On Tuesday the 17^th of May 2011 Google announced via the Google Adwords Blog the introduction of the URL domain in the headline of all ads.

As seen in the image below your URL or Domain used to be presented just at the bottom of your ad despite playing an important role in the deciding role of whether a user will click your ad or not!

Old Adwords Format - Note there's no URL at the Title

As Google understands that the display URL can be an important deciding factor, whether a user clicks on your ad or not, which has prompted them to place the more emphasis on URL domain by featuring it within the ad headline .

How will the new ads look, you may ask?

As you can see in the image provided below the ads will look no different.

New Adwords Format - Note the URL at the Title

The URL will be displayed after your headline with a vertical bar ( | ) separating the two.
As well as including the URL in the headline it will also be continued to be displayed at the bottom of your ad.

In the event that you already have your URL domain displayed in the headline, Google is intelligent enough to identify if this is the case and will not display your URL again in the headline.

It is also possible for the display URL domain to appear in addition to a description line that is promoted to the headline, as long as the resulting headline is sixty-eight characters or less.

Finally this latest change to Google Adwords Ads is a global launch that affects all countries and languages.

For more information about the latest news, changes & trends in Google Adwords visit the Google Adwords Blog.

Cheers

Leigh Walker

SEO/SEM – The Online Circle

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If you are talking about Facebook yes it can. Welcome Facebook ads.

But how much is the cost of a friend for Facebook brands?

A study by social marketing and analytics firm Webtrends found that the cost of advertising on Facebook that encourages a user to become a “fan” on the brand’s Facebook page is $1.07  (1.05 AUD).

“There are a lot of studies trying to say how much is a fan worth,” Justin Kistner, Webtrends’ senior manager of product marketing for social, “but the answer depends on the kinds of campaigns you are driving at that fan base.”

Many brands get too focused on the absolute number of their social media audience and don’t put enough value on target group relevance & engagement.

What my Social Media Team sees in the vertical industry is that a lot of them build a fan base on Facebook through discount offers and quick giveaways – but then they don’t get any brand amplification because their fan base is not looking for engagement therefore not LTV (Life Time Value). However, that’s where the real value lies, particularly when comparing CPMs for traditional online advertising with the cost efficiency of social media when done right.

With this on mind, are fans worth $1.07 each for brands?

The Wall Street Journal (Digits blog) sat down on camera with Michael Lazerow, the CEO of Buddy Media, a firm that sells software for brands that want to market on Facebook. Lazerow argued they’re worth far more. See highlights below.

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Why reinvent the wheel when you can get your competitors blueprints and improve your website accordingly?

It is relatively easy to research the successful concepts, techniques & methods your competitors have tried and tested. Review your competitors work based on the following topics:

• On Page Optimisation
• Link Building
• Social Media

So what are the methods of attaining actionable info from your competitors?

1. Select the right Competitors to analyse

Firstly, knowing who your main competitors or industry leaders are is an important first step for any business. But which competitor should you analyse?

Identify the competitor that your feel best resembles your own business. Make sure they have a good online presence. You can check this by searching in Google your most competitive keywords and identify their performance. If you are seeing consistent results you are then on the right track and can be assured that you have chosen a good competitor to analyse. There are also free tools available that can compare websites.

2. Insight into Competitors Website Structure

Now that you have a good understanding of who your real competitors are the next step is to commence the analysis. Understanding your competitors website, structure, content and size is the starting point of your analysis. This is because it can unearth the complexity of the strategy being adopted, there are several tools capable of crawling your competitors websites.

3. On Page Optimisation:

The next step is to look at the on page optimisation of the site. Does your competitors website have any common themes or topics consistent throughout the site? Is there a clear indicator that the website is consistent, relevant and topical, which attracts search engines.

Review the list of pages specifically focusing on the page titles, descriptions and URL structure to identify any consistencies throughout the website. For example, can you identify the keyword being targeted on the page? This can be determined by identifying consistent keywords reflected in the URL, Page title and description that are being used to set the relevancy of the page. This is a very important part of the competitors analyse and should be completed thoroughly to identify any patterns.

