How you should approach your sales funnel has changed due to the evolution of online and the explosion of Social Media. Social media has the ability to redefine how businesses interact and form relationships with current customers and potentials.

The infographic from Get satisfaction talks us through how you can feed your funnel:

A short time ago Google officially launched a change to their algorithm targeting websites that are cluttered with paid advertisements above the fold. According to Inside Search the Google update “looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”
Sites that have little quality content above the fold will be most affected by the change.

A bad user experience results from visiting a website and being presented with poor quality content, excessive advertisements making site navigation confusing and difficult, or requiring the user to scroll down the page in order to read the website content. This is something Google is trying to punish by introducing this algorithmic update. Moving forward these types of sites might not rank as highly.

The algorithm change does not affect sites that place ads above the fold to a normal degree. The change will affect sites where there is a small amount of visible content above the fold and/or relevant content is pushed down by ads.

Google asserts that websites that implement ads to a normal degree will not be affected by the change, with only around 1% of all searches impacted. But how do you determine a ‘normal degree’?

Google recommends using the Browser Size tool, along with other chrome based tools that demonstrate just how much on screen real estate is being occupied by advertisements.

Impact on SEO

On paper the new algorithm change could be viewed as a good thing, with less ads meaning more relevant quality content, right? But this raises a question about whether or not Ads can be considered irrelevant content.

What about Google themselves? A large proportion of Paid Search ads appear above the fold before the user has to scroll down to reach the natural listings. Using their own logic the Ads would appear further down SERP results.

Danny Sullivan has touched on whether Google’s own search results are top heavy in an interesting and informative blog post on Search Engine Land.

On the above image the yellow box washed out and blends into the white of the natural listings. Is this deceptive or misleading?

The response from Google regarding the algorithm change was that “this is a site-based algorithm that looks at all pages across an entire site in aggregate. Although it is possible to find a few searches on Google that trigger many ads, it is vastly more common to have no ads or few ads on a page.

This algorithm change is designed to demote sites that make it difficult for a user to get to the content and offer a bad user experience. Having an ad above the fold does not imply that you are affected by this change. It is excessive behavior that Google are working to avoid for users.”

Danny asked the question how Google knows what an ad is.

“Google have a variety of signals that algorithmically determine what type of ad or content appears above the fold. It is completely algorithmic in its detection. Google do not use a hard coded list of ad providers.”

Conclusion

This change is one of over 500 Google expect to roll out to search this year. From an SEO perspective the update is another facet in the equation which must be considered.

It is probably too early to consider completely revamping your paid advertisement strategy, but it is worth keeping it in the back of your mind and using common sense. Continuing to deliver relevant content and the best possible user experience is always the best practice recommendation for web users.

Content will always be king, long live the king.

So, who do people friend on Facebook? It starts out with real life actual friends, then flows on to friends of friends, businesses & then randoms!

But what is it that gets you un-friended? Am sure we’ve all been there or given our friend list a cull every couple of years. It seems being offensive is the number one reason to become someone’s un-friend along with not being well known or trying to sell someone something. For me it’s more about interaction – if people don’t interact and am going through a cull they may or may not get removed.

The stats above come from  NM Incite’s infographic which looks at why we friend and unfriend on Facebook. It also covers what social media is most used for in general. The main reasons are to keep in contact with family, be entertained, read consumer feedback, learn about products and finally, to get coupons and promotions. Check it out:

The stats all came from the State Of Social Media Report that was conducted in early 2011 and released Q3 2011.

There was a major advertisement battle last year in India. It was about the “Mystery Shampoo” and if it was the number 1 shampoo.

Around July 23rd, P&G Pantene came up with the idea of Mystery Shampoo. It was on TV, web, blogs and print but nobody really knew what it was. The idea was to build buzz about the “mystery” theme, finally ending with a big reveal that it was Pantene.

There was just one hitch with their plan: their biggest competitor. There had been hints of the Mystery Shampoo campaign before it launched, and just a few days later on July 28th, Dove came out with a counter advertisement “There is no mystery. Dove is the No. 1 Shampoo.” Any buzz that Pantene was trying to build was ruined and Dove reaped all of the rewards from this campaign. This is a classic example of smart entrapping of a competitor in marketing.

So what went wrong with Mystery Shampoo?

• Gave hints about campaign even before launch
• Too much time between tease and reveal
• Gave enough time for smart competitor to cash-in on the opportunity

Cautions and Some Tips

• Teasers extended to long durations can be put brand at risk
• Don’t give hints to your competitors
• Don’t use incorrect statistics (you can and will be sued by competitors!)
• Guard yourself for defence before you go out to attack a competitor
• Create good memory about brand by using strong visual effects. Build a story. Build curiosity.
• Your product should be available in market when you launch/reveal the campaign. A teaser is all about building curiosity and expectation which ultimately leads to purchase
• When you create expectations, make sure that your delivery meets those expectations
• Use different mediums to maximize your exposure. Make the best use of social circles
• It is worth making big noise when you are ending your campaign

All search performance results are calculated on a “last click wins” basis. This means that the last click a user makes always gets the credit for the sales revenue or conversions, regardless of how many other searches are made before this click.

