Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – August 2016

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

In the first article this month we look at Google’s recent release of price extensions for mobile AdWords ads. This should be interesting to AdWords managers who are keen to promote products and services with prices in the first position on Google’s mobile search results.

We also look at some helpful tips on how to boost video rankings through both invisible and visible ranking factors. This should be useful for SEO practitioners who focus on improving their video rankings on both YouTube and the Google organic search results.

Finally this month, we look at the purchase of Yahoo by US telecoms giant Verizon and how it intends to turn around Yahoo’s recent second quarter loss of $440m by focusing on its brands and large existing user-base through digital 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…

New AdWords Price Extensions Introduced

Google has recently released a new ad extension, for prices, so that additional information can show with mobile text ads that includes the cost of services and products. This is a useful addition that allows advertisers to showcase some of their range in the search results.

These new price extensions show as multiple rows and provide valuable information to prospective customers before they click on the ad. Each row features a type of product or service, its description and price, and a link to a relevant landing page. This structured way of highlighting information makes it easier for people to compare their options and decide if they’re interested in the products or services, right from the mobile search results page.

Google claims that the addition of these price extensions can increase the CTR by as much as 18%. Also, by highlighting the price of a service or product it may encourage people to call directly from the search results, without needing to visit the website and therefore incurring a cost per click.

For time-sensitive offers like promotions, it’s possible to create multiple price extensions with corresponding start and end dates to ensure the prices remain accurate. There must be a minimum of three entries for each extension, and up to a maximum of eight.

This is an appealing addition by Google, but the catch is that price extensions will only show with mobile text ads that are in position 1. It’s highly likely that the introduction of these will lead to an increase in the average cost-per-click for that position, as demand and competition increases for that top spot, especially in peak shopping periods such as the lead up to Christmas. So the best practice we’d recommend for these is to have them running only for very short periods during special promotions.

If want more information about how these price extensions in AdWords could help your business, contact us now.

Video Content Optimisation Tips

This article provides helpful information on the best practices to boost video rankings and should be interesting for any SEO practitioners who need to focus on video search results. It’s divided into two sections: invisible and visible ranking factors.

Google’s YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Internet. It offers a wide range of management features and even provides its own comprehensive analytics dashboard to help channel managers determine the value of their content. These functions, together with the close link with Google, help it to achieve a competitive advantage over other platforms, like Vimeo or Vine and attract more users by doing do.

Any company that produces video content therefore has the opportunity to attract video views and website visits from this content, either directly from YouTube or from the integrated video results that sometimes appear in Google’s search rankings. However, to achieve this visibility, video content owners need to consider the following ranking factors:

Invisible Ranking Factors

• Video Filename – Use a descriptive video filename as well as hyphens between words
• Meta Tags – Research the popular search keywords before tagging your video and use the relevant tags, with 10 or less keywords per video. Also don’t use the same keywords you used in your title and description as ‘tag-stuffing’ can get your video removed
• Watch Time – Create descriptive and emotional video thumbnails as well as a compelling introduction, then build up interest throughout the video with programming, branding, and packaging techniques. It’s good to use annotations in the video and links in the description to encourage users to view more content on your website, and then encourage comments and participation to get users involved and to keep them interested
• Flags/Reports – Make sure you follow the Community Guidelines and if you feel that your video was wrongly flagged, appeal the removal.

Visible Ranking Factors

• Title – Write a descriptive, relevant title using appropriate search keywords, and limit titles to 100 characters with the main keywords towards the front of your title for better SEO value
• Description – Include keywords here as well but be aware of the first 157 visible characters. Describe the video without giving away too much information amd provide a clear ‘call to action’ link to on-site content
• Transcripts, Subtitles and Captions – Your channel name, icon, banner and vanity URL should reflect your brand. Remember to fill in the channel keywords and targeting, plus the channel description and social links.
• Quality – Make sure that you focus on delivering the best content possible (preferably in HD), ensure that the audio is comprehensive and of cousre the picture should be clear and not blurry or out of focus!
• Engagement – Use any and all channels to get people to watch your videos and measure your views/engagement with analytics. Promote the video and moderate comments to ensure quality and recency of engagement, and respond to people who are commenting
• Inbound Links and Embeds – Utilize any and all marketing and PR channels to build links to the channel and videos, with a focus on your best content because it will naturally attract links. Remember to also embed videos on your site or blog to build up views and engagement
• Social Shares – Set up social buttons on your website to make it easy for users to share across networks and encourage your followers to share your content.

