Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – April 2014

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 the role and importance of landing pages and how they can have a significant impact on how an online marketing campaign performs – in particular, with Google AdWords. Next, we examine how 2014 is likely to be a revolutionary year in the search environment as it’s predicted to be the first year in which mobile search queries exceed desktop search queries based on global searches.

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…

The Role and Importance of Landing Pages

If you’re using Google AdWords, a good landing page can provide your business with a series of important benefits, including improving your Quality Score, which in turn can help to improve your ad position and lower your cost per click. A good landing page can also improve conversions, save you money and have a substantial influence on whether a campaign succeeds or fails.

Landing pages are those pages on your website that people first see when they find your site through a search engine – either from the ‘organic’ results, or via the paid listings such as AdWords. Each landing page therefore gives the site visitor a first impression of your business and plays a key role in conversion optimisation – getting a visitor to complete the task on your site that you want them to, whether it’s to make a sale, send an enquiry or sign up for a newsletter.

As noted above, a landing page is an important element in Google AdWords as it can contribute to an improved Quality Score. Each time you create or amend an advert, Google will automatically visit the landing page being used from the ad and assess how well the landing page will work, so there are some key requirements to consider.

The following tips need to be followed to ensure visitors enjoy your landing page experience and that you can maximise your Quality Score for each keyword:

• Make sure your landing page has content that is relevant and closely to related to the text ads and keywords used. You should check the title tag, description tag and body content for the terms being used.
• Visitors should be able to easily find what they want. If your text ad is selling a product, make sure the product is easy for visitors to find once they are sent to your landing page.
• Ensure your landing page offers unique and useful information, including offers that are unique and only available from your site.
• Contact information on the landing page should be easy for visitors to see, and if a landing page requires information through a form, it is important to let the visitor know why and for what purpose.
• Make sure the privacy policy of your business is easy to access from the landing page.
• If you are selling online, make sure that personal data is collected using a secure processing server (https) with a valid certificate.
• If you are showing adverts on your landing page, make these clearly distinctive from your own content.
• Avoid pop-ups and other features that can be considered annoying to visitors.
• Make sure that the back button works if visitors want to return to the search results.
• You should also consider how your page is viewed from a mobile device if this is a core part of your advertising market.

In summary, a landing page should be easy for visitors to use and it should portray a sense of trust. The landing page should be highly related to the text ad and keyword that enticed the visitor to click the advertisement. A landing page should be easy to understand and visitors should be able to quickly locate more information if it’s needed.

If you’d like more information about landing pages, or a review of those you are using, please contact us for more information.

Mobile Queries Outgrow Desktop Queries

2014 looks set to be a revolutionary year in the Search Marketing sector, with mobile search queries expected to overtake desktop search queries for the first time. The news has been indicated by several industry leaders, including Google’s Matt Cutts, and comes earlier than expected with most predicting such a shift was still years away.

Mobile search queries are expected to exceed desktop search queries based on global searches, which shows the changing nature of the search environment. Google is reluctant to confirm these reports, as the company wants to encourage cross platform promotion, and this does of course remain the smartest strategy for advertisers who still need to target both desktop and mobile users.

However, the increasing trend in mobile searches are hardly a surprise for industry experts, considering there are estimated to be two billion desktops actively being used across the globe, which is well short of the five billion active mobile devices. This mix does vary by country, with India, for example, being well ahead in mobile v desktop usage, whereas globally, mobile traffic is seen to be about 30% of all Internet activity.

The increasing search trend on mobile has made it more important for website owners to ensure their websites can be accessed through these devices. Also, advertisements targeting mobile platforms are becoming ever more important as a result of the booming mobile search queries. The data available within AdWords can clearly show mobile usage and advert interaction. Plus, Google Analytics also provides website marketers with information about visitors arriving from mobile devices and how they interact with the website.

When this data is reviewed, AdWords advertisers can understand the behaviour of their specific market and then determine what type of mobile ads are created. Both mobile text and image ads can be implemented to either high-end smartphone users – which include users of iPhones and Android devices – or to the declining number of WAP users, which includes mobile devices with smaller screens.

If you’d like to know more about reviewing and targeting mobile search users in your marketing activity, please contact us for information.

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 the ongoing development of the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery and how this is becoming a valuable resource for users to access and develop key website performance reports within their Analytics account. Next, we take a look at the rich, interactive formats of the cross-device engagement adverts that Google AdWords recently introduced, and discuss for which types of businesses those are most suited.

In the final article this month we examine Google’s targeting of link networks and how this has led to the removal from the search results of several link networks from around the world, plus the recent targeting of unethical guest blogging techniques.

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…

The Google Analytics Solutions Gallery

There have been some on-going developments to Google Analytics over the past year which have facilitated its user-friendliness with easier ways to see how your website is performing on key metrics. This should be of interest to any business using this tool, or Analytics user who wants quick and easy access to different report formats and to the key metrics that really matter to their website marketing.

Google originally announced the launch of its Google Analytics Solutions Gallery in January 2013. This was aimed to help new users, for whom it can be overwhelming to figure out where to look first for the data and insights that enable better decision making. It was also directed towards more advanced users, for whom it can be time consuming to create different custom reports or dashboards to get the clearest snapshot of a website’s performance.

The Google Analytics Solutions Gallery has been developing over the past year and is now a valuable resource that hosts a wide variety of Dashboards, Advanced Segments and Custom Reports which can be quickly and easily imported into your own Analytics account to see how well a website is performing on different key metrics. Google initially introduced a range of solutions that it deemed to be useful for most businesses, but as more users create and share new report formats, the gallery now holds over 3,000 different templates, such as:

• Social sharing report – Content is king, but only if you know what it’s up to. Learn what content from your website visitors are sharing and how they’re sharing it.
• Mobile activity reports – choose from a range of dashboards or custom reports to get deeper insights into mobile or tablet behaviour.
• Publisher dashboard – Bloggers can use this dashboard to see where readers come from and what they do on your site.
• Technical dashboard – get insights into load speed, browser usage and screen resolutions to monitor how well your site performs.
• Engaged traffic advanced segment – Measure traffic from high-value visitors who view at least three pages AND spend more than three minutes on your site. Why do these people love your site?

