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

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

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

Thanks to Gregor for doing the video for us.

a tour of the new timeline pages pt 1

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

In your cover image you cannot have:

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

More useful Facebook tips…

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

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

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

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

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

SEO corner

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

Facebook fro Google SEO

What impact does Facebook have on your Google rank?

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

SEOing your Facebook Page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim brought up a scary looking algorithm (Edgerank):

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

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

a tour of the new timeline pages pt 2

Back to Gordon for more features of the new Facebook:

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

To invest or not to invest?

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

… so should Facebook make their own search engine!?

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. Facebook timeline for business pages: 9 things you need to do by 30 March
2. New Media Breakfast: Facebook Privacy Settings, Pages & Advertising
3. Facebook company pages get a much needed overhaul

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

54%

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

7500

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

8.3million

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

14.8 billion

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

1/5

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

125 billion

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

 photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Related posts:

1. Month In Numbers – April 2011
2. Month In Numbers – March 2011
3. Month In Numbers – June 2011

paid search accounts for nigh on half of $31 billion of revenue generated through online advertising last year

Not only does search advertising maintain a massive 47% share of the 31£ billion of revenue driven through digital advertising last year, but it’s on the rise and shows no signs of slowing, increasing its percentage as more and more money is poured into internet marketing. Not to mention, the £15 billion generated by paid search alone represents a 27% increase from 2010’s revenue.

extensions, reviews, images and now badges: “Trusted Stores” joins AdWords

Retailers may be pleased to hear that Google’s Trusted Stores program, which is meant to encourage more clicks to store’s websites via a wee badge attesting that the store upholds some basic customer service standards, is now being integrated with AdWords. As Parker explains, said retailers will have to submit an application and offer up a decent performance history of their service provision — from timely shipping to satisfying unsatisfied customers.

Then again, Google alleges that becoming a Trusted Store won’t suddenly bump up one’s ad position, nor is the badge entirely clear to the average internet user. If someone doesn’t think to hover over it and review the positive information about the store, it may do no more good than the pre-existing seller reviews that you see in the form of stars on search results.

ratings are now running on Bing ads

Speaking of our starry friends, merchant reviews now display in Bing search ads (in much the same way that they do on Google). In spite of acting the copycat once again, Ballard and Brennan opine that this will make Bing more competitive against Google – at the least, I agree that this inclusion will probably get more people clicking.

Google revamps location targeting options on the heels of Microsoft

I posted about Adcenter’s location refinements earlier, but it’s all about AdWords this month, with a Google announcement that they are trying to make these options more powerful.

The changes range from the minor – clarifying the language they use, to the major – targeting people’s location regardless of their intent and expanding to offer greater control in the Display Network. Similar to Microsoft, there’s an American-centred focus in play, enabling campaigns to be targeted by zip codes. With current geo-targeting technologies being what they are in the UK, it’s unlikely that Google will attempt this level of detail over here at the moment, but we never know what’s round the corner. Sean at PPC Hero delineates the other important changes in a much more readable way than Google (IMO) over here.

the ability to actually track conversion data from your ad extensions: the future is now

With nary an official announcement, eagle-eyed marketers picked up on the fact that you can now collect data from your ad extensions – the extra hyperlinks that sometimes display under the normal ad. This means that you can see whether someone who converted on your site (bought a product, submitted an enquiry, etc.) entered your website from the main ad text or clicked on one of your extensions. Lee details the process of setting this up.

Sarah at PPC Hero breaks this down a bit more for us and is able to realize for the first time that her ad extensions enjoy a good click-through rate. This means that there is a good ratio between the number of impressions, or times that your ad displays on Google, and the number of clicks. However, she observes that these extensions aren’t really driving conversions, which leads her to conclude that she should test some different ones. As Lee notes: the good news is that you can analyze your extensions against different days of the week, the normal ads and other metrics, but the bad news is that this data is pulled together in aggregate, so you cannot test per extension.

AdWords for video has deployed on Youtube

Keeping the AdWords train rolling, Google’s put out an official announcement that they’ve created PPC for videos; a clever strategy, considering the audience that Youtube enjoys and the expense involved in airing a traditional commercial—on top of that, you’re able to manage your campaigns from your normal AdWords account.

