Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – November 2015

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, featuring news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at Google’s recent announcement that they will now be targeting hacked sites in the search results with changes to the algorithms, so that identified sites will be removed from the ranking results to protect searchers and improve the quality of the results.

We also look at the new Facebook M service which has recently been announced, which is designed to be an advanced digital personal assistant, combining artificial intelligence and real people to help users complete tasks. Finally we look at the latest enhancements to the Google AdWords Display Network service, that can help advertisers improve the cost-effectiveness of their campaigns.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google Search Results Filtering Hacked Sites

As a follow up to our article in September about avoiding getting your website hacked, Google announced in October that they are introducing a series of algorithmic changes that aim to tackle hacked spam in the search results. This makes it ever more important to ensure that your website is not affected by this problem.

There has been an increasing number of legitimate sites being hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behaviour, such as malware downloads, promotion of traffic to low quality sites, porn, and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs. This is a significant issue for the website owners – who may not be aware of the issue – and for Google, which monitors impacted sites in their search results to try to prevent unwitting searchers coming across these bad sites.

Website owners that don’t implement standard best practices for security can leave their websites vulnerable to being easily hacked, so that spammers and cyber-criminals purposely seek out those sites and inject pages with malicious content in an attempt to gain rank and traffic in search engines. Google has recently posted a series of webmaster blog articles with tips and advice to try to avoid this happening and they are now aggressively targeting hacked spam in order to protect users and webmasters.

These latest algorithmic changes that have been reported will eventually impact an estimated 5% of queries, depending on the language. Google says that as they roll out the new algorithms, searchers might notice that for certain queries, only the most relevant results are shown, reducing the number of results shown on a page. This is due to the large amount of hacked spam being removed, and should improve in the near future.

So Google is taking steps to weed out the bad content whilst retaining the organic, legitimate results. From a webmaster perspective, following the recommended best practices that we recently outlined is a good strategy, and having a Google Search Console account to also monitor potential issues that Google has picked up is also advised.

If you’d like to know more about these new ranking changes and how to avoid your site getting hacked, please contact us for more information.

Facebook M – a personal digital assistant

At the end of August, Facebook announced that they were testing a new service called M. This is a personal digital assistant inside the Messenger app, that completes tasks and finds information on the user’s behalf, being powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.

M appears to be a significant project for Facebook and one that they are investing in with a long term strategy to become a leading service that can effectively complete tasks on your behalf – such as purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and more. It is intended to compete and perform much better than Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.

The difference with Facebook’s M is that it’s currently a hybrid service that uses artificial intelligence combined with a group of Facebook employees who will make sure that every request is answered. If M can provide a more efficient service than its competitors, Facebook hopes to boost the number of people using it on mobile, which will in turn lead to increased revenue from their transactions.

Once a user gets access to M through Messenger (which will be free), they can send a note to M, which will be interpreted by the software as a natural language query and then ask follow up questions in the message thread, if required, and send updates as the task is completed. Users won’t necessarily know whether a computer or a person has helped them.

The unique aspect of this service is that Facebook’s M ‘trainers’ have customer service backgrounds and so they will make judgments and perform tasks that the software can’t. As the service is used more and more, the intention is that the software will then learn from human behaviour and eventually become sophisticated enough to process requests correctly itself. This may be sometime off and could represent a significant financial investment by Facebook, but they are taking the long term view that this will become a powerful market-leading tool in the future.

If you’d like to know more about Facebook M, please get in touch.

Google adds new features to the AdWords Display Network

Over the past few years, the Display Network part of Google AdWords has seen a range of improvements in targeting and ad formats, to reflect the increasing role of this feature for advertisers to reach potential customers on all devices. Google has recently introduced some additional new features that enhances the functionality of this service.

Firstly, Audience Insights have been added directly in AdWords to help advertisers find out more about their target market and to improve the targeting options by such aspects as age, location, and interests. These insights provide aggregate information about people in your remarketing lists, so that advertisers can quickly and easily take action through improved targeting. For example, if most people who converted on your site are cycling enthusiasts, you may wish to add this affinity audience to your campaign. Or, if many of your customers are females between the ages of 25 and 34, you might want to customize your ad creative to appeal to this demographic.

The second enhancement is that the display ads will now only be charged on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis if the ad is viewable on the screen. Google says that most display ads (around 56%) never had a chance to be viewed because they were ‘below the fold’, or in a background tab, so that although an impression may be generated, the ad wasn’t viewed. Therefore Google is changing their system to only bill advertisers when the ad impression is viewable, so that over the next few months, all campaigns that buy on a CPM basis will be upgraded to be viewable CPM (vCPM).

The third new enhancement affects dynamic remarketing ads, which will now become more flexible and automatically re-shaped and re-sized to fit all device types. These ads are linked to a Merchant Centre feed for ecommerce retailers and the design layouts will also be touched up to look great on any mobile or desktop site, or app.

These are all welcome additions and should help display advertisers see better results from their campaigns – if you’d like to know more, please contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In a continuation in our regular series of articles about Google AdWords developments, this month we take a look at a couple of new developments which should be of significant interest to AdWords managers, or any business that has a campaign running. Firstly, Google recently announced that Gmail ads are now available for all advertisers directly in AdWords. Secondly, structured snippet extensions have been released, which are useful as they allow advertiser-provided structured information to show with text ads and can improve ‘AdRank’.

In our final article this month, we take a look at how the SEO industry is eagerly anticipating the launch of Google’s latest ‘Penguin’ search ranking algorithm. This is expected to include real-time updates and may be launched before the end of 2016.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Using AdWords to Place Gmail Ads

Google AdWords now provides all advertisers with the ability to target ads to Gmail users, so this article should be of interest to any marketers who have previously considered advertising within this service. This is a worthy consideration, as the traffic volumes in Gmail can be vast, so there’s plenty of potential to target a wide-ranging audience.

Google recently made Gmail ads available for all advertisers directly through AdWords. Standard text ads no longer display in Gmail and have been replaced with higher-quality ‘native’ ads that integrate more seamlessly with the inbox.

Advertisers can manage these Gmail ads right in AdWords by setting up a Display Network campaign and creating a Gmail ads format in the Ad gallery. The ad has two main parts:

• The collapsed ad that users initially see, which matches the look and feel of the Gmail inbox. Users can click on this to expand it and get more details.
• The expanded ad unit is triggered by a click on the collapsed ad. This is a full-page native ad that recreates the informational and visual richness of a landing page. After users click to expand, any subsequent clicks on the content are free, including clicks to save the ad to an inbox or forward it to others.

Advertisers can choose from several customisable Gmail ads templates for the expanded ad unit. They can feature a single image, highlight a promotion that combines an image with a description and call-to-action button, or showcase multiple products at once. The custom HTML format offers the greatest amount of flexibility in how assets are configured and allows the creation of an even richer ad experience by including videos, forms, phone numbers, and multiple links and calls-to-action.

Once the ads are developed it’s then possible to reach the desired audience with advanced display targeting, by using the existing options like keywords, affinity audiences, demographics, and topics. For example, a sports apparel advertiser could select relevant topics like “Fitness” and “Sporting Goods” or reach people in the “Health & Fitness Buffs” or “Running Enthusiasts” affinity audiences.

As Gmail ads have evolved, Google has continued to give users the ability to actively control the types of ads they see. As with other Google ads, users can manage their ad settings to remove unwanted ads from specific advertisers. They can also opt out of interest-based ads entirely.

Google’s announcement to make the native Gmail ad option available to all AdWords advertisers is a positive step. It’s probable though that, due to the large size of the target market and the ‘big-player’ level of competition, the cost of using these ads may be mostly prohibitive for some markets but would be worth testing with some focused targeting criteria.

More information about how to display Gmail ads can be found here.

If you want to know more about how to set up an effective Gmail-based advertising campaign, please contact us now for more details.

