By Pete Dudchenko and Craig Macdonald

Google rolled out this week two key changes to their Search Engine Result Page and organic search management processes. The purpose of this note is to provide Covario clients with Talking Points on how to address these changes.

Issue 1.  Changes to the Google Search Engine Results Page

The Search Engine Result Page (or SERP) for Google has been altered. This change has been in beta for about 6 months now – and it appears to be gaining prominence in the last week.  The new SERP layout looks like this (for the example keyword “roller coaster”)

By Dema Zlotin, Founder & VP of Strategic Services

Last week during the iPhone 4.0 software launch, Steve Jobs introduced iAds as a built-in ad platform for app developers to make 60% of every $1 of ad spend that appear on their apps. Yesterday, Twitter released its long-rumoured self-service ad model that allows companies to pay for their tweets to remain at the top of search results pages on Twitter.com and 3rd party Twitter apps.

Both announcements demonstrate how much opportunity these companies believe exist in targeting ads to their lucrative customer bases.  While these ad platforms are both in their infancy, we expect targeting of various types (demoraphic, location-based, category, keyword) and numerous biding models (CPC, CPM, sponsorships) to be tested.

By Stephan Spencer, VP of SEO Strategies at Covario

The launch of the iPad this week may be the inflection point driving primary adoption of mobile devices for personal computing in the US. The iPad, like most mobile devices, includes a browser with a different set of specifications from the standard desktop environment. As such, advertisers need to address the issue of whether their current desktop oriented web environment will render on an iPad, or on mobile devices in general.

The purpose of this Point of View is to let Covario customers know what important differences the iPad offers in terms of browsing experience and how these differences could thwart web visitors from driving brand interaction or conversion.

by Craig Macdonald, CMO, Covario, Inc.

China’s control of the media in its country will now extend to the Internet with Google’s decision to eliminate its censored server there. Going forward, Google will shift all Chinese Internet traffic to its server in Hong Kong. Obviously, this won’t sit well with the Chinese government, which is now likely to be in a position where it believes it has no other choice than to censor content coming from Hong Kong.

Consequently, Google’s exit from China is significant. However, this is more of a political than a marketing issue. The outstanding question remains how far the Chinese government will go towards censoring social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Industry Insights from Dema Zlotin, Founder & VP, Strategic Services, Covario, Inc.

This morning Google stopped censoring search services (Search, News, Images) in China — see googleblog.blogspot.com. This has been done by redirecting Google Search users from www.google.cn to www.google.com.hk, so that all such services are being delivered from servers located in Hong Kong.  Google hopes that this approach will allow them to maintain uncensored services for mainland Chinese population while adhering to local laws. While this appears to be a clever technical and legal maneuver, we believe this approach will be blocked by the Chinese government shortly, as it violates the spirit, although perhaps not the letter, of the laws in mainland China. This may, however, protect locally based employees from prosecution — especially in light of today's news about Rio Tinto's employees facing trail in China — since the violation is not occurring on mainland Chinese soil. It also puts the initiative in the hands of the Chinese government to proactively block Google’s distribution, and allow Google to live up to its stated ideals.

Ann Lewnes, the Chief Marketing Officer of Adobe, has said that “Marketing is the new Finance” — meaning that the digital age is driving the corporate marketing function to become accountable for spending in a far more rigorous way than the old “reach and frequency” metric days. Adobe officially put its money where its marketing is by purchasing Omniture for $1.8 billion. According to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, the goal of the merger is tocreate a holistic way in which to develop creative content and measure the value of that content — be it video, web pages, mobile content, or social media content, and to “close the loop” in the content creation and content measurement worlds.

We believe this is a brilliant strategic move for Adobe, one that could change the rules of the game for digital media — from creation to measurement to monetization.

The saga continues. A year ago Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo in a hostile bid worth $44B. Recently, the Bing launch caused the two firms to trade some short term market share — none of which had much effect on the industry powerhouse, Google. However, that saga may be coming to a new stage as both firms have agreed on a partnership around search advertising. The purpose of this note is to describe Covario’s views on what this partnership means for our clients — the world’s largest search advertisers.

What’s the Deal?
Bing AdCenter will become the global paid and organic search system for the combined platform. Advertisers will be able to purchase paid search inventory through Yahoo. The engineering teams will be combined in order to integrate and leverage the information flow from search to provide better targeting over time. It seems like Microsoft is buying the Panama platform and will selectively integrate functionality from the system into Bing AdCenter. The display and content network businesses of both firms will be independently owned and operated. The deal is global — and will impact engines like Naver, which are powered by the Yahoo search algorithm. Yahoo Paid Inclusion program and Site Explorer were not commented upon. Many of the mechanics are still not available, and as they come available we will share additional details.