How Processing Fluency Impacts Web Marketing – Whiteboard Friday

June 13, 2013 by

Posted by randfish As marketers, we’re trained to think that our audiences consider the rational inputs we display, and through them, come to rational conclusions. But what about cognitive biases that might influence processing and decision making? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand dives into how processing fluency impacts web marketing, and explains why things which are easier for us to digest are more likely to induce action. How Processing Fluency Impacts Web Marketing – Whiteboard Friday For reference, here is a still of Rand’s whiteboard. Video Transcription “Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to start with a conundrum. In fact, it’s a conundrum from a research project that is based on a fluency bias. Fluency bias being one of the many cognitive biases in the field of psychology. Let me start by asking you a question. Do you believe the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety unmasks”? So a large number of participants in a research study were asked whether they believed this, and a second group, another group of participants in the same study were asked separately whether they believed the statement, “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals.” What do you think were the results? Take a minute to guess. People believed this one massively more by a shocking margin. And you would think to yourself, “Well, I am not nearly so foolish a person as to think that my belief in a statement like this would be biased by rhyme, conceals/reveals,” and yet that is exactly what happened time and time again. This study can be reproduced with success. Far more people believe “What alcohol conceals, sobriety reveals,” rather than the alternate use of the word “unmasks.” This is called, one of my favorite cognitive biases in the world, the “rhyme as reason” bias. Rhyme as reason. Let me give you another famous example that some of you have probably already jumped to. Do you remember Johnny Cochran in the famous O.J. Simpson trial, declaring to the jury, “If the gloves does not fit, you must acquit. If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.” So human beings, especially in the marketing and technology world, are trained, we are trained to think that people are logical, that people consider the rational outcomes, the rational inputs, and they come to a rational decision based on those inputs. And yet a cognitive bias, like rhyme as reason, would suggest that’s not really the case at all. We are biased by all sorts of things. Rhyme as reason is one of many fluency biases. The fluency bias or the fluency processing bias essentially suggests that things which are more easy for us to comprehend, which are more simple for us to digest, lots of good examples here. Attractive people on magazine covers are more likely to draw our eyes. Concepts that are simple for us to understand, phrases that we’ve heard many times, things that relate to things in our memory, all of these are simpler for us to understand and therefore more credible, more believable, and more likely, in the marketing world, to induce action. Let’s take this over to web marketing for a second and think about things where this happens. Page speed load time. When something loads more quickly, not only are we more likely to stay on the page, we’re more likely to trust the brand more. We’re more likely to recommend it to others. We’re more likely to use it ourselves. In fact, when Microsoft did a famous research study where they increased the amount of time before search results were returned by a mere 250 milliseconds, which is undetectable to the human eye, right? If you were shown a film strip and then there was a 250 millisecond cut, your eye could not detect it. Your brain would not know that you had been shown that image, and yet what they found was that abandonment rates went up. People searched less, and they searched less often, and they were less likely to return to the site. This is fluency bias at work. The aesthetic attractiveness of a website’s or a web page’s layout is likely to drive us to take more action or to take less action, to recommend something, to tweet it, to share it, to link to it. No wonder, right? The pronounceability of a brand name. One of my favorite, favorite examples is that a study looked at the pronounceability of stock market ticker symbols during their IPO, at a public market offering. And you would think to yourself, “Now, wait a minute. These are some of the smartest human beings in the world, who are working at hedge funds, who are working at large investment portfolios. There is no way that they are going to be taken in by the pronounceability of a stock ticker symbol.” Why does it even matter whether a stock ticker symbol is pronounceable or not? And yet pronounceability has a high correlation with more successful IPOs in their first two weeks after offering. Insanity. Insanity. We are all subject to this. No matter how smart you believe yourself or you audience to be, fluency biases, processing fluency, and cognitive biases as a whole are undoubtedly having an effect on your audience. The familiarity of user experience. Some of you have seen some of the screen shots from Moz Analytics and probably maybe a few of you have gotten access to the private beta, and over the next couple of months more people will. Inside that product you’ll notice that it looks very similar to another product. Right? There’s sort of a, “Oh, look at that. There’s the navigation on the left-hand side. There’s a little graph up here, and the time frame is over here, and then there’s a chart of data down here.” That reminds me a