Structured Snippet Extensions Available in AdWords

In the second of our AdWords articles this month, we take a look at the use of structured snippet extensions to show additional information with text ads. This should be of interest to AdWords managers, as all ad extensions typically boost the performance of an ad and are also a factor in supporting ‘AdRank’. Although ad extensions aren’t always eligible to show, the more that are provided, the better the auction is at selecting the best combination of extensions to improve performance, so these new ones are a useful addition.

Earlier in the year, Google introduced dynamic structured snippets in AdWords. This automated ad extension can give customers a better sense of the content on a website before an ad is clicked upon. Whether it’s highlighting a list of hotel amenities or top clothing brands, dynamic structured snippets can make search ads more relevant and helpful while saving time by simplifying campaign management.

Since their release, Google has received feedback requesting a function to enable customisation of the information that shows in this format, which is why structured snippet extensions became available to all AdWords accounts during September. The advertiser-provided structured information that shows with text ads can range from amenities to brands to product types. A predefined “Header” can now be selected to then input a list of customised values that make the most sense for a business. For example, a hotel brand promoting hotel property can now create a structured snippet for “Amenities”, such as ‘Free Wi-Fi’, ‘Swimming Pool’ and order them accordingly.

There is a similar extension already available called ‘Callouts’ but their uses differ by having distinct attributes. Callouts should be used to highlight what makes a business, service, or product unique, whereas complimentary structured snippets highlight a specific aspect of the particular product or service. The use of both gives an excellent depiction of what a business provides, whilst simultaneously contributing to boosting the performance of an ad.

More information about Structured Snippet Extensions for AdWords can be found here. If you’d like to know more and how they can be used as part of your AdWords campaigns, please get in touch.

Real Time Penguin Algorithm Updates

Our final article this month examines a topic that is currently of great interest to the SEO industry. Changes to Google’s ranking algorithms can have a significant impact upon how businesses perform on the Search Engine Results Page, so it’s necessary to keep up-to-date with any forecasted amendments to these.

The so-called Google ‘Penguin’ algorithm update was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing the search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s guidelines by using ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques to artificially increase the ranking of a webpage, particularly by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page through unscrupulous techniques and using poor quality websites.

Since then there have been numerous updates to this algorithm change to continually refine and improve the quality of the search results. The last official update was Penguin 3.0, which took place on October 18 2014, almost a year ago. The last time we saw a significant shift with the Penguin algorithm was before December 2014, so the industry is expecting another one soon although Google is being typically coy with the details it releases about it.

In June, Google’s Gary Illyes explained that they’re working on solving the issue of making the Penguin algorithm run in real time, which is a “hard problem” for Google. The most recent information is from John Mueller at Google Switzerland, who said that he doesn’t know for sure when the Penguin algorithm would launch but if he had to guess, it would be before the end of the year and it would be the real time version.

Google has regularly stated that they will be making Penguin run more often and as it’s almost a year now since the last update, the next one is expected soon. Judging by the limited information provided though, there’s the feeling that even Google can have problems with such a technical advancement, causing its release to be frequently delayed. Once it is released however, there may be some more Penguin penalties for unethical links pointing to many websites, so it’s well worth keeping an eye on.

You can read more about the suspected launch of the dynamic update by the end of the year, here. To find out more and how it could impact your website, please contact us.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we take a look at Google’s recent changes to the format of the local search listings when displayed on the main search results page. This should be of significant interest to businesses that have any local ‘My Business’ listings and want to target local searchers.

In our second article, we look at Google’s advice for website owners and managers on how to avoid being targeted by hackers, which is becoming an increasingly common problem. Finally this month, we take a look at Google’s recent launch of the new Adwords Report Editor, a tool which any business running an AdWords campaign should be interested in, to help review and analyse their marketing performance.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google Changes Local Search Results

Google has recently changed the way in which local search listings are being displayed on the first page of search results. This should be of interest to any business that has a local business listing, as they are an important asset on the Search Engine Results Page, as Google gives them preference in the organic rankings.

Up until recently, Google would usually display about 7 local business listings in the search results, so this recent change to limit the list to 3 businesses means that there’s more competition for the limited visibility. So having a well-optimised listing is more important than ever.

The new listings have a number of important changes, including telephone numbers being replaced with directions to the address, as these changes are mostly designed for mobile searchers looking for a location. These directions also link to the new Local Finder in Maps, as does clicking upon the business’s red icon in the search results. Within these new Local Finder results there are 20 opportunities for visibility.

The links to the business’s associated Google Plus pages have also now been removed, as G+ is going through a change of focus and will soon be split into two elements – Photos and Streams. Fortunately, this change won’t impact the ability for searchers to view reviews of a company, which will still appear in the grey box that appears when the listing on maps is moused over. Seeing reviews is now a two-click process into the Local Finder and then another click on the reviews, which isn’t very user friendly.

However, if there are sufficient reviews to show the star rating out of 5, there is a link directly to those reviews from the search box. This means that there’s still a good reason for compiling as many of those positive customer reviews as possible because having that visible star rating provides a competitive advantage as it immediately draws the eye towards the business that has it displayed.

Google has been making a series of changes over the past few years to the Places / My Business listings and to the local search results, which can often be a confusing or backwards step for some companies. It’s hoped that it will soon settle on the most effective format and stick with it for a while, as the data that its own Local Analytics provides is currently not completely accurate and so has limited use.

If you would like to know more about how your business can benefit from these latest changes and having a local business listing displayed, contact us now for more details.

How to Avoid Being Targeted by Hackers

Google has recently been publishing a series of articles for website owners with tips and techniques to avoid their websites being hacked. This is because they say that they’ve seen a 180% increase in the number of sites getting hacked over the past year. Therefore if you publish anything online, one of your top priorities should be security, as getting hacked can negatively affect your online reputation and result in loss of critical and private data.

First launched in 2014, Google’s ‘#NoHacked’ campaign aims to educate webmasters about ways to avoid, or identify hacking attacks on their website, and to keep data and account secure. A recent series of blog articles on its Webmaster Central Blog, has added more content to support this campaign.

Some of the key recommendations made by Google have been:

• Ensure that all your website’s software is up-to-date: one of the most common ways for a hacker to compromise your site is through insecure software on your site. Be sure to periodically check the site for any outdated software, especially updates that patch security holes. If you use a Content Management System (CMS), or any plug-ins or add-ons on the site, make sure to keep these tools updated with new releases – this is particularly important for WordPress sites, which are a primary target for out-of-date software.
• Strengthen your account security: creating a password that’s difficult to guess or crack is essential to protecting the site. For example, a password might contain a mixture of letters, numbers, symbols, or be a pass-phrase. Password length is important. The longer your password, the harder it will be to guess.
• Research how your hosting provider handles security issues: Your hosting provider’s policy for security and cleaning up hacked sites is in an important factor to consider when choosing one. If you use a hosting provider, contact them to see if they offer on-demand support to clean up site-specific problems, or a managed administrator services option, to update software. You can also check online reviews to see if they have a track record of helping users with compromised sites clean up their hacked content.
• Use Google tools to stay informed of potential hacked content on your site: having a Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) account can be useful to receive notifications from Google about malware or other issues on your website. It’s important to have tools that can help you pro-actively monitor your site. The sooner a compromise is discovered; the sooner work can begin on fixing the site. You can also set up Google Alerts on the site to notify you if there are any suspicious results for it.

Website security is a fundamentally critical issue for any online business, so taking heed of these points could make the difference to avoiding, or surviving a hack-attack. Check out the blog articles from Google and check what security processes you have in control for your site.

If you want to know more about how a website security plan could help to protect your online business, contact us now for more details.

Google AdWords Launches Report Editor

At the start of August, Google AdWords announced the new Report Editor tool, which would be rolled out over the coming months. This is yet to appear in some accounts, but it will do so in due course, so it’s well worth being familiar with it in advance.

