Only 5% of charities know about the grant…:( we are doing our best to change that!

It’s holiday season so for those of you unaware of this amazing opportunity we thought we’d fill you in on the details – a present from us to you!

The scheme offers in-kind AdWords spend to selected charities of up to $10,000 (£6,500) a month. If the charities can spend this amount consistently they can then apply for a grant extension up to a value of $40,000 (£26,000) per month.

Google publicly states that they are currently helping only around 4,000 charities worldwide. This is a tiny number compared to the 180,000 registered charities in the UK alone. It is quite apparent that the others simply don’t know about the programme, or only partially better, don’t have the resources to apply and manage the grant. Google don’t heavily promote the scheme – perhaps so as not to exhaust the resources available. The scheme is currently managed by a group of Google volunteers and there have been no advertising campaigns or initiatives that we’ve seen to actively promote the scheme. Who’d blame them – why give advertising away for free when people are already paying for it!

They don’t give grants away willy nilly. You’ll need to be a registered charity (see the Charities Commission website to check) and, obviously, you need to have a website – and you mustn’t have any revenue generating ads. You’ll need to be competent at AdWords management to a certain degree – or have a great grant adwords management company that is, acting on your behalf. Part of the application process involves setting up an AdWords account whilst adhering to a strict set of detailed guidelines. The account will then be reviewed by a Google Volunteer – which can sometimes take up to 6 weeks – I guess there aren’t many volunteers! Having said that, we have had applications for our clients approved in less than 48 hours so it depends on who’s working when and the quality of your application. We have noticed that recently the approval time has greatly improved…

There are a couple of restrictions, however, you can only advertise on their search platforms (no display advertising and no search partners) and there is a maximum CPC of $1.00 across the entire account – not ideal if you’re competing for high cost keywords. However, if you find someone experienced to manage and optimise your grant account your charity can still benefit from at least 90% of the keywords you would ideally be advertising on. Remember, break your account down into multiple campaigns and ad-groups focusing on long tail keywords appropriate to your charity. Keep ads relevant to ad-group and try to include keywords in the headline and description. It is also very important to make sure the destination url is very relevant to the keywords/ad group, thus helping keep Quality Score high and your bids below that $1 mark!

Most of the time the Grants are a great tool – they can be used to reduce costs and increase your reach for free.  We find that for the larger charity accounts that we manage it is worthwhile complimenting the grant account with a smaller paid account for those high cost keywords that you simply can’t get near with a $1 CPC.

We at Esseoh specialise in online marketing for NFPs and charities and are currently managing a large number of Google Grant accounts for our clients and have a 100% success rate in applying for a grant. Get in touch before the 31^st January 2012 and we’ll do the whole application for you for free!

Please contact us directly for some google grant case studies and charity testimonials.

For a little taster look at the results we achieved for a few of our charities:

One of our larger charities – You can see a steady increase from around 1,500 visits to well over 10,000 visits per month from the grant alone

"Do no evil"

What’s happened?

On Tuesday 18^th October Google told us that searches made by users that are signed-in would, by default, be made via the SSL version of Google (https//www.google.com). As a result, webmasters will no longer be able to see the search query (keyword) that sent their visitors to their websites. Most, but not all, of search marketers are less than pleased with the change.

 Why have they done this?

Google say this change is part of their on-going “commitment to provide a more secure online experience” and is primarily a feature to protect the privacy of their users. An odd justification, if you ask me, considering the same data they are withholding “to protect users’ privacy” is still available for those who are willing to pay Google for the privilege. Yes, search query data will still be served to webmasters for paid search results!

Funnily enough, not everybody in the SEO sphere is utterly convinced that privacy protection is the real reason behind this change. Most notably, Ian Lurie, has declared full on war with Google arguing that it couldn’t possibly be down to privacy when they serve adverts according to the body of emails and have photographed almost every inch of the world for anybody to view online. Lurie goes on to categorically state that the only reason for this change by Google is to shut out competing ad networks. Previously, third-party ad networks have relied on the referring query string containing the keyword referral data to serve relevant targeted ads. Now the query string is missing this vital piece of information (keywords), these ad networks will almost certainly suffer. It can’t be long before a law suit is filed against the search giant, surely?

