Google’s new encrypted search for logged in users now appears to be blocking a much higher percentage of search terms than when it initially rolled out two weeks ago. In some cases, it might even be higher than the 10% or less figure that the company initially predicted might be impacted.

Blocking Search Queries                 

Two weeks ago Google announced that it would start encrypting search sessions of anyone signed in to Google.com. In practice, this means that Google stopped passing the organic keywords that referred traffic to websites whenever users are logged in Google and conducting searches.
This change caused strong reactions, both in the web analytics industry (as this means that organic search becomes less trackable) and also in terms of whether Google was protecting privacy fully (since advertisers still receive this information).                                           

Single Digit Impact Predicted

Google predicted that the change would impact 10% or less of searches:

Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.

In fact, the week the changes started rolling out, various reports put the “Not Provided” percentage — which is what those using Google Analytics see if terms are blocked — at around 2% to 3%.

High Single Digit To Above 10% Now Happening

However, as of October 31, we have seen a very significant increase on the Not Provided figure here on Search Engine Land. It’s not just us, either. Looking at data from several websites across industries, we see a range of 7% to 14% of total organic keywords now being blocked.
Below you see how the “Not Provided” figure has suddenly spiked for Search Engine Land:

Below you can see how the percentage of Not Provided for the total organic keywords for November 1st to the site is above 10%, 12.87% in all:

The figure is even more dramatic, however, when you consider it as a percentage of Google-driven keywords. In other words, the 12.87% figure above means that for ALL keywords from ANY search engine to Search Engine Land, 12.87% of them were blocked.
As this blocking is only happening by Google, what’s the percentage of only keyword traffic from Google? That works out to 14.2%.
Of course, one might expect Search Engine Land to have a higher percentage of search-driven traffic than other sites. But as said, we’ve also looked at sites beyond Search Engine Land.
Danny Sullivan’s personal blog, Daggle, had 13.65% of its Google-driven keywords blocked. One non-tech site had 7.1% of its Google-driven queries reporting “Not Provided.” Another non-tech site we know of had 8.83% of all its keywords reporting as “Not Provided.”
We’d love to hear what others are finding — please comment below, if you’d like to share your figures.

Rollout Still Happening; Percentage Could Get Higher

The rollout was supposed to take place over the course of several weeks. The process is still happening, and it seems as if it was suddenly enabled for more users on October 31.
Google wouldn’t confirm that, nor say how complete the rollout is at this point. In general, the company said:

As we noted, this change will occur over the next few weeks. Traffic figures will naturally vary depending on a website’s audience. What we provided was an estimate.

If there are significantly more people not yet being included in encrypted search, the percentage of Not Provided queries would likely grow over the coming weeks.

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About The Author: Daniel Waisberg is the Founder of Conversion Journey, a consultancy that provides insights on improving the performance of websites. He is also the founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement & Optimization website. You can follow him on Twitter or Google+. See more articles by Daniel Waisberg

SEO Beats PPC & Social Media For Generating Leads, New Industry Report Says

SEO is the number one source of leads for both B2C and B2B marketers, beating out both PPC and social media marketing in a recent survey of online marketers. But more of those surveyed say they plan to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2012, ahead of SEO and PPC.

The numbers come from the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report, which was compiled by Webmarketing123, a California-based online marketing agency. The company surveyed more than 500 U.S. online marketers in August and September; about two-thirds of all respondents identified themselves as B2B marketers.

Whether B2B or B2C, both groups of marketers agree that SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation. 57 percent of B2B marketers credit SEO as their primary source of generating leads, while 41 percent of B2C marketers said the same thing.

Both types of marketers say that website traffic is the primary way they measure the success of online marketing efforts. Brand awareness was at the bottom of the list for measuring success by both B2B and B2C respondents.

The survey asked a number of budget-related questions, including one about which channels get the majority of the marketers’ budgets. On the B2B side, one-third indicated that SEO gets the majority of their budget. But on the B2C side, more than 42 percent say that PPC gets the majority of their budget — about double the number of B2C marketers who said SEO is their top budget allocation.

Overall, 60 percent of respondents said they plan to increase their budget for social media marketing in 2012; 53 percent plan to increase their budget for SEO and 40 percent will increase their PPC budget.

Those increases in social media spending are likely field by another couple statistics from the survey: 68 percent say they’ve generated leads from either Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, while 55 percent have closed deals from social media leads.

The 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report can be downloaded from Webmarketing123′s website. You’ll need to provide name and contact information. There’s also an associated infographic with many statistic, which we’ve posted separately here: Infographic: Digital Marketer Views On SEO, PPC & Social Media.

