Attacat of Edinburgh » Brain

New website launch: SocialandCocktail.co.uk

Attacat Joel — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:56:00 +0000

There’s nothing better on a Summer’s evening than a cool cocktail, so Attacat are delighted to have been involved in the creation of a new website for SocialandCocktail.co.uk. It’s a fantastic resource for cocktails and cocktail recipes and cocktail bars across the UK.

This project included:

Creating the site in a WordPress platform
Advice and assistance with content generation
Online marketing consultancy

Website launched – what’s next?

The website is just the start. Attacat will continue to work with SocialandCocktail.co.uk to improve their social presences, SEO and traffic generation capabilities.

Online daily deals: good for the customer but bad for business?

christie — Fri, 25 May 2012 08:33:31 +0000

The UK is going mad for online discounts – the BBC programme The Apprentice aired on 23 May, where contestants had to source deals for such a business, highlighted this.

daily deal stats:

According to organisers of Europe’s first Daily Deals Summit held in March, in just 6 months, from July to December in 2011, Britain spent £3 billion through daily deal websites such as Groupon.
Voucher sites have taken over sitting at 37.4 million UK internet visits in December 2011, up 28% in a year, as visits to price comparison sites have halved year-on-year according to Hitwise.
LivingSocial claims that its voucher sales have almost doubled when compared the previous year.
Managing Derector of LivingSocial UK and Ireland said,

Over the last 12 months we have been rapidly expanding to offer membership to more UK consumers, and it is fantastic to see that the popularity of people trying LivingSocial, and discovering more about where they live, shows no signs of slowing down.

Looking at Edinburgh specifically we have a few main offer sites: Itison, Today’s Great Deal, KGB Deals, Wowcher, LivingSocial and Groupon, but the list is growing every year. Also, with the addition of Facebook offers into the market there is a question of whether pre-pay and sign-up deal sites will be superseded by instant login, socially-connected offerings. With the information that a hotel in Ireland made over $1 million in 24 hours on Facebook offers it’s a tempting deal for businesses.

the good bits…

Along with giving you offers such as 2 for 1 meal deals or even 70% off tooth whitening, daily deal or voucher sites can be incredibly helpful for businesses in a number of ways:

Ensure restaurants fill up midweek tables that may have otherwise gone unsold
Offer businesses the chance to reach out to potential new customers
Build up a new contact data base for future promotions

When it works it becomes about getting as many people through the door when business is quiet and promoting the brand. If done well voucher and deal sites have the potential to be very successful for small businesses.

…and the bad…

If a business doesn’t do their homework, however, a daily deal or voucher marketing idea can spell trouble:

Some daily deal business models take about 50% of all voucher sales
The business must also be prepared for what could be a very busy time for staff: booking in and dealing with new customers while trying to up-sell in order to make back some of the lost income
In some cases this is causing the business themselves to lose out on making money in order to promote themselves on these sites

big slap on the wrist for Groupon

At the end of 2011 daily deal sites came under some fierce criticism for over selling vouchers, mostly on behalf of small businesses who would have needed to risk bankruptcy in order to service these deals.

Indeed in mid-March the British arm of Groupon got its knuckles rapped after The Office of Fair Trading said it had found breaches of consumer protection rules. Groupon now have three months to ensure offers are realistic and prices are transparent and accurate.

Groupon stats

UK based Copywriters Cooper Murphy conducted a survey into Groupon that found out:

82% of Groupon Business users were unsatisfied with customer repeat business
50% of Groupon business users would not advertise with the company again
65% said that Groupon was profitable for their business

A Groupon wedding?

Vouchers drive footfall but is this more of a fair-weather customer and not really what a business wants? Indeed in the Cooper Murphy survey 78% of merchants believed that people who buy vouchers of Groupon are more ‘stingy’ than regular customers. Surely the true goal of a business would be to generate a loyal customer base who will frequently visit without the need for discount or incentive, talk about their experience and get others to come and spend more each time – not just to get a lot of people through the door.

Itison.com

Let’s look at one local daily deal site in a bit more detail. Itison.com is a free-to- join website sending out daily deals to its members based in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen.

