In this post, which is the first of a series, I will examine an element of online design which I believe to be of particular importance when attempting to create engagement with a user. For this post, I will discuss hover and active states of links and CTAs.

For readers who don’t really know what I’m babbling on about, a hover state is the state of a button upon rolling over it. The active state is when the button is pressed.

Luckily in my first job three years ago, I was taught to use hover states on all buttons, and later on, active states were forcefully implemented upon all preceding buttons on our web builds. I say lucky because it is an often overlooked element of building a website which had been drummed in to me like a 3mm bleed on a brochure from the absolute outset. With some websites, you get one agency designing it and one agency building it so an integral relationship is broken. Who was meant to design these button states?

The thing is, I can understand why they are sometimes forgotten. Obviously a lot of the time, the result you’ll see is an underline when hovering over a link but personally I don’t think it’s enough. Normally that means it is simply text in the first place without a line, in which case it is not absolutely obvious that it is a button. Buttons need to look like buttons.

Up until recently my rationale was merely to ‘make them look nice’. From a project point of view, that is a waste of time. Everyone wants things to look nice but if it doesn’t serve an end purpose, you don’t really have much of a leg to stand on to create the time needed to create such.

However, since being at Epiphany and learning quite a lot more about the SEO value of pieces, conversion has beamed as the practical reason for creating interactive, and dare I say, ‘responsive’ buttons. I find this highly ironic, given that most raved about ‘responsive’ sites don’t have well-responding buttons.

Hover states to me are as important as braille is to a blind person –  nobody has any time anymore and they need to know what they’re able to interact with. As purveyors of the web, we have to make absolutely sure a user instantly understands what is going on. An active state gives comfort to a user that something is happening. Too often you see users click a site and nothing appears to happen so they click it again. Unfortunately much to their peril, they’re actually making the process a whole lot longer than it should be whilst getting irritated at the website and ultimately, the brand.

Giving a clear active state, which implies it has been pressed, gives the user the assurance that they have done something. You know how it is when you’re on a laptop – sometimes you just don’t know if it’s done anything. With the snowballing effects we are now capable of executing with modern web technologies, I feel we have an opportunity to bring new and innovative ways of approaching active states because they seem a bit of a dying breed and I’m a little lost as to why. They are important.

These two combined create a much better environment for a user, to browse through content and enjoy the experience. They’re subtle, very subtle in fact. But I honestly believe they strongly contribute to both time spent on a website, and ultimately, conversion rates. Beauty can be a subtle thing, and this is one of the finest examples I can think of in the entirety of digital marketing.

FEATURE: Sites of the month

From this month onwards, my blog posts are going to include a little regular feature: my personal favourite pieces of digital work from the past month of viewing. This month, I would like to pay huge credit to three sites which took my breath away:

http://captaindash.com/

http://www.underarmour.com

http://annasafroncik.it/

Absolutely fantastic work. Enjoy!

Please leave your thoughts below or on Twitter - @WengersToyBus

With little previous connection to these platforms, the fashion industry is beginning to realise just how relevant they could become and as models use social media to boost their careers, industry experts are exploring ways to utilize the value of their follower base.

Having a household name has always been an advantageous resource to maintain supermodel status, although this was traditionally done through exposure in gossip columns and magazine paparazzi snaps. Today’s popularity and usage of social media enables people to put themselves out there and so the business and tech savvy models have begun creating brands for themselves through social platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. Name recognition increases a model’s value – those who become celebrities in their own right, as opposed to being the silent face of a label, have much more to offer in return for a new or extended contract.

Social media lets models really communicate with their audiences and expose their personalities; by reading a model’s blogs and feeds, fans can truly get to know the person behind the clothes. This is beneficial for fashion labels as the models can create extra buzz for the brands they represent, by simply dropping a tweet or posting a blog about a show.

As models post behind the scenes photos on their pages and tweet about their favourite clothes, fashion fans are essentially gaining entry to the back stage fashion world they could never have accessed before. Also by providing this insight to the hidden realms, models are cultivating huge follower bases from all over the world.

“I realized there was an audience interested in what I had to say, not just the images from my work,” said model Coco Rocha. Now 23, Rocha is facing increasing rivalry for work as younger models enter the scene, but her fan base of more than 200,000 Twitter followers and 66,000 Facebook friends has empowered and extended her modelling career. Rocha writes personal posts mixed in with some fashion focused ones to highlight the brands and magazines she’s working with.

The industry is adapting the way they select models to include consideration for this, Michael Flutie – a renowned agent and manager said that “If you have 10 beautiful girls, you have to narrow it down somehow and you’re going to narrow it down to the four who can communicate really well digitally.”

Social media profiles are exposing models for who they are and the lives they lead off the runway, it is a way for chatty, likable personalities to shine through – altering the traditional method of choosing models purely by who is most photogenic. Rocha said “When I started, models were booked only for their cheekbones. Now I think I get bookings because people will say they respect me, or we stand for the same things, or they think what I have to say is interesting. It’s better to hear that than just, `You have gorgeous cheekbone structure.’”

On Twitter, at the time of this post, @cocorocha has 260,493 followers, nearly 40,000 on Facebook and just a brief look at these pages demonstrates how they can easily engage fans in fashion trends, news, reviews and even get them involved in ‘fantasy fashion’ where followers share their ideal fashion team.

For a more in-depth look at the fashion sector, click here for our sector report.

Please leave your thoughts below or on Twitter – @Heather64

As part of the changes, the calculations of impression share data will now only update once per day and unfortunately for those who live by GMT or similar, these once per day updates take place at noon Pacific Time (GMT-8). So that means our campaigns will not show impression share data for yesterday until 8pm today. This is probably too late to make bid or budget changes based on this info.

OK so to get an estimate, which is sensible, I would suggest that there are two things we need.

Firstly, we need some sort of model which represents a ‘typical’ distribution of impressions throughout the day for the account. To do this, grab some top level impressions’ data for your account and segment this by hour of the day. Then find the percentage of impressions each hour that contributes to the daily total. We should also add the cumulative total percentage for reasons which will become apparent later in the calculation.

Bear this in mind: the longer the date range is that you pull this data from, the more accurate model you are likely to get. However, you should ensure this data is ‘typical’ in that it was with the same budget and has no changes which would affect impressions, such as major keyword changes.

Next we need to collect the impression data for the day that you are trying to calculate, remember to segment by hour of day. Now, if we have significant lost impression share, the later rows may be blank. Let’s compare:

So we can see that the budget ran out a little after 10pm. For the calculation, I’m going to assume it ran out at 10pm and ignore the 1,699 impressions after this.

So to calculate, I’m going to sum the impressions received up to 10pm which is 105,094. Using our distribution model we can estimate that this relates to 91.5% of impressions we receive in a day and so, to calculate 100% of impressions, divide our total by 91.5 and multiply by 100.

(105,094 / 91.5) * 100 = 114,857

And finally, to get to get a lost impression percentage:

(114,857 – 105,094) / 114,857 = 8.5% lost impressions share.

There are a few things to bear in mind if you are going to do your own calculations this way:

• It will only work if your campaign delivery method is set to accelerate, and was set to accelerate for the duration from which you take your impressions model data.

• The validity of any result is very dependent on the quality of your impression distribution data.

• If you have campaigns that perform differently, produce a different model for each campaign.

• If you have days of the week which perform differently, produce different models for each day.

Have the changes to the impression share data affected your campaigns? Leave a comment to let me know.

Most email clients will also disable images on a HTML email until the user clicks to allow them. This can make image heavy emails not as effective as they could be, should the user never allow the images to be displayed.

I’m not sure if they were the first to think of this, but Pizza Express came up with a clever idea in their emails for when they are displayed without images. Using some precisely sized table cells with background colours set, they show a ‘pixel’ representation of how the non-loaded image looks. The image is very precisely sliced and when the user allows images, the relevant part is then loaded into the correct table cell.

I recently came across an online tool for converting pixel art into HTML on CSS-Tricks which inspired me to have a go myself. So I drew myself a version of Capcom’s Megaman, where each pixel is a separate table cell with a background colour set on it.

So if I happened to be sending out a HTML email about Megaman, I could paste my (giant) table code into it and all my receivers would be able to see my ‘image’ without having images displayed!

What do you think of my table below?

