Facebook Muscling in on Google Ad Revenue?
Thanks to a @dannysullivan tweet today, I found an article on AdAge.com entitled “Facebook Books $1.86B in Advertising; Muscles In on Google Turf“. While the article brings up some interesting facts, I found it interesting that the actual headline is completely misleading. If you read further into the article, there is a specific quote that pretty much spells out the facts.
That doesn’t mean that Facebook is taking any significant market share from the search titan; indeed, Google makes more than $2 billion in advertising revenue in a given month. But Ms. Williamson believes there’s an emerging duopoly in the self-serve online-ad realm. The social network now accounts for almost 5% of total online-ad spending, and its share may increase to as much as 8% in 2011. Read more
Think Social Search!
Over the past 2 years, in case you have lived under a rock, the bulk of pharmaceutical marketing conversation has revolved around social media initiatives like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. The value of social media channels can’t be argued…this is where the people are and marketing basics tell you that you should go where the people are. I’m a huge fan of leveraging social media channels as a part of an integrated marketing strategy, but I’m not a big fan of putting all your eggs in one basket. I’m an even bigger fan of the concept of social search. The fact is, search marketing and social media initiatives can be improved and empowered by an integrated approach. Add additional online marketing channels – like display media, mobile media and e-mail – and you will find a very powerful online marketing strategy.
Content Strategy: Key Step for SEO and Site Development
Have you ever heard your agency use the phrase “content strategy”? If you answered no, you should probably be asking yourself why right about now. Creating an efficient, fluid content strategy is arguably one of the most important phases of defining and designing your website. This is by far more important the the look and feel or the technology used to make the site…because content is what users are coming for at the end of the day. If you don’t have high quality content that informs and helps users, the fancy flashy things and innovative technological implementations don’t mean a thing. Users demand content. That being said, what’s involved in developing a content strategy?
Content Strategy Process
This checklist is a high level view of the things that should be considered when developing your site’s content strategy. Read more
Google Updates Search Results Again
Today, Google announced that they have made an update to their search results that could potentially have a pretty significant impact for pharmaceutical SEO efforts. Before today, Google would typically only display up to 2 unique page listings (this does not include SiteLinks) for a single domain on on a given query. What this means is that for some certain queries, “authority sites” could potentially capture a larger portion of the search results and limit opportunities for other websites to be displayed on the first page of results. For example, let’s take a look at a query for “cancer information”. I have taken a screenshot below to illustrate my point. Read more
Bing to Power Yahoo! Search Starting This Week
In case you had missed the news or weren’t aware, as of this week Bing has started powering organic search results on Yahoo! Search for the English language in the United States and Canada. With this transition, Bing will move from a small competitor to Google to a significant competitor and possibly even a slight threat. Google still dominates with over 60% share of search, but Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo will now power more than 5 billion monthly searches (around 32% share of search in the US). As a search marketer, this is a significant change from what we have been used to and it offers a strong opportunity. Read more
FDA Issues Warning to Novartis for Social Sharing
While I was out on vacation completely ignoring work and focusing on my new baby girl, the FDA issued a warning letter to Novartis for Tasigna®. This letter was issued because Tasigna.com uses a Facebook share social media widget which allows users to share Novartis-generated content via their Facebook status or updates. Based on the issuance of this letter, many pharmaceutical marketing experts have come out with their specific opinions and recommendations. This post is ONLY my opinion on the matter, but I felt like much of the issue is focused on the smaller piece of the concern rather than the real concern as I see it.
Many briefs I have read focus on the fact that social sharing widgets are based off of meta data and for that reason much of the “blame” for this warning letter has been associated with inappropriate or misused meta data. While in some cases meta data may be in non-compliance – particularly in examples represented in this notice of violation letter – in my opinion the meta data is not an issue that should be focused on as a solution. I have seen various recommendations, ranging from completely generic meta data to simply leaving those fields empty. From a search perspective, these options are not beneficial and would actually likely result in decreased search engine rankings and lower visitor engagement. These are not simply factors that concern SEO…they concern user experience and web best practices. Read more
Flash and SEO: Can they Co-Exist?