Take this even further to understand the level of on page optimisation undertaken by the competitor you can look at whether image optimisation has been taken into consideration. This can be identified by the use of alt tags and title tags. Additionally, internal links should be reviewed to see if the use of no-follow is incorporated, this can help funnel Page Rank to the most valuable pages within your website.

4. Competitor Keyword Intelligence

Often site owners target a vast range of keywords in the hope of increasing their exposure and opportunities to generate traffic. This sounds great in theory, but the reality is only a small percentage of keywords actually provide quality traffic. The key here is to unearth the successful keywords and focus solely on them.

Trying to identify the competitors’ keywords that are performing can be difficult and time-consuming process. However there are plenty of software available that can analyse the website and provide the top performing keywords, try these sites complete.com and Spyfu.com. Once the list of potential keywords has been identified it is important to validate the list of keywords using similar software.

5. Competitor Backlink Analysis

It is staggering the amount of website owners, SEOers, and online marketers that again try and reinvent the wheel when it comes to generating or sourcing new inbound links.

Backlinking competitors using the range of tools available or even through search engines (using the appropriate operators) allows you to generate an inclusive list of URL’s linking to your competitor. Inbound links to your website play a very important role in the search engine’s algorithm. Quality links from credible sites will typically have a great impact than that from poor quality irrelevant website. So the key here is to determine from your list of backlinks which are good quality sources worth perusing for your website & which can be disregarded. Use Page Rank to initially gauge the quality of the website.

Background Information

Understand what other online assets your competitor may have. This is important as it could unearth any new initiatives your competitor is using or planning on using.

To do this you can use the list of domains your competitor is linking to and use Whois to check the information of each of the websites. Additionally, use DomainTools.com, which allows you to complete a review IP lookup this will indicate other websites that your competitor has hosted on the Server IP address. This will identify any of the website that are actually owned or run by the competitor. It also indicates if your competitor has a network of sites linking back to their site.

Now that you have completed the initial competitive analyse it the most important stage is to put your findings into practice. Firstly, you need to determine which strategies are going to be worth using on your website. Obviously not all strategies are going to be suited and some may need refinement to suit your requirements. The final step is to monitor your efforts and refine where needed to ensure you are on the right track.

That’s not the end of competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis is an on-going process for all areas of your SEO campaign, it should be actioned on a regular basis to ensure that your website and business is striving for continued success.

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We all know position is king when it comes to PPC campaigns, with most traffic coming from the first two positions, but purely focusing on this point can waste a client’s investment. Aligning the client’s business objectives is an important step in understanding Bid Management techniques.

However before exploring Bid Management techniques it is important to better understand the algorithm behind the most popular PPC software, Google’s Adwords. Unlike with other companies PPC models, Google’s Adwords is not purely based on bidding for the highest keywords to get position 1. They also take into consideration the Click Through Rate (CTR), which is the number of people who actually click on the ad. It is then averaged using the Cost Per Impression (CPM) method, which is based on the average cost of showing the ad per thousand displays (cost per thousand impressions).

Now that we have a better understanding of Google’s algorithm we can look at using bid management techniques to get better returns on investment. Having clear objectives for the campaign is an important first step; just trying to impress the client by being number 1 is not a good use of client’s money. What does the client ultimately want, is it purely awareness, which is impressions or do they want people clicking and converting to sales?

Impressions and the click through rates are influenced by position; the higher the ad & more targeted the ad the more clicks or views it will receive (ad copy will also influence click through rates).
What’s not taken into consideration is the quality of clicks. Ads shown in position 1 will attract a high percentage of clicks, but the quality of clicks can be low. To improve conversion rates and maximise the budget, marketers should aim to be still on the first page of Google, but not necessarily position 1. Position 3 to 5 can still generate good volumes of clicks to your website and they tend to be more qualified (better quality clicks). The CPM rate for position 1 and 2 are high so by reducing the bid of the keyword can help improve the conversion rate. It is important to note, ad copy impacts the number of clicks, poorly written copy will attract less clicks.