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About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee

 

Google Tweaks AdWords To Give Landing  - Page Quality More Weight

After quietly testing in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score. This means ads with landing pages that Google deems to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank higher for lower cost-per-click bids.  

“What we’ve seen is that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads. But the landing pages — the merchant sites, the advertiser landing pages — are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction,” Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team told me. This, says Alferness, means the user experience isn’t what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”

Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal. If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was. The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivizing advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding. Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.

Alferness says Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality.

“What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance — choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to sort of push on those best practices. I gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”

The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.

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About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

Google Looks to Cash in with YouTube Channels, New Circular Ads

Google is reportedly in the final stages of negotiating several deals for original YouTube content with major media outlets and celebrities such as Tony Hawk. The search giant is also testing out new ad formats, one of which is reminiscent of the Sunday newspaper circulars, in an effort to drive both online ad revenue and website visitors into physical stores.

YouTube Tricking Out Video Channels, Hello Tony Hawk?

Google/YouTube will advance over $100 million to partners, who will then split ad revenue sold against the content with the world’s largest video site, "people familiar with the matter" told The Wall Street Journal. By offering free channels with high quality content featuring household names, YouTube will try to draw premium advertisers and their big ad budgets online.

Earlier this year, YouTube went into the movie rental business, with 3,000 full-length offerings on their U.S site and, later, over 1,000 titles on YouTube.ca. Late in August, they also broke the 1 billion views marker with their Promoted Videos program. Now, they’re after a share of the global TV advertising pie, a market expected to reach $221.9 billion by 2015, with online and mobile TV advertising growing substantially from their relatively small bases in 2010 (PwC).

The ad budget may not come from traditional TV budgets, but with digital expected to take over 33 percent of the projected $578 billion global advertising spend by 2015, this is where the money is at. And Google, the proud papa of the biggest video site going, surely knows this and will capitalize on it.

The WSJ speculated on a number of potential YouTube partners, but no deals have been formally announced. As for Hawk, his side isn’t talking (yet) and had “no comment at this time.”

Google Launching Circulars in a Step Forward for Offline Retailers

Google also launched a new website promoting the different ad formats they’re testing; ads that may incorporate visual, local, and social elements. One third of searches with ads, said Google, show enhanced ad formats.

One of these new and highly visual ad formats is expected to formally roll out today and is designed to help drive traffic to physical stores. Google Circulars are large-format, location and query personalized ads with the option for numerous click-points.

Much like the Sunday circular in a traditional newspaper, these new ads will pop up when a user clicks on a search or display ad. They are desktop, mobile, and tablet compatible.

Every day, there are more than a billion searches on Google, with more than half of those searches coming from outside of the U.S. (Google internal data). Google will formally introduce the new Circulars ad format later this week at an Advertising Week event.

For now, here is a sneak peek at a Circular mockup:

                   

           

Article Written By  Miranda Miller, October 4, 2011

Facebook Launches “People Talking About This” Metric, Premium Ad Unit & More

Facebook is launching a new “People Talking About This” metric for fan pages this week, designed to show conversations happening about a brand or page owner across the web. It’s part of an upgraded Page Insights tool. Also released is a new Page Insights API tool.

Facebook emailed us the information about the launches tonight, which coincide with the start of Advertising Week in New York tomorrow. Given it’s a Sunday evening, I’m just going to post what was sent, and we may do a deeper follow up tomorrow.

Page Insights Tool

Facebook emailed the following about the updated tool:

With the new Page Insights, Facebook is emphasizing the importance of sharing on Pages, because this increases a brand’s reach, and reach is an important metric to marketers. Facebook has enhanced Insights to show brands how to get more people talking about and sharing the things Pages/brands put on their Pages, which is key to getting a brand’s message out to more people. And research shows that word-of-mouth conversations among friends are the most influential for getting a brand’s message across.

With the new Page Insights, Pages can:

See how posts they put on their Page reach people on Facebook – beyond their fans.

See Total Likes, number of Friends of Fans of a Page, the new public and internal Pages metric, ‘People talking about this’, and Weekly Total Reach of a Page

Optimize content for posts -whether they’re photos, videos, questions, etc. – see what’s working best at reaching the most people, and how to increase the viral nature of these posts.

Facebook also sent this screenshot:

People Talking About This

About the new “People Talking About This" metric (which is to roll out this week, Facebook told us), Facebook emailed:

“People Talking about this" counts ‘stories" – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user's news feed:

liking your Page

posting to your Page's Wall

liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums)

answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events

mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page

liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.

