There are many kinds of products to be bought on the Internet. The numbers of online stores to choose products from just keeps growing – sometimes you can buy a product from the e-commerce website of a local retailer, other times from an e-commerce website in a country on the other site of the world. The quantity of content online is so huge that it is easy to get frustrated and not know what online source you can trust. This is the landscape of the Internet which can be explained by two theories:

The Long Tail

The concept of the Long Tail is that while the majority of people search using the same queries (products, services, subjects, etc.), few people look for less popular/specific keywords. However, from a holistic perspective, the variety of keywords with low volume of searches is greater than the variety of generic search queries. The graph below illustrates this theory:

The Paradox of Choice

The Paradox of Choice reflects the idea that due to the many options available for purchases these days, we often become more anxious, because of the time we spend deciding what to buy, as well as frustrated when making a “wrong choice” – i.e. if we weren’t satisfied with a purchase, but it was the only brand existing, we would be angry with the providers of that product. On the other hand, if there were many brand options for a particular product, we would feel irritated with ourselves for not having made the best choice.

Internet users frequently use search engines to filter through to the results that are most relevant to them. This process is also a way to reduce the anxiety of finding specific product/service/content. That is why if you have a site and you want to be accessed by your potential users, you should do Internet Marketing.

PPC

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is essential for branding and e-commerce because it allows you to create specific advertising messages to promote your website for the keywords that are important to you. In other words, if you want to promote your site, make your brand known or advertise a product/sale, PPC will give you total control for this. Moreover, due to the cost-per-click system, the traffic is guaranteed since you just have to pay for the accomplished click. A good PPC specialist will understand your product and manage your online campaign so that you will be noticed by the potential client that is helpless among so many results.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about your identity. Many times search engines don’t classify you as a relevant website for determined query because your website is not informing correctly who you are. SEO strategies are based on long term activities that will improve your visibility by spreading your brand all over the internet (link building) and also by making sure that search engines can read through your pages and understand that you should be prominently in the natural results.

SMM

Social Media Marketing can be explained by the word “relationship”. The internet became one of the main ways to express opinions about everything, including products and services. This kind of opinion can be considered more important for users than usual advertising as it comes from a third-party and tends to be seen as a more trusted source. Therefore, it is vital to understand what clients are talking about your brand in the social networks and encourage them to try your product/service and tell others the good experience they had.

Conclusion

A website is not only the business card of a company, but also the heart of a corporation as it contains many kinds of information to serve different stakeholders. That is why money should be allocated for Internet Marketing, because it grows the site’s visibility making the business pop up in front of the internet users eyes.

We have all seen it, organic results for simple searches, returning domain names we never heard of before, all including keywords within the domain name, in order to get more clicks and traffic from being on page 1 of Google.

As with most search engine relevance indicators, the domain name has become a place to put keywords in, forgetting the essentials around marketing a business, namely building a brand.

It is important to know that no matter how high a website ranks, most people would rather buy from a brand they know and trust. This is proven in the research Outrider commissioned recently with Global Reviews;How Australians are shopping online.

This didn’t stop the domain name spamming from being abused to the extent where it became difficult to find a known brand to appear for certain search queries. This has had an impact on how relevant the results were for the user, meaning Google had to evolve.

The good news is that recently, we have seen interesting evolutions in how reputable brands have been gradually getting back some of their rankings, and how SEO has become more valuable than ever for them to provide the right keyword context around their brand.

Overall improvement in rankings from brand sites

The brand search engine visibility appears to have improved in the past few months, over a wide range of different brands and markets.

We would like to think it is thanks to how good we are at helping clients improve their SEO but it is on a larger scale than that.

Where a year ago, the search for “car insurance Australia” would have returned a website such as www.carinsurance.com.au, we now see AAMI, GIO, Bingle, Youi, Allianz etc. Even ISelect (price comparison site) doesn’t appear on page 1, when it used to only a few months back.

We would have many other examples but it would be more interesting if any of our readers have any examples relevant to this, so feel free to share in the comments!

