Greenlight's Magazine: 2013 Predictions Edition

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December 2012

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EDITOR Alicia Levy

MaRkETIng & PRODucTIOn Ashley Burgess

cOvER Bryant Arnold

DEsIgn & LayOuT Ben Mckeown

cOnTRIbuTORs Andreas Pouros

Adam Bunn Matt Bush

Tom Lidbetter Sam Haseltine

Hannah Kimuyu

PubLIshED by gREEnLIghT Level 14, The Broadgate Tower

Primrose Street London, EC2A 2EW

t: +44 (0)20 7253 7000

e-mail: [email protected]

www.greenlightdigital.com © Greenlight 2012 – all rights reserved

FOREwORD 2013 will be the year that Microsoft becomes relevant once again

3 sEO 2013, the year of Negative SEO and ‘secondary searches’

5 ThE 2013 cOnsuMER Google provides insights into how consumers searching habits will change in 2013

8 REsPOnsIvE wEb DEsIgn The importance of having a Responsive Web Design site

9 cOnTEXT wILL bE kIng Improvements in the interpretations of Social Media posts in the contextual analysis space

12 sEaRch & DIsPLay 2013 The start of a united Search & Display vision

Studying trends is very useful when making predictions because a

prediction in essence, should be the observation of a trend with the expectation that it will continue at a certain pace, to materially change the reality of the people who will live that change. within that context, we have the luxury this year of a number of observable trends:

� google’s market share of search dipped below 90% in the uk, its lowest point in 5 years. Microsoft’s bing picking up the difference

�The apple iPad has seen its market share drop from 60% to 50% this year, with devices from the likes of samsung and google making steady progress

� 140% more Microsoft Mobile Os systems were shipped this year compared to last

� netflix’s market share grew, against analyst predictions that amazon, hulu and hbO go would decimate it

� On mobile devices, it’s not netflix but youTube that dominates bandwidth usage (google Play was 7th, followed by netflix and iTunes)

� In two-way communications, Microsoft’s skype increased its market share of the IM market, and now holds 83% of it with the absorption of windows Live/Messenger

� On desktops, google chrome, Firefox, and apple’s safari all lost market share to Microsoft’s IE9 this year

� Data so far suggests Microsoft’s Xbox will be the best

1 www.greenlightdigital.com

selling games hardware of the year, aided by the release of black Ops 2, halo 4, and the securing of the third skyrim expansion pack, ‘Dragonborn’, ahead of a Pc or Ps3 release

For me, taken in aggregate, these trends suggest that Microsoft has been stealthy like a ninja, making significant inroads into its competitors businesses whilst the world’s gaze has been focussed on Apple, Facebook and Google over the last 12 months. Specifically:In Search

Bing has for the first time eaten into Google’s UK dominance to a newsworthy degree. Whilst Google has made amazing progress against Apple in the world of devices (from 46.9% market share with Android to

68.1% this year) its core product, Search, hasn’t proved as resilient to Microsoft as everyone might have assumed. This trend is likely to continue due to Microsoft’s market gain in desktop browser usage; IE9 has increased its share of the browser market to 54%, at everyone’s expense including Google’s. With IE10 around the corner, preloaded into Windows 8, this puts Bing in front of even more people by default. In devices

In devices, Apple’s dominance is declining, with a very public assault from the likes of Google, Samsung, and Amazon. Lesser publicised is the 140% increase Microsoft has seen in the number of MS Mobile OS systems it has shipped this year compared to last. In fact, of all devices only

Android and Microsoft have increased their market share this year.In two-way communication

Microsoft’s Skype is growing in dominance, largely due to Skype now absorbing Messenger/Live to give it an 83% market share. Whilst instant messaging has been waning in terms of usage, the new Skype will be part of all Microsoft products, including the lounge-owning Xbox, which means Microsoft is set to dominate two-way communications, which it will attempt to mirror on mobile.In gaming

The Xbox, located under 70 million TVs in the US alone, gives Microsoft the opportunity to control people’s living rooms in a way that Google TV and Apple

