A number of new features have made their bow on the revamped MSN homepage, which made its first official appearance today.

Five months after the first sneak previews appeared, the new look previewed boasts a much more stripped-back appearance, with white replacing the previous blue background.

The choice of content on the homepage takes most of its cues from structured Bing data, which among other things, will inform the choice of local news which appears.

About 45 per cent of Bing’s traffic is estimated to come through the MSN homepage, so it is hardly surprising that the new site ‘front door’ includes many pointers to it.

MSN joins a raft of major new homepage roll-outs in recent months, which have included Yahoo!, AOL and, in the UK, TalkTalk, the new identity of the former Tiscali ISP.

The MSN creation contains a number of options to create a personalised front page, including ‘My Cities’, which lets users customise MSN Local Edition and at the same time save details of up to three other locations to follow; Hyper-local Tweets, which highlights posts on the Microblogging site again relevant to the user’s home areas; and TrendWatch, again a ‘Twitter-watching’ application which flags up the day’s top trends and biggest movers.

With all systems now go on the merger between Yahoo! and MSN after American competition regulators gave the massive transaction the go-ahead, search engine marketers are pondering over whether this will mean major changes to their optimisation strategies.

The two parties have said that they will be in no hurry to roll out the service, and will wait until they can iron out all possible glitches before rolling out their new entity.

Writing on SearchEngineWatch, Jason Tabeling, director of search and media at New Jersey-based interactive marketing firm Rosetta, said building trust with MSN could be a key tactic.

“My gut tells me that folks who don’t already have some established quality score credit with MSN when everyone gets merged will be at a disadvantage,” he said.

Advertisers should also be better able to target the sites they want to be represented on through Yahoo!, he said, which Tabeling described as “long overdue, and (a move which) will help advertisers’ performance”.

“The ability to block poor referring partner sites is something that has greatly improved our clients’ results, and is something that is differentiating in the marketplace today, even when compared to Google”, he told SEW.

Yahoo is also believed to be working on its own equivalent to Google Sitelinks, where advertisements featuring top search items can be deep-linked to sellers’ sites and promotions involving those products.

These links are expected to use a cost-per-click model to generate revenue.

Extensive testing of these features is likely before they are fully implemented, but Yahoo! is said to be holding out the prospect of increases in click-through rates (the total number of clicks on an advertisement as a percentage of times the advertisement is viewed) of about 25 per cent.

For a start, do you think Baidu.com is a search engine? I certainly do, and so does Wikipedia. But when it comes to Google Analytics, things stop being so simple. Compare screengrabs 1 and 2 below. As we can see, on the first screen grab baidu.com is tracked as a referral site; on the second it is included among “Search Engines”.

The arrival of Bing was announced in late May, but until 6 June Microsoft’s new baby was “scanned” (pun intended) as a referring site in our clients’ logs (screen grab 2). Since 6 June it has grown up to be among search engines (screen grab 3). This kind of acceleration only happens in the Internet world, it seems, but nevertheless it doesn’t address the problem of incongruity when it comes to identifying and categorising tracking sources in Google Analytics. An article on Search Engine Watch blog, dated per 9 June, mentions that Google plans to include Bing in the default list of search engines.

Better still, the article was prompted by checking GA this morning and finding that Google itself was tracked as a referral site (screen grab 4). In other words, as great as Google Analytics is, it absolutely needs to be improved. And while I’m on it, I will say that the first thing it must improve NOW is to automate tracking of clicks on outgoing links. You still have to add a piece of code on the outgoing link, including files and images, if you want to see how many visitors clicked on it. You used to be able to see those clicks in FeedBurner – until it was completely migrated over to Google, and they got rid of the feature altogether. Considering that some newcomers, like Clicky Analytics, offer you tracking of outbound clicks as a part of the package, I just cannot see any sense for Google Analytics not to notch this mechanism up and include outbound clicks in reporting. This is a very natural expectation of a web analyst, to say the least.

SG 1 - Baidu.com tracked as a referring site.

SG2 - Time period from 1 Jan till 5 June 2009, baidu.com is tracked as a search engine, but no Bing in sight yet...

SG 3 - Time period from 1 Jan till 6 June 2009, Bing appears among Search Engines.

SG 4 - Google is tracked as referring site in Google Analytics, 11 June 2009.

Microsoft have announced they plan to go live with their new search platform Bing on June 3rd in the US. Although it is still in Beta in UK, I’m sure it won’t be long before we are fully integrated.

Bing is set to replace the current Live Search platform. The new platform is designed to be a semantic based search engine, so it should understand the context of a search better, and therefore return the most relevant results.

Microsoft who currently hold just over 3% of the UK’s search market as opposed to Googless 90+% according to Hitwise are hoping this will take them a step closer to increasing their market share and reducing Google’s dominance.

The engine will integrate many new features taking it in line with some of the tools available in Google as well as some new ones! The most notable being an ‘Explorer Pane’ which will be displayed on the left hand side of the results page, offering results for other suggested searches.

Microsoft hope to improve the quality of results reducing the time and effort it takes for their users to find what they are looking for.

They have a tough battle getting their search volumes to the heights of Google, but we look forward to seeing the finished product.