Report Editor is a powerful AdWords tool that lets you explore account data in brand new ways from within a browser. Access to it will be apparent when the new ‘Reports tab’ appears in the AdWords account and from this tab, you can open a pre-defined report or create your own report from scratch. It provides an easy-to-use interface that enables the building of custom tables and charts that can be segmented, sorted, and filtered to help find the insights that matter to a business.

The key functions are:

• Explore your data with simple drag and drop actions
• Sort, filter, and pivot your data to focus on the slices of information you need
• Visualize your data in pie, bar, or line charts to reveal powerful insights
• Apply multiple segmentations to analyse your data with finer granularity.

Key metrics and dimensions can be examined by simply dragging and dropping the selected ones into a table or chart. Metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions can be viewed and then you can add dimensions like device, campaign, or adgroup to segment the data further.

It’s also possible to visualise data. Charts can quickly unveil performance trends that may be missed when looking at numbers alone. Now, it’s possible to instantly create a line, pie, or bar chart to surface your key insights. It just takes a click to instantly switch between different charts and tables. Just like tables, it’s possible to save and share charts with others or set them to run regularly.

This release has been warmly welcomed by the AdWords management community, as it makes the data more actionable, providing more powerful insights and vastly reduces the amount of time spent creating ‘old-style’ numeric reports, which don’t highlight the KPIs as effectively.

You can read more about the Report Editor, here. If you would more information about how this important reporting tool can enhance the performance of your AdWords campaigns, contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we take a look at Google’s recent enabling of local reviews through AdWords. This should be of significant interest to AdWords managers, although Google has yet to confirm when these will appear in the UK.

In our second article this month, we look at how Bing has improved its Webmaster Tools service, which includes compelling information that webmasters should be aware of, in order to utilise some of the best search tools available. Finally this month, we take a look at Google’s release of its latest quarterly financial results and what sections of its business are currently receiving most focus.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google Enables Local Reviews Through AdWords

This latest change by Google is an interesting development for businesses that are keen display good review ratings as part of their AdWords ads. Google recently announced that it will combine both ‘My Business’ listings and AdWords campaigns, to show these ratings beneath the ads. It’s yet to be definitively clarified by Google whether this will soon be coming to the UK from the US, but the rollout of this option is likely in the coming months.

At present, these review extensions will only appear within the ads on desktop and tablets, not mobiles. This is quite ironic as Google has become increasingly focused upon showing location based search results on mobiles and people increasingly rely on the opinions and experiences of others to help make decisions, such as which restaurant or dentist to visit! So we would have expected these reviews to be included in the mobile search results, but as space for these ads is more limited, this is the primary reason why these will only be shown on those devices that have more room for advert ‘real estate’.

The new ‘My Business’ reviews will be seen instead of seller ratings from 3rd party sites. Previously it was only possible to get Google Local review stars if you were using AdWords Express and typically they would show if you had at least 3.5 stars and a minimum number of reviews (in the case of seller ratings that number is 30). Google hasn’t yet specified the exact number of reviews that are required to show the local review stars, but it will probably be a similar number to reflect well-reviewed businesses.

Although the review ratings don’t include mobile ads, the local ratings seen on desktops and tablets will make ads more useful and informative to consumers searching for local information. They can also improve a business’s ad performance, so these are a welcome addition by the search advertising community.

If you want to know more about building your business reviews and using these within your AdWords ads, please contact us now.

Bing Improves Webmaster Tools

It’s essential for every SEO practitioner to keep track of their website’s performance, and there are plenty of tools that can be used for this. Bing is still a small player in terms of search traffic compared to Google, but Bing’s tools can be helpful in increasing search traffic and quality on both those and other search engines.

A useful feature in the Bing Webmasters toolkit is Connected Pages. This allows the connection of related pages and to get insights into the search traffic from Bing to social network accounts. For example, if your Twitter account and Facebook account are also ranking for your brand name you might want to see how much search traffic they generate. With this feature you’re able to see and analyse this data. The only requirement is that these social network accounts link back to the site that you’ve verified in Bing Webmaster Tools. This feature is extremely useful if your brand has a large social presence and so by adding all of your social networks to Connected Pages, it’s possible to keep track of their search performance.

Another good feature from Bing is the Index Explorer. This makes it possible to find old sub domains or subfolders (such as ones a developer worked with a long time ago) that are still being indexed by the search engines. It’s important to detect any duplicate content that may have been left from that work and Index Explorer is an excellent way to reveal the areas that you don’t want Bing bot to identify anymore. This allows the Bing crawler to focus on more important pages and it can also be good for finding old, lost folders that had been forgotten about!

Geo-Targeting is another decent Bing feature for sites that have multi-regional directories. It speeds up the process of marking pages as localised content for a specific country/region, such as for a http://example.com/newzealand/ directory. This saves plenty of time adding canonical URLs to the pages to specify which is the preferred version for the search engine to show – which is still required in Google’s Search Console (the new name for their Webmaster Tools service) to prevent duplicate content.

Bing Page Preview is useful to show previews of your pages in its search results. If Bing bot visited your page when it was down or scripts weren’t running, then Bing could be showing the wrong screenshot of your site. Within Bing Webmaster Tools Page Preview feature it’s possible to make Bing replace the screenshot with an updated version. This feature ensures that you always have influence on how your site looks like in its search results and allows you to block images from the site that aren’t wanted to be seen.

In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. For real SEO experts, the API is a great way to export a lot of available data from Bing Webmaster Tools. Even with Google’s newest version of their API, a lot of information is still not available. Bing enables the export of information on search terms and crawl settings directly from the API. It also provides search volumes on the keywords that you’ll receive traffic from and so this information is useful for a site’s SEO work, and can’t easily be retrieved from Google (at scale) anymore.

These Bing specific features are additional and superior to those provided by Google at present and enhance the SEO development to assist in getting the best performance in not only the Bing search results, but those for other engines, also. Any SEO expert should be very familiar with them and it’s possible that Google will follow Bing’s lead here and introduce similar tools to their Search Console service.

If you want more details about how to make the most of Bing, or Google’s Search Console to enhance your site’s SEO, contact us now.

Google Releases Second Quarter Financial Results

In mid-July Google announced its latest quarterly results which elated investors as they exceeded Wall Street expectations. They were primarily based on strong advertising revenues driven by Search, YouTube and Play, coupled with the perception of a new commitment to financial discipline as the company continues to grow and expand across more business areas.

With the latest quarterly revenue up 11% year on year, and 3% on the previous quarter, to US$17.7 billion, Google’s stock soared to a new high. Class A shares crossed the $700 threshold following the announcement of the results, up more than $100 from the trading price at the time the market closed the previous day. The spike added an extraordinary $50 billion of market capitalisation. In their primary search arena, paid clicks through AdWords jumped 30% globally compared to the quarter a year before. However, the average cost per click was lower again due to the increasing share of mobile search ads.

However, nearly a year after the launch of the ‘Google for Work’ brand, little was mentioned about its intention to storm into the enterprise market with its cloud-based productivity tools, along with a new commitment to a channel strategy. So the results provided very small insight into the health of its cloud business. Google was also quite coy about their results and didn’t go into much detail, with Ruth Porat, the new CFO of Google, only stating “Our strong Q2 results reflect continued growth across the breadth of our products, most notably core search, where mobile stood out, as well as YouTube and programmatic advertising. We are focused every day on developing big new opportunities across a wide range of businesses. We will do so with great care regarding resource allocation”.

Google is shedding partners with a new program that eliminates all but the most profitable. Those are the same partners that the company said formed the cornerstone of its strategy to become a serious enterprise cloud player. There were only two uses of the word “cloud” in the entirety of the Google earnings presentation, or Q&A session that followed. There was no mention of Google for Work and Ruth Porat only referenced the enterprise cloud business once by telling investors it falls into the “adjacent areas” category of Google’s various business pursuits.