As shown above, there are close similarities between the techniques for optimising videos as there are for web pages. If they are correctly implemented, they will result in a better focus on YouTube’s priorities and a business channel that has a greater potential to rank content well.

You can read more about these tips here or if you want to know more about how we can help you to improve your video rankings, contact us now for more information.

Verizon to Buy Yahoo For US$5bn

At the end of July it was announced that US Internet firm Yahoo is to be acquired by American telecoms giant Verizon Communications for nearly US$5bn. Yahoo was once a market leader in the early days of the web, but has slowly dwindled in recent years and will now be combined with AOL, another faded Internet star, which Verizon bought last year.

The price tag for the deal is well below the $44bn Microsoft offered for Yahoo in 2008, or the $125bn it was worth during the dot.com boom around 2000, when Yahoo and its directory were popular destinations on the growing web. Verizon said the deal for Yahoo’s core Internet business, which has more than a billion active users a month, would make it a global mobile media company.

Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, who took the helm at Yahoo in 2012 but who has made little progress in returning the company to profit, said: “Yahoo is a company that has changed the world, and will continue to do so through this combination with Verizon and AOL.” In late July, the firm reported a $440m loss in the second quarter, but she said the board had made “great progress on strategic alternatives”.

The takeover however, which is due to be completed in early 2017, raises questions about whether the Yahoo brand could disappear. Together, AOL and Yahoo will have more than 25 brands, including Yahoo Mail, the photo sharing service Flickr, Tumblr as well as AOL’s Huffington Post and Techcrunch news sites. AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong said the deal was about “unleashing Yahoo’s full potential”, and creating a major player in mobile media.

Beyond the talk of becoming a global media company, Verizon chief executive Lowell McAdams wants a larger share of the booming digital advertising pie. He thinks this deal will help him and, as a leading US mobile phone network, Verizon already had a wealth of data from smartphone users that it could mine. Its purchase of AOL a year ago for its programmatic advertising technology allowed it to leverage that more effectively. Yahoo, meanwhile, has struggled to build its mobile advertising business.

So its appeal is that it has content. With Yahoo, Verizon gains the Internet company’s 600 million monthly active mobile users, as well as its email service, Yahoo Finance, and Tumblr, which are popular among the latest generation of users. The idea is for Verizon to take on Google and Facebook. In 2015, these latter two claimed the largest share of the digital ad market. Whether or not Verizon can compete with them, and overcome the trouble Yahoo had building its mobile advertising business, will be interesting to see. It certainly will be a significant challenge.

If you would like more information about the Yahoo takeover, please contact us now.

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 monthly issue of our regular newsletter which features news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search engine marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at Google’s recent announcement of the largest change to AdWords in years with Expanded Text Ads, which will allow search marketers to promote their products or USPs in more detail.

We also look at how caution should be taken when receiving emails about link schemes that could improve a website’s organic rankings – both from the recipients perspective and for prospective link builders. Finally, we look at how Microsoft is to buy LinkedIn for US$26bn and what it means for the shareholders of both companies, as well as the market as a whole.

On a separate matter this month, we’re delighted to announce that we have just been given the status of a Premier Google AdWords Partner, which recognises Web Marketing Workshop UK as ‘one of their most valued agencies’. Google says that this new badge is designed to recognize Partners who manage a substantial portfolio of Google advertising campaigns and deliver great results for their customers.

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 AdWords Rolls Out Expanded Text Ads

Google recently announced the largest change to AdWords in years – the format of text ads is changing. According to Google, this new format – known as Expanded Text Ads – has delivered clickthrough rates up to 20% higher compared to existing test ads, during their tests.

The most prominent feature of the change is an increased character length in the headline from 25 to 60, over two headlines. This will enable advertisers to maximise the space on mobile, desktop and tablet devices to promote products and services. The description lines, which currently consist of two lines of 35 characters each, will be merged into one, with 80 characters (inc. spaces). This increase from 95 characters to 140 characters in the headline and description combined is a significant one, with almost a 50% increase.

This new ad format reflects the recent change where Google moved all AdWords ads in line with the organic search results (with no ads being shown in a right hand column any more) and therefore Google wants to display the ads in a way that look more like the traditional organic results. The roll-out of this new format is currently limited but is expected to appear as standard ads on Google.com (USA) from the end of July, and globally by the end of October this year, when the current ad format will be discontinued.

