SLI is exhibiting at eComXpo next week, April 4-6, 2006. This is a virtual trade show for search, affiliate and interactive marketers. There are some fantastic speakers presenting and it is free to attend. So if you would like to find out more about our products and services then please come and visit. With our staff spread around the globe we are going to attempt to man the booth 24/7 so you should be able to drop in at any time.

This is our first virtual trade show – and I am very interested to see how it goes. I love the fact I don’t have to travel. I’ll be calling into the booth regularly and we’re giving away one of our brass telescopes – call into our virtual booth to be in to win.

Free registrations for attendees.

Click fraud has been an been an issue for as long as pay per click as been around. There has been renewed media interest in the topic since Google settled a lawsuit for $90 million. As it stands now click fraud is an annoyance – it’s one of the costs associated with running a paid search campaign. A cost that can be difficult to determine and is often ignored until it starts having a noticeable impact on your campaign.

The search engines are trying to detect click fraud and not charge for the fraudulent clicks but this is a battle that is difficult to win. A skilled fraudster can probably outwit any algorithm they come up with.

One solution is to change the model from pay per click to pay per acquisition. There has already been a move towards this with the increasing popularity of pay per call. Google has also been testing this. Bill Gross, arguably the father of the PPC model, is promoting a pay per action model with one of his start-ups, snap.com. This model is a lot harder to defraud. If you want to spend your competitor’s advertising dollars you can click on their ads and buy lots of their products – but I don’t think they’re going to get upset.

So how is this relevant to SLI? We have some experience in detecting this type of behavior. We have techniques to ensure that one person’s activity can’t unduly influence the learning on any of our customers’ site searches. In the past when we have detected this behavior they have been crude attempts to influence the results. For example a keyword that normally gets 2 searches a day, suddenly gets 30,000 in one day from a single IP address. If you’re going to do click fraud – don’t use a sledge hammer – be subtle about it.

This is also relevant to us for our Ad Champion service. This automatically creates and manages paid search campaigns from the data we collect from site search activity. We are very wary of click fraud happening on these campaigns which we are running for our customers. We have an advantage though – because these campaigns are operating mainly in the search tail. In order for click fraud to be successful our customers’ competitors would have to spread the clicks over lots of keywords and it’s difficult to work out what they are. If there’s a sudden increase in clicks on a keyword that normally doesn’t get searched for very often – then it stands out like a sore thumb.

For our Site Champion product, which automates search engine optimization for tail terms, we charge either on a cost per click or a cost per acquisition. The cost per click is susceptible to fraud (although we haven’t seen it yet), but because it’s operating in the search tail, it too will be difficult to defraud. The cost per acquisition model is risk free for our customers but there is an overhead to tracking the sales. I predict that the risk free appeal of the cost per acquisition model will mean we will see it more and more in the major search engines.

This week we announced our new customer Chiasso. I love our customers – and these guys are no exception. They sell all this cool furniture on-line and through their catalog and they’re about to open their first store. Like almost all of our customers they’re growing. If you’re looking for a different sort of gift – maybe a funky toaster or a stylish lamp – then you should take a look at what they’ve got to offer.

They’ve been great to work with and I’m pleased we’ve made a significant difference to their site by providing a better search experience. Somehow Chiasso manage to create good press for themselves. I was impressed when I read about them in Time magazine while they were trialing our service. Our announcement this week also received good coverage – DM News, Tech News World, and Chain Store Age all covered it – with more to come.

It was nice to see a story about site search today. The crux of the story was that Forrester had released a report showing that 56% of web sites didn’t have search engines that supported users’ goals. This is very definitely supported by what we see and I think it happens because it is very easy to create a bad site search and users’ expectations of search are continually increasing.

It is fairly easy to create a site search – a form where you type in some words and get back some results. Almost any web developer can use existing or free software to create this experience. Most content management solutions will come with some sort of basic search. But to create a good site search requires expertise and experience regardless of whether you’ve using free software or an expensive package you’ve bought for the job. Their is an art to;

• indexing all the content while not getting duplicates
• indexing the right text – for example it may not make sense to index the navigational text on each page
• presenting the search results in a format that most helpful to your users
• implementing and displaying refinement and sorting options
• and most importantly ensuring the results are as relevant as possible

This is one of the reasons why we chose to deliver our site search as a service rather than software. When we build site search for a customer the engineer assigned to the task has the benefit of years of experience across many different types of sites. The result is always a better experience than someone who is building site search for the first time.

The other reason why so many sites have search that does not meet their users’ expectations is that their expectations are increasing. The article referred to the Google effect – where people expect all search to be as good as Google. This is reinforced by those sites that do get site search right – with relevant, well laid out results that are easy to drill into, that quickly and easily satisfy peoples desire to find the information that they seek.

It has been mentioned in the past that search has a long tail, that is, a large proportion of the queries are unique or don’t get searched for very often. This is useful for search marketers to know about. e.g. the term digital cameras gets searched for often and many people trying are optimizing pages and buying keyword based advertising. However the term “7 megapixel canon camera with 2 day delivery” hardly gets search for at all, but would convert to a sale better, be easier to optimize for and cheaper to buy.

I wanted to see if site search has the same sort of tail as web search and explore what the implications are for site owners. First I reviewed the data from one of our web search customers and plotted the popularity of the top 1000 search terms – shown as a percentage of the overall traffic. The most popular search term (”google”) accounted for only 0.0044% of all the traffic. The 1000 most popular search terms only accounted for 0.3% of the overall traffic. This definitely looks like a tail.

We then selected four of our site search customers and plotted the popularity of each of their 1000 most popular terms. As you can see from the chart below – although each site has completely different content and visitors – the tails are all the same shapes. The main difference is in the size of the tail. Not surprisingly the more traffic a site has, the longer the tail.

We then looked at what portion of the search traffic was covered by the top 1000 search terms and plotted it against the total search traffic.

So what implications does this have for site search owners – knowing that they own a long tail? One of the main implications is how site search owners go about searchandizing. For those unfamiliar with the term (I’m not sure who coined it) searchandizing is using site search for merchandising, for example promoting products within your own site search for certain terms. Most advanced site search solutions provide these facilities. If you have a highly trafficked site then promoting items for a small number of individual terms is not going to have a huge impact for the majority of your users – you need to merchandise the tail.