The Social Impact on Paid Search

Initially, +1s were URL specific and could only be accumulated when users +1ed the URL within the SERP or within an Adwords ad that directed traffic to the same landing page.  Now, Google is displaying +1s with ads on Google.com as well as on the display network.  Google notes that ads with +1s tend to have higher click-through rates (CTR) and typically perform better because they have been socially recommended.

Often times Google+ is compared to Facebook, especially due to the connection between the “like” and “+1″ button; however, it is important to keep in mind the difference between search engines versus social engines.  According to Google, people that search on Google billions of times a day are often looking for brands and businesses.  As a result, these brand pages help people develop meaningful connections through their search queries.  Previously, the Direct Connect feature allowed users to navigate to a Google+ brand page by including a “+” before the search terms.   Because brand pages are now appearing on the SERP without the use of Direct Connect, users are immediately exposed to the brand’s recent posts and pictures within the Google+ brand page.

 The Google+1 Button Boost & What Advertisers Should Know

The launch of the Google+ brand profile increases the importance of +1s in advertising.  Most are aware the +1 button allows users to publicly endorse brands within organic search results and even on paid search and display ads.  Paid search ads in Google also carry the same +1s that organic search results carry.  As a result, paid search ads that link to sites many people have +1’d are more likely to receive higher placements within paid results.  This can influence a user’s decision about which ad to click.  Paid searchers will have to account for this in their pay-per-click strategy as +1s grow in popularity.              

There is greater opportunity for the advertiser to create strong connections between marketing channels, including both paid and organic search.  These brand pages aggregate all of users +1 activity throughout the brand’s organic listings and paid search advertisements.  Essentially, brand pages represent a user’s engagement with the brand anywhere within the Google search web.                                                                                                                                                      

Because advertisers have control over +1 activity and user behavior, ads become more relevant and brand interaction increases.  Advertisers should pay close attention to this interaction and influence in order to plan for the future.  With an increasing number of brands utilizing social media as part of their overall advertising efforts, it will be crucial to take note how many brands shift focus away from Facebook to Google+.

For example, if you live in the US and want to visit Google’s French website, you would use the country TLD identifier “.fr” for France.  Some popular generic TLD’s include:

Many of these TLD’s have rules for registration.  For example, only official government agencies can own a .gov TLD.  Other TLD’s such as .com, .org and .net are all available with no rules to entry.  In addition, many of the TLD’s have a different expiration date and need to be re-registered at an earlier or later date than others.

SEO, Paid Search and Social Contribution

As more companies use SEO, Paid Search and social strategies to promote their brands, the type of TLD becomes less significant.  In the past, high traffic-generating keyword-based .com’s were purchased.  Based on Google’s former algorithm, a domain that contained a generic keyword like “dog.com” would be relevant in the search results if someone searched on the term “dog”.  But as of October 25^th 2011, Google was granted a patent on a new algorithm that allows little emphasis on the keyword contained within a domain.  This gives freedom to any brand that does not have a generic related keyword within their domain.

A brand can capitalize on a keyword that produces large volume, but that does not mean a brand cannot survive without that option.  In fact, most of the top traffic producing US websites contain words that do not exist in the English dictionary: Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Bing, etc.  Brands can still achieve success with a healthy SEO, Paid Search and social strategy.  For example, the term “twitter” had no search volume before 2006 as it was not yet an actual word, yet the purchase of twitter.com did not hinder the company from becoming a household name and a top 10 traffic producing website in the US.

.COM

The most well known TLD is .com.  19 of 20 top US traffic websites contain .com.  Searches for the term “.com” exceed any other TLD.  .Com is the most sought after TLD, with little to no entry for generic terms with that particular extension.  Those generic .com’s also tend to be the most expensive TLD’s on domain registration sites such registration.com and networksolutions.com.  Practically all premium domain names for sale contain .com.  The vast majority of Fortune 500 companies have a .com TLD.  Many people can easily find a company using the brand name followed by a .com in the URL.

Public Perception

• A company with a .com is perceived as more legitimate given the majority of successful companies have their brand’s .com registered in their name

Traffic Volume

• Traffic volume can be lost from consumers searching for a brand’s .com when that brand does not own a .com

.COM vs. Other TLD’s

Although a company may be able to purchase a different TLD, the problem becomes competition.  If someone already owns the .com of an actual company, that company will have to sacrifice the lost traffic to the owner of the website.  Supply and demand regulate purchasing a domain.  The demand for a .com website is much higher than that of any other TLD.  If a website is available that is a generic term, one can expect the price of that domain to be higher for the .com over any other TLD.  As people continue to see .com as the dominant TLD, it will remain the most valuable.

Other TLD’s such as .net and .org are virtually the same as .com and are usually the next choice offered by domain registration sites.  Wikipedia is a .org website with a top 10 traffic ranking in the US.  Websites without a .com will not be penalized by Google in SEO results.  As .com’s become less and less available, .org’s, .net’s, and .biz’s, etc. may become a publicly viable solution.

According to Adweek, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) went as far as to add hundreds of new TLD’s starting in January 2012.  This may or may not be confusing for people who are comfortable with the current TLD’s, but it may open up more avenues for branding.  If less emphasis is placed on .com’s as they become almost impenetrable, other TLD’s may become more valuable with room for generic keywords again.

Recommendations

In a full blown digital age, companies should choose a brand name that has a .com available given that the public sees .com as a staple URL.  New brands should not get into the habit of choosing a name first and web address second, but rather the other way around.  As .com’s become a dry well, companies will have to get creative in choosing a brand name given that most .com websites are already taken.  Existing companies whose .com has been taken should choose a domain that is highly marketed and resonates best with the consumer.  Generic keyword influenced domain names have all been chosen and are not as relevant as they were in the past.  With SEO, Paid Search and Social strategy such an integral part of promoting a brand, a domain name that does not contain a .com or generic keyword does not mean a brand cannot succeed, although having a .com is preferable and should be sought after first.

Recommended Reading

DNS Infrastructure
Top-Level Domain Name Plan
Top Websites in the United States
Google Commercial Queries Patent
Google Webmaster Help

The Third Wave of Personalization

Making organic search results relevant means limiting their scope. Search engines have been exploring how to achieve this in a meaningful, personalized way for some time. First, it was past user browsing history, as previously visited pages served as a strong relevancy indicator; sometimes even directly, with users simply attempting to navigate back to a page that they had previously visited. It comes as no surprise that the major search engines have facilitated direct access to this data via official browsers (Chrome for Google, Internet Explorer for Microsoft).

Second came geography, as a search result for “best pizza” in New York (Di Fara’s Pizzeria, naturally) would likely not provide much value or relevance to a user in California. Geography is used to fill in the search query pothole, automatically taking the search user’s location into consideration in order to limit the search query scope and consequently, the results. This personalization was achieved with IP-tracking, manual user customization and integration with mobile devices. Hence, the search giants have also secured access to this data with mobile platforms (Windows Mobile 7 for Microsoft, Android for Google).

We now find ourselves in the midst of the third wave: using data from social media to provide highly relevant results. Facebook began featuring Bing results in its internal search results last year. Now Bing has returned the favor, adding Facebook recommendations to its organic search results. Although data from social media has been used to influence organic search ranking results for some time – in addition to social media results being featured outright in organic search – the major search engines are now taking active, and aggressive, steps to integrate social data seamlessly.

The Enemy of Google is My Friend

Furthering their united offensive against Google, Facebook and Bing have taken their honeymoon into an auspicious first year of marriage. Facebook recommendations or “likes” will now be incorporated and displayed whenever Bing users search.  By logging into their Facebook account, Bing users now have Facebook data integrated into organic search results right on the search results page.

This functionality mirrors Google’s blatant Facebook rip-off “+ 1” button, which attempts to add a social recommendation component to Google’s organic search results. However, Google is still missing a critical piece of the puzzle: a viable social media platform to actually fuel the entire thing. Here, Bing has the upper hand with access to the holy grail of social data via their Facebook partnership. Google, on the other hand, has been tenacious, but entirely hapless (i.e. Google Buzz), in their search for their social media holy grail.

Implications for Social and SEO

Rather than simply standing next to organic search results, social media is now on its way to becoming seamlessly integrated into them. As a result, search users are going to increasingly expect to see social personalization in search results. Brands now find themselves at a critical junction as not receiving those coveted Facebook “likes” will have direct implications on their organic search presence and consequently, click-throughs and conversions.

Hopping on the much-panned “social-media bandwagon” has become a question of life and death (presumably from dysentery). Getting in good with search users is going to mean getting in good with their friends (zig-a-zig-ah). Brands with active social media presence will benefit greatly in this new age of social personalization. If friends’ “likes” were only marginally impactful on transactional behavior in the Facebook environment, they are likely to be much more decisive in Bing’s search results, where users are actively looking to complete transactions (rather than interact with their friends).

Many alarmists will surely claim that SEO is dead. And as always, they will be right. Traditional SEO, without any concern for social (i.e. Bubble-boy SEO/SEO performed from under a rock), is dead – but that news break came about 10 years ago. What these developments reinforce is that SEO and social are and will persist in being a married and unified discipline. SEO will continue to be vital in making the pages and content that people “like” discoverable and visible. Social will take over from there, further leveraging pages and playing a role in determining their visibility based on personalization.

In a white paper published by Advertising Age, The Rise of the Real Mom, the Boston Consulting Group states that moms control $4.3 trillion of the $5.9 trillion U.S. consumer spending total, or 73% of household spend. The Shriver Report, issued in October, found that women are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families. And just last week, Google released another study on moms they are calling Four Truths about Moms and Search, created in collaboration with BabyCenter and two different research vendors between October 16 and November 17 of this year.

The details of these studies are fascinating to me as a mom and even more so in my role as a marketer. They also confirm what I already know, of course, that moms are WAY ahead of the average consumer when it comes to Search and Social Media. The ability to effectively reach moms (and that $4.3 Trillion dollar pocketbook) can drive the success of your marketing campaign and even the success or failure of your brand.

According to the Google study, women’s use of Search doubles when they become a mom, and a new mom is “born” every seven seconds in the US. This gives new meaning to the term “query volume.”

In fact, moms are using Search more than any other online activity, even more than email, with expecting moms and working moms at the top of the scale. I think any mom reading this would completely agree with these findings. I’ve referred to my pregnancies as “research projects,” since there was so much to read and learn in a very specific period of time.

It’s not surprising that moms have become experts in Search – what Google is calling “Black Belts.” Three out of four moms claim that they’ve gotten better at search since becoming a mom. They have moved beyond the 1-, 2-, or 3- word queries to long and specific strings. They want information and advice relevant to where they are right NOW.

The days of finding a mom because she’s searching for “fever” are far behind.

Now you need to be there when she’s searching for “28-month old 101.9 degree fever” or “3 year old lactose intolerant symptoms.” And you need to appear on that first page in either ads or organic results: only 31% of the moms in Google’s study move beyond page one, with 34% saying that they only look at the top of the first page.

Further, they actually expect to see trusted brands in that space, and question when they don’t appear. I have frequently used the Consumer Reports analogy for this phenomenon: There is a (perhaps) unconscious belief that Google somehow ranks search results the same way Consumer Reports might rank products in one of its reviews, with the “best” option appearing on top. Given the number of product searches a Mom does — particularly an expecting or new Mom — that 34% who only look at the top of the page could represent $1.5 trillion in spending.

Keep in mind that they are not just looking at the organic results on the Search results page: 50% said they “expected” to see well-known brands highlighted with a sponsored link. They even base their clicking behavior on that positioning with 75% admitting that location/rank aids their decision to click (compared to 67% of non-moms.)

Ask any mom — or any marketer managing search or social media for a CPG brand — what moms are looking for and talking about online, and you will likely hear the word “coupon.” The number one way moms find online coupons is Search. Doubters reading this may be surprised to learn however that moms are not simply coupon clippers, they are discovering new brands and products this way with 71% saying that they will buy a brand twice after trying it once with an online coupon.

So just because a brand marketer is pulling back on the print budget, they don’t have to lose the chance to coupon, they just need to make the coupon available online and allow the moms to find them through Search or Social Media (value-driven messaging can easily be done in 95 or 130 characters!). In fact 57% say they have delegated the task of finding coupons or deals to search engines, making couponing one search activity that is overshadowed only by locating product reviews and finding recipes.

But moms’ use of Search goes beyond products, recipes and reviews: they have formed an emotional attachment with their search engine. 47% of expecting moms, 44% of moms with infants, and 42% of moms with kids under age 12 admit that they believe Search Engines can help them be a better parent. And 65% of all moms say that they think of Google as a close friend or family member. (Of course, wouldn’t we all want a close friend or family member worth $153.4 billion? That would buy a LOT of Cheerios.)

Moms are also finding close friends of the flesh-and-bone kind online: they are reaching out to each other for community and advice — beginning with the very first glimmerings that she might be pregnant. Social Media in public forums such as Facebook, or in anonymous communities such as those on BabyCenter, is quickly becoming a major part of a mom’s life. According to the BabyCenter’s 21st Century Mom study, moms’ use of social media increased 462% from 2006 to 2009 and 70% of moms use social media on a monthly basis.

Social media allows them to save time and multi-task in a growing variety of ways such as sharing photos and videos of growing children with family far away, archiving family memories on blogs and scrapbooking sites, and comparing symptoms with other moms – allowing her to shorten or even skip a trip to the doctor.

She’s also selecting where to share her information, using open forums such as Facebook for posting the darn things that kids say (an activity I am guilty of abusing on Twitter and Facebook) and private or anonymous forums to share more intimate details or seek and give advice for personal or relationship issues. They are also taking social media offline, using sites like Meetup.com to find ways to meet other women like themselves. A quick search of Meetup finds 6,076 meet-ups across the country for moms. Luckily for marketers, there are ways to sponsor these private forums and meet-ups, allowing you to be right where the moms are!

And marketers are finding ways to talk to the moms that other moms listen to most. Articles about the recent FDA guidelines on companies providing “samples” (read: swag) to bloggers, always mentions so-called “Mommy Bloggers.” Finding those mommy bloggers who are the strongest “influencers” has been a treasure chest for building communities and driving sales.

Harnessing the power of Moms is a great way to successfully market online, particularly in segments like CPG. The key is to be ‘plugged-in’ to where moms are, and the plethora of recent data seems so show that the brightest glow of energy is coming from Social Media and Search.

Before diving into the implications of real time and social search integration to the biggest search engines (excluding YouTube), it’s important to know the basics and the background to what these new deals mean to marketers and the brands who love them. Presented below is everything marketers need to know about the Bing and Google social search deals.

The worlds of search and social media are colliding. During the Web 2.0 Conference on October 20, Bing and Google announced separate partnerships which will bring real-time updates from social networks to their search results pages.

These announcements reinforce a major shift in the way marketers must approach content on social networks. Now, more than ever, the visibility and perception of brands will be filtered through search results pages.

Bing Twitter

Bing announced a partnership in which users will be able to search Twitter status updates directly from Bing.com, at http://www.bing.com/twitter. The homepage of the new service allows users to either search twitter updates, or navigate the most popular topics currently being discussed on Twitter via a tag cloud.

Fig1. – Screenshot of Bing Twitter homepage

Bing Twitter search results updates span the last seven days, and are organized into two categories: Full Twitter updates (otherwise known as Tweets) and frequently shared links:

Fig 2. – Screenshot of Bing Twitter results for “Windows 7”

These updates are visible on search results pages as soon as they are published on Twitter. While Twitter updates are currently only featured on Bing’s designated Twitter page, we expect that these real-time results will eventually be integrated directly into the main Bing reply page.

Bing also revealed plans to integrate Facebook data in a similar way, although Microsoft officials stated that data from Facebook would “come at a later date.”

Google Social Search

Shortly after Bing’s announcement, Google unveiled a similar partnership with Twitter. This agreement is a core component of the launch of a larger system called Google Social Search. Google Social Search presents users with a personalized set of search results based on updates from their network of friends and followers.

Once logged in to their Google account, users can access social search as part of Google’s “options side bar.” (see Fig. 3)

Fig. 3 –Google’s Social Search tool is currently accessed via their “More Options” sidebar

In many ways, this announcement pits Google directly against Facebook in the battle for a user’s “official” online identity. The service will be managed through a user’s Google Profile, and will allow them to plug directly into several different services, including Twitter. At this time, Google has only revealed Twitter’s involvement and claims that additional social services will be included over the next few months.

Fig. 4 – Google Social Search allows you to search for information posted by your
network of contacts via their blogs, Twitter profiles and other social networks

While these results are currently delivered via a specific page on Google, the company has stated plans to show relevant social search results at the bottom of its general search results page.

The one drawback to Google’s service seems to be its total reliance on a user’s existing social network connections to return results. Users must both log into a Google account and link their social accounts via their Google Profile page in order to see any results from the Social Search tab. This could potentially slow the growth of what would otherwise be an interesting addition to Google results pages, as users may not fully understand the mechanics and benefits of linking their accounts in this way.

Fig. 5 – Google Social Search results for the same query as Fig. 4, with user logged out of their profile

Who Benefits, and Why?

Consumers: Perhaps the most obvious benefit of these partnerships is the ability for consumers to access a rich, personalized data stream of real-time updates about the world around them. This information stream has the potential to significantly change the way people perceive search engines and the information that can be pulled from them.

The Search Engines: For Microsoft and Google, these deals are ultimately about defending market share and building user loyalty by presenting users with a broader scope of content that is more personally relevant to them – an important part of the escalating war between the two search giants. While the engines will essentially have access to the same stream of data, the differentiation will be in the way they parse and present that data within the rest of their site experience, a trend that we will see play out over time.

Twitter: The real winner of these deals is Twitter – their strategy is reminiscent of one used by Wikipedia. By focusing on search engine optimization, Wikipedia was able to make itself ubiquitous within the search engines, and introduce millions of people to their service. It’s expected that Twitter will find itself in a similar situation, and the additional visibility should help them break out of the recent flattening of their user growth trends.

What Do These Announcements Mean For Marketers?

While search has proven invaluable to consumers, it has traditionally had limitations when dealing with current events. In order for information to show up in a search engine, it needed to have been published to a website that the engine was aware of, and then crawled.

In comparison, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook allow users to publish brief status updates which become immediately available and searchable. This real-time access played out famously through recent events like the plane crash in the Hudson River and terrorist attacks in Mumbai, where individuals living near the events were able to quickly share news, photos and information about the incidents much faster than the traditional news media. This same platform gives marketers the ability to engage directly with their customers and fan and get broader exposure for those conversations through search engines.

These partnerships dramatically increase the average consumer’s exposure to social media, making it essential for marketers to engage with consumers and consider how the interaction will play out on search results pages. Any sentiment – positive or negative – about a product or service that is shared on Twitter or Facebook now has the opportunity to appear side-by-side with general search results, influencing public perception and giving companies vital information in areas ranging from corporate reputation management to customer service and product development.

For companies with corporate Twitter accounts, this added exposure could also mean a dramatic increase in followers, as more people are introduced to the service as part of their every day search experience.

Recommended Reading:

Google’s New Social Search Is a Big Chess Move Against Facebook
ReadWriteWeb

Google Social Search is Coming & More on Google-Twitter
SearchEngineLand

Social Search: Customers Influence Search Results Over Brands
Altimeter Group

Below are some screenshots of this fabulous makeover. Seems pretty mild, huh? It helps if you look at the top of the frame in each shot…

Before:

After:

We decided to compile data across all of our campaigns to see exactly what effect this seemingly tiny move would have, and what impact it might have for Google’s coffers. We excluded our auto industry data due to all the hoopla that was cash for clunkers – an unusual occurrence that is likely to skew that particular data set.

The results? A whopping 14.47% increase in click-throughs from the 11-day period preceding the change vs. 11 days after the change.

The data was pulled from a Wednesday to Sunday to control for any day-of-week trends and any keywords with positions that changed by more than .5 were excluded.

Although the effect on Google’s revenue remains to be seen, it is obvious that Google can continue to make more money despite the recession and the occasional gloomy analyst.  If the early indications are accurate and a close to 15% rise in clicks holds across the line, the impact on billions of dollars of revenue should be substantial. It may be time to buy some more GOOG.

Many publishers assume that the cost of using paid search to support onsite advertising is unsustainable. In many cases this is in fact true, but there are instances where paid search can be arbitraged properly to build profitable ad revenue.   For instance, we were able to achieve a cost per page view of under $0.01 for a women’s interest publisher while driving over a million pageviews a month.  In part this was due to their narrow focus – we were able to cherrypick less expensive keywords that still drove traffic – something considerably more difficult with a larger general interest site.

Over time however this works best as a bridge to SEO’s effects kicking in. SEO and paid search can be compared to the difference between buying and renting a home.  Sure, renting is great for the short term.  Renting can allow you to experiment with all sorts of living arrangements (Brooklyn chic but cramped, suburban swank) to find out what best suits your lifestyle.  Similarly, you can use your short term PPC campaign to help plan your long term SEO effort and find out what works best for your goals.

A paid search campaign allows you to look at which keywords performed the best and structure their SEO efforts around it.  The same can be said for the ad copy.  If the paid search copy that referenced free shipping worked great for conversions, use it in your Meta description so that success will be carried over to your organic listing.

Paid search can still be used moving forward  to fill in the gaps of your SEO efforts.  This is especially useful for misspellings and misunderstandings.

Unifying paid search and SEO is not a new concept. After all, they can both map to common goals using keywords, both rely on SERP visibility and relevance, and can in fact increase clickthough rates when used in tandem.

Although one can see the importance of running either one alone, it’s clear that SEO and paid search can feed off of each other to create the most efficient and effective campaign to achieve your goals.   Whether it’s using one to make up where the other lacks or using one to help with strategy on the other, the benefits of running them together and sharing data can’t be ignored and in a sector as pressured as online publishing could make the difference between publishing and perishing.

Now Google aims to do the predicting for you with their latest update to Insights, and they have also published a nifty companion paper available here. While much of the paper is filled with the kind of statistical modeling formulas that drove my decision to get a degree in History the top level conclusions are quite interesting. For instance, according to Google:

• Over half of the most popular Google search queries are predictable in a 12 month ahead forecast, with a mean absolute prediction error of about 12%.
• Nearly half of the most popular queries are not predictable (with respect to the model we have used).
• Some categories have particularly high fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Health (74%), Food & Drink (67%) and Travel (65%).
• Some categories have particularly low fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Entertainment (35%) and Social Networks & Online Communities (27%).

What this allows for in the Insights tool is the ability to see that global query volume for terms like  “pancake recipes” show clear seasonality that allows for predictability:

The red line at the bottom of the chart is for the query “pancake coupons” and while there isn’t enough data to allow Google to forecast moving forward, the slight lift over the last year maps to the recession related findings in the report, per Google again:

We show several examples that demonstrate possible influences of the recent recession on search behavior, like an observed increase of query share for the category Coupons & Rebate compared to the forecast. We also show a negative deviation between the query share for category Restaurants compared to the forecast, where as the category Cooking and Recipes shows a similar positive deviation.

I would also point out what they’ve noticed in the car industry as a function of tough economic times:

We show that in the recent 12 months there is a positive deviation relative to the forecast baseline (i.e., an increased query share) in the searches of Auto Parts and Vehicle Maintenance while there is a negative deviation (i.e., a decrease in query share) in the searches of Vehicle Shopping and Auto Financing.

While Google takes pains to point out that they can’t foresee the unforeseeable, these trend extrapolations are interesting guides that marketers can find helpful.

It’s also instructive to look at the categories that Google found hard to predict, such as entertainment. I suspect a big part of the difficulty there is reflected in the lack of long-term branded keyword data. In other words, someone in the auto sector might consistently search using the brand name “Chevrolet” no matter what other marketing efforts are in market – whether they be incentives, new model launches, or other efforts. Similarly, marketers are likely to always want to capture the traffic around “Chevrolet” as a search term.

On the other hand folks searching for “Transformers 2” are very unlikely to know or care about the studio releasing the film, and there is little (if not zero) point in using, say, “Warner Brothers Records” as a search term when you want info on the new Flaming Lips record. As a consequence branded campaigns are a very small part of marketing in the entertainment world and search term volume and interest comes and goes with whatever specific initiative is on tap.

One of the most interesting takes was an offhand comment from Vice President of Media John Chan. While sipping on his 40 he pointed out that for many of our paid search campaigns, campaign performance was noticeably better on Bing than on Yahoo.  There are three reasons this might be:

1) Bing has better technology than Yahoo, leading to more efficient campaign performance
2) Bing and Yahoo users differ significantly in how they use each platform and Bing is simply a better platform for pure search
3) Some unknown combination of 1) and 2)

Furthermore, this deal shows that both Yahoo and Microsoft, despite some lip service paid to Yahoo’s current technology during the press conference, are firmly in the 1) camp. Better technology (in this case Bing’s) will have a positive effect on campaign performance on Yahoo.

Before Google became so dominant the question of what drove results on different search engines was an important component of campaign brainstorming. Is Google so efficient because their technology is the best, or is it because they have the broadest base of users? It’s the nature (inherent platform usage is unaffected by underlying technology) versus nurture (underlying technology drives usage) debate.

So here we have Microsoft and Yahoo coming down on the nurture side, betting that just as in the 1983 Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd classic Trading Places, outfitting search loser Yahoo with the right trappings will give it the tools for success. Unlike the film though, Microsoft doesn’t have to be stripped of what it has to prove the point.

What will be especially interesting will be to see if the Bing search technology lifts Yahoo almost, but not quite up to the level of campaign efficiency that exists on Bing itself. That difference could lead to 3), the idea that it’s some mixture of nature and nurture. Yahoo’s portal like design and the type of users attracted to it could still lead to different behavior than a “purer” search engine environment like Bing.

Obviously, we at Reprise Media are all fascinated to see how this grand experiment in nature versus nurture plays out.

So how different is Bing from Google when it comes to SEO?

The biggest difference is the weight given to what goes on offsite in the forms of links, something of a Google specialty that Bing gives much less weight to. On the other hand Bing does give much more weight to the domain name within a site’s URL to determine search rankings. There are a host of other differences that can add up to noticeable disparities in how a site is organically ranked on Google and Bing search results.

What will be interesting to see is how much of Bing’s most innovative aspect – how results are displayed and organized – comes to Yahoo. Right now, the layout and organization of results pages in Bing can give clues to what content needs to be created or altered on unoptimized websites. As an example, the related categories tool can give businesses the opportunity to optimize for several placements on the same results page.

Bing also pulls additional content into the preview pane on its organic search results, which means proper optimization should take into account the increased scope of information pulled from site and page description data to determine the best placement of key terms.

 Yahoo would be foolish not to incorporate these features into results, but will they also incorporate Bing’s unique Travel and Shopping results, presumably as an enhancement or replacement for their own Travel and Shopping channels? The answer is still unclear but travel sites and retailers should be taking a close look at Bing and optimizing for it now so that when the Microsoft/Yahoo deal kicks in next year, they have a head start on ranking for the 30% chunk of the market the combined duo is likely to represent.