Leave your comments below or on Twitter - @_davesellers

Now it appears I may hear even more about her than normal! Not content with her millions of Twitter followers, Lady Gaga has branched out further into the online world by launching a new social network site called littlemonsters.com. This is the first venture of Backplane (the company co-founded by Gaga’s manager). Reports so far say that the site looks similar to Pinterest and feels like Reddit. However this is currently invite only (while in BETA) so not currently in the public domain.

What I do know is that it will be used to share Gaga-related content, allowing her fans who are known as ‘little monsters’ to create videos, share posts and highlight what they are interested in!

Obviously this is exciting news for Gaga fans and equally as exciting for Backplane. They claim this could one day change the world and be bigger than Twitter and Facebook – quite a bold statement!

Matt Michelsen, CEO and co-founder of Backplane told Mashable:

“Backplane is about bringing together communities and Gaga’s community just so happens to be the community we’re using to learn about proper functionality. We think we can really change the world”.

Regardless of whether I’m a fan, I’m quite interested to see what the site can do and if one day it could be a big player in the social media arena. Just waiting for my log-in now . . . .

Will you use Lady Gaga’s social network site? Let me know your thoughts below! - @Goodster31

About nine months ago, one of my friends told me about ‘Pinterest’ – a new visual social book marking site that lets you collect, share and organise the images you like on the web. Being a graphic designer, Pinterest looked like the perfect solution to my overfilling, unorganised ‘inspiration’ folder on my desktop – so I signed up and was instantly hooked, preaching about Pinterest to all my friends and colleagues.

Pinterest’s mission statement is to ‘connect everyone in the world through shared tastes and the things they find interesting’. Launched in March 2010, Pinterest was a niche, spread mainly via word of mouth. However, it is only in the last four months that it has really started to gather momentum. During September to December 2011, unique visitors to the site grew by 400%. In January 2012, Pinterest launched an app to integrate into the new Facebook timeline. Now, Pintrest has more than 7 million registered users and counting, and is one of the top 10 social networking sites.

How does it work? Currently Pinterest is invitation only, but you can request an invite or an existing users can send you an invite. Once signed up, the world is your oyster. You have the option of creating as many different ‘boards’ as you like. For example, one of my boards is called ‘inspiration for me’ which is where I collect all my design inspiration. Then by installing a ‘pin it’ button into your browser bookmark bar you can ‘pin’ any image from the web, upload your own, and assign it to any board you have created. Each ‘pin’ added links back to the original site it came from allowing other users to discover where the pin originated. This has seen Pinterest driving more traffic to company websites and blogs than You Tube, Linkedin and Google + combined. It ranks number five in the list of social media websites driving referral traffic, beating Reddit and MySpace for percentage of total referral traffic in January 2012  just falling short behind Twitter.*

*(according to a Shareaholic study)

What is so great about Pinterest? It’s fun, visual and it looks good. Gone are the days of storing JPEGs on your desktop and hyperlinks in a list or bookmarks bar/folder. The key to Pinterest is that it’s easy.  It’s easy to organise images and it’s easy to share, appreciate and ‘re-pin’ images. It’s also easy to search for images and inspiration within other users’ pin boards, allowing you to discover new things and gain inspiration within this creative community.

With the web and social sites becoming more visual over time, it’s easy to see how Pinterest appeals. Its popularity is growing very rapidly. I think it will soon become apparent what kind of role Pintrest will play in the social media playground and how brands (particularly retailers) will be able to interact and capitalise on the platform and its users. Watch this space!

Happy Pinning!
(If you need an invite get in touch.)
@rosey_lee

I’ve talked a lot before about symbiosis between journalist and PR, and this is precisely where that relationship can come to the fore.

By championing your brand as a resource for expert comment in any given field, you’re opening up a whole new playing field for PR opportunities.

If a journalist knows that he or she can actively approach someone from your brand for comment or information, then by consequence you can benefit from totally organic links and mentions.

Relationships with media outlets have to be built over time. Above all, any approach must be trustworthy and transparent – there can be no smoke and mirrors.

When developing relationships with journalists, it’s important to ask yourself:

• What value can my organisation bring to a news article?
• In which areas can I offer genuine expert opinion?
• Does my organisation conduct research or hold any facts and figures that are unbiased and genuinely representative?
• Will my contribution come across as a sales pitch?
• How can I render my contribution to be as impartial and objective as possible?

It’s often wise to offer comment relating to subject areas that are a step removed from your line of business. This is to avoid putting across facts or figures directly linked to your business objectives, which may be immediately dismissed by a journalist.

What are your top tips for developing a brand as a go-to resource? Tweet your thoughts @amybyard

Their new Facebook app called ‘The Serenade’ enables users to create personalised songs to invite someone on a date. Simply go to their Facebook app and select who you want to serenade, why you fancy them, what you would like to do on the date, and what makes you so special. Then you can preview your customised video and post it on your friend’s wall.

This is a truly global campaign, it is available in 20 languages and there are 640 different combinations you can create. All the songs are performed by Paul “Kiss” Kissaun, the same artist and band featured in Heinekens film “The Date”.

Yesterday Heineken hosted an eight hour YouTube event called ‘Serenade Live’, where people from around the world had the chance to serenade their potential valentines live online to try and get a date.

So with only four clicks between you and your valentine, what’s stopping you?

https://apps.facebook.com/heinekenserenade/

Will you be using the app? Let me know below or on Twitter - @rlparker81

Introduced in 2010, the Square app was invented by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and is available for iOS and Android. In addition to the added convenience, this application will prove extremely useful for Romney as he continues on the campaign trail, mingles with the retired and kisses babies for further endorsement. On the other side of the fence, President Obama and his re-election team have also signed on to the Square app with the hope of creating a unique Obama Square app. This technology will allow both campaigns to target fundraisers and unofficial volunteers who, after purchasing the square card reader at the local Best Buy for only $10 (just over £6), can canvas door-to-door. Although as an added spiff, the Obama team has announced recently that they will be providing Square readers to campaign offices across the US.

It has been estimated that there are now 313 million people living in the US, according to the US census estimates for the end of last year. In 2008, just under half of the current population voted in the election. With recent reports that more than 90% of Americans use mobile phones for purchases, the introduction of an app for fundraising is definitely a step in the right direction. Ironically, US politicians, both at a national and local level, have been rather slow to embrace social media compared to their counterparts across the pond in the UK. However, Obama will always be known in history as the first presidential nominee to successfully utilise social media during his campaign. Through the use of an iPhone app, YouTube chats and the latest Google+ video conference, President Obama has been very effective reaching the people of America and voters will probably recognise this in 2012. Romney might have previous experience as a Republican hopeful, but he has much to learn from Obama in terms of engagement.

Having said that, both Romney and Obama will need to adjust their mentalities and strategies to include mobile users, to ensure they reach all levels of the technology-advanced. According to a MSNBC article, over the Christmas season, online shopping saw a staggering increase of 16.4% from 2010. The report from IBM also highlighted the increase of purchases on smartphones and tablets. For 2011, analysts have found that mobile purchases on these two items have increased by more than 80% from last year – m-commerce reached an unbelievable $5.3 billion!

Not many with their eye on the Oval Office seat can afford to miss out on the billion dollar pie (except perhaps Mitt Romney who earned more than $20 million in 2011). The truth is m-commerce should be on the agenda of most brands and companies, or at least those who want to reach consumers and accurately gauge multi-channel behaviour.

While Romney the man has won the votes of those in Florida and other states across the US, Romney the brand has work to do before August, when the Republican nominee is announced, if he has any chance of beating Obama (who has a distinct advantage as the incumbent) and any hope of winning over the millions who will probably vote via mobile.

How will the Square app play a part in the future of m-commerce? Let me know below or on Twitter – @YorkshireTexan

(Photos: Politico and PC Mag)

Fortunately, as is almost always the case with these things, clever people have worked hard to come up with better ways and all I had to do was use what they’ve created. I used three tools to achieve something approaching the debugging power of Visual Studio:

• Xdebug– This is an extension to PHP which hooks into the code and provides all the debugging data
• Easy Xdebug – A Firefox extension to control debugging data from the browser
• Eclipse PDT – A fully featured IDE for PHP development

The first step is to install Xdebug – there are instructions for doing this on the Xdebug website. The simplest way is probably to install using PECL but I did it by building the source. The Xdebug website provides a configuration tool which allows you to paste in the output from a phpinfo() call on your server and it will determine the correct download and configuration for your system. Once it is installed, you just need to enable it in php.ini, make a few configuration changes, and  it should be good to go.