Drop in rankings of websites with no brand

We have seen examples where websites with no actual clear brand or name have dropped significantly in the results, being perceived as less relevant, even for the most legitimate of websites.

For example, legitimate tourism websites have had a hard time if they were using the region as the domain name, as a region cannot be perceived as a brand. The result is that Google has allocated more value towards government TLD sites (.gov.au), thus increasing the page 1 competition.

Again, if this is something you have noticed in your sector, feel free to share any relevant examples!

Google SERP updates

An important change which happened recently was the brand site links, mentioned in an earlier blog post. For most brand search terms, Google now displays up to 12 site links to help the user find the most relevant page to him.
This gives brands more valuable exposure on the page with the aim of increasing click through rates.

This alone is a strong signal that Google is giving the love back to brands.

Is giving more importance to big brands more relevant?

The challenge is where to draw the line between what a brand is and what is simply an SEO over optimized website.

We would like to think that Google is clever enough to understand what a brand is based on search patterns leading to websites. For example, if I am searching for the latest news on gadgets, my search for “Engadget latest reviews” will lead to Google understanding I want to find Engadget for my information, thus considering “Engadget” a brand.

In any case, we would like to think this is an improvement in the way search engines allocate value to websites, and should help clear out any 2 month old website whose sole purpose is to outrank all brands by abusing search engine algorithms.

But this question is more open to all of you out there. Is Google on the right track? Should brands you know from TV, stores, magazines, newspapers be better results than the others?
Share your opinion in the comments box!

We are very excited to have Outrider’s very first guest blogpost in the lead up to the Online Retailer Sydney 2011 Conference!

Ben Liau, who will be speaking at the event, is a digital marketing enthusiast who specialises in developing digital marketing strategies. His forte includes SEO, SEM, email marketing, social media marketing, web analytics, & ecommerce. He is very passionate about online marketing and web start ups, and blogs about new updates and trends in the digital marketing world at www.digitalonlinestrategy.com . You can follow him on twitter @benliau . He is also the marketing manager at www.mooo.com.au

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Multi channel marketing for an online retailer is essential for reaching their valuable customers.

In this day and age a business cannot depend solely on one marketing channel; it needs to use the right mix of digital marketing techniques to be successful.

The key to being successful is to integrate your digital marketing channels for extra effectiveness and to boost your multi channel marketing strategy.

Here are 3 techniques that you can use to integrate your digital marketing channels to boost your multi channel marketing strategy.

Getting better SEO with help from SEM

For an online retailer a good example of integrating marketing channels is integrating SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing), which usually would go hand in hand. With any business, choosing the right keywords for their website is essential. Everyone knows that it is not easy to rank for high traffic keywords and ranking for specific keywords does not mean that you have chosen the correct keywords. You can use SEM to instantly advertise for different keywords and see which ones bring in the right amount of traffic with the right amount of conversions. So by leveraging SEM to find out which SEO keywords are performing for your site, you can optimise your website for the right keywords, and double your sites effectiveness on the search engines like Google.

Integrating marketing channels to test, measure, and scale!

Digital marketing channels have the advantage of being a lot easier and quicker to test, measure and scale.

A good example is using SEM like Google Adwords to test different advertising promotions.  By A/B split testing two ads with different promotions, you can determine which promotion is most appealing to customers before using it for other channels. And knowing which promotion is converting with customers, you have the additional insight that can be used when sending out EDMs (electronic direct mail) to customers.

Another good example of testing advertising copy or brand visuals is through email marketing. You can send out an EDM (electronic direct mail) to your subscriber list, and split test different advertising copy or design visuals. After a few tests, the variations with the best results (opens, clicks & conversions etc) will determine the winning ad copy or design visuals.

The results can be then used to update copy on your website or change your branding visuals to enhance your brand BVL (broader visual language).

Leveraging marketing channels off each other = double the effectiveness.

The real value in integrating marketing channels is so they can leverage off each other and become more effective then they would be, just operating in isolation.