Itison takes 35% commission, however we have been told from a source that this is negotiable. We have spoken to one of the business who has offered deals on their site before and he cannot speak highly enough of them!

Eddie Brown, a personal trainer and director at Edinburgh City Boot Camp has run deals with Itison and has profited from this promotion.

He has, in fact, found that the quality of the Itison customer is “very high compared to a lot of deal companies” and this has lead to a 40% conversion rate from buying the offer to being a full-time customer with his company. His overall aim when deciding to run an offer was “to broadcast the business through their large database and let people experience my product”, and he has found this approach to be successful. Eddie has found the process of working with Itison a positive one and has some tips for another business looking to promote with a daily deals or a voucher website:

Ensure you have an efficient booking system and follow up procedure for a return visit for customers.
Make sure you can cope with the volume of new customers and make sure they get the same quality of product or service as everyone else.
I have used 6 daily deals companies and their customers from different daily deals companies are very different: one did huge volume but conversions were only 10%. So decide what price point you want and volume would suit you best and do a little bit of research or ask around.

We also spoke to Reuben Welch, a partner of Alien Rock climbing centre, who have used Itison, Groupon, Living Social and Deal Monster to run offers. They haven’t been running their Itison offer long enough to know how many people will return after purchasing a voucher but said that Groupon gave them around a 10% return rate and Living Social around 20%. The promotions they run don’t give them huge profits; they run them to just increase awareness of Alien Rock and to make some money. Reuben also gave us his top three tips:

The amount of repeat custom is likely to be low – don’t factor it into the financial calculations, it’s a bonus! The deal must stand up financially on its own, even if it just breaks even.
Make sure you have plenty of good third-party reviews online before running the deal and that your website is up to scratch – people will research you before buying.
Set your terms with them rather than the other way around e.g. 30% commission, payment on ALL valid sales, voucher validity to suit you, bulk payments to reduce paperwork. Set realistic caps on sales.

In an interview with The Drum in November 2011 Oli Norman, Founder and Managing Director of Itison, stated that they focused on “customer service, favourite brand terms and quality deals”.

We spoke to Jenny Wallace, Itison’s Director, who let us know that Itison clients can:

’cap’ their deals to ensure that their feature is not oversold. We work closely with our clients to ensure that caps are manageable and controllable

They can also implement blackouts times on deals to try and avoid the problems Groupon ran into when more vouchers were sold than companies could handle. Jenny explained another way in which they avoid acting in the same fashion as Groupon is that Itison are very careful to ensure their top price is accurate, whereas Groupon have allegedly been known to inflate theirs in order to make the saving seem larger.

Jenny also had three top tips for a business looking to run a promotion with a daily deals site:

Ensure your deal is structured to allow up-spend from your purchaser.
Ensure your cap is controlled. The key to a deals success is the customer having a positive experience and seeing your business run to its optimum, not feeling like they’re being cattle herded!
Treat your deal customers like gold – they are as valuable to you long term as your full paying customers.

Itison stats

In fact when it comes to daily deal sites Itison have some pretty impressive stats:

92% of their members use Itison to discover new places
88% of members have returned to the deal venue as a full paying customer
The average Itison purchase is over £70
96% of Itison’s hosts would run another deal with them
73% of hosts even said that an Itison member is worth as much or more to their business than regular customers.

in the end

So it seems the rise of the voucher and daily deal site is almost unstoppable, and it makes sense: why would you pay £210 for an MOT when you only need pay £39 with a voucher, or receive laser liposuction for £592 when it’s £99 with a voucher. It’s the cheaper way of living an expensive life, through a piece of paper printed out from a website. Huge as the appeal will be to businesses looking to appear on the site it takes some consideration. Depending on your reasoning, what type of business you are, how you use it, and what deal site you go for, it could be a huge hit or a huge disaster…

New Cookie Tool: Just in time for the enforcement deadline!

Attacat Tim — Fri, 25 May 2012 07:40:37 +0000

With just a day to go until the cookie law “enforcement day”, the new version of our cookie audit tool is now live. Please take it for a spin!

