Performics top 3 trends to drive participation and performance in 2013: (1) AUTOMATED INTUITION: Advertisers activate Big Data to customize ads at scale, by intent, across devices, in real- time to better Connect with participants, (2) THE HUMAN ALGORITHM: Participants move beyond traditional search results to Discover alternative (human!) authority for crowd-sourced decision making, (3) SEARCH APP+IFICATION: Search engines seek to Empower participants by giving them niche content—e.g. integrated vertical search portals directly in the results.

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PARTICIPATION ACTIVATED:
A Trends Report
by Performics
@Performics

2. Par•tic•i•pa•tion Acti•vat•ed:
The Process of Turning Engagement into Action
We’re creating over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each
day. For years, search engines, search management
platforms, advertisers and agencies have been collecting
this data, coining it “Big Data” – but it has only been
actionable to marketers on a small scale.
“This is the year of breaking data
out of the cloud.”
2013 is when marketers will activate participant data
across screens, at scale, in real-time, setting in motion a
spiral of shares, likes, comments, clicks, leads and sales.
This is traceable, individual, optimized data that feeds
back into (and out of) the cloud. Performics’
Participation Activated Report sets out the major
themes to watch. By embracing these themes,
marketers can better drive participation in 2013.

3. THEMES
AUTOMATED THE HUMAN SEARCH APP-
INTUITION ALGORITHM IFICATION
Participants move Search engines
Advertisers activate
beyond traditional seek to Empower
Big Data to customize
search results to participants by giving
ads at scale, by intent,
Discover alternative them niche content—
across devices, in real-
(human!) authority e.g. integrated vertical
time to better
for crowd-sourced search portals directly
Connect with
decision making in the results
participants

4. AUTOMATED INTUITION
Advertisers Leverage Big Data
to Customize Ads by Intent,
MICRO-TRENDS
at Scale, across Devices to
Connect with Participants
Remember the scene in Minority Report
where Tom Cruise walked into a mall
and a Gap ad scanned his retina,
Real-Time Search by Data /
personalizing a custom message: “Hey Intent
Analytics
Tom, how’d those assorted tank tops Bidding
work out for you?” This is the
Retargeting Teams
application of Big Data for retail. In Mass
many ways, this future is here.
SEM Personalization
Platforms Social
Expanding e-commerce platform Profiling
advances, robust analytics tools and
attribution modeling allow
unprecedented application of Big Data.
Marketers are beginning to deliver
highly customized Minority Report-
type ads, at scale in a completely
automated way. We’re calling this
trend Automated Intuition.

5. AUTOMATED INTUITION
Micro-Trend 1: Search by Intent
For years, marketers have been managing campaigns separately by device: (1) desktop, (2) tablet, (3)
smartphone. Meanwhile, participants have been moving across devices, fluidly consuming content.
Because participants think of devices as fluidly connected, Google Enhanced Campaigns (rolling out in
late Q1 and Q2) enable marketers to manage devices as fluidly connected . AdWords will now be
designed to manage hybrid desktop and mobile campaigns per context (intent), not per device.
Location: 41.85˚ N, 87.65˚ W
With Google Enhanced Campaigns, marketers can
Time: 8:30AM
deliver search ads based on user intent. What intent
does a user have when he searches for “coffee?”
Well, that depends on where he is, what time it is and
what device he’s on. He may want a coffee shop or
home coffee delivery. Enhanced Campaigns enable
marketers to make cross-device, automated
inferences based on participant data , at scale
Location: 42.01˚ N, 87.45˚ W
Time: 9:07PM

6. AUTOMATED INTUITION
Micro-Trend 2: Retargeting
Through retargeting, marketers can make automated inferences to engage specific participants that
have already engaged with them. Emerging search capabilities soon coming out of beta enable
advertisers to customize bids, copy and landing pages for searchers cookied on the advertiser’s site.
In social, Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX) enables advertisers to reach users based on their browsing
histories (via cookies). Advertisers will be better able to engage Facebook users to complete lower-
funnel activities—like booking a flight after searching, buying a product after filling a cart or
subscribing to a service after browsing.
Search Facebook
Ex: If a marketer knows that a searcher has engaged with that Ex: A user who places products in her shopping cart on a retailer’s
marketer on its site, that marketer can bid up for that searcher site but doesn’t purchase later sees a Facebook ad promoting 10%
and serve her customized copy: off the products in her cart:
User Later Searches User Later on Facebook
User on Your Native Site User on Your Native Site

7. AUTOMATED INTUITION
Micro-Trend 3: Mass Personalization
In 2012, Google unified its Privacy Policy to allow permission to share valuable user data across all
Google services. This sharing enables advertisers to better customize ads and search listings to
each individual user across Google properties (i.e. targeting search ads based on searcher profiles
discovered by peoples’ browsing histories). But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
In 2013, Google+ could become a global user ID that links everything a user does online. Yahoo!
Axis, which enables participants to integrate content across desktop and mobile, could connect
user habits cross-device. Advertisers could then feed personal data into campaigns to create
Minority Report-type ads at scale.
User on Your Native Site User Later Searches
*Of course this all hinges on whether Tom Cruise thinks it violates his privacy

8. THE HUMAN ALGORITHM
Customers Increasingly Seek
to Discover Alternative
MICRO-TRENDS
Authority for Crowd-Sourced
Decision Making
People are moving beyond the
traditional algorithms of Bing and
Google to places like Amazon, Data Ubiquitous “Answer”
TripAdvisor, Quora or Facebook to Management Search
Platforms
get search results influenced by People-
their friends or peers. Powered
Established Accuracy User-
What these people see and say Search Collective Generated
has significant impact on your Portals Relevancy Content
brand. Search marketers must
think less about pleasing
algorithms and more about
pleasing participants. We’re
calling this trend The Human
Algorithm.