lot of Google Analytics, which many people who are watching this Whiteboard Friday and might be using Moz Analytics are almost certainly familiar with. And that is no error. That familiarity of user experience, that, “Oh, yes. I have been here before. Oh, yes. I am familiar with how to use a web analytics product or a search engine or an e-commerce site.” There’s a reason that these follow into patterns and why these patterns are successful when they are repeated and deviation from those patterns can actually be dangerous. The legibility of font and text in a blog post, in a piece of content can influence whether it’s shared more or less. The ease of discovery and shareability of something. If something is very easy to copy and paste inside my browser so that I can easily tweet it, or if I am sent a link by somebody in an email that just says, “Hey, if you would retweet this that would be great,” and it goes directly to their tweet, wow, this is very easy. It’s very easy for me to share it, and therefore I am more likely to do so. Processing fluency dictates it is thus. I would urge you, whenever you’re thinking about your marketing campaigns, whether those be in the SEO world with things like your domain name, your title, your URL. Your URL, in a study by Bing, domain name and URL, the little part in the search results that’s green, actually had a significant biasing effect on where clicks went. Almost as significant, in fact, a little more significant than whether there was a rel=author profile picture, according to Google. These are separate studies, but the data should match up. The readability of that content. Social, the sharing time. When was it shared? Was it shared at a time when I’m going to see it? Was it shared at a time when I’m likely to be on a device where I’m more likely to share? Maybe that’s mobile if it’s a retweet. Maybe that’s desktop if it’s something where I actually want someone to take action, or a laptop, or a tablet. The length of the content. Length is very much a part of processing fluency because very long articles, depends on the subject matter, but we have a tendency not to read or to comprehend and process all of that information. In advertising, your copy, your layout, your design, this is classic ad agency world stuff that people have been doing for decades. And in content, the style, the UX, the complexity of that content. Again, another really good example, Moz’s own search ranking factors, which are produced every two years, and this summer we’re coming out with a new version. It will be first presented at MozCon and then appear on the web. But the complexity of the new UI, that we launched in 2011, made it such that engagement on those pages was far less because you had to click over to different tabs to actually see the numbers, as opposed to seeing it all on one page. It reduced the shareability, the number of links it got, as compared to when it was done in 2005, 2007, and 2009. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. If you were investing in web marketing channels, in content marketing and SEO, in social, and advertising of any kind, I would urge you to think about the fluency of the work that you’re producing and whether people can really consume it as effectively as you’re hoping they can. This can have a big impact on the effectiveness of the work that you do. All right everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.” Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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How Processing Fluency Impacts Web Marketing – Whiteboard Friday

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Inside YouMoz: How To Guest Blog for Moz

June 12, 2013 by

Posted by KeriMorgret Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at YouMoz? Here’s an explanation of what we’re looking for, how to put together a good post, and some frequently asked questions. I’ve had the privilege of being at the helm of the YouMoz editorial team for almost two years now, and have been amazed and awed by the content that you all have shared. On an average weekday, we get 5-10 submissions, and we publish about 10% of our submissions. I wanted to share more about who we are, what makes for a good YouMoz post, and how to get in that top 10%. Who Reviews Posts? Miriam Ellis is a Moz Associate specializing in copywriting and Local SEO. She provides the initial review of your post. Melissa Fach is a Moz Associate with extensive editorial experience in the industry. She is one of the people who will closely review your post and provide you with feedback. Keri Morgret (that’s me!) I’m a Moz employee on the community team. I also will closely review posts and give you feedback, as well as do a final check of your post before publishing it on the YouMoz blog. Erica McGillivray , Jen Lopez , Ashley Tate , and Trevor Klein also help with the review process as needed. What is the Review Process? All posts are reviewed for obvious spam and if the post has already been published. In these cases, we decline the submission and leave a note for the author. Miriam makes an initial review of the post and leaves internal notes for the team. The post status changes from “Pending Review By Editor” to “Pending – Reviewed By Editor”. This doesn’t mean it’s going to get published, but please know that only about half of the submissions even make it this far. To check the post status, go to Manage Posts (visible when looking at the Moz Blog), click the Posts tab, and then look for the status and any notes from the editor. Melissa or I do an in-depth review of the post, with other people from Moz giving additional opinion or reviewing posts as needed. We’ll make a decision to decline