On May 10^th, Microsoft announced that it would be adding a few new features to its Bing search engine, fundamentally changing the look and feel of the SERP (search engine results page). The new SERP will have a three column layout incorporating a social experience. The far left will remain somewhat intact, leveraging both paid and organic listings. The center column is a new feature called “Snapshot” that will display information such as maps, prices, reviews, and pictures (think local directory content). This column appears to also house additional paid listings when there is available space. The far right column will house the new “Sidebar,” which is Bing’s latest experiment with social integration.  They rolled these new changes out today.

Attempts at social integration with Bing search results are not new, and began with Facebook status updates appearing in organic search back in October 2010. Bing then added Likes and mobile check-ins, and is now evolving into a dedicated space on the main SERP. Bing has made it clear that it intends to integrate with the social giant as much as possible and this is the next step in that process.

All of these changes are said to be aimed at efficiently generating information that will help users get something done. Bing’s press release claims people should “expect more from a search engine.” But is this update, the “most significant update to Bing since launch” the more that people should expect?

While Bing is slowly beginning to chip away market share from Google, Bing has failed from a financial stand-point since its inception as part of Microsoft’s Online Services Division with losses in the billions. And don’t forget to subtract the people that only use Bing to search for Google.

The major play for Bing is obviously the social search sidebar. This new feature will help users ask specific questions (things they are searching Bing for) to Facebook friends. The new activity feed on the SERP will allow users to easily share entire searches including the results with a friend on Facebook. The shared searches will function similarly to private messages, and will prompt the other person that someone has shared a search with them. Next, that person can offer advice from the included SERP, or recommend something else entirely.

To help identify exactly who you should ask, Bing will suggest people that may know something about your query based on information from your friends’ Facebook profiles including photo albums and relevant ‘likes.’

Of course for this to succeed and be useful, a significant number of people will have to allow Bing access to their Facebook profile; a scary thought indeed. What happens if Bing uses photos to suggest to your boss that you’re an expert on vodka when they’re trying to find the nearest liquor store?

Most of the heavy-lifting seems to be focused on Facebook content. However, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Foursquare, Google Plus, and others will be used for another feature called People Who Know. Here, Bing will suggest influential or potentially helpful people based on their profile and publicly published content.

Google has recently attempted to make search a more social affair with its launch of Search Plus Your World to a less than enthusiastic reception. Bing is taking a somewhat different approach. Instead of forcing all results to be influenced by social signals, it is choosing to keep them separate and off to the side. Almost as if to say, “If you want social search results, here they are. If not, they’re over here out of the way.”

The examples Bing provides with the announcement of the new tools seem promising, and if well executed could be a kick-start for the struggling search engine. Bing may open the door to social search and provide an easy way for people to ping their friends with a quick quandary. But once people get an answer from their friends on say, where to get the best sushi in town, are they then going to Google the restaurant?  We will have to see.

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If your keywords have a quality score of below 7, your cost per acquisition (CPA) could be suffering as a result.  It is common knowledge that bad quality scores can impact your click costs, but by how much?  And how does that cost affect your bottom line?  A recent study by Three Ships Media suggests that the penalty for low quality scores could be affecting your CPA by as much as $50.  In this study, we examined thousands of keywords from accounts across multiple industry verticals.  The results were astounding: on average, a drop of one point in Quality Score led to an increase of $0.38 for keyword CPC prices.

38 cents might seem like “no big deal” – but let’s stop and think about it.  Imagine an account running with a $1,000 monthly budget.  Assuming your average CPC is $2.00, you are able to buy 500 clicks per month.  With an industry standard conversion rate of 2%, you might expect to get 10 sales ($100 CPA).

Let’s say you are able to improve the quality score of your keywords by just one point.  That 38 cent savings would allow you to now buy 617 clicks.  With the same conversion rate, you would produce two to three additional sales.  These additional sales bring your average CPA down from $100 to $81.  You just saved $19.  That’s nearly a 20% decrease in your customer acquisition cost!  If your budget is larger than $1,000 per month, your absolute savings increase even more.

If you need help improving quality score, here are some recommendations for getting the boost you need:

• Ensure ad groups contain tight sets of keywords that are highly relevant to ad copy
• Use keywords in your ad copy
• Improve ad click-through-rates by continually testing ad copy with strong call-to-actions
• Mirror targeted search keywords on your landing page
• Partner with a Google AdWords Certified Partner such as Three Ships Media

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It’s local. It’s hyper-local. It’s hyper-focused. Call it what you will, but there’s no denying the recent explosion in location based marketing. As digital media provides create a wealth of adverting options, there’s no excuse for not executing this tactic. Given the blurred line of social media, local advertising and mobile ad units (commonly referred to as SoLoMo), these strategies should become part of your core offering now as clients will begin expect them in the future.

Hyper-local (as I like to call it) advertising essentially targets an audience within a narrowly defined distance/radius from a location. By applying some best practices, an advertiser should expect to see huge lifts over traditional digital marketing (see blog post from Kiss Metrics). The most basic and up front metrics to show success are higher CTR (not surprising as the more relevant you can message your brand – the higher audience engagement). And as we all know, higher CTRs typically yield lower CPCs, thus providing a more efficient channel to display your message to your audience.

