Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – March 2016

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 our first article this month, we take a look at Google’s recent introduction of a new layout for AdWords ads in the search results. This is a significant change to the way in which the ads are being displayed and should be critical information to all businesses and search marketers that manage an AdWords account, as this is likely to have quite an impact in the future.

Our second article examines Facebook’s recent roll-out of emoji-style ‘Reactions’ and the potential value of this data for the marketing industry. Our final article describes Google Grants for non-profit organisations and the eligibility criteria required to receive Google Ad Grants to the value of $10,000 USD per month in AdWords advertising.

You can read more below, or you can also browse through previous editions of the newsletter 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 Introduces New Layout For AdWords Ads

On February 19th, in a move that could have a significant impact upon AdWords campaigns in the future, Google announced a dramatic change that removes ads from the right side of its desktop search results, and places ads only at the top and/or bottom of the page. Simultaneously, the company said it may show an additional ad (i.e. four, not three) above the search results for what it calls ‘highly commercial queries’, such as searches for “hotels in London” or “car insurance” and then place two or three text ads at the bottom of the page.

Google confirmed that the change is now rolling out to all desktop searches worldwide in all languages, following a period of testing and gradual implementation. As a result of this change, the search results page becomes a cleaner list of results with no ads appearing down the right hand column, with 2 exceptions: Product Listing Ad (PLA) boxes, which show either above or to the right of search results; and ads in the Knowledge Panel for brand name or some general information searches. The removal of all right-side ads obviously makes the desktop and mobile search results more similar, although on a mobile search, Google typically shows either two or three ads at the top of the results.

The changes on desktop searches mean that the total number of text ads that can appear on a Search Engine Results Page will shrink from as many as 11 to a maximum of 7, and the top 4 positions are now the only visible ads to users without having to scroll down the page. Although this ads another place to the prime positions at the top of the search results, this change will inevitably make competition for those positions more fierce, possibly leading to an escalating cost-per-click and overall AdWords advertising costs. So it’ll be interesting to see how first page and top of page bid minimums shift.

There is also an impact on the search experience for many users, and although ads have been gaining more of the primary real estate in recent years, this move ensures that the organic search results are pushed further down the page for many searches. Since some searchers dislike the ads and prefer to rely on Google’s ‘own’ results driven by the SEO techniques of relevant websites, this may mean that some searches could become more disillusioned with the apparent commercial focus of the Google results.

So far the main reaction to this change has come from the search engine marketing community and it’s too early to tell what longer term impact this change may have, or how advertising costs may increase. We’ll be monitoring this closely over coming months and will implement and required changes to keep costs to a minimum, whilst maintaining as prominent positions as possible for our advertisers.

If you want to know more about how these changes may impact your Google AdWords campaigns, please contact us now.

Facebook Rolls Out ‘Reactions’

Following an announcement at the end of last year, Facebook has now started to roll out emoji-style Reactions for all users, which will allow you to express your feelings to a post in a more descriptive way than just a ‘like’.

Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Reactions were now being introduced across most countries after a period of testing. The idea, according to Zuckerberg, is to add “a little bit of complexity” to something that is very simple. “When you only have a like button, if you share a sad piece of content or something that makes you angry, people may not have the tool to react to it.” So now Facebook users are being given new tools in the form of emoticons labelled “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad” and “angry” – or they can still just “like”.

It is likely to be advertisers who will be most impressed about this change to the way Facebook works as it will enable them to gain better levels of feedback and market reaction to content posted on the social media site. The latest results show just how much they have bought into the social network’s message that it offers a unique way to connect with consumers and learn everything about them. Now they will have a far more complex set of data available and potentially make advertising more appealing.

Simon Calvert, head of strategy at the marketing agency Lida, says if the new system accurately reflects human emotions then it will be very interesting. “The ability to build better emotional connections with consumers is something that advertisers really prize. Facebook ‘likes’ have become a somewhat devalued currency because brands collect them mindlessly”. But he sees advertisers using Reactions in a far more sophisticated way to get insights into the emotions people feel about products.