AdWords campaign managers therefore need to ensure that the testing and rollout of Expanded Text Ads is included as a top priority over the next few months. Google recommends that advertisers need to rethink their entire creative by trying not to tack copy onto existing ads and initial tests have shown that advertisers who completely rethink and rewrite their ads for the new format see better performance.

The benefits for advertisers include more direct control over headlines, without having to hope that Google would automatically carry up correctly punctuated portions of description line 1 into it, which it only did randomly and not all the time. There will also be room to fit in more product specific information or unique selling propositions.

We’ll be testing these new format ads over the next few months and if you want to know more about how ETAs could improve your business’s advertising, please contact us now.

Caution About Link Schemes From Black Hat SEOs

In the early days of SEO, ‘black-hat’ techniques such as hidden ‘keyword stuffing’ and ‘link farms’ were prevalent. Thankfully, things have progressed significantly since then with Google’s enhancements through the Panda/Penguin algorithms penalising such unscrupulous techniques. However, there are still some shady link schemes so it’s necessary to be cautious about emails that offer to put strong links to your site upon reputable, powerful ones, as these offers are usually too good to be true!

These type of offers violate Google’s quality guidelines and can harm your site rankings. Such ‘spammy’ link-building tactics, defined by Google as ‘link schemes’ are, buying or selling links that pass PageRank (which includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links); exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it in a blog, for example, and including a link.

Google considers these schemes to be an attempt to fool the search engine algorithms. If lower-quality content can rank high just because it has amassed a high quantity of backlinks, that is not a great experience for the searcher. So Google strives to rank quality content that will meet user needs.

When it comes to spammy link building techniques, there are two types of penalties that can impact your site: algorithmic and manual. An algorithmic penalty occurs when your site loses rankings as a result of an algorithm update – in this case, Penguin. Webmasters may be able to restore rankings by getting rid of spammy backlinks before the next Penguin update, but that is not a guarantee. In any event, steps should be taken to remove or disavow spammy backlinks.

An algorithmic ranking demotion is bad, but it is not as devastating as a manual penalty, which can cause a site (or some of its pages) to be removed from Google’s index entirely. Essentially, the Google ‘Spam’ team manually reviews your backlink profile and places a penalty on the site. To remove a manual penalty, you must work to remove or disavow spammy backlinks and then file a reconsideration request, which is a process that can take weeks or months.

Ideally, all links to a site would be earned naturally, rather than acquired through deliberate link-building efforts. To gain natural inbound links, webmasters and SEOs should build content that is engaging, shareable and easily linkable. So, when receiving emails from SEO practitioners, make sure that you follow these guidelines:

• Ignore offers of paid link-building or link schemes;
• If the email states the person is from a reputable organisation, they would use the email address of that company, not a generic one, such as from Gmail;
• Punctuation and spelling errors in the email should also ring alarm bells!

It’s certainly beneficial to remain cautious and ideally stay away from link-building offers that do sound too good to be true, as doing that will help to avoid link penalties, which can severely damage a sites rankings, traffic and consequential conversions.

If you want more information about how unscrupulous link-building prospecting, or black-hat SEO techniques can impact your business, contact us now.

Microsoft to Buy LinkedIn For US$26bn

In June it was announced that Microsoft will pay $196 a share for LinkedIn – valuing it at US$26bn – which is a deal that Microsoft hopes will help it to boost sales of its business and email software. It will also give it access to the world’s biggest professional social network with more than 430 million members worldwide.

It’s possible that LinkedIn will be integrated with a number of Microsoft assets such as Office 365, Exchange and Outlook, but how deeply integrated it will be isn’t specified at this stage. Microsoft emphasised however, that LinkedIn would continue to operate as an independent business and there will be a different approach to previous integrations, to preserve LinkedIn’s “distinct brand, culture and independence”.

Microsoft has to be cautious about such purchases, as the entire US$7.2bn value of the Nokia’s mobile phones division, which it bought in 2013, was written off just a year later. So Microsoft’s investors may look at that $26bn price tag nervously, while anyone with a few LinkedIn shares would be pleased with the 50% premium (on the Friday before the deal) closing share price to buy LinkedIn. That price amounts to US$250 for every active user.