Once you are logged into your Analytics account, you can access the Gallery from different points when setting up new reports, or you can go directly to the Solutions Gallery site. The most popular reports being downloaded recently are:

• New Google Analytics User Starter Bundle
• Social Media Dashboard
• Site Performance Dashboard
• SEO Dashboard – Finding Top Content and Keywords
• Segmentation Greatest Hits: From Ad Analysis to SEO to Sitelinks
• SEO Insights for Google Organic (not provided)
• The Remarketing starter pack (A recent inclusion that improves Remarketing with Google Analytics, by enabling the full power of enhanced segmentation for this data set).

Google’s efforts to ease the use of Analytics for both novice and advanced users have been well received and the development of the Solutions Gallery will continue. If you would like to know more about this resource and how it can help to filter the most important metrics for your website, contact us now for more information.

Google Launches Engagement Ads

A recent development in Google AdWords has been the introduction of Engagement Ads as part of the Display Network. These ads use a new format that can be relevant to businesses that want to strengthen brand-to-audience relationships by making a rich creative canvas come alive as consumers stream videos, play games, and more.

Since the initial beta launch on Engagement Ads, they have become multi-screen compatible and offer a number of different formats. Advertisers have found it preferable to enable consumers to have the same experience with their brand, irrespective of which device they’re using to connect. Google has therefore included self-service ad formats, including Cross Device ads, a YouTube Masthead Lightbox to aid in consistent branding across ad formats, and a Shopping Catalog Lightbox, which allows users to display multiple products from a merchant center account. The latter lets marketers showcase a number of items that shoppers can click and purchase, right from within the ad unit.

Engagement ads are available in a number of standard banner sizes and create interaction with the user. When customers interact with these ads, they load rich media either within the ad, or in an expanded canvas to present more information in video or graphic format. This type of interaction reduces ‘accidental’ engagements and therefore provides users with a better experience and should also give advertisers better value and recognition from the advert engagement. For instance, on laptops and desktop computers, people can hover their mouse over the ad for two seconds in order to engage with the content, whilst on mobile phones and tablets, consumers can tap on the ad to prompt the engaged state.

The Display Network engagement branding campaigns are directed more towards large corporations rather than SMBs, but the Shopping functionality may be more suited to SMBs with a wide range of products. You can watch an informative video about Google Engagement Ads here.

If you want more information about how these kind of ads to help your business and how they can be used as part of your Google AdWords campaign, contact us now.

Google Targets Bad Link Networks

Google has implemented strict approaches over the past year through penalising and removing link building networks and spam guest bloggers from search engine rankings. Guest bloggers defined as spam have had their sites and network of sites penalised and in some cases removed from Google search results. During the same period a number of large link building networks, predominantly from Europe, have been completely removed from the Google search results.

The head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts, recently announced that webmasters should avoid guest blogging requests as the practice is currently polluted with spam, which has led to a substantial amount of sites receiving penalties. The recent trend for spam content and links being generated through poor guest blogging techniques has been cracked down on by Google and more action is indicated for 2014, so doing this purely for link building is now being targeted (you can read more about this here).

Automated emails to blog owners and automated requests for guest blog posts and reciprocal link exchanges has rendered the technique ineffective, with Google now ignoring or penalising the practice. The changes in guest blogging highlights the importance of natural link building and this can also be seen through Google recently targeting and removing several link networks.

Over the past month Google has removed two major link networks in Poland from search results and this follows take-downs from Germany and other European countries. These link networks have been de-indexed from Google search results and sites associated with these networks have received substantial ranking penalties.

These strict approaches by Google over the past year emphasise the importance of natural link building to achieve SEO success. If you’d like to know more about how to avoid getting penalised by Google and the best practice for natural link-building, contact us now.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter 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 recent changes to its AdWords Ad Rank system and how this can have a dramatic impact on the average cost-per-click. Next, we review the link from AdWords and Gmail adverts to Google’s explanation of ad targeting, which provides useful insights into competitors’ keywords and also provides the option to block adverts.

In the final article this month we assess the use of bid strategies in AdWords and why it’s important for managers to use a bid management style that suits a specific account or 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 Changes AdWords Ad Rank Calculation

Google recently announced a change to Ad Rank, its ad serving calculation in AdWords that determines where your ad shows and how much you’ll pay per click. This is a significant development, which should be of interest to anyone who’s running an AdWords campaign, as it can have a noticeable impact on the average cost per click (CPC).

This new change to Ad Rank now factors in the expected impact from ad extensions (particularly sitelinks), as well as the previous factors of max CPC bid and quality score. Ad Rank is also becoming a bigger factor in determining whether ads are eligible to display with extensions and different formats.

So, most importantly, extensions and formats now play a role in the price you pay per click and in the position your ads display. Google is always endeavouring to enhance the user experience and says that “they make ads more useful”. This typically leads to an improvement in click-through rate and overall campaign performance.

There are various types of advert extensions and formats, including location and call extensions, as well as sitelinks. Google states that “adding sitelinks boosts the average CTR on an ad by 10-20% (or by 20-50% when the search is one of your branded terms), so that implementation should be time well spent”.

Google wants advertisers to use all the available extensions that make sense for their businesses, but advertisers don’t have to worry about having the right combination of extensions displaying for a given situation. For example, if someone is searching on a mobile phone for “car repair”, the user might be most likely to respond to the ad when they can click to call a phone number or tap a link to get directions to visit in person. So Google may show a combination of call and location extensions with your mobile search ad.

In addition to serving extensions according to context, Google says it will automatically show the highest performing extensions and formats, meaning those expected to yield the greatest clickthrough rates. Because Ad Rank is now more important in determining whether your ad is shown with extensions and formats, you might need to increase your Quality Score, bid, or both for extensions and formats to appear.

Therefore it’s essential to ensure that all AdWords campaigns now have a good variety of ad extensions, otherwise your average CPC may rise as a result of increased competition from other ads with a large expected impact from formats. Whereas conversely, there may be lower CPCs if your extensions and formats are highly relevant, and Google expects a large positive performance impact relative to other competitors in the auction.

If you’d like more information about how the inclusion of ad extensions can improve your AdWords campaign, contact us now.

‘Why These Ads?’ Drop-down Menu Option

As noted above, Google is consistently aiming to enhance the user experience and make ads more relevant to them. So, a while ago they released improved transparency and choice regarding the ads users see on Google search and in Gmail. When you search a query in Google today you will see, up in the top right corner of the ad, a link to a drop-down menu that includes “Why these ads?”. This system is to help users only see the ads that are relevant to them.

