Users of Google's AdWords pay per click services will now have the option to optimise their campaigns to display ads with the highest conversion rates.
The new option will be offered alongside the two existing alternatives marketers have for choosing which of their ads are displayed to users, which currently allows people to either display the ones with the best clickthrough rates or rotate them evenly.
"Some of you have told us that the ad with the highest clickthrough rate isn’t always the ad with the highest conversion rate and that you’d like to be able to optimize for conversions rather than clicks," Google said in a post on its AdWords blog, which is why the firm has implemented the new feature.
The company added that the new feature will give marketers another way to experiment with their promotions and determine which ads are providing the best returns.
Other improvements made to the services offered by Google recently include the integration of social media listings into its organic search engine results pages.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Companies engaged in search engine optimisation techniques may be interested in the news that Google has implemented a major update to its algorithms in order to filter out low-quality content.
In a post on the firm's official blog, Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts explained that, while previous modifications had been subtle, the new changes would affect almost 12 per cent of queries performed on the site.
This is intended to filter out poor-quality content, such as sites without original content and those which do not offer users anything of value.
"At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on," Google added.
The company said that it is a major step forward for the search engine and would help provide users with more relevant and interesting results than it had done previously.
Commenting on the update, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan stated that there will need to be some in-depth analysis of the content that remains high in Google's results before it can be determined if the changes have been beneficial.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
Oscars fever has gripped the country – and now it’s ClickThrough’s turn.
In late 2010, ClickThrough announced their inaugural Staff Awards to recognise outstanding individual achievements from within our organisation.
Each Award reflected values that are prized by our clients and colleagues: attributes such as Creativity, Personal Effectiveness, Quality and Efficiency.
A voting panel was formed from senior managers within the company, and this panel reviewed all the great work done by our people over the last year – a considerable commitment!
Although there was so many examples of great work, the panel unanimously agreed on the very deserving winners, who we announced last week.
So, without further ado, we are pleased to announce the winners of the ClickThrough Staff Awards 2011:
Quality Award: Adrian Epstein, for producing work of the highest standard for our clients.
Efficiency Award: Lauren Myatt, for building our copywriting team around efficient ways of working.
Personal Effectiveness Award: Jene Pedder, for demonstrating her ability to manage multiple projects effectively.
Rookie Award: Glenn Tucker, for making such a great contribution in the short time he has been with the company.
Creativity Award: Rob Stoubos, for his fantastic work in developing Facebook marketing strategies for our clients.
Congratulations to all of our winners, from everyone at ClickThrough.
In light of the fact that mobile search volume has more than doubled on the year, Dr Dave Chaffey gives some pointers on how you can approach a mobile strategy and target those looking for local services.
The increased popularity of smartphones and mobile apps was one of the defining features of 2010 for Internet marketers. The increased usage of mobile devices suitable for search led to an increased use of mobile for searching.
Within Google the volume of mobile searches increased by 130% year-on-year (in Quarter 3). Looking further ahead, research by Cisco predicts that Global mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015.
So every marketer should be asking about the relevance of mobile search for their markets and which steps are needed to take advantage of these trends.
Recent developments in analytics tools can help you work out the relevance of mobile search for you. Here are the steps I suggest you take to review the relevance of mobile search for your organisation:
Step 1. Review current usage of your web sites by mobile devices.
Google Analytics enables you to review the current number of visitors to your web sites through mobile devices broken down by platforms such as iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android. Mobile device usage of your site is within the Visitors section of the reports.
If you find that the percentage of visitors has crept over 5% as it has for some companies, then it’s certainly time to formulate a plan. If not, it’s likely there are other priorities for you. Although it may be that mobile search is important, but you have poor visibility. The next steps will help you decide the future potential.
Step 2. Analyse the volume of mobile search demand for your products or services.
Early in 2011 Google introduced information on mobile search volumes by device for certain keyphrases in its Keyword Tool.
So you can use this tool to assess the number of searches occurring for your target keyphrases on mobile and compare this to the actual number of visitors.
Step 3. Assess the relevance of mobile + local search for your customers.
If you offer local services by stores or other outlets, using the same tool I described in Step 2, you can now also see how many people are searching for services within a town or City using their mobile phone. I was surprised to see that for some phrases related to London, over 20% searches were from mobile devices.
Within Google, Google Places has become a lot more important for local searches involving the name of a location plus a service. If you see the tell-tale red balloons dominating the search results for searches related to your services in an area, that’s a sure sign you need to take action.
Step 4. Review your current visibility for mobile searches
Once you know the volume of relevant phrases for your market you can complete a gap analysis to see how visible you are for your phrases and giving you an idea of the opportunity.
I have explained the approach to a gap analysis on my previous post on this blog.
Step 5. Implement a mobile search strategy
The final stage once you have mined the insights on your current performance and future potential is to implement your mobile search strategy. Google does have a separate robot “Googlebot-Mobile” which crawls mobile sites and it is possible to direct this crawler to specific mobile content you have developed.
However, since Smartphones are the main way mobile sites are accessed these tend to show very similar results to the standard Google results. There is so little mobile specific content that Google has to feature the results from the regular search to give the most relevant results.
You can see what I mean by accessing the mobile version of Google search from your desktop.
So for me, the largest part of your mobile search strategy after you have done the analysis is to make sure your website renders well and gives a good experience in the main phone types your users are accessing!
A new study that may interest website marketing services providers has revealed that people in Europe spend most of their time online using search engines, social media and directory sites.