 It’s not all bad

Here at Passion Digitalwe’re not big on whinging. Whilst we can definitely see the impact this change is going to have, there’s really not a great deal we can do about it. First things first, you need to be tracking the numbers of these ‘referral data-less’ visitors. Here’s a great custom report to do just that in Google analytics (an early Christmas present):

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=custom_report&uid=wMnfQd0jQCiALMwSjQC6wg

Once you’re tracking the visits coming from those (pesky) signed-in visitors the future doesn’t look all that bleak after all. Considering that these signed-in users will have come from a SERP that was heavily customised to that individual person based on various factors such as browser history, social activity etc. the data from these visitors, in actual fact, wouldn’t have been that useful anyway. Now that we’ve separated the types of visits we can concentrate on those that have arrived from the main Google search algorithm. After all, this will still be the source of the (vast) majority of all organic visits to a website, and is the only algorithm we can really optimise for.

What can we do?

• Try and kick up a fuss – write a snotty letter to Google asking them to revert the changes as it’s making your life harder. (Good luck)
• Give up.
• Change your entire site to run behind the https protocol.
• Get on with it:
  • Remember messrs Yahoo and Bing are still giving us our data (for now).
  • Use internal search data more in our website analyses.
  • Concentrate and optimise for visitors who have arrived via the main Google algorithm.

Also - I got my zombie problem solved.

 [Image via unrealitymag.com]

One of the best parts of this industry is that it seems to advance at a fast enough rate to keep you constantly on your toes, which is especially true, if you’re trying to be competent in SEO and PPC on several search engines. This post was supposed to go out on the week of June 6 2011 but got a bit delayed, and then Google started testing a new version of sitelinks and then it got delayed a bit more.. you get the picture. Anyway – Google Adwords Extensions..

Here’s an at-a-glance guide to Adwords Extensions. And the posts about longer titles in Adwords and Location extension.

Regarding the Sitelinks extension- let me make this as clear as possible:

YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO USE SITELINKS EXTENSION IF YOU’RE ADVERTISING ON GOOGLE SEARCH.

I want you.. to start using Sitelinks!

Why use Sitelinks Extensions?

As with all extensions for Adwords, the Sitelinks increase the visibility of your ad. The unique thing about this extension though is that it displays only when your ad appears on top of the organic search results, meaning that you already have to have a well performing ad running (average position 1-2.x is good in most cases).

Apart from the visibility (and increased CTR) factor, you can use the extension to weed out irrelevant clicks.

For example: One of our clients is offering database cleaning services, including database checks against Telephone Preference Service lists (lists of people who’ve opted out from marketing contacts by phone). One of their performing keywords is “Telephone Preference Service” (on phrase) – obviously this results in loads of irrelevant searches. By adding Sitelinks with texts like ‘Corporate Database Cleaning’, ‘Database Audit’ etc. we effectively identify the service as being b2b, thus lowering CTR, but increasing the conversion rate.

Another great thing about this extension is that it lets you direct people to different pages with one ad.

For Example: Let’s say you’re advertising Häagen-Dazs for their brand name. Since the search for this keyword can mean a number of things, it would be beneficial to include sitelinks like ‘Shop Locator’, ‘Products’, ‘Dessert Recipes’ so that each searcher has an increased chance to end up on the page they’re looking for – thus lowering the bounce rate and increasing the amount of potential conversions.

How do They Appear?

So – How exactly does the Sitleinks extension look in action? In the simplest form it looks like this:

This is why the optimal number is 4

As you can see, you basically get twice the real-estate on the Google page if your Sitelinks show, so that’s a definite attention-grabber and CTR-increaser right there.

Additionally it was reported on 7th June that Google is testing an embedded version of the Sitelinks extension. It looks like this:

Not as good, but still could attract attention

This is at a test stage at the moment, but could be rolling out live in the near future. The embedded Sitelinks will be triggered if your Sitelink text is an exact match with your ad copy text (probably other factors are also involved, but this is as much as can be gathered from the original post). In theory you could get an ad that is a full link, but I doubt that Google’s going to go for that.