The framework encourages a 70-20-10 split in resource dedication: 70 percent going to core businesses like Search; 20 percent to the adjacent businesses, which include Chrome and Android as well as the cloud platform; and 10 percent to developing “really sizable” new markets by pursuing “exciting opportunities,” Porat told investors. Omid Kordestani, Google’s chief business officer, did tell investors, “We’re seeing strong momentum around Google Cloud platform, with a range of great new features”. Other than that, no further information was divulged, as Google chose to keep their cards close to their chest. This isn’t surprising, as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services ramp up their attacks to win the hyper-scale cloud wars and aggressively beef up their channels.

If you want more information about Google’s recent financial results, please contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we take a look at Google’s recent updates to its search algorithm and the impact this may have on businesses’ search results. We also examine the imminent update to the Panda algorithm and what impact that’s likely to have on the results.

In our second article this month, we provide a reminder for AdWords advertisers that Google’s support for Adwords Editor v.10.6 ends on July 1st and scrutinise the benefits for AdWords managers of upgrading to the latest v.11.1. Finally this month, we discuss how Google has enhanced the localised “Near Me” search results and what can be done to increase a business’s conversions through the correct use of advert extensions, particularly in mobile ads.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google Updates its Search Algorithm

In mid-June, Google confirmed another core search algorithm update which is likely to have an effect on the search ranking results. This is therefore an important issue for any website business to consider and whether these changes may have an impact on their organic rankings and website visits coming from Google.

This latest update by Google was a core ranking change, which is something the search engine does throughout the year. Google stated that it was not related to the previous, significant, Panda or Penguin updates, or related to it’s aim to have more sites secured (using the https protocol) by promoting those in the rankings. (Some sources have in fact reported that the rankings of https domains have actually been adversely effected by the recent changes).

Google’s Panda Update is a search filter introduced in February 2011, designed to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. Panda is updated from time-to-time. Google also launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results, in particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings.

In May, Google said they are still working on making these two algorithms refresh faster, but more recently said, “this is not a Panda update. As you know, we’re always making improvements to our search algorithms and the web is constantly evolving. We’re going to continue to work on improvements across the board”. Google has remained quite cagey about the recent change, with Gary Illyes recently saying, “I can’t comment more on this, though. We make hundreds of changes every year”.

So initially, the consensus was that it was simply a normal Google core search update for which they won’t provide further details. But upon further scrutiny, this update may have been related to news content, as data analysis showed that “new newsworthy content” received a boost in the rankings with the update.

The SEO community is expecting to see more updates very soon, as the Panda algorithm is due to be refreshed again. Google has told the community to expect core search algorithm updates in the future, as they continue to work on making search quality better. Gary Illyes announced that the next Panda update will happen in the upcoming weeks and he referred to it multiple times as a data refresh, not an algorithmic change. It’s intended to further refine the accuracy of the targeting of sites with poor quality content. So the ‘shake up’ in the rankings isn’t expected to be quite as dramatic as it would be for the introduction of a complete change to a search results algorithm.

If you would like more information on how the Google algorithm changes could impact the rankings of your business, contact us now for more details.

Google’s Support for AdWords Editor 10.6 Ends July 1st

AdWords Editor was designed with the most sophisticated advertisers in mind, as it helps to reduce the time spent on managing large campaigns by simplifying workflow, but for anyone managing an AdWords campaign, it can be a great time-saver. In February this year, we published the article ‘Google AdWords Editor is Updated’ which described what Google are calling ‘the biggest update to AdWords Editor since its release in 2006’. In this follow-up piece, we take a look at the support for AdWords Editor v.10.6 ending on July 1st and the benefits of upgrading to AE v.11.1.

There are numerous changes made to the latest version, including full support for labels, upgraded URLs, call-only ads and ads in mobile apps. There are also improvements to the search bar, more localisation support and enhancements to overall User Interface navigation, which provides a sleek, fresh new layout that makes viewing data, accounts and edits easier than ever.

More details about 10 new features can be found here. The upgrade symbolises how seriously Google is about catering to advertisers who manage multiple or large accounts. One of the key benefits is the ability to quickly download multiple accounts at once and view them side-by-side. Also, viewing different parts of an account at the same time on multiple screens is a massive change that allows you to view everything at once, making it easier to gain insights into the data.

Two other important benefits are the option to save popular searches, and the function of being able to view the history of recent changes. It’s now possible to undo or redo changes immediately, which is critical when making thousands of changes and can prevent any hard work being lost. Another important addition is the function to create and manage call-only ads in AdWords Editor, as they represent an easy and efficient way for mobile consumers to connect over the phone with businesses.

The updated version of the popular offline Editor has been well received by the AdWords community. The benefits of it certainly outweigh the limitations, so remember to upgrade to it now as support for the older version has now ended and this is not likely to work from this month.

If you would like more information about how the use of AdWords Editor can improve the AdWords management for your business, contact us now.

Google Enhances Localised “Near Me” Search Results

According to Google, 4 out of 5 consumers say they want search ads to be customised to their city, post code or immediate surroundings and that now more than ever, people search online to find things nearby. Interest in “near me” searches on Google has doubled since last year, with 80% coming from mobiles. So it has continued to develop richer local ad formats that deliver more relevant localised information based on what someone searches for.

Last year Google enhanced location extensions to show up to three different locations for a business in a single ad unit. From the end of May the search results were enhanced to show three or four different businesses for location-related searches, such as “nearby restaurants.” Each ad features click-to-call and directions. This new format organises the information that on-the-go consumers need, so they can easily compare options and take action, like calling the business or visiting the store.

In addition to location extensions, there are many types of other extensions in AdWords that can make ads more useful and engaging. These include Sitelinks, Callouts and Reviews. The correct use of the right extensions help businesses reach their goals of driving online and offline conversions, giving customers the information they were seeking “near me”, and reinforcing customer trust. This in turn can lead to significant rises in incremental conversions and so, are critical to get right in the increasingly mobile-centric online world.

If you want to know how the correct use of extensions can help your business benefit from Google’s enhanced localised search results, contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we revisit a story from September last year about the rise of fake referral visits in Google Analytics reports – at the time this was just the ‘semalt’ domain, but since then, this occurrence has become more widespread for many Analytics users, including a new version which creates fake ‘events’. This should therefore be of interest to any Google Analytics users who, like many, have become increasingly frustrated with this problem and we consider ways that this problem can be resolved.

In our Adwords article this month, we examine Dynamic Search Ads and how they can be used to enhance the marketing of e-commerce sites – if they are correctly optimised – and we take a look at the best ways to do that. Finally this month, we look at the re-branding of Google Webmaster tools into Search Console, which has been done to appeal to ‘everyone who cares about search’.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Tackling Referral Spam in Google Analytics

Over the past year the occurrence of fake referral visits appearing in Google Analytics reports has become more widespread and an annoyance for many website marketers who are seeing an increase in these false domain names in their reports. These is something that Google Analytics can’t seem to block and new types of fake activity are starting to appear, including false event actions. So what can be done about them?

We first covered this issue in September last year with an article called ‘The Issue of Semalt Referrals in Google Analytics’ as the first occurrence of this activity came from fake visits appearing to come from the semalt.com domain. Initially this was a minor irritation but the number of sessions now coming from fake or ‘ghost’ domains is becoming more widespread and a bigger distraction for many websites as they can skew the visit metrics in many accounts.

These ghost referrals create visit sessions in Analytics traffic reports, apparently indicating that people have clicked to a website from a fake link on the reported site. These sessions are identified by 100% new visits and also show 100% bounce rate, and often occur in high numbers for a short period of time. Common websites offer ‘buttons’ for your website or special SEO offers, and the sessions mostly emanate from Brazil or Russia, although this is not always the case.

