The good folks at BloomReach shared some data with me recently. This data showed how “gift” oriented search queries differ from other types of queries. In the process of reviewing this I realized that it provides an excellent example of how drawing premature conclusions from data can cause you to make bad mistakes.

As background to the source of the data, BloomReach provides a product called BloomSearch that is in use by a large number of e-commerce web sites. The product enables those sites to scalably modify their product pages so that they can capture a lot more long tail search traffic, resulting in significant incremental revenue.

As a result of this, BloomReach has access to lots of information on how these sites perform. Let’s take a look at a sample of the data!

This shows data for 9 anonymous e-tailers. We see the bounce rates shown for 2 different types of queries – “gift” and “non-gift”. BloomReach found that gift queries contain certain obvious terms like “gift” or “present”, or sometimes not so obvious things like “mother’s day flowers” or “Valentine’s Day chocolates”.

Some gift queries occur at the same time every year, while others are unpredictable and ongoing (i.e. birthdays and anniversaries). For example, “housewarming wine basket” is another example of a gift query that was included. “Non-gift” queries represent all other queries.

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Key Points

1. Initially when Bing launched social search, they wanted to carve out a distinct space for the social results. Later on it became clear that these worlds were blending together and it made less and less sense to keep them in a separate space.
2. Bing is now indexing 30 times more data from Facebook than they had previously. On average, people will see about 5 times more results than before.
3. While Bing is doing a much better job of harnessing user’s relevant friend information, they are also focusing on relevant “expert” information as well; influential bloggers, subject matter experts…
4. Even though search and social results are blending, they are still kept separate because really, how can anyone decide which of those to rank more highly?
5. The notion of a Like is still a little bit perplexing from a ranking perspective. What does a Like mean for a page? Does the user like the design, the content, or maybe just the picture? Bing tends not to just use a pure Like signal to do ranking.
6. Shares are basically the same as Likes – not used a ton for web ranking except in velocity (like the way Twitter is used for discovering news).
7. It’s an uncharted territory as far as what are the best types of queries for social search. It may be that in social search every query should have a person as an answer. Even something like, “what’s the height of Mount Everest,” a very definitive, objective query should have human results.
8. Bing’s social search has combined together four different services and applied a layer of machine intelligence on top and applied a layer of semantic knowledge on top of that to deliver that one result; something no one else is doing right now.
9. When someone changes privacy settings or deletes a post from Facebook, Bing gets that update in real time. The result is then purged from their results in minutes not hours or days.
10. The social pieces in the Facebook experience were all developed by Facebook. Bing uses their own algorithm on the social search data for their social search results. It is completely independent of what Facebook does with Graph Search, even though it operates on the same data set.
11. When you search on Bing, it gives you the web results plus all the different updates that come from the Facebook social graph. On Facebook it really pivots more around the person and their interests.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Let’s talk about Bing and Social Search!

Stefan: Initially when we launched social search, we really wanted to carve out a distinct space for the social results. That was done partially from a user experience standpoint to identify the fact that we think social results are often very different than web results. The web results are what the web knows about your query; the social results are what people know about your query.

As we really got into it, it became clear that a lot of times these worlds were blending together and it made less and less sense to actually keep them separated off in that carved-out space. They are still separate in the new experience, but it’s much more in line with the overall experience than it was before.

Let me show you what that looks like. If I try something simple, like Hawaii, what we get are the web results on the left-hand side. In the middle, you get our snapshot, which pulls in data and services from across the web. You can see people who were born in Hawaii, who their governor is, celebrities who are from there, all sorts of different things.

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Key Points

1. The adoption rate of mobile devices is off the charts. There are about 120 million smart phone devices in the United States and between 40 to 45 million tablets.
2. The Television and Video Game industries are offering increasing amounts of supplemental content optimized for mobile devices broadly to encourage multi-screen engagement and specifically to encourage social interaction and the discovery of secret content or levels.
3. As mobile technology works through its growing pains, many publishers have to choose between having a really great robust app experience versus a really good browser experience.
4. Responsive web design is a great concept, but not many sites, other than the major brands can take advantage of it. Often times, you will get a “Plain Jane” mobile experience because it’s the same site getting translated across a number of devices.
5. An average user downloads approximately 50 apps during the course of their 2 year phone contract, but they tend to use only 7 to 10 applications regularly.
6. Many users want to spend more time with apps because the user experience is much more fluid than a browser. However, when it comes to making the all important conversion, whether it’s submitting personal information or not, people feel a lot more comfortable going through the browser.
7. Apps that take advantage of cross-platform functionality are finding much greater success than those that don’t.
8. Google and Bing’s mobile search results are more action than description driven. There are a lot more quick links that are available versus the more general, broad descriptions.
9. In many cases, the conversion actually happens offline. Users have learned to engage with mobile search in this way, and there has been a tremendous growth in requests for data on a hyper-local level.
10. There is a huge intersection between mobile and social media and all the other formats of media that exist and create an overall advertisers brand. Brands need to view mobile as part of a converged effort in order to make their brand standout.