My php.ini section looks like this:

[Xdebug]

zend_extension = /usr/lib/php/modules/xdebug.so

xdebug.remote_enable=true

xdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1

xdebug.remote_port=9000

xdebug.remote_handler=dbgp

xdebug.profiler_enable=1

xdebug.profiler_output_dir=”/home/dan/tmp”

xdebug.idekey=ECLIPSE_DBGP

xdebug.remote_connect_back=1

Other than the paths, these settings should do for most systems. The xdebug.remote_host setting is the address of the machine where the debugger will be running (in this case it will be the Eclipse IDE). It’s only important if you are debugging on a single remote machine. In my case I need to be able to debug on multiple machines (PHP runs on a shared dev server). Here the remote_host setting is unimportant but we need remote_connect_back enabled. This means when a remote machine receives the debug info, it responds by connecting back and the server allows this.

The idekey setting refers to the debugger which will be listening for debug data. We’re using Eclipse, so the setting is ECLIPSE_DBGP.

That should be enough to get Xdebug up and running. The next thing to do is to install the Easy Xdebug Firefox extension to allow it to be controlled. This should simply be a case of adding the extension. There is one configurable option, to specify the Xdebug.idekey (see above) but it didn’t work when I tried changing it and it doesn’t seem to prevent it from working.

The final stage is to install Eclipse PDT. This is a free, fully featured IDE for PHP development (Eclipse itself is for Java but PDT is the PHP extension). An alternative is Netbeans, and there are plenty of online tutorials for setting that up with Xdebug too.

Eclipse has loads of configurations and settings, and I won’t go into any of that here as there isn’t time, but we need to set a couple of options to get debugging working.

To configure Eclipse for debugging, go to the Preferences menu, expand the PHP section and click on Debug.

The first thing to set up is the debugger. There is a drop-down for selecting “PHP Debugguer”. Make sure it is set to XDebug (it might be set to Zend Debugger), then click Configure to the right. Again, select XDebug and press the Configure button. Important things to do here are to make sure the port matches the one specified in the XDebug config (if you didn’t change it, it should be 9000 by default) and to make sure that “accept remote session (JIT)” is set to “any” or “prompt” to allow XDebug to make a connection.

Finally, you’ll need to set up your server under “PHP Servers”. Add a server and fill in the name, base URL and local path to your code.

This should be enough to get basic debugging up and running. There are some more advanced things that can be done with configuring PHP servers etc., but this should be enough to start with.

To begin debugging, navigate to your project in Firefox and click on the icon for Easy XDebug in the corner (it’s a little green bug with a green arrow on it). The green arrow changes to a red square to indicate debugging has been enabled.

By default there should be a breakpoint enabled on the first line of the code (this can be switched off in the project settings) so if you now pull the page in Firefox, the debugger should swing into action.

If you selected “prompt” for the “Accept remote session (JIT)” setting (see above), you will be prompted to accept the remote debugging session. Press yes to accept it. Now depending on whether or not the debugger has managed to find the correct source file, you may be prompted to select it from a list (the “Path Mapping” options should allow you to set this up so it always knows but it seems temperamental and won’t work for me on a remote server.) Once the source has been located it should focus on the breakpoint where execution has stopped and will allow you to step into/out/over lines of code and inspect/modify the state of variables.

This setup isn’t quite as polished as you get working with .NET and Visual Studio, but it’s a huge improvement on the “standard” php debugging tools (i.e. the echo function). It’s sometimes a little flaky and doesn’t offer the ability to run inline commands on an interactive console or to move the execution pointer around as Visual Studio will (not that I’ve found anyway), but overall it’s made debugging PHP a much easier, quicker and more pleasant experience.

Has anyone else had tried this? Please let me know below or on Twitter - @dan_d_martin

For example, if I’m on the train reading my Twitter stream, and I see an interesting link, I’ll often favourite the tweet to read later. My phone isn’t the ideal device to read an article and poor reception can mean it takes ages to load.

Another example: if you take a picture on Instagram but only want to post it to Flickr rather than Facebook. Whilst the iPhone app does have those options, you might want to filter them based on a hashtag in your comments, or if they are taken at a certain time.

This is where ifttt.com steps in. Short for “If This Then That”, it allows you to connect social networks, bookmarking sites, geotagging services, etc. If you do one thing then the website will do something else.

The possibilities are endless, although luckily there are already a lot of suggestions from users as to the things you can do.

So in my first example, I have set up ifttt.com to automatically search my favourited tweets for a URL, then add that URL to my reading list on Readability, a bookmarking and article-reading network.

ifttt.com allows users to create recipes from the 40 or so social networks. They can be based on RSS feeds, timed events, or when you get an email from a certain person. If you want a way to automatically update your Linkedin status every Monday morning, you can do it. When you check in on Foursquare with a photo, you can send a photo post to your Tumblr blog. How about adding an article to your ‘Read Later’ list in Readability when you star an item in Google Reader? No problem.

My favourite though is the SMS to Phone Call recipe. Do you need to escape a dull meeting or boring colleague? Text ifttt.com with an SMS tagged with #ifttt and it will call you back, creating the perfect opportunity to make your excuses and leave.

Have you used ifttt.com? What’s your favourite recipe? Let me know on Twitter @chris5marsh

There is a point to my waffle. I have been forced to use my iPhone more and more for searching online. I wouldn’t say I’m a late adopter, just that I haven’t ever been that impressed by brands’ mobile sites when I have used them. So when looking for a large toy storage box the other day, I expected to visit the usual suspects for this: Argos, Mothercare, Ikea and Toys R Us.

However when I searched online for “toy storage box with seat”, I found plenty of companies I had never heard of. My experience of their mobile sites was not great as they didn’t seem to have taken into account the needs of mobile users very well. Sites didn’t render properly, drop down menus didn’t work as expected, page layouts were messy and buttons overlaid text links which made it impossible to select the option you wanted next.

So I defaulted to the brands I have already mentioned, and I’m sorry to say that my experience wasn’t much better.

Ikea couldn’t tell me if the item I wanted was in stock anywhere in the country. The option to check stock in your local store didn’t work at all due to the drop down not loading at all, making it impossible to work out whether my local store stocked the item I wanted.

Argos offered a very good mobile version of their site, only to tell me that the item I wanted had to be bought via the full site. Upon directing me to the right page on the full site, the postcode lookup for delivery appeared in a pop up which was not centrally in the mobile browser, but way down to the left. It took me minutes to find what I needed and I only managed to find this by zooming out.

The Toys R Us site was impossible to find my way around. The drop down navigations were very difficult to operate on a mobile, and I gave up after about 20 seconds of trying.

As for Mothercare, they have really tried to optimise their mobile experience by building a mobile-only site. Now this renders fine and works pretty well but there is one major drawback. They only have a small range of the products they stock on their mobile site, and there is no link to go to the full site to see the larger range.

I finally parted my money with Argos, purely due to the fact that it was easier to buy the item I wanted from them.

So there is a lot retailers need to do to close this gap. As Search Engine Land reported in January, 2011 was the year where shopping via mobiles really grew. Bearing in mind that 86% of people use a mobile while watching TV, retailers need to really capitalise on this.

What are your thoughts on mobile-friendly sites? - @sbaker81

(Photo: Econsultancy)

The graphics are now pretty astonishing, even for the free games, and are catching up with high gameplay standards. Much like Sony’s oft-promoted and overlooked Xperia – which made a name for itself with a game-specific handset that ran PlayStation games – the iPhone, as well as its rivals, are now publishing games that were £40 on a console just a few years ago. One of these that’s now hitting the top downloads list is Grand Theft Auto III, which actually looks sharper and smoother, even if there are fewer cars (and associated processing demands). Naturally, the gameplay is just as good, even if you’re using limited touch-screen controls.

Obviously, the game that really made mobile gaming popular once more (RIP Snake) was Angry Birds. The simple yet entertainingly addictive game was introduced to me through popular reviews in April 2010 and it’s not been out of the top ten downloaded apps chart since then. Spawning countless merchandise lines and even a film deal with Rio to release a tie-in game (which was average – at least by Rovio standards), it made it big. Take a look at the huge £50 stuffed toys in HMV if you don’t believe me.