So why are these fake referrals happening? In most cases, by appearing as a referral source the people behind these domains want Analytics users to notice them and so visit their websites to see what they are. They may then try selling SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or Analytics services, like Semalt did (and is now using the domain best-seo-solution.com), or they may be trying to spread a virus onto an unsuspecting user’s device. Either way, they represent an unscrupulous technique which is an annoyance at best, and at worst, a threat to the value of Analytics reports as well as people’s devices.

A more recent development has been the creation of fake events in users’ Analytics reports which are linked to the ghost referrals coming from the domain eventtracking.com. Indications are that this issue is going to get worse, but there has been little acknowledgement from Google about this, or attempts to block this activity, so what can be done?

The best way to remove these fake referrals is to add a filter to your reports view (rather than by adding the ghost domains to the Referral Exclusion list in the Admin / Property settings). A Google search for many of these fake referral sites will display many articles and opinions on how to deal with them, but most will recommend creating a filter for the Google Analytics views being used – in which case, a RAW unfiltered view should be retained and a new view created with the necessary filters added. Details about how to filter all types of referral spam can be foundhere. You can also find out about removing the newer eventtracking.com referral spam here.

Eventually Google may build in some ways to remove this ghost activity from all Analytics accounts, but the people and techniques being used behind this dubious business practice will keep trying to find ways to add their spam activity to the Analytics reports. Hopefully it remains a phase that will eventually die out, rather than a growing trend that increasingly damages the value of Google Analytics as a tracking and reporting tool for websites.

If you want to know more about how these ghost referrals could impact your business and ways to combat them, please contact us now for more details.

Using Google AdWords Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are one of the varied campaign formats that can be used by Google AdWords advertisers to help increase search coverage for paid ads, particularly for advertisers with large websites, or ecommerce stores with multiple products. DSAs are linked to the pages on a website that are indexed by Google and therefore driven by the content of the website.

When using a Dynamic Search Ads campaign, Google AdWords will use details from your indexed web pages in the Google search database to decide whether to enter an ad into the auction for a given search query. Assuming it judges the search query a good fit, it dynamically generates an appropriate headline and landing page to show to the searcher.

Another way to think of DSAs is like the text ad equivalent to product listing ads. With Google Shopping, you give Google a feed of all your product information and set bids based upon information contained within that feed. With DSAs, Google grabs the information it needs from your site and targets it based upon that information.

Marketers who should use DSAs are e-commerce advertisers with thousands of items in stock and a huge inventory of landing pages, making it a useful technique for sites that have a constantly changing mix of products. Another method is when AdWords advertisers may have an extensive website of content who may want to target a wider range of ‘long tail’ search terms that aren’t currently covered by the standard keyword targeting techniques.

There are three key positives to using DSAs:

• No one wants to spend hours every week uploading new products (or keywords) and pausing ones no longer sold. DSAs will take care of this without the associated costs that come with using a specialist advertising platform.
• The dynamic advert headlines aren’t limited to just 25 characters.
• This is a much better way to mine for new keywords than the traditional keyword planner. Where that planner tool is effectively ‘blind’ to your specific products, DSAs will be harvesting data from your site and so having it running in the background makes sure you don’t miss out on changes in user behaviour or new keyword trends.

However, there are also two key negatives – firstly, you give Google a lot of control over your ads, not only where they’re pointing, but also what they say. And secondly DSAs also cross the SEO-PPC bridge, so that if your website contains poorly optimised title tags or page content, for example, matching the right query to the right product is going to be trickier for Google. So DSA product targeting used to be a bit poor on accuracy, but they are a lot better now and perform extremely well when properly optimised. Setting up DSAs is relatively straightforward, however they tend not to do well without careful monitoring and optimisation.

DSAs are designed to sit in the background and catch any traffic that might have fallen through the cracks of your existing campaigns. This means you’ll need to do the fairly arduous job of adding in all existing positive keywords from your account as campaign-level negative keywords for your DSA campaign. In addition to this, checking the search query report will help you ‘trim the fat’ out of your campaigns and so running these regularly is the key to running a successful DSA campaign.

As it’s not possible to control the advert headlines, the 2 description lines can be edited and tested, often with a strong offer or call to action. Optimising ads is also the best way to improve a DSA campaign’s structure, by comparing the search queries for each ad group against the ad copy and then writing something more relevant. Finally, and crucially, to get the best long-term ROAS (return on ad spend), separate the top performing DSA search queries into their own adgroups and compile highly relevant advert creatives.

You can read more about DSAs here or if you would like more information about how we can help maximise the use of DSAs in your AdWords account, contact us now.

Google Webmaster Tools Re-branded to Search Console

Google Webmaster Tools was first unveiled about a decade ago and has been developed as a valuable resource for website marketers, providing a host of tools for anyone wanting to review and improve their website’s performance in Google’s search rankings. In May, Google announced that Webmaster Tools would be re-branded as ‘Search Console’.

This change is in name only, because Google has realised that the reports and analytics part of the service appeals to more than just webmasters and so they want the name of the tool to attract “everyone who cares about search.” Search Console is meant for marketers, SEO specialists and webmasters.

This name change comes soon after the recent revamping of the Search Queries report – renamed as Search Analytics – which now breaks down search data and filters in many different ways for a more precise means of analysis. This upgraded report remains one of the key tools in the Webmaster Tools / Search Console account, as it reflects the ways that a website ranks in Google and attracts clicks from the search results, as well as reporting on changes to ranking positions.

More can be read on Google’s announcement about this here, or you can contact us now to find out about the Search Console tool.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we take at look at how the correct ownership and allocation of User management permissions in a Google Analytics account can be an vital factor in the successful running of an online business, in terms of the control and security of data.

We also look at Facebook’s ad relevance score, which can help achieve greater visibility for ads and also lead to lower costs to reach your target audience. Finally this month, we review Google’s recent announcement about the use of ‘doorway pages’ for search optimisation and how recent ranking adjustments could penalise this technique.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month or by subject. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Ownership of Google Analytics Accounts

This is a critical topic for analytics managers in online businesses of all sizes, as it’s vital to know who owns and manages Google Analytics accounts and access permissions for your company. The analysis of this important data can be crucial for streamlining the profitability and success of a modern-day business, but the management of access to it is often over-looked.

At corporate, SMB, or small business levels, there can often be multiple accesses granted to numerous administrators of an analytics account over time. These can be across various departments, or for internal or third party managers who may have also created the account in the first place. Most large companies have multiple pockets of analytics professionals spread throughout the organisation so it’s possible that there are multiple users of the account/s with differing levels of access privileges.

The important issue is that the business needs to ensure ownership of their own website analytics data, and have control over access to this information to maintain security and longevity of the reporting. There have been many cases where a website developer has created the Google Analytics account, for example, but not provided the site owner with full admin rights, so that there is always a danger that in the long term, if relations with the supplier sour, then the business could lose access to their account.

Since many companies are now using Google Analytics, Google has improved the ways in which access permissions are granted, as they understand the importance of the access privileges and have therefore provided the ability of users to do this in a logical manner. Google introduced two big changes to user permissions in recent years:

• There are now three different types of user permissions: 1) Manage Users provides full control of the settings and user access 2) Edit access enables users to make changes to the set-up options, but not provide access to other users, and 3) Read & Analyse access gives users the ability to view reports but make no changes to the settings.
• These 3 different types of permissions can now be applied any of the 3 different admin ‘levels’ of a Google Analytics account: Account level, Property (website) level and View (reports) level.

This set of options enables Analytics administrators to apply the correct permissions based on what the User should be able to do. For example, a big company with a separate marketing team can provide access to only those sections they wish them to view. It’s important that ownership of the account is clear, as many organisations forget to audit the people that have access to the data and so this should be done at least once a year (or once a quarter depending on the required level of data governance).

People that that don’t need access should be removed, or have their permissions adjusted as necessary. It’s also best practice to regularly assess and limit the number of users that have Edit permissions at the Account level, and of course to ensure that the login accounts with full manager access are part of the business and not an email that is linked to an external agency or could be lost in the future.