The content of this drop-down box is different for an AdWords advert than for the ‘organic’ results. The former drop-down contains ‘share’ and ‘why this ad’, whereas the latter contains ‘cached’, ‘similar’ and ‘share’. When the “why this ad” link is selected, it leads to a page that gives details about the way in which the advertiser used the keyword to generate the advert: e.g. ‘This ad matches the exact search you entered’, or ‘this ad matches terms similar to the ones you entered.’ This provides useful information about how your competitors are bidding on particular keywords and can be used to create those with alternative match types, or give insights on how to improve your keywords’ quality score.

There are options on that page to ‘block this advertiser’, or ‘control your ad settings’ (by going to the Ads Preferences Manager). You can choose to block ads from specific advertisers, or opt out of personalised ads entirely. It’s always possible to go back at anytime and change this in your preferences. When a user opts out of seeing search and Gmail ads, it’s still possible to show your ads to them but not in the normal targeting ways. If a user blocks your ads specifically, your ads will no longer be shown to them.

It is important to note that when users block your ads, this will not directly affect calculations of your quality score and ad rank, but it’s interesting that Google uses the words “not directly”, implying that it possibly could in other ways. As Google is always trying to improve search relevancy and overall satisfaction, it’s likely that if the majority of people are saying that they don’t want to see your ad this will “indirectly” affect your ad and how often it shows.

So there’s a fine balance with this, as it will save advertisers money from unwanted clicks, but it may also damage their quality scores and ad rank, which in turn would increase the average CPC. Access to these settings isn’t widely known by users however, so it’s unlikely that they will have a significant impact either way.

If you’d like more details about the ‘Why these ads’ dropdown and the Ads Preferences Manager, please get in touch.

Using Bid Strategies in Google AdWords

Bid management strategies need to be carefully chosen by AdWords advertisers due to different strategies having a series of benefits and disadvantages. The first and most important process that needs to be performed by advertisers is through identifying the most appropriate bid management strategy for a campaign and implementing this for a specific objective.

The most widely used bid management strategy is ‘manual bid management’ and, although this is a time consuming process which involves monitoring and editing keyword lists manually, this technique allows greater attention to detail and control of bids at the individual keyword level. However this is difficult for accounts with a substantial amount of keywords and requires bid management to be based on a series of bulk edits or desired rules. Alternatively, automated rules such as flexible bid strategies allow for wider automated bidding across an entire campaign.

The types of AdWords flexible bid strategies include maximizing clicks – with AdWords automatically setting bid prices to maximize the amount of clicks generated – and target search page location where AdWords automatically corrects bid prices with the goal of getting your ad on the first page of Search results. By using this type of strategy you are giving Google’s system control of your bid levels and spend, which may not always work to your best interest and limits the flexibility of bidding across different search terms.

Target cost per acquisition is more complicated but allows account owners or managers to set bids with the goal of generating as many conversions as possible. Enhanced cost per click is a flexible bid strategy that changes bid prices, attempting to increase conversion levels. A different form of automatic bid management is target returns on ad spend, which brings in more variables through attempting to maximize conversions, but at the same time providing value by reaching a target return on average ad spend. These techniques can work well but are best used when the account generates a lot of conversions and therefore gives Google’s system more data to work with.

It is therefore important for advertisers to identify and effectively implement a bid management style that suits a specific account or campaign. A poorly performing campaign can have a change in fortune and produce better results through a simple change in bid management strategy, but it can also work the other way. The greater the understanding an advertiser has with a campaign, the higher the chances that an ideal bid management strategy is chosen and leads to success, although of course the techniques need to be tested and assessed.

If you’d like to know more about the best strategies for using bid management in AdWords, please contact us now.

Welcome to the latest issue of our monthly newsletter – the first for 2014 – which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing and search marketing techniques and trends.

To start the New Year, we’ve put together a list of the top events that took place in the search engine marketing / online marketing world in 2013, which have had an impact on websites already, but will also have an ongoing impact throughout 2014. These events include developments in the Pay-Per-Click field with Google AdWords, within the SEO sector, and also with Google Analytics.

We’ve covered these events in some detail in previous issues of this newsletter, but here we summarise the main changes and the implications for any website marketer, as they will all have a bearing on developments in 2014 and may be used to an advantage where applicable. In this fast changing and developing marketplace, we can expect further changes in the next 12 months, but for now, these recent ones from the past year need to be considered as part of your marketing plans for this year.

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…

Developments in Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Google AdWords launches Enhanced Campaigns

In February 2013, Google announced major new changes to AdWords, called Enhanced Campaigns, and these were fully implemented across all accounts by the end of July. Enhanced Campaigns met some criticism from advertisers as some of the previous flexibility across devices was removed, but the benefits included some more flexible bidding strategies and targeting of some ad extensions. Most advertisers have not seen significant changes since the introduction of Enhanced Campaigns, although the main issue remains the management and cost of mobile ads and some associated factors. However, since the new system is now fully operational, advertisers should be looking at the new opportunities for their campaigns and how some of the new settings can be used to their advantage.
(You can read our original article on this issue here).

Google Shopping integrates with AdWords

In September there was a significant change to Google Shopping (previously called Google Product Search) which meant that it became more closely integrated with the paid AdWords advertising system. Although any ecommerce business can still upload their listings to Google Shopping, the visibility of these in the search results and in the Shopping search is now dependent on running a Google AdWords Product Listing campaign. This change proved controversial as many small businesses showed concern that they would not be able to compete with those companies that can afford a larger advertising budget. However, since the change, most advertisers have found that the paid Product Listing Adverts are a very effective search marketing technique for price competitive products, at a lower cost per click than the standard text ads. This is likely to become more competitive in 2014 but it’s an essential advertising tool for online retailers to be using.
(You can read our original article on this issue here).

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Trends

Google introduces the new ‘Hummingbird’ Search Algorithm

Google announced a major change in 2013 through implementing the ‘Hummingbird’ update, which is a new search algorithm that attempts to improve results for conversation based search queries. The Hummingbird update allows Google to understand more detailed search queries and to also identify the correct meaning or context of the search request to produce more relevant results. Some website marketers have seen notable ranking changes following the introduction of this change, but the impact for most companies was minimal and underlined the importance of unique and quality content on web pages. However, it is one of the ongoing and ever-changing factors that website marketers need to consider as part of their SEO strategy and content development to ensure that ‘long tail search terms’ are being incorporated effectively and that search referrals continue to increase in 2014.
(You can read our original article on this issue here).