Still, a grand share of the cash made from that creation was through the 69p price tag. When you’ve got hundreds of millions of people downloading Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio, you’ve got a real income right there. Merchandise was easy to create, given the unique and instantly-recognisable range of birds and pigs, even if they look like a Poundstretcher Pokémon brand.

Now, game publishers have to go a different route to grab your money. Take two more recent popular releases: Temple Run and Tiny Tower. Both are excellent games in their own right: the first is a simple linear mad dash using simple commands, while the other is an 8-bit style simulator akin to Theme Park or The Sims. However, if you want to make real headway and unlock the bonuses, you need to earn your keep and collect in-game credits. Particularly with Tiny Tower, there’s a push to get you buying this currency with real money, ranging from a few quid to £20+.

If you’re a serious gamer, this is sneered at. If you’re to get the credit for what you do – much in the same fashion as Xbox Live’s Achievements system or the slightly less-appealing PlayStation 3 Trophies spin-off – you put in the work yourself. Simply buying your way to the top doesn’t make it an enjoyable experience.

But publishers aren’t going for this approach of potential players. All you need is a little frustration, impatience or even just a couple of drinks to make the investment. The one thing that should never be forgotten is that Apple users utilising the App Store on their iPhones already have financial details associated with their account, meaning that it’s a case of one-touch buying as soon as you’ve confirmed your password. A smart financial move, if ever there was one.

It’s a slippery slope, particularly when most games are 69p and bonus in-game additions are often a similar cost. Even Angry Birds can’t be excused – it brought in the Mighty Eagle download, where you can basically do every level again to achieve 100 per cent destruction on every stage. I should know, because I was suckered in to buying it for the original. It’s actually pretty good, truth be told.

Others, however, aren’t. Not that people know, of course – you often only have a rough idea of what you’re letting yourself in for when you spend even £3. For instance, I once bought Covent Garden Wild Mushroom soup for £2 and I’ve regretted it ever since. It’s awful. Damn my hindsight.

Nonetheless, publishers can thrust their wares hard, fast and relentlessly in your face. Often, it’s only a slightly misplaced touch that has you on the “Get More Coins!” screen instead of “Retry”. From there, it’s just one moment of ultimately human weakness that will have you succumb to the delights of 1,000 Tiny Tower Bux or 200,000 coins on Temple Run. Theme Park’s re-release tried to sell add-ons to such a terrible degree that it’s got across-the-board one-star reviews – maybe the peer-reviewed App Store system works well, to some degree.

Still, if you take these options, the game sadly stops becoming enjoyable – it’s simply a process. With 1,000 Bux on Tiny Tower, you can have every shop stocked and making you money to build dozens of floors; you’re not earning them. I want that high score on Temple Run that earns me a comparatively meagre 1,500 coins – at least I did it myself.

Maybe games want to keep you bad at gaming. At least this way, publishers can keep getting you with shortcut deals every time. Who am I to judge? I’m just another mobile gamer that still buys into these offers, however small-yet-tempting they are.

What’s the worst in-game deal you’ve bought into? Do any mobile games you’ve played stand out as swindlers?

-@matthewgardner

Website testing regularly causes tracking issues and contained below are three basic checks as soon as any new test goes live:

(Assuming website test went live on = www.mywebsite.co.uk/test)

1. Is your site listed under the referrals section within analytics?

Yes – Since Implementing The Test

If a significant portion of your traffic is listed under the referrals section, it is highly likely that there is an issue with your tracking.

Yes – Including A Time Period Previous To Test Implementation

Your tracking has probably had issues for a while, and this should definitely be investigated further. At a guess, likely to be a result of subdomain/cross domain tracking issues or a combination of code placement and site speed.

No

Good, no issues so far.

2. Have you seen a sudden spike in Organic Traffic, Direct Traffic (or in fact, any traffic source) that coincides with the test?

Yes – Since Implementing The Test

It is likely that the source has been lost for an alternative traffic source such as paid search. Try navigating to the page that contains the test.

Now there are two main ways to see both test variations, use two separate browsers, navigate to the test page, and keep clearing cookies on one of them until you have a browser set to each page (an uncouth but still effective approach).

Google Analytics Specific

(The principal still applies to other tracking solutions)

Force analytics to show you a version by the addition of variables, add the following onto your URL and change the value after preview to view different versions:

# utmxid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX;utmxpreview=1

To obtain your utmxid for website optimiser, preview your experiment and take the id from the preview URL. More details can be found here:

http://support.google.com/websiteoptimizer/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=63841

e.g.

www.mywebsite.co.uk/test#utmxid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX;utmxpreview=1

This should then allow you to choose which variation you are shown.

Now try adding ‘?utm_source=TEST’ into the URL, after being re-directed by the test, does the utmx cookie still contain TEST as the source value?

If not, it is likely the analytics cookie has not been set before the re-direct occurred, thus losing the original source. You need to ensure that the cookies are set before the re-direct takes place.

No

Perform the test above anyway, just in case a random traffic surge masks any spike you may have noticed (unlikely you say, at least until it happens to you).

1. Appear to have a small spike yet cannot find an issue?

Segment your traffic. If a specific traffic segment is causing the spike it is likely that that particular segment has an issue. It may be that your site breaks for all mobile traffic, does not work in IE, Chrome, Firefox or even the tracking above could be breaking on a single segment. Segmentation should help you narrow down any analytics problem to the source, not just for website testing.

Any questions or comments? Please leave them below or on Twitter -@JamesMHolding

Just because your overall cost per sale is £6, it doesn’t necessarily follow that every sale you make is profitable. Consider for example, your brand name. Chances are, the cost per click on your name is much lower than for the rest of your account, and there’s a good chance that the conversion rate is higher as well. So what? Consider the impact of splitting this data out:

Your performance looks good – you’ve made £5000 (from 500 sales making £10 each) and only paid £3000, so you’re £2000 in profit. But what happens if you split it into brand and non-brand?

Interesting… The sales via your brand name have cost £2 each, but your non-brand sales have been costing £10 each. It appears that non-brand conversions aren’t profitable at all!

However, it gets worse. Overall, your non-brand sales may be breaking even, but if you’ve ever tried to generate more sales by increasing your budget, you’ll know that this is an over-simplification.

Any time that you increase your bids to generate additional sales, your cost per conversion will increase sharply. This is because you will not just be paying more for the incremental clicks that you pick up, you’ll also be paying more for the clicks that you were already getting. Conversely, reducing your bids will reduce your CPA disproportionately. Consider the ‘Other’ campaign above. What would happen if you were to reduce the cost per click to £0.20 (from £0.25)? It’s impossible to tell for certain (since you don’t know whether you’ll drop one place or three, or what impact this will have on your click through rate), but for the sake of argument, we’ll say that clicks also fall by 20%, and that conversion rate doesn’t change.

Your CPA has also dropped by 20% (obviously, since your conversion rate hasn’t changed, and your CPC has dropped by 20%), but if you look at the figures more closely, there’s a bit more to it than that.

By paying £0.25 per click instead of £0.20, you’ve increased your click spend by £900. But if you look at the sales volumes, you’ve only got 50 more. The additional sales have cost you £18 each – and they are only worth £10!

This is the basis of sweet-spot analysis – one way to identify the most profitable position is to estimate the cost per click at which the incremental cost per sale becomes unprofitable.

In fact, extending this analysis further, you’d probably want to reduce your bids to just 12.5p – halving them:

By reducing your bids by half, you’re now making £625 in profit on this campaign (125 x £5), but even then, you’d be missing a trick.

The performance of the different Ad Groups within the campaign may be completely different, so in the same way that your overall figures masked the fact that brand was propping up non-brand, some Ad Groups may be masking the underperformance of other Ad Groups. Continuing the example from above, suppose that having reduced the cost per click to 12.5p as above, you see that your two Ad Groups are performing as follows:

Neither of these bids is optimal – increasing bids on Ad Group 1, and reducing them on Ad Group 2 will result in higher profits on both:

Theoretically, you could extend this analysis even further, down to keywords, though I would argue that if the performance of keywords in the same Ad Group varies, why are they in the same Ad Group (surely the fact that their conversion rates are different should indicate that the people searching are different, and may respond to different adverts).

There are a number of flaws with this type of analysis. Firstly, we haven’t taken into account the average order value. If Ad Group 2 had a much higher AOV than Ad Group 1, then you’d want to pay more per conversion. If this data is available, then you should be using it to calculate the profit for different levels of bids, rather than the overall figure.