Search Marketers need to workout the optimal conversion rate that will deliver the desired clicks and impression for your ads. With Google releasing very little information about their algorithm it is up to your Search Marketing company to continually research, test and refine ads to maximise return on investment.

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He did, in February, this excellent short on Chatroulette that became the official explanation of what is the site.

Casey has now published his new video in the same style as the previous video sums up the controversy about Facebook’s privacy.

The very title says: a movie for anyone who is the “blue social network” – Facebook.

A Movie for Anyone On FaceBook from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

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Everytime I’m speaking on an Internet Marketing Seminar or teaching Social Media Classes I always listen to the same question:

“I’ve got limited time to invest in social media, but there seem to be a million sites out there. How do I know which one is worth my time? If I only have time for one, which one should it be?”

Generally I try to explain that all tools available should fit into your strategy and your level of commitment – either time or content production- and I then explain how I use my various online presence and my expectation with each one of them.

However every single time I end up talking about LinkedIn and my fixation with this tool.

What is Linkedin?

LinkedIn is a website that allows professional network with over 70 million members globally.

LinkedIn is one of those sites that tends to get brushed aside in the sexy, shiny world of social media. It’s not flashy, we rarely hear buzz about billion dollar valuations and you don’t get a billion email reminders to visit because your contacts on LinkedIn are not encouraged to write on your wall, send zombies after you or take lengthy and inane quizzes.

What are LinkedIn Features?

Linkedin has many handy features but one I like to use most are their groups. A powerful networking strategie along with seeding content strategy.

LinkedIn Groups allow you to:

* Quickly discover the most popular discussions in your professional groups.
* Have an active part in determining the top discussions by liking and commenting.
* Follow the most influential people in your groups by checking the Top Influencers board or clicking their profile image to see all their group activity.
* See both member-generated discussions and news in one setting.
* Easily browse previews of the last three comments in a discussion.
* Find interesting discussions by seeing who liked a discussion and how many people commented.

LinkedIn has now rolled out few changes to their groups making it more social and more engaging.

Watch the video below.

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Moo! Why don't raise the stickiness?

Here are 2 quick tips to make your website more user friendly and more SEO efficient using Free Google Tools.

Google recently introduced Web Elements, which are simple snippets of really simple code you can copy/paste into your site’s HTML.

Quick Tip 1 – How to insert Google Search on my website?

If you don’t have a Search tool on your website you may be missing an opportunity to improve customer retention and conversions on your site.

Because users want fast answers and because they are used to pop words and hit search, it’s a good idea to make their life easier on your website giving them a search facility,

The Google Custom Search Engine team has made it really easy to add custom search to any site. Just follow these steps:

1) Access Google Web Elements

2) Click on Custom Search

3) Configure to automatically search your website.

4) Copy the code

5) Place on your website.

Quick Tip 2 – Add Google Maps and Directions to your website.

Meet the Google Maps driving directions gadget that makes it easy for customers to get directions to your office or store.

Thanks to Google, businesses can now offer customers quick and easy step-by-step directions.

The new Google directions gadget will allow business owners to pre-fill the direction “To” field with one or multiple addresses, while leaving open the “From” field so that customers can input their address or some other starting point.

From there, customers can print driving, walking or transit directions in just one click. Google will also provide suggestions for related addresses if users enter vague starting locations, as sometimes knowing the exact details of where you are ‘right now’ is difficult.

The widgets are great for users and add a nice bit of functionality to sites. However, they’re only good for showing users where you’re located. If you want Google to know, and to rank you accordingly, you’ll still need to tell the search engines where your bricks and mortar store is located. And that means using the text on the page to convey it. You can’t leave it up to the gadget.

This helps you in 2 ways.

1) It improves the stickness on your website. Users don’t need to leave your website to find directions.

2) It helps to improve your Local Search SEO.

As a smart small business owner, you want to make sure you cover your bases, so here’s a couple more tips:

1. Grab the directions widget to make it easy for users to map out and find your  location.
2. Create a detailed, keyword-rich Directions page to make it easy for search engines to map out your location and consequently improve your SEO.

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

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