May 2010 – Online Insights: Search Engine Marketing

Real-Time Results: Google’s Latest Addition to Search

Traffic to Facebook outpaced that to Google in the second week of March this year, according to Hitwise. The implications of this for search are huge. Consumers are now more likely to get up-to-date news, information and links from their social networks than from leading search engines. But don’t think Google and Bing are going to go down without a fight. Welcome to real-time results.

Betting on Change
Real-time results quietly became available on Bing and Google in the latter part of 2009. Basically, these results are live updates from popular social sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from blog posts embedded within the search results. When a person does a search on Google or Bing, they will now see these live updates that were published just seconds ago. But is anyone paying attention?

In a recent eye-tracking study conducted by Oneupweb in February 2010, we found that nearly three-quarters of the participants had never even heard of Google’s real-time results. Honestly, we weren’t surprised by these findings. Just take a look at how public opinion toward social networking has changed in the past few years. In 2006, many people considered Facebook to be a site strictly for college and high school kids. Today, the most active users on social networking sites are the baby boomers and Gen X-ers. YouTube was a novelty in 2005 and Twitter didn’t even exist. Today, Twitter is the talk of the town and social networking sites are the mainstays of the digital marketer’s tool kit.

Sometimes, the “quiet beginnings” eventually make the biggest splash. Real-time search is no different–while it was launched quietly, it’s sure to make a big bang since it’s about re-defining the search process altogether. The rules are going to change, and that’s what online retailers need to focus on.

Real-Time Results Matter
Basically, Google and Bing are now offering their complex algorithms for filtering through the firehose of social feeds, as they happen, in real-time. This gives the consumer unprecedented access to the most up-to-date and relevant information. Whereas exposure to brands on social sites is limited by the reach of the individual’s network, anyone can see a real-time result in Google.

And there is a huge audience for real-time–in a single day Google processes over 300 million search queries. Now that’s opportunity for real exposure.

Information Seekers are Tomorrow’s Consumer
In the eye-tracking study Oneupweb conducted on real-time results, we wanted to see if the people conducting those 300 million search queries were paying attention to the real-time results they were served. We split our test subjects into two groups: information seekers and consumers. We asked them to do a search on the same keywords, but the information seekers were told to simply look for information on a product, while the consumers were informed that they were looking to buy that product. Then we tracked how and when they used the real-time results.

We found that the consumer group quickly zeroed in on the top results, and often favored results that were associated with pictures of the search term. The information seekers behaved differently, however, and were more likely to take a closer look at the scrolling real-time results.

So it would appear that real-time results aren’t too valuable to a company when it comes to making an immediate sale of its products or services. But don’t discount them quite yet.

Those “information seekers” who engage with real-time results today may expect this feature to help them with a product search later on. The majority of the participants surveyed in this group were equally split as to whether they liked (47 percent) or where indifferent to (47 percent) the real-time results. Comments included “the latest updates were helpful and almost crucial to the product search” and “Twitter results are more ‘human.’” Only six percent of the information seekers we surveyed disliked the real-time component.

This is just the beginning. Before real-time results, users doing searches online were isolated from social inputs. But now consumers have the opportunity to get instant feedback on a product or brand from other consumers without ever having to log in to a social profile. And, for the consumer, the value of this kind of “live” feedback will grow as they come to expect real-time results.

Looking Ahead to Real-Time Relevancy
While the expectation is that everything online happens at the speed of light, don’t forget the human element. People are in the process of learning how to adapt to a new way of thinking when it comes to real-time results, so we’re not going to see any drastic changes overnight. But search is changing, and those who adapt early will be the first to discover how to leverage real-time search.

The idea is simple: search the content of the web as it happens to find the most up-to-date and relevant information. To actually achieve this, however, is not so simple. And it is still a long road ahead as we attempt to harness the real-time web. But the implications are huge, particularly at this time when we are seeing a dramatic rise in mobile devices. Expectations for search and social engagement are changing, and it will require a robust and well integrated online marketing strategy to stay relevant to your consumers in the future. You can bet on it.

Lisa Wehr is CEO and founder of Oneupweb, a full-service digital marketing agency. She has been counseling clients on improving website ROI and search engine marketing since 1996. She can be reached at info@oneupweb.com. Or send her a tweet@LisaWehr.