Featured Article: Paid Search Best Practice Guide - Enhanced Campaigns The SMG Search team have contributed 6 chapters for the newly released Econsultancy Paid Search Best Practice Guide. The guide is a key starting point for beginners and experts alike on all aspects of PPC. Drawing on a plethora of knowledge across our wide client base, we have touched on topics such as testing, integration with other media and bid management software. Being experts in search, we are at the cutting edge of the marketplace, able to comment on many of the most recent updates to the PPC marketplace in these chapters, such as Google Enhanced Campaigns and the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance. The Paid Search Best Practice Guide is a must-read for all search practitioners and is available via subscription or one-off fee at Econsultancy.com http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/paid-search-marketing-ppc-bestpractice-guide
41% of businesses can accurately track mobile vs. desktop interactions – 6th Mar 2013 Despite the ever increasingly importance of mobile search, it has been reported in an Econsultancy article that just 41% of businesses are able to accurately track mobile/desktop user behaviour interactions. In an ever evolving search industry, with a mobile first dependency only set to increase businesses will need to continue to develop strategies to effectively track user behaviour cross-device. -
Kevin Ting
For more information from this Econsultancy article please see link below: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62287-just-41-of-businesses-canaccurately-track-mobile-vs-desktop-user-behavior
Amazon Launch New Mobile Ad Network – 7th Mar 2013 This week Amazon have a launched a new mobile ad network, that will allow advertisers to run ads on mobile app that have been downloaded from Amazon’s app store:
What these ads have over Google’s ad network is a wealth of data and knowledge on their customers, meaning they can target existing users with more appropriate ads based on previous purchase across the Amazon network. This means Amazon ads will potentially a lot more targeted and a lot more profitable for advertiser to explore, as these will be available not just on Amazon’s Kindle but also Android devices with Amazon apps installed. -
Kevin Ting
For more information from this announcement please see links below: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-new-mobile-ad-network-is-ahuge-threat-to-google-2013-3 http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/05/amazon-mobile-ad-network/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/12/24/is-amazons-advertising-athreat-to-google/
Google Enhanced Campaign Brings Free Google Forwarding Numbers in Call Extensions – 5th Mar 2013 Google introduced forwarding numbers last year to help advertisers to track calls coming from PPC ads on computers and tablets. It used to charge advertisers £1 for each call that comes from Google forwarding numbers. But now, with Google Enhanced Campaign, Google forwarding numbers become completely free!
How do Google Forwarding Numbers work? If you choose to use Google Forwarding Numbers in your call extension, Google will provide a unique phone number that's displayed with your ads. If a potential customer calls this phone number, AdWords will route the call to your business phone number. You'll then be able to see detailed reports about calls generated from your ads. Benefits of upgraded call extensions in Google Enhanced Campaigns Measure phone call conversions: Help understand the effectiveness of your ads by tracking how many calls you receive that last longer than the duration you specify. Free calls with Google forwarding phone numbers Cover all devices: With upgraded call extensions, your business phone number can appear on all devices. Legacy call extensions show your business phone number only when the ad appears on mobile devices unless you opt to use Google forwarding numbers (available only in the U.S., U.K., and Germany). Better extension reporting: See how many clicks you receive on each part of your ad when a call extension appeared, such as clicks to your ad's headline compared to clicks on the call extension. Break these statistics down by campaign, ad group, or ad. Flexibility: These extensions can be added to ad groups as well as campaigns, while legacy call extensions can be added only to entire campaigns. In-place editing: Edit your call extension without resetting its performance statistics. Start/end dates and scheduling: Specify what dates, days of the week, or times of day when your call extension should appear. It’s particularly helpful if your call centre doesn’t open 24/7.
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Blair Liu
More Details: http://googlemobileads.blogspot.fr/2013/03/enhanced-campaignsimproving-online-and.html
A look into how Google deals with WebSpam – 6th Mar 2013 In the wake of Interflora’s dramatic removal from and subsequent re-inclusion into the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), as a result of SEO activity that did not comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines (link to a brief summary here), Google’s Head of Webspam Matt Cutts released a video in which he addresses Google’s standards for manually removing spam from the Google index: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Mb3ZiXno4Dw
The video reiterates that Google has very clear webmaster guidelines that cover the most common spam methods but do hold numerous internal training and peer reviews to ensure that they are prepared to respond to anything that is not in keeping with the spirit of the webmaster guidelines. Despite the swift “recovery” of Inteflora, and BMW, from their exclusion from the SERPs it’s important to note that this is not the norm when it comes to recovering from penalties: : JC Penny took 3 months to return to anything resembling their pre-penalty levels of traffic and visibility and many sites take longer. SEO that complies with Google’s webmaster guidelines is long term activity that drives incremental, sustainable results without the threat of penalty or exclusion from the SERPs. How Search Works In 2010 Google released a video titled “How Search Works” which explained the what happens behind the scenes from when you type a search query into Google’s search engine and the esults are returned a half second later. I would recommend watching it if you have not seen it as it lays out the process in a clear and easy to understand way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs
This year Google has released an updated, somewhat more in depth piece of content under the same title but in the format of an interactive infographic: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/
The infographic is divided into three parts that cover: Crawling & Indexing: How Google finds and stores the web's content
Algorithms: The programs & formulas that deliver the results pages Fighting Spam: How Google keeps results relevant While Google has plenty of resources on this topic on its site they aren’t nearly as consumer-friendly as this format which goes a long way to helping those not familiar with Search understand how it works. -
Ashley Lindley