their hands more than full catering to this market alone. While this happens to be the case for most companies, China’s leading tech forces are increasingly eyeing expansion opportunities beyond the country’s domestic borders to keep up past years’ exponential growth rates.

Certainly, if you are to judge from the statements made by a wide array of China’s top tech CEOs, most of these companies aren’t falling short on their global ambitions. So far though, moves made into international territory by online giants such as Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, have been sporadic and indecisive. However, considering the unprecedented growth that has taken place in the online sphere over the past decade in China, who could really blame them for focusing almost exclusively on their rapidly evolving domestic market?

The most recent estimates put China’s online population at a whopping 600 million, making it the world’s by distance largest online market by user count. Albeit impressive, if you do the maths, this actually paints a picture of an online market that is anything but saturated, with more than half of the country’s population having yet to come online.

This, however, hasn’t stopped UCWeb – China’s most popular mobile browser – from recently announcing an international offensive in which the company is planning to invest RMB 3 billion ($488 million) over the next three years in an attempt to gain a similarly dominant position in vast emerging markets such as India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam, the Financial Times reports.

UCWeb’s “modest” objective, the FT further notes, is to acquire 1 billion users by 2016, of which half should come from outside of China. This would mark an increase in new users of 150 %, up from 400 million today (300 million domestic users; 100 million international).

Indeed, this ambitious international bet by UCWeb poses the interesting question of whether we’ll soon see other big Chinese tech players follow suit with full-blown international market entries?

To answer this question, we’ll have to look towards two emerging developments, which essentially are working against each other when it comes to deciding whether to pursue international expansion or not.

1. Decreasing internet growth rates encourage international expansion

Despite the vast growth opportunities that still exist, prior years’ precipitous surges in internet penetration have come to an end. In its comprehensive 31^st statistical report on the development of the Chinese internet, CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) concludes that internet user growth has decelerated rather notably over the past year and is expected to further contract going forward.

A comparison of Baidu’s 2011 and 2012 full year financial results support this trend (note: in this specific case there are other external factors, such as increasing domestic competition, that have impacted on Baidu’s performance; however, it’s still indicative of a cooling domestic internet climate).

Annual revenue and profit increases of around 50% would probably excite most business execs, but in Baidu’s case it’s actually an alarming development compared to the prior year. And while year-on-year growth deceleration is inevitable as markets mature, a continuation of this development would make a compelling case for international expansion.

2. When you’ve got something very valuable, you should hold on for dear life

A maturing market, on the other hand, also implies intensifying competition, market sophistication and rising consumer trust – ultimately creating a foundation on which ecommerce can flourish.

The potential of Chinese netizens’ rapidly improving consumer trust in ecommerce is certainly not lost on multinational companies in the West. In fact, most of them have realised that they simply cannot afford to ignore China unless they want to see the competition sail away with the prize. The move, however, is complicated — and in some cases even made impossible — by a protectionist government that heavily favours the well-being of local Chinese businesses.

These high barriers to entry are slowly eroding though, meaning that Chinese companies sooner or later will have to allocate more resources to defending their home turf from being overtaken by eager aspirants from abroad looking to capitalise on the financial goldmine that China truly is.

These two developments combined — decelerating internet growth rates and increasing interest in online China, particularly from abroad but also at home — put leading digital Chinese companies in somewhat of a dilemma: To go global to counter cooling domestic internet growth? Or to keep all troops within the borders of China to focus fully on keeping foreign and domestic competitors at bay and tap the vast potential that has, rightfully, yet to be tapped?

UCWeb aims for both, and I have a funny feeling we’ll see similar ambitious moves from other Chinese tech giants soon enough – if not this year, then in 2014.

Yandex Soon To Be Russia’s Largest Media Company By Ad Revenue

Immanuel Simonsen — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:37:28 +0000

Russia is undergoing radical transformation these days, growing ever-wealthier and increasingly opening up for international trade and collaboration, most noticeably demonstrated by last year’s accession into the WTO after 18 years of negotiation.

While a multitude of factors are contributing to the rapidity with which Russia is transforming, at the root of it is a dramatically changing media landscape where the internet is spreading like a wildfire meanwhile state-run TV channels (and TV in general) are decreasing in importance and influence.

The precipitous rise of the Russian internet is, quite frankly, breath-taking, and last year’s announcement that Yandex had surpassed Russia’s largest TV station, Pervy Kanal, in terms of monthly visitors definitively put the last bit of doubt concerning the Runet’s exponential growth into demise.

The writing is surely on the wall! As Russians flock to the internet, so will advertisers.

While TV remained the by distance biggest medium by ad spend in 2012, according to the Communications Agencies Association of Russia, the leading players in that category will soon see their previously so impenetrable kingdom be overtaken by Yandex.

This became clear when Pervy Kanal this week released its financial results for 2012, demonstrating yearly ad revenues of 28.2 billion Rubles ($896 million). This is only marginally higher than the 28.1 billion Rubles reported by Yandex for the full year, and with internet penetration marching on unimpeded, coupled with advertisers increasingly finding value in the digital medium, it’s only a matter of time before Yandex becomes Russia’s largest advertising platform – across all media!

That said, it seems it will take some time for online to surpass TV as a whole in Russia, as can be seen below. This in turn demonstrates Yandex’s extremely dominant position on the Runet, where it earns an impressive 1 in 2 Rubles spent on online advertising.

Source: Own Elaboration, Data by CAAR

5 Key Insights From comScore’s 2013 Europe Digital Future in Focus Report

Immanuel Simonsen — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:40:06 +0000

Keeping track of trends in an ever evolving digital age and gathering reliable data to inform business decisions can be a time-consuming and often times expensive undertaking.

As this even holds true for companies that operate in a single-market, you can probably imagine the complexity that piles up when catering to an international audience.

Luckily for you, I’ve compiled 5 key insights from comScore’s recently published Europe Digital Future in Focus 2013 report, which contains a treasure trove of insights into how Europeans navigate the digital landscape across devices and web properties.

If you do business across Europe, I strongly recommend you to go download the full report, but for now let’s take a look at a few particularly interesting findings.

1. The global perspective – international markets make up an ever-larger chunk of the global web

The US’ global digital domination has been waning rapidly over the past decade and a half. As of December 2012, comScore estimates that US internet users make up a ‘mere’ 13% of the global digital audience, compared to 66% back in 1996.

Moreover, while the US remains the world’s single-largest ecommerce market at the time of writing, various reputable sources find that China is on track to surpass the US as the global leader later on this year.

Expect this trend to intensify as the internet really starts to pick up in developing and emerging countries.

Source: comScore Europe Digital Future in Focus 2013

2. Russia solidifies its position as Europe’s biggest online market by user count; Watch out for Italy

Only outpaced by extremely strong internet adoption growth in Italy, Russia distances itself as Europe’s largest internet market by user count, up 15% over December 2011. Internet penetration in Russia, however, is still modest and further underlines the market’s great potential.

Source: comScore Europe Digital Future in Focus 2013

Much like Russia, Italy has been off to a slow start in terms of digital adoption, yet it’s somewhat surprising that the boot-legged country comes out as Europe’s fastest-growing online market. But despite last year’s rapid growth, Italy’s online population remains significantly smaller than similarly sized countries like the UK and France.

Additionally, and perhaps a more interesting metric, eMarketer research shows that while a lower percentage of the Italian population may be online compared to some of its comparable European neighbours, average spend per online buyer is second only to the UK in Europe. Now, couple this apparent willingness to spend big with modest internet penetration (still sitting below 50%) and you’ve got yourself some potential.

3. The UK is +10 hours ahead of European average in terms of engagement; Turkey once again among top 3

The UK consistently takes up the top spot as Europe’s most engaged online audience in terms of time spent online. In fact, UK netizens spend as much as 10.4 hours more online per month than the average European.

Also, for those of you who haven’t followed comScore’s ongoing tracking of the European digital landscape, it may come as a surprise that the UK is followed by Turkey in second place.

This is not an isolated case, though; Turkey has for quite some time been among the top three European nations for online engagement.

Source: comScore Europe Digital Future in Focus 2013

4. Vast differences between Europeans when it comes to ’search frequency’

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you’ll know that search patterns often differ tremendously between countries. Normally, authors will point to language constructs, regional language usage and culture as differentiating components – all of which are indeed valid in their own right.

However, turns out the frequency with which Europeans search also greatly differs.

In this regard, the average online Turk conducts almost 3 times as many monthly searches as the average connected Dane! And more interestingly perhaps, the amount of time people spend online doesn’t always correlate with how many searches they carry out.

To stick with Turkey, its online population appears to make a disproportionately high amount of searches – even when factoring in their high online engagement. Conversely, people in the Netherlands are well below the European average in terms of monthly searches, despite being among the top 3 most engaged online populations. If you take a closer look at the data, you’ll find that there are many such deviations.

Source: comScore Europe Digital Future in Focus 2013

5. Cross-device usage remains super fragmented

A topic of great interest in marketing circles these days is cross-device media consumption. And for good reason!

Unfortunately, however, the far majority of articles out there don’t go deeper than the “multi-platform is huge – get on or get left behind” sort of approach. That’s a shame since comScore’s data indicates that, while consumers in general are becoming more platform agnostic, the extent to which multiple devices are shaping the online experience remains hyper fragmented.

For example, if you’re targeting the UK, it’s indisputable just how critical a multi-platform strategy will be to achieving your business goals. Heck, nearly one third of all UK page views in December last year were on mobiles and tablets!