So – grabbed your attention? Good. On to the next part:

How to Set Up Sitelinks Extension

There are essentially two ways to set up the sitelinks extension – an easy or basic setup and an advanced one with more tracking in mind. Before we start, you need to enable the Ad Extensions tab in Adwords.

Basic Set Up

The basic set up of Sitelinks is very easy:

1. Go to the Ad Extensions tab in Google Adwords
2. Select ‘Sitelinks Extensions’
3. Choose ‘+ New extension’
   

   Steps 1 to 3 of Sitelinks extension set up

4. Select a campaign that you wish the Sitelinks to appear for (high performance campaigns recommended)
• It’s recommended to use either relevant pages or just key sections of your site (‘Related Services’ vs ‘Contact Us’). Alternatively you can use the sitelinks to establish the type of business that’s advertising (as shown above).
5. Enter the link text and destination URL for the Sitelinks (4 is recommended, but you can have any number from 1 to 10)
6. Click ‘Save’
7. Done!

Advanced Set Up

The advanced set up is more or less the same as the basic one with these small additions:

• In step 5., when writing in the destination URL, add ?sitelink=name to the end of that URL, so it will show up your analytics tools as a unique page.
  Example #1:
  If your original URL is http://www.mydomain.com/category/item,
  then enter  www.mydomain.com/category/item?sitelink=sitelinkname
  Example #2:
  If your original URL is http://www.mydomain.com/category/item?pageid=1
  Then enter http://www.mydomain.com/category/item?pageid=1&sitelink=sitelinkname
  
• Create a custom segment in Google Analytics, where you identify that page URL should contain ‘sitelink=’ parameter,  for easier tracking.
  Get It Here  
  
• Do not copy and paste the Sitelinks to each other campaign – make the URLs with unique identifiers, so you know which campaign the visitor came from

Bam!

You’re done..

Subscribe not to miss the next instalment of Getting Results in Google Adwords

Links to other extension posts:

• Adwords Extensions
• Title Extensions
• Location Extension
• Call Extension
• Products Extension

Let the festivities ensue!

To be honest, they’re just launching the pilot program at the moment. But knowing that the ability to use the Google Analytics filtering capabilities on the Webmaster Tools data has been the topic of many online marketers’ dreams, I think it will be here to stay.

So – how to get in on the action? Simple:

1. You have to be a verified Google Webmaster Tools owner of site and an Analytics account administrator.
• Sign up for Webmaster Tools (follow instructions for verification)
• How to set up a Google Analytics Account
2. Submit your application
3. Wait for approval or denial
4. Good luck and happy analysis!

Above: the button

In any case it seems that the experiment has gone better than expected and almost three months later they’re launching the +1 button for websites.

As far as I understand, the websites that will have their pages +1’d will have the benefit of the colourful icon added to their Adwords ads. And with Google Checkout badge for ads being discontinued, this may be the next best thing.

Here are some resources you can read for more in-depth info:

• Official Google Blog
• Official Adwords Blog
• Sign up for Google publisher button announce (newsletter)
• Search Engine Land post about +1 Analytics

Location Extension in action

Here’s how to do that:

The first thing you’ll need is a Google Places account and a Google Adwords account. I assume you already have the Adwords account so this is how to set up the other one.

Setting up a Google Places page

1. Go to http://www.google.com/places/
2. Choose ‘Get Started’
3. Sign in with your existing Google Adwords account (essential, if you want to link places & PPC together)
4. Follow the instructions until you’re told to wait for a PIN code
5. Wait for a PIN code to arrive at your specified address (usually within 2 weeks in UK)
6. Go to  http://www.google.com/places/ again
7. Input the PIN in the provided field
8. Done!

one of us, one of us, one of us, one of us, one of us...