Allen expands on this with some useful screenshots and it seems like a reasonably fair system which should pose no threat to those hoping to understand it. For a start, there are “match types” that let you choose when your ad appears in the video: pre-roll, the end of videos, in the related videos or in the search results. Combine this with Facebook-style demographic / interest / topic targeting and Analytics that will let you study what users did on your channel after clicking your ad — best of all, you won’t pay for users who skip your ad or for repeat viewings!

So, what sort of businesses do you think could benefit the most from this type of PPC?

your new ad rotation strategy options: auto-optimize, because Google knows better than you

You know how it’s common practice to split-test your ads for a good period of time so  you can collect enough data to determine which ad copy is statistically better than the other variants you’re using? You know how marketers therefore tend to rotate their ads evenly because they know what they’re doing and can make their own decisions about which ads work for which campaigns? Well forget all of that because you can now only rotate your ads for 30 days before Google locks in on whatever is generating the most clicks (because clicks are the only variable we care about, obviously) and starts displaying this text way more often than the others you use. You can read Google’s post on their blog but I would propose a more apt title for it: “All Your Clicks Are Belong To Us: Google and the Search for More Money”.

Project Glass: any step towards becoming a cyborg is a good step (unless you’re becoming a hipster cyborg)

Innovative in the same way that the Wii was or the first tablet computer, this concept will undoubtedly get ripped-off and repackaged by competitors  – all of which underscores Boyd’s point that this technology will have to be heavily adopted to become successful.

I don’t claim to know better than anyone else how good (or affordable) this technology will be or how easy it’ll be to get to grips with, but my initial reaction of curiosity isn’t much altered. I have to confess I’m mostly interested in the prospect of Google Maps at eyeball-level, considering how geographically-challenged I tend to be, but I am a bit concerned at being perceived as a sociopath when talking to my glasses (I’m aware that other products have presented this problem but I don’t as of yet own any of them) — or worse, being perceived as a hipster or general doofus.

Honestly, I’m still at the point of considering this product from the perspective of a consumer evaluating tempting, shiny things rather than a marketer craftily thinking of when and where to slide in the PPC ads. However, it’s bound to happen eventually and challenge advertisers in terms of figuring out the best targeting options for the device. For example, if you were already out and wanted to do a Foursquare-type search to find somewhere to eat, paid search ads could display alongside the organic results — and well-written ones would certainly attract your attention! If you’re out and about, you may very well want an option that provides speedy service or be keen to see who’s running a tempting special offer near you, and the copy of the ad may prove more persuasive than the normal results. It will certainly be interesting to see the form that PPC takes in forthcoming devices like this, at any rate.

Anyways, check out Project Glass here. What’s your opinion of it?

Thumbnail image courtesy of seroundtable.com

Related posts:

1. PPC Roundup – April 2011
2. Adwords location extensions now charged cost per click
3. Social media roundup: April 2012

facebook gets all hipster:
puts on silly glasses and buys Instagram

The big acquisition news in April was Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for a cash-plus-shares sum of $1billion. Yes, $1billion. Apply some stupid filters to poorly composed photos, promote to hipsters, make $1billion.

Now there clearly has to be some logic to splurging crazy amounts of cash on a photo-sharing platform that doesn’t actually make any money, and the suggestion is that it’s part of Facebook drive to develop their mobile offering. People share photos on Facebook, people share mobile photos on Instagram – there’s a clear tie-in.

Nobody’s quite sure how they will monetize Instagram (they surely can’t have paid this much for it not to), with this article by BusinessInsider giving a few ideas, although suggestions like ‘it will keep people using Facebook’ aren’t really monetisation ideas…

other facebook: ads, IPs and telling you what to read

We’re all bored of Facebook now, so I’ll try to make this brief. In Facebook ads news they’re going to be improving the Insights data for ‘action measurement’, which means you’ll be able to see who then used your app, RSVP’d, or talked about you in addition to the usual likes. There’s also been some research indicating that linking to a Facebook property (e.g. a FB page or app) rather than an external site will result in lower Facebook costs and more effective advertising. The embedded Slideshare on the article doesn’t appear to work, so please form an angry, pitchfork-carrying mob and hunt the creators down if you want to see it.