Full Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: What are your thoughts about the mobile market?

Diran: The adoption rate, obviously, is off the charts. We have about 120 million smart phone devices in use here in the United States. This took about 10 years to reach. Tablet devices have grown much faster than that. We are at 40 to 45 million devices in just two to two and a half years.

It used to be that people were slow to adopt new technology that required some initial set up or to use something completely new, but I think the iPhone changed that, and the iPad did it for the tablet market.

In terms of usage and consumer behavior, people are much more comfortable with these devices. It used to be that people were slow to adopt new technology that required some initial set up or to use something completely new, but I think the iPhone changed that, and the iPad did it for the tablet market. People are much more comfortable spending most of their time attached to these devices.

It’s a very personal thing. People like the customizability and personalization of these devices. That’s a big part of the reason why Android gets a lot of popular attention. Not only is there a broad range of devices to choose from but Android users also have more choices in home screen customization and what widgets they can use, whereas iPhones are a lot more rigid with their grid layout.

On a cultural level, people are making shifts in their behavior, whether it’s consciously or subconsciously, in order to incorporate this mobile lifestyle. I don’t think a lot of research has actually been done to understand the long term effects for what this means for consumers. We are seeing a lot of changes and are going to continue to see them with the advent of new technology, new platforms, and faster Internet. It’s going to continuously evolve at an even quicker rate.

Eric Enge: Is part of the reason for the rapid growth of the tablet market due to smartphone’s relatively small screen size?

Diran: It could be, as tablets are in between devices. The smartphone is something that people have with them all the time and is portable to the point where it can slip into their pocket; a smaller screen actually has a benefit. However, we are also seeing a trend of the size of smartphone’s screens increasing. The Galaxy Note 2 that came out recently has a 5.5 inch screen which isn’t that much smaller than the 7 inch iPad Mini or the Galaxy Nexus 7. The line between tablets and smartphones is becoming increasingly blurry. Some of that growth is probably related to the screen size because you did have the 10 inch iPad type of tablets, but now you are getting the wide screen devices in the 7 inch tablets that are quickly outpacing the sales of the previous generation of tablets.

While there may have been some correlation between screen sizes in terms of adoption that is being blurred very quickly. People who have smart phones tend to also buy tablets. About 25% of Smartphone users also own tablet devices.

Tablets and smartphones are being used in different ways. People on their phones are messaging, using them as a way to connect to the Internet and to be social. Tablet devices also have many of these capabilities, minus the phone bit, but people are using them a lot more in their down time at home. They use tablets to read books, to consume media and content, and as a second or even third screen to their television.

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Eric Enge: Hi. I’m Eric Enge, CEO and founder of Stone Temple Consulting. I’m here today with Greg Jarboe, co-founder and president of SEO-PR and author of the book, “YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day,” and we’re going to have some fun talking about some things that people don’t really necessarily know about success in video marketing, and YouTube in particular.

Greg Jarboe: You want me to give away the secret sauce?

Eric Enge: I do.

Greg Jarboe: Oh, man. OK.

Eric Enge: (Said with a smile) I mean, I invited you to our facilities for that explicit purpose. So, let’s dig in. You were telling me just a moment ago about this guy – I apologize, I forget his name – that has this really unique spin on marketing on YouTube. Why don’t you tell me that story?

Greg Jarboe: The guy is named Ray William Johnson, and if you don’t know Ray, that’s OK, you should find out about Ray. Part of the reason why I use Ray as an example in the courses that I teach at Rutgers, for example, is Ray made a million dollars last year in selling advertising on YouTube next to his channel.

Eric Enge: That sounds like a pretty interesting sum of money, and I think you mentioned to me that he had this really unusual insight into how he got people to respond to the ads.

Greg Jarboe: Right. So, Ray has done a number of things right. First of all, he’s funny enough that people watch his videos (and let me put the emphasis on “funny enough.”) They’re also interested in subscribing to his channel partly because he does two new, original videos a week on Tuesdays and Fridays, and he’s got 5.8 million subscribers.

Eric Enge: Wow.

Greg Jarboe: People who say, “Please send me an e-mail the next time one of Ray’s new videos goes up,” so that’s a following. And then what Ray figured out ahead of everybody else is that if people were watching his videos, laughing at his humor, and then going on and doing something else, Ray would remain a poor, starving comedian for the rest of his career. So Ray’s innovation, the one that I show in the classes that I teach that wakes the students up, it’s like, “Say what? He did what?” is Ray has got a couple of things in the middle of each video called “Cool Transition.”

So he does a video that is broken into three parts. And between part one and two, and part two and three, there’s this quote, “cool transition,” and the cool transition is anything but. It’s actually quite boring. It’s actually quite monotonous. It’s actually quite predictable. It’s the part of the video where you start glancing around and seeing what other things are there.

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