Conversations On Pages

About “Conversations On Pages," Facebook emailed:

1. Conversations on Pages let brands reach more than just their Fans – which is important in increasing awareness, finding new customers, and even driving sales.

2. Friends of Fans represent a larger set of consumers than just a brand's Fans – 34x larger, on average for the top 100 brand Pages, and 81x larger for the top 1000 (comScore).

3. Friends of Fans are also much more likely to visit a store, website, and even purchase a product or service (comScore).

4. Starbucks Fans & Friends of Fans spend 8% more in stores and are transacted 11% more frequently than average Starbucks customer (comScore)

5. Bing Fans conduct 68% more searches on Bing than average Bing searcher. Friends of Fans conduct 27% more searches on Bing (comScore)

Premium Ad Unit

About the new Premium Ad Unit, Facebook emailed:

Investing in ads helps boost a Page's brand messages, and we've seen that social context around advertising is both better for brands and better for people because the advertising becomes more relevant.

So today Facebook is also introducing a new expanded Premium ad unit that combines Page posts with social context from your friends when available. When the person viewing this brand's ad has friends connected to this brand's Page, Facebook will expand the unit to include a line above that shares which friends like the Page – thus combining the brand's voice in the ad with a friend's voice, together.

Facebook sent this screenshot of the new ad unit:

Facebook Page Insights API

About the new Facebook Page Insights API, Facebook emailed:

To encourage third party development and analytics innovation, Facebook is also announcing a Page Insights API for the analytics developer community, so that they can create customized Page Insights solutions for existing and potential clients.

Webtrends (Gatorade, Simon Malls), Wildfire (Electronic Arts and Virgin Atlantic) and Context Optional (Sony Playstation and Levis) are already creating customized insights tools for clients based on the new Page Insights through the Facebook Insights API.

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About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely citedauthority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a process which relies heavily on the proper application of keyword rich, relevant and descriptive original text. This makes sense given that search engine users type words into the search engine in the first place and it is these words that the search engine crawlers root out.

Having a site plastered with the most glorious images that the eyes will ever be lucky enough to see, won’t help you at all to appear in the search listings for a relevant keyword topic. If you want to be represented within the search results for a particular range of keywords, the only way to do so is to use search engine optimisation techniques focussing upon these keywords and key phrases. Even image searches are performed using keyword sets.

But let’s face it, we’re not in the 90’s anymore and nobody wants to visit a site and be greeted by unforgiving columns of text and absolutely nothing else. Thankfully, you needn’t sacrifice all of the fantastic images on your site in order to improve your SEO performance; it is simply recommended to improve the context and relevance of these images by supporting them with keyword rich, descriptive text.

Images can rank within relevant search engine results based on the keyword text that surrounds them on the page. So, in order for an image to demonstrate good SEO, think about applying a keyword relevant heading, caption or description to the image.

An internet without pictures would be a dull place to surf, but a picture without plenty of supporting text based context is unlikely to be found by a search engine user who isn’t already acquainted with your brand, company name or products.

Google Analytics Real Time Reports: Web Traffic Right Now

Google Analytics just announced a new set of reports called “Real Time.” They will be seen in the new interface of Google Analytics (available to all users), under the Dashboard tab; according to another recent announcement, this tab will soon be renamed the Home tab. This new feature does not require extra tagging.

According to Google, full roll-out could take up to 1-2 weeks, but in order to get the new feature sooner than later you can signup for the beta by filling the form athttps://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/

Google Analytics Real Time will show the number of people coming to a site for every minute, and the number of visitors actively on the site at that moment. It enables monitoring the sources sending traffic to the website, the pages being viewed, the GEO location of visitors, and the keywords that brought the visitors (if from search, paid or organic).

While for some users this feature will not bring new insight into user behavior (e.g. small websites), this feature will be specially interesting for content websites. Publishers will get an instant insight into which content is attracting visitors and can adapt the website based on that. For example, if an article about a certain celebrity is receiving high engagement it could immediately be added as the featured post on the homepage or sidebar.

Other occasions where real time data could be helpful:

• Verifying the effectiveness of an ad just as a campaign goes live
• Measuring social media impact as it happens
• Watching the impact of a tv campaign when you know your commercial is on

Do you find it useful? Let us know in the comments how you use it and why you think real data is / is not important.

About The Author: Daniel Waisberg is the Founder of Conversion Journey, a consultancy that provides insights on improving the performance of websites. He is also the founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement & Optimization website. See more articles by Daniel Waisberg

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