Now on to part two:

Setting up Location Extensions in Adwords

Nothing overly hard here either. Just follow these steps:

4. Choose your extension

1. Login into your Google Adwords account: http://adwords.google.com
2. Choose the ‘Campaigns’ tab on the green menu
3. Choose ‘Ad extensions’ tab on the grey menu (here’s how to enable ‘Ad extensions’ tab)
4. Choose to view Location Extensions (see picture)
5. Have Google Places verified?
• YES
1. Choose the first option ‘Addresses from Google Places’
2. Click ‘New Extension’
3. Choose the campaign and Google Places account
• NO
1. Choose the second option ‘Manually Entered Addresses’
2. Click ‘New Extension’
3. Choose campaign and enter the address and details
6. Click ‘Save’
7. Done!

Congratulations, you’ve enabled Location extensions for your Adwords Search ads campaigns that you selected.

As you probably guessed, you can only have one location extension per campaign, so if you have several business locations that are using the same campaign, I’d suggest changing that to local versions (let’s say 10 to 20mi around each office) with appropriate location extension enabled. Also you can continue running the ‘global’ campaign (if you have one), just remember to exclude the allocated local territories from geo targeting. Remember – the key to good results in Adwords is micromanagement…but don’t go over the top!

I wrote that by hand.. honestly

That’s about all to say about the location extensions. If you have anything to add – feel free to do so in the comments or our Twitter feed.

Still to come in the series: Call Extensions, Sitelinks Extensions, Product extensions.

Edit (June 1st, 2011):

Location Extension Update

In the days since this post was published, Google has announced that they will start charging for clicks on the ‘Get Directions’ part of the location extensions. Here’s a repost of their short Q&A:

Q: Where will I see performance metrics for clicks on directions?

A: You can see the number of clicks on directions in the same place as your other click metrics (select Segment, then Click typefrom your summary tables). You can review the performance of these clicks to determine if they’re helping you meet your marketing goals.

Q: How will directions appear in ads on desktop and mobile devices?

A: For AdWords campaigns with location extensions enabled, a “Directions” link will be eligible to appear in your ads and sponsored Google Maps info windows on desktops.

On mobile search ads, a “Get directions using Google Maps?” pop-up will appear when the user clicks on the expandable map. Clicking on “OK” in the pop-up allows users to get directions to your business.

Q: Where can I see the past performance of clicks on directions?

A: For a report, select the Free clicks view within the Dimensions tab of your AdWords account. If you don’t see the Dimensionstab in your account, click on the arrow button next to the existing tabs above your performance table, and select it in the dropdown menu.

Q: I don’t want to pay for clicks on directions. How can I opt out?

A: You can do this by removing the location extensions associated with your campaign. However, location extensions provide valuable information to local customers about your business, so we encourage you to carefully analyze your campaign performance before doing so.

Read the whole Google post here.

Links to other extension posts:

• Adwords Extensions
• Title Extensions
• Sitelinks Extension
• Call Extension
• Products Extension

Replace 'in Toronto' with 'Petroleum Industry' and 'Workopolis.com' with 'Reed.co.uk'

Didn’t think much of it at the time, with Google playing mind games all the time, but then I came across this post. Google’s rolling out a new addition of Adwords ads in the search results – adding domain names to the title. At the moment it’s reserved to select ads that show up above the organic search results.

But back to the point – yesterday I posted an article about the use of Adwords ad Extensions and it ended on a cliffhanger. Here’s a reminder:

Let’s say you’re using the extensions already (or don’t wish to use them) and want to increase the prominence of your listing in other ways. There is, of course the good old ad optimisation, where you try to find the best possible ad for a query, but you don’t want to look at the percentages and goals and all that boring stuff – you want your results NOW!

Here’s a simple method that not many advertisers are using: longer titles.

Some weeks ago Google announced that if your ad’s description line1 is or incorporates a complete sentence, that sentence will be added to the title, in the occasion that your ad displays above the organic results. It’s very simple, easy to do and doesn’t need any special coaching – just add a full stop at the end of the description line 1 and watch the magic happen:

Reed in the lead!

Further on, you can use sections of description line 2 as that sentence, leaving less text below but getting a much longer title:

Bigger is better according to Google..