Another social media marketing expert, Kristal Ireland of Twentysixdigital, says there is always great excitement when Facebook makes a change like this. She believes there is an opportunity to learn far more about what people think of marketing messages but says the real challenge will be to make sense of the flood of new data: “You might end up with such fragmented data that you can’t make up your mind what your ad should look like.”

But what should Facebook users think about laying out their emotions for all to see? Nick Oliver urges caution – his company People.io aims to help users take control over their social media data and realise its value to advertisers. He says “from the consumer point of view they are now giving up their emotional data for advertisers to use and manipulate. People open themselves up on social media and the data is used in ways they never expect”. He argues that the rise in the use of ad blockers, which are largely ineffective on Facebook, makes this data even more valuable. “The demand for a price of people’s attention is getting higher.”

Of course, the big question for advertisers is just how honest people will be in expressing themselves via the Reactions buttons. The social media era has seen millions sharing their feelings online – but companies have also quickly learnt just how dangerous that can be. Understanding the significance of Facebook’s new Reactions will become an essential skill for anyone working in social media marketing.

If you would like more information about how Facebook advertising can help your business, contact us now.

Google Grants for Non-Profits

Google Grants is a donation program that distributes free in-kind AdWords advertising to qualifying non-profit organisations. Participating non-profit organisations are eligible to receive up to US$10,000 per month in advertising within the AdWords search engine marketing platform so it provides an excellent opportunity for charities and other non-profits to get their message out to the search market for a minimal cost.

Google says that the Grants scheme tries to make it easier for people to donate to a cause and so the easier it is for them to donate, the more likely it is that they will. The more frequently the ads appear next to Google search results, the more people will be aware of a cause and so that can translate into more donations and more volunteers, which is the lifeblood of every non-profit organisation.

Once qualifying for the Google Grants scheme, a non-profit can set up and manage a Google AdWords account like any other advertiser, and compete in the search results auction for relevant keywords. However, there are some restrictions and limitations in the way this can work, namely:

• Advertisers can only use the Google Search network, so not Search Partners or the Display network
• All campaigns are keyword targeted only and can only use the standard text ads
• Maximum bid levels are limited to US$2 per keyword
• Advertisers must actively manage the AdWords account by logging in once a month and making at least one change to the account every 90 days.
• The ads and keywords should match the organisation’s programs and services.
• Strictly commercial advertising is prohibited. If products or services are promoted, 100% of the proceeds must go directly to supporting the program.

Getting access to this level of ‘free’ advertising is very useful for many non-profit organisations, and very active or high spending users could achieve Grantspro status with US$40k of funded advertising per month. However, the main challenge with these campaigns is to work with the maximum CPC level, which can limit ad ranking in competitive markets and makes the achievement of good Quality Scores at the keyword level much more important, so that campaign structure is vital. Also, in a market where the local exchange rate is impacted by movements against the US$, this can also affect ad ranking positions.

If you’d like to know more about Google Grants and whether your non-profit organisation is eligible for the scheme, please contact us now for an initial review.

We hope you’ve found this month’s newsletter useful. As usual, if you have any questions or need help with any of these items, please contact us if you need any more information on the items covered, or our advice on any aspect of your website’s performance.

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 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 – the last for 2013 – which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing and search marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month, we take a look at Google’s updated Opportunities Tab within AdWords and how, if used correctly, it may improve the performance of a campaign.

Next, we take a look at the importance of Google Webmaster’s search query data and how this can be very useful in helping to provide more information about the keywords that are used from the search engine to visit your website, and which are the main landing pages that are visited from the search results.

In the final article this month, we examine the different types of Facebook advertising and the different reasons and benefits of using these as part of a social media marketing campaign.