the post, return the post to the author for edits, or to publish the post. We will either leave a note in the editor comments field of the post, or (usually) email the author at the email address on their profile with our decision. Don’t panic if your post was returned to you! Many of the posts on the YouMoz blog (and even those that have been promoted to the main blog) have gone through the revision process. This means we think your post has potential, and there are some things that could be improved to make it a great post for YouMoz. When a post is approved for publishing, I do one final check for spelling, grammar, valid links, image attribution, and several other details. We try to notify the author of publication at least several hours to a few days before we publish. It is beneficial for the author to be able to respond to any comments by our readers, and to promote their post (Roger will also share the post on Twitter). What Content is a Good Fit for YouMoz? Actionable, detailed content with references tends to do the best on YouMoz, and case studies or examples are particularly popular. Think about the readers of this post, and try to make it so this is something that the reader could take to their boss and say, “Let’s give this a try. Here’s a post where this person tried it, they got good results, and they explain how to implement it.” This post is from a security company, but a wide variety of people could follow their tutorial using Google Analytics to develop an FAQ strategy . This post used screenshots of GA to explain step-by-step what they did complete with an example to cut and paste, and provided information about how it impacted their company. We want to publish original content that has not been published elsewhere. By original, we mean both “don’t submit an exact copy of a post that is already online” and “don’t take the outline of a post and change word order enough to pass Copyscape”. YouMoz readers are looking for new information that they haven’t already read on another site. Include enough details so others can replicate your actions or your processes. Try to anticipate the questions someone might ask or alternative explanations and address that in your post. Here are two examples: If you’re discussing a tactic that increased your traffic, include additional information that might be relevant. For example, if you’ve been revising content about pumpkin carving and state the increase in traffic is due to the authorship you implemented, yet the traffic comparison is the month of October (the end of October is Halloween in the US and when people carve pumpkins) to the month of September, readers are likely to comment that it was increased search queries that led to the traffic rise, not the inclusion of authorship. Instead, in this case you could compare October this year to the previous October, and compare pages with authorship implemented to pages without authorship implemented. If you’re examining a search engine result page, include information about which search engine you were using (google.com? google.co.uk?), your location, if you were logged out (generally, it’s best to use an incognito window in a browser to help minimize personalization based on your search history and cookies), what query you ran, if you modified any parameters in the URL, if other people saw the same results, and any other relevant information. Back up the “what to do” statements with information about “how to do”. References are often key to a good YouMoz post. You don’t need to explain how to do every single step, but give enough context and a brief explanation, then link to where there is authoritative information. A good example is this post about spring cleaning your website . If this same post with no links had been submitted, it would not have been approved. Instead, the post did well and was promoted to the main blog. I want to write a case study, but am not able to share sales figures or visitor data. What can I do? Find out what data you can share. Perhaps you can’t share the exact number of visits the site received or the raw dollar figure of the sales, but you can share that traffic increased by 10% compared to the previous year, or that the time on site increased. This post about opening up content on their website doesn’t have exact visitor information, but does include enough information to show that their experiment had a positive impact. If you don’t have any data you can share as an example, consider sharing something that you’ve built to help you learn something or be more efficient. This post breaks down how the author reviewed job descriptions to build a list of topics to learn more about, and how he prioritized that list. Google just announced that they are doing XYZ, and I’d like to write about it for YouMoz! We usually don’t cover general industry news on YouMoz. There are a number of other blogs that are quite good at covering the latest announcements from the search engines, including Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable . What works for YouMoz is a post talking about what Google is doing, and how it impacts the business, what you can do to take advantage of or mitigate the latest development, or other actionable information. An example is determining how the shutdown of Google Reader might impact your bottom line, example spreadsheets, and how to explain this to your C-level executives. How many words should I write? We don’t have a minimum or maximum word count. Generally posts run from 1000-3000 words, but we have published posts that were fewer than 500 words and posts that were over 10,000 words . What about links? Relevant links are encouraged in posts. The previously mentioned post about spring