Analytics data can provide valuable insights into the way in which a website is running, so maintaining full ownership of the account is a significant consideration, which is often over-looked in the successful running of a business. You can read more about managing Google Analytics User permissions in this article by Justin Cutroni, the primary Analytics evangelist at Google.

If you would like to know about ensuring the correct levels of Google Analytics management for your business, contact us now for more information.

Facebook Ad Relevance Score

An increasing number of businesses are using Facebook to advertise to their customers and target market. If your business is already doing so, or considering it in the future, this information is useful to bear in mind, as it’s important to understand the advert relevance score. The more relevant an advert is to its audience, the better it’s likely to perform and advert relevance score makes it easier for you to understand how your advert resonates with your audience.

Facebook considers how relevant an advert is when determining which adverts to show to a user. When your advert is relevant to your audience, its relevance score is higher and it is therefore more likely to be served than other adverts targeting the same audience. As a result, you pay less to reach your audience and this relevancy factor is similar to the way in which the Google AdWords keyword Quality Score works.

Advert relevance score can also help you:

• Know when to refresh your advert. When your advert’s score drops, it may be an indicator to refresh your advert’s creative or change its targeting.
• Determine which advert creative is more relevant. You can use the score to test your creative to help determine which message, image or video resonates most with your audience.

After your advert is served more than 500 times, it receives a daily relevance score from 1–10. Ten means that Facebook estimates your advert to be highly relevant and one means that it’s estimated to not be very relevant. (You can view the score in Adverts Manager by going to Campaigns and clicking Adverts).

Your advert’s relevance score is based on positive and negative feedback that Facebook expects from the people seeing it, based on how the advert is performing. It is calculated differently depending on your objective (e.g. clicks to website or video views) but it’s based on:
– Positive feedback: The number of times Facebook expects people to take a desired action, such as sharing or liking your advert, or help you achieve your objective, such as visiting your website.
– Negative feedback: The number of times expected for people to hide your advert or indicate a negative experience, such as choosing not to see adverts from you.

There are a number of ways to improve your advert’s relevance score, with the five most important being:

• Be specific with your targeting
• Consider your advert’s image and message
• Refresh your advert
• Learn from testing
• Avoid using offensive content

Following these tips can save your business advertising revenue by reducing the cost of Facebook advertising. You can read more about the Facebook ad relevance score here.

If you want more details about how we can help your business succeed through advertising on Facebook, contact us now.

Google Sets Guidelines for SEO Doorway Pages

Google recently announced that it will soon introduce a search ranking adjustment to clamp down on the use of web pages that are created solely for search engines. This is very important for webmasters and online marketers, as sites with large and well-established ‘doorway page’ campaigns might see a negative impact from this change.

Google’s Search Quality team is continually working on ways in which to minimise the impact of ‘webspam’ on users. This includes targeting these so-called ‘doorway pages’ as they have a long-standing view that such webpages are developed only to improve rankings on search engines, which in turn can harm the quality of a user’s search experience. For example, searchers might get a list of results that all go to the same site, so if a user clicks on one result, doesn’t like it, and then tries the next result in the search results page and is taken to that same site that they didn’t like, that’s a really frustrating experience.

Over time, Google’s seen sites try to maximise their ‘search footprint’ without adding clear, unique value. These doorway campaigns manifest themselves as multiple pages on a site, or across a number of domains. To improve the quality of search results for Google’s users, it will soon be introducing a ranking adjustment to better address these types of pages and this could have a dramatic impact on the rankings of sites that use this unfavourable SEO technique.

To help webmasters better understand their guidelines, Google has added clarifying examples and freshened its definition of doorway pages in its Quality Guidelines for Webmasters. Therefore here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages:

• Is the purpose to optimise for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of the site’s user experience?
• Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?
• Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?
• Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?
• Do these pages exist as an ‘island?’ Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site?
• Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?

Therefore it’s essential that webmasters who have previously used ‘doorway’ pages take notice of this imminent change and edit their website accordingly. You can read more about Google’s ‘doorway’ page guidelines here.

If you want to know more about how the use of these pages could seriously impact your business’s rankings on Google, contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we take a look at Google’s ranking algorithm update, which should be extremely interesting for mobile search marketeers, as it will have a “significant impact” on mobile search results.

We also look at Google and Twitter’s new partnership which aims to benefits users by providing fast and democratic Twitter search results. Finally this month, we examine Microsoft’s recently announced, comprehensive overhaul of its Internet Explorer web browser with Project Spartan.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month or by subject. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google’s Mobile Ranking Algorithm Update

In a follow up to our December 2014 articles on ‘Google’s Mobile-Friendly Search Results’ and ‘Using Mobile Performance’, we take a look at, more specifically, the algorithm update that will have a “significant impact” on mobile search results worldwide for mobile searchers.

Not only is it beneficial to ensure that you have a mobile or responsive site, but also to test it to see how mobile-friendly Google deems it to be, so the ‘mobile-friendly’ accolade can be displayed in the mobile search results for your site. As we covered previously, this can be done by using the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Note that the mobile-friendly update only affects mobile search results – i.e. searches from smart phones and tablets, not those conducted on a desktop or laptop computer.

Google recently stated that on April 21st 2015 its mobile ranking factors will not only label your site as mobile-friendly (as it has already been doing for those that it deems as such), but will also use that to determine if your site should rank higher in the search results. This is expanding on its mobile ranking demotion algorithm launched back in 2013 and from that “users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimised for their devices.”

This has been announced in advance, as Google said it wants sites to prepare. So, you have a few weeks to get your websites mobile-friendly! It stated it had been experimenting with mobile ranking factors recently, and now the changes to the algorithm are almost here.

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji from the Webmaster Trends team was recently quoted as saying that the “upcoming mobile-friendly ranking algorithm will have more of an impact on Google’s search results than the Google Panda update and the Google Penguin update did”. Unlike those, it is only impacting the mobile results but even so, it will have more of an impact than them. She didn’t specifically release a percentage of queries impacted, but believes that about 50% of all searches done on Google are on mobile devices.

This algorithm update would not be so important if mobile search wasn’t becoming so dominant. While some industries may not see a significant number of consumer driven searches coming from smart phones and tablets, many, if not most, do. Last year saw the very first moment where mobile search overtook that of desktop and the year ahead will continue along that path.

The critical point from this is that if 50% of your traffic from Google comes from mobile devices and if it seems you are not mobile-friendly, virtually all of that traffic from mobile is at huge risk. So if that’s the case, then it can’t be emphasised strongly enough that it’s imperative to get to work on it immediately.

If you want to know more about how the imminent algorithm update may impact your specific website’s mobile ranking results, contact us now.

Google and Twitter Announce New Partnership

Google and Twitter recently announced that they are back together again and had reached an agreement that will provide Google full access to Twitter’s content stream.

The partnership means that Google now has access to the stream of tweets known as the ‘firehose’. The ‘firehose’, aptly named, sprays nearly 9,000 tweets per second into the ether of the Internet. Previously, Google used to crawl Twitter in order to pull out relevant tweets for search results. That didn’t work well because when Google tried to crawl Twitter at the appropriate rate, there was a possibility of a Twitter server meltdown.

Instead, Google now has complete access to the ‘firehose’ and it benefits from this because Google is about all about indexing fresh information, which is what Twitter provides. Users aren’t satisfied with the information that is four hours old. They want information that is four seconds fresh. That’s precisely why Twitter was invented.

Google’s priorities are to “focus on the user and all else will follow”, understand that “fast is better than slow” and that “democracy on the web works.” So this partnership is about users. Also it’s fast and it’s democratic, so it’s ideal for Google.

The original Twitter/Google partnership fizzled out in Summer 2011, partly due to Twitter’s growing pains. Both companies have since grown, matured, and are ready for something long-term and serious.