Bing! A new threat to Google

Half of Europe’s teenagers search the web with no parental supervision, a new survey has revealed.  The survey into the web routine of around 20,000 14 to 19-year-olds across Europe found that 51% enjoy uncontrolled access to any and every website.

The MSN research also found that 29% of the teenagers it questioned have suffered some level of bullying while using the web. The new survey comes as the EU marks Safer Internet Day with help from 17 social sites to improve the protection offered to younger users.

Main sites involved

1. Arto
2. Bebo
3. Daily Motion
4. Facebook
5. Giovani.it
6. Google/YouTube
7. Hyves
8. Microsoft Europe
9. Myspace
10. Nasza-klasa
11. Netlog
12. One.lt
13. Skyrock
14. StudiVZ
15. Sulake/Habbo Hotel
16. Yahoo!Europe
17. Zap.lu

With the popularity of social networking sites such as Bebo, MySpace and Facebook among most of the youngsters it has improved there overall web knowledge and has helped them to become sophisticated web users.

Other statistics show the following interesting information, British parents were the most likely, 77%, to use filtering software and to talk to their children about what they do online (87%). This oversight did not mean that British parents were the most worried about what their children could see online. French (88%), Portuguese (84%) and Greek (81%) parents were the most concerned about their offspring seeing inappropriate content such as violent images or adult themed sites.

Parents who are concerned about what their children are doing online are encouraged to place family computers downstairs, and maintain an interest in what their children do online and teach children safe habits.

Online fashion retailers have seen an overall 31% increase in traffic over the past 12 months, which has highlighted a massive gap with just a 1% increase for traditional catalogue companies. This last statistics comes from the released ‘Engaging Online with the Empowered Customer’ report by Experian.

It also found that many retailers were still failing to capitalise on the increased take-up of online shopping by not encouraging repeat purchasing. Just 30% of customers created almost 70% of revenues. The report also highlights that 45% of customers were single purchasers.

Google has seen impressions across its Content Network grow by over 300% year on year as advertisers continue to divert money from Yahoo and Microsoft comparable programs. Its UK Search Engine Performance Report Q4 2008 found impressions on Google’s Content Network, which includes search-based Ad Sense ads on sites such as

• MySpace
• Telegraph.co.uk
• Last FM

Surged 308% year on year to account for 6.4% of all UK search impressions. This latest growth delivers yet another blow to its main rivals Yahoo and Microsoft. Yahoo Search alone saw search spend fall to 8.4% in Q4 from 13.9% the previous year.

The improved of the content service by Google has paid dividends after a large investment  no its Content Network in 2008, this including the addition of new ad formats and, in October, third-party ad serving using Double Click technology.

The report also showed in Q4 2008 the UK search market:

• Grew 14% quarter on quarter
• 11% year on year
• Google now receiving 88.2% of all spend
• Up from 82.6% in Q4 2007

It's Play.com Time

Play.com has increased sales by 24% year-on-year over the Christmas period, according to the latest report released.  As an avid user of the site myself I can understand the success where others have struggled with its easy too use shopping cart, free delivery and on many products including larger electrical ones the best price.

The Play.com’s peak trading time was recorded as the 8 December, with over a 1,000 orders per minute being processed, up from 700 the previous year.

Quote from Simon Perree, CEO at Play.com, “Despite concerns this year about the credit crunch and holding back on gift spending, Play.com has had a hugely successful Christmas with strong sales across all product categories.”

Even with the current Credit Crunch issues sweeping the nation Internet advertising spend seems to still enjoying a level of growth with overall spend reaching 1.68bn in the first half of this year, which is a 21% like-for-like increase based on last year (Source: IAB).

The highlights of the latest survey is a 28% year-on-year growth for paid search, which now accounts for 58.3% of total online spend and almost breaking the 1bn barrier (981m) for the first time in a six-month period.

Other areas saw Display advertising rise 16.3% year-on-year to 333.8m, this was helped by a 36.6% increase in investment on embedded formats such as banners, rich media and video via social media networks.

Report shows that the majority of online display ad spend is still being achieved via the major portals and online publishers, but sales networks representing thousands of smaller sites have increased their volumes and accounted for 41% of all display expenditure.

Classifieds advertisements grew by 30.2% year-on-year to 361.6m as recruitment, property, automotive and small ads continued their migration to the internet from print classifieds, which declined 10% year-on-year.

Technology leads the market sector advertising spend table with a 17.3% market share, followed by finance at 11.9%, entertainment & media at 10.7% and recruitment at 9.9%.

Overall online increased its market share by four points to 18.7% of the total UK ad market, only 0.6% behind total press display (19.3%) and 3% behind TV (21.7%). The total advertising market was £8.98bn, down 0.7% year-on-year, during the period January to June 2008. The advertising market would have experienced a 4.6% decline without internet advertising growth.

With the Credit crunch still biting it is predicted that Christmas shoppers will turn to the Internet pushing sales up by 15 per cent from last year. Online sales for the final 3 months of this year are forecasted to be around 13.16 billion.

December the 8th has been ear marked as the biggest online shopping day, so let’s see if the statistics agree on the 9th.