Secondly, there’s no way to predict accurately the impact on clicks of increasing or reducing your bids. Since this is the case, I would advise against making dramatic changes to your bids – changing them slowly over a period of time will allow you to assess the impact on clicks with more confidence, and reduce the risks inherent in basing your bids on estimates.

Another concern is the conversion rate. Most of the time, the conversion rate isn’t affected that much by the position in the search results (something Hal Varian at Google acknowledged in 2009), but there are cases when the conversion rate can be affected significantly. In these cases, the effect of bid adjustments cannot be estimated with the same degree of confidence, and you should rely on empirical data far more.

However, perhaps the biggest assumption in this analysis was that your brand conversions weren’t caused by non-brand searches initially. People searching for you by name must have been led to your site by something, and whilst some may be via word-of-mouth or other advertising, much of it may be people that have visited your site previously via a non-brand search, and are returning to make a purchase. Clearly, these sales are at least partially (almost entirely) due to the non-brand clicks, and excluding their value from non-brand understates the true value of these clicks.

On this last point, the solution is multi-touchpoint conversion attribution. By assigning part of the value of the sale to the first visit, and part to each subsequent visit, you’ll get a much truer idea of how your Adwords campaigns are performing.

The two points to take away from this blog are these:

• Don’t rely on the overall performance of your account. Look at the performance of the individual Ad Groups and campaigns (particularly non-brand campaigns or Ad Groups). If you aren’t being given this information by your marketing team or agency, request it.

• Don’t be distracted by the total cost per sale – consider how much the incremental sales have been costing. Could you make more money with a higher or lower bid?

• Use conversion attribution to understand the true value of your PPC campaigns (and the rest of your marketing), and attribute your sales appropriately. This data is now available in Google Analytics, so your marketing team or agency should be able to analyse it for you easily.

Please share your thoughts below – @CustardMite

We’re all bombarded with messages and advertising, and it’s hard to get your message to stick. It’s well documented that marketers need to use even more sophisticated ways of reaching their target audience. Some commentators explain that tomorrow’s successful marketers are going to be data analysts, finding patterns in terabytes of data to make sure that they’re targeting the right audience with the right messages at the right time.

The whole point of the online world is that people find communities of people who are interested in the same things as them (folding picture of Ross Kemp or zombie crochet). People follow other people who they want to hear from, people that they trust to be entertaining, honest and interesting. So when your favourite celebrity seems to change their personality, and then you find out that someone has paid them to do it, you could be forgiven for feeling lied to. And that’s the trap that social advertisers need to avoid. It’s far too easy to make the same mistakes as marketers have traditionally made in the offline world – bombarding people with irrelevant, annoying, interrupting noise.

The background to all of this is a PR stunt in which celebrities including Ian Botham, Amir Khan, Rio Ferdinand, Cher Lloyd and Katie Price were paid to tweet on unfamiliar issues (Ferdinand on knitting and Price on global politics) before eating a Snickers and returning to ‘normal’. The campaign got a reaction from people for many reasons: including commentators saying that the tweets suggested that eating Snickers turns you into an idiot. But the fierce heat might be yet to come, with the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) investigating undeclared celebrity endorsements and Office of Fair Trading (OFT) expressing concern over the matter. Consumer protection regulations launched in 2008 mean that the OFT can seek a court order, potentially leading to a criminal prosecution and an unlimited fine if celebrities aren’t clear to their audience when they are being  paid to promote products in the form of advertising. It might be the first Twitter campaign to be banned by the ASA who are launching an investigation that could set a new benchmark in social advertising.

It’s no surprise that many of these celebrities’ followers took exception to being advertised to on Twitter. As the number of social advertising channels is growing, with G+ bringing social recommendations into search results pages and Facebook launching sponsored stories, marketers need to remind themselves of the mistakes that have been made in offline advertising before launching themselves into people’s social worlds.

What are your thoughts? Do you feel like you are being bombarded by adverts on Twitter? @tominleeds

The policy continues down the road of Google’s long term goal where they see internet users never having to leave Google when using the internet.

This focus has been seen by many as Google operating a monopoly on the internet after Larry Page launched “Google Plus Your World” earlier in the month.

The new privacy policy incorporates all of Google’s services, including YouTube and Gmail, enabling Google to share data about a user’s behaviour across these different platforms.

This means for example, that if you’re emailing your car insurance provider about renewing your policy from your Gmail account, when you pop over to watch that clip of the funny cat on YouTube, you would be shown adverts for car insurance before the video played.

Or it may be that you are searching for things to do in New York when you visit next month and are presented with hints, tips and photos from recent trips your friends have made that have been posted by them on Google+.

Alternatively you may be navigating through rush hour traffic using Google Maps when Google Calendar suddenly informs you that unless you catch the 8:27am train, you’ll be late for that important board meeting.

According to Google, this collation of data across all of Google’s properties will create a much more relevant internet experience for the user by only showing them adverts and information that is related to their own personal needs, interests and preferences.

In terms of SEO, it is yet to be fully seen how this will impact. However in theory it could force new avenues to be explored.

Search Engine Optimisation could require a far more socially aware aspect to campaigns that interacts with specific user groups across all of Google’s products. Rather than concentrating almost solely on rankings within Google’s search engine, more focus may need to be put on Google+ and YouTube.

A far greater synergy between organic and paid activity may also need to be developed. Aside from just working together to establish maximum visibility within search, SEO and PPC could be required to combine in other ways to ensure that a user’s activity with one of Google’s products is effectively targeted over on another.

What are your thoughts? - @PG_Martin

The most recent change to the algorithm has been geared to punish websites with excessive “above the fold” advertising, sites that stack the top of the page with nothing but advertisements.  According to Google, the changes are to encourage websites to be more user-friendly, stating that “rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see that content right away.” This could result in Google dropping any ad-heavy sites from its search results.

Although Google states that this change will only affect about one in 100 searches, with only the sites deemed to “go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree,” it is still vitally important to consider how these changes could affect your SEO campaign.

The main thing that jumps out with these changes in mind is that banner advertising, although it may still be of some SEO benefit, it may not be as useful to your campaign as it once was and will definitely mean that you will have to be much more selective with which sites you choose to advertise on.  The changes will definitely lead to much more creative approaches to an SEO campaign, and creating interesting and original content that can be promoted by other sites, also ensuring your own website is constantly updated with fresh content, although this was important before will now be even more crucial. This will be important if you are to effectively drive traffic to your site. I wouldn’t heavily rely on banner ads or put any focus on acquiring links Google could deem as irrelevant to the site user, as theses will have less and less effect on your campaign.

If we have learned anything from this latest update from Google, it’s that it is now, more than ever, extremely important to keep up with the algorithm changes and adjust your SEO campaign accordingly.

What are your thoughts? – @gary_greenall

If you’re the ambitious sort and you’ve yet to celebrate the big three-oh (or even if you have), maybe you could take a few tips from these game-changing whippersnappers:

Alex Pareene - @pareene
Political blogger, 25

Alex Pareene cut his teeth writing characteristically ascerbic articles for Gawker.com, before being signed to Salon by former Observer staffer Steve Kornacki in April 2010. He’s now one of America’s most feared political commentators, recently setting his sights on the GOP presidential nominations.

Sean “Day[9]” Plott - @day9tv
E-sports promoter and additional pylon construction facilitator, 25

Known for his tireless dedication to e-sports broadcasting and daily videos on “being a better gamer”, Day[9] is the poster boy for those who want to bring competitive gaming out of the basement and into a multi-million dollar scene. His goofy casting style and sharp strategic insight make him a regular face at events like Dreamhack and Major League Gaming.

Tavi Gevinson - @TaviGevinson
Editor-in-chief of Rookie magazine, 15 

Tavi began blogging about fashion aged just 11, and has since appeared regularly in Teen Vogue, French Vogue and at numerous fashion events around the world. She was recently described by the Huffington Post as going from “amusing industry oddity … to a regular working insider” in the space of two years, and is credited with inspiring countless other young fashionistas to write.

Scott Kidder - @skidder
Editorial director of Gawker Media, 27

The man at the helm of one of the internet’s most-read blog families, including io9, Kotaku and Jezebel, Scott Kidder certainly knows a thing or two about the transition from print to new media – and in fact was responsible for a good deal of it, having formerly worked at ABC News and music blog aggregator The Hype Machine.

