A useful and cost-saving new function which has been added to the updated Google Adwords interface is the integrated search query report pop-up screen. This provides advertisers with more detailed information on the search queries that their site visitors have used before clicking on their PPC advert and allows better targeting of the campaign over time.

Once advertisers are logged into their Google AdWords management interface they can click on the “See Search Terms” button that now appears at the top of each keyword activity report. This opens up a pop-up screen containing data about the actual search queries that have been used by searchers on Google which then lead to a clickthrough from the relevant PPC advert.

Advertisers can therefore now view the search phrases that generated clicks to their site and assess whether they are relevant enough. The detailed breakdown by search phrase will show the usual data provided by Google, such as the total impressions, clickthrough rate and average ad position, as well as the cost and any conversions generated from the clicks.

The power of this report is that it enables advertisers to identify the relevancy or otherwise of their targeted search terms, particularly if these are set at the broad level. It can demonstrate the wide variety of search terms that users input into Google’s search panel and can either show high volume terms that should be specifically targeted – if not already – as well as phrases or individual words that should be excluded as a negative term to reduce impressions and clicks.

This data was previously available as a report within AdWords, but this new tool allows more immediate and flexible control of the keyword targeting within a campaign. It can sometimes mean that words or phrases are excluded after the click, but this can reduce future unnecessary spend. What it doesn’t do is indicate where high impressions may still be generated from terms where the advert is not clicked.

However, this tool is one of the good improvements added to the Google Adwords management interface and allows campaigns to become more tightly focussed upon the most effective keywords, which should help to improve clickthrough rates and conversions.

If you’d like to know more about this function and how it can be used to help improve your Google AdWords campaign, please contact us for details.

At the end of May, Google timed its developer’s launch of its new collaborative communications platform – Wave – to perfection, in order to steal much of the attention that the launch of Microsoft Bing was seeking a few days later. Wave, which is designed to be an evolution of email and an Instant Messenger (IM), spent four years in development and was created by the Sydney-based development team behind Google Maps. The launch was received with much acclaim by developers, who are seeing this as potentially a major step-forward in online communication.

Communication within Wave is more like an IM conversation than email, as it intends to combine the older email methodology with the more recent trend in social communication systems, such as Facebook and Twitter. Social networks are designed around conversation ‘threads’ and Wave will enable multi-person conversations in real time through these conversations that Google calls a ‘wave.’ Lars Rasmussen, from the development team, explained that because it integrates email as well as a real-time workflow, Wave allows “Synchronous and asynchronous (communication) in the same conversation. And you can switch back and forth, depending who is online at any one time”.

The potential of Wave is huge. It has been designed to be an open standard platform, rather than just a standard Google product like Maps or Reader, which will allow users to contribute to the same Wave from computers and mobiles, regardless of their operating system. As it’s also developed using a group of development APIs, it will also allow developers to integrate gadgets and robots into Waves. There will be many people who will find this integrated functionality extremely useful and provide new opportunities to develop the service in the future.

Wave therefore has the potential to create massive workplace and communication efficiencies and could significantly change the way web users interact in the digital space over the coming years. The first Alpha version has been tested and the interface is slick and easy to use, giving users the ability to share maps, video images and documents with a simple, drag-and drop interface. Communication is intuitive and not cluttered at all and it works by far the best within Google’s Chrome browser, which is understandable at this stage!

Wave really seems to focus on contacts and people, which is the direction communication is taking. Email applications currently focus less on people and more on the content of the message, so this is where the evolution of Wave is a notable step forward and why the developer community is so excited about the launch and the possibilities that Wave now provides. It may take longer for the general web user community to accept and use this different style of communication but this may also herald the future style of online communication, which would be the most significant development for years, and one that Microsoft may be looking at with envy!

Wave will either massively boost the popularity of social networks, or it will devour them. Either way, the two-way conversations that are the hallmark of Web 2.0 are here to stay and they are only going to get more widespread through the development of communications platforms such as this. Wave was launched to widespread acclaim and hype, but with some great 3rd party apps and greater customisation, it could actually match this hype.

To find out more about how you can enhance your communication capabilities with Wave in the future, please contact us now for more information.

Last month also saw the much anticipated launch of Wolfram Alpha, the new “computational knowledge engine”. There were the