9. THE HUMAN ALGORITHM
Micro-Trend 1: Ubiquitous Search
Search is ubiquitous; it’s everywhere. When participants turn to sites like Amazon for reviews from
real humans, they may not call it “searching.” But, in fact, they are searching. And as a search
engine, Amazon is as important as Google. To illustrate, a bike shorts brand could rank #1 organically
on Google for “bike shorts.” It could have a perfectly optimized paid search program. It could deliver
the right messages at the right time in display, social and email. It could have poor Amazon reviews
and not sell any bike shorts.
Participants are increasingly dependent on answers from sites like Amazon, Quora and TripAdvisor
from context-rich human opinions. Success in the age of The Human Algorithm hinges on activating
participation—reviews, comments, likes, shares to engage participants across the path-to-purchase.

10. THE HUMAN ALGORITHM
Micro-Trend 2: People-Powered Accuracy
Social networks are clearly capitalizing on The Human Algorithm trend. In January 2013, Facebook
rolled out Graph Search. Graph Search results are influenced by humans; they include
information that the searcher’s friends have shared (people, photos, interests, places, “Likes”). To
illustrate, a user can search “NY restaurants my friends like” to see results for restaurants in NY
liked by their Facebook friends.
Additionally, Twitter rolled out the Twitter Human Computation Engine in January 2013, which
puts a human layer on Twitter search to increase accuracy. Contributors look at trending queries
and evaluate them for relevancy, effectively annotating Twitter’s search algorithm.
Facebook Graph Search (Jan. 2013) Twitter Human Computation Engine (Jan. 2013)
Twitter: “How would you know that
#bindersfullofwomen refers to politics,
and not office accessories? . . . [W]e need
to teach our systems what these queries
mean as quickly as we can [by sending
them] to real humans to be judged.”

11. THE HUMAN ALGORITHM
Micro-Trend 3: Collective Relevancy
How will traditional engines embrace The Human Algorithm ? They’ll continue to expand social
integrations to bring more human into their algorithms. Bing revealed major social integration in
2012—the right-hand “sidebar” column that displays recommendations/advice related to the
searcher’s query from friends, experts and enthusiasts—with emphasis on Facebook and
Twitter. Sidebar also features a box for searchers to pose questions to their Facebook friends.
In January 2013, Bing also announced a five-fold increase in Facebook-influenced results.
Bing Social Search
The challenge for the traditional
engines is that Facebook, Amazon
and Twitter “own” most of the
participant data that enables The
Human Algorithm. However,
Microsoft has the Facebook
partnership, and Google will
continue to build social data of its
own through Google+.

12. SEARCH APP-IFICATION
As Users Move to Niche Sites,
Engines Adjust w/ Vertical
MICRO-TRENDS
Search App-ification
Participants are increasingly
moving to vertical sites for
product discovery. 33% of
shoppers now start their searches Listings Generic “Niche”
on Amazon vs. 18% on a search Integration Irrelevance
Discovery
engine (Forrester). This is Feed
reminiscent of the old days when Evolution
people used vertical-specific Vertical- Utility-
Vertical
portals to search. Specific Data Gardens Based
Search
Google is well aware that this
participant trend is a threat to its
“one-stop shop” status. Thus,
Google is working on a series of
“apps” within the search page for
vertical queries. We’re calling this
trend Search App-ification.

13. SEARCH APP-IFICATION
Micro-Trend 1: Generic Irrelevance
Can you imagine a world without Google? A world where people ditch mass search engines for
niche engines? A world where people use restaurant search engines to find restaurants, hotel
search engines to find hotels, skinny tie search engines to find skinny ties? It’s not that crazy. We
know the importance of vertical search result relevancy.
The biggest threat to Google isn’t Bing. It’s a million little niche engines—Citysearch, TripAdvisor,
RetailMeNot (coupons), SkyScanner (flights), TinEye (images), Pipl (people), MixTurtle (songs) and
SlideFinder (Powerpoint slides). Participants who have specialized needs are, in a way, finding the
established engines irrelevant —and looking elsewhere for “better” results.

14. SEARCH APP-IFICATION
Micro-Trend 2: Feed Evolution
In Search App-ification, the “apps” push down traditional results. In the below example, the
Google-controlled Shopping Ads (PLAs) draw searchers’ eyes from the top-ranked Amazon organic
listing. If you’re a retailer trying to make it solely in traditional SEO, what do you do? Because
traditional organic results are increasingly losing real estate, you’ll have to insure your presence in
these continuously evolving “apps” and product feeds:
• Google Local/Maps listings (local SEO) AdWords Ad
• Google+ Business Pages (social SEO) Shopping Ads (PLAs)
• YouTube videos (video SEO)
• Google Shopping (PLAs) (feeds/CSE):
App-ification accelerated in Feb. 2013 when
Google purchased Channel Intelligence (product
feeds optimization) to bolster Google Shopping
• Travel/hotel sponsored content Organic Listing
• Top-sponsored ads to trump “app” results

15. SEARCH APP-IFICATION
Micro-Trend 3: Vertical Gardens
Of course, innovation often encounters legal barriers. In a ten-month investigation ending in
January 2013, the FTC explored allegations that Google “manipulated its search algorithms to harm
vertical websites and unfairly promote its own competing vertical properties.” For example, in the
below screenshot, the Google hotels “app” pushes all the organic listings below the fold. However,
the FTC eventually determined that this practice could be “justified as innovation that improved
Google’s product and the experience of its users.”
The FTC gave Google the green
light to continue to
prominently feature its own
properties. App-ification is
already happening in verticals
like shopping, travel, hotels,
weather, local and coupons.
Is your vertical next?

16. PARTICIPATION ACTIVATED:
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