A simple example is leveraging social media with email marketing. Getting new fans on a new Facebook page or Twitter account can prove challenging at the start. But if your business has been operational for a while, and you have an existing subscription list of customers that you regularly email, you can leverage off your subscription list by emailing your list and asking your members to join your Facebook.

You can also provide them with a share-to-social option to allow them share it with all their friends. Having your customers as fans on your Facebook page, will double marketing effectiveness and increase traffic, because of the viral nature of social media networks.

This works in vice versa as well; you can easily build your email subscriber list from your Facebook page, by offering incentives to fans for signing up using Facebook sign up applications.

Conclusion

I’ve only outlined a few examples here of integrating digital marketing channels, but there are many more ways you can integrate marketing channels together to boost your multi channel marketing strategy.

As long as there is good communication, and you are measuring the correct metrics and working toward the correct goals, marketing channels can be easily integrated with each other to produce more effective results.

The recent research commissioned by Outrider Australia into online consumer purchase behaviour has delivered some very powerful insights into how Australian’s are researching and buying products online. As many of you know, some of the findings were presented at last weeks AIMIA sponsored event, Online Retail: Brand Engagement in a Multi-Channel Environment.

One of the key insights which has been doing the rounds in the media for the past week has been that brand and shop terms have overtaken generic terms when people begin researching to buy products online.

49% of people were also more likely to click on a brand they trusted compared to 29% of people clicking on a link relevant to their search. This is a significant change when compared to the 40% of people choosing relevancy over brand (39%) in 2009 (See below).

Q: Why did you click on the search links you picked? (Check all that apply)

The findings raise some interesting factors for marketers to consider when designing their search strategies.

1. With brand search continuing to increase, the first is brand protection. Google allows advertisers to submit their trademark to them for consideration, to prevent other brands from advertising under it. This is fairly critical, otherwise you leave yourself open to competition advertising under your brand and leveraging your investment into other marketing channels to generate brand related search traffic.

2. With the ‘pool’ of generic searches becoming a smaller percentage of overall searches, add to this more brands and businesses advertising online than ever before, it is absolutely critical that you have a multi-pronged approach. The smartest brands are now using search at the core of their digital marketing strategies and leveraging an integrated approach across search, display, EDM and Social Media to maximise cost efficiencies for brand awareness exercises and not be at the mercy of rising paid search and affiliate marketing click costs.

3. From a brand exposure perspective, search is still very cost effective, and for smaller brands that may not have the marketing budgets of the bigger players, search is still an extremely important channel. But in saying that, it is getting harder to get the results you may have achieved with the same budget a couple of years ago, especially with more of the major traditional bricks and mortar retailers waking up this year and investing in e-commerce and online marketing. This means you need to be more vigilant in addressing other aspects in the consumer purchase journey. Elements like site design, website user experience and targeting are now more important than ever.

Outrider is happy to provide further insights into the research and work with you to practically implement some of the key findings into your current digital marketing campaigns. We welcome you to contact our Commercial Manager, Victor Navarro on (02) 8968 4068 or victor.navarro@outrider.com with any questions or to arrange an appointment.

Earlier this week, a few of my colleagues and I attended the ‘Go Measure with Google Analytics’ event in Sydney. In this post I will  summarise  some of the key learnings and take-aways that we got from what was a very interesting day indeed (forgive the lengthy post, I have a lot to cover… ).

The agenda gave insight into some of the speakers we would witness over the course of the day, including several of Google’s own, namely John Jersin (Google Analytics Product Manager from the US), Alex Speziali, Peter Evans and Dave Smith (Analytics Specialists for Google AU/NZ), and Timo Josten (Google Analytics Certified Partner Manager, APAC & EMEA). Also on the panel were several Google partners – Christian Bartens, Director of Datalicious;  Daniel Rowan, GM of Internetrix, and Benjamin Mangold, Director of Loves Data (formerly Mangold Sengers), to offer their insight into some of the vast Google Analytics complexities.