The importance of search query data in Google’s Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is starting to gain more importance for website owners when reviewing search query data and traffic coming from organic (SEO) search rankings. This is due to the more limited data now available in Google Analytics (see below) which means that the reports in Google Webmaster Tools provide at least some level of insight and trend information. The Google Webmaster Tools reports can be integrated with Google Analytics, but also provide some depth of analysis in the original reports, including the ability to click on a specific page URL and see what search terms are sending traffic to that URL. Although there are also limitations with these reports, all website marketers should be using this information at least monthly to track their SEO activity.
(You can read our original article on this issue here).

Guest blogging gains popularity

Following Google’s previous actions to crack down on poor quality links, 2013 saw an increasingly popular trend for ‘guest blogging’ for website marketers to develop valuable backlinks on popular and prominent blogs. However, it has also become a new platform for spam emails and for bloggers to be inundated with requests to post content, so that what used to be a valuable technique has now become popularised and questionable. While the technique can still be used effectively, Google’s Matt Cutts has emphasised that spammy or paid content can lead to harsh penalties for specific websites or networks of websites. It is therefore more important than ever to implement effective and valuable strategies for guest blogging, including developing relationships and contributing valuable content, and it remains one area to consider for link and content development in 2014.
(You can read our original article on this issue here).

Changes with Google Analytics

Google Analytics showing “(not provided)” search data

Perhaps the biggest frustration for search marketers in 2013 has been the increasing impact of ‘not provided’ data in Google Analytics, which has meant that organic search term data is no longer being reported and so is unavailable to companies to see which search terms have been used to find their website through a Google search. This is the result of Google using a secure search function, initially just for Google account users but then, by the second half of 2013 for most searches globally, due to privacy concerns. For search marketers, this loss of data is significant and places more reliance on Google’s Webmaster Tools reports (see above) or data from paid search activity. By February 2014 it’s expected that all Google search data will be ‘not provided’ and there is little that can be done about this other than look at the overall search traffic volumes and some alternate but less insightfull reports.
(You can read our original article on this issue here).

Google’s Universal Analytics

Google had been testing their ‘Universal Analytics’ tracking code for some time and made it available to all Analytics accounts in March 2013. The roll-out of this significant new version is likely to continue more actively in 2014 as Google wants to move all websites to this upgraded version of the new tracking code – it’s a simpler but more flexible tracking method, enabling new functionality and potentially tracking of users across different devices. There are still some limitations – such as being able to use remarketing – but this should be fixed soon and the new UA code will need to be upgraded by website owners to keep up with the ongoing development of Analytics tracking and reporting.
(You can read our original article on this issue here).

Google Analytics introduces Demographics & Interests Reports

Regular users of Google Analytics will have seen some notable changes to the report layouts and naming during 2013 as Google continues to improve the product and make it more accessible to the average user. Two notable reports that have been added are the Demographics and Interests reports, which use Google’s user data to provide a sample insight into the visitor profiles of a website – you can see gender, age range, interest categories, which in turn can provide new insights as well as advertising targeting opportunities. To enable these reports, website marketers may need to amend their Analytics tracking code (and the new Universal code doesn’t yet support these reports) but it’s a recommended enhancement that should be implemented and reviewed in 2014.
(You can read our original article on this issue here).

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.

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

In the first article this month we take a look at new research that shows the importance of phone calls from search results on a mobile device, which means that having a ‘click to call’ function is very important and how this can lead to better branding and improved sales. Next, we examine the importance of WordPress website security and 6 important steps to take to ensure that your business website isn’t a victim of unscrupulous hackers.

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…

The Importance of the ‘Click to Call’ Search Function

The Google AdWords blog has recently published the results of new research which shows that 70% of mobile searchers call a business directly from search results. This action can be taken, for businesses that enable it, by using the ‘click to call’ button that appears in the search results on mobiles. So it’s important for businesses that appear in the search results on Google to know this function exists and the importance of having it show with their mobile-targeted results.

Google says that their ads drive over 40 million calls each month and therefore it’s important for businesses to understand consumers’ use of the click to call feature. The new study by Ipsos Research showed that, from the 3,000 mobile searchers surveyed, calls are important for positively influencing brand perception through the inclusion of a phone number in the search results, as well as still being a vital channel for research and purchasing. Through research, calls help a consumer move closer in purchase consideration and a larger number of calls happen when someone is ready to buy.

It was found that click to call was an important feature for people looking to find information and make purchases across the 7 industries studied – travel; restaurant; auto; retail; finance; technology; local services. Within the local services sector, 76% would use call features to schedule an appointment for professional services, so this makes it particularly important for localised search results (including Google+ Local listings). Also, the majority of calls generated by mobile search ads are not quick informational calls, but instead tend to be more substantive research or transactional calls.

The inclusion of a click to call button can lead to an increase of 8% in the adverts overall clickthrough rate, because of the larger ad size due to the call button, or users feel more confident in the business. Nearly half of mobile searchers indicated that the lack of a call option would lead them to be both frustrated with the business and more likely to turn to another brand. Additionally, 33% said that they would be less likely to refer the brand to others and would be less likely to use the brand in the future.

So encouraging phone calls should still be a priority for all businesses and the importance of this shouldn’t be underestimated in an increasingly competitive online environment. This can be done quickly through an AdWords campaign by attaching call extensions to mobile search ads, (whereas the presence of the call button in organic results depends on a number of factors). Furthermore, the data provided by AdWords on call metrics from doing this can be valuable to identify areas to improve campaign performance and increase the number of conversions.

If you’d like more information about how the ‘click to call’ function can help to improve your business, contact us now for more details.

The Importance of WordPress Website Security

WordPress has become the leader in web publishing, with over 72 million sites using their Content Management System, which is estimated to be more than 25% of all websites operating on the Internet. As a result of this success, it has become a favoured target for hackers, so it’s crucial that if your business uses WordPress, your site is well protected.

In order to make a WordPress site more secure, there are a number of things to watch, plus before making any changes it’s essential to back up everything:

1) Update the admin user name. Surprisingly many people don’t change this from the default “admin”, or use other very common ones, such as “administrator,” “test” and “root”. So ensure the one your site uses is different. This should ideally be done during the initial set-up, or subsequently by going into mySQL and updating the user name, in the wp_users table.