The tool now:

recognises more cookies
automatically creates a custom “Cookie Information Page” for your site (see our one for an example)
saves reports for future reference
(coming soon) has an export function
links into our free cookie warning button generator

So what if if there’s only one day to go. All you need is an hour?

Our tool does not seek to be perfect, but does aim to fill the niche of “if you only have one hour (or even less) to spend on working towards compliance, then here is a good way to spend it”.

Here’s a video overview of the tool (no I will not seek to make a living by doing voice overs!)

We really welcome your feedback and ideas for improvements in the comments below.

Known Limitations

we don’t recognise every cookie but we will add to the database over time
we can’t track flash cookies and local storage objects so please ask your developers about them
we are ironing out some bugs with the “save for later” functionality
our warning triangle may or may not be compliant.

Happy auditing!

Cookie Directive: Does our cookie warning triangle comply with the law?

Attacat Tim — Thu, 24 May 2012 11:52:32 +0000

With just over a day to go until the ICO (the UK cookie police) begin to enforce the Cookie Directive, I remain confused, despite having carefully studied the initial guidelines and the updated version, as to whether our proposed solution of a warning triangle on every page of our site goes far enough or not.

Last year I argued that it would be acceptable in certain circumstances, but further advice has been issued by the ICO since.

Some of this advice suggests it definitely isn’t:

It has been suggested that the fact the Regulations do not specifically refer to ‘prior’ consent suggests that consent can be obtained after the activity consent is needed for has occurred (in this instance after the cookie has been set).

It is difficult to see that a good argument could be made that agreement to an action could be obtained after the activity the agreement is needed for has already occurred. This is not the generally accepted way in which consent works in other areas, and is not what users will expect. Setting cookies before users have had the opportunity to look at the information provided about cookies, and make a choice about those cookies, is likely to lead to compliance problems.

Our solution does set cookies before the the information is provided.

But other advice and informal advice from them suggests it is OK when used with relatively un-invasive cookies:

The Information Commissioner does however recognise that currently many websites set cookies as soon as a user accesses the site. This makes it difficult to obtain consent before the cookie is set. Wherever possible the setting of cookies should be delayed until users have had the opportunity to understand what cookies are being used and make their choice. Where this is not possible at present websites should be able to demonstrate that they are doing as much as possible to reduce the amount of time before the user receives information about cookies and is provided with options. A key point here is ensuring that the information you provide is not just clear and comprehensive but also readily available.

Elsewhere they also have this to say:

the more privacy intrusive your activity, the more priority you will need to give to getting meaningful consent

So in summary we are still taking the view that it is OK for Analytics cookies but not advertising cookies. Of course we may be wrong and if you choose to use our free cookie button generator, you need to do so at your own risk.

What we do know though is that it is going further than many well-known brands, even if any lawyer would be likely to say that our solution does not go far enough.

What we are of course doing, as part of our compliance plan, is maintaining a watching brief on this and have a willingness to change our approach if required.

What if I have banner adverts?

Behavioural advertising is what this directive is largely aiming at and the industry so far is steadfastly refusing to comply.

My view is that in many ways this is more of a problem for the networks than those of us with websites displaying banner adverts.

The industries response has been to come together to offer an easy way to opt-out of advertising cookies at the Your Online Choices site and I feel that including the informed choices icon in a website’s footer (linked to an explanatory page) would at least be a hat tip to the directive.

Remarketing cookies?

Many of our clients do so-called “remarketing” where adverts are shown (on other sites) to people who have visited our client sites. Unlike just showing adverts on our site, if we were remarketing then we become a very active participant in the setting of cookies and the privacy invasion. I am of the view that getting a full opt-in is required if you are remarketing.

What about share buttons?

In my view share buttons have greater privacy implications than anonymous analytics software as like most banners they track folks across different websites with the ultimate aim of tailoring advertising. Somehow them being “social” makes them seem less worrisome! We are working to decrease sharing cookies but will continue to use our warning triangle (and home page notice) on the basis that the user has to have engaged with the social network for them to experience behavioural targeting (I know that is an over-simplification)

What if I am risk adverse?