With the click path report, you can see the entire user journey that leads to the conversion on a website.

You might be surprised by the user’s search activity before converting on your website and it might bring insights to new things to optimise or test.

Depending on the product or service that you’re selling, it could take one click or 20 before a customer makes a final purchase. The higher the cost and commitment, the more research is usually done before a purchase, meaning lots of clicks!

The click path report gives you additional data and then valuable insights to the consumer behavior and the real influence of your keywords or campaigns.

You can look at First Click (where the initial click that brought them to the website gets the sale), Last Click (the last click gets the sale), or Equal Attribution (all clicks share evenly in the sale value) models to get an idea of the value of different keywords.

Below are 4 situations where a click path report can give you valuable insights:

1. Before pausing a keyword

As I said earlier, the click path report gives you additional information about the keyword performance. It is often quite tempting to pause a generic term: it’s expensive, doesn’t bring a lot of sales, etc. However, you might find out that some of those terms are sitting at the start of consumer journey and are the words bringing customers to your site in the first place! Before pausing a keyword, keep in mind the keyword might have initiated or assisted in more conversions than Last Click gives it credit for.

2. To see how generic terms support other conversions.

This leads to my second point: a click path report helps to understand the real performance of generic keywords. Generic keywords are often not rewarded for the support they give to other keywords and particularly brand keywords.

If you put yourself in the mindset of the user, the fact that generic terms are not highly performing actually makes sense. Before most purchases, the user will start with a more generic search, e.g. “cheap holidays in Thailand”. The user will then narrow his search throughout the process, maybe “hotel prices in Bangkok” to finally search for your brand and make a booking.

Google calls this the search funnel. In this example, the conversion will get attributed to the brand keyword. However, “cheap holidays in Thailand” and “hotel prices in Bangkok” clearly played a role in the final booking and some part of the revenue should be attributed to these words. That’s what the click path report will allow you to do.

For one of our clients, we realized that many generic keywords initiated or supported conversions on the brand and could make their CPA much more in-line with our goals.

3. To see how channels complement each other

A great thing about the click path report is that you can also see interactions between channels.

For one of our clients, we actually found that remarketing was a much more valuable channel than we had originally anticipated. The number of direct conversions was quite low but it appeared that the number of users who had a remarketing click within their search funnel was quite high.

These insights can be valuable and highlight how the different channels work together to bring more conversions for the site.

4. To understand user involvement

The click path report gives you the full user journey. This means you get visibility on how many clicks it takes a user before converting on your website.

In other words, the report helps you to understand how often the user is going back and forth and gives some insight to how trustworthy the user thinks your brand is. We ran click path analysis for different types of products for an online retailer. This retailer is well known for one specific product and they’ve recently diversified their range. For the main product, the average number of clicks was lower, with an average of 1.4 clicks before a conversion. The time between the first click and the last click was also shorter compared to the other products. These results can give you a better understanding of the buying confidence and the role of brand awareness in the buying process (association of a product with a specific brand).

Do you have any other times that you run a click path analysis? Tell us in the comments!

Sixty seconds. It doesn’t seem like a long time. I mean, Usain Bolt could probably run ridiculously far, but I’d still be waiting for the elevator to get downstairs. On the web, a LOT can happen in 60 seconds. And it does. Every 60 seconds, there are 98,000 tweets, 168 million e-mails sent, 600 new YouTube videos uploaded (at least a few of those not including any cats).

Take a look at what else happens in just 60 seconds on this place we call the web:

Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers

Welcome back to our Blogs that Float Our Boat Series! Today I’ll share mine. I have to admit, it was REALLY difficult to narrow these down! I read a lot of blogs. But anyway, let’s continue.

Overall Happiness- reading these sites just make me happy.

Stratejoy- A website dedicated to the Quarter-Life Crisis. Stratejoy gets a fresh batch of spunky 20 and 30-something female bloggers every 6 months to talk about their struggles, finding their happiness, and overall life. Molly chooses amazing writers and fosters an amazing community.

NicoleisBetter- I love Nicole and would totally stalk her try to be her friend if I went to California. I found her through a Stratejoy letter to her younger self, where she reprimanded herself for wearing the “We do it better in the water” Abercrombie shirt that I most definitely also owned in 2001. Her blog used to be about all things hilarious, and it still is, but now it’s also about her journey of figuring shit out. And giving advice like not waiting to pursue your dreams, not settling for less than awesome, and making plans to figure out what you really want.