cleaning your website had a considerable number of links to resources. You can link to your own site or a client’s site in your post, if it is relevant and on-topic. In this post about lessons from a 100k pageview post , the author links to content from his company’s blog. The YouMoz is all about how that post got over 100,000 pageviews, and is a very appropriate example. Unfortunately, we often see posts that start out “My coworkers at our Springfield SEO agency were having coffee the other day” with a link to the SEO services page of their agency and a post that has no inherit need for that link. If your post only links to your own properties, that’s going to be viewed by many users as a bit too promotional for your own site. There is a Blog Bio section of your profile where you can have a link back to your company in your bio that will show at the bottom of the post (it’s not displaying at the moment, but it will be fixed shortly). Affiliate links are not allowed. Do I need to have a degree in writing to write for YouMoz? What if English is not my first language? You don’t need to have perfect spelling and grammar to have a post published on YouMoz, nor does English need to be your native language. However, we are not a college writing lab. We will give you feedback about what could make your post work better for our readers, and we will check for spelling and obvious grammar mistakes, but we are not able to go through a post line-by-line and help you rewrite it. Give yourself plenty of time to research the post (including finding the examples, references, and images), write the post, have others review what you’ve written, then come back and look at your writing anew after you’ve had a break from it. Take in the feedback other people have given, and do one last review in a word processor for spelling and grammar mistakes. This post about Author Rank needed only two typos fixed out of 2600+ words, and needed very little work from the editors. The author later revealed that four coworkers had reviewed his post and given feedback. The post has 166 thumbs up, only one thumb down, and from the first comment had requests to promote it to the main blog. Be aware that people from all over the world read YouMoz, and may not understand references that are regional in nature or specific figures of speech. It can be helpful to avoid some idioms, and add additional information for context. Technical Details Finding Images Images are great to have in a post! If you’re not making screenshots of your own material (info on that below), please be sure that you have the right to use the images you are submitting. Here’s one post on finding photos for your blog post , including using stock photos, Creative Commons pictures, and commissioning your own photos. Including a note at the end of your post about your image sources would be really helpful! We will erase before publishing, but this saves us from having to email you asking about the image source. Adding Images Here are some tips that will help your image look good in the post, and minimize the amount of back-and-forth needed with the editorial staff. Our biggest request is that you resize your browser or your spreadsheet before taking screenshots. Often a computer screen is set at 1200 pixels wide, and the site (or application) adjusts to fill that whole space. When you take a screenshot and that width and then need to reduce it to the 730 pixels wide for the blog, the image can be hard to read. If you adjust column headings to remove extra horizontal space (wrapping the text can help), or adjust the width of your browser before taking a screenshot, it can make a big difference. The two images below are before and after examples of removing extra space in a spreadsheet. Both are the exact same width, but one is much more readable. You don’t need Photoshop or fancy image editing tools. I’m on a PC, and use a combination of Paint and Irfanview (free) to resize images, automatically crop extra white space, and with the RIOT plugin you can “save for web” and have a reasonable file size for your image. To insert an image in your post, you’ll first need it hosted somewhere (your own site, or a free hosting site like imgur.com (if your post is published, we’ll automatically copy your images to our CDN). In the post, click the Insert Image icon, then paste in your image URL. Your image will now appear in the post. Formatting your post Using headings is a great way to help organize your post! If you’re using our editor to compost your post, headings can be found when you click the paragraph icon. Text alignment is adjusted when you click the icon shown below. If you’re accustomed to our old editor and resistant to change, you might give this editor a try. We have no relation to and do not support it, but it may be a more familiar interface for you. You can paste the source code from that editor into the source code view of our editor (click the button in the toolbar for that view). Spelling and grammar checking After you’ve finished your post and had it reviewed by some trusted people, do one last check for spelling and grammar. One method that works well to catch many mistakes is to paste your post as plain text into Word, then select the language as your local language, and make sure that “do not check spelling or grammar” is unchecked. I’ve often found that Word decides that part of the text is a different language, or that you somehow don’t want it to check all of your document. Here’s a handy page on setting your language in Word that will help you find this semi-hidden setting. FAQs How does a post get promoted to the main blog? This is the most common question! There is no exact formula, but instead we look for how the community has felt about the post. Some indicators of this are the number of thumbs, the number and type of comments, reaction on social media, and post analytics. If you wrote an awesome post that got on Hacker News but didn’t get a ton of thumbs or comments on the post itself (because it was discussed on HN and those users didn’t sign up here just to thumb), we’re going to notice that and take it into consideration. Did you know that we have post analytics that are available on every post? Take a look! We generally promote posts within a week or two of them going up on YouMoz. We’re considering looking back a couple of months and evaluating posts that were slower to catch on with the audience but did well and were not time-sensitive. Please give us your feedback about this in the comments!  