New Google Analytics Features

The aim of the first half of the day was to educate the audience on some of the new features of Google Analytics, with most of the focus on the multi-channel attribution feature – the key to evaluating the performance of all your channels of online interaction. John stepped up first for the keynote address, and spoke of how version 5 of Google Analytics allows for easier data analysis, and provides more opportunity to leverage data. He wisely advised us all to stop thinking of just the last click, and start giving credit to channels/search terms playing their part by assisting conversions on our website. John also shared some stats on how the average number of pages per visit and average time on site metrics are dipping across the board in South East Asia – demonstrating lowering attention spans of web surfers and emphasising the need to capture their imagination as swiftly as you possibly can.

Conversion Paths

Christian was up next and certainly got the audience thinking. The topic du jour was attribution, and the message was to rethink attribution and look at the full path/journey of the user. Not just the different types of search terms that may have been used, but also the channels (touch points) that led them to your site along the way. There are many different ways businesses can engage with their consumer base, including e-mail, banner ads, through mobile content, paid search, affiliate marketing and social media. We need to start analysing more thoroughly how each of these channels contributes to overall conversions.

I particularly liked the idea of measuring ‘assists’ (or influencers) as last click attribution modeling may not give those channels the credit they deserve for the part they played in the decision making process. The new multi-channel funnels feature in Google Analytics makes this process far easier.

Google Analytics Goals

The focus of Alex’ presentation was around site goals – specifically looking at more than just your obvious key goals e.g. sales. She recommended splitting your goals into micro (small) and macro (large), as this will give you a more complete picture. Many of you will be familiar with the cyclical purchase process: consideration – evaluation – purchase – post purchase/ongoing exposure. Define goals for each stage of the consumer journey, for instance, consideration goals (micro) might be time on site or pages per visit. Active evaluation goals (again these are micro goals) might take the form of watched videos, requested goals or viewed testimonials. Post purchase micro goals could be newsletter signups, Facebook ‘likes’ or Google +1’s.

Mobile and Social Plugin Tracking

Time was ticking along, so next we had a couple of Googlers, Peter and John, very briefly covering mobile and social plugin tracking. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you’ll very likely be taking part in the smartphone explosion (you may even be reading this on one!) – the prediction is that by the end of this year, half of all Aussies will have a smartphone. Amazingly 75% of large online advertisers don’t have a mobile optimised site – I’m sure this number will start dropping sharply when people start to understand how well this particular demographic can convert in the right circumstances.

With social plugins, you can see how visitors to your site engage with plugins such as the Google +1 button or the Twitter ‘tweet’ button. Since there is no new pageview when clicking these social buttons, some tweaks need to be made to register this data in GA.  For plugins that aren’t Google owned, you will need to make a call to the new _trackSocial() method – more on this can be found at http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-plugin-tracking-in-google.html. We can also see from this what part the different plugins play in terms of ultimately converting visitors.

Landing Page Optimisation

The 2^nd half of the day focused more on the testing (LPO) side of things. The main hurdle to overcome with testing is the age old question of what to test…

Timo from Google suggests that you:

• Start where you are losing money!
• Use Analytics to identify opportunity
• PRIORITISE – start with pages losing most revenue (e.g. highest bounce rate)
• Rule out low quality traffic
• Think BIG! Then refine
• Ask your visitors!
• Find where users leave your site
• Do some competitor analysis for inspiration
• Ensure accuracy of your data

Following in a similar vein, Ben then talked through some examples of how Loves Data got some great results by making some very small changes for their clients including NIB, Amnesty International and BT Super for Life. For NIB, playing with the colour scheme and moving the quote form positioning resulted in a whopping 32% uplift in quotes subbed! Again, the message here is keep things simple, only ask for what you really need, and make it look easy.

Page Speed Optimisation

One of the more mind-blowing stats of the day came next when John stepped back up a 3^rd time to talk about page speed – every second of latency can affect your conversion rate by up to 7%! This one is particularly interesting, and one I intend to use to hammer home the importance of page speed to my clients. Next we saw another case study, this time a travel website called Amari, who improved their page load time by 11.5% just by removing whitespace in their HTML code and by actioning the low hanging fruit taken from the Google Page Speed tool. Even minor changes can have a big impact!

