New: Google Disables Starring Results On Search Results

Google has disabled the ability to star search results from within the Google search results page.

As you may remember, Google replaced SearchWiki with starring results back in March 2010, about 16-months after Google launched SearchWiki. Now that Google has re-introduced a way to block sites in Google, Google has determined you no longer need to star search results from the search results page.

This does not mean that you can no longer see stars in your Google search results. It does however mean that you will no longer be able to star results directly from the search results. Instead, you now need to go Google Bookmarks and add a bookmark there for a star to show up in your search results. Read more at searchengineland.com

You built out your new ad copy, tested out a bidding strategy, measured web and store sales to measure the online to offline effect; however, in the end you got the worst outcome possible – inconclusive results.

A negative result would have been better; at least you would have known that your hypothesis was wrong or that your strategy was not effective. But an inconclusive result tells you nothing, which can be incredibly frustrating as a marketer.

There are many reasons why a well-designed test might fail. For example, seasonal effects might be ignored, the dataset might be too small or the marketplace might change during the test.

However, a very common error in test design is not accounting for volatility – fluctuations in performance due to unpredictable events in the marketplace.

In this post, I shall delve into the issue of volatility, how it might lead to a test with inconclusive results and finally, how you can mitigate its effect on your test.

To understand the issue better, let us assume that you want to test the hypothesis that online SEM spending leads to offline store sales. To test this hypothesis, you ramp up your online budgets in increments every week.

Your plan is to run the test for 5 weeks, collect the data, do a regression analysis and answer the question, “What does one dollar spent online lead to in offline sales?”.  Now let us, put some real numbers in this thought experiment.

See more at searchengineland.com

Yesterday’s post on Social Media Crisis Management was a bit of experiment to see how highly I could rank for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I also wanted to share my results with you, so you can hopefully learn a bit more about the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

First, I picked a fairly specific term, in “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I checked prior to publishing yesterday’s post, and there were just a shade under 29,000 Google results for that term.  This is important because you need to pick the most specific term as possible, because this will result in less competition, and (if you’ve picked the right term for you) it means you will be more likely to get the ‘right’ kind of traffic.

Second, I made sure the term was in the title and mentioned a couple of times in the post.  I also made the term “Social Media Crisis Management” at the front of the post title, I originally had the title as “A No-Nonsense Guide to Social Media Crisis Management” but Amy wisely suggested that I flip it so the term I was targeting was at the front of the title.

Now, a note about keywords and phrases: You do need to pick and target specific keywords and phrases, but you also need to incorporate them into the post in a way that makes sense to the reader.  I only used that term in the post twice, because that’s all I felt it needed.  It might have helped the results to get it in there once or twice more, but I felt I would have had to compromise the flow of the post’s structure to do it, so I didn’t.  You always have to remember that you are writing for people, if the post doesn’t make sense to them, then it really doesn’t matter if it does well in search results.

See more at mackcollier.com

While Microsoft’s Bing and Google have just added social media to their search engines, Facebook appears to have upgraded its own search: the site now groups query results under category headings. Previously, search results would show up in the drop-down menu without any organization, but now Facebook organizes them by category headings, as you can see in the screenshot to the right. This change saves you from having to click on “see more results from search,” followed by “show results from everyone.” It’s not clear whether the site has a predetermined order for listing categories. Read more at www.allfacebook.com