However, out of the 18 European countries for which comScore provides individual reporting, only three are seeing more than 20% of total internet traffic being generated by mobiles and tablets. In Poland and Turkey, for example, more than 95% of all traffic is being driven by PCs.

Now, should this impact on your approach to multi-platform on an international scale, I’ll ask you rhetorically?

Device Share of Page Views Across Countries in Europe

Source: comScore Europe Digital Future in Focus 2013

As always, over to you. Are you surprised by any of these findings? Do they correlate with other data you’ve come across on the web? What’s your own experience in dealing with European markets? Best practices? Pitfalls to look out for? It’s all up for debate in the comments section below.

Yahoo Japan To Integrate Curated Content Into Its Search Results

Immanuel Simonsen — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:28:03 +0000

Keeping abreast of recent trends and developments can seem a monumental task thanks to the unprecedented circulation of information on the web these days. Therefore perhaps, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that searchers and content “distributors” alike have welcomed content curation sites with open arms.

In an attempt to ride the wave of this trend, Yahoo Japan — Japan’s leading search engine — and NHN Japan have announced a partnership that will see the former integrating curated content from NHN’s highly popular Naver Matome platform into its search results.

Naver Matome, which in many ways bears resemblance to sites like Scoop.it! and Storify, has made an astronomical leap over the course of the past year, with growth significantly outpacing both Facebook and Twitter. To be more precise, the content curation service reportedly attracts around 41 million monthly visitors and accumulates more than 1.2 billion page views per month.

In a joint press conference, the two internet behemoths disclosed that the project will commence later this month and also shed a tiny bit of light into how the collaboration is likely to play out in practice. Apart from giving much greater prominence to curated content in search results, Yahoo Japan is planning to set up a separate tab that only returns Matome results. This search function will also be implemented on Matome’s website to improve the user search experience.

Needless to say, this development makes content curation for Naver’s Matome platform an important variable in the overall SEO strategy for the Japanese market.

Tried And Tested Tips To International SEO Excellence

Immanuel Simonsen — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:51:10 +0000

Image credit: Stock.xchng

Are you already catering to an international audience? Or maybe you’re contemplating international expansion as a means to grow your business?

Whichever is the case, there’s a multitude of factors that come into play when you’re operating globally. Here are some tips and general guidelines that will help you conquer the beast that is international SEO and ultimately succeed on foreign shores:

1. Run PPC campaigns to unveil local search patterns

PPC can be an incredibly cost-effective marketing tool for obtaining valuable market insights in unknown territory. Which search terms are being used? Which ads are being clicked? What converts? What doesn’t? These initial insights will serve as a brilliant starting point for defining and developing highly effective SEO strategies in the locale.

Check out this article for 5 essential tips for global SEM success.

2. Research keywords, don’t translate them

Oldie but goldie – and for good reason! Despite the avid attempts here on the site and elsewhere, it appears the large majority of businesses still put their international faith in the hands of either machine translation or, if the stakes are slightly higher, sheer translation.

However, as there’s no such thing as a one-to-one relationship between keywords, relying on direct translations is bound to result in a great deal of missed opportunity. Follow this approach and prepare to end up targeting useless keywords with little to no search volume in the locale.

Instead, use the insights you’ve obtained from your local PPC campaigns to support and validate the keyword researches carried out by natives in Google’s, Baidu’s and Yandex’s respective keyword tools.

If you’re still not convinced, you might want to read this post.

3. Have natives write up content around your targeted keywords

Once you’ve got your initial set of keywords for the locale, it’s time to map out where to deploy these. In a post-Panda and -Penguin era it’s particularly important to create natural, high-quality content that resonates with users in the locale, so have natives write up some solid content around those keywords.

Avoid keyword stuffing and machine translation at all costs, however, if money constrains you from localising or translating deep-level pages, ensure to at least disallow robots from crawling those pages by using the robots.txt file.

4. Geo-targeting will make or break your international adventure

Geo-targeting remains one of the most challenging, yet most important issues when it comes to international SEO. And while there are many different ways to skin a cat, the advice below is tried and tested:

4.1 Host in the country you’re targeting

Hosting in the country you’re targeting is a geo-signal for Google and also allows for faster load speeds.

4.2 Choose a local domain structure

A thorough analysis and evaluation of your site structure before you expand can save you a great deal of trouble down the road. A ccTLD structure (e.g. .de, .fr, .es), however, will generally benefit you in so many ways.

For one, local domains serve as the strongest geo-targeting signal in Google’s algorithm, meaning that your country-specific sites are much more likely to reach their intended audiences.

Secondly, local searchers find ccTLDs to be significantly more relevant, which in turn dramatically increases your likelihood of achieving higher CTRs and ultimately rankings. Moreover, the local domain approach helps you keep a shorter, simpler and cleaner URL structure.

“But hey, I’ve read several places that hosting and maintenance costs can quickly run out of control with a local domain structure?”

Truth is it isn’t really as expensive as some say – not for global companies or those with international aspirations anyway. If you belong to the latter group who have yet to make leap, I assume you’re contemplating international expansion because you’re already doing well in your domestic market and have sufficient free capital to fully support your foreign adventure?

Either way, chances are that this investment might pay off in one of two ways (or both):

Your performance in the locale is stronger due to greater perceived relevancy, as mentioned above.
As you reduce complexity and signal more clearly to Google which sites go where, you’re also more likely to not end up spending most of your time figuring out how to implement hreflang tags and other technically tedious issues to make your sites display in front of the right audiences. Time is money, as they say.

“Ok, ok… but you have to build authority separately for your sites then?”

Correct. Compared to a subdirectory structure, ccTLDs require greater effort in terms of building authority because you basically start from scratch.

But let me, rather rhetorically, ask you this: You’ve managed to gradually build authority in your domestic market since you first started out, haven’t you? Why would you assume that succeeding in international markets requires any less effort? Going global is no easy feat. In fact, the presumption that it’s easy happens to be one of the primary reasons why so many companies fail on foreign soil.

4.3 Don’t always set a geo-target in Google Webmaster Tools for subdomains or subdirectories

While you may by now have detected my enthusiasm for local domains, I can appreciate that restructuring your entire global setup can seem too big a hassle if you’re already trading internationally through a subdomain (es.example.com) or a subdirectory (example.com/es) structure.

If that happens to be the case and your services are geographically restricted to a certain country, it can serve you well to set a geo-graphic target in Google Webmaster Tools.

For example, if your site www.mydomain.com/de only takes orders from German speakers in Germany, it would make sense to set Germany as the geo-target for that site.

However, say you accept orders from German speakers in Switzerland and Austria as well but don’t have sites targeted specifically at these countries, then setting Germany as the geo-target would only limit your reach and worsen your performance.

4.4 Use hreflang to help Google serve up the right page, but don’t implement it unless a need has been identified

Ensuring that the right page is displayed to the right audience is of course the end goal of all your geo-targeting efforts, but sometimes it happens that Google confuses which page to serve up – even if you’ve followed the steps outlined above.

This nagging issue of Google showing the wrong page when you have a perfectly adequate, country-targeted version is particularly prevalent when you target multiple countries that speak the same language.

Let me explain.

Let’s say you have separate pages targeted at the United States, the UK and Australia. Apart from currency and shipping options, these pages are identical. A common scenario could then be that your US (www.example.com) page has more authority than its UK (www.example.com/uk) and AU (www.example.com/au) equivalents and thus ranks when users search in the google.au or google.co.uk country domains.

When implemented correctly either as mark-up in the or in XML Sitemaps (the latter is significantly easier), you essentially let Google know that these other versions exist and that you’d like them display in their respective local Google domains instead of the US version.

See below an implementation example in XML Sitemaps for a ccTLD structure:

The hreflang tag can be implemented across languages and domains, and the above is just one of many scenarios where it could make sense to apply it. However, for the sake of the length of this piece I won’t regurgitate what others have already said, but instead direct you to some good sources:

Maile Ohye of Google gave a session on geo-targeting and the hreflang tag at the International Search Summit last week, which took place alongside SMX West in San Jose. Andy Atkins-Krueger has written up some key takeaways from that session here.
Pete Handley was one of the first to provide implementation test results, and his article still holds up as a good resource on the topic.
A relatively long-form piece by Saijo George on the Search Engine Journal.
A video á la SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday providing some thoughts on hreflang.

4.5 Build a local QUALITY link profile

Google also analyses where your incoming links are originating from and uses it as a signal to determine local relevance. Therefore, you’d want to focus your efforts on building a solid local link profile however challenging it may be.

Creating awesome local content is definitely a good start, but that alone won’t always cut it. As in your domestic market, a strategic and sustained effort into outreach is necessary to thrive – and arguably even more so internationally since your brand awareness will likely be lower in these markets.

Think about online influence a bit as if it were the US economy – a select few make up an extremely disproportionate share of total output. So when jotting down your local influencer list, focus on quality rather than quantity, or put differently, it’s less about how many incoming links you can stack up and more about getting the right people/properties to link to you (cf. Google Penguin).

Use social influencer tools such as Klout to identify your targets in the locale. Once you’ve got your list of people and properties to target within your vertical, add them on social media, share their stories, link to them in your own blog posts and gradually make them aware of your digital existence.