FOREWORD by Andreas Pouros

These trends suggest that Microsoft has been stealthy

like a ninja, making significant inroads into its competitors

businesses whilst the world’s gaze has been focussed on Apple

the MAGAZINE - Greenlight 2

TV can only dream of. To put this in perspective, Xbox is in 26% of US homes, the iPad is in 15%. An even more interesting statistic is that the Xbox this year captured 28% of all non-PC/Mac video viewing versus the iPads 27.1%. Xbox advertising has grown by 142% since 2010. With the Xbox’s market share increasing and the iPads decreasing, the Xbox is increasingly looking like the next big thing for advertisers – I’d say it is the advertising worlds best kept secret right now. Again, some stealthy ninja skills from Microsoft, carving out that market and now leveraging it for advertising.

The Xbox 720 is scheduled for release next year too, and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that this will be a huge development. We already know that it will support an always-on power state and will utilise a chipset that can allow concurrent apps. Add SmartGlass to this and you have the Xbox as a media (and advertising) delivery mechanism in the home that is always on, feeding from and feeding into every other networked device. There are already various clues around how Microsoft could compel people to accept being advertised to all the time too – for example, the Xbox 720 will likely go on sale for just $99 if you also sign up for a two year Xbox Live Subscription, i.e. opt-in advertising. This looks likely as Microsoft is already trialling this

with a specific 360 package today.A potentially formidable ecosystem

If you add up all these small victories, a strong case could be made that Microsoft has most of the ingredients necessary to build a great ecosystem for consumers, and the trends above suggest it might be on the right track. It dominates the desktop and gaming domains, is leveraging both of those to increase the advertising it can sell in Search and display, whilst also getting ready to push its new mobile offering aggressively at an opportune time when Android has already weakened Apple, and there are questions that the latter may have lost its mojo. There’s space for a third player in that market, particularly given the decline of Nokia and RIM.

Some of you will disagree and say that Microsoft can’t compete however much it tries because the only real strength it has is on the desktop and given that the PC is dying, it cannot leverage the PC for much longer to push Bing via IE10, or use it as a compelling part of a wider ecosystem.

But whilst it’s fashionable to suggest that the PC is dead, the argument doesn’t stand up to reason, nor do any numbers support that view. In short, the PC will survive for a multitude of reasons – simple ergonomics (I have iPad RSI right now), large screens, storage levels, number

crunching power, keyboards (far more valuable than we have given them credit for), and more.

In terms of numbers, the economic woes out there has had a bigger impact on PC sales than any questions over their utility – Lenovo for instance have seen an increase in sales this year by 23%. The trend is not suggesting death at all. Don’t take my word for it – if we take a basket of search terms to represent desktop machines, e.g. ‘PC’, ‘desktop computer’, ‘laptop’, etc, and have Google plot their popularity as search terms over time, you get the graph below, which clearly shows that the demand for desktop machines has maintained, as opposed to suffering a certain free fall to its death as the media has led us to believe and we’ve blindly accepted without question.My prediction for 2013

2013 will be the year that Microsoft becomes relevant once again. It will begin to leverage its dominant position on the desktop and in gaming to build an exciting ecosystem that will make Microsoft a compelling choice for consumers, and by extension an increasingly important advertising partner for marketers. It has all the ingredients, bar one, to make this possible. The missing ingredient would be something like Netflix, which leads me on to my final prediction - Microsoft will buy Netflix in 2013. �

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Searches for Desktop Computer related terms (Source: Google Trends)

SEO by Adam Bunn

do think 2012 will be looked back on in SEO as a year like no other in terms of the unprecedented disruption it has caused to the SERPs and the clearest message yet from Google that things are different now. Whether they are or not is largely irrelevant, since just the inherent threat will be enough to change behaviour. The key is whether that change causes you to give up altogether or actually evolve. So, next year will be the social SEO year instead… right?

This is the problem with predicting things in SEO on a yearly basis. You kind of know what’s going to happen, just not when. Sometimes people don’t even realise their prediction has already happened. I remember the “year of mobile” has been predicted for at least five years running, and I’m sure it will be again this year, but it’s already crept up on us (mobile campaigns are vital to many businesses, often yielding better results than their desktop equivalents).