To summarise: just adding a full stop, question mark or an exclamation mark at the end of description line1 will result in a longer title, if your ad appears on top of organic results – easy and fast way to increase your CTR.

Regarding the previous post about Adwords Extensions – I’ll be uploading short setup guides over the next week the next few weeks (will add the links, when they’re live), so stay tuned for the next exciting instalment of Getting Results in Google Adwords!

Links to other extension posts:

• Adwords Extensions
• Location Extension
• Sitelinks Extension
• Call Extension
• Products Extension

100 Billion Impressions!!!

Enough with pop-culture references.. Here’s how to use Google Adwords nifty ad add-ons:

Where to find them?

This one’s easy – just:

1. login into your Google Adwords account,
2. select the ‘Campaigns’ page,
3. click on the downward arrow at the end of line,
4. tick ‘Ad extensions’,
5. press ‘OK’.

Exhibit ‘A’ – Enable the extensions tab

Choose your Weapon

As with gladiatorial combat, it’s essential to know which tools to use in Adwords Extensions and for what.

Admittedly gladiators are deadlier than Adwords, but otherwise..

Here’s a quick summary of the available extensions and what they’re good for:

Location Extension

Location Extensions are used to add your business address to the ad text, when it shows up in search results,

Location Extension in action

effectively making your ad larger and gaining relevancy in local areas.

Good for: local businesses, local branches of larger chains, restaurants, pubs etc.

Not so good for: online-only businesses, non-local businesses etc.

Special feature: you can add your Google Places Page to the ad, thus generating even more visibility and adding a ‘get directions’ option on your ad.

How to set up Location Extensions

Call Extension

Add another line of text to your ad – your phone number.

Good for: businesses with a dedicated phone line, call centres, local businesses, mobile ads, prank calls (not advised).

Not so good for: businesses that don’t want to receive calls.

Special feature: you can make only the phone number clickable in the mobile version of the ad – clicking on the ad will start a call to the indicated number and you’ll be charged for a click.

Product Extension

You can’t afford NOT to use Product Extensions if you’re in online retail. And think about Google Checkout – that blue button certainly gets attention.

Available to Google Merchant Center users this extension will display the relevant product with the ad.

Good for: eCommerce sites, retailers, all kinds of product sellers.

Not so good for: service businesses.

Special feature: adds review information and the Google Checkout logo (Edit: discontinued as of June 2011), if you’re using the system.

Sitelinks Extension

Additional links from the ad to pages on your site.

Good for: sites with promotions, supplementary products/services… lots of things.

Not so good for: one page websites.

Special feature: effectively you gain more SERP real estate to promote your business.

Additional Options

Let’s say you’re using the extensions already (or don’t wish to use them) and want to increase the prominence of your listing in other ways. There is, of course the good old ad optimisation, where you try to find the best possible ad for a query, but you don’t want to look at the percentages and goals and all that boring stuff – you want your results NOW!

..tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of this article..

Links to other extension posts:

• Title Extensions
• Location Extension
• Sitelinks Extension
• Call Extension
• Products Extension

Imagine that one day Google decided to go into politics and run for president/prime minister/clan leader of your local government. Knowing that most elections are won by whoever can dig up more dirty secrets about the other candidates, there’s only one way that would end:

I, for one, welcome our new search engine overlords.

And it’s all thanks to Google Analytics – the single largest data gathering system on the web today. It’s free and it gives lots of information to website owners and managers – and if you know how to customise it this information can become even more useful.

The first thing you ought to do is set up filters and goals so you don’t count your own visits and get separate at-a-glance notifications about the results of your site.

The second thing to do after setting GA up is setting up automated alerts, so you don’t have to monitor your websites progress every day, but still get notified if something of interest happens.

Google Intelligence Alerts

Google Intelligence is easily found on your left hand side, when you login to your GA account and choose a profile.

From here you can add custom alerts that will be sent to your email based on your requirements.

Here are some useful custom alerts that you can add right now (click the ‘add it’ link to add the alert to your GA account):

• Analytics Flatlining

Probably the one must-have alert on any GA account – notifies you if/when your analytics code stops tracking;

Add it!