5. Include a geo-selector – don’t auto-redirect

While a geo-selector — you know that neat thingy which allows you to easily switch country when you’ve ended up on the wrong version of a site — may not as such be included under the geo-targeting umbrella, it’s an essential component in any international digital strategy

If your site is currently auto-redirecting based on a user’s IP address, please go change that immediately. Not only will some users find it extremely frustrating to automatically be redirected to a site which they potentially don’t understand (or just don’t prefer), it will also inhibit Google’s crawlers – which are predominantly US-based – from discovering your sites outside the US.

Instead, offer the user choice and allow crawlers access to your multiple site versions through a geo-selector.

Recommended read: Geo-selectors can take many shapes. This article looks at some of the different options and how your choice of geo-selector will impact on usability and SEO.

6. Optimise for Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia

Although Google’s global dominance is indeed mind-boggling, the search behemoth isn’t ruling the roost everywhere. Such is the case in two of the world’s most attractive online economies, China and Russia, where Baidu and Yandex hold around 75% and 65% market share respectively.

While Google seems to have definitively outplayed its role in China, other local search engines, such as Qihoo 360 Search and Aliyun, are emerging. Watch out for this space as disruption in some way or another seems inevitable.

Moreover, if South Korea is a potential target for your business, be aware that Naver is the search engine of choice in the highly developed Southeast Asian country.

Recommended read: Webcertain’s Search & Social Report (free download) will provide you with recent insights into the search and social media landscape in 34 countries across the globe.

7. Join Leading Local Social Networks

Along the same lines, the likes of Facebook and Twitter aren’t dominating the social space in each country on the planet, despite gradually making inroads into markets previously dominated by local social players.

Though the social media landscape still remains more fragmented than that of search, it’s clear that there’s a strong correlation between resiliency towards foreign search engines and social networks.

In other words, the few countries where Google doesn’t dominate also happen to be the ones where Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have yet to become market leaders. Heck, in China these networks aren’t even accessible due to government restrictions.

A few from China include: Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter), Tencent Weibo, Renren, Qzone, WeChat (IM app)
Russia: Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki (Twitter seems to be the new hot social star, though)
Recommended read: Webcertain’s Search & Social Report.

8. Accommodate for preferred payment methods & display prices in local currency

Payment methods differ tremendously between countries – even seemingly similar countries. In fact, 60% of all online cross-border transactions are not completed because the merchant trader doesn’t provide adequate payment methods for international payments, notes Julian Wallis from Ogone Payment Systems. Having local solutions in place is key to boosting conversions by increasing familiarity and thereby reducing perceived risk.

In relation, displaying prices in local currency can prove a significant trust-builder. Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC), which automatically offers your customers the choice of paying in their own currency by identifying where the payment card has been issued, is an effective solution to dealing with this.

Recommended video: Julian Wallis on international and cross-border retailing.

9. Create a Google+ Local page if you have a physical address in the local market or are planning to set one up.

Besides migrating Google Places to Google+ last year, Google’s introduction of its Knowledge Graph means that your local company listing(s) is given much greater weighing and thus helps you in your pursuit of occupying more shelf space in the search results. Compared to the little effort it takes, it’s extremely rewarding.

10. Watch out for cultural colour connotations

Colours have culturally assigned meanings and values which widely differ as well. Red, for example, is typically associated with danger in the West, whereas in many Eastern countries it symbolises prosperity, festivity and good fortune. Conduct research into this before replicating your Western website design in far-away markets.

11. Choose a CMS that supports UTF-8

Most Content Management Systems support UTF-8 these days, and Google has long been using Unicode as the company’s internal format for all the text it searches and processes. Make sure to use this format to avoid mangled characters across languages and character sets.

Follow these rules, or guidelines if you will, and you should be well on your way to creating a solid, high-performing international digital presence.

Now over to you! What important aspects have I missed out on when it comes to international SEO? Which of the above do you find to be most important? Conversely, are there any which aren’t that important?

Photo credit: Ko:(char *)hook via photopin cc

Yandex Launches Visually-Enhanced Ads On Its Ad Network

Immanuel Simonsen — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:14:26 +0000

Whether you’re running campaigns on the Yandex Advertising Network or participating as a publisher, yesterday’s announcement that Yandex will be offering integration of images into its contextual ads could prove beneficial for everyone involved.

From an advertiser’s perspective, the option of adding images into contextual ads could improve click-through-rates and lower cost-per-click, and most importantly perhaps, visually-enhanced ads have the ability to support positioning and branding efforts in a way that pure text ads simply don’t.

A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and for foreign businesses that have just made the leap into Russia and whose brand awareness is low, visually enticing ads are more likely to not only grab a visitor’s attention but also convey a message that goes beyond a few lines of ad copy.

For publishers, well-performing ads equal higher revenues, however website owners can easily opt-out of showing images in the ads at any moment.

“Advertisements with images can be placed on popular Yandex services including Yandex.Maps, Yandex.Weather and Yandex.Fotki, while sites in the Yandex Advertising Network are set to join the program on March 28″, the company writes in its press release.

5 Essential Tips For Global SEM Success

Immanuel Simonsen — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:09:25 +0000

It generated substantial buzz in the search marketing industry when eBay last week published research that overall deems SEM ineffective. Especially large scale companies that already enjoy a high degree of brand awareness will find little to no value in the advertising channel, the company argues.

Several PPC pundits have since fired back saying that SEM isn’t the problem. Rather, they say, eBay simply ’sucks’ at the discipline. And admittedly, the plethora of examples they provide to support their case don’t put the online auction and shopping giant in a particularly flattering light.

While I won’t delve into the issue any further, I’m convinced that search engine marketing can deliver substantial returns and support overall business objectives if managed properly. The sad reality, however, is that far too many companies continue to struggle with getting the most out of the channel. For international businesses this especially holds true since there’s an added layer of complexity in having to deal with multiple markets, languages, and cultures.

So without further ado, here are 5 tips to get you on track for global SEM success:

1. Keyword Categorisation Is A Central Task. But Research And Selection Should Be Done Locally

Getting the right categorisation for your keywords is essential for international campaigns. These categories are ideally defined centrally and will remain unchanged across markets. There are several advantages of a fixed approach, such as consistency and unified reporting. This in turn will help you more accurately benchmark country performances, save time and money, and ultimately result in a better, more focused end result. Remember, it’s easier for everyone to work within a single framework. Simplicity breeds understanding as the late, great Steve Jobs once said.

However, simplicity is not an invitation to be “lazy” or taking the path of least resistance. It’s been pointed out time and again, but translating lists of English keywords is being utterly oblivious to the often striking differences between languages and subsequent search patterns across markets. The approach is backwards and broken for so many reasons and — contrary to common perception — counterproductive and potentially damaging to your brand. With this in mind, keyword research and selection should always be carried out by a native speaker with a decent understanding of PPC.

2. Get The C-Suite On-board

“It’s all good chief, but we simply haven’t got the budget to employ native keyword researchers and copy writers. And generally we face little to no support from the people with the purse strings .”

Well, if your resources are too scarce to employ natives, at least do yourself the favour and run a visual verification on Google Images to ensure that your locally targeted keywords and ad copy aren’t misleading (or absolute gibberish) to the searcher. No better way to burn through the little budget you do have than by serving up ads that completely fail to meet consumer expectations.

But here’s another (and better) idea, though. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that you’d be doing yourself a much bigger favour by following the approach below, which will help you overcome initial economic constraints and a general lack of support from the C-suite:

Set up two identical ads – one in English and the other in the local language of the country you’re targeting.

Allocate the same budget for the two ads and compare performance.

Now if you really want to prove your point, go create a single localised landing page and analyse how it stacks up against its generic English counterparts. Of course, for this approach to work your local language landing page will have to be on the money as far as translation goes.

If you do this and don’t see any notable difference in performance, you can call me Al.

Joke aside, my point being: What is the one thing that all C-level execs understand? Numbers, am I right? Prove the impact on the bottom line and get the budget you deserve. And if it so happens that this budget won’t stretch as far as to taking on new employees, several multilingual search agencies will be up for the task without you having to break the bank.

3. No Universal Best Practice for PPC – Thorough Testing Imperative for Consistent Global Success

Once you’ve hopefully made a convincing case to the people with the purse strings and got yourself some more budget to play around with, greater testing needs to be undertaken.

Even in the single market PPC is far from an exact science. The fact that there’s no magic recipe for doing PPC may be a tough pill to swallow, but unfortunately that doesn’t make it any less true. Now, add to that linguistic and cultural differences when expanding globally and you can multiply your uncertainty levels by a thousand. Consistently delivering great results on a global scale thus requires even greater devotion to testing.

A/B testing is arguably the most common way of doing this. Multivariate testing is another method where you have multiple versions of the same ad, however all ads carry identical elements – to a lesser or larger extent. For instance, you may decide to change the description only but keep the title and URL. Similarly, you may change the title but keep the URL and description.

Play around with it as you find appropriate, but be careful not to draw definitive conclusions based on results from small sample sizes.

4. The A’s of Writing Ad Copy

Having said there is no universal best practice or guarantee for PPC success, there are of course some general guidelines that seem to work universally. These include:

Adequate ad for keyword & landing page: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Have multiple ads and landing pages within the same campaign.

Action terms: PPC can be applied to many different scenarios, but it’s generally targeted at users deeper down the conversion funnel. Including clear calls-to-action like “shop”, “buy”, “join” etc. is essential.

Attract attention: Include symbols and local trust anchors in the copy ($, €, AM/PM, etc.).