The other problem with predictions of course is that usually it’s pretty impossible to say whether one was correct or not, since most of them aren’t given to simple yes/no answers. But to you, reader, whether 2013, 2014 or 2020 is the “year of Social SEO”, it’s neither here nor there – what matters is whether you can say

Last year I predicted that 2012 would be the year of “Social SEO”:

Next year, the confluence of user signals influencing search engines perception of brand strength, and everyone being on the “Social Media helps us build links” bandwagon, will make 2012 the year of social link building.”

By this, I meant that brands would embrace the integration of SEO, Social and PR to create a wave of genuinely interesting, powerful online marketing campaigns (in the parlance of our times this is now becoming known as “content marketing”).

What actually happened?If I had to characterise what

actually happened in 2012, it would be this:

2012 was the year when Google killed the old style of SEO and almost everyone milled about looking confused about what to do next, mainly because most businesses just weren’t ready for anything different.

When I say “killed”, it’s important to note that Google hasn’t actually stopped certain approaches to SEO from working, as even the grubbiest tactics are still proving fruitful (if you want to watch this in action, you can do a lot worse than monitor the rankings for “payday loans”, where a hacked sports blog is ranking on page one as of this writing, and has been for weeks). But I

Adam Bunn Director of SEO, Greenlight

4

you have embraced it for your site. Having said all that, and as

much as I rather like waffling on circuitously making a point about the future of SEO, I’m still bound by some draconian word count requirements and the theme of this issue of our magazine to deliver some actual predictions. So here is not one, but two predictions:1. Negative SEO will become commonplace

This year it’s become clear that some links, which historically may have simply been ignored by Google, are actively bad for rankings. An almost inevitable consequence of the proliferation of negative signals in the algorithm is that unscrupulous brands and agencies will start trying to use them as a weapon against their competitors, for example by seeking out the cheapest and nastiest paid link schemes out there and pointing them all at a top ranking competitor. For a very small investment in time and money it’s entirely possible to go and buy hundreds of thousands of low quality forum and comment spam links, and the flawed logic will be “ah ha… now that’s much easier than optimising my own site!”

This means that everyone needs to be on red alert for this type of activity and take appropriate measures if it does happen (namely, have an itchy trigger finger on your shiny new

Disavow Tool).2. Identification and targeting of Knowledge Graph “secondary searches” will be essential

In a world where the Google search results pages are constantly being tinkered with, the launch of the knowledge graph this year really stands out as the biggest development. Essentially for certain keywords, Google now shows some particularly advanced and prominent related searches that have the potential to drive traffic to longer tail keyword variants. For example, a search for “things to do in Paris” shows a carousel of landmarks and tourist attractions before any search results. Clicking on one does what I’m calling a “secondary search” for that landmark or attraction.

I think marketers who pay attention to the queries that are triggering knowledge graph

results, and what the secondary searches are, will see some good results in 2013. The secondary search terms will typically be less transactional and therefore less competitive to rank for. This prediction even extends to Paid Media as well, where the secondary search terms will tend to be cheaper to bid on, and I think Google will launch some sort of tool for advertisers that enables them to at least see what secondary terms are being triggered from the keywords they already bid on, if not automatically bid on those secondary terms.

In essence, you will be capitalising on the knowledge graph to get cheaper traffic and, if you are visible for both the trigger term and the secondary terms, better brand awareness. �

A search for “things to do in Paris”


consumerThe world today is changing. and it’s changing faster than anyone of us had ever dreamed to imagine. The internet is our telephone, our Tv, our shopping centre and our workplace, all at the same time. we are heavily dependent on it for information gathering and for communications. It is hard to imagine a world without the internet.

2013 THe


So what has driven the changes in consumers lives so dramatically?

We think there are three main reasons: speed, access and information.Speed

The evolution of wireless access technologies is about to reach its fourth generation this year. The UK’s first 4G mobile service will launch in 16 UK cities before the end of 2012 and we are predicted to have 4G in 70% of the UK by the end of 2013, offering faster networks than ever before.Access

Mobile phones have truly become accessible to the masses; they are no longer the preserve of the wealthy few. The price of an entry level smartphone has fallen dramatically over the last few years bringing the average price to well under £100.Information

This immediate access to real time information has resulted in a shift in consumer behaviour. Consumers are savvy and well informed and this behaviour has become overwhelmingly apparent since the onset of difficult economic times. Price comparison and deals sites have seen an all time high as consumers hunt for deals and discounts.