Shares in LinkedIn, which floated in May 2011, have fallen by more than 40% this year. The stock plunged by a quarter in February after the company issued a profit warning for the first quarter and reported an annual loss of US$166m. However, shares soared 47% following the announcement of the deal, whereas shares in Microsoft have fallen by 2.6%, bringing the decline this year to almost 10%. The takeover is by far the biggest acquisition made by Microsoft, which paid $8.5bn for Skype in 2011 and it eclipses the $19bn that Facebook paid for WhatsApp in 2014.

If you’d like to know more about this move by Microsoft, and the possible impact on LinkedIn, please contact us.

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 monthly issue of our regular newsletter which features news, tips and advice on effective website marketing, with a particular focus on search engine marketing techniques and trends.

In the first article this month we look at how Google recently provided more information about ranking factors for ‘Google My Business’ listings. This should be of interest to any businesses, or SEO managers who are setting up or managing these listings to target a local market.

We also look at the identification by Google of the new and emerging threat of ‘Clickjacking’. This is a sophisticated form of online threat to Cost-Per-Click display ads, so Google’s defence against it should interest any business running AdWords campaigns.

Finally we look at the latest online advertising expenditure report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK for the 2015 year, which increased to over £8.6bn and saw an increasing importance of mobiles and, more recently, videos in the online advertising space.

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 Updates Details on Improving Local Ranking

In an interesting development from Google – who are usually notoriously coy about releasing detailed information about how to achieve good search rankings – they recently added more details to their help page, named ‘Improve your local ranking on Google’. This provides more insights on how to achieve better visibility with local search results.

As reported in our September 2015 newsletter article ‘Google Changes Local Search Results’, the reduction in the number of listings displayed from 7 to 3 has led to increased competition for those spots. Therefore these recently updated details are welcomed by small business owners and the SEO industry, as any information provided by Google about these factors is always useful.

Google does still do their best to keep the specific details of their search algorithms confidential, to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone. Previously, the help page had about five paragraphs of text around relevance, distance and prominence for ranking in the local results. Now, Google has vastly expanded the document which now covers the newer local ‘3-pack’ results, as well as how to be included in that pack and how the ranking positions are determined.

In terms of these rankings, Google still outlines relevance, distance and prominence, but expands upon each of them. Here is a summary of the key points in the revised content:

• Relevance – this refers to how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. Adding complete and detailed business information can help Google better understand your business and match your listing to relevant searches. Relevant terms in a business name can be important but this should still be the correct name for the business, plus selecting the best category/ies and using a good business description can all help.
• Distance – just like it sounds, how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, Google will calculate distance based on what’s known about their location, which tends to be more accurate if on a mobile device.
• Prominence – this refers to how well-known a business might be. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be prominent in local search results. Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles and directories).
• Reviews – having Google reviews, including the number and rating score are factored into local search rankings. More reviews and positive ratings are likely to improve a business’s local ranking. A business website’s position in the main search results can also a factor, so SEO best practices also apply to local search optimisation.

You can read the updated Google help file here. If you want to know more about how ranking well in a local listing could help to improve your business, contact us now.

Google Rolls Out More Defences to Thwart Clickjacking

Google recently identified ‘Clickjacking’ as an emerging threat to cost-per-click display ads. This is a type of web attack where the appearance of a website is changed so that a victim does not realise they are clicking on one or more ads. For example, a user may intend to click on a video play button or menu item, but instead clicks an invisible ad unit. They reacted quickly by rolled out new defences to protect advertisers against this threat by using a combination of technology, operations, and policy.

Earlier this year when Google’s operations team identified Clickjacking activity on the display network, they moved swiftly to terminate accounts, removing entities involved in, or attempting to use, this technique to trick users. The engineering team worked in parallel to quickly release a filter to automatically exclude this type of invalid traffic across display ads.

This approach delivered a two-phase solution to publishers who violated Google’s policies: firstly, the operations team cleaned out publishers from the ad systems; secondly, engineers built a new filter as a durable defence to protect against Clickjacking traffic.

The combined Clickjacking defences operate at considerable scale, analysing display ad placements across mobile and desktop platforms, evaluating a variety of characteristics. When the system detects a Clickjacking attempt (or an normal ‘invalid click’), Google zeros-in on the traffic attributed to that placement, and removes it from upcoming payment reports to ensure that advertisers are not charged for those clicks.