Live Examples

Finally, the panelists went through some live examples of audience submitted webpages to make some suggestions for potential test elements.

Much of what we heard were standard testing techniques – things like keeping important items above the fold, testing different offers/headlines/colour schemes/incentives, trimming off as many unnecessary fields as possible, displaying pricing, and demonstrating social proof ie. testimonials/case studies.

And with that, the day was wrapped up!

If you attended the event, we’d love to hear your thoughts on it, and what parts you enjoyed most. Reply and let me know how you intend to use the insights you learned on the day!

As you may have noticed over the last week or so, Google have been experimenting with extended sitelinks.

At Outrider we have been busy testing these sitelinks for various branded keywords for our clients. These new sitelinks have been appearing on and off since early last week, but now the official word from Google is that they are here to stay.

Below is an example of these extended sitelinks for the keyword term “Outrider”

As you can see the new sitelinks have been expanded to show up to 12 deeper level page links rather than the 8 that were shown previously. A spliced (shortened) version of the URL is also displayed, along with a short snippet description of the page itself.

Just like with the organic listings on SERPS the content that is displayed (and highlighted) in these URL and description snippets are dependent on the keyword query.

According to Google these extended sitelinks will make it easier for users to find the exact page they are looking for on the website by providing them with more content to read through before even clicking through to the website.

These extended sitelinks will not only improve user experience and click through rate; they also highlight the need to include keyword rich and relevant descriptive content to each page of your website, and not just the homepage.

Algorithm changes with sitelinks

Another exciting announcement from Google relating to sitelinks is a modification of the algorithm currently in place. According to Google the sitelink algorithm will be combined with regular organic results to further improve the quality of links displayed according to the users search query. It is safe to assume, then, that this algorithm will go through a few tweaks and changes over time.

Outrider will be continuing to test the impact these new extended sitelinks have on click through rate and general organic traffic performance in the coming weeks.

The recent publication by searchengineland.com of the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors has offered a great introduction to the basic concepts of SEO in the form of a funky infographic.

It offers those new to search engine marketing a good foundation on how to optimise a website and what needs to be considered – for example the architecture of the website i.e. can the site be easily crawled and if inbound links to your website are from trusted, quality websites will this aid your rankings?

Although the infographic makes for a good start, the more experienced search marketers still struggle with the decision of where to focus their SEO efforts in order to best optimise a website and get the most from their SEO activity. For example is it better to concentrate efforts on link building or focus on onsite content to achieve better rankings?

It could well appear that our prayers have been answered by SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin, who has published the 2011 edition of the Search Engine Ranking Factors which gives insights into the segmentation of the search ranking algorithm into various components like “page-specific, link-level features,” or “domain-level, keyword-agnostic features.”

SEOmoz did two things to obtain their results for Ranking Factors 2011; first of all they surveyed the opinions of people in the SEO industry (132 SEO experts) on what features they felt mattered most to rankings and then correlated their data.

Secondly, SEOmoz took a sample of 10,000 results from Google and looked at which features correlated with high rankings.

The Future of Search

The key findings indicate that the future of search will rely heavily on user experience and social signals and less on keywords contained in domain names and the effectiveness of paid links.

Correlations were identified between sites with high social activity (i.e. Facebook Shares and Tweets) and high rankings, thus strenghtening the argument that social signals are considered for ranking positions.

However, it is worth noting that the websites tested would need to be of a certain quality to attract high volumes of social signals and links. It would be difficult to draw consice conclusions without knowing which sites were included in the survey.

The ranking factors for 2011 differ from what were considered important ranking factors in 2009. For example, the authority of the domain was considered the highest ranking factor when optimising a website back in 2009, whereas 2011’s findings demonstrate a greater importance on linking.

This is probably influenced by Google, who are becoming more instantaneous allowing news and twitter feeds within its results pages. This gives newer domains an opportunity to occupy slots on the search engine results pages.