2) Use a strong password. Not only should the username ideally be unique, but the password should also be very strong and includes letters (upper and lower), numbers, special characters, with over eight characters in total. (There are free programs, such as Keypass, that can create and remember which passwords are associated to which of your accounts).

3) Change the wp-config Security Keys: Tucked beneath your WordPress database settings in your wp-config file are your site’s unique keys and ‘Salts’. These are a random array of letters, numbers and special characters you’d likely never run across unless they were pointed out to you. Making a new set is easy with a tool within the CMS that WordPress provides. More details about this can be found here.

4) Limit Login Attempts: WordPress provides a free plugin to do this. It’s surprising how many attempts, mainly by hacking bots are locked out by this useful tool. It’s very configurable and has helpful features like logging offender’s IP addresses and emails you when a lockout happens. These emails may be slightly disconcerting, but serve a reminder that the site is well secured.

5) Use “Secure WordPress”: This is another essential, free WordPress plugin that patches many holes that exist in the basic WordPress install. It will do things like removing the version number of WordPress throughout the site or blocking malicious URL requests. The plugin allows you to toggle these options on and off to customise the settings for your security needs.

6) Backup, Backup and Backup: This can’t be emphasised enough! The best defence is to ensure that there is a complete, up-to-date backup of the site. It’s possible either to download the files to your local machine, or ask your web host about backup options. The latter can sometimes be flawed, so if you want total peace-of-mind, it’s best to regularly do that yourself on a scheduled basis. Ensure that you’re also backing up your database, with one of the numerous options that are available, such as the WordPress Database Backup.

It’s possible to alleviate many attacks just through these 6 steps that will ensure you’re not any easy target, like 99% of the sites that don’t take these precautions. Prevention is much better than cure and usually a lot less time consuming that trying to recover from an attack after it’s too late. Just imagine how you’d feel if the site and database was lost, so be pro-active beforehand, as it can happen.

You can view more in-depth details about this here:

If you’d like to know more about how we can help to secure your WordPress website, contact us now.

Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – September 2013

Welcome to the latest edition of our regular newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing techniques and the latest trends.

In the first article this month we take a look at how Google’s recent changes to Analytics access controls and user permissions provides enhanced flexibility over what level of data can be viewed. Then, we follow-up our previous article on Google Shopping with an update on how its evolved into a Paid Listing service, that allows businesses to showcase their products online, as well as the importance of keeping up-to-date with recent developments.

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

On to this month’s edition…

Google Changes Analytics User Permissions

Google recently announced two primary changes that offer more specific controls over how different users can interact with Google Analytics accounts. These changes are to its access controls/user permissions and are going to make a big difference to those that manage Google Analytics accounts. However, companies still need to own their Analytics account and the data, so should have ultimate control over these settings.

Of course, ultimately, Google owns your Analytics data and since the data resides on their servers you could never gain full control over it. However, the original creator of the Analytic account will have administrative control over the data that’s collected and the access provided to other users, and so this should be the business itself and a centralised login so that no one person in the company controls this.

It can often be the case that if Google Analytics has been set up by a web designer, the admin access to the account is controlled by them, and previously, if set up as part of their overall account, the designers couldn’t then add admin access for a business as this would give users access to all their other design clients. This has caused issues with a lack of control by the business, and the potential to lose data if the relationship with the web designers sours.

The recent changes to the access permissions and roles provide more control over which sections of the data can be viewed (but not claimed) by certain individuals. Firstly, access permissions will be able to be set at the property level, not just at the account and profile levels. Secondly, access roles are expanding beyond the current administrator and viewer options to allow any user a combination of view, edit and manage users access. So this provides more powerful control, but also means it can be more complicated to know who has access to what parts of an account.

Google explains how permissions will be inherited in the new system: “Properties inherit permissions set on their parent account, and profiles inherit permissions set on their parent properties. For example, a user with view access to an account, also has view access to all of that account’s properties and profiles”. Existing account admins still get full access in the new system (edit, view and manage users) and existing account viewers will continue to have view-only access.

Matching the new permission types with different levels of the hierarchy should give every type of organisation the flexibility they need in controlling access to data and configuration settings. It’s important that organisations audit the people that have access to the data once a year (or once a quarter depending on the data governance), as many forget to do this. They should exclude people that no longer need access, or adjust their permissions as necessary.

If you’re a Google Analytics manager, User Permissions is a critical tool as it helps to push more data into the hands of more people in a safe way. You can read more about the new Google Analytics User Permissions here.

If you’d like to know how we can help your business to make the most of these changes, contact us now for more information.

Recent Developments with Google Shopping

In a follow-up to our original article in September 2011, entitled “Google Shopping becomes an important online shopping tool” – where we described the original shopping comparison service – this month we look at how this has evolved into a tool that allows business to showcase their products online through the Google Merchant Center, plus it has become an integral part of Google AdWords.

Google Shopping – formerly Google Product Search, Google Products and Froogle – originally allowed users to search for products on online shopping websites and compare prices between different vendors. The service listed prices submitted by merchants, and was monetised through AdWords advertising like other Google services.

Alongside the immediate re-branding from Google Product Search to Google Shopping on May 31, 2012, Google also announced that in late 2012, it would change the service to use a “pay-to-play” model, where merchants would have to pay Google to list their products on the service, with results influenced by both relevance and the bid amounts they pay. Google justified the move by stating that it would allow the service to “deliver the best answers for people searching for products and help connect merchants with the right customers.”

The change proved controversial as some small businesses showed concern that they would not be able to compete with larger companies that can afford a larger advertising budget. Microsoft’s Bing also attacked the move in an advertising campaign known as “Scroogled”, which called Google out for using “deceptive advertising practices” and suggested that users use its competing Bing Shopping service instead.

Although the paid listing version of this tool remains controversial, it remains a very effective way for businesses to display their products online with images, for those larger sized ones that have sufficient budget resources to do this. So for those that are aware of this technology, it’s important to keep up-to-date with recent developments. One of these is the recent announcement by Google about the enforcement of a specific requirement, which is aimed to continue improving data quality on Google Shopping.

The compulsory use of the “unique product identifier” and “identifier exists” attributes will come into force from September 16th in Australia. By November, all violating listings will be rejected and will not be served through Product Listing Ads, so it’s vital that this requirement is put in place by then. (These new feed specifications are already being enforced for all accounts in the United States and non-exempt accounts in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom).

Please review the latest product feed specification to learn more. Or if you’d like more information about how to use product listings with images online through Google Shopping contact us now.

Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – July 2013

Welcome to the latest issue of our regular newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing techniques and trends, to help you keep up to date on the latest developments.

In the first article this month we take a look at the use of phone call tracking to identify conversions by source coming via this route. Next, we examine guest blogging and how it’s critical to focus on the relationship building process, rather than just as a link-building technique. Finally, we take a look at the release of Google’s Universal Analytics into public beta and the features and benefits of this.

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…

Using Phone Call Tracking

Whether your business is using conversion tracking as part of Google AdWords, or goal tracking in Google Analytics, this type of data is essential to understand where sales or enquiries are coming from, down to the keyword and advert level. However, for any business where most leads may come via a phone call, this is harder to track as the link between the source of the website visitor and the phone call being made is broken. This is where phone call tracking techniques can add more insight and value to an advertiser.

Phone call tracking has been around for many years in different forms, and as the need to track and optimise conversions grows, this technique is becoming another important tool for the advertiser. There are a number of good phone call tracking companies operating in the UK market and they can provide a reasonably low cost way of tracking the source of conversions, whether they come from Google AdWords or any search engine visit, or from any other third party website. Google AdWords also provides a call tracking system in the US and UK.

Call tracking usually works through the addition of some javascript on a website or web page, which identifies the source of a visitor and displays a unique phone number on the website. If the visitor calls the business, that number will track the lead by source, potentially down to individual search term level. Whether the website has their standard phone number displayed in the text or as an image, an alternate number can be displayed depending on where the site visitor come from, although images will need to be changed or adapted to cater for this.

The advertiser will buy a range of phone numbers – usually 1300 or 1800 – to be used for the various advertising sources and displayed on the website. The call tracking company will generate these numbers and track the calls made, including the option of recording the phone conversations, and provide analytics to show which sources have generated the calls. This data can sometimes be imported into a Google Analytics account as well, as a goal source.

One potential issue for advertisers is if they use a memorable number, such as 1300 FLOWER, as call tracking won’t be able to replicate this number and make it so memorable to the user – which can be an issue if the number might be used in a radio advert or on a billboard. The other main question is how many numbers might be needed, as these can be generated as ‘absolute’ (one number for each source) or session based (where a pool of numbers are used and displayed in time segments to identify source). The former method can be very expensive, particularly if there are lot of search terms being used in an AdWords campaign, but is more accurate. However, the latter method should be sufficient for most advertisers.

Although the cost of call tracking isn’t that high, it is an additional cost to include as part of the marketing activity. However, the insights that call tracking can provide is extremely valuable and enables advertisers to see the real cost per lead being generated by source, which will provide a more accurate figure for a Return on Investment calculation. Otherwise, call enquiries will remain a general ‘pool’ of new business leads which can’t be attributed to a source or the advertising spend.

If you’d like to know more about phone call tracking for your marketing campaigns, please get in touch for a discussion.

Best Practice for Guest Blogging

The regular changes that Google’s been making to its search algorithms recently to clamp down on poor quality links or content has started to change the focus of many website’s link building strategies. Outsourcing link building to agencies that use bulk link techniques on dubious sites has never worked that well, but now more than ever, an effective link building program should be focused on ‘relationship building’ rather than simple link building.

One of the popular ways to go about relationship building is by being a guest blogger on a reputable blog. This has always been an incredibly effective means of generating high quality links from popular and relevant web pages, but more recently the over-use and poor implementation of this technique has resulted in many bloggers cringing at inboxes full of poorly written, self-serving pitch requests, and ultimately ignoring the vast majority of would be ‘guest posts’. In the same way that numerous linking request emails started to flood into mailboxes several years ago, the same is now true for guest blog requests, so that a number of blogs are now closing their doors to guest post submissions.

Furthermore, according to Matt Cutts – the head of Google’s webspam team – “Google is willing to take action if they see spammy, or low quality guest blogging…which is basically putting low quality articles with embedded links on that site”. He goes on to say that “article-spinning, or low quality syndication are the areas in which Google are going to take an interest”. You can hear more about his comments in a video here.

Guest blogging still works however, and works well, but it has to be done effectively as genuine relationship building, rather than blatant link building. The links will come by building real relationships with the people running the sites so that a level of trust and respect is developed and the guest blog posts add to the quality and tone of the original blog.

Here are some useful tips on the best practice for guest blogging:

• #1 Research potential link sources well: Research sources through social media channels, especially Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Seek out high quality blogs and get to know the blog first, before making contact.
• #2 Don’t be too direct: The first time you contact a blogger, don’t pitch to them – instead, get to know them. If you are targeting a larger blog with multiple writers, then you might want to go by the way of an introduction. Most bloggers are happy to help out people they like with a link, but the only way to get that is to focus on the relationship before the link.
• #3 Approach through social media: Better yet, skip email altogether for the first contact. Instead, make contact through social channels, where you are much more likely to get a response. Twitter is one of the best social networks for finding and connecting with bloggers and should be the first point of contact. Start by following, then tweet directly to them, but don’t ask for a link on the first tweet.
• #4 Personalise the pitch: What if you don’t know enough about the blogger to make it personal? Then it’s probably too soon to be pitching for a link! Nothing will get your guest post denied quicker than sending a generic pitch.
• #5 Offer value: The best way to get what you want is to give something back. The primary value you should be offering is excellent content to the blog, so create valuable, unique content to submit to the blogger. Also, offer to promote and share their content on your social networks, bring technical issues to their attention, such as dead links or broken forms, and leave good quality comments and participate in discussions.
• #6 Maintain the relationship: Often when guest bloggers manage to get a link placement, they don’t continue the relationship with the blog’s owner. So follow up with the blog owner / editor to see if they have any feedback, positive or otherwise. If your content is good, the blogger will be eager to publish more of your submissions in the future. This is particularly useful for agencies that can leverage these relationships with multiple clients.

As outlined above, the process of guest blogging can be time consuming but should reflect the natural process of relationship building rather than a quick link request. If you would like more information about how guest blogging can improve your relationship building (and links), please contact us now for more details.

Google’s Universal Analytics in Public Beta

In March this year Google announced to all Google Analytics users the option to use Universal Analytics. This offers a new way for businesses to understand the changing, multi-device customer journey through the conversion path, as a typical consumer today uses multiple devices to access the web and interact in many ways with a business. This is likely to become the default system for Google Analytics, so websites have the option to try this for themselves now.