It makes sense to do the following whether you are risk adverse or not:

Adding prominent notices to your home page
Removing cookies from your website (our audit tool can help here)
Having a good cookie information page with opt-outs (which our soon be released updated audit tool will generate automatically for you)

If you want to beef up your response to the directive then consider the following:

a time delay between users arriving on your site and the setting of cookies may allow you to argue that your users have been given an opportunity to peruse your cookie information. You could also do this by not setting any cookies until they move on to a second page.
Move to a full prior consent opt-in approach to be bullet proof (but accept loss of revenue)

What consent mechanisms are you adopting?

Update 25/05/2012 – The ICO have just issued new guidance. My first very brief flick through is making me happy

Panda and Penguin: Google ranking algorithm updates

Attacat Joel — Thu, 24 May 2012 11:39:25 +0000

It’s the big news in SEO – recent changes to Google’s search ranking algorithms named Panda and Penguin.

Over a three week period in April 2012 these major iteration updates or ‘filters’ to the algorithm have affected how certain links and sites are perceived, and has caused some sites to slip or even completely lose their positions in Google search engine results pages (SERPs). So what are they in simple terms?

Google Panda

Panda is thought to be a change to how the algorithm assesses on-page factors and usability – so that’s things like:

· quality

· depth and duplication of content

· prevalence of adverts

· ’overoptimisation’
(trying to hard to optimise for search engines and forgetting users)

Sites that scrape or copy content from elsewhere, produce ‘thin’ or low value content on a grand scale, are heavily templated/database generated content or sites that are plastered with Adsense adverts are all types of sites that have been ‘hit’ by the update.

Google Penguin

Penguin has been considered an equivalent filter to to Panda but targeting offsite factors – so that’s things like:

· links and low link quality

· link networks

· social and comment link spam

· footer and sidebar (not content) links

· sitewide links

· overall site link profiles

· anchor text

Although there’s not full agreement about what the change actually means (the only way we can know is by looking at sites that have been hit or devalued), the consensus is that Penguin has worked with the Panda update to really hit the value of links from spammy, low value sites, and has reduced the value of ‘unnatural’ links such as footer and sitewide links i.e. links that are not relevant or in context.

It also seems to be looking at overall site link profiles, with sites that have a prevalence of low-value links (low PageRank or DomainAuthority) with few higher quality also being affected.

It’s been proposed that anchor text (the words that are linked from) has been devalued or become a significantly less important part of the algorithm, with Google perhaps now being far more educated about what a site is about that it doesn’t need to rely on the anchor text words to spell it out for it.

It’s also highly likely that unnatural anchor text profiles i.e. sites that have unvaried, mostly keyword rich (overoptimised) anchor text and little brand anchors have been negatively affected.

If you want a bit more insight I’d recommend you read the excellent Penguin and Panda discussion involving a load of top SEO pros collected by CognitiveSEO.

what’s it all for?

The overall aim of these updates is to reduce web and link ‘spam’, so that low quality links and low value sites are reduced or even removed from consideration of the algorithm and therefore search results. Has it been an total success? No, there are many instances of sites being penalised that perhaps shouldn’t have been, and sites dropping because of more ‘unfortunate’ than spammy practices.

However, with consistent iterations and updates it’s likely to really reduce the effect of spammy and low-quality SEO techniques – which can only be a good thing.

Images from the ever-excellent NatalieDee.com

5 AdWords setup mistakes to avoid

Attacat Jon — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:36:32 +0000

photo credit: Orange_Beard

Thinking of setting up an AdWords account?! Well check out our top 5 AdWords mistakes to avoid and you won’t regret it… gulp.

time zones

This is one of the most common mistakes we find – it’s hardly earth shattering but it’s a simple thing that you can’t undo. During the final stage of an AdWords account creation you may (or probably not) notice that AdWords asks you what time zone you want to set. Setting the wrong time zone will affect your reports and statistics and can cause you some real annoyance further down the line, so spare this stage a couple of minutes please.