These three drivers have changed how consumers behave. At Google, we think that there are five trends in consumer behaviour that are worth planning for in 2013. The 2013 consumer will be: constantly connected, empowered, savvy, busy and have high expectations.Consumers are constantly connected

Internet connected devices have made it possible to access the world wide web at times and places that we wouldn’t have dared to consider maybe even as little as five years ago.

Now, consumers are spending one and a half hours of their personal time online (excluding work) which is a 48% increase compared to two years back. And they are spending time online across multiple devices. 40% of all UK adults use two or more devices to access the internet and 28% of all time spent online is via mobile. What to do?

As a result of this shift to being constantly connected, it is critical for businesses to offer a fantastic experience for their customers across all devices - a website that looks good on mobiles and tablets is a necessity, not a nice feature to have. Going forward, businesses should plan

their other media around mobile and tablet usage, as those mobile devices connect all other media and activity together.Consumers are empowered

More than a third of consumers in the UK watch video on demand and one in ten UK households have internet connected TVs. This is not only affecting TV viewing, but also many forms of traditional media. More than three quarters of British people say they now get their main source of news online. Online offers them the most up-to-date breaking news and provides them with the flexibility to check at times which are most convenient for them.What to do?

Empower the consumer by leaving choice and control in their hands. Most consumers, if you ask them, will say they dislike ads and will actively avoid them because they feel as though they are being bombarded.Consumers are savvy

Consumers are visiting more sites and conducting more searches over longer periods of time to ensure that they are thoroughly researching their purchases to get the best deals. Before making a purchase, today’s consumer spends up to 27 days and 3:17 hours across 22 sites. Two out of every three British consumers claim to shop around for the best prices and deals. That’s a lot of savvy shoppers!

More than half of all consumers confess that they don’t like paying full prices for anything!

Two out of every three British consumers claim to shop around for the best prices and deals. That’s a lot of savvy shoppers!


And two in three are shopping around for the best prices and revel in the thrill of getting a bargain. After four years of economic uncertainty, consumers have become used to this mindset and will continue this deal seeking, savvy behaviour well into any economic recovery.What to do?

Consumers research products they want to buy thoroughly before committing to a purchase. So it is important that your brand remains at the top of their mind during the research process, as consumers are still somewhat undecided as to exactly which brand they are going to buy. Ensure you maintain a strong presence in the Search results so that you can be found not only when consumers are looking for your brand, but also when they are searching generically for a product that is offered by your brand. Search is not to be viewed solely as a direct response mechanism. Search can also be used as a great tool for branding; a great complement to your other media.Consumers are busy

Today’s consumer is constantly on the go. Nearly 60% of UK adults say that there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they would like. As consumers become increasingly pushed for time, they are seeking ways to make their lives easier with the ultimate goal of saving time. By next year, 90% will make purchases online , 53% of internet users are expected to have their groceries home delivered and

mCommerce is expected to grow by 40% year on year. What to do?

In order to win when your customers are very busy, make their lives easier for them. If they are looking at your ads or site on a mobile, let them call you. If they visit your site, use remarketing to bring them back (around 97% of visitors do not convert on their first visit). Also use high impact communications to stand out; a great example of this is the YouTube homepage masthead, which reaches around 12m people every day.Consumers have high expectations

Seemingly, as a direct result of consumers being empowered, today’s consumer has very high expectations of products and services. They become frustrated when websites don’t load quickly enough. In fact, one in four consumers abandon a website if it doesn’t load within four seconds. They expect fast speeds on their mobiles too; half of mobile users abandon a mobile site if it doesn’t load within ten seconds. And three out of five won’t return!

High expectations extend to customer service. Two thirds of consumers cite poor customer service as the main reason to switch supplier. And 90% of consumers say that they would even be prepared to pay more for a better customer experience .What to do?