Universal Analytics introduces a set of features that change the way data is collected and organised in a Google Analytics account, so you can get a better understanding of how visitors interact with your organisation. In addition to the standard Google Analytics features, Universal Analytics provides:

• New data collection methods
• Simplified feature configuration
• Custom dimensions & custom metrics
• Multi-platform tracking.

Therefore some of the benefits of using Universal Analytics to businesses are:

• Understanding how customers interact with the businesses across many devices and touch-points
• Gaining insights into the performance of mobile apps
• Improving lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions to help understand which channels drive the best results
• Improving the speed of a website by reducing client-side demands.

The aim is to change the way that data is collected and organised in the rapidly evolving online world of multiple platforms. Multiple platforms are not just limited to desktop, tablet, phone, but also game consoles, the point of purchase (POP), the shopping trolley, ski lift, billboard and so on.

Many of the benefits promised by Google’s UA hinge on two updates to the platform. Firstly, the ability to get data into UA from any source, and secondly, the shift from tracking visits to tracking visitors. The future of data does indeed seem to be blurring the lines between online and offline, and with these new tools, the hope is to make more sense of it all and to paint a better picture for the brand, the client, or any user’s understanding of the data and trends. Through an understanding of this data, business and individuals can better understand how visitors interact with their business online.

UA is an exciting development that holds significant promise for solving some difficult issues such as multi-device measurement and online/offline integration. Currently, the technology is still new, so more experimentation is needed in order to test UA’s promises in real-world environments. However, new Analytics accounts have the option to use this code, or existing accounts are gradually getting the option to upgrade as UA is being rolled out by Google.

If you would like more details about how the use of Google’s Universal Analytics can help your business, contact us now.

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Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – June 2013

Welcome to the latest issue of our regular newsletter, which covers news, tips and advice on effective website marketing techniques and trends, to help you keep up to date on the latest developments.

In the first article this month we take a look at how the use of Google+ can lead to SEO benefits. Next, we assess Google’s recently released Display Benchmarks tool and how that can be used to improve the success of display campaigns. Finally, we report on Yahoo!’s acquisition of the social networking tool, Tumblr, and the implications of this move.

On to this month’s edition…

The Benefits of Using Google+ For SEO

Although Google+ is still struggling to establish itself as a viable social media alternative to Facebook, the number of users is increasing as Google integrates the tool with other services and starts to create a community around the range of features being offered. There are also some SEO advantages to having a well set up Google+ profile with both personal and business pages.

With any link-building strategy, it’s very important to network and build genuine connections and relationships that will help spread your content. Google+ facilitates this by allowing the linking of all of your social media profiles, sites and blogs in an organised manner. It’s also possible to link to sites to which you regularly contribute and, importantly, all of these links are “followed”, rather than “no follow” links and you’re able to select the anchor text (in your bio).

Google will follow the links in your posts and the more people share them, +1 your posts or link to your profile, the more valuable these links become to you. If your post goes viral or is shared by a high authority profile, the value of the links increases more. Content on Google+ is indexed rapidly – some say almost instantly – so it’s a great way to get posts by you into Google’s index quickly when there is a hot topic.

With many social media sites, you have little to no ability to edit your content once it has been posted. However, Google+ allows you to go back and make edits to posts as you see fit. Furthermore, Google provides the option for you to take ownership of that content and so it’s important to set up an author tag (for an individual claiming content on a page) or a publisher tag (for a business to claim ownership of a site).

Both the author and publisher tag can’t be used on the same page and if the publisher tag is used, it’s only for the homepage, not internal pages. You can use the author tag for internal pages with content. It’s still a good idea to use Google’s “rel=publisher” tag, but you won’t get the image in your SERP listing like you do by using the authorship tag.

It’s important to remember that a Google+ profile needs to be set up in order to implement the Authorship Markup and take advantages of its benefits. To set up a personal profile, you can go here. Business profiles can be set up here.

The benefits of doing this are:

• It makes your listing more robust, because it includes a photo, your name and links to more content by you. There are also indicators that your authorship markup may give you a boost in rankings. While some say it doesn’t directly help, others have reported an increase in rankings after implementing it.
• Your authorship markup also helps you build trust as it establishes you as a real person in the often-anonymous online world.
• It also allows you to claim your name (you don’t want someone trying to steal your name!) and your content (you’ll be seen as the original and rightful owner of the content and won’t have to worry about a “copy scraper” outranking you).
• You can improve your click-through rate by playing with your profile image that’s shown in the SERPs. Images that perform best seem to be close-ups where the eyes are looking to the right towards the listing in the SERPs.

Once you’ve completed the profile and you start posting, keep in mind that the first sentence of your Google+ post becomes part of the title tag, which impacts rankings and influences click-through rates. A word of warning is that Google doesn’t tolerate “spammy” practices, so it’s vital not to turn your profile into a link farm!

There are a lot of different ways to connect with influencers in your industry and networking on Google+ with those is one of the core focuses of Google+ users. It’s fairly easy to do because there are so many ways to do it, but be sure you don’t abuse the privilege, as if you become seen as a spammer, it will be very difficult to grow your presence.

While Google+ numbers aren’t as large as Facebook, they are growing and as with most things, it’s the early adopters that do well in the long run. So it’s worth beginning now to establish your position. Google+ is probably here to stay and also likely to get more important to your rankings and traffic.

If you’d like more information about Google+, or help with setting up a profile, please contact us now.

Google Introduces a Display Benchmarks Tool

During May, Google announced the launch of a new tool called “Display Benchmarks” that provides useful comparisons or reference points aggregated from ad campaigns across the industry. If you are using display ads as part of a marketing campaign, this new tool facilitates an understanding of how your display campaigns compare to the rest of your industry, which helps to better plan and measure the success of those campaigns.

The comparisons can show average expansion rates for automotive creatives, expected Rich Media interaction rates for retail creatives from France, or just the average clickthrough rate for Entertainment ads from the US. So if you’re looking for comparisons by country, industry vertical, or how different ad formats and sizes perform compared to each other, the tool offers up-to-date benchmarks across 10 key display metrics, such as interaction rate and time, expansion rate and video completions.

For example, through its own use of the tool, Google has shown that people are increasingly choosing to interact with video ads. They state that video completion rates are the highest ever seen, increasing by approximately 24% since Summer 2012, to a 60% completion rate. This improved interaction rate correlates to larger ad sizes: the bigger the ad, the more frequently people will interact with it. It also found that rich-media-expanding formats are better for getting people to interact frequently, while in-page formats are better for encouraging longer interactions.