goal tracking

Tracking is your blood in AdWords. If you can’t track an end value from your PPC spend, then how can you confidently sustain that level of expenditure – you may be losing hundreds or alternatively making them (and therefore missing out on making even more!), but the key point is that you’re none the wiser! So before you go all John Wayne and go gun-ho with your campaign statuses, you should spend some time reviewing, implementing and testing your tracking code. Once you’re confident that you’re tracking something meaningful then launch your PPC activity and you’ll have a much better grasp on what you’re driving.

analytics

Don’t make the mistake of undervaluing Google Analytics. Analytics merits a separate discussion, but for this post accept this piece of software as omniscient and therefore essential to your PPC armoury. So BEFORE you launch your AdWords account please ensure you have setup your Analytics and attempted to sync it with Adwords. Why? Because you’ll gain a much better understanding of how AdWords impacts your bottom line compared to other marketing mediums giving you a more comprehensive approach to optimising your account and the budgets within it.

campaign setting

Once you’ve created your campaigns you need to ensure they are setup correctly. AdWords provides you with some default options that could seriously hurt your wallet, pride and perspective if you pay them no attention. If you’re unfamiliar with these settings then we recommend paying attention to the following in particular: Networks, Bidding Option and Locations.

With Networks it’s highly advised to never combine search and display as they target audiences at very different stages in the buying cycle, thus meriting different approaches. With bidding options, don’t be afraid to use manual CPC bidding to give you more control of spend. This might seem risky but it’s not the most difficult aspect of PPC management so you should give it a try! Finally, locations are very important; think carefully about which countries you can cater to and which products are worth promoting there. At the very least, target the countries separately for easier analysis. Having your campaign settings setup correctly will save you money, stress and confusion – trust me.

free advertising

Don’t setup a new AdWords account without some type of financial discount from the lovely folks at Google. Usually you can get vouchers up to £75 which can (unfortunately) be only be applied to new accounts – but the little effort required is well worth the reward. If you’re unsure about where to get a voucher then give us a call/email and we’ll get you a code.

We’ve only covered our top 5 issues, but there’s plenty more to be aware of! Hopefully these initial tips will help you in your journey and if we can be of any assistance then please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

AdWords auction insights

Attacat Steve — Wed, 23 May 2012 08:35:56 +0000

Photo credit fun-gallery.com

Woo-hoo! I guess Google must have felt sorry for us after the ad rotation palaver, and decided we needed a bit if cheering up! How about a tool that gives us more insight into the actual ad auction and what our competitors are up to? Brilliant! There’s loads of cool things we want to know!

Sorry, but before you start thinking of competitor’s CPCs and Quality Scores, maybe keep that excitement bottled for the moment. Auction insights should be available to all advertisers at some point this week, but it may be a while before it becomes an invaluable part of your competitor analysis.

Photo credit adwords.blogspot.co.uk

what does it do?

Google AdWords Auctions Insights lets users run a report (only for individual keywords at the moment) and view half a dozen metrics against other advertisers. These include impression share, verge position, overlap rate, position above rate and top of page percentage.

the biggest drawback

From my understanding it only shows whose ads are appearing at the same time as yours, not if that advertiser is actually bidding on the same keyword – they might have a similar term on broad match while you’re bidding on exact march, so the data becomes very muddled here.

do we need this competitor data?

Although you should be competitive in nearly all aspects of your business, bidding and ad exposure isn’t really one of them. In truth we all pay the same price – for each impression that is. If your ad gets clicked a lot it’ll seem like you’re paying less on a CPC basis, but as CTR is one of the defining influences on Quality Score, then per impression you’ll probably be paying pretty much the same – remember there isn’t a sales rep at Google taking free lunches off your competitor to give them a lower rate.

On top of that everyone has different margins, and it’s more important to focus on what you need to achieve to be profitable, rather than what your competitors are doing with their different setup.

These insights are interesting but there’s nothing we’re not already seeing in the standard search results, the information is just easier to understand.

Keyword tools: 12 resources for researching keywords

Attacat Joel — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:28:42 +0000

Good keyword research is the base for any good SEO or PPC campaign, so here are a few research tools you might find useful.