Ad traffic quality has always been a priority to Google, which has consistently put in place sophisticated technology to detect and not charge for, or eradicate, ‘invalid clicks’. It’s swift to respond when such emerging threats appear and the combined defences work well to combat those.

If you want more information about how ‘invalid clicks’ and Clickjacking could impact your AdWords campaigns, please contact us now.

Online Advertising Expenditure in the UK Increases to Over $8.6bn

In their latest report for the twelve months ending December 31st 2015, IAB UK stated that the online advertising market experienced another year of significant growth in 2015, growing by 16.4% over the previous year on a like-for-like basis, to finish the year at £8.606bn. This reflects the ongoing growth of the market, and in particular, the strong trends in mobile and video advertising over the past few years.

This latest data comes from the regular Digital Adspend Study conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK, together with PwC and shows that all online advertising segments experienced another strong year of growth in 2015. Display ads were up by nearly 25% to over £3bn, with 60% of this spend being reported as programmatic advertising. Paid Search was up by 15% to £4.36bn and Classifieds grew by 5% to £1.1bn. Search remains the largest sector of spend with a 51% share of the market, followed by Display at 35% and Classifieds at 13%. However, as usual the Search figure remains an estimate as Google doesn’t reveal their actual figures for this report and this would comprise the largest part of this spend.

Most notably, mobile advertising continued its meteoric rise, increasing by just over 60% to reach £2.6bn in 2015. This is a significant increase and mobile now accounts for just over 30% of all digital ad spend, compared to just 2% in 2010. This rapid growth should clearly be noted by all online marketers, and was accompanied by strong growth in the social and video advertising sectors.

You can read more here. If you would like more information on how these figures can be used to improve your online marketing, contact us now.

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 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 our first article this month, we take a look at the recent introduction into AdWords by Google of Smart Goals Optimisation. This is a development that should be of interest to all businesses and AdWords managers that are keen to reduce their average Cost Per Acquisition for conversions, which in turn, can lead to increased margins.

Our second article examines Google’s launch of a new Webmasters website for the recently re-branded Search Console and how User feedback influenced that release. Our final article describes the significance of the recent update to the Google ranking algorithm and how SEO practitioners and industry experts are still often surprised by these updates and the speed at which they can dramatically impact the Google organic ranking results.

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 Smart Goals Optimisation in AdWords

Conversions are a key metric for AdWords accounts, to help advertisers make better use of their ad spend. However, some companies haven’t got conversion tracking in place, so a recent development by Google should be of interest to any business that runs AdWords, as there is now an alternative way to track conversions.

A conversion is a key metric for almost any business and can be defined as “that moment when users do the thing on the site that you want them to do” – e.g. complete a form, view an important page or .pdf document, or make a purchase. Many AdWords advertisers are already measuring their website conversions, using either AdWords Conversion Tracking or imported Google Analytics Goals and Ecommerce transactions. Measuring actual conversions is ideal, because it allows bids, ads and the website to be optimised with a clear goal in mind.

However, numerous small and medium size businesses aren’t currently measuring website conversions as they may not have a way for users to convert on their website, or they may not have the time or the technical ability to implement conversion tracking. Google understands the importance of this metric, so recently released an easy-to-use solution, termed ‘Smart Goals’.

These Smart Goals need to be set up in Google Analytics, and they can then help to identify the highest-quality visits to a website so that the data can be imported to AdWords and so the ad spend can be optimised for those key visits. The implementation requires no changes to website code and can lead to many more conversions.

Smart Goals are generated by Google applying machine learning across thousands of websites that use Google Analytics which are opted in to share anonymised conversion data. From this information, dozens of key factors are distilled that correlate with the likelihood to lead to a conversion – such as session duration, pages per session, location, device and browser. These key factors can then be applied to any website.

The easiest way to think about Smart Goals is that they reflect website visits that Google’s model indicates are most likely to lead to conversions. The highest-quality visits to a website can now be turned into Smart Goals automatically, as there are no additional tagging or customisation required and there is a Smart Goals report in Google Analytics. The behaviour metrics in this report indicate the engagement level of Smart Goals visits compared to other visits, helping to evaluate Smart Goals even before the feature is activated.

Smart Goals can be then be used as an AdWords conversion and optimised accordingly, by setting up a target CPA (cost per acquisition). However, there must be at least 1,000 clicks from AdWords over a 30-day period to ensure the activation and validity of the data. The Adwords spend is then based on the likelihood of a conversion, as determined by the Google model.