TheBloggess- Jenny is crazy. But in the kind of way that makes me want to read everything she writes ever. Someone who wears a wolf costume made from a real wolf to the movies? C’mon, how could I resist?

MediocreAthlete- Rebecca is NOT a mediocre triathlete, but she hangs out with super-humans, so she thinks she is. Her tales of training blunders, eating bugs, and race success inspire me to get off my own butt a bit more often.

Travel- I may or may not be obsessed with travel. And when I can’t go anywhere, the next best thing is to read about the people who are travelling!

TravelsOfAdam- I met Adam back in 2006 during my study abroad in Sydney. We remained good buds and took a fateful trip to Iceland back in 2009 where we met a lot of full-time travelers. For the first time, we both asked ourselves why we were stuck in the American system of 2 weeks holiday per year, planning to maybe take a cool vacation when we were 40. A few months later, we quit our jobs to travel the world. Adam has captured his journey (which continues today in Berlin!) through his blog, definitely worth a read.

AdventurousKate- A solo female travelling the globe, Kate tells it how it is. Her stories are honest and funny, she’s new to the scene but she blogs a lot and is always fun to read.

TwentySomethingTravel- Another blogger that encourages readers to get out and travel now! Traveling in your 20’s (or 30’s, or 40’s, or any age) might not seem like the perfect time. There will never be a “perfect” time. Just go.

NomadicMatt- One of the most popular travel bloggers out there, Matt has been on the road for more than 5 years(!). He’s been to a lot of places you’d like to go and writes detailed travel guides with great tips on must-see’s and ways to save money.

TheEverywhereist- I actually found Geraldine because of her SEOMoz hubby, and I’m so glad I did. While she’s not a full-time backpacker like the rest on the list, she’s funny, ridiculous, and slightly obsessed with baked goods. A winning combination in my book.

Work- the marketing stuff, the online stuff, etc.

SethGodin – The marketing guru, himself. His posts are short, and he writes every day. It’s a good way to open your mind and start the day.

OutspokenMedia- I fell in love with Lisa’s writing back when she worked for Bruce Clay. She writes about SEO, social media, building a brand, blogging, general ways to make your site better, and some fun posts here and there. Go for the SEO advice, stay for the unique writing style.

SEOmoz- This is the site that pretty much taught me SEO when I was fresh out of university. Lots of beginner’s guides, YouMoz posts with really detailed SEO experiments with results, and a fantastic community that shares knowledge. In my opinion, the go-to site for any beginner.

SearchEngineLand- SEL breaks stories in the search world as soon as they happen. If you want to stay up to date, this is the blog for you.

It is one of Google’s most dramatic search updates; integrating personal/social search and website content all in its patented search algorithm. Introducing Search Plus Your World!

Rather than going through the list of its features (which you can find out by searching here) and discussing Google’s latest antitrust law breaches, let’s dive into the bigger scheme of Google’s intent with Search Plus Your World and its implications for SEO.

Who Knew Swimming with Sharks in Australia would be so awesome?

I’m sure a lot of people these days know that there are awesome things to do , if you search hard enough for it. Care to swim with the sharks in Australian waters?

However, it is more than likely people would only try something new & awesome (like swimming with sharks) through trusted recommendations from personal connections via word of mouth, rather than simply reading it online. Here’s how Search Plus Your World actually comes into the picture.

The Lead up to Search Plus Your World

Search Plus Your World is the missing piece of the social media puzzle that has brought together Google’s attempt in delivering a rich and useful “Google” content experience to search engine users, positioned for businesses. This is through organising content by named entities i.e. people, places in search results, rather than content only provided by website owners.

The past few years have also seen many product inclusions in Google’s SERP’s (with many failures) which have brought them to this point, including:

• Google Social Search.
• Google Rich Snippets.
• Google Buzz.
• Google Plus One Button.
• Google +.
• The Google Bar UI Change.

However to provide a clear distinction between personalised/social search & web content, other changes were required to “clean up” its SERP landscape.

• Google Panda Updates – lowering search engine rankings for websites with low-quality content.
• The introduction of schema.org – rich mark-up to provide more structured data to search engines.
• Expanded Site links – Most often for brand queries to provide even more relevant results for users
• Improving search filters for other Google verticals, particularly image & social results.
• Implementation of the authorship tag – To associate content with named entities.
• Query Encryption (SSL) on Google.com – To protect personalised search query data.
• A toggle to distinguish between personalised/social search and website results – Search Plus Your World (as below)

Search Plus Your World for SEO Impact

Basically, the use of Search Plus Your World will allow search users to find content based on:

• Google+ content from your circles.
• Related people and pages from Google+.
• Photos from you and your friends.
• Profiles in search.