Ad environment: Thorough analysis of the competitive environment in your vertical in the local market is of the essence for writing effective ad copy. You may find that average CPCs, CTRs, ad depth (how many ads are shown for your targeted keywords) etc. differ notably, even between seemingly similar countries/markets.

5. Use PPC insights to inform & shape SEO strategy

Finally, PPC can be an incredibly effective marketing tool for obtaining valuable market insights in unknown territory. Which search terms are being used? Which ads are being clicked? What converts? What doesn’t? These initial insights will serve as a brilliant starting point for defining and developing highly effective SEO strategies in the locale.

If you stop treating SEO and PPC as were they two separate entities, soon enough you’ll discover the tremendous value of deploying a holistic approach to global search marketing.

While no guarantees can be made, following these tips will get you off to a good start.

Game On! How Yandex Uses Sports Rivalry To Succeed In Turkey

Immanuel Simonsen — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:01:22 +0000

When Yandex expanded into Turkey in 2011, the company proclaimed that it was aiming for 20% of the Turkish search market. Russia’s leading search player might still be a far cry from achieving that objective, but it is gradually making inroads into a heavily Google-dominated market through clever, locally relevant marketing tactics that should serve as inspiration for other companies with international aspirations.

One of last year’s brightest initiatives was Yandex’s showcasing of its maps service in a campaign that provided Istanbul citizens with real-time traffic information displaying on large LED boards strategically placed around the city.

This year, the company seems to have put its focus on the one thing that makes the nearly 75 million large Turkish population go nuts: football (soccer). Launched on Valentine’s Day, “Futbol Aşkı” (Football Love in Turkish) is a competition that aims to increase uptake and usage of Yandex’s proprietary browser by leveraging the extraordinary passion inherent in one of football’s greatest rivalries – the clash between Turkey’s two largest football clubs, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe.

Following negotiations which granted Yandex the permission to use both clubs’ respective brands, the company’s local team in Turkey launched customised Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe browsers that come with pre-installed quick links, bookmarks, team skins etc. for both clubs. These browsers can be downloaded on the campaign landing page (image above) which features a counter showing the score of the two sides in real-time. This score is based not only on the number of downloads but also on subsequent usage, thus providing fans with an incentive to try out the actual browser and not just leave it at downloading it.

And judging from the figures, the campaign has been hugely successful. So far, both teams have garnered more than 8 million points (+1 for each download; +1 the first time a user browses for 30 straight minutes without shutting down the session). Moreover, social buttons have been embedded within the site, allowing for easy sharing with supporters’ social circles and resulting in nearly 10K shares on Facebook, 2.5K on Twitter, and finally a mere 300 shares through G+.

The race is close as the competition goes into its final phase (ending this week on March 14th), but a Yandex spokesperson let us know that a new competition, in which Yandex search usage will become a performance variable, is about to be launched.

The Added Value Of Top Rankings That SEOs Rarely Talk About – A Global Perspective

Immanuel Simonsen — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:48:45 +0000

Over and over research shows that the top 3 listings on search engine result pages receive significantly more clicks than listings down the ladder. Shocker, I know. But while top rankings on search engines are absolutely vital for online brand visibility, traffic and ultimately business, SERP prominence serves another purpose that is talked about and assessed less frequently.

What I’m here referring to is the impact high rankings have on brand perception. In other words, are consumers more inclined to correlate a high ranking with a strong, authoritative and trustworthy brand? Experienced SEOs will tell you yes. The intuitive answer would also be yes. But is this really so? And if yes, does it differ across countries?

According to the Consumer Barometer by IAB/TNT/Google – an insanely cool (and free) insights tool that allows you to analyse and compare the digital landscape in 39 countries worldwide – the answer to both is yes.

Leading brands are expected to be on top of the search results page

Leading companies that fail to convert their brand equity into prominent rankings will not only lose out on a large amount of traffic but also fail to meet the expectations of online consumers. In fact, Japan is the only country in the chart below where less than half of the online population expect leading brands to dominate the search engine shelf space. Conversely, more than 9 in 10 of Saudi Arabia’s online consumers expect high SERP visibility from leading brands. Consumers similarly have well above average expectations to leading brands in Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico and Argentina, whereas the online population in highly developed internet economies like Sweden, Netherlands and Germany to a lesser extent expect overall brand strength to be reflected in high visibility on the likes of Google, Yandex and Baidu.

High rankings could very well be your cheapest and fastest way to gain local consumer trust

This site talks a lot about the opportunities and challenges connected to international expansion. On the challenges side of things, one issue that pops up time and again relates to brand strength. Specifically, how do you go about doing business in a country where you (at least initially) don’t enjoy the same brand strength as in your domestic market?

Surely, it can be an expensive and uphill battle to create a strong reputation in a market where you have little to no brand awareness. Should the objective of increasing awareness come at the expense of severely reduced profit margins due to lower-priced penetration strategies? Or through a significant ramp up of your advertising efforts? Or other profit squeezing market entry strategies?

Turns out there’s another option.

According to findings from the Consumer Barometer, a majority of online consumers equate search engine placement of a brand with its importance. Put simply, the more prominent your brand is in search engine results, the more important it will be perceived.

That said, as can be seen below, there are vast existing differences between countries, with emerging markets placing greater emphasis on the correlation between high rankings and ‘brand importance’.

Largely similar to the graph above, in Germany a modest 1 in 3 online consumers say that SERP placement of a brand reflects on its importance, whereas this figure is 2-2.5 times higher in Spain, Brazil, Taiwan, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Now, should this reflect on how you allocate your budgets in the locale? Of course it should.

In some countries high rankings alone won’t turn your unknown brand into a trusted provider of goods or services. In others this may suffice. High rankings are for obvious reasons – the ones of visibility and traffic that we already touched upon in the article – very important for any internet business in any country. But in some markets there’s an added value in the shape of improved brand strength so notable that achieving that top rank will make the sweet spot even sweeter. The efforts your company puts into SEO when entering foreign markets should reflect this.

Social Media And The Catholic Church: A Match Made In Heaven?

Immanuel Simonsen — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:09:28 +0000

With well over a billion Catholics scattered across the world, few organisations, if any, cater to an audience as international as the Catholic Church. Much like corporations are struggling with recession in most developed countries and have to look towards emerging markets for growth opportunities, the Vatican is facing a recession of its own in the shape of rising secularism in the Western world while performing far better in developing and emerging markets.

What’s particularly concerning for the Church is that the latter trend is largely caused by its own inability to stay current and relevant in an ever changing Western society, especially among younger demographics whom for obvious reasons are very important targets to ensuring the prosperity of the Church over the long haul. On the other hand, however, this may also be consoling to the Vatican in that its faith is somewhat in its own hands.

The departure of Pope Benedict XVI next week therefore poses an important strategic question for the Vatican with regards to the subsequent election of his successor: Should it focus on expanding its already growing presence in South America, Africa and (some parts of) Asia, or should it rethink its approach to regain relevance and resonance among citizens in developed countries? Or both?

It’s an important consideration to include into the equation of appointing the next head of the Catholic Church. But while it’s possible to achieve both – further expand in undeveloped regions whilst revitalising its presence in the West – it requires greater flexibility and adaptability. And with all due respect, these are virtues not normally associated with the organisation in question.

Say, even if the higher-standing people within the Church hierarchy are willing to take new remedies, there’s an obvious constraint in loosening the rigidity of an organisation that has to please 1.1 billion stakeholders.

Therefore inevitably, the Vatican’s announcement late last year that the Pope would start posting messages on Twitter under the handle @Pontifex was met by substantial criticism from particularly the Church’s most firm believers. Nevertheless, “the Pope’s presence on Twitter is a visible expression of the conviction that the Church must be present in the digital world”, the Vatican said in a statement.

The Pope’s arrival on Twitter also demonstrated the Holy See’s awareness and acknowledgement of the crucial role translation plays in resonating with a global audience. While Latin remains the lingua franca of the Church, the Vatican further launched @Pontifex profiles in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Polish and Arabic. Combined, these nine languages reach approximately 900 million of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, estimates The Economist. Not bad at all. Jesus would indeed be proud, as The Economist put it.

The Vatican also operates its own YouTube channels in various languages and actually goes beyond “just” adding subtitles to the videos it publishes. Surprisingly though – given that Brazil boasts the most Catholics in the world – Portuguese is left out. From a pragmatic point of view this is even more surprising when adding to that the large number of Catholics in Portugal, Mozambique and Angola. Moreover, unlike its multilingual presence on Twitter, videos on YouTube are available in Chinese and Lithuanian but not in Arabic and Polish.

Less About Representation Than Mindset

Choosing Pope Benedict XVI’s successor is certainly a question of representation. It’s estimated that three quarters of Catholics today live in the developing world, while two thirds of electors and candidates for the papacy come from Europe. As always, bookmakers have been quick to offer odds on the candidature for the papal office, and despite the misrepresentation, it isn’t perhaps all that surprising to find Cardinals from Ghana and Nigeria among the favourites.

However, if the Vatican goes for the ambitious bet (the one that aims to defeat rising secularism in the West without losing focus on its key growth markets in the developing world), it will be much more about the mindset of the next Pope than it will be about representation.

Specifically, will the person taking over the papal office make strides to build on the Vatican’s move into digital pursued under the leadership of Benedict XVI, or will he sack the “social profile” that he inherits? Or will he just be indifferent?