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

On to this month’s edition…

Google updates the AdWords Opportunities Tab

Google recently announced some changes to the Opportunities tab within the AdWords system, which can potentially help advertisers find ways of improving the performance of their campaigns. This section in the main navigation tabs suggests different ways to increase the performance of the campaign (or spend with Google) so it can provide good insights but also needs to be managed with caution.

The new Opportunities tab is designed to be more user-friendly and presents the advertiser with suggestions based on the previous 7 days of activity (or longer for some elements). These are some of the options within the Opportunities section that can be considered to improve a campaign’s performance:

Convert more customers in your best locations
If your conversion rate differs across locations, you might see opportunities to increase your location bid adjustment where your conversion rate is high, or decrease your location bid adjustments where your conversion rate is low.

Get more out of your existing budget
If you’re maxing out your budget, you might see opportunities to lower your bids to capture more clicks – or, of course, Google might suggest that you increase your daily budget level!

Be there more often than competitors
If your ads are being seen less frequently than other advertisers competing for the same traffic, you might see opportunities to be seen more frequently with (higher) bids to show your ads more often than advertisers like you.

Show ads that are more relevant
If Google spots an adgroup with keywords related to lots of different themes, it’s harder for you to show a highly relevant ad, so you might see opportunities to create new adgroups from existing keywords. This can be a particularly useful suggestion that can help to improve your targeting and your keyword Quality Scores.

Reach more customers on closely related searches
If you’re missing clicks on searches that are very similar to your existing keywords, you might see opportunities to broaden your keyword match types – which will, of course, increase your spend.

Be seen on the first page
If your ads are showing below the first page when users search on high-quality keywords, you might see opportunities to raise your bids to show ads on the first page.

The opportunities you’ll see are tailored to your account and should be selected based on their possible impact to your performance. The new look design and presentation in this section now makes it easier to decide which opportunities are being suggested and which should be implemented.

Of course, as noted above, these opportunities or suggestions by Google do need to be handled carefully and with caution, as the simultaneous implementation of too many opportunities could result in a dramatic difference to the way in which the allocated budget is spent. The recommendations are being generated automatically based on past trends and many of them will also benefit Google from increased spend for the advertiser and income for Google, so ideally these opportunities need to be consider carefully in the context of the campaign objectives.

Best practice would be to introduce one opportunity at a time, then monitor how that impacts the campaign before introducing more, through on-going optimisation and review. The most appealing initial opportunities are those to get more out of your existing budget and show ads that are more relevant, both of which could lead to a lower average cost per click.

If you’d like more information about the new Opportunities for better campaign performance in AdWords, please contact us now.

Using Google Webmaster’s Search Query Data

Anybody who regularly runs Google Analytics reports would be familiar with the increasing percentage of keywords bundled into the rather unhelpful “(not provided)” data category. So the Google Webmaster’s search query data, which includes a “top pages” tab, is starting to gain more importance for insights into Google’s SEO ranking activity for a website. This data is provided through the on-going changes to improve the compatibility between Webmaster Tools and Analytics and shows search queries that drive traffic to your site, as well as which pages benefit the most from them.

The “top pages” tab is in the search queries section of Webmaster Tools and is where you’ll find data for the pages that perform the best in Google’s search results. It shows impressions, click counts, average position, and an increasing amount of data for individual website pages. Clicking on any page URL will show a list of what search terms are sending traffic to it and users can also click on any of the search terms to see how it performs across your site – i.e. which pages get traffic from this term.

This is a very useful function within Webmaster Tools, which helps to fill the gap created by the unavailable “(not provided)” keyword data in Analytics. Data can be compared for the last 30 days compared to the previous 30, so broad trends can be reviewed to see how often a website has appeared in the search results, which search terms clicks have been acquired from, and what ranking positions have changed.