Twitter is the quintessential real-time news feed and soon tweets will appear in search results for the world’s most dominating search presence. But it could take as much as a few months, as Google doesn’t yet have a method of featuring tweets in the results. Then they will start to be visible in them as soon as they’re posted. Most likely, Google may feature them on the main results pages, or position the feed to the right of the results.

Social search is bigger than ever and when Google and Twitter combine forces, it will be even harder to determine where one ends and the other begins. So it’s imperative that Search Engine Marketeers are aware of social. Social Media Marketeers also need to be aware of search marketing as these days, as there’s less to distinguish between the two.

If you would like to know more about how this partnership may impact your online marketing, contact us now for more details.

Microsoft Announces Project Spartan

Microsoft recently announced that it will radically overhaul Internet Explorer with ‘Spartan’, a new web browsing experience for Windows 10. The new browser will have the most advanced features ever and have an all-new rendering engine, but beyond that Microsoft wanted to focus on three new features.

Chief among those new features is new linking support that lets users annotate web pages and sync all of those notes to OneDrive and share them with collaborators — a service that makes sense, given Microsoft’s focus on the stylus with its Surface lineup.

There’s also a new reading mode that strips away the clutter of a page and makes it more like reading a book, which is a feature that Apple has offered for a while in Safari on both the Mac and on iOS devices.

A second major feature for Spartan will be the integration of Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant. Microsoft is planning to use Cortana to surface information on flights, hotel bookings, package tracking and other data within the traditional address bar. Cortana integration in the Spartan browser is planned to replace every instance of the existing Bing methods in Internet Explorer.

Another key feature includes a new way to group tabs together to de-clutter the occasionally messy interface of multiple browser tabs. Spartan will allow users to group tabs however they want, making it easier, for example, to split up personal tabs from work ones.

Microsoft is planning to keep the look and feel of Spartan very similar across phones, tablets, and PCs as it’s designed to be a single browser across all devices. It will be a Windows Store app, enabling the company to quickly and easily update the browser in future. The desktop version looks like a simplified version of Chrome, with a tabbed interface above the address bar, alongside options to go back, forward, and refresh a page. It’s all designed to look lightweight, without the bloat typically associated with older versions of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft will continue to include Internet Explorer in Windows 10, primarily for legacy compatibility reasons. Spartan is the main browser in Windows 10 however, and most users will be accessing the web using it. While Spartan is a codename, it’s not yet clear if Microsoft plans to continue the Internet Explorer branding with its new browser.

It you want more information about Microsoft’s Project Spartan, contact us now.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. Please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance. Also, if there are any issues you would like to see in future editions of this newsletter, please submit your suggestions to us.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter for 2015, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we take a look at Google’s recent release of AdWords Call-only campaigns and describe the pros and cons of these. This significant development should be interesting to businesses and AdWords managers that run campaigns of all sizes.

We also look at Google’s recent upgrade to its My Business listings that provide business owners with more control over how their photos are displayed in the search results. Finally, we examine the importance of getting AdWords ads to show on the first page of the results and how to do so. This should be of significant interest to any business that is currently running any AdWords campaign, or intends to do so at any time in the future.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month or by subject. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google Releases AdWords Call-only Campaigns

At the end of February, Google announced the launch of the new AdWords ‘Call-only’ campaigns. These are specially designed to only show ads on smartphones where a call can be made from the search results, and is therefore important for any business where mobile search and call leads are important, so that every paid click can be a phone call to your company.

People are living their lives online and engaging with businesses in new ways. With smartphones in hand, consumers are increasingly looking for products or services while on the go and then placing a call right away. Google states that “70% of mobile searchers call a business directly from search results.”

This is why the new AdWords Call-only campaigns have been introduced, since they are a way for businesses to reach potential customers by prominently showing their phone number, business description and call button when people are searching. It’s uniquely built for businesses that value phone calls more than website clicks.

Many businesses may still prefer to display the link to the website as well as the phone number however, as consumers may wish to have a look at the website before they make the call. It’s still possible to show both the website link and the phone number through the call extension option in the standard AdWords campaigns, but the new ad type is now simpler to create and manage. Firstly, AdWords managers click to create ads, then they can drop down to choose the call-only ad type. There is still a ‘display URL’ which helps to show who users are calling, but this doesn’t link to the site as the ‘destination URL’ from an ad extension does.

This quick set-up can be a time-saver for advertisers and now replaces the existing option to just show the phone number in ads. The advantage of this is that it’s now possible to bid just for phone calls and since every click goes towards a phone call, it’s possible to design a bidding strategy based specifically on CPA or ROAS goal for calls. This helps maximize the value of every call to a business and will be of benefit to those companies that want to target the mobile searcher and encourage direct calls.

The disadvantage is that these Call-only campaigns may lead to a rise in the average cost-per-click for the calls, and as the ads are easier to set up there’s likely to be more competition for the calls than previously. Also, critically, when a click occurs and the number is loaded up on the searcher’s phone, the advertiser is charged, whether or not the call is made. So this may result in lost expenditure on wasted clicks and as such, should be closely monitored for a positive Return On Ad Spend.

If you want more details about these new Call-only campaigns and how they could impact your business, please contact us now.

Google My Business Upgrade Gives More Photo Control

Also announced by Google at the end of February is the ability of businesses to have more control of photos displayed with their search and map results, through an update to the Google My Business product. This is a useful change for any business listed on this service, but especially those with shop-fronts who may want to better present their business online.

Once a business has a Google My Business listing set up and verified, it’s now possible to indicate to Google which image should appear when customers search for a business on Google. While doing that, it’s advisable to give a business a fresh look online by updating the profile, logo and cover photos to ensure these are up to date and as effective as possible.

The new photo interface walks business owners through six categories of images – identity photos, interior photos, exterior photos, photos at work, team photos and additional photos. The dashboard includes explanatory hints for each category. From the identity section – the profile, logo and cover photos – a business manager can select which image will be displayed on search and map results.

This is a useful enhancement to the previously limited choice of how the images could be displayed and will benefit businesses such as restaurants, in particular, that will be able to showcase their food more effectively than before.

If you would like more information on how Google My Business listings can help to improve your business presentation, contact us now for details.

Understanding the First Page Bid Estimate in AdWords

Any AdWords advertiser will know the value of prominently displaying ads on the first page of search results on Google. In order to do this, however, it’s necessary to understand what a first page bid estimate is and then to know that even if the first page bid estimate is met, in some cases the ad still may not appear on the first page of results.

The estimated First Page Bid amount within an AdWords account approximates the cost-per-click (CPC) bid needed for the ad to reach the first page of Google search results when a search query exactly matches the keyword. This estimate is based on the Quality Score and current advertiser competition for that keyword. There is also an estimated Top Page Bid that approximates the CPC bid needed for your ad to appear regularly in the top positions above the main search results.

When managing an AdWords campaign, these estimated bid levels can be seen in the Keywords view, by adding new columns to the standard settings. These estimates can then help an advertiser to make better bidding decisions. On average, ads that appear on the first page or above the search results tend to get substantially more clicks than ads that appear on other search results pages or alongside the search results.

If your first page bid estimate is very high, it may mean that your keyword’s Quality Score is poor or that competition for that term is high. The first page bid estimate is a guide, meant to give you greater insight with which to plan your bidding strategy – but meeting your first page bid estimate isn’t a guarantee of ad position. Ad position will still depend on competition from other advertisers, the components of your Quality Score (expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience), your CPC bid, the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats, the budget and account settings, and user and advertiser behaviour.

First page bid estimates try to estimate the bid needed for your ad to generally reach the first page of search results for the device(s) that you’re targeting. If you’re running a campaign that is only serving on a single device, the bid estimate will reflect the bid required to generally reach the first page of search results on that device. Otherwise, the estimate will reflect the bid generally required across all devices, which can include mobiles, where there are fewer ads shown on the first page of search results.