From the time a customer arrives at your site, ensure you give them a good user experience

- make sure that your site isn’t one of those which they abandon! Use analytics (Google analytics is great for this) to constantly check your load speeds, and to find where people have a bad experience and fall out of your site. Optimise your site for all devices, either by building bespoke sites for each device, or by using responsive design so your site is great on all devices.

Also ensure that you can provide a fast and efficient customer service, maintaining a real-time, open dialogue with your customers (and potential customers) across multiple channels. Use Social Media to talk to your customers where they are, consider using Social Media management software like Wildfire so that you are able to see the whole picture in one place.2013 holds lots of opportunity

If businesses make sure they respond to consumers, they will be well prepared for 2013. Google is excited about the opportunities in 2013, and is happy to help other businesses take advantage of them. �

Matt Bush

Agency Head, Google UK


page, as this will impact loading time – another important signal in ranking.

Poor mobile experiences also mean people are less likely to share socially and more likely to bounce right off and back to the search results, never to return. In both cases these aren’t good signals to Google to better rank your site in the search results.

However, Google does say that responsive is not the only option – the other two being device specific HTML and separate mobile URLS. Both options here are perfectly valid choices as far as Google is concerned and the search engine asks that specific hints and annotations are added to the pages to help it index them properly. However, Google does warn that user-agent sniffing (on which both these techniques rely) can be error prone and if implemented incorrectly, can result in accidental cloaking - something which Google has never much cared for.

Despite Google’s recommendation and all the obvious benefits, responsive web design does have its issues. Most importantly, desktop sized images downloaded to a mobile can drastically increase the page load time, especially for older or cheaper phones with less powerful CPUs. It’s interesting that Google

Responsive web design (RWD) has been around since 2010 but will explode

onto the web in 2013.With new devices equipped

with screens of all sizes coming out every other day - the Galaxy S3 phone; the mini iPad; giant iMac screens; a myriad of different laptops; netbooks and so on - it’s becoming difficult and expensive to design, build and maintain a web presence that maximises the user experience on all devices and additionally doesn’t chase away customers through a clunky and hard to use user interface.

Responsive web design is a relatively new approach, starting to gain traction as a solution to this problem. The approach uses a combination of fluid grids and layouts, flexible images and the intelligent use of CSS media queries to alter a design according to device size. As a user

switches from their desktop to tablet for example, the website should automatically switch to accommodate resolution, image size and scripting abilities. This means that columns disappear as the screen size reduces, navigation menus shrink gracefully to fit a small screen and just the right content is displayed to make the user journey simple and obvious regardless of what device is being used.

But it’s not just pure user experience that matters. In the summer of 2012, Google stated that its recommended approach to supporting multiple devices was to use a responsive solution. According to Google, it’s easier for its algorithms to assign indexing properties to your content if the desktop and mobile content is on a single URL, rather than on separate pages or subdomains.

Furthermore, Google has said that it can discover your content more efficiently if it’s not separated on different URLs per device, as it only needs to crawl your pages with a single Googlebot agent. This improvement in crawling efficiency can “help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh”. Additionally, Google also prefers users not to have to be redirected to the appropriate device optimised version of the

RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN by Tom Lidbetter

According to Google, it’s easier for its algorithms to assign indexing properties to your content if the desktop and mobile content is on a single URL


Take a look back through one of your old, printed, photo albums. Even with the

benefit of the scrawled notes on the back of each, how many of the photos from, say, 20 years ago do you clearly recall? Take away the notes on the back of each photo and you’re left with how I currently believe Social Media monitoring tools see the social web; small snapshots of the past with no context other than who is in each photo.

When people directly mention a brand or a key term, we can measure it and understand it, but only in the context of itself. A single photo in your family album for example. That, however, is only part of the problem. What we more specifically can’t do is measure and understand what is being said about your brand when the brand term is not specifically mentioned. A photo in your album that you may have taken but are

not actually in, for example. This is the focus of my prediction for Social Media in 2013.