Finally, in an effort to get more people to use those really, really annoying social reader apps in Facebook (that show you what news story your friend was reading but then won’t let you read it – see image right from the oatmeal) Facebook are trying out trending or promoted articles. It’s not yet clear how these are promoted or why they insist on ruining the news.

social media tools: so much awesomeness

I’m going to be really generous now and provide you with some useful resources of social media tools. Why? Because you promised to retweet this post on Twitter. Don’t give me that look, you promised. I heard you. Well you can’t go back on it now.

17 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using – a little list from KISSmetrics that includes such little-known tools as Google+ and Hootsuite. Riiiiight. Apart from these clangers there are some fairly good tools on the list, paid and free, that you might not have come across.

Socdir | Social media directory of tools – there are a lot of social media tools out there, so Socdir is attempting to collate and review them in one place. Nice idea and will hopefully get better and better with time.

tumblring down

I apologise, that subheading is awful. It does, however, help to introduce the news that Tumblr now has 50 million blogs and 20 billion posts. Well done Tumblr. It’s a platform that’s largely stayed off my radar, but is getting some really good uptake and is being used by some as a social hub for their brands. They’re testing new developments to attract brands and bloggers including promoted posts and suchlike, so worth keeping an occasional eye on.

oh jesus more pinterest, kill me now

Oh there goes the Pinterest bandwagon, with every hipster and annoying marketer in the world on board.

In fairly interesting news, the Pinvolve app that converts Facebook pages into Pinterest pinboards apparently increases repins by 150%+ according to TechCrunch. Fully cross-integrating your social presences is definitely highly recommended, and this is a great example of how social-to-social can help spread your content even further. So give it a go if it’s relevant to your offering.

If you’re sharing on Pinterest then have a gander at these video tips, or at this selection of tips and tools. Then hope that the Pinterest bandwagon crashes into a tree or something.

another share button

Following the standard trend Google have introduced a share button for Google+. You can now add this to the near-infinite list of share buttons on your site alongside Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Digg, Stumble, Tumblr… maybe eventually there’ll be a button that automates moving your mouth and telling the person next to you.

success? measure it

And to finish, here’s another post from KissMetrics featuring some good general strategy advice on measuring your social media campaigns.

Related posts:

1. Social media roundup: February 2012
2. Social Media Roundup – April 2011
3. Social media roundup: January 2012

dodgy local listings

I’ve had to report quite a few dodgy listings I’ve found this week.

A number of affiliates, claiming to be the actual companies they’re selling for, are using addresses close to the actual business address. One I have seen is using the actual hotel address but with pictures of the nearby train station and a link to the affiliate site (it was actually listed as a electrical engineering company until yesterday).  Clearly this is not right but when I reported it I was told that it’s an owner verified listing so it wouldn’t be changed without the owner’s consent! Clearly the hotel owner did not want this but the Google Maps team don’t seem to be able to make this distinction…

These listings are spam, and done purely to game the system. It’s a bit like old skool SEO; you can get away with a lot in Google Maps and get results.

google: local listings are important

The change in focus from Google over the past year has been to include more Maps (Local, Places – whatever you wish to call it) listings into the main results. Personally I think the first iteration of this, with blended Places and organic listings, actually worked quite well. I’m sure Google had data to say it didn’t, which is maybe why they changed again.

Places is supposed to be great for the little guy – now they can compete with the larger companies and their multi-million pound budgets. Well, that’s what Google are suggesting anyway.  However, the reality is that the Google Maps system is pretty difficult to use and very inconsistent. Should you show your address details if you have a brick-and-mortar shop but travel to your customers? You’d better get it right otherwise you won’t be part of the mix any more. What about the reviews brought through to Google Maps from other services? These seem to change on a weekly basis (think TripAdvisor now not being shown).

I’ve seen listings suspended for months for making the tiniest change – not ideal if you are a local business and rely on these listings for your custom.

an example

I was looking earlier today for directions – and this is what prompted this rant – to a client office in Bradford. As you’d expect I checked in Google Maps and noticed on the left-hand side “Places” in Bradford. One of these was Harrods. I think we can pretty much all say that we know where Harrods is, and actually the address (in London) is still correct on the listing but for some reason Google thinks it’s slap bang int he middle of Bradford. No offence to the people of Bradford but I’m not sure Harrods would be the success it is if it was there!

My point being that if they can’t get Google Maps right for one of the most iconic businesses in the UK how on earth do they get it right for the plumber/sparky down the road who relies on  this service to find his customers?  You say perhaps he shouldn’t rely on this but this the situation we are in and the service that Google sells to these people.

You can recreate this by searching for Bradford and about 50% of the time you will see Harrods listed as a place in the left hand side.

Google Maps team: please, please get this situation sorted out.  And when we give feedback: listen!

Related posts:

1. Google’s Local Listings: A New Hybrid Algorithm
2. Annotate Maps on Google Maps
3. Reviews Added to Google Maps

If you’ve been managing an AdWords account this week you’ll probably have noticed a pop-up notification about changes to the way AdWords uses Phrase and Exact match: plurals and misspellings will now be included by default.

changes to Exact and Phrase match

Lets take each seperately and compare:

multiple match types in an account

I like Exact Match because it is exactly that – exact. Keeping two or more match type variations of the same keyword allows you to split the data, rather than all the eligible search queries being triggered by the same keyword. This means you can compare the performance of an exact keyword with everything closely related to it, and can speed up the time it takes to identify potential relevance issues.

the new match types example

Let’s continue with the time honoured example of the humble tennis shoe to show what search queries wouldn’t be triggered by the new Phrase match type, and if you switched to the often underappreciated modified broad.

 This is only a selection of eligible terms and there is still a huge number of unknowns out there, and do not rely on your Search Query Report to make you aware of them as this will only ever show you a fraction of them. Modified Broad (like Phrase to a lesser extent) comes at a price and you need to invest time in negative keyword research to improve it’s efficiency. Below compares the eligible keywords again, but now with a small selection of negative keywords.

how does Modified Broad work?

Modified Broad is actually more closely related to Phrase match than it is to Broad. While Broad match predominantly uses past Click Through Rates to determine how relevant a user’s search query is to your keyword, Modified Broad uses plus signs as ’anchors’ to insist that that word must be within the search query.

when to use the new match types?

If you’re really tight for time and don’t need the extra level of sophistication that comes with splitting keyword data across multiple match types then I’d recommend accepting the new changes to Exact and Phrase match types, unless you have any very closely related brand terms that may confuse Google into thinking its a misspelling. However if you’ve got the time or the know-how to do it quickly and efficiently, I’d recommend splitting the keyword data by several match types, including different modified broad variations. Either way, remember your negative keywords!

Related posts:

1. Google Adwords new keyword match type
2. being relevant: do we need to add search queries?
3. Another Google Test: Are you related?

google display network improves management options

By now, you may have heard about the new interface within AdWords which was recently rolled out to better enable marketers to keep tabs on their display campaigns. Basically, the Display Network data is getting pulled into a brand-new tab which will allow you to view progress at the keyword level, not just the ad group level. Ideally, this should make buying into display advertising as easy as traditional search. Perhaps Google has recognized the general opinion held of the display network by many marketing companies (as exemplified by the above meme) and hope to broaden their display client base by encouraging advertisers to stop disabling the option to utilize it.

PPC Hero are extremely optimistic about the change, opining that it will help AdWords users better target and optimize their display campaigns.

Rather helpfully, Dent provided us with an in-depth guide to AdWords Display Marketing, which is a great read for anyone who isn’t already a banner ad guru. From my perspective, it’s quite interesting to read about the pros and cons of non-text ad options and whether to choose high-traffic websites with large readerships or small websites that sharply target interests.

adwords expands campaign limits (again)

Digital marketing types will undoubtedly be thrilled to hear that Google has further expanded upon their campaign limit expansion of last year: from 500 to 10,000 possible campaigns per account. The logic is to make it easier to manage your campaigns from a single place; the reality is while aimed at helping bigger advertisers, most will already have their AdWords activity separated into several different accounts and managed through an MCC. I shudder at the thought of a single AdWords account getting even remotely close to the new campaign limit!

general downturn in ad spend

In other news, search and display spend was down during the last quarter of the year, according to Kantar Media.

Interestingly, it seems like some of the most expensive sectors in which you can invest in PPC (insurance, financial etc.) have cut back in the most significant way. One commenter hypothesizes that these “digital dollars” may have moved away from tried-and-tested locales “ towards emerging and unmeasured digital platforms”. I’m sure this will be the case to some degree, but Search and Online Display are still a long way off from plateauing.

feeling negatively about microsoft?

With AdWords being the major player in the paid search arena, many marketers simply duplicate their accounts into adCenter with the same settings. Poirier makes the point that while (in AdWords) you can set negative keywords at the campaign level in order to apply them to all of your ad groups, this structure will not apply to adCenter. This means that if you had set a negative at the ad group level, none of the campaign-level negatives would have applied to that ad group.

Late last year, Microsoft brought in an exact match option for negative keywords and a Negative Conflicts Report — and just recently, they’ve allowed users to set negatives at the campaign level (which will apply to the ad group negatives). Essentially, they’ve brought their product closer in line with what AdWords has come to offer, which is what advertisers have come to expect. The article offers some recommendations about how to check and tidy up your account in the wake of these recent changes. I’m not entirely sure to what extent Microsoft are pioneering or imitating, or whether it’s the best development choice that Microsoft could make, but it certainly makes managing adCenter less annoying – and presumably, adCenter feel that making things more accessible for Google acolytes might help them carve into the enormous piece of pie (well, almost the entire pie) that AdWords occupies.

adcenter changes geo targeting

On top of this, adCenter has been making changes to their location targeting – by planning to remove over 10,000 cities from their options, ones that don’t have significantly measurable traffic. Marketers will simply need to choose from a list of three nearby cities to target, instead, as Microsoft don’t want to bother with the citizens of those smaller cities that haven’t interacted with their network. However, it’s important to note that any geo-targeted campaigns for these cities will be paused and defaulted to “worldwide”. This currently only applies to the US and Canada – we’ll keep you posted when this starts in Europe!

alliances strengthen between google’s competitors

Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are now reselling each other’s unsold media across their entire display networks (branded sites and partners). Each organization has expanded its reach by offering access to all of their cumulative inventory and ad space in the hopes of appealing to media buyers who want a broad and complex marketplace to work with. Together with the forthcoming merging of Yahoo! Search Marketing and adCenter, this truly marks the end of an era.

why you need to maintain the momentum of your ppc

From what I’ve been reading, I’ve noticed that some advertisers seem to think of PPC as only a temporary fix — just a stop-gap while their SEO campaign gains momentum, dropping their paid ads once the organic results start performing well.

If you hold to any of these viewpoints, it’s time to change your way of thinking!

The Google Research team has been studying how organic search results impact upon ad impressions and clicks and published findings that show 81% of ad impressions are served in the absence of an associated organic result on the first page. If a search ad is paused, half of the clicks that it would have gained will NOT be replaced by organic clicks. A staggering 96% of ad clicks are incremental for those appearing in the organic position of 5 or lower.

Parker has posted some good infographics about why you need to maintain the momentum of your PPC account. Good SEO practices will obviously increase the number of clicks you get through organic results, but dropping your paid aids can cause you to lose up to 85% of the traffic you enjoyed while running your AdWords campaign – and the organic clicks don’t come anywhere close to compensating for this loss. Even if you decrease your ad spend, some of the “displaced” clicks will go through to your organic results but most of them will simply be lost. On the flipside, if you start your PPC campaign from nothing, you can gain a massive increase in incremental clicks. So don’t get complacent about your paid ads! Even if you build up a lot of brand identity, your competitors can  still step in to occupy that space at the top of Google if you choose to vacate it, so keep testing and optimizing those ads!