Why do some posts go straight to the main blog? The technical infrastructure we have is responsible for some “YouMoz” posts going straight to the main blog. For our regular main blog authors, we have special permissions for them to be able to post directly to the main blog. For authors doing just a single post on the main blog, having them submit to YouMoz and promote it right away is the easiest technical way to do things. Why is the review period so long? We strive to be TAGFEE in our reviews, and give quality feedback to all legitimate posts, even the ones we decline. Sometimes it takes a while to read through the post and get into the author’s head and understand where they are coming from, what they are trying to say, and compose an email back to the author explaining how their post could be improved. The editing team has a wide variety of knowledge, but we sometimes need to send a technical post off to another Moz employee or associate for them to review. We don’t want to publish a post that has incorrect information that could do harm to a site, for example. Various things can interfere with author communication. The email address in the profile might be sales@somecompany.com and the email doesn’t get passed along to the author, or the email goes into a spam bucket. Sometimes we have posts that are 90% there and just need a couple of small tweaks, and we never hear back from the author for whatever reason. Sometimes we’ll be short an employee because of a vacation, we’ll launch a new product, migrate domains, or need to email every single Moz user and answer their questions. Sometimes, it all happens in the same week. The awesome thing about this team is that we’re cross-trained and can pitch in to help each other. At times, it means we’ll have a bunch of people tackle YouMoz and the review period is nice and short, and at other times it means that we need to devote our energies to other tasks and the YouMoz queue grows again. We Want You to Write for YouMoz! Are you ready to write a post? We hope you can take what you’ve learned here and decide to Submit a YouMoz Post ! Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Inside YouMoz: How To Guest Blog for Moz

Filed Under: Advertising, affiliate marketing, Apple, articles, Beginner, blogging, conversion, Ecommerce, email marketing, facebook, Featured, Google, Google: Analytics, How To, Interviews, Link Building, linkedin, local seo, location, Marketing, mitt, online marketing, Paid Search, phil internet marketing and social media and seo, research, Sales, sea, Search Marketing, seo, social media, success, Top News, traffic, travel, twitter, Video Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

The Evolution of the Use of the Internet: the Italian Case

February 5, 2013 by

Posted by gfiorelli1 When I talk to my American SEO friends, I cannot help but notice their surprise when I tell them that Google in Italy owns 95% of the search market share. Because of this ownership, search engine optimization is virtually synonymous with Google Search Optimization in my home country. However, Italy is not an exception. If we examine the percentages that Statcounter.com  presents of the search engines’ market shares in Europe between January 2012 to January 2013, the monopolistic percentage repeats itself again and again, with very few exceptions: Spain 96.08% Portugal 97.31% France 93,78% Belgium 98.21% Ireland 94.55% United Kingdom 91.54% Netherlands 94.33% Germany 94.81% Austria 96.3% Switzerland 95.76% Denmark 96.48% Norway 91.97% Sweden 96.25% Finland 97.14% Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia 96.85% Poland 97.31% Czech Republic 77.04% Slovakia 97.98% Slovenia 94.72% Croatia 98.19% Serbia 97.54% Montenegro 95.26% Macedonia 95.26% Greece 96.77% Romania 97.59% Bulgaria 97.71% Turkey 97.97% Belarus 71.29% Ukraine 82.74% Russian Federation 57.01% Malta 92.46% Cypre 94.47% The only countries where Google does not own the majority of search results are the Czech Republic (thanks to Seznam), Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia (thanks to Yandex, which is unfortunately losing market share). Sad, isn’t it? With such a monopoly put in place by Google, it’s pretty easy to understand why even a simple change in its algorithm is able to send a big portion of European SEOs into a state of panic. But really, aren’t the above figures representative of the way people actually search and find information on the Internet, and, eventually, visit our websites? The answer is yes, but not quite. To explain my slightly contradictory answer, let’s look at an interesting study a friend of mine, Paolo Zanzottera , shared at the  ConvegnoGT  conference in December.  