Working on a daily basis with social monitoring tools has afforded me the opportunity to explore how they viewed me in an area I consider myself relatively influential (at the very least, passionate!); football. For all my sins, I’m a big West Ham fan and since 2006 I’ve been talking about my team regularly on my blog, which is fairly successful, and on Twitter since about 2007. So, from a social marketing perspective, there’s an argument for someone like me being either an influencer or someone who would be ideal to seed related campaigns. However, I’ll never be considered. Why? I don’t regularly mention the exact term, “West Ham” and will therefore be very unlikely to appear in influencer search results.

Of course, I regularly talk about West Ham in the context

of “the game on Saturday”, “great performance” or (more commonly!), “we’re going to struggle this year”. Importantly, Tweets like this regularly garner engagement and interest and often there will be some sort of discussion as a result of these Tweets. I’ve not needed to mention “West Ham” for my 1,500 or so followers to know what I’m talking about because they’ve come to understand that, in all likelihood, if West Ham are playing at the time of my Tweet, it will most probably be about West Ham regardless of whether I have directly mentioned them. Analysing only the volume of mentions also opens the door for false positives or, more precisely, people who have a passionate disdain for West Ham and mention them a lot in what they publish. To the undiscerning social monitoring tools, this person would actually be ranked as an

CONTEXT WILL BE KING by Sam Haseltine

Tom Lidbetter

Web Development Director,

Greenlight

has endorsed RWD when slow load times mean a poorer user experience. There is currently no perfect solution for this, although there are many reasonable workarounds and two (possibly complimentary) proposed W3C extension specifications that browsers may soon adopt.

Some argue that a better approach is to use responsive web

design for desktop and tablets and then entirely separate HTML for mobile, thus allowing you to truly target content to mobile users with no restrictions.

Whatever the arguments for and against RWD, it’s clear that more and more organisations are seeing it as the best fit for their needs. Even though it probably isn’t the right approach for

everyone, there is no doubt that 2013 will be a very big year for responsive web design. �


influencer!By way of example here are

some Kred badges of accounts suggested by a well respected social media monitoring tool to be the accounts with the most mentions of ‘West Ham’. There is one caveat however, one of these badges is for my own account although it was not even close to featuring in the ‘most mentions’ influencer list. To add a little more context, one is a football news aggregator, another the official account for the Premier League and another is the official Sky Sports account:

If you’re not familiar with Kred, the two scores displayed broadly represent the following.

� Influence: “is the ability to inspire action. It is scored on a 1,000 point scale.”

� Outreach: “reflects generosity in engaging with others and helping them spread their message.”

Ideally you want a high score in both and I, personally, would consider that to be both greater than 700 and 6, respectively. So that rules out three from the above list (including the official Premier League account), but not mine. The aggregator and Sky Sports obviously remain (due to sheer wealth of content and therefore term mentions - which actually makes them unrealistic outreach opportunities). All in all from those seven, only two plus my own account (745/7) would be worthy individuals to actively

pursue for a digital marketing campaign related to West Ham, yet my own account didn’t appear in the original ‘influencer’ list. It is my belief that contextual analysis of Social Media accounts will lead to far more accurate, reliable and relevant returns on influencer discovery.

My understanding of contextual analysis would be to study factors such as: what events are happening at the time of the Tweet, which terms are

consistently referred to, which key terms are mentioned in users replies to retweets, the content an individual follower publishes and what content appears within the links a user shares.

Through Twitter’s Interest Graph and Facebook’s Timeline (why else would they surface entire timelines if it wasn’t to improve insight for marketers?!) it’s evident that not only is this data there in some capacity, but that Twitter is actually already using it. Take this Promoted Tweet for example:

It was delivered to me when


viewing the stream for my West Ham account. On the surface it’s terribly targeted; I clearly don’t live in Southampton! However, it just so happened that West Ham had played Southampton just two days before this ad was delivered to me. It’s clearly an example of a bad use of Twitter’s Interest Graph as it doesn’t relate to me in the slightest, but the principle

remains.I’m confident that until

social marketers have the tools to accurately translate and work with this data, we’ll always fall short in terms of reaching outreach potential. For 2013 I think we’ll see a rise of interpretations in the contextual analysis space, improvements in accurately targeted advertising and tools

Sam Haseltine

Social Media Strategist, Greenlight

that bring this ability into the mainstream. �

SEARCH & DISPLAY by Hannah Kimuyu

What I predicted for 2012?At the back end of 2011,

Google was just about to launch its DoubleClick Search V3 platform - DS3 - a bid management programme set to combine Yahoo! and MSN adCenter into an AdWords type interface. There were also rumours of an even bigger investment into Invite Media, a Demand Site Platform (DSP) Google had acquired earlier that year. With an exciting combo of Search and Display technologies on the horizon, I asked marketers - as advertisers will we really need to invest elsewhere when Google could potentially provide it all?What 2012 delivered?