If you want to know more about Smart Goals, you can read more here, or contact us now for details of how this feature could help benefit the performance of your AdWords campaigns.

Google Launches a New Webmasters Website

Webmasters should be interested to hear that in mid-January Google introduced a new Webmasters website for the recently re-branded ‘Search Console’ (formerly know as Webmaster Tools). This was created as a result of extensive user feedback by analysing visitor behaviour and conducting user studies to organise the site into the most useful categories.

The site contains support resources to help fix issues with a website, SEO learning materials to create a high-quality site and improve search rankings, and connection opportunities to stay up-to-date with Google and the Webmaster community. It also contains new features, including:

• Webmaster troubleshooter: A step-by-step guide to move a site or understand a message in Search Console. The troubleshooter can help answer these and other common problems with a site in Google Search and Google Search Console.
• Popular resources: This section contains Google Webmasters YouTube videos, blog posts and forum threads are detailed in a curated list of Google’s top resources.
• Mobile-friendly tools: With mobile search and mobile-friendly websites becoming ever more important, there’s a section to test your site on a mobile device, read a mobile guide and a checklist for design and usability.
• Events calendar: It’s possible to talk to someone from Google through a series of online ‘hangouts’ or at a live, local event. There are office hours and events in multiple languages around the world.

You can visit the new Google Webmasters site here or if you want to know more about how this resource can help to improve the SEO of your business, contact us now.

Google’s Significant Core Ranking Algorithm Update

SEO practitioners should already be aware of the critical importance of following developments in Google’s ranking algorithms, especially as the recent one led to much confusion within the industry. In mid January Google updated its core algorithm and although it rarely confirms these types of updates, it was significant news when Google went on record that the change webmasters were seeing in the organic rankings was related to the core update.

Google Panda, one of Google’s most significant spam-fighting algorithms that was first introduced in February 2011, was only recently confirmed by Google as officially part of its core ranking algorithm (probably since late 2015). There will therefore be no more separate Panda update announcements which helped to clear up some of the recent confusion. Gary Illyes of Google has stated that although Panda is now part of the core algorithm “the recent ranking fluctuations you noticed have absolutely nothing to do with Panda or other animals!”.

There is still some confusion about which parts of Panda run with the core algorithm and which don’t. So the remaining questions are, now that Panda is part of the core, what is the difference to the update and how does it differ both in terms of ranking and to webmasters, impacted by Panda?

Google recently answered this question, which is unusual, as it typically doesn’t discuss the core ranking signals and updates. To be core, the algorithm needs to be consistent enough to run by itself without much worry that it won’t work right – i.e. the algorithm is consistent enough to not require many changes in the future and can run with ‘less hand-holding’. Now that Panda is now part of the core ranking algorithm it means that it’s been tested, it works, and it can now run by itself without much worry.

That doesn’t explain the content of the core that caused the recent ranking fluctuations, though. There was another core update on the following weekend (16 & 17 January), which resulted in SEOs and webmasters reporting major ranking changes in Google. Many webmasters are waiting for a Google Penguin update (the first Penguin update was in April 2012, to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results). We are expecting it to happen early this year so that when we see major fluctuations, some are quick to say it is a Penguin change, but Google is telling us this is not Penguin but rather just common core ranking algorithm updates, the same as those which occurred on the previous weekend.

The main issue is that January has been pretty volatile in the search results for both the automated tracking tools and the talk in the community. But again, Google is saying it is not Penguin, it is core, so there is still not a Penguin update to report.

The specific content of these core ranking updates will always be mysterious and hard for webmasters to understand, which is just the way Google likes it! But, based upon the patterns established over the past few years, it is most likely that this adjustment, like the others, focused on the better understanding of user intent and identifying high-quality content.

If you would like more information on the Google algorithm updates and how they might impact your website’s organic rankings, contact us now for more details.

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.

This is the first issue of our newsletter for 2016 and so we’d like to wish you a happy and prosperous year ahead.

The start of a new year is usually a good time to review what’s been and to plan for what’s to come, and so we’d like to contribute to this process with a review of best practice for search engine marketing.

From our regular client management as well as training courses we run, there are some key essentials required – what we’d suggest are the ‘3 pillars’ of any website marketing activity using search engines (and in particular, Google).

We’ve outlined below some of the key things that you should have in place, or be considering as part of your online marketing activity, and why they are important for your business.