Of course achieving this goal is much more complex and requires deeper transformation than just expanding the Church’s multilingual social media portfolio. Nonetheless, it’s a signal from the top that there exists some degree of willingness to change ‘business as usual’, which can potentially echo down the entire organisation.

However, in a thought-provoking comment that I came across recently, Artemio Cruz argues that “the Catholic Church seemed to manage well with Latin for nearly 2000 years, even though, or perhaps just because, most of the population had no idea what was being said.” While surely giving food for thought, I will state my case that @Pontifex, a term that means ‘Bridge Builder’ in Latin, is a bridge that will be best built by increasingly communicating with the 1.1 billion Catholics around the world in their various vernaculars. Whether or not Pope Bendict XVI’s successor agrees with me remains to be seen.

Top 5 Global Search Properties: How Did They Perform in 2012?

Immanuel Simonsen — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:05:42 +0000

In an article published last week here on the site, Graeme Sewell of Webcertain alluded that 2013 could signal the beginning of the end of the PC and the end of the beginning of the tablet. The reasoning behind his statement was that global PC shipments saw a year-on-year decline in Q4 2012 for the first time in more than five years, meanwhile tablet shipments continued their spectacular upward trajectory. If current numbers hold up, tablet shipments are on course to surpass those of PCs by the end of the year, wrote Graeme.

This development, the transition from PCs onto mobile devices, is directly reflected and supported by comScore’s most recent qSearch analysis (widely considered the most reliable source in terms of tracking the global search engine market), which saw the total global number of PC searches decline by 4.6% in December 2012, compared to the corresponding period in 2011. More interestingly perhaps, comScore already started reporting year-on-year declines in traditional desktop searches back in September 2012, thus giving greater reason to believe that we’re dealing with a sticky trend, rather than an isolated event.

The decline is particularly interesting because it has occurred amidst a period of rapid internet uptake, with a whopping 250 million new users accessing the internet in the past 12 months, according to WeAreSocial. A big chunk of this growth, however, is being driven by emerging markets where mobiles are often the primary, if not the only gateway to the internet. Hence, this may very well explain the miniscule impact it has had on global desktop searches, if any.

Surely, the prolific use of smartphones and tablets as a means of accessing the internet, hereunder conducting searches, is disrupting search as we know it at an unprecedented pace. In certain verticals, mobile traffic already accounts for around one third of all searches, whereas the figure across all categories is expected to be somewhere between 10-15%. No doubt the industry is standing at an inflection point which in many ways bears resemblance to the early days of the internet. Nonetheless, these figures still suggest that, despite the rightful buzz about smartphones and tablets, the desktop remains the most important channel in most verticals for driving traffic and conversions – at least for the time being.

So without further ado, let’s dive into the specifics to see how the top 5 global desktop search properties have performed in 2012, using comScore’s most recent qSearch data.

Judging from the figures, it’s been an eventful year indeed.

US Search Engines Have All Witnessed Notable Desktop Declines in 2012

Google, Bing and Yahoo all saw year-on-year decreases in desktop searches, with Yahoo experiencing the by far steepest decline as the amount of searches plummeted by a concerning 20% year-on-year. Although more modest than Yahoo, global market leader Google also saw a notable drop of nearly 10% Y/Y. Desktop searches on Microsoft sites amounted to 4.12 billion in December 2012, down 10.5% compared to December 2011.

Unlike recent data from the GlobalWebIndexIndex, which suggest that mobiles and tablets are extending the social networking experience rather than replacing the PC, it appears that when it comes to search, mobile does seem to effectively replace some searches – notably those with local intent – that were previously conducted on the PC. In other words, mobiles and tablets are supplementary to a lesser extent in search than social networking.

Source: comScore qSearch

Yandex & Baidu Resilient

Local search stars Baidu and Yandex, however, have managed to counter the desktop headwind and, in fact, increase the number of searches by 13% and 27.8% respectively. Admittedly, they also both have the advantage of operating in exponentially growing internet markets where growth is surging to an extent that is bound to reflect positively on performance – shift to mobile or not.

Baidu Solidifies Second Place… But It Faces Increasing Domestic Competition

Baidu’s desktop increase, combined with the steep decline of Yahoo, means the Chinese search behemoth has solidified its position as the world’s second largest search engine over the course of the last 12 months. But now is surely no time for complacency. For the first time since Google pulled out of mainland China back in 2009, Baidu’s facing serious competition from domestic rival, Qihoo. In fact, Baidu’s year-on-year increase of 13% would have been notably larger had Qihoo not stirred up the Chinese search market in August 2012 in a move which saw the internet company capturing an incredible 10% of the lucrative search market literally overnight (see spike in graph below).

What’s even more interesting is the fact that Qihoo has managed to grow its share even after Baidu struck back; something that has resulted in analysts downgrading Baidu in concern that Qihoo poses a valid threat over the long-term, simply because Baidu’s sheer fiscal muscle power so far has proven insufficient to wipe off its now biggest contender.

Source: comScore qSearch

Moreover, just to add a little extra perspective on the impressive growth of Qihoo; the amount of searches Qihoo processed in December 2012 equalled those carried out through Amazon and Facebook – combined!

Yandex Surpasses Microsoft Sites

While difficult to see in the top graph of the article, when looking at Yandex and Microsoft in isolation, it shows how Yandex in quite spectacular fashion has managed to surpass Microsoft search entities in 2012. Apart from Bing, accounting for more than 90% of total searches via Microsoft Sites, these entities include MSN, Hotmail, Windows Live and a few others. Yandex on the other hand only has its search engine categorised by comScore as a search entity, yet it has outperformed Bing et al. with a strong performance, up 27.8% year-on-year and thus advancing to fourth place globally. This also indicates that Yandex yet again has managed to keep Google at bay, despite its many attempts to conquer the lucrative Russian market.

On a different note, it also leads one to wonder whether Microsoft’s so-called great splash with Bing in the year gone by – be that deeper social integration with Facebook or a neat design revamp – has had little to no impact?

Source: comScore qSearch

Google Remains The Undisputed Global Search Champion… But It’s Not All Plain Sailing

With nearly 115 billion monthly desktop searches processed in December 2012, Google unsurprisingly remains the undisputed global search leader. Indeed, this makes the Mountain View-based company nearly 8 times bigger than distant runner up, Baidu. But unless Google sees a significant higher percentage of mobile searches than its rival search engines, it’s not really news that should make Mr Page pop the champagne.

Having said that, it’s not unthinkable – far from it in fact – that this could prove the case thanks to the widespread global adoption of Android and following setting of Google as the default search option on those devices running the OS. Whichever is the case, Google has seen its global desktop search market share plummet by 8 percentage points over a period of just 12 months, as shown below:

Source: comScore qSearch

With mobile searches increasingly making inroads into total search traffic, Google’s main concern has revolved around monetising the channel as the mobile cost-per-click metric has demonstrated comparable lower returns to that of desktop. But the search leader may just have found a way to increase the profitability of mobile clicks.

Coming into effect from the middle of this year, Google won’t allow advertisers to buy ads strictly for desktop, nor will mobile only be an option, reports Business Insider. The push is bound to bring more advertisers to the mobile platform – whether they like it or not – thus resulting in increasing competition and, as a result, higher mobile CPCs. This also sees a shift to a more holistic and integrated approach that sort of merges the different channels, rather than treats them separately. Will other search engines follow suit?

Wrapping It Up

The overall decline in global desktop searches emphasises the behaviour shift to multichannel. While desktop remains the most important in terms of scale, the amount of business you’ll leave on the table by solely focusing on this channel is more than evident.

From the perspective of the search engines, 2012 has been all about transitioning themselves for the mobile future. 2013 will be about monetising it. And those who do the best job at this are undoubtedly steering for glory in the disruptive times ahead of us.

Now over to you! Are you surprised by any of the findings? Will Yahoo somehow find its way back into the game under the leadership of former Googler, Marissa Mayer? Will Baidu be able to weather the increasingly competitive environment in its domestic market? And similarly, does Yandex have what it takes to keep the big G at bay once again as Google is likely to intensify its focus on the rapidly growing Russian market?

Yandex’s Social App Put On Hold As Facebook Stands Firm On API Blocking

Immanuel Simonsen — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:59:02 +0000

When Yandex last week launched Wonder, its ‘experimental’ social aggregation app, the initial excitement it must have brought at the Russian Google didn’t last long. In fact, Facebook pulled the plug just three hours after Wonder went live by blocking the app from accessing its data.

Facebook noted that the app, which in many ways is similar to the company’s recently launched Graph Search, was in violation with its platform policies in that it perceived Wonder to be a search engine. Yandex then quickly released an official statement in which it argued that Wonder couldn’t be categorised as such because it only browses and collects data exclusively associated with a user’s social connections, and only if the user has expressly granted the app permission to do so. In other words, Wonder fetches and mines only the social media activity of the friends/connections that are in the application user’s social graph.

Image Credit: TechCrunch

Yandex and Facebook have been in discussions over the issue since Thursday morning, however according to this newly released official statement from Yandex it appears its efforts to revoke the decision have been wasted:

We discussed the issue with Facebook and it was confirmed that Facebook views the application Wonder as something that violates the Facebook Platform Policies (section I.12) and that the access to Facebook’s Graph API will not be restored.

According to Section I.12, no data obtained from Facebook can be used in any search engine or directory without the company’s written permission. The reason behind Facebook’s decision to revoke our access to their data appears to be that they do consider Wonder to be a search engine, while our understanding of what it is differs from this view.