• Traffic Drop

The second most important thing you’ll probably want to know about as soon as possible is a sudden drop in your tracked website’s traffic. You can set it up to compare with previous day, same day last week, last month or, as I’ve set it up, last week;

Add it!

• Drop in Organic Traffic

Another thing you’ll want to be notified about is a decrease in traffic from search engines;

Add it!

• Sudden Traffic Spikes

Enough with the drops and decreases – sudden traffic spikes are also worth tracking;

Add it!

• Referrals Increase

Ever had a link to your site posted on a high traffic blog, news piece, twitter or facebook that you only discovered after a week or a month? Here’s an alert that will notify you of increases in referred traffic;

Add it!

That’s enough of alerts from me – you should have the basic knowledge about the possibilities of GA Intelligence by now to go in and do some experiments setting up customized alerts.

Advanced and Custom Segments

To further enhance the usefulness of the information you get from GA, there’s a function called ‘Advanced Segments’ that you can access on the upper right side of your GA interface.

In most cases you can get useful insights when using the default segments like ‘Paid Search Traffic’, ‘Mobile Traffic’ or ‘Non-bounce Visits’, but the real value here is the ability to create your own custom segments, like:

• Visitors That Spent Less Than 10 Seconds on Your Site

No matter what your website is about, it probably takes at least 10 seconds to classify a visitor a good one and the default ‘Non-bounce’ segment just counts visitors that have viewed more than one page. This segment is useful in weeding out the traffic sources that get you low quality visitors;

Add it!

• Visitors That Spent More Than 10 Seconds on Your Site

As useful as knowing which sources bring you bad traffic, is knowing which sources bring you good traffic and what that traffic does on your site, so here’s a segment that would show longer staying visitors:

Add it!

• Bounces

This segment shows all visits that are bounces. Useful for having absolute numbers rather than just a bounce rate for landing pages.

Add it!

• Excluding Traffic from a Medium

Let’s say you want to see traffic from all sources, except your PPC campaigns – with the default segments you can deduce it by subtracting the Paid Search segment from All Visits segment. Not very productive, is it? Here’s a segment that does just that and you can customize it to fit your needs:

Add it!

• Other Segment Examples

The segments listed above are the ones that I use frequently across all of my managed accounts, but there are many that I just create and delete or use just occasionally. It’s very useful and gives lots of information when you pinpoint a specific set of parameters, like:

Mobile Users from London

Actual Site Users

Track Image Traffic (Rachael from Seer Interactive)

I strongly recommend setting up custom segments yourself, as the real value with them is the ability to track very specific groups of visitors. They are also useful for GA Intelligence alerts, as you can set up an alert ‘Drop in Mobile Users from London’ for example.

To sum up – Google Analytics may just give you general info or it can be the best web tracking platform, if you set it up correctly.

We will follow this blog up with another post on a number of custom filters that we use regularly that can be very beneficial.

We hope you found this post intersting and informative

This year is no exception, with Google taking the lead so far:

gBlimp – new ad serving method

Not as subtle as the Display network, but way more targeted if left on its own

http://www.google.com/adwords/blimpads/

Gmail Motion – no more typing

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/motion.html

Google Docs Motion – move like you’ve never moved before

No more back pain from sitting at the computer. Now you can get back pain the old fashioned way

http://www.google.com/google-d-s/promos/motion.html

Google Translate for Animals app

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/

LinkedIn Network – check people you may know

Now that's what I call networking

Get a job at Google – as an autocompleter

http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/mountain-view/autocompleter/index.html

Helvetica – Comic Sans.. what’s the difference?

I actually prefer to use comic sans

YouTube turns 100 – a look back to the early days

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/03/looking-back.html

Huffington Post Subscriptions for New York Times employees

yeah, yeah - I know it's an US news source

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/a-word-about-digital-subs_b_843385.html

The Guardian  – Live, if early, Royal Wedding blog

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/by-royal-appointment/2011/apr/01/royal-wedding-live-updates

Will keep adding as I find them..