Google keyword tool

The ol’ Adwords favourite, although it’s absolutely riddled with flaws. Don’t trust the search volume figures to be anywhere near accurate, and remember Google won’t show you the ‘niche’ terms that actually get a lot of search traffic unless you type them in (in which case you already know of them). Remember, because it’s an Adwords PPC tool they want you to bid on the nice expensive generic terms…

PPC search query reports

While we’re on the subject of Adwords, always mine your search query data from your search campaigns (broad or modified broad keywords) to see what people are actually searching for. There’s nothing better for getting an understanding of the SEO landscape than a information-gathering PPC campaign.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is a keyword research and optimization tool that operates in Microsoft’s Excel add-in provides similar keyword research data to the Google keyword tool but based upon Bing and Yahoo! search data.

Google Insights for Search

While finding out up-to-the-minute, socially-discussed keywords is a whole different ball game that I won’t delve into here, Google Insights can give you a nice idea of changing search volumes and rising keyword searches.

YouTube keyword tool

The no.1 video site has a huge amount of search traffic and data ready for your consideration. As with any tool you’ll need to weed out the irrelevant stuff but don’t forget about it.

Google Suggest and Ubersuggest

You know when you type one word in Google and it suggests a few relevant longer queries? That’s Google Suggest, and Ubersuggest is a great tool for grabbing these in a nice, usable format for research.

SEMRush

Have a quick lookie at your competitors’ top keywords (both natural and PPC). You’ll only get the full data with a paid account but the free level with still give you some nice data to be going from.

Anchor text

Talking of competitors, why not see what anchor text people are linking to them with? Tools like OpenSiteExplorer or MajesticSEO have all the backlink and anchor data you need, but you’ll need to have a paid account.

LSI keywords

Scrapes search results pages and crunches together popular reoccurring one, two and three-word phrases from the ranking pages and results.

KeywordEye

Want a visual representation of the keyword market but can’t be bothered making a Wordle? KeywordEye can help, and with a paid account will allow you to scrape and see competitors’ keywords too. The data is taken from SEMRush.

Internal search

Do you have search functionality in your website? You track it, yes? Well use that data right now! Find out what your existing site users are actually searching for.

Alchemy Excel

Warning: this one’s a bit more complicated and is for the Excel educated. A bit of Excel trickery from Richard Baxter at SEOgadget that uses the Alchemy API to crawl competitor URLs and scrape keywords, you can find it here: Excel Alchemy script

photo credit: jetheriot

May 2012 New Media Breakfast: making the most of Facebook timeline for business pages #nmbrek

christie — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:39:21 +0000

(Here are my notes taken from the recent Facebook New Media Breakfast. Please be gentle, this is my first post on the Attacat Brain!)

This month’s New Media Breakfast (#NMBrek) (ran in Glasgow last month) kicked off with the video of Morph Suits Co Owner and Director Gregor Lawson, he stated that without their Facebook they would not exist to the extent they do today. In their 3rd year of business they now have a turnover of £11million, have 1million Facebook likes, and use it in 3 ways:

They do the basics – responding to posts and all posts even bad ones.
They give fans lots of ways to engage with them.
Using Facebook to combat business challenges and turn them on their head.

He recommends that Blendtec and Duck Tape are good business to have a look at on Facebook.

Thanks to Gregor for doing the video for us.

a tour of the new timeline pages pt 1

Gordon White from FatBuzz started the morning by going through the new look Facebook and explained the dimensions of the photos:

In your cover image you cannot have:

Contact information
Price or purchase information (e.g. 40% off)
Any ‘like’ or ‘share’ references
Calls to action (e.g. Get It Now)

More useful Facebook tips…

Pinning posts or comments means if you have a very active page this comment won’t get lost in everything else that’s going on. For extra visibility of a post you can also make it span across the page by pressing the star icon button.
The timeline feature at the side of the page is useful to show important or interesting milestones in a company ‘s history. An example of this being done well is Deans ShortBread. The creative way they have worked their Facebook makes it interesting for fans and encourages ‘likes’.
There is no longer a landing page to incentivise likes and run promos – but you can use a URL to take them to a landing page with a link to ‘like’ the page.
This new Facebook forces you to engage and be active in order to be successful and drive people to your page and grow your likes.
Around 1-2% is a good engagement rate (talking about this:likes) but this can vary dramatically depending on your business.