Research and methodology Paolo presented the results of an extensive analysis of data obtained through the Italian Web Analytics platform,  ShinyStat . He used this data to paint a picture of what search and Internet usage in Italy has looked like over the last few years. The data samples Paolo worked with include: Reference period : January 1, 2010 – October 31, 2012 Basic metric analyzed : visits (DAA) from the world of Italian sites (89.18% from Italy) Sampling of visits : random visits (1 random visit out of 30 in distributed days and hours of the week) Size of search sample : 300,117,541 visits from search engines Size of social sample : 47,032,022 visits from social networks Total size of the sample : 750,022,334 visits Number of sites analyzed : 3.000 websites during the fixed period of time distributed in 47 categories and divided into 5 kinds of traffic Let’s take a look at the data displayed in a more meaningful way. Visits from search engines Visits from search engines to Italian sites 2010-2012 As we can see from the chart above, organic search is constantly increasing. The increase between January 2010 and October 2012 alone was 154.49 (39.34% between 2011 and 2012).  Please note that the increase is not represented as a constantly ascending line; instead, it presents a series of ups and downs, which are not justifiable only with seasonality. Indeed, the peaks of traffic volume should be explained through a bigger identification of the search engines through mass media as they are in correspondence with events that mark the news and impact on the awareness of the users (e.g. elections, political scandals, the earthquake in Emilia Romagna, sporting events, etc.). In Italy, Google is not the only current search engine. In fact, there are international search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Ask; and “national” search engines, such as Virgilio, Arianna, and Tiscali. Yet, as the chart below shows, the domination of Google is obvious. Visits from single search engines In reality, all the Italian national search engines (and Conduit, which is French) are powered by Google, so its domination is even more evident here: Organic visit by “algorithm” This domination is shown even further in the following market shares. Please note that Google was able to increase their market share, despite the recent Bing/Yahoo alliance. Algorithm market shares in Italy 2010 vs 2012 If Google is typically the only search engine used, then it is important to know how the organic traffic to our sites is coming from the different Google organic algorithms. In this case, the research defined four verticals: Web Images News Maps Note: a Google vertical like YouTube is not included in this research, as it was meant as a social platform. Organic search powered by Google in 2012 What about the evolution of how Italian sites where searched? The data collected by Paolo clearly show us how users are progressively moving from the old classic “one-word query” to more sophisticated middle and long-tail keywords.  It’s important to note that the use of single-word queries is not typically due to a user’s potential ignorance in the use of search engines, but is more likely due to searches for brand names or domain names. Keyword length evolution 2010 vs 2012 Another important topic when it comes to organic search is the impact of Not Provided. The chart below shows us that Not Provided is clearly impacting Italian organic search, but the percentage in October 2012 is not high enough to prevent correct SEO work ( it was at 14.85%). Nonetheless, the rise of Not Provided in organic search is impressive and constant. Obviously, in very specific topics, the percentage of Not Provided can rise up to almost the 50% of the searches: Not Provided vs Provided evolution 2010-2012 Social traffic The impact of social media in organic traffic is, without a doubt, one of the most important events of the last few years. This trend is evident in Italy, too. Keep in mind that in Italy, the “mainstream acceptance” of new Internet tools usually happens later than in the USA (or UK). This was the case for Twitter, which just exploded during the last 14 months. That said, this delay in accepting and using new tools seems increasingly shorter,  as exemplified by the acceptance of Pinterest, which in Italy has suddenly adopted in close comparison to the rest of the world. Twitter and Pinterest explosions in Italy In Italy, social media’s status of “popular” and only used by a small, very active group of early adopters changed to become widely accepted between 2010 and 2011. Social media is now part of a completely mainstream environment (+1768%). But the data collected via ShinyStat shows us that around October 2011, the referral traffic from social media had a dramatic boost. This boost was so powerful that in October 2012, the traffic from social media was equal to the one between January and October 2010! If we compare this chart with the chart highlighting the evolution of visits from search engines presented in the beginning of this post, we will see that news and events are the main generators of traffic from social networks. It is a completely natural occurence as social media outlets are the places where people discover news, talk about what’s going on in their area, and even generate news stories. Evolution of traffic from social media in Italy between 2010 and 2012 Twitter and Pinterest are interesting and important social networks, but in social media (as in search), there is just one, almost monopolistic, dominator of social media in Italy: Facebook. Evolution of traffic from the different social networks in Italy between 2010 and 201 2 Right now, Facebook represents 97.69% of the referral traffic from social networks, while the amount of visits generated by the other social networks is almost “symbolic:” Social network market shares in Italy 2010 vs 2012 As we can see, just 0.22% of visits from social networks right now are from Google+. However, recent studies show that in the last couple of months, Google+ is actually growing with a faster rhythm than Twitter. So, how is it the overall quality of traffic from social networks in Italy? Not so good, according to metrics like bounce rate and pages per visit that Paolo used in order to have a first raw “quality analysis.” Bounce rate from social is usually very high, and the time per visit and pages per visit numbers are much lower than the numbers from search engines. With these statistics, is it possible to represent the larger influence of social versus the use of search in Italy? Yes, it is: Search traffic vs social traffic in Italy between 2010 and 2012 Both are growing, but the distance between search traffic and social traffic is getting smaller. If we visualize the traffic volumes in percentages, then the growing importance of social networks is even more evident. Here are the social traffic shares in January 2010: Search vs. social in Italy on January 2010 And here in October 2012: Search vs. social in Italy on October 2012 All of these “versus” analyses are confirming something we already know to be true through experience: in Italy, the real competitor of Google is Facebook: Google vs. Facebook vs. Others (i.e. search engines and social networks) on October 2012 Desktop vs. mobile Mobile is an hot topic, and the charts we see usually refer to USA or UK markets. But what about countries like Italy? Maybe you don’t know yet, but Italy (and, similarly, Spain), is one of the nations where the mobile market is more evolved than the biggest players in the technology game. The ShinyStat data shows us how mobile is on the rise in Italy. Thanks to the über fast evolution of smartphones, the introduction of iPad and Android phones/tablets, and the use of Internet everywhere, mobile is literally exploding: Growth of visits from mobile in Italy between 2010 and 2012 In less than three years, the traffic from mobile devices to Italian sites grew 8x. The spikes are easy to understand as they correspond to August’s metrics. Italians cannot seem to shut their smartphones off (even when they are on holiday), and during August 2012, one of five visits came from a mobile device. In reference to mobile iOS, Italy reflects global trends well: Evolution of traffic from mobile and iOS in Italy between 2010 and 2012  In Italy, too, we see that there are two clear competitors: iOS (Apple) and Android (Google).  It is interesting to notice that the distance in terms of traffic generated between the two operating systems seems stable. What does that mean? It means that Android didn’t really eroded market share from Apple, but inherited users from all the platforms outside of iOS, especially Symbian: Mobile market shares by iOS in Italy on January 2010 Mobile market shares by iOS in Italy on October 2012 The ShinyStat data allow us to dig even deeper into the analysis of mobile traffic. For instance, let’s take a look at the traffic from Apple devices. In this chart, we can see that users are moving from using their iPhones for searching and visiting sites to using iPads: Traffic from iPhone vs traffic from iPad in Italy between 2010 and 2012 The war of the browsers Part of the analysis presented by Paolo Zanzottera was focused on which browsers are used for visiting Italian sites between 2010 and 2012: Browser use between January 2010 and October 2012 We can easily see how Internet Explorer (and, similarly, Firefox) were used for steady amounts of visits to Italian sites between 2010 and 2012. In an agrressively competitive industry that is ever-changing, this statistic is basically saying that Internet Explorer and Firefox lost market share for being static. The charts below give us even more confirmation: Browser market share January 2010 Browser market share October 2012 Takeaways So, what conclusions about the Italian Internet and search industry can we draw from this analysis? First, thinking about optimizing for Google only while working as an inbound marketing strategy is shortsighted, even in countries such as Italy (and most likely the other European countries) where Google has no stand-out competitor in search. User behavior suggests that, although Google is currently winning the race, they might not be forever. Along with that thought, the weight of social media (with Facebook leading the charge) is so heavily tied to SEO that today, it could be synonymous with the term “SEOcial.” Secondly, it has become absolutely clear that even in a market like Italy’s (and certainly Europe as a whole), we must understand that the Internet is everywhere, and we must complete the final transition from a desktop-only world to a multi-device Internet marketing strategy. As a consequence, conversion rate optimization of mobile sites, not just SEO, should be a priority of every web marketer during 2013. Finally, a more general conclusion can be made: user behavior when searching and using the Internet is changing at a rate even higher than that of just a few years ago. If we use the Italian case as a benchmark, we have observed that the market is largely different today from what was just two years ago. The increased speed in changing behaviors is a factor that needs to be explained, especially to those whose decisions make the most impact in any business. A lengthy amount of time spent on decision making, fueled by excessive bureaucracy, can be equal to a disaster online at the current rate of change. Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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The Evolution of the Use of the Internet: the Italian Case

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