You may not know it, but your life is influenced by Eli Goodman. The SearchFest 2012 opening keynote speaker is head of ComScore, which is the powerful brain behind a lot of the major research influencing not only search, but the business and marketing world as a whole. SEMpdx is proud to welcome Eli to Portland and The Governor Hotel to kick off our best year yet. The following is a live overview of Eli’s epic discussion on current trends, hot issues, and the future potential of search:
What is ComScore? It is a Panel of 2 million across 150+ countries for measurement across multiple platforms. That is pretty epic if you ask me.
Current Trends in Search –
The U.S. leads the world in search, and 2/3 of those searches are taking place where else? Google!
Search is growing both in intensity and users. As users grow, so does their number of searches. Columbia leads with 240 searches per person a month. Woah!
Search is being driven by ‘heavy’ searchers who make up about 65% of all search users. Heavy in this case means a lot of use, like a lot.
In December of 2011 Bing finally grabbed the number 2 spot in search, overpassing Yahoo! This is a testament to the improved user experience and heavy ad spends (plus good strategy).
Although surface numbers won’t necessarily show it, Bing appears to be forming as legitimate competition against Google, as it shows the most improvement in search intensity (number of searches per user).
On October 18th Google stopped sending referral data for logged in users, proclaiming an effect on 7% of users. In January 2012 42% of users were logged in to Google while searching, accounting for a large quantity of total searches (which I missed because he is moving slides at a very swift pace).
The underlying theme seems to be cash, as detailed analysis makes it seem that this strategy is a long term ploy encouraging businesses to sign up for paid search which provides much more intuitive numbers.
Time to talk about Search Plus Your World! Towards which we as a whole had a very similar reaction to the referral data announcement. Everybody freaked out, at first.
Guess what guys, personalized results are showing up for less than 1 percent of searches so far. On the other hand, +1’s are showing up in 12% which is a much bigger deal.
Google Plus had the most successful social media launch in history.
Google introduced bottom ads in November 2011. This was not about adding more ad slots. On January 23rd Google announced a major algorithm change penalizing banner ads which happened to corresponded to the launch of bottom ads. Bottom ads appear to be attached to long tail terms and are helping Google take up a lot more real estate in SERP ad space. This means the landscape of PPC is changing, with many more long tail opportunities.
2012 Search Predictions –
Google’s 12% social return rate in search will be noticed by Facebook and Bing, which has a much lower rate of 5%. Mr. Goodman predicts that this gap will begin to close courtesy of Facebook and Bing working together.
Search SERP’s are going to begin showing Pinterest brand pages in the top 10, similar to how you already see Facebook and Twitter accounts. This means more shelf space for brands.
Mobile search ROI is going to improve as targeting options become more clear and integrated.
That is it for the keynote! We look forward to an awesome day here at SearchFest!