Nicholas “Comex” Allegra - @comex
iPhone jailbreaker turned Apple intern, 19

Creator of the JailBreakMe website, which allowed even the most non-technical of iPhone users to hack the device and install third-party software with a single gesture, Comex was last year taken on as one of Apple’s newest interns. The moral here is that if you bloody the nose of a multinational technology behemoth, maybe they’ll just give you a job.

Pete Cashmore - @petecashmore
CEO of Mashable, 26

Aberdeen-born Cashmore was one of the few Brits to make the list, but his impressive credentials make up for it – growing Mashable from a one-man operation in 2005 to one of the world’s most profitable blogs today, while maintaining a Twitter account that consistently ranks in the top 40 for popularity. Last year, the first Mashable Connect conference attracted 300 social media executives and entrepreneurs.

What do you think of the list? Please leave your comments below!

According to adCenter themselves, the enabling of this feature will both increase traffic volume, while at the same time bring more relevant traffic to your website. While both of these are perhaps admirable goals, it’s tricky to imagine how both could be accomplished at the same time. Given that by definition broad-match can match to a fairly wide range of search queries and should be used with caution as it is, broadening its scope so that it can match to an even wider spectrum of queries seems to make it more likely that only the first of these goals (increased volume) is going to be accomplished, and probably at the expanse of relevancy.

adCenter’s own advice – which seems mostly sensible given the potential increase in irrelevant traffic – is to closely monitor account performance in the coming weeks, and consider taking the following actions:

• Increase daily budget limits (this is the first recommendation they give, but of course should only be done if conversions increase along with the increase traffic);
• Run search query reports to discover new irrelevant queries and add new negative keywords to filter out where necessary;
• Adjust bids so that you’re bidding more for phrase and exact match keywords than for broad;
• Consider switching from broad match to a more restrictive match type, either phrase or exact.

If nothing else, keep a close eye on traffic and spend levels to see if you get any sudden spikes across your accounts in the next couple of weeks.

Has anybody else noticed any traffic spikes or increases in irrelevant search queries as a result of this change yet? Please share them below.

It is very useful to monitor these metrics, especially the Lost IS (Budget). This shows what percentage of impressions your campaign did not receive because of budget restrictions. If a campaign is showing a level of lost impressions, the advertiser can then decide what changes to make to improve performance, either reducing bids to get cheaper clicks for the same budget or increase the budget.

According to the Google Adwords blog, the impression share metrics will soon be available at ad group level. The Lost IS (Budget) will not be available as budgets are not set at ad group level, but we will be able to see the impression share, lost impression share due to rank and exact match impression share. These three column options will soon start to show in Adwords accounts at ad group level.

Exact Match IS and Impression share have been available through the dimensions tab previously but we will soon be able to see all three in the ad groups tab.

This will give us more insight into where a campaign is losing out on impressions. We will be able to see if a very strong performing ad group is missing out on impressions compared to other ad groups in the same campaign, and make adjustments to improve the performance.

Once this becomes available I will use it to see how I can make improvements to ad groups and will report back any findings in a future blog post! – @aimee_roberts

Like most tools, its usefulness depends on your ability to analyse the data presented to you and selecting the options most relevant to you or your business.

Let’s take the current trends in the UK over the last 7 days (if you’re not sure how to do this, simply leave the search term field blank and change the date range to ‘Last 7 days’ and hit search):

Why are these topics trending? Netflix as a result of their online movie streaming service launch in the UK, Georgia Salpa is a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother (I’ve had to Google some of these to find out I swear!), Beyonce Baby due to the birth of her first child Ivy Blue Carter… all very interesting I’m sure you’ll agree, but not massively relevant for most digital marketers.

Instead, here are some scenarios and uses of the tool that could be extremely useful.

Scenario 1 – The Electronics Store

Let’s say I own an online electronics store and I’m quite keen to gauge how interest for 3D TVs has been increasing in recent years.

If I wasn’t aware already, it’s clear that interest is on the increase year on year and I could expect this growth to continue going into 2012. If my range of 3D TVs on my site isn’t that comprehensive, it’s probably about time I started increasing it! Or from an SEO/PPC perspective, this is certainly an area I need to start investing some time and money in.

Scenario 2 – The Travel Agent

An online travel agent will clearly know that they operate in one of the most seasonal industries out there, but what can Google Insights for Search tell us more precisely?

We can clearly see a pretty standard seasonal pattern year on year here – a spike at the beginning of the year as people start to research holidays for the upcoming year. This tails off quite quickly, before a gradual increase each month leading to a spike once again around August time at the height of summer (or most likely, the summer holidays for kids). Clearly this is extremely useful data – digital marketers can use this to plan out their promotional activity across the year, whether that be in email, PPC, SEO or display advertising.

Scenario 3 – The Newspaper Publisher

The way people are reading their news is changing. The rise of smartphone and tablet devices has inevitably lead to greater visits ro online versions of newspapers and magazines. Can Google Insights for Search show this shift more precisely?

As you can see above, I’ve compared two trends in this example. The blue line represents searches for newspapers, whilst the red line signifies ‘newsnow’ which is an online news portal/search engine. Clearly you can see that as newspaper searches have been on the decline, news searches have been gradually increasing year on year. This data would certainly show the importance of investing heavily in optimising online newspaper sites or downloaded app versions for people to read on the move.

Scenario 4 – The DIY Store

You’re a huge stockist and always looking to increase your range to meet potential customer’s needs on your site. Furthermore, the ‘real estate’ space on your homepage is a key area of the site, so you’re always looking to display the key types of products users are looking for.

You adjust the filter on this occasion to ‘Product Search’ instead of ‘Web Search’ and instead of all categories, select ‘Home Improvement’ with it being most relevant to your business.

On this occasion, we don’t need to focus on the trend line graph, as it’s too general in this instance. Instead, if you focus on the top searches and rising searches in this category, it can provide a wealth of data.

All the products mentioned above indicate users’ needs at present, so it would be worthwhile to ensure these types of products are featured heavily on the site and in any promotional activity.

Are you running a PPC campaign and are you bidding on these types of product categories? If not, now would be an excellent time to start.

The scenarios above are just a few of the ways the Insights for Search tool can be incredibly helpful to business owners, digital marketers or online advertisers in a wide range of industries. I’d be really interested to hear about other ways you’ve used the tool for your business or clients, so feel free to drop me a comment below or tweet me @PeterGould83

With regards to how London plan to keep everything under wraps, they have decided to place tight restrictions over the how the 70,000+ volunteers can use social media. The guidelines put in place will stop the volunteers giving away their location including posting pictures, what they are doing or any news they hear about athletes. This is in contrast to the athletes themselves who will still be able to tweet and post Facebook updates.

Bolt improving his world record time at the 2009 World Championship (Photo: BBC)

These restrictions won’t be too much of a surprise as the last Olympics was held in Beijing in 2008, with China permanently blocking some of the largest social media sites including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

However some believe by restricting volunteers’ use of social media, it will lessen the hype surrounding the Olympics.

Do you think it is a mistake to implement these restrictions? Could it even be detrimental for London’s economy? -JamesWalker88

What is SOPA?

SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act – a proposed anti-piracy bill that is being debates in the US Congress . SOPA is separate to the existing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

SOPA has a lot of supporters because it’s trying to tackle copyright in general, which would not only cover the well-discussed film/music piracy issues, but also areas such as fake brands, fake medication, etc.

Some of its supporters include NBC Universal, Comcast, Ford, Pfizer, Xerox, Walmart, News Corp, Estee Lauder, Disney, Visa, Tiffany, Pearson Education and even 3M.

Why Stop SOPA?

There’s also a lot of big names who are against SOPA: Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bloomberg, Yahoo, AOL, Mozilla, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, OpenDNS, Internews, Reddit. There are also plenty of big-name founders: LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Netscape, Alexa, Craigslist, PayPal, Wikipedia and Blogger.

But why try and stop a bill that’s has a ‘good’ purpose – to stop piracy?

Many of the Stop SOPA supporters want to stop piracy, but feel that the bill it not well-defined enough. It’s too generalist and broad, and this means that it could have serious implications on not only the ‘freedom’ of the internet and creativity, but also increase the overheads of their services.

So it’s not that they’re against SOPA’s intent, but many feel that it’s too ill-defined for the bill to be passed in its current state.

Many of the supporters of ‘Stop SOPA’ are participating in today’s SOPA Blackout Day by either revoking access to their services, home pages, or simply creating a ‘black out’ effect on their sites to show their support.