Gordon explained that the new layout can have its frustrations: for instance it can show up very old posts at the top of the page making it look like the page in not frequently used; also the number of your friends that have liked the page shows up very boldly, this has the potential to make the page look very unpopular.

Gordon explained an eyetracking test that was conducted on the Facebook pages of Gap, Mancester United, Pizza Hut, Coca-Cola, Coldplay and American Express Facebook pages. The findings of these prove interesting:

The heading graphic/ cover photo is it seems not as important as people think – users naturally scanned down and dismissed it as an advert.
The timeline is well received so perhaps an excellent opportunity to be built upon for a lot of businesses – works best if it is kept up to date with regular status updates and posts. Users are most likely to interact with your page if a friend has interacted.
The ‘About’ button well was received, Gordon explained that he suspected this was because it is the same place on the page as the previous Facebook design, and it is also often easier to find out about a brand on their than on a company’s website, this should be considered as your Facebook page may be how people are finding out about your business.
Facebook users rarely use the apps at the top of the page, and very few noticed arrow button that opened other tabs.
Pinning a post to the top of the page seemed to have little impact on users.

However Gordon believes you have to think about the type of brands tested (well known) and as it was only tested around one month after timelines were introduced the results could be very different in 6 months time…

SEO corner

Gordon then handed over to Tim Barlow from Attacat Internet Marketing to talk about Facebook and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Facebook fro Google SEO

What impact does Facebook have on your Google rank?

First off he explained that the greatest result likely come from indirect effects: relationships that results in signals that Google likes such as links
Facebook’s direct impact on SEO is probably relatively low as most of Facebook is private and off-limits to Google (personal profiles).
Google can index EVERYTHING on your timeline, you can build up your keywords and relevancy and links up, there is a lot of opportunities there. The more relevant and stronger Google perceives the site to be the greater ranking boost it will get. But you should not have a Facebook page just for Google SEO, it will not work!

SEOing your Facebook Page

Searching on Google is very revealing to what they view as important and the places that you want to get your key words in (don’t forget: users first, keywords second).

Looking at the Facebook page listing in Google for a search for ‘coke’ and comparing it to the Coca-Cola Facebook Page we can see:

The page name is important
category gets included (so chose wisely)
text from the ‘about’ section is included so can you include your keywords without putting your users off?

In another search, for ‘Facebook Coke’ it was the text from a pinned post, so if you have relevant posts you may want to consider pinning them…

The sub listing came from an app, msuggesting they might be good SEO opportunities.

But when we look at what Google actually sees … this app page is empty, so it is only really the page (app) name that is important.

On a search for Cokes Facebook URL all the highly ranked pages were posts, not images or apps suggesting that this is where the SEO goodness is -

Also, fan pages can like other fan pages, it seems logical if you have more fan pages liking yours that it would improve your rankings? However any more than 5 ‘likes’ cannot be seen by Google so it’s useless past this, Google can follow mentions though so this is worth doing.

Another useful tip for linking to your Facebook – If you click on the timestamp of a post it will link to a single page where this can be seen and you can put the address of this on to a blog post ect and this can improve your SEO.

Tim brought up a scary looking algorithm (Edgerank):

it determines whether your Facebook activities get seen in peoples news feed or not. You are more likely to see an update if they have more likes and comments from people you know. So they key is in the end to be interacting and being sociable with as many of your followers as possible.