As mentioned above, social metrics have been indentified as being an important ranking factor to consider and it appears that domain hosting longevity is no longer as critical.

This is just a snippet of the findings available.

The report is detailed and insightful and for search marketers wanting a more in depth look into SEO Ranking Factors it is a must. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

What is gTLDs (Dot Anything)?

Worldwide Internet revolution is to be announced in June 2011, where web addresses will expand beyond dot com. Generic Top-Level Domains (dot anything) can be acquired for a price of $US185,000. Governments, businesses and entrepreneurs are expected to race to apply for popular Top-Level Domain names in a 60-day application window that will come after the official announcement. The first Top Level Domain names will likely be active mid next year.

The Implications for SEO

While experts predict there will be less confusion and dependencies on search engines like Google, that’s not necessarily the case. They argue, rather than doing searches on Google for something like “restaurants in London”, it is much simpler to browse “restaurants.London”. However, how would users know if such an address / directory exists? They would have to do a normal search in the first place.

For illustration, it is safe to say that most people know the exact web address of Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo. But they still search to find these sites anyway, even by typing the complete address on search engines.

Top Search Terms

Moreover, listings like “restaurants.London” would be very similar to existing web directories, and not much different than for example Yahoo! and dmoz. The organisation who runs the gTLD could also charge the advertisers some fees to be listed.

Search engines have not given any comments yet regarding this development. Therefore it is too early to conclude the implications for SEO and rank algorithms. But some questions that can be addressed are:

• Would we trust a site more if it has a gTLD?
• Would the click-through rates increase by having a gTLD?

If the answers are yes, then presumably search engines will think the same, and will update their rank algorithms to benefit these gTLDs.

We should also anticipate how it may affect the impact of keywords in domain name / TLD, and geo-targeting ability. For example these URLs:

Domain or TLD?

• Which would be weighted more by search engines, the domain name or TLD?
• In this case, which one is better; restaurants.sydney or sydney.restaurants?
• Would we be able to control geo-targeting on Google Webmaster Tools for our gTLDs?

Conclusion

Having said the points above, it is quite a big change in the Internet addressing system. Would it be beneficial to buy a gTLD? We would say yes, but merely as a defensive measurement against competitors and investors willing to spend more to buy our brand gTLDs. Will our gTLDs rank better than our usual dot com website? It is still too early to tell. Another question to be asked is: Would we invest US$185,000 to buy a gTLD, or spend it on an SEO / SEM campaign where the ROI is more measurable?

Those that haven’t signed up for Google Analytics in the last year may not have noticed that Google have updated their Google Analytics tracking code! The migration to the asynchronous (async) tracking code is probably the most significant change to the data collection mechanism of the analytics product since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 – for the first time allowing users to place the tracking code anywhere on the page without interfering with page load times.

The benefits of the new tracking code include: -

1.       Faster page load times,

2.       Increased accuracy in tracking of visitors,

3.       Less page interruptions,

4.       IMPROVED SEM AND SEO RESULTS!

Should you upgrade to the new tracking code?

Read on to find out the benefits to you (The Good), why you might not want to upgrade (The Bad) and instructions on how to upgrade tracking code (The Ugly – for those that don’t code).

The Good:  Benefits of the Async Tracking Code

Improved SEM and SEO Results: For us at Outrider, Australia’s largest search engine marketing and optimisation agency, we think the best part of implementing the new tracking code is the improved page load times and the effects of this on SEO and SEM. Google is no stranger to enhancing online user experience and has publicly stated that they use site speed in determining Google organic search engine rankings, as well as using page load times to determine quality score for ranking of Google sponsored links. By implementing the new tracking code, you’re improving your SEM and SEO and you’re opening up the opportunity of increased ROI through lower CPCs and increased rankings in your paid and organic listings!

Optimised User Experience: Compared to the traditional ga.js tracking code which stops all other activity while it’s loading, the new Async tracking code improves page load time by using code that is able to load in the background while your page content loads. Page load time tests by Position 2 show that the Async code does provide faster load time of websites compared to the traditional ga.js tracking code. By having a website that loads fast without any errors, your visitors are more likely to be in a good mood and ready to convert.