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…

SEO Essentials for a Website

Every website should have the basics for SEO – search engine optimisation – in place, particularly as there are many things that can be controlled by the website owner and implemented reasonably easily.

Although some search markets can be very competitive and challenging, having a good SEO structure will enable a website to maximise the opportunities to rank on the first page of results for as many terms as possible. So, the key things to consider are:

• Search term research – identify what your potential customers are searching for across many different variations. Use the Google search suggestions as a starter, but the AdWords Keyword Tool for more in-depth insights, and build a list of good, relevant search terms including the most popular, common terms, as well as the wide variety of ‘long tail’ terms that can provide many opportunities to reach your search market.
• Using terms on the website – from the list of search phrases you can then write keyword focused and attention grabbing title tags and description metatags for each page of your website, as well as coordinate the page content to target the same phrases in a prominent way that’s not too repetitive.
• Creating internal links – external links, or backlinks, to your website are important but can be hard to achieve, so make use of your own internal website links as a first stage, linking suitable content together to help engage users and also target search terms in the anchor text of the links.
• Using Google Search Console – every website owner should have a GSC account in place (previously known as Webmaster Tools). It’s a free service and enables a communication channel with Google, as well as providing help and insights to ensure your website gets the best experience with Google, plus you get access to the excellent Search Analytics report and links reports.
• Using Google My Business – this is essential for any local business but just as important for any business to ensure that their company details and ‘owned’ and up to date on Google / Maps. Claiming and verifying a listing is important, as well as ensuring it’s 100% complete, uses some suitable content and category groups for the business, and attracts some good reviews to help ranking positions.

Paid Search Marketing Objectives

Using paid search ads is always an option for websites to improve or expand their coverage in the search results and to target core search terms to drive more visits to a website. However, whether it’s Google AdWords, Bing Ads, or another form of paid advertising, every business should have an objective for the ad spend, and a way of measuring that.

Paid search advertising can be a very cost effective way of getting interested prospects onto a website, and it can become one of the primary sources of traffic for a website. However, it can also be an expensive exercise, especially in markets that are seeing more advertisers bid on terms, so having clear objectives and a way to measure them is essential, such as:

• Online sales – an easy one to track and a clear objective for an online store, with sales and transaction value providing an excellent and measurable way of proving if the ad spend is working, or where spend can be cut or increased to get the best results.
• Online enquiries – any online forms are also a measurable way of identifying good responses from a search advertising campaign, whether it’s an online form or a clickable email link, these can be measured and a cost per lead identified.
• Phone enquiries – this becomes harder to track where the action happens ‘offline’, but any business where calls are a key response mechanism should use a call tracking service, even with Google’s basic call extensions in AdWords. There can also be ways of tracking related signals from a website, such as clicks on the number from a mobile device, or views of a contact page.
• File downloads – maybe a key metric involves downloads of a PDF document or order form, or even clicks off to an external site like your business’s Facebook page. Using event tracking provides more flexibility in tracking actions on a website that you want visitors to take, and combining these with conversion goals is a great way to track the effectiveness of your marketing activity.
• User engagement – for some websites where content is key (such as blogs or news websites) it can help to track user engagement metrics such as bounce rate, pages viewed, time on site, or repeat visits to gauge the success of a marketing campaign at getting the ‘right sort of people’ onto your site, and use these as measurable objectives and goals.

Insights from Google Analytics

The third essential element for any search marketing campaign is to understand what’s happening, both with the quality of visitors coming to the site, but also how the website performs in converting these visitors to the required conversion objectives.

Any website analytics package would be good for this, but as most websites use Google Analytics these days (and it is an excellent free tool for this purpose) then we are covering the use of this here. Some of the main reports and tools to use would be:

• Key metrics – tracking the trends with such key metrics such as sessions and users, as well as new v returning visitors, is a core focus. Also user engagement based on bounce rate trends, time on site, pages viewed and, ultimately, goal conversions all help to indicate the success or otherwise of your marketing activity.
• Trends – this is an important way of looking at data, rather than just as a snapshot for one time period. Trends in data, such as month or month, or year on year, provide better insights into what’s working well – or not – and how recent changes or testing programmes are working.
• Secondary dimensions – within most data tables in Google Analytics, there is the option to add a secondary dimension, or to break down the initial line of data into more detail by another set of criteria. This can be a great way of gaining more detail and insights about a report when looking for answers.
• Segments – probably the best tool in Analytics is Advanced Segments, available above most report tables, which provides the ability to isolate data or compare two or more datasets for a particular group of visitors to the website. Also good for better insights and to delve into small, specific groups of users via the default or custom built segments.
• Custom reports – to access more advanced data insights, custom reports provide the ability to build your own data tables and combine these with secondary dimensions or segments to view data tables not available through the standard menu options. Gaining insights by hour, or day of the week, for example, or monthly trends for the past 12 months, are just a few ways that custom reports can be used to understand more about your marketing and your website.