So summed up Facebook optimisation is quality over quantity but also with a large dose of engagement and relevance thrown in.

a tour of the new timeline pages pt 2

Back to Gordon for more features of the new Facebook:

You can now find out who the page admins or owners are meaning the companies have more potential to work together.
You can also choose who your featured likes will be, as Tim explained earlier Google can only see a few so in the admin area of the page you can tailor this to your business.
It is now easier to change your name: you can simply request a name change from Facebook, but you will need to send a utility bill with this to make it more secure.
There is now the option to have one lead page owner who no one can remove; this person also has to give the ok for others to be removed as admins and any other major changes on the page.
Gordon also reminded everyone that using a personal profile as a business page was not advisable as Google cannot see a personal profile. This link: www.Facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate can be used to transfer you profile over. Being a page means you get the full Facebook functionality benefits as well as the full SEO benefits. Facebook pages also get valuable insite data that Google cannot provide.
In the last couple of weeks we have seen something new from Facebook – Facebook Offers. A free way to receive discounts from business and brands – driving engagement with pages and brands.

Gordon who explained that there are many options for apps to encourage their use. Mimicking your website such as Fattbuzz do in an app link or having a mailing list on another one. One tip was to make sure that app tab pictures are interesting and engaging to users.

To invest or not to invest?

On the eve of the the Facebook IPO, Tim took a slightly irreverent look at the investment. Some numbers:

… so should Facebook make their own search engine!?

They have all the data the Google is desperate for … they know who your friends are, where you hang out, what you like doing etc and this could be used for an incredibly powerful search engine. Tim explained that they were rumoured to be developing their search capabilities, but who knows whether this will be an internal search for Facebook or a Facebook web search and his bet is that they are quite far down the development route…

So it seems as if the IPO of Facebook is more of a lottery and not a clear cut thumbs up or down. By investing in to them you would be buying into what Facebook could be, not what it is today.

Next New Media Breakfast:
With Craig McGill, MD from Contently Managed highlighting some of the ways in which the whisky industry have used social media.
Glasgow on 25^th May in 29 Members Club, Royal Exchange Sq.
Edinburgh on 14^th June in Tigerlily, George Street.

Month in Numbers – April 2012

Attacat Jane — Mon, 07 May 2012 09:01:58 +0000

Easter eggs, bank holidays, marathons, rain showers…and some fairly interesting numbers from the big internet marketing melting pot. It’s month in numbers o’clock – here’s what April had on offer stats-wise:

54%

A survey by internet statsmongers E-consultancy reports that this is the percentage of online businesses that have carried out a cookie audit in advance of the upcoming enforcement period of the EU Cookie Directive (from 26 May websites must gain consent from their visitors to use cookies). Crumbs! Sounds a bit scary, but cue shameless plug: Attacat have built a simple cookie audit tool, minus confusing bells and whistles, to help website owners work towards complying with the Directive. And it’s free!

7500

According to survey Branded3, this is the number of tweets needed by brands to rank in the top 5 results on search engines. An interesting stat around the hot topic of the role of social signals as a ranking factor, BUT I would say that this one has to be taken with a really, really big pinch of salt – there might be a correlation between tweets and ranks, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the first actually influenced the second. This SEOmoz blogpost looks into this issue further, with some interesting takeaways.

8.3million

A pretty tidy figure, but the number of monthly active users on Pinterest is actually down from March’s 11.3 million. So does this mean Pinterest is passé? “Probably not” say Business Insider; more likely these decreasing numbers can be accounted for by the flash-in-the-pan types who hopped onto the bandwagon during the recent burst of coverage and have since abandoned ship now they’ve decided the site isn’t quite their cup of tea. Marketing and communications blogger Mitch Joel has also been chewing over the drop in numbers, and you can read his take on it all here.

14.8 billion

This is the amount in dollars that search advertising brought in in 2011, up 27 % from 2012, with online advertising as whole showing a 22% growth rate. Check out this and other interesting stats on search from this Search Engine Land article.

1/5

This is the number of searches that show rel=author mark-up within the first 100 search results according to a new study, backing up predictions of SEO pundits that Google will increasingly draw on authorship as a signal for its algorithm (as blogged about by my colleague Joel at last month’s Link Love conference – if you’re new to the concept of authorship markup, check out this Google blogpost to get up to speed).

125 billion

So much love in the world (aww); this is the number of friendships hosted by that scrappy lil’ start-up Facebook. Read more on this and other interesting FB numbers from Jeff Bullas’ Facebook facts and figures spreadsheet.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography