What that means?

2 things
Short term – From all users coming to a website using SSL/Google we will NOT be able to track search queries and keywords
LongTerm – I believe Google will be forcing SSL and it will give more value for websites built and hosted under SSL certification. SSl will become one of the hundreds itens Google assess before ranking a website.

Google state it will be less then 1% of the users (I personally can’t believe on this number), and that what got all online community angry.

This article conflicts with information stated on other Google Blogs.

For instance this one says that Analytics will still have the data, however when you then look at that blog analytics.blogspot.com it clearly states that this will not be the case.

(From the post) How will this change impact Google Analytics users?
When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google “organic” search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google “cpc”.

So basically all keyword research, targetting and optimisation is gone for 1% of the users

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1. Google to change Adwords? What’s coming.
2. Google’s real changes
3. Google Business Maps – A quick guide for beginners

Paid, Owned and Earned Media - Defining Digital Strategies

If you are familiar with the concept of Owned, Earned and Paid Media you understand that Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) can play a colossal role for your Social Media seeding campaign.

But just how much is too much?

I thought it would be interesting to share with you a study from Wordstream.com which shows the most expensive keywords in Google AdWords.

The 20 most expensive keyword categories with the highest search volume and highest costs per click, thereby netting Google the most money, are:

1.     Insurance (keywords in this category include “buy car insurance online” and “auto insurance price quotes”)
2.     Loans (keywords include “consolidate graduate student loans” and “cheapest homeowner loans”)
3.     Mortgage (keywords include “refinanced second mortgages” and “remortgage with bad credit”)
4.     Attorney (keywords include “personal injury attorney” and “dui defense attorney”)
5.     Credit (keywords include “home equity line of credit” and “bad credit home buyer”)
6.     Lawyer (“personal  injury lawyer,” “criminal defence lawyer)
7.     Donate (“car donation centres,” “donating a used car”)
8.     Degree (“criminal justice degrees online,” “psychology bachelors degree online”)
9.     Hosting (“hosting ms exchange,” “managed web hosting solution”)
10.     Claim (“personal injury claim,” “accident claims no win no fee”)
11.     Conference Call (“best conference call service,” “conference calls toll free”)
12.     Trading (“cheap online trading,” “stock trades online”)
13.     Software (“crm software programs,” “help desk software cheap”)
14.     Recovery (“raid server data recovery,” “hard drive recovery laptop”)
15.     Transfer (“zero apr balance transfer,” “credit card balance transfer zero interest”)
16.     Gas/Electricity (“business electricity price comparison,” “switch gas and electricity suppliers”)
17.     Classes (“criminal justice online classes,” “online classes business administration”)
18.     Rehab (“alcohol rehab centres,” “crack rehab centres”)
19.     Treatment (“mesothelioma treatment options,” “drug treatment centres”)
20.     Cord Blood (“cordblood bank,” “store umbilical cord blood”)

When I am asked about ROI on Social Media I like to consider that if your Earned and Owned media presences have been created and maximised, you reduce your reliance on Paid media. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sometimes also pay for some extra attention, but it certainly means you depend less on these paid channels. And, because AdWords and other programs like it are based on an auction system, competitiveness and costs for them will continue to be driven upwards.

Generating ROI based on traffic – a simple formula

Let’s assume you are in the Real Estate industry and you want to decide between the immediacy of Pay-per-click and the long term benefits of Social Media and SEO.

You consider investing in Pay-per-click and generate immediate traffic.

If you generate about 1,000 visits a month paying $50 this equates to $50,000/month

If you invest the same amount of money across your Owned media and start to generate the same qualified traffic you have built yourself a long term asset and you can therefore amortise the investment over time.

This is an easy way to start a polemic on ROI in Owned Media versus ROI for PPC.

Which side are you on?

Related posts:

1. Social Media Resistance – Breaking the Shell
2. Marketing Magazine Special Edition
3. The Most underutilised Social Media tool.

Google's new photo-sharing platform Photovine is now in beta.

Google recently launched the beta app and website for their forthcoming photo sharing service, Photovine. This new iPhone app and social media service will finally put them in direct competition with other fun and popular apps like Instagram and Picplz. Will it become the next big thing in photo sharing? I’m not so sure.

While info on Photovine’s development direction is limited, it appears it will have minimal to no connection with Google’s recent Social Media platform, Google+.  If this is true, I believe it to be a huge strategic error.

One of, if not the most important features of killer apps like Instagram and Picplz are their ability to post content simultaneously across a near baffling number of social media services. In just a few seconds I can take a photo, add a cool filter, caption, tags, and geo-locations then post it on my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Foursquare.

This simple and quick functionality I believe is an important reason why so many Social Media platforms can survive and even thrive despite being in direct competition.

If it becomes more difficult to manage content on one of these social media platforms than others, there is a good chance it will fail as users are less likely to manually update multiple services or completely ditch the ones they are currently entrenched in. Right now, it’s Google+ and even the yet to be released Photovine that should be worried.

If Google can’t even properly interconnect their own social media services or support their own operating system (No Photovine Android app has been announced), how can we expect them to do so across our favourite 3^rd party social media clients or photo storage clouds?

As mentioned, the Photovine app is currently ONLY available on the iPhone with no Android app officially announced. This could be a smart strategy, targeting the most engaged and abundant audience for their service, however should the success of this one seemingly independent product really be put above the brand’s overall image as a company that follows through and supports its products/users long-term.

Whatever they do they better do it soon, because rumour has it Facebook will soon be announcing their branded Photo-sharing app. If true, this could for some users tip the scale of useful feature differences between Facebook and Google+, negatively impacting the growth of Google’s fledgling platform.

So, how do you engage in Social Multimedia and do you have room for one more on your electronic grapevine?

Related posts:

1. The new and improved Facebook
2. The Future of Search.
3. Social Media Resistance – Breaking the Shell

Mark Zuckerberg revealing the new Facebook and Skype features

FACEBOOK has just received a facelift thanks to Skype, allowing users to make free video calls to their friends through the site.

The social networking giant announced a partnership with the web video call service, Skype shortly after Google launched its own social networking site Google+, which also features video calling.

Set out to be made available globally in the next few weeks, the widely anticipated feature brings two of the web’s most popular consumer services together and offers face to face video chat; users who don’t already have the Skype feature installed can instantly download it when a friend calls them.

The partnership makes use of Facebook‘s connections with Microsoft which invested $240 million in the firm back in 2007, and also acquired Skype in May this year for an estimated $8.5 billion. Skype’s chief executive, Tony Bates, said that the company had put a major effort into making sure that its own infrastructure would be able to support Facebook’s immense client base, which will help Skype meet its own goal of reaching 1 billion users.

Founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the site had reached 750 million members, though he further added that the company doesn’t measure success by user numbers anymore, but rather using the volume of shared content as the main measure for activity.

With the news coming out a week after the launch of Google+, permitting groups of people to engage with each other by video calling in ‘Hangouts’, Facebook’s video does not yet have the capability of Google+’s system. But when Zuckerberg was asked if Facebook will be rolling out group video calling, he said not to rule anything out.

He also added that one-to-one calling makes up the vast majority of video calling.

Well, let’s see how it goes,

Related posts:

1. Facebook sends more traffic to broadcast sites than to newspaper sites
2. Bing steps up with Facebook
3. Facebook users not taking advantage of privacy controls.

Why you ask?

According to Google, there has been a growth in voice traffic by 600% in the past year. Approximately every 24 hours users will speak close to about 2 years worth of dialogue into the system.

It is also thought that Google is rolling out these innovative search results & products in the wake of Bing making its presence felt stronger within shopping & travel search results.

How you might ask?

Users will be able to use a microphone connected to the computer or built into the computer by clicking a little image of a microphone that is located within the search box, once clicked, the user will then be able to speak their query.

What happens if the Queries are quiet complicated or very long?

According to Google these more complex queries appear to work just as well as a simple one or two word query, as Google has enter approximately 230 Billion words per day into the language bank which takes  into consideration multiple accents & pronunciations. English is currently the only language available, but additional languages are to be rolled out in the coming months.

Related posts:

1. Google Focusing creating better User Experience for Mobile Users
2. Changes in Google’s Search by Images & its Significance to the User:
3. Google Instant – Pre-Loading Web Pages in Web Results

“In the past two years, mobile search traffic has grown five-fold. Mobile search today is growing at a comparable pace to Google in the early years,” Mr. Singhal said.

With desktop search, people start searching when they get to work and stop searching when they get home – with an hour drop in the middle of the day for lunch. Desktop search behaviour drops off during the weekend, and yearly patterns show a drop during winter and summer holidays.

Another interesting point made was that even during your peak holiday seasons like Christmas there appears to be no slowing down of the mobile search epidemic.  This is typically useful for advertisers who experience a drop off in searches related to desktop search results during the holiday seasons. So for online advertisers being mobile friendly is a clear winning strategy to limit the drop off in search activities during these periods.

Related posts:

1. Changes in Google’s Search by Images & its Significance to the User:
2. Google Instant – Pre-Loading Web Pages in Web Results
3. Who throws more money on Google? Google’s top Advertisers

The innovative initiative to be rolled out by Google is the ability for a user to drag & drop images or paste the image URL into the search query field and Google will provide results for similar images.

An additional image feature is Google Instant’s extension to image search, where images below the query box change as the user types.

So what does this mean for a webmaster?

If your website is an e-commerce website the release of search by images means potential search queries for images could turn into potential shopping trips for users, working best with well established products.

So what does this mean for a user?

The ability to be able to search for products like cars, clothes, shoes, appliances & so much more

One important issue Google raised was that there is no facial recognition, but in the event of a search of an image of a celebrity say, Google compares pixels and provides results of images that are similar to the face of the celebrity, provided there is a well-documented visage.

Related posts:

1. Google Instant – Pre-Loading Web Pages in Web Results
2. Google Maps weird images
3. Be Famous. How to show your profile on Google’s Results