Related posts:

1. PPC Roundup – March 2011
2. Yahoo & Bing UK Transition now earlier in 2011?
3. PPC Roundup – August 2011

Actually quite a lot has happened over March and the Easter period so prepare to be metaphorically headbutted in the face by a stream of pure information:

google speccy four eyes

I actually thought the announcement of Google Glass(es) was an April fools as I was on holiday and not really paying attention, but it’s really just the next logical step in augmented reality. I’m linking to BBC news because hilariously if you search for Google glasses or similar no results from Google show up (because they posted it on Google+). Nice PR guys. And as a sometimes glasses-wearer I know that it’s only a matter of time until people take the pee out of them.

google plus redesigns / copies

Now that the initial ‘buzz’ (that’s an in-joke) that surrounded Google+ has died down Google know they’ve got work to do to keep people interested in any way/shape/form. So they’ve had a bit of a redesign tinker, moving the navigation to the left and adding a pretty close impersonation of the new Facebook cover photo. It’s also been suggested in the last month that Google could introduce their own web-wide comments platform (similar to Facebook comments), which will probably be based in Google+ somehow.

free-ish social media tools

TheNextWeb has collated together a collection of largely free social media tools that you’re likely to find useful in 2012, so try them out and let us know which ones you rate. And while we’re on the subject of tools, here are some for updating Facebook automatically (although it’s best not to).

pinterest: connect and track a redesigned waste of time?

T’is the season for social media platform redesigns apparently – maybe it’s the sun finally coming out – and the hipster-favourite photo site is following along with a Pinterest redesign of personal profiles. But enough of the visuals; it’s about people, and there’s now a suggestion that connecting Pinterest with Twitter is a very valuable way of gaining new followers and should be done from your very first signup.

However despite the fuss it’s been argued that Pinterest traffic is worthless, and chasing it a total waste of time unless you know what you’re trying to get visitors to actually do so you get value from it. It’s a good point that should always be remembered in any marketing efforts – what are you trying to achieve with the time and spend? The more data you can get the better, and this post on tracking who’s pinning what content on Pinterest (warning: techy post) is very good if you can get your head around it.

facebook searches, lists and leaves

There’s been a lot of speculation that Facebook Search is not too far away, largely stemming from a picture posted by Mark Zuckerberg in which a suspiciously search-like bar can be seen on Facebook running on his laptop.  Apparently. If you look really hard. So, analysts are predicting a bit of a fight between Facebook and Google over who will dominate social search sphere, with, currently, Facebook having the data-stuffed FB social graph but rubbish search and Google having super search but fairly poor Google+ social.

Facebook have also introduced ‘interest lists‘ as a means of segmenting the stream of information that is shown in a news feed, and it could be a good way to become more relevant to your target users and improve your EdgeRank. But it’s likely that, similar to objectives targeting, it’s been introduced to improve the performance of facebook ads and make them more money. Yaaaaay!

Related posts:

1. Social media roundup: April 2012
2. Social media roundup: February 2012
3. Social Media Roundup – October 2011

Blog network armageddon

Before you read this as Google penalising blogs, please don’t.  This is something very different: it’s a crack down on networks of blogs created specifically for the purposes of achieving rankings.

As explained here, for the vast majority, this really isn’t a big deal.  This is NOT a few people getting together and agreeing to promote each others’ content from time to time.

It IS serious scale and involves the exchange of cash – if you are running your own SEO you will likely know if you are involved in such networks (even if you only know it as a SEO secret weapon).  If you have outsourced your SEO this is a timely reminder to ensure you fully understand the tactics being used on your site.

If you are still nervous then this very long presentation will give you all the background you need to know.

Other changes

Google’s monthly blog post on algorithm changes this month detailed 50 changes. Here’s some highlights from my perspective at least:

• better comprehension of the # symbol (good news for tweeters and those wanting their hash tags to be found)
• increased focus on more recent videos
• 2 x anchor text tweaks including “Better interpretation and use of anchor text” (anchor text is the words within a link – in my view one of the most over valued ranking signals but that’s a discussion for another day)
• freshness (i.e. newer content getting ranking boosts over older content) is now impacting a much greater percentage of listings, if not all listings. And they are getting better at detecting old pages (which rightly or wrongly I interpret as them getting better at detecting pages that have been made to look new but may not actually be new)
• A lot of reduction in synonyms use – good news for old school SEO copywriting (that’s not an endorsement by the way!)

We have also seen massive changes to local results this month with Google adding local results to what we might normally deem to be national searches (e.g. A search for SEO, when conducted from Edinburgh, now includes a couple of results that would normally only appear for a search for SEO Edinburgh)

More to come?

It looks like there may be  further action against search engine spam on the horizon as on March 16th, Google promised us that an over optimisation crack down is coming “within weeks”  (so likely to happen whilst I am on my Easter break writing this then!)