Google stayed true to its promise and launched its DS3 platform, and later on in the year a rather unusual quiet launch of Double Click Bid Manager (DCBM) or Invite Media v2 to most people.

So what happened to Google taking over the tech world, and leaving us with no choice but to use them and them only?

Like all predictions, my enthusiasm was bigger than the actual delivery. With all things in the digital world, nothing happens overnight. It requires a few years of grace to really take off. Surprisingly though, Google has been quite late to the bid management and DSP game; with the likes of Marin, Acquisio, Kenshoo and DC Storm making a real impact for some time now.

So was 2012’s launch of DS3 and DCBM too little, too late? And what does 2013 realistically look like for this interesting combination of technology?2013...

My enthusiasm lives on. I’m still convinced that advertisers will be turning their heads to Google’s combination of Search and Display management technologies. We

have to remember, the year of Mobile ran for over three years, before eventually making a dent in 2012, contributing to more than 38% of online searches. Therefore something worth waiting for needs time…right? So what’s changed?

� DS3 API is now available to integrate all third party tools, i.e. Omniture.

� Google Analytics (GA) part integration, but full integration is set for Q1 2013 whereby if you already use GA there’s no need to use the Double Click tags, as it will offer an end to end solution.

� Full inventory management capabilities with one-click integration with the Google Merchant Centre.

� All feed related programmes (Product Listing Ads etc) will have a fully featured management and optimisation process, coinciding with Google Shopping’s commercial model from Q1 2013.


� Google Tag Manager, introduced at the back end of summer, more to follow…

And then there’s DCBM or Invite Media, with many new advancements in v2, but the ones that stick out the most for me include:

� Full integration with Google Display Network (GDN)

� Full integration with YouTube � More granular geo-targeting

capabilities � Cross channel retargeting, e.g.

YouTube, AdWords etc � And the most exciting access

to premium inventory or ‘private deals’, which is definitely the next big thing for display data buys and optimisation in 2013 But is this enough to have usall thinking Google and only Google?

Surprisingly, Yahoo! and Bing have not offered us any way to integrate Search and Display. The Search Alliance has (understandably) been its core focus for 2012. That said, without sounding critical, we’ve all seen great and much needed improvements since the Alliance.

Other DSP’s continue to improve massively, new exchanges are opening (Facebook is certainly one of the most exciting), and a new wave of ‘super real-time bidding’ specialists are paving the way, by offering a ‘managed service’ making it easier for digital agencies to get involved in display. Surprisingly, very few of these specialists are developing their own technology, instead piggybacking off two, sometimes

Hannah Kimuyu

Director of Paid Media,

Greenlight

three DSP’s yet building their own reporting and targeting interface on top. In the last few months, we’ve also seen various data ‘geeks’ coming out of their labs, offering unique data buys and targeting features that are simply a plug-and-play option. So it’s fair to say 2012 has been a busy year for display, with everyone contributing to its growth. Regardless, I’m still convinced (I hope not foolishly) that Google is the only one with its eye on integrating Search and Display across all devices.

Like most years, Google has always made a BIG contribution to digital growth and development; however I am convinced 2013 will be the start of a united Search and Display vision, pioneered by Google. �

Greenlight’s Digital Advent Calendar

GreenliGht’s DiGital aDvent CalenDar is filleD with Great tips to help you Create suCCessful online

Christmas CampaiGns.

Find out how to make Twitter and Pinterest work for your business and discover the do’s and dont’s of SEO & PPC.

http://www.greenlightdigital.com/digitaladventcalendar/


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