I’m excited to watch the boundaries continue to disappear between what was historically three silo-ed channels. Clearly, the user expects this, and if we want to be savvy marketers, we have to provide what the user wants and expects.

If you have any additional questions or follow-ups, please contact me on Twitter: @mikelamar

The SES conference in NY last week was a smorgasbord of information.  A few takeaways:

• Keynote speaker Avinash Kaushik kicked off the event with a rousing dissertation on the beauties of Big Data.  He made a good point: average conversion across the top 50 websites is about 2.5%.  Most optimization efforts are focused on that 2.5%.  But this misses the value the other 97.5% of traffic represents.  It is vitally important to determine what value the rest of your traffic has to your business, and then tracking it.
• Avinash called this other activity “micro-conversions”.  They may not be actually purchasing, but perhaps they are configuring, or looking at a location, or comparing prices.  Because they did so at your site, spending time there with your Brand, they therefore have value.  And maybe even potential for SEO opportunities if you optimize your site for those kinds of activities.
• His summation of this was “be less wrong”.  It’s a good way of looking at the reams of data available: what does this tell us beyond what we usually are looking for?  How can we broaden the definition of success so that more of the many different options available on your site are considered valuable?
• Mobile was a frequent topic at the conference.  91% of US cell phone owners have their device at arms’ reach 24/7.  Try a quick survey of people you know and this pays out.  Mobile search is rising quickly and will surpass desktop search in two to three years, according to Google.  90% of those who search take action, 70% within an hour.  Companies wishing success in the near future will need to ensure that their sites recognize and serve content appropriate for the device being used: type of phone or tablet.  Actions?  Make cleaner pages, bigger buttons, higher rankings on organic searches (only the top three listings show up, and most people never scroll).
• Landing pages were another rich area.  Frequent, consistent testing is necessary to ensure that pages are performing as well as possible.  One panelist noted that whatever is working now won’t be in 6 months, so testing is vital.  So it is surprising that 61% of companies test less than 5 pages per month.  How many should you test?  As many as you can effectively drive traffic to and track.  Testing can result in a 5-20% lift in conversion.
• Best practices for landing pages include reinforcing/repeating claims from ads in  the landing pages themselves.  When a prospect clicks they should be see something relevant to their search when they get to your site — it should not be a visual or topical disconnect.  Another good piece of advice was to think of consumer activity on your landing page as a “landing session”; not a landing page.  Give them a clear path to what you want them to do next.
• When building a landing page ask yourself some straight questions to gain clarity:
• Is the page relevant to the search?
• Are you making it clear that your product or offering is the right solution to that search?
• Is it obvious what your prospect needs to do next?
• In the SEO realm there was good guidance regarding what might run afoul of Google and impact domain authority and site rankings.  There are a few things that are clearly red flags for Google: linking too quickly: if your number of links climbs too rapidly that is a sign that the links are not genuine.  2) Unnaturally occurring anchor text: if many of your links have identical anchor text Google will be suspicious.  3) Same type of link in quantity: same issue: it looks wrong to Google if many links are from the same sources (all from URL directories, all from blog comments, etc…).  4) Links from sites with no inbound links: this screams “link farm”.
• Two sure things to do to help SEO:
1. Make sure your title tags and meta descriptions are accurate and unique in your site; one of the first things search engines consider when matching search queries with sites is the page description.
2. Do everything you can to ensure your site loads as fast as possible.  Search engines and consumers both are cruel to slow-loading sites.

Effectively managing investments in digital marketing activities is rarely a true core competency for businesses.

In some instances, owning all digital marketing competencies is crucial to the company’s business model.  (For instance, online retailers that compete solely on price or marketers where unbranded SEM drives a majority of their revenue.)  In contrast, many other organizations are actively considering outsourcing some or all elements digital marketing – perhaps in the same fashion with which they outsource certain information technology functions.

Realizing this, executives often ask me:  “How much of this should we learn to do ourselves?”   vs.  “How much of this should we have others actively manage for us?”  I don’t honestly know what each business should do – but I do know what needs to get done.

In that spirit, Three Ships offers a checklist to help senior executives assess the quality of their internal efforts against the urgent demands of their business, its customers, and the marketplace:

Managing Investments in Targeted Advertising

• Use Demand Side Platforms to combine behavioral data, including unique touchpoints per user that incorporate demographic data, browsing history, time of visit, frequency, and recency, thereby purchasing audience more efficiently than traditional display networks.
• Segment the performance of all keywords by geography, seasonality, time, browser, and device, and optimize bids accordingly.
• Cull negative keywords multiple times per week to improve Quality Score, improve Click Through Rate and lower Cost Per Click.
• Evaluate arbitrage opportunities for high-value branded competitor keywords across different search platforms on a daily or weekly basis.
• Keep a dashboard of spend, CPC, CTR, and conversion data.