How Can SOPA Affect SEO?

One of the primary objects of SOPA is to have copyright infringing sites ‘processed’ within five days of a request being made by the copyright holder. This means potentially removing the site form SERPs, access via ISPs, freezing any related payment accounts (e.g. PayPal) and generally removing them from the internet.

In a perfect world, right and wrong are black and white and people never make mistakes. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world.

Anyone who’s ever been removed from SERPs by accident knows that it’s not a quick process being ‘put back in’, and getting your SEO status back to where it was pre-ban can be extremely hard work.

What if your site (or a client’s site) is hacked and used to promote copyright infringing material? It can take a while to get Google’s malicious site flag removed sometimes. How long would it take to recover from the effects of a SOPA takedown in this instance?

Additionally, how long will a ban last? How will you appeal against a ban several years later if you need to use a banned (but now free to buy) domain?

What if in five year’s time we find that a huge proportion of URLs are banned under SOPA, reducing the available domain pool even further than it already is?

Additionally, the extra time and money spent on search engines such as Google on applying SOPA will potentially divert funds (and creativity) from improving existing products and developing new ones.

Can SOPA Help SEO?

On the other hand, SOPA could have the potential to directly help SEO by allowing the faster removing of competing (and illegal) sites.

For example, if your main client is a large brand such as Estee Lauder, or works in a small niche with a completely unique (copyrighted) product, SOPA would make it easier for you to ‘takedown’ sites competing in the same space that breach your clients copyright like a site selling illegal Estee Lauder fake products.

This could therefore lead to better visibility in SERPs for long-tail traffic, more visits and potentially more conversions (assuming that they would make the same purchase from the official copyright holder in lieu).

However, I’m not sure that the side effects of SOPA would create an overall benefit for SEO.

Whack-A-Mole

The article on SOPA by Search Engine Land makes an excellent comparison between trying to shut down copyright infringing domains with SOPA to a game of ‘whack-a-mole’ – simply because anyone who gets shut-down can quite easily set up under a new domain name.

Just like spammers can start spamming from other email accounts or freshly compromised SMTP servers, it’s very hard to stop.

Alternatives For SOPA

The ‘whack-a-mole’ comparison makes it obvious that trying to ‘shut down’ the sites by removing them from SERPs and ISP access probably isn’t the right way.

DMCA

DMCA already covers copyright breach, although it’s probably not as ‘fast’ as some people would like, but that’s more of a process/implementation issue. I’m sure DMCA could be amended to make it more effective.

Education

More needs to be done to educate internet users on the topic of copyright infringement. Not only in terms of “it’s bad to download music illegally” but also in the sense that many physical products that breach copyright may not even be close to the real thing. This is one of the main concerns with buying medication online – there’s an awful lot of fake medication on the market at the moment.

So there needs to be a stronger message that copyright infringement can have serious implications for consumers too, especially in relation to pharmaceutical products.

Banks – Payment Processing

More needs to be done to fight infringement from the root of the cause.  Various studies have been carried out to track down the specific banks and financial institutions that are favoured by scammers. In one study, the University of California spent several months infiltrating the three most popular fake Anti-Virus scams to try and determine which financial institutions are used to accept/process card payments – its’ quite a short list.

There’s a reason these banks are favoured. Maybe they’re not as stringent as others or easier to access?

Banks – Payment Charges

On the other side of the coin, Brian Krebs highlights that one of the world’s largest rogue pharmacies had a large proportion of its customers using specific banks. Specifically, 15% of payments were made by customers using a Bank of America card.

Could banks do more to educate their users and put more safeguards in place to check where payments are going?

Domain Authority & Banks

Could more be done to make the domain-purchasing process more secure? At the moment anyone can buy a domain, which is great, but should sites who accept payments (via PayPal or a bank) be put through more stringent security checks before they’re allowed to accept payments?

What are your thoughts? – @MeniroDev

It’s all happened so fast. I’ve drafted this blog five times now and I’m sure it’ll probably be out of date by the time it goes up on the day itself. Damn you, newsworthiness. So, if you’ve missed the coverage in any way, here’s a bit of a recap for you.

SOPA happens to be, in the eyes of the more liberal and/or creative online networks, the worst thing to potentially affect internet freedom in the history of the technological frontier. While I could try and simplify it, the basic gist of it is as follows:

“The bill would make unauthorised streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten pieces of music or movies within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.”

The somewhat floral writers of SOPA – mostly backed by the American conservative right – have claimed that the bill is “[t]o promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of US property, and for other purposes”. It carries over to international sites, too – advertisers, payment sites and ISPs would all be forbidden from interacting or working with infringers based overseas, such as those in the UK. SOPA even requires search engines to remove infringing websites from their search results (unlike PIPA, its not-so-offensive-yet-still-annoying cousin), which is a fantastically invasive law considering the money these online companies will make on behalf of the US government.

Ever since Reddit posted a blog to explain its stance, plenty of sites have jumped on board with it to join the crusade. It’s nicely fitting for a user-moderated community to lead the initial charge, though that’s the wonderful thing about the ultimate democracy that Reddit provides – it reflects a fantastic spread of personalities, even if it’s largely dominated by what Fox News calls “liberals” and “socialists” (British equivalent: relatively balanced people).

As a result of this announcement, organisations decided to demonstrate their anger – such as Cheezburger, TwitPic and even WordPress – in hope that Wikipedia would follow suit in a similar way to how it responded to the Italian government’s wiretapping bill, therefore delivering immediate success.

Still, while Reddit’s actions resulted in plenty of headlines, it’s safe to say that it relied on Wikipedia to turn the tables in the favour of internet users, as opposed to the companies and individuals represented by SOPA. Even the Cheezburger Network’s Ben Huh, who operates Fail Blog, Failbook, Graph Jam and Memebase, said that fans of his actions should “go ask Wikipedia to do it” too.

After weeks of arguments, the oft-discredited Obama administration finally weighed in with its thoughts. “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response,” it said, without mentioning the possible trial of Richard O’Dwyer, “we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” A smart move from the forward-thinking and liberal governance associated with Obama (at least overseas).

Then Wikipedia announced its intentions to blackout on January 18th. The anti-SOPA response was heightened to an almost critical mass, even though supporters of SOPA basically admitted that they would shelve it. Shelving is not good enough for online organisations that actively campaign for eradication, though, so the tribute to the ill-conceived copyright-destructive SOPA bill continued.

Rupert Murdoch, continuing his campaign to be The Most Loved Man in the Universe, decided he would speak in favour of SOPA and claim that Obama was “pandering to Silicon Valley paymasters”. Only then did the fight become one of good versus evil. Well, maybe. Many thought that it simply funnelled down into a matter of inevitable capitalism and consumer culture versus the rights of the individual.

In regards to this battle, wise words came from Zack Whittaker of ZDNet’s Between the Lines column, who rightly explained that the demonstration against the weakening SOPA bill could only be truly successful if Facebook and Google had a similar strike and cancel services in the US, or even worldwide – at least they would then be reflecting their own anger at proposals. “Both Facebook and Google have everything to lose should these bills pass through Congress,” he explained, after giving links to both companies that would send emails of anti-SOPA sentiments. “But users of the free and open web, as we live and breathe it, have the most to lose. Not only are services crucial to our everyday lives under threat, our freedom quite literally hangs in the balance.”

Maybe Zack is right. Perhaps people are sick of seeing the puppy dog eyes of Jimmy Wales with yet another demand for cash. Our cash! For a free service! The scoundrel. Maybe these individuals would only get on board to destroy SOPA if their only free search engine and social network of choice is taken down for a day. Woe betide those faced with such hardships from these much-used no-cost sites.

As these huge companies battle it out on our behalf – including myself, even though I’m British – it’s easy to let them do their thing. Does this symbolic blackout gesture really mean that much, or will policymakers simply find a way around it with a future bill?

As a person immersed in all things online, would you only get on board if the likes of Google and Facebook did, too?

-@matthewgardner

A useful technique in all retail environments is to try and look at your offering from a customer’s point of view. This is no different when considering your PPC campaigns. Your advert is an opportunity to not only say what you have to offer, but also attempt to remove any barriers between the customer and the sale.

So let’s run a scenario of when a message could help get the click and make the sale. We’ll go for the most obvious retail event on the calendar – Christmas. From the beginning of November, impressions for “Christmas Gift” searches begin to rise quite sharply. But what messages do we want to use and when, or put another way, what do users want to see and when?