In some cases, your ad may still rank on the first page even if the first page bid level isn’t reached, or it might not appear on the first page of search results even if first page bid estimate is met! Therefore it’s necessary to keep in mind that this estimate is a guideline, based on your keyword’s Quality Score and recent advertiser competition that applies to search queries exactly matching your keyword. It isn’t a guarantee about your where your ad will appear, but it does indicate that you may be losing out on possible search impressions for your target market.

Below are a few common reasons your ad might not show on the first page, even when you meet this bid estimate:

• Other advertiser activity: There could be new competition on your keywords.
• Search customer activity: The searches customers are performing might not match up exactly with your keywords.
• Budget changes: If you’ve changed your budget recently and it’s been spent, your ad might not run.

If your ads continue to not appear on the first page of search results when you meet the first page bid estimate, then it’s necessary to improve your Ad Rank. You can read about understanding ad position and Ad Rank here.

If you want to know more about bidding strategies and how we can help to improve your AdWords campaigns, please contact us now for details.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter for 2015, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we take a look at Google’s recent release of its ‘Pigeon Update’ algorithm that’s intended to improve the quality of local search results and we consider what impact that’s having on UK business listings.

We also look at the changes that have improved the level of sophistication and ability to target potential customers through the Google AdWords Display Network. Finally, we examine how the global release of Google’s latest version of the popular AdWords Editor tool has been the most significant change to it since its inception in 2006.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter, either by month or by subject. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest developments during the month, or follow our Facebook page or Google+ page for updates.

On to this month’s edition…

Google’s ‘Pigeon Update’ and Local Search Rankings

Google originally launched their new ‘Pigeon Update’ algorithm on July 24, 2014 for US English results, stating that it provides “more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals”. Also, in an attempt to improve the quality of local searches, Google are “now relying on the factors such as location and distance to provide better search results to users”.

This local search ranking algorithm was unusually termed ‘Pigeon’ by industry watchers, following the previous Panda and Penguin updates in recent years – the reasoning was also that pigeons know their locality well enough to be able to fly back home! Following 6 months of usage on Google.com, ‘Pigeon’ was rolled out to UK search results in the middle of December 2014 and there have been some significant changes noted in the local search engine results since then.

The ‘Pigeon’ algorithm isn’t one focussed on fighting ‘spammy’ results, as long as there have been no unscrupulous methods implemented to get better local search ranking results that don’t comply with Google’s guidelines. However, it has altered the local listings in the search results – particularly where the small panel of 3-8 local results would appear on the main Google search page for the locally focused search term. There are now fewer ‘local’ listings for some search terms and early reports indicate that for some searches, Google is opting to display a higher percentage of standard web page listings, instead of the local results derived from the Google My Business listings.

Google also seems to be heavily favouring the physical proximity of a business location to the search intent, to provide a better ranking in from ‘Google My Business’, particularly for mobile searches. This is one of the most significant changes in this recent update, and of course something that can’t be changed by a business! However, there are also some ranking rewards for local businesses who have invested wisely in their own website’s SEO, as this ‘Pigeon Update’ appears to use more of Google’s main web search ranking signals built in to it.

For example, authoritative backlinks matter more in web search than they do in local search. Those and unique, relevant website content are now also becoming an increasingly significant factor in ‘local’ results along with the physical location of the business. As such, the update should reinforce that it is more vital than ever to have a mobile responsive, useful, properly optimised website for your local business to help target customers in your area. This is a crucial consideration in light of the mobile search revolution – as the mobile browsers have much less space available, attaining the top rankings in those is becoming increasingly important.

If you want to know more about how to improve your local and mobile search results, contact us now for more details.

Improved Google AdWords Display Network Targeting

Google recently announced that it’s changing the way in which customers can be reached through their AdWords Display Network. This should be interesting to any online marketeers that use this network, especially for widespread company branding which targets customers’ ‘other interests’.

Since 2009, advertisers have been using ‘interest category’ marketing to connect with people across the Google Display Network based on their interests. Since then, Google have added new and more powerful interest-based capabilities: affinity (for enthusiasts), custom affinity (for niche segments), and in-market audiences (for ready to buy shoppers).

As these more sophisticated audience tools offer advertisers additional flexibility and control, since January 15 2015 ‘other interests’ is no longer a targeting option for new and existing audience campaigns. Current campaigns that target ‘other interests’ will continue to run until June 2015, after which they’ll be automatically upgraded to one of these options:

Affinity audiences: Reach TV-like segments at scale to drive brand awareness (e.g. Kraft used affinity audiences to reach cooking enthusiasts to build awareness for their new ‘Fresh Take’ brand).
Custom affinity audiences: Niche segments that can be found and custom-tailored for a brand (e.g. Electronic Arts used custom affinity audiences to engage fans of specific NFL teams in their recent Madden GIFERATOR campaign. They created 32 custom affinity audiences, one per NFL team, to reach fans of specific teams with display ads timed to the real-time action on the field).
In-market audiences: Reach consumers while they’re actively browsing, researching or comparing products related to a category you choose (e.g. the online car dealership Autobytel uses in-market audiences to reach customers actively researching specific models, price comparisons, and consumer reviews, as opposed to casual car enthusiasts).

So the level of granularity that Google provides for controlling the targeting on its Display Network is increasing in its sophistication and will continue to do so, to give companies the best opportunities to target their customers most effectively.

You can read more about the enhanced GDN reach and if you want more information on how to better focus your Display Network targeting, contact us now for more details.

Google AdWords Editor is Updated

Google recently released an updated version of one of its most popular management tools – AdWords Editor – and this update was a significant one with some major changes to the look and functionality of the tool. AdWords Editor was designed with the most sophisticated advertisers in mind, as it helps to reduce the time spent on managing large campaigns by simplifying workflow, but for anyone managing an AdWords campaign, it can be a great time-saver.

AdWords Editor 11.0 represents the biggest update to the application since its initial release in 2006. It’s been redesigned from the ground up, with old features being enhanced and new ones added to help do more, in less time. With a brand new visual design and faster interface, AdWords Editor 11.0 is built to improve efficiency as you view changes as they’re are made across accounts, campaigns and adgroups.

The new design and interface mimics the Windows OS by enabling the ability to view multiple accounts at once by opening as many account windows as desired. Arrange them side-by-side and even copy and paste or drag-and-drop items between them. You can also add and manage all of the accounts, download data, and monitor status in the new accounts manager. It’s also possible to open multiple windows to view different parts of your account at the same time – for instance, you can now open a new window to view your keyword list while creating your related ads.

As the number of accounts grows, so does the need to find the things in them quickly. So there’s now a panel for selecting type lists. This feature removes the need to navigate using tabs, so you can quickly perform common tasks while instantly accessing your campaigns, advanced features and settings. If you’re looking for something specific, use the improved, advanced search bar. You can now apply multiple search criteria and filters, and even save popular searches for future use. Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, it’s easy to navigate and make changes using simple keyboard shortcuts (Mac & Windows).

Making large-scale changes is now even easier in AdWords Editor 11.0. Advanced multi-select functionality makes viewing and updating specific parts of an account simple. Select any combination of campaigns and ad groups to view their ads or keywords, and paste them into multiple campaigns and ad groups at once. You can also manage your Shared Library to assign bid strategies and sitelinks across multiple campaigns and ad groups. The ‘Make multiple change’ tool now automatically organises your text into rows and columns as you add, update, or remove multiple items on the fly, and a detailed history of your recent changes is now just a click away, along with the option to quickly undo or redo multiple changes in sequence or in bulk.

This update has been warmly received by the AdWords marketing industry, as it isn’t a forced update that immediately renders the previous version obsolete. Both versions can be used concurrently as mastery of the new version is attained, so that by April 10, 2015 support for previous versions will be withdrawn. You can read more and download the new version here.

If you want more information about how the new version of AdWords Editor can simplify your campaign management, contact us now.