Better Tracking Accuracy: The new Async tracking code increases accuracy of reporting by tracking website visitors as soon as they visit the webpage compared to the traditional code which tracks visitors after the whole page content has loaded. Google recommends that the new async tracking code be placed at the top of the page in the <head> section of the source code, which allows for tracking of visitors that may exit or click a link before the whole page loads. After installing the new tracking code, your bounce rates may rise but at least you will know your true weakest pages and maybe even identify several that don’t work!

The Bad: Why not upgrade to Async Tracking Code?

Flash websites: If your website is mainly flash, it’s likely that you’re using the Adobe Flash component approach to track your site and simply inserting the new code in the <head> will not work.

The Ugly: The Tracking Code

Place the following Async Tracking Code at the bottom of your <head> section on every page of your website and get rid of the old ga.js tracking code.

Customised tracking tags:  Custom tracking tags such as virtual pageviews, e-commerce, and cross-domain tracking will require basic recoding. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t upgrade just because you have custom tracking tags.  However, be warned that tags will require updating for features to be retained.

Note on Site speed: The new Async tracking code doesn’t automatically track page load times, however to activate this feature you need to modify your traditional code anyway. So, why not kill two birds with one stone and update your tracking code as well as insert the Site Speed code to your website. Read Outrider’s blog article on Google Analytics Site Speed Feature.

Google in the US last week has introduced its latest experiment of the “+1” (plus one) button as part of Google search results. This allows you to see or apply a “+1” to the Organic Search results or Paid Search ads. This is not available on websites, yet.

This new feature basically helps you identify which search results that has been recommended by your friends or other people that found a search result relevant or enjoyed the user experience of that site.

However, to be able to use this apply new feature, you must have a Google account. You can still view the +1 without logging on but you won’t be able to see the finer detail of those people recommending that site

A more in-depth analysis has been given by Danny Sullivan of the “+1” button.

Here is Google’s quick view of the “+1” – Google +1 Video

How does this affect Paid Search?

You can use the “+1” button on search results which will appear next to the ad. Google have done testing on the ads with “+1s” and find that there is a lift for ads with the “+1” and that the response rate will increase, leading to an increase of CTR.

A higher CTR then increases your chance for higher quality score which in turn leads to achieving a lower CPC – based on Google’s quality score theory.

Google have also stated that all ads will have this function with the option to opt out, when people click on the “+1s” it won’t be considered a click and advertisers will be able to see which ads are getting the most “+1” hits.

You will eventually be able to endorse an ad with the plus “+1” button on the Google Search results, you can also do this once you visit a site, which will then automatically place the “+1” on the ad.

How does this affect Organic Search?

At this stage the “+1” does not appear to disrupt traditional SEO, but it seems, if successful, that it may change. In my opinion, ranking in the Organic Search results is more about putting keywords in meta tags and on-page and link building, so this may end up being another step in the optimisation process of websites so they meet user expectations and get all the important “+1” click.

Google’s intention to roll out “+1” is apparently not just about building a social network or adding another social layer to SEO, but it’s also about building a social graph which can then be used as a measure of page ranking. Danny Sullivan has suggested that social graphs are the way of the future

Social influences on SEO have already been around for a short time and are already popping up in blended searches on Google. There is evidence that social shares have a strong correlation with search rankings.

This graph from a SEO blog from Tom Critchlow shows correlation between metrics and ranking. It should be noted though that correlation and causation are very different phenomena, which may be entirely exclusive from each other.

“It shows that Facebook shares are well correlated with rankings. In fact, comparing to other factors we see Facebook shares are similarly correlated to the number of linking root domains.”

Find out more here – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-1-and-the-rise-of-social-seo

Your SEO or SEM/ PPC analysts will now be focusing on creating imaginative body copy and images and also ad texts which may be the difference between a ”+1” or none at all.