Wonder’s functioning, in its current state, as well as the quality of user experience it provides, largely depends on the access to Facebook’s Graph API. Since this access was revoked, we decided to put our application on hold for the time being. We will be considering partnership opportunities with other social networks and services to offer our users a richer internet experience via Wonder.

This is just one out of several recent cases where Facebook is denying third-party apps to tap into its friend graph. By gradually establishing what appears to be some kind of data protection iron curtain, Matt McGee of Marketing Land argues that Facebook is essentially going against its own mission statement of creating a “more open and connected world”.

Protecting its data without dissuading developers to create products for the platform, however, is no doubt a delicate and difficult line to tread for the social behemoth. It also raises the important ethical question for the industry as a whole: Who owns your social data? The platforms or the users who feed the data to these platforms in the first place?

As the tagline of that movie goes: “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”. Well, you surely don’t get to +1 billion without making an additional few.

Yandex Expands Partnership With CERN In Deal That Could Improve Search Quality

Immanuel Simonsen — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:39:43 +0000

Today, Yandex has announced a collaboration with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in which Russia’s leading search company will provide its computing resources and data processing technologies, including MatrixNet, to CERN researchers. In return, Yandex gets wide access to extremely large-scale experiment datasets that will help improve its proprietary machine learning technology, MatrixNet, and ultimately its search results.

Today’s announcement takes the collaboration, which began in April 2011 when CERN started using Yandex’s servers for some of its data simulation, to the next level. While MatrixNet is already being tested on one of seven experiments currently running at the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest particle accelerator – a more user-friendly service to help scientists leverage the technology without assistance from Yandex specialists is currently in the makings.

Set for launch in May this year, this customised version will help physicists at CERN to better deal with inhumanly large amounts of data (10bn particle events per year has been detected since the first protons were fired through the LHC in 2008). As Andrey Golutvin of CERN says:

Today’s physics deals with large datasets that need to be properly processed and interpreted. New discoveries are all but impossible without meticulous data analysis.

Specifically, the use of MatrixNet could enable scientists to detect very rare events which wouldn’t otherwise have been detected. It will most likely also allow for detecting these events at much greater precision, meaning that hypotheses and theories can more accurately be confirmed or refuted.

A key feature of MatrixNet, which Yandex launched in 2009, is its ability to take into account a vast number of factors without relying on a particularly large sample size to achieve high relevancy or confidence levels – an important feature when trying to identify consistency of extremely rare event instances.

Yandex has been open to contribute to more experiments since the initial launch of its custom-built search tool for event detection at CERN in April 2012, and with today’s announcement it appears that its machine learning technology will become a more integral part of data analysis processes at the biggest particle physics laboratory in the world. However, while dealing with these vast datasets is said to improve the technology of MatrixNet, it remains unknown how big an impact it could have on search quality going forward.

Will Mobile Prove To Be Baidu’s Big International Break?

Immanuel Simonsen — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:13:22 +0000

In a move to cash in on the rapidly increasing demand for mobile internet across Africa and the Middle East, Baidu and Orange have joined forces in an exclusive deal that will see the two companies launch a co-branded version of Baidu’s mobile browser.

Launched yesterday for customers of Orange’s Egyptian MobiNil network, the aim is to roll out localised versions of the browser across each of the 19 countries in which Orange currently operates in the region.

‘El Browzer’, as it’s dubbed, will be available for download for existing Orange customers using Android devices, while shipments of Android handsets later in the year will come with the app pre-installed.

Strong adoption of low-cost Android devices

France Telecom, owner of Orange, says it’s seeing very rapid uptake of lower-priced Android smartphones amongst its nearly 80 million large mobile customer base in the region. In fact, the telecommunications operator states in the press release that it has seen demand for Android devices double in the second half of 2012.

Whereas price and poor 3G infrastructure have previously impeded prolific smartphone adoption across these markets, such barriers to entry are quickly eroding as smartphones become more affordable and 3G networks improve.

This partnership will further help in bringing affordable data plans to consumers in Africa and the Middle East. Baidu’s mobile browser is reportedly significantly more data efficient compared to other mobile browsers, reducing the amount of data consumed by up to 90% in some instances.

Baidu’s first real international breakthrough?

It’s no secret that Baidu’s internationalisation strategy, apart from sporadic moves in Japan, is entirely targeted at emerging markets. In 2011, the Chinese search behemoth launched services in Egypt and Thailand, followed by a move in the spring of last year in which Baidu announced the opening of an office in Brazil to support its expansion plans in South America.

However, while Baidu’s success beyond its domestic borders has so far been fairly limited, the partnership with an already well-established player like Orange could potentially pave the way for its first real international breakthrough. TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden notes that “Chinese companies have long eyed developing markets like Africa as places for expansion beyond their home territory. It’s a strategy that has worked to great effect for companies like Huawei and ZTE with network equipment, with deals for cost-competitive kits underpinned with well-termed vendor finance agreements with the carriers to seal the deal.”

Certainly, this marks an important step in Baidu’s aspirations to become a globally recognised brand – especially during a time where concerns from various sides have been raised over increased domestic search competition from Qihoo, as well as a general lack of mobile visibility.

Tapping into ‘underserved’ potential

Surely, Baidu’s choice to focus on emerging markets outside of China makes perfect sense when you think about the success it has achieved in its home country. Hu Yong, General Manager of Baidu’s International Business Unit, said following the announcement of the co-branded Orange-Baidu browser:

Baidu’s success has been built on developing technologies, products and services appropriate for China, the world’s largest emerging market. We’re now bringing that experience to bear in other markets now enjoying rapid growth.

The new browser is currently available in Arabic and English, while a French version is in the makings. And localising for the Arabic-speaking population throughout the region could especially prove a wise move. Recent research on the size and economic potential of languages online shows that Arabic has surpassed French, Russian and German in total online population, in addition to demonstrating the fastest growth of online spending potential between 2011 and 2012. However, Vijayalaxmi Hegde of Common Sense Advisory notes that, despite this apparent potential, the Arabic-speaking world continues to be heavily neglected by global organisations: “Arabic is also the most underserved language on top global websites around the world. Languages are considered to be “underserved” when they appear less frequently – with less available content – than either the size or economic potential the online audience warrants.”

In this light, Baidu’s efforts to make strides in the Middle East and Africa make even greater sense and could be a significant step for the search engine in its plans for international expansion.

Europeans And Their Languages: In Which Countries Does Translation Make Sense?

Immanuel Simonsen — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:27:06 +0000

Europe is a region well known for its linguistic diversity and high degree of multilingualism among its citizens. There are 23 officially recognised languages and more than 60 indigenous regional languages. Then on top of this you have many non-indigenous languages that are spoken by migrant communities across Europe, as stated by the European Commission in its comprehensive report on “Europeans and their Languages” from 2012.

Surely, with so many languages in play, how do you decide when and where translation is feasible, and when it’s not?

Below I’ve compiled a few insights into how Europeans use and perceive languages, which are taken from the abovementioned report, commissioned by the European Commission and carried out by TNS Opinion & Social Network in the 27 Member States of the European Union.

It’s a misconception that almost all Europeans are multilingual

According to the report, 54% of Europeans are able to hold a conversation in at least one other language than their mother tongue, one in four speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue, and one in ten are conversant in three or more foreign languages.

While that’s a lot compared to the global average, almost half of the region’s 740 million large population are monoglots (people who speak only one language). Moreover, when respondents were asked if they knew any foreign language well enough to communicate online, that number dropped to 39%. In other words, less than two-fifths of Europeans speak a foreign language to a level that enables them to communicate and engage online. For English specifically, the by far dominating foreign language in the EU, that number is 26%.

When you add to this that previous research has found that a whopping 9 in 10 Europeans prefer surfing the web in their native language, the amount of missed opportunity by having your website in, say, English only becomes very apparent.

Which are the 3 most common foreign languages in each Member State?

In 19 out of 25 Member States (excluding the UK and Ireland), English is the most widely spoken foreign language. Not only is English the most spoken foreign language, it’s also perceived the by distance most useful foreign language, with 67% of Europeans naming English as one of the two most useful languages for themselves. This indeed puts it well ahead of German (17%), French (16%), Spanish (14%), and Chinese (6%).

French and German are the two most commonly used foreign languages after English; however, the report interestingly finds that, when correlating these findings with those of the equivalent 2005 survey, the perceived importance of knowing French and German have decreased rather notably. Put differently, these languages aren’t considered as useful as they used to be.

Degree of multilingualism greatly varies between EU countries

As can be seen above, there’s also widespread national variation on the degree of multilingualism between European countries. To better demonstrate these outspoken differences, below I’ve compared the top 5 multilingual countries against the bottom 5:

This is extremely valuable information when considering whether translating a website is economically feasible. For example, it’s plausible that it won’t make that big a difference on your performance to keep your website in English if you’re targeting Dutch consumers, however it surely will if you’re aiming to make inroads in Hungary, Italy or Portugal – just to name a few.

In favour of multilingualism, but not at the expense of native languages

There’s great openness amongst Europeans towards foreign languages; arguably an understatement given that more than 8 in 10 express that knowing languages other than their mother tongue is very useful and that everyone in the EU should be able to speak at least one foreign language.