Semantic search

Looking a little further forward we can expect Google to increasingly answer our questions directly on the search results page, at least according to this interview with a Google engineer in the Wall Street Journal.

 the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders

Under the shift, people who search for “Lake Tahoe” will see key “attributes” that the search engine knows about the lake, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content. In contrast, those who search for “Lake Tahoe” today would get only links to the lake’s visitor bureau website, its dedicated page on Wikipedia.com, and a link to a relevant map.

( Larry Page and Sergey Brin)

As part of getting ready for this check out Attacat Joel’s post on getting started with microformats

Looking even further ahead

Might Google Glass be the future of the search results page? (Perhaps with Siri (voice control) as the search box)

Is Google’s biggest threat Google?

The above of course assumes that Google continues to dominate search.  However with seemingly increased disastisfaction with personalised or “social” results, disgruntled ex-employees ranting  and rumours of Facebook developing a search engine (or at least improving it’s currently diabolical internal search) increasing, it just may be we will see a significant shift in power in the coming years.

SEO industry naval gazing

Internal industry debate should usually remain, well, internal.  This month in addition to the now usual SEO being dead/morphing into inbound marketing debates, there has been one almost surprising debate: outing SEO tactics is immoral

This is the idea that revealing the use of spammy tactics in public forums is not helpful to the industry.  The argument put forward suggests that all it achieves is people losing jobs and that dealing with Google spam should be a job for Google only.  Although I can sympathise with aspects it is far too extreme a view for me.

Useful resources

If you are starting to get to grips with SEO for mobiles, here’s some thoughts on google-bot-with-mobile-hat-on 

The old (but still excellent) Web developers SEO cheat sheet first released in  2008 has received an interactive update.  (If you like tools like that you may also be interested in Attacat Ben’s url builder spreadsheet)

Intelligent speculation

Inevitably the one thing that moves my understanding of SEO on the most in any month is speculation from those I admire in the industry.  This month it was a key but simple message coming out of the London LinkLove conference: “Link building is here to stay”. (You can read Joel’s comprehensive notes from the conference here)

Related posts:

1. SEO Roundup: How SEO evolved in January 2012
2. Local search roundup: February 2012
3. SEO Roundup: How SEO evolved in November 2011

Keeping the integrity of your community should be more important than it's size. Photo credits: Telegraph.co.uk

nutshell

Facebook is testing a new targeting option to reach users ‘more likely’ to complete a certain action. In essence, it allows advertisers to target conversions, rather than users. But these actions are only a measurement of success, and shouldn’t be confused with the actual purpose of the campaign.

background

At the moment, many advertisers run advertising campaigns on Facebook with the purpose of growing their community through gaining more likes on their page. In most cases they’ll have a target Cost Per Like they’re willing to pay and will regularly optimise their bids to make sure they’re meeting their target cost for each like they’re driving.

how it works

Facebook are now trialling a new targeting feature, that will flag users who regularly like pages and install apps as being priority users and more valuable. The important point here is that they aren’t necessarily more interested in you, there’s just more chance that they’ll like your page.

pros

It reminds me of how a display network works; the same ad impression can have a different value for each advertiser eligible to be shown, so why shouldn’t this be taken into account when selecting the advertiser? What’s the point of showing an ad for a new app to a user who refuses to install them? This change will drive greater efficiency overnight in an ad platform that is currently completely missing it’s potential. It’s another layer of evaluation that can be added to each ad impression.

cons

Could advertisers begin chasing the Like-happy users of Facebook, regardless of their actual relevance to the product? Could the integrity of a page’s community be jeopardised by an influx of vacuous likes? Even worse, the extra competition from advertisers chasing these users could push up ad spends disproportionately, meaning a large bill for filling your page’s community with uninterested prolific-clickers.

final word

If the goal of your advertising campaign is purely to drive likes or app installs, then targeting users who regularly complete these actions is sound advice. But if you’re using your PPC budget as a catalyst to help grow a quality community, then this can only come from understanding your target audience and reaching all of them. Who knows, your most valuable followers might not like any other pages but yours!

Related posts:

1. PPC Roundup – August 2011
2. Targeting iPad Users with AdWords
3. Facebook ads downfall: more ads and shorter ads