There are some discrepancies between data that is shown from both of those accounts as the information is being collected from different sources, and the Webmaster Tools data is quite generalised, but it’s a good step in the right direction. You can view more information about the reasons for that discrepancy and the best ways to use the search query data here.

So website marketers who use Webmasters and Analytics should be aware that this data is available to provide valuable information about the website and how it is driving visits from Google’s search results. The Webmaster Tools data can now supplement the reports that are withholding information from Analytics and so trends can be seen to show if SEO activity is improving website visits, and from which search terms.

If you’d like more details about the most effective ways to use this data to improve the performance of your website, contact us now.

What are the different types of Facebook Advertising?

If you are using Facebook business pages as part of your social media marketing activity, there are a number of ways to run advertising on the Facebook platform. Over the past year Facebook has tried to make the process of setting up ads more useful for advertisers, as well as adding more options to give advertisers more flexibility, but also to create more revenue options for Facebook! So, what are the main options and how can they be used?

Advertisers on Facebook can either use ads to direct users to their Facebook content, or to take them directly to their website content. Internal ads – that keep users within Facebook – tend to work better in most cases and these are called ‘engagement ads’. Anyone clicking on the advert can take an action without leaving Facebook, which is where they probably want to stay and interact within this social networking site.

There are several different types of Facebook advertising which can be used by advertisers – these are the traditional Facebook ads down the right hand column, as well as the newer options of Sponsored Stories and Promoted Posts. Each can be used in different ways, such as to build up the number of Likes, or to encourage more engagement with your content, such as commenting or sharing posts.

The traditional Engagement Ads on Facebook are the ones used to promote your business page and these usually appear down the right hand column, against the news feed of a target user. Advertisers can use a range of targeting options to try to reach the most relevant target audience, based on location, age range, interests and other factors. The ads include a link to the Facebook page (or external website) and also include a Like button, so that a strong compelling ad can attract more Likes without necessarily getting users onto the business page first.

Another ad option is Sponsored Stories – this can be used to show an advert based on a post on your business page, or a new Like by a user, and it will be displayed to your followers and their network of friends, so this is good to use once you start building up a strong network of Likes. It’s a way of getting more visibility for a post or an action (see last month’s issue about EdgeRank) and these stories can capitalise off a friend’s interaction with a Facebook page to reach more people on a personal level.

It’s important to remember that with these ads, the advertiser is less able to control all the content that is being promoted, because Sponsored Stories promote the actions of Facebook friends with a specific business page or entity with the goal of enticing Facebook members to like the same page as their friend, or friends, have. If a member or visitor interacts with a Facebook business page, this action will be promoted to a larger audience, regardless of the post’s contents. Sponsored Stories therefore promote a friend’s relationship and interaction with a page, to target and encourage a Facebook member to interact with that business and so Sponsored Stories can be effective in improving a company’s image and through emphasising customer satisfaction.

Promoted Posts are a newer advertising option on Facebook and give advertisers many different options through promoting links, photos, texts and videos. Page Post ads contain different formats that are classified as sponsored or promoted to increase the advertisers reach. Page Post ads can be used in a link form to promote a website or in a photo form to promote something like an upcoming sale.

A Promoted Post text ad gives businesses the opportunity to go into more detail about a service or product being offered. Offers in a form of an electric coupon can be included in an ad, which is redeemable for a member who clicks upon the advertisement. This form of Facebook advertising is popular amongst larger companies, as the content of the advertisement is totally controlled by the advertiser, unlike Sponsored Stories.

Facebook has also introduced Sponsored Results, which gives advertisers the chance to appear in the Facebook search results for relevant search terms. This is a very similar concept to the Google AdWords model to target searchers, and is also linked in to Facebook’s Graph Search which was introduced over a year ago to improve the search functionality within the site. At this stage, these type of ads can only be set up using the Facebook Power Editor – a tool we will be covering in a future issue of this newsletter.

If you would like to know more about how Facebook advertising can benefit your business, contact us now for more details.