We hope you find the above summaries useful and a good checklist to compare how your search engine marketing is set up ready for 2016. If you’re not using some of these options, but should, please get them ready as some of the main cornerstones for the coming year to help give your online business a greater advantage.

And, 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 update to its Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool in AdWords and its decision, due to popular demand, to retain the version of the tool that’s available to everyone.

We also look at the radical changes to the new version of Google+ and how reviews will be removed from the G+ Local pages, but will remain in the Search and Maps results. This is a relief to Local SEO practitioners and businesses that source numerous visits to their sites from positive reviews.

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…

AdWords Preview Tool’s New Look

Google has always provided a useful advert preview and diagnosis tool to help advertisers view AdWords ads and the interface has recently been given a new look. This is a valuable tool in the AdWords account and has a number of advantages when reviewing the search results, both for paid ads and also for SEO rankings.

The AdWords Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool is available in the Tools menu when logged into an AdWords account. For advertisers, this is useful to help identify why an advert might not be appearing, or to check that the correct ad is showing from the right adgroup. It shows a preview of a Google search result page for a specific term and for a selected location so that advertisers can check which ads are appearing and in what position, without the influence of any historical or personalisation factors.

The tool allows you to see the exact same results as a Google search, without affecting your ad performance by generating additional impressions, and the results displayed can’t be clicked, as they are simply an image of how the results would be appearing to most searchers at that time.

By changing the version of Google and the user location, the results can also replicate how people in other locations or countries could see the search results, which would be very difficult to replicate in the main Google search interface.

In mid November, Google quietly updated the tool within AdWords and the new interface now embeds a Chrome-like browser directly into it, as opposed to having it open in its own sub-browser. The new interface makes the tool feel more part of the AdWords portal and makes things a bit more compact and cleaner by keeping the user within the overall experience of AdWords.

Google also recently announced that, after hearing feedback from its advertisers, they decided to keep the ‘logged-out’ version of the tool as well, so that anyone can use this, whether or not they have an AdWords account – although the full benefit comes from being logged into AdWords at the same time.

You can view the logged-out version of the tool, here.

If you would like more information about how the Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool can be used, and how it could benefit your AdWords campaigns, please contact us now.

Reviews Disappear From Google+ Local Listings

Google recently introduced the new Google+ design and announced that reviews are being removed from the Google+ Local listings. This news initially alarmed local SEOs and businesses that rely upon those reviews to attract regional traffic, although Google has fortunately alleviated those concerns – for now – by stating that reviews are still accessible on Google Search and Maps (which have always been the primary way that users find business reviews).

The removal of the G+ Local page that was integrated with the Google My Business listing is seen by many as a move in the right direction, as having so many interlinked G+ products only led to confusion for many users. So the news that the reviews will still be shown on Search and Maps (as well as the Local Finder and the Knowledge Graph) means that the removal of those from just G+ Local will not be a large concern for local SEO, thankfully, as numerous good reviews can be effective at generating traffic.

Google is being positive about the imminent demise of G+, which appears to be another failed attempt to take on Facebook in the social media field. Google states that due to feedback from users, there were two features they kept coming back to: Communities (which now average 1.2 million new joins per day), and Collections (which launched just five months ago and is growing even faster). Therefore the new and fully redesigned Google+ focuses upon interests in the form of those Communities and Collections.

Google+ was always un-intuitive to use, so it’s a wise move that the new G+ is much simpler, although this could also mean that its value and usage declines as well. It’s also more mobile-friendly and cross—platform compatible as it’s been rebuilt across web, Android and iOS so that users now have a fast and consistent experience, whether viewing it on either a big or small screen.

You can read more about the new G+ here and here. There is also a good article about how to get reviews on Google here.

If you would like to know more about how the removal of reviews from G+ Local listings could impact your business, contact us now for more details.

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, 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.