So what does this change mean for businesses depending on Google for their website traffic?

All users signed in to their Google account will see the personalised results as the default. At the moment there are observations from SEO professionals i.e. John Doherty suggesting Google is hiding local listings for personalised results. Danny Sullivan also demonstrates no Adwords results, as they are currently being replaced by Google+ brand pages.

Raven Tools co founder & CPO Jon Henshaw provides a great summary of its impact.

“In theory, it will provide more relevant search results that have been pre-screened by trusted connections.
1. Your participation and GPA in G+ will influence some of the search results for other people.
2. Your participation will not affect the search results for the majority of people doing searches outside your network, with your GPA being the possible exception, assuming it has some impact on the algorithm.”

Overall, for the time being, the quality of personalised results has not made any significant contributions to Search Plus Your World. This is due to the lack of engagement by Google+ users and the adoption rate of the Google Authorship tag.

Search Plus Your World for SEO Recommendations

It is clear that Google+ reinforces Search Plus Your World. Since other social media channels i.e. Twitter and Facebook aren’t integrated in Google, this places an ever greater emphasis of playing by Google’s rules.

Here a few tips for businesses to get ahead of the game:

1. Treat your Google+ profile like a website – ensure it includes all relevant yet optimised information about you. Include links on your profile back to your website.
2. Create a Google + Brand page and become an active member to become influential in other users circles.
3. Include targeted keywords in all Google+ posts to increase the likelihood of it being found in search.
4. Treat +1’s like quality backlinks. Only link to content that is worth sharing with your personal connections. SEO managers should focus on gaining high quality links for a website, as this will influence the authority of a Google+ page.
5. If blogging is a part of your SEO strategy, it is important to implement the authorship tag by linking it to your Google+ profile. This will help your profile gain more authority on Google.

Final Thoughts on Search Plus Your World

Even though Google is trying to make this a central part of what they do, it is my opinion that they have brought this latest update too soon. Like other newly introduced products, i.e. Google Places, Google should have introduced it on the right hand side of the SERP’s. Over time and with more user feedback, it could have then placed it “in” the search results.

Group M have also commented on the development of Google Search Plus Your World in a recent press release.

Let us know your thoughts!

Time to Search + Your World in Google.

Mid-Q4 2011, YouTube announced that they replaced Insights with YouTube Analytics.
Some of the latest features’ include :

• Quick Overview: The new overview provides all of the information that YouTube think  you care about, while also enabling easy access to more detailed information.
• More Detailed Reports: More detailed statistics which hopefully can help you gather more precise understanding of your content & audiences.
• Audience Builders: Discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions.
• Audience Retention: This new report allows you to see how far viewers are watching through your video.

And they wrapped it up in a nice pretty infographic for us too:

Happy 2012! I hope everyone’s as stoked as I am for the last. Year. Ever. Today, a 70 year old taxi driver told me that the only thing I have to do in my life is get married. I promptly proposed to him, but he turned me down. Hopefully 2012 won’t be full of more heartbreak like that.

Today we’ll talk about something near and dear to all of our hearts: money! Bids on AdWords, specifically.

Let’s do it.

What are bids?

Your bid is the absolute maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for a click on this keyword. We’ve already talked about your Quality Score, which makes up half of your ad rank, but your bid is the other half. If my bid is higher than your bid, and we have the same Quality Score, my ad rank is higher than yours and I’ll rank first. Woot.

How much do I really pay?

Your bid is the maximum you’d pay, but most of the time you’ll end up paying a lot less. The exact formula that Google uses is a bit complicated.  They multiply your Quality Score and your bid and get your ad rank. Then they look at the ad rank of the dude below you, divide it by your Quality Score and add one cent. That’s your price!

This infographic comes from SmallBizTrends and explains it pretty well:

When should I change my bids?

You should change your bids whenever you can make your campaign better. In Google AdWords, you should always be testing something. Quality Score takes some time and effort to change, but you can change your bid instantly. And changing your bids means changing your position. And that means you can test which position works best!

Maybe you’re currently ranking 5th for a certain keyword- increasing your bid and your position to 3rd might get you lots more clicks and lots more conversions. Maybe you’re ranking 1st for another word but spending ridiculous amounts of money. Decreasing your bid might drop your costs but maintain your conversions. You never know until you try.

Should I keep increasing my bid until I’m first?

Google would like that very much! But it’s probably not the best strategy for you. Being first for everything doesn’t make sense because some words are more important to you than others. I’m sure that there are some words that you want to be first on (like, your brand), but there are others where 3rd, 4th, maybe even 5th is the sweet spot of lower cost without sacrificing too many conversions. Do whatever works for you, there’s no “perfect” position, so keep testing until you find what’s right for you!