The 2010 Europe Digital Year in Review report by comScore revealed that Brits are among the biggest users of the internet on the continent, spending 25 per cent more time browsing the web than the European average of 24.3 hours a month.
Display advertisers reached 97 per cent of people in the UK with their content in the last 12 months, with social media being the leading publisher for these ads.
The report also revealed that Google remained the dominant player in the European search market, reaching nine out of ten consumers across the continent.
However, the firm's popularity in Europe may not be good news for its competitors, as French search engine 1PlusV has filed a new anti-trust complaint this week against the company.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Internet marketing services providers may stand to benefit from greater usage of social media sites, which has been revealed by a new study.
Research by eMarketer estimated that Facebook will increase its user base by 13.4 per cent this year, which will mean 132.5 million adults in the country interacting with the site at least once a month.
This accounts for 52.2 per cent of all people with an internet connection, which could provide a large opportunity for marketing professionals to exploit.
Twitter will also continue to grow, the report noted, increasing its number of users by 26.3 per cent in 2011.
By 2013, eMarketer forecasts that nearly 28 million individuals in the US will be tweeting.
Paul Verna, author of the report, explained that the figures he has compiled are likely to be a more accurate reflection of the number of people actively using the services, as opposed to other studies which may have included dormant accounts.
Last week, chief executive officer of Twitter Dick Costolo stated he hopes to improve the integration of his site with mobile devices to make it easier to access while on the move.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
Owners of small businesses should be focusing their search engine marketing strategies on localised search in order for it to be effective.
This is the view of Jake Hird, senior research analyst at Econsultancy, who said getting such enterprises listed on services such as Google Maps and Google Places could be a vital part of a successful campaign.
He added that business owners looking to take advantage of the mobile marketing options that are now available should also consider localising their content in order to prepare for future developments.
Although tools such as Google Instant for portable devices are not yet able to provide location-based content, this is something the company may be looking to implement later this year, so websites should be prepared for any developments in this area.
According to data published as part of the MerchantCircle Confidence Index last week, local sellers have yet to fully tap into the opportunities afforded by mobile marketing.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
The number of firms planning to increase the amount of money they allocate to their internet marketing services has grown, a new study has found.
According to the Econsultancy and SAS Marketing Budgets 2011 report, 72 per cent of respondents to its survey said they are planning to add to their digital marketing budgets this year, up from 68 per cent when the question was asked last year.
The average increase would be 35 per cent, the study found, while just over half of firms expect to spend more on advertising as a whole.
Director of marketing for SAS UK Richard Kellett commented: "The proliferation of new channels … continues to put significant pressure on both our marketing budgets and the skills and imagination of marketing professionals."
Another finding of the report was that investment in business analytics software is also likely to increase as companies seek to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Earlier this week, it was stated by the Interactive Media in Retail Group that the amount of money spent by consumers over the internet in January was £5.1 billion – a 21 per cent increase from the same period last year.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
In the wake of several high-profile incidents of companies that have been discovered seeking to unfairly manipulate their search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, one writer has highlighted tactics that must be avoided.
Writing for PC World, Katherine Noyes said that the top SEO technique that could result in a site being delisted from Google is cloaking – where a search engine is shown a page heavy with text and keywords, while a human user is sent to a different page.
She highlighted the case of BMW a few years ago, who used such a tactic to top searches for used cars, while those who clicked on the link would be redirected to the company's home page.
This resulted in the site being removed from its index when the deceptive technique was uncovered.
Another method to avoid is paying for links to your site from a third party broker, which is also in direct contravention of Google's webmaster guidelines, Ms Noyes added.
Recently, US retailer JC Penney was discovered doing this by the New York Times, which was described by one expert, Damon Pierce, as "the most ambitious attempt I've ever heard of".
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
You can easily add a QR code to any bit.ly link now simply by adding .qr to a bit.ly link e.g. http://bit.ly/dNcRxx.qr
Now, for some people this may seem gibberish, but it actually represents a great opportunity for forward thinking businesses looking to promote their companies, products and websites, particularly using mobile marketing or social media, such as Twitter.
A QR code (Quick Response code) is a two dimensional barcode, made to be read by camera phones equipped with the software required to read the codes. QR codes are all the rage in other countries, for instance, Japan, and will undoubtedly catch on soon in the UK because of the multiple purposes for which they can be used.
The barcode can link to an image (for instance of a product), open a website in the mobile browser, display text, or you can use them as a kind of digital business card with all your contact information. The list of places where such a barcode can be displayed is endless – think “flat surface”, and you get the idea.
Bit.ly, the URL shortening service, decided last autumn to incorporate QR codes into its service; so to direct people to your QR code for a specific website, you just add .qr to the end of the bit.ly link. The advantages of this could be manyfold, particularly for those who have realised the potential of QR codes for marketing purposes.
Imagine that you can now include an advert or an article with a QR in your target market’s favourite magazine that takes them straight to an online video, podcast, Buy it Now page etc, without them needing to search for you online, type in a long URL etc? Or you decde to conduct a local advertising campaign by putting QR codes on buses, in shop windows, on billboards and so on? Or you can hand out business cards at an industry event or networking meeting that hold a wealth of information on a dedicated website specifically aimed at that audience, and accessed simply by pointing a mobile phone at the QR?
QR codes are free to create and share, and their novelty to many people means that if you are the first to use them, in your sector, region or marketing, and provide compelling content to capture the imagination of your audience, you are likely to be on to a great traffic generator for your online content.
How could you use QR codes in your business today?