So, if this tool is used to its full potential, it can certainly shed some valuable light on the best way to improve display campaigns by reaping the benefits of the industry-wide information it provides. You can learn more about it here.

Contact us now if you’d like more information about how we can help you improve your display advertising with this tool.

Yahoo! Buys Tumblr for US$1.1 Billion

During May, Yahoo! acquired one of the leading blogging services – Tumblr – for US$1.1bn. This is a notable deal, made by Yahoo’s chief executive Marissa Mayer who was appointed in July last year, and she has called the move a “unique opportunity”. However, it could also be a huge risk for Yahoo!, which now has to generate revenue from the deal without alienating the Tumblr user base.

The plans for the acquisition are for Tumblr to continue operating under its own brand and independently of the new owner, with co-founder David Karp continuing as Chief Executive. Tumblr combines elements of blogging with social networking, and its simple design has attracted millions of users since its launch. According to the site, it now hosts 108 million blogs, with over 50 billion posts. Crucially, it also has a significant presence on mobile devices.

Observers says that the move is partly an attempt by Yahoo! to regain favour with the younger ‘hip’ market, where Tumblr has proved a great success. Yahoo! has lost favour in recent years, both in terms of search and also as a social site, although the initial reaction from Tumblr users to the takeover has been mostly negative – which would be expected.

However, Yahoo! is hoping that its purchase of Tumblr will boost traffic to its other properties, such as the photo sharing site Flickr, which is being relaunched with new features to compete against Instagram. But the question is really whether the US$1.1bn fee will also help to boost revenue?

Analysts suggest that Yahoo! has significantly overpaid for the deal – Tumblr’s 2012 revenue was just $13m, according to a recent report by Forbes magazine, and despite its fast-growing user base, it has struggled to make money and has traditionally resisted advertising. Yahoo! says they will be working with Tumblr to create ads that “are seamless and enhance the user experience”. However, there is a danger of alienating users with more advertising – a challenge that faces most social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

Yahoo! has struggled in recent years, with a lack of direction and innovation, which is the reason why Marissa Mayer was brought in from Google. Despite this, Yahoo! remains a major online property, with around 700 million visitors to its website every month and the majority of its revenues comes from advertising. However, it has limited mobile reach and lags behind Google in the search engine rankings. It also shed more than 1,000 jobs during 2012 and has long been divided over whether it should focus on media content or on tools and technologies.

If you’d like to know more about this deal and the role of Yahoo!, please contact us for details.

Web Search & Marketing Newsletter – May 2013

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

In the first article this month we take a look at Google’s changes to its search engine filters and algorithms since 2011, including how this may have had an impact on your website’s rankings, plus what can be done to avoid any penalties. Next, we assess the importance of specifying to Google and Bing through the use of canonical links, which webpage takes precedence when there are duplicates and how to avoid the common mistakes when doing so.

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

On to this month’s edition…

Google’s Panda and Penguin Updates – Two Years On

Each year, Google changes its search engine’s algorithm up to 500-600 times. While most of these changes are minor, every few months Google rolls out a “major” algorithmic update that affects search results in significant ways. In this article we evaluate how Google has continued to evolve the significant releases of their “Penguin” and “Panda” updates, how these changes caused some website’s rankings to decline, and what can be done to prevent this from happening to yours.

On February 24th 2011, Google announced its first ever “Panda/Farmer Update”, which was a ranking penalty that targeted poor website content (what it termed as “thin” or “not good enough”), or websites that used dubious content farms and ones with high ad-to-content ratio. Panda is a site-wide penalty, so that if enough pages are tagged as poor quality, the entire site is subject to it, (even though some good quality pages would continue to rank well). The only way to lose the penalty is to remove or improve the poor quality content. This major algorithm update hit some sites hard, affecting up to 12% of search results according to Google.

The Panda update had a series of subsequent changes over the following year and the “Penguin Update” (aka “Webspam Update”) was released on April 24th 2012. That evaluated the incoming links to a site to determine if they involved link schemes that were solely intended to improve rankings. This was done by automatically raising flags by examining the ratio of links compared with those for competitors’ sites, which then led to a manual investigation by Google. This impacted an estimated 3.1% of English-language search queries.

Subsequent updates were made to Penguin on May 25th and October 5th 2012 and the final release of Panda (#25) was on 14/4/2013. That filter is now going to become part of the core algorithm (Panda Everflux). This means that businesses of all sizes need to consider creating websites/pages with quality, relevant content that enhances the user’s experience. Also, any links that are created to point to it need to be genuine ones, rather than just being developed in an attempt to improve rankings.

So the main outcome post-Penguin, is that businesses need to take care with link building techniques and, ideally, to start earning links through real relationships and useful content. This is not easy for many websites, but Google will reward those websites that follow the process of combining good quality webpage content together with genuine links to support its ranking performance, as these are the kind of sites that it deems will benefit its users’ experience.

If you would like details about how we can help your website improve, rather than get penalised in the rankings, contact us now for more information.

Using Canonical Links and avoiding common mistakes

The use of ‘canonical links’ is a helpful tool for webmasters in cases where a website may have duplicated pages of content. The role of ‘canonicalisation’ allows website owners to tell Google and Bing which webpage is the one to give precedence when there are duplicates of that page on the site. However, there are some common mistakes that need to be avoided when doing this.

It’s often a common occurrence for a site to have several pages listing the same information, or set of products if it’s an ecommerce site. For example, one page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating. If Google knows that these pages have the same content, it may index only one version in the search results, or it may penalise the site for creating duplicate content pages.

Therefore website owners can specify a canonical page (the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content) to search engines by adding a ‘link’ element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the ‘head’ section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Google that of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful – therefore please prioritise it in search results.

The use of canonicalisation has to be done carefully however, as there are some common mistakes that can be made and it’s important that it should only be used for pages that are duplicates.

These are the most important points to consider:

• Verify that most of the main text content of a duplicate page also appears in the canonical page.
• Check that rel=canonical is only specified once (if at all) and in the ‘head’ of the page.
• Check that rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content (i.e., not a 404, or worse, a soft 404).
• Avoid specifying rel=canonical from landing or category pages to featured articles (as that will make the featured article the preferred URL in search results.)

If you would like to know more about how the use of canonical links can improve your website’s indexing of duplicate pages with Google & Bing, contact us now.