Pre-December

It is highly probably that a lot of people will be searching for Christmas gifts early on in the research stage of the buying cycle. So perhaps the important message may be related to the range of the products you offer?

Early December

In December, users are more likely to have done some research and have a better idea about what they are looking for. I feel the price becomes more important as people have a better understanding of what they wish to spend and may have compared prices on other similar items.

Mid-December

The later in December we get, the more panic sets in and the important question becomes “will it be delivered in time?”

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of variations to consider when writing your adverts, and a lot of content to include in there which could prove useful. However, you do have limited space so the ability to think about the right message at the right time could really set you apart from your competitors.

There are many more events in the calendar which affect sales. How have you adapted? Please leave a comment! -@Nastino

For those of you that don’t know about the story, find out more here.

Whilst the public and the paparazzi are in a frenzy to get hold of pictures of Blue Ivy Carter, the search marketing experts amongst us see this as an opportunity.

The search volumes around terms such as ‘Beyoncé’s baby pictures’ are huge at the moment. A quick search on Facebook for ‘Blue Ivy Carter’ confirms there are already way more groups then I can fit into a screenshot:

Facebook advertisers that are up to date with the latest news trends can potentially exploit the huge interest to expand their current campaigns. Here’s how:

1. Keep an eye on a news feed, scanning it regularly for potential stories big enough to have an impact on your Facebook campaign.

2. Work out if your target market corresponds to the latest search trend. For example, people looking for stories on Antony Worral Thompson stealing some cheese might not fall into one particular category. We can be fairly certain that people searching for pictures of Blue Ivy Carter are female and interested in both pop music and celebrities.

3. Armed with this knowledge, you can expand your Facebook target demographic to include people with an interest in the news story. E.g. if you were selling a subscription to a celebrity magazine, the Blue Ivy Carter story would be perfect.

4. Test performance- not every story will add huge volumes to your campaign like the Blue Ivy Carter one will, but testing out each opportunity is the best way to ensure your campaign never goes stale.

N. B.

This blog post is a perfect example of the power of current trends, with such huge search volumes around “Beyonce” terms; this blog post received roughly 10x more traffic than other posts published in January.

- @matt_buckley

Your blog probably isn’t as big as Jezebel or Gizmodo, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t strive for the same great content and get a heap of links out of it. It’s not going to be a quick fix, but with this handy guide you should see a rise in links month on month.

Publish fresh news as it happens

Following news in your niche is something that you’re probably already doing, but it’s likely you’re getting a lot of it second-hand from other blogs. If you want people to link to you, you’re going to have to leap onto news as soon as it’s published. Set up Google Alerts so that it updates you as and when a story is released so you can act as soon as possible. Sign up to newsletters and RSS feeds of industry leaders in your field and consider signing up to press release distribution channels to be the first to know about new developments.

Put a spin on recent news

If you don’t catch the latest news, then don’t worry, you can still get some great links from putting your own personal spin on developments. Consider writing a ‘top x things you need to know about [news subject]’. Constructing news, especially if it’s complex, into an easy-to-digest format can make people link to your post as an alternative to the original source of the story. You can also post your own opinion on the matter, but note that a controversial opinion is one that’s more likely to be linked to than if you go with popular opinion.

Install social media counters

Most bloggers have social media buttons already installed, but adding a counter to each button will help you track your most shared posts, giving you an indication of what kind of posts are popular with readers. This means that follow-ups and similar posts will likely be well-received and likely gain some links. These counters are relatively easy to install, especially if you’re using WordPress or Blogger.

Interview figures in your niche

Not only will interviews with prominent figures garner interest but they will also add more authority to your blog. You might not think you’re able to get an interview, but you would be surprised. People are always looking for free publicity and taking ten minutes out of their day to do an interview is well worth their time. However, if you’re going to conduct an interview, make sure your questions are interesting. Research interviews that have been carried out in the past with that person and think about questions that haven’t been asked yet. Always try to extract an exclusive out of them. If you don’t ask, you won’t receive and a juicy bit of information is powerful link bait.

Post every blog update on all your social channels

If you’re only uploading blog posts and leaving them sitting there, you’re wasting potential link bait opportunities. Post each update on all your social channels, so Twitter, Facebook and Google+. If you’re only on one or two of these networks, get on the others. The more networks you’re on the higher the probability that your post will be amplified through a Like, Re-tweet or a Share, and the more likely it is that someone that sees it will want to link to is.

Please leave your thoughts below or on Twitter - @scottmalt

Search plus Your World involves three new features introduced by Google:

• Personal Results – this finds information specifically for you ex.) Google+ photos and posts. This includes not just your own but also those shared with you that only you will be able to see on your results page.
• Profiles in Search – both in autocomplete and results; this would enable you to quickly find people you are friends with or people you may be interested in following.
• People and Pages – this would help you to find profiles and Google+ pages  related to a specific topic or interest, and enable you to follow them in just a few clicks.

By default, you will be shown the Personal Results view i.e. search results based on your behaviour and social connections. However you will also be able to see what your search results look like without personal content via a toggle, as shown below:

This new addition will largely benefit those involved in search engine optimization as it allows you to switch between personalised and unpersonalised results. Unpersonalised will not provide results from your friends, private information or any personalization based on your Web History.

Obviously there are a number of security concerns but Google has informed us that any information provided by signed in users is secured by SSL encryption. Therefore protecting your search results which includes private content by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.

Currently, Search Plus Your World does not cover any other social network where content is shared such as Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. In other words, Search Plus Your World is currently only displaying content from Google+. It will be interesting to see whether or not Facebook allows Google to start using their content despite already partnering with Bing. This would allow them to personalise its search results based on a searcher’s Facebook friends’ likes.

Will this enhance your experience whilst searching on Google? Let me know your thoughts.

However one club is leading in the use of social media and is actively encouraging the use of it – Man City.

Below are the highlights of some of the social media initiatives Man City have put into place:

Follow The Captain

Last week Man City captain Vincent Kompany joined Twitter, but he didn’t just join randomly to see what Twitter was about as a number of celebrities have done. To announce his arrival, Vincent asked City fans to tweet him their motivational team talks ahead of last weekend’s FA Cup match against cross city rivals Manchester United using the hashtag #followthecaptain. The most inspirational tweet chosen by Kompany received his match day shirt, captain’s armband and a poster of their speech signed by the captain.

Considering he was sent off after 11 minutes, not the greatest of competitions!

Twitter Live Chats

Man City have held a number of Twitter live chat events with the players. A player is selected and a hashtag is then created which users can use to tweet the player. Fans who participate will hopefully have their question answered with a video of the player answering them added to the Man City YouTube channel. The last one of these live chats was with Nigel De Jong #asknigel

Big Screen Tweets

One of the latest innovative trials by Man City was to show the tweets of fans on the big screen before and after the games against Norwich City and Newcastle United at the Etihad Stadium. Tweets were shown between 1pm and 2:30pm and then from 5:15pm until 6pm. All tweets using the hashtag #blueview were moderated by the Man City web team and if deemed acceptable, posted onto the big screen for all the fans in the ground to see.

Training Session Video Stream

Open training sessions for the fans to watch their idols train is nothing new in the football world. But back in August 2010, City offered their growing fan base outside of Manchester, who couldn’t make it to the stadium, the opportunity to watch the training session on Facebook. Following the partnership between Facebook and Ustream, live streaming has been available through a tab on Facebook Pages.

YouTube

Back in October, City became the first Premier League club to sign a content deal with YouTube, which allowed the club to control its rights-owned and club-created YouTube videos whilst also allowing them to manage the advertising featured around their content. City are heavy users of YouTube and have an in-house production team that create more than 100 videos per month for the channel. The goal is to allow fans to gain a greater insight into the club than previously possible. This is a great way of growing their worldwide fan base, and allows fans to be more engaged and feel more involved with the club.

I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise that this hasn’t all happened by chance. Man City have invested heavily in digital, with a department headed up by Richard Ayers whose efforts were rewarded at the 2011 DADI Awards with the DADI Individual of the Year award. Did we mention that we won Best Use of Organic Search at the same awards ceremony?!

Are there any other initiatives that I’ve missed out? Do you know of any other sports teams taking a similar approach to City? Leave your thought below or on Twitter @andrewlowdon.