In the pharmaceutical web world, you are typically hard-pressed to find an agency or brand marketer that doesn’t want to integrate some level of Flash into their site. In my time, I have seen everything from recommendations to build a site entirely in flash to building a flash splash page to “wow” the users when they first enter. So the question comes up quite frequently – is flash really bad for SEO? Why do SEOs hat flash so much? To give the short answer, I personally am not opposed to flash when it makes sense and offers some important interaction/functionality. I am opposed to useless/non-functional flash that doesn’t bring value to a user’s experience…especially if that non-value addition negatively impacts the SEO value of a site. Read more
Doctors Warn About Relying Too Much on Google
This morning, Tracie Biggerstaff pointed out an article over at Search Engine Land entitled “Doctors Warn About Relying Too Much on Google. In this article, a study is discussed and points out that the quality of content in health-related search queries is not great. Non-profit sites score highest, followed by academic sites, and non-sales-oriented commercial sites (like WebMD). This study further stated that newspaper articles and personal websites typically held the least accurate information. Finally, “commercial sites with a financial interest in the diagnosis, such as those sponsored by companies selling a drug or treatment device, were very common but frequently incomplete.” Read more
Google Chrome – Making the Web More Accessible
As I made my rounds through the dozens of blogs and sites I read on a fairly regular basis, I came across an announcement at the Google Chrome blog that I felt was a significant announcement, particularly for pharmaceutical marketers that may have accessibility concerns. I have embedded a video talking about this new enhancement below, and wanted to quickly comment about it.
From an accessibility perspective this is a pretty neat rollout of new features for Google’s Chrome browser. Essentially, now available with Google Chrome is a set of extensions under the new category broadly labeled “Accessibility”. Here’s a quick outline of a few of the more interesting extensions (from my view). You can find a full list of Accessbility Extensions over at Google Chrome Accessibility Extensions.
- ChromeVis (by Google): Magnify and change the color of any selected text. Use the mouse or the keyboard to move the selection around the page.
- Zoomy: Changes zoom level according to resolution & browser size.
- UserScriptCSS: Apply a user stylesheet and or script to pages.
- Readability Redux: a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.
- Keyboard Navigation: allows you to browse the web without using a mouse.
- Chrome Daltonize: exposes details to the Color-blind user, to see what would have otherwise been missed.
You can find a full list of Accessbility Extensions over at Google Chrome Accessibility Extensions.
How’s this Impact Pharmaceutical Marketing?
Pharmaceutical marketers have a very specific target audience typically, and in many cases these target audiences could be people that suffer from accessibility concerns. By embedding extensions within Google Chrome, it makes it much easier for the target market to access and engage in the content provided.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of Intouch Solutions.
Medication Search Implications Followup
Last week, I wrote a post discussing the launch of Google Medication search - a partnership between Google and NIH to display government-hosted content as the forced first result for most brand drugs. I find it a bit odd that this forced result does not apply to all brands at this point, but perhaps that is due to the fact that it hasn’t propogated all the way down to smaller drugs? I do know that for the the big-name, high profile drugs have the NIH result placed above all others, forcing the official product site to be the #2 result. As I had indicated in my original post, one of my fears was that this would have a direct impact on natural search traffic to brand.com sites.
This discussion has been picked up quite a bit in the cyber world by folks interested in pharma marketing. Wend Blackburn from Intouch Solutions’ official ePharmaRX wrote a post about this as well, addressing some of the unspoken concerns that I did not include in my post. This topic was also mentioned over at Reason.com by Ronald Bailey (using direct quotes from my post and also from Greg Sterling, a well-known search marketing expert). John Mack also wrote about this new enhancement at Google, although he has a more positive view of the enhancement than I myself do.
In any event, the “enhancement” by Google to display NIH results above even the official brand.com site is a clear manual manipulation of search results, which is most definitely blurring the lines between natural and paid (as Wendy suggests in her post). Other points made are that, when you click on the new sponsored links from the NIH, in many cases you will find information that is outdated, inaccurate or not fairly represented. Why is it that the government which provides restriction to pharmaceutical marketing efforts can ignore those same restrictions? Is information from 2005 or 2007 on a government agency website really more applicable and valid than updated information on a brand.com site? I seriously doubt it.
I stand firm that I don’t believe that these results are necessarily in the best interest of consumers. It certainly isn’t in the best interest of pharma companies and marketers. It does benefit big government and big Google, though. Google stands to potentially increase paid search revenues as pharmaceutical marketers will look to supplement the lost traffic with new traffic sources. Google and everyone else knows that pharma prefers paid search over natural search in general – primarily because it is guaranteed and more easily managed, in my opinion. This means that pharma SEM could see an increased budget trend with Google Medication Search in place. Government, on the other side of this partnerhsip, will have the ability to seed their content and information through one of the most powerful sources of information gathering by consumers.
Is it censorship? Maybe. Is it a Google “hand job” to the government? I say yes. I personally think it is too much government influence on Google search (i.e., a bit “Google China”).
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the opinions or positions of Intouch Solutions.