Moreover, a majority of Europeans are in favour of being able to speak a ‘common language’ across all EU Member States, however, 81% state that all languages should continue to be treated equally. That’s indeed a very important catch, and it actually represents an increasingly favoured view towards treating all languages equally, compared to the 2005 survey. The report notes:

(…) although most Europeans support the notion that everyone in the EU should be able to speak a common language, this view does not extend to believing that any one language should have priority over others.

Multilingualism is NOT on the rise

There can be no doubt as to how enormous an impact multilingual proficiency within the EU will have on reaching the proclaimed objective of creating a truly integrated Europe going forward. Its impact on workforce mobility, competitiveness and finally overall economic performance of the Union in a global marketplace certainly shouldn’t be underestimated either.

While the internet is often described (and rightfully so) as this unifying force that brings us all closer together – be that geographically, culturally and linguistically -“there are no signs that multilingualism is on the increase within the EU.”

In fact, findings from the report show that there has been a small decrease in the proportion of Europeans who say they’re able to speak a language in addition to their mother tongue, compared to the 2005 survey. This decline is largely driven by notable decreases in Russian and German proficiency in Central and Eastern countries such as Slovakia, The Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary.

Having said that, the report does find that foreign languages are increasingly being used ‘regularly’ on the internet, up 10 percentage points since 2005 and thus marking one of the most notable changes recorded during the period.

Closing thoughts

As each Member State is responsible for its own educational and language policies, a truly integrated, ‘common-language-speaking’ Europe seems light-years away.

Also, bear in mind that being able to speak a language doesn’t imply that people use it frequently, prefer it over their mother tongue, or actively go to seek out products and services on the web in that language. Hence, the most important thing to be aware of when jotting down your European expansion roadmap is the notion that there’s no such thing as a golden rule, single-language or uniform cultural identity within the region.

However, since translating your website into the vast amount of languages that are in use within the region will often be an economical no-go, what you can do is create clusters of countries that share similar linguistic and cultural characteristics, e.g. English website for Holland and the Scandinavian countries, Russian for the Baltics and so forth. Then for countries with a low degree of multilingual proficiency, you’ll have to evaluate whether the economic potential matches the costs of translating your site. Targeting countries like Portugal, Hungary, Italy and Poland with a foreign language will simply be a waste of time, money and effort.

While such an approach often won’t put you on even ground with your local competitors from a language point of view, you might be able to benefit from the economies of scale that come along with having an international presence. However, going back to the opening question of where translation makes sense, it should go without saying that the ideal solution will always be to target any given country in its mother tongue. And in many cases it’s absolutely essential to compete and ultimately be successful.

Survey: Working With Multilingual Search Agencies & Local Search Engines

Immanuel Simonsen — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:16:00 +0000

In 2012 one story after the other was published here on the site about the massive potential of going global, with especially the rapidly emerging BRIC countries receiving lots of attention.

While no one can dispute the great economic potential of targeting these mastodons, many businesses continue to refrain from doing so due to language barriers, use of local search engines, cultural differences, legal issues, or for entirely different reasons. Others, however, have already made the leap and are beginning to reap the rewards despite initial obstacles.

Whether you have a lot of experience or are a rookie (or anything in between) when it comes to working with multilingual search agencies and local search engines, we would like to hear from you in this very brief survey. This one actually only takes two minutes to fill out.

Thank you very much!

Take the survey here

The Evolution Of Personalised Search: Brilliant Or Just Creepy?

Immanuel Simonsen — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:23:18 +0000

Last week, in what can be characterised as a late move, Yandex announced that it has started personalising its results.

What particularly struck me following the announcement was the fact that Yandex’s proprietary technology would potentially allow the company to completely personalise the results it displays to users. But it doesn’t. Why? Because during the testing of this approach throughout the last year Yandex discovered that by fully personalising its results it would actually be doing its users a great disservice. In short, they simply deemed these results less relevant.

So what really got me thinking was this: If hyper-personalised results aren’t necessarily what users prefer when it comes to search, how come Google and Bing, in particular, are putting such a massive emphasis on it?

Innovation happening faster than we’re able to adapt

If you’re one of the cynics, you’d probably argue that it’s a purely selfish move for economic reasons, through which Google, as well as others, provide marketers with extensive targeting capabilities in return for higher CPMs, CPCs etc. Obviously, bumping up advertising revenues is an essential part of it… but is it really the only one? Could it be that it’s also driven by a strong desire to create amazing, game-changing products that also happen to be monetisable? I wouldn’t know, I’m just asking.

Ironically, however, it seems that the breath-taking speed of innovation occurring in technology today means that technology itself is evolving faster than we’re able to adapt… and because there’s something very pleasant and comforting about what we already know that’s indeed scary to many of us. It’s not necessarily that people don’t appreciate change, however too many changes happening too quickly will often result in some form of negative or worried response. In some odd way you might say that technology is standing in its own way.

So perhaps the real questions to ask are:

Are the ways in which some search engines use our data to provide hyper-personalised results, in fact, creepy or less relevant? Or have we just yet to adapt to this new reality?

Whether good or bad, it seems clear that there’s no way escaping it; personalised results are here to stay in some way or another. So in order to better understand and answer the questions above, taking a closer look at the past and present of personalised search and the attitudes towards it is probably a good way to start.

So here we go (hope you’re still with me )…

‘Big Data’ paves the way

In marketing circles personalisation has been one of the bright stars in the buzzword bingo for what is now decades. And in all fairness, it’s not without reason. Personalisation is a tested-and-true tactic and has arguably become more important than ever before due to the increasingly cluttered information landscape we as consumers navigate in.

Surely, in an age of Big Data, marketers and publishers alike have never had better conditions of personalising their communication. The amount of personal data we’re sharing online these days, often unknowingly, is feeding data giants, search engines in particular, with an abundance of information.

Bing and Google both say this data enables them to deliver a much better user experience by tailoring results to fit the specific preferences of the individual searcher. The critics on the other hand fear that Google will ultimately know more about you than your partner. They also argue that the increasing degree of personalisation in search results is detrimental to relevance – more on both of these a bit later, but first let’s take a look at how personalisation in search plays out in practice.

The 3 major areas of personalisation in search

Search behaviour, language, and geographic location of a searcher have historically been the main determinants of personalisation. These still carry great weighing and have gradually become more sophisticated signals in search engine algorithms. However, Google’s introduction of Search Plus Your World in early 2012, which arguably marked the most radical iteration of its search results ever, has shook up the entire search engine industry and added an extra layer to the personalisation equation so it now looks something like this:

Search Behaviour/History

Historic searcher data is what we typically associate with personalised results – be that:

Query history (what has a user searched for in the past)
SERP interaction (what has a user clicked on in the past)
On-page browsing behaviour
Bounce rates
Bookmarking
Etc., etc…

In the recent case of Yandex, its algorithm takes into consideration several factors when serving up personalised results, though it seems to rely mainly on the query history of the user. The more a user searches, the more tailored results will naturally become. In the example below, it can be seen how the same search query will trigger different suggestions and reorganising of results based on a user’s previous searches. For queries where Yandex doesn’t have sufficient information on a user’s preferences, personalisation is switched off.

Personalisation based on search behaviour is an iterative process in the sense that, as your search patterns change, so will the results that are displayed to you. Accordingly, your most recent searcher history will bear greater weighing than search behaviour detected, say, a year ago.

Geography

Search engines have long used geographic signals to determine the relevance of their results. However, the sophistication and precision with which results are nowadays served up have dramatically improved since these signals were first deployed by Google more than a decade ago.

In the wake of the proliferation of mobile internet consumption and the greater local precision on these devices, the days where geographic signals were restricted to the country-level are long gone. Heck, the far superior geo-location technology on mobile devices means we’re even moving rapidly beyond personalisation at the city-level when searching.

In the example below, I’ve conducted two generic searches for Starbucks – one from my office and the other at home. While it’s not a completely different set of results, one listing has been swapped. Perhaps it retains the two stores that are closest to my home, even when searching from the office, since I primarily search from home on my iPad?

Even for PC searches, Google continues to place a greater emphasis on local results; probably best exemplified by the company’s Venice update this year. In essence, even for generic, non-localised search terms conducted on a desktop, local pages will now much more easily find their way into the top slots if in close proximity (or deemed in close proximity) of the searcher.

Note below the striking prominence given to “Seattle listings” when searching for a highly competitive, non-localised term such as SEO, as noted by Mike Ramsey in his great piece on how to understand and rock the Venice update.

Tip for global businesses: For international corporations with footprints in multiple markets this further underlines the importance of making each presence truly local for maximum visibility. Consequently, restricting yourself to targeting at the country-level may no longer be enough, even if you have a stronger backlink profile than local competitors.

The added social layer

The integration of social into search is no longer any news flash, nor does anyone seem to doubt the decisiveness of the social dimension in search going forward.

Surely, in many ways it makes sense to make search reflect how we obtain and deem information useful in most other aspects in life; by turning to the people we know and trust for advice. Having said that, the extent to which these signals are already given prime shelf space in search results is striking – be that Google/G+, Bing/Facebook, or Baidu’s relatively recent integration of Sina Weibo tweets into its results.

In the specific case of Google, its determination to make its social project work is particularly noteworthy. Following Google’s launch of SPYW earlier this year, an abundance of articles have analysed the impact G+ connections have on search results. And the conclusions are fairly unanimous; social connections & activity on Google+ can be the number one factor trumping all other SEO efforts like links, title tags etc.

Google Authorship also reflects a move from what you might call the traditional brand (e.g. website) to the personal brand, i.e. the author. In essence, this means that the person linking to you can bear greater weighing than where it’s from. And the Google+ profile of an author is for Google a strong indicator as to how influential that person is. Expect this to gain impetus in 2013.

It therefore goes without saying that ALL companies are now neglecting G+ at their own peril. Since the content you add on Google+ can reach not only the people who have you in their circles but also their followings, boosting the amount of circles you’re in can reap great rewards for SEO.

Tip for global businesses: For global businesses in particular, this means identifying and mapping out local influencers and authorities within your vertical in each locale. At the International Search Summit in London some weeks back, Bas van den Beld did a presentation on Social Search and used the analogy of “local hairdressers” to describe these influencers; the ones who are likely to talk about your business and share it with the local community. By identifying and influencing those influencers, you’ll not only benefit in the social networks but also directly in the SERPs.

How it all comes together?

So personalisation anno 2012 is a highly complex technical process that factors in a plethora of different signals. In practice, I imagine a step-by-step process could go something like this:

But are personalised search results really what users want?

Well, yes and no it seems. Search, as the word implies, is exploratory in nature. On the one hand the web is a BIG place, which need filtering and tailoring to fit personal preferences, but hyper-personalised results will on the other significantly limit the scope based on previous behaviour and/or social connections and actions.

Indeed, it appears to be a very delicate line to tread. As Grigory Bakunov, Deputy CTO of Yandex, said last week at the press conference in Moscow when announcing Yandex’s introduction of personalised search:

Our testing and research shows that our users appreciate an appropriate level of personalization and increase their use of Yandex as a results.

I’ve highlighted ”appropriate“ because that somehow seems to illustrate the catch here. Yandex says it has seen some very encouraging figures when personalising results, such as 37% higher CTR on a personalised top result; however, when providing users with completely personalised results these were deemed less relevant.

As Andy Atkins-Krüger, CEO of Webcertain, puts it in his Search Engine Land article, “users don’t want to get locked down in their own interests”.

So while search engines say it provides better results, findings from a survey by Pew released earlier this year point to the contrary; 65% of respondents perceived personalised search as a bad thing due to the limited information you get online, compared to just 29% stating that it provided more relevant results. And Google’s heavy push of its own social network in its search results surely hasn’t helped in improving this perception.

Personalisation raises serious privacy concerns

As touched briefly upon in the opening section of this piece, serious concerns over privacy issues have emerged following the increasing degree of search personalisation. Google’s move, in particular, to unify its privacy policy earlier this year, through which more than 60 separate policies have been boiled down to one, has had privacy experts and lawmakers up in arms in concern that Google will ultimately know more about you than your partner.

In essence, the big G is now able to collect and merge user data across almost all of its services (something which was not possible with the previous structure), which in turn allows Google to gain a much deeper understanding of who you are and what you want to know at a given moment in time. More on this is in the final section.

It also appears that it’s not just lawmakers and privacy crusaders who worry about the means of personalising search. The aforementioned survey by Pew took a look as well at the extent to which people found personalised search an invasion of privacy, with findings showing that a whopping 73% were “Not Ok” with the increasing personalisation and storage of their user data.

In Europe, this concern has been followed up by formal investigations carried out by French watchdog CNIL, who subsequently has found Google’s policy to be breaching EU law on several counts and has given the American search behemoth until spring next year to formally respond to its recommendations. Given this, it’s far from unlikely that we’ll get to a point in 2013 where Google will have to adapt the way it handles user data and ultimately how it operates some of its web services in certain countries.

Tip for global businesses:
If you’re an international player, beware that this affects you too (or at least it should). For example, if you’re doing business online in Europe, I probably won’t have to remind you about the “Cookie” Law! As regulations and general privacy concerns largely differ between countries, so should your market approach. In the worst case scenario, you might be in breach with national laws yourself.

The future: Google knows what you want BEFORE you know it yourself

Well, in that case the future is already here. Sort of. Search is certainly undergoing a radical transformation these days, but since the building blocks for the next generation are currently being laid, the true revolution at this point in day is mainly happening behind closed doors. Having said that, we are seeing product launches that provide us with a good indication of where we’re headed, and although these products can already seem amazing – magical at times even – they are merely beta tests of what’s in store for us in the near future.

Google Now is one such product – an ambitious cross-over company project that gives the first indications of how Google’s many products may come together after unifying its privacy policy. The Google Now app, which essentially comprises of voice search and automated cards that ‘pop up’ with relevant contextual information (without you explicitly searching for it), is currently only available on Android devices running ‘Jelly Bean’ and up.

Indeed, it radically alters the paradigm of search as being a blank box in which you actively go to seek information. Because Google is now able to pull information about you from almost its entire range of web services – be that calendars, Gmail, maps etc. – it’s developing a much deeper understanding of not only who you are but also a contextual understanding of what you need in real time.

For example, it might “tell you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work (it already knows the route of your daily commute), when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favourite team’s score while they’re playing(…)All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them,” Google explains on the landing page for its relatively new cross-over service.

You can check out the short Google Now video here.

In its current shape, it functions more like a personal assistant you just hired. He/she might bring you tea when you asked for coffee, but with time, effort and training this assistant has the potential to become better than you could ever have imagined. Down the road, this personal assistant will always be one step ahead of you, handing in documents you need before you even thought about it yourself, reminding you about appointments that slipped your mind, and providing you with exact directions to get there. In short, a proactive rather than reactive personal assistant.

Increasingly, you’ll be opting-in by default. So if you’re an avid user of Google products and don’t actively go change your settings, Google will know when your flight departs, in which gym you normally do your afternoon workout (and when you do it), if you’re in near proximity of any of your friends or family etc. and provide automated suggestions accordingly.

So basically, although these are baby steps to what search has the potential to become, Google is in some cases scrapping the second step – the one where the user types in a query – in the search personalisation process that I outlined earlier in the piece.

This is radically different from the current “bar bet settling” function of smartphones as a blunt search instrument, as wisely pointed out by Dieter Bohn in this in-depth article on Google Now & the future of search.

And one thing is certain; it truly divides the waters. Some people seem to love it, while others are genuinely freaked out by it (as illustrated in some of the comments that I’ve scraped from articles and videos about Google Now):

So now that we have a better understanding of the evolution of personalised search and where it’s headed, let’s go back to the opening question: Creepy or brilliant? To be honest, although I don’t even have a spouse to remind me that I need to go exercise, as opposed to the person commenting above, I’m still not quite sure which of the two to go with.

Now over to you! Are you a supporter or totally creeped out by this? Are you rushing to your Google settings to opt-out as you read this? Or is this just the inevitable evolution of search, technology and society in general? Have your say in the comments below. It’s much appreciated.

3 Considerations Prior To Launching A Global Multi-Screen Strategy

Immanuel Simonsen — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 14:21:38 +0000

Given the proliferation of mobile and tablet internet consumption, these days it shouldn’t come as any surprise that by only targeting desktop users you’ll likely leave a lot of potential on the table.

However, one thing is being aware of the ever increasing impact mobile devices have on consumer purchasing patterns; another is actually implementing it into your global digital strategy. Because truth is, the inevitable complexity that comes along with having to manage and track multiple devices across different markets is just as evident as the huge potential inherent in these relatively “new” channels.

So how do you actually determine whether the potential exceeds the challenges and additional costs of employing a multi-screen strategy in the markets you target?

At the recent International Search Summit in London, Stanislas di Vittorio, CEO of eSearchVision, suggested three important areas to consider/research before rushing into multi-screen mode across all international markets:

Audience/User characteristics in the single market
The competitive landscape in your vertical in the single market
Technical assessment

Audience
Mobile usage continues to be hyper-fragmented on a global scale. Heck, in many countries significant regional differences even exist between the urban and rural population. Important questions to ask will be:

What is the device mix in the market? Smartphones vs. simpler feature phones? OS market shares for tablets and mobile?
What is the internet use split by device in the market, i.e. how much traffic does each device generate of total internet consumption?
Are there any existing geographic differences of the above (below the country-level)?
Inclination to purchase – to what extent are mobiles and tablets being used for purchasing goods and services?

Carry out this research for the overall population and then compare how your target audience stacks up against the country average.

Competition
Benchmarking who you’re up against, as well as assessing your own brand strengths relative to that of your competitors, will help in unveiling market-specific opportunities:

Are your competitors making use of mobile channels?
If so, how?
Is there a mismatch between the opportunities you’ve identified in the previous audience analysis and how businesses are employing multi-screen strategies?

Applying a simple SWOT-structure to analyse each competitor, if done properly, will often do the job here.

Technical
Finally, taking a reality check to determine whether you’re actually able to pursue those identified opportunities from a technical standpoint is of great importance. Questions to ask yourself include:

Can you provide both Web and App options suitable for your target audience?
Is it economically and technically feasible?
Will you be able to accurately track and attribute the value of your multi-screen campaigns?
Do you have in-market support and the necessary capacity to fully capitalise on the strategy once it goes live?

Making the right decisions
By following this approach that Stanislas outlined during the summit, you’ll be able to decide and justify:

What devices to target (and exclude).
How to structure geo-targeting. For example, you may decide to target your iOS campaign only at iPad and iPhone users who live in tier 1 and 2 cities in China.
Accurately define objectives and KPIs for each market and campaign.

If you’re interested in reading more, Stanislas was sharing a few insights here on the site into multi-screen strategies on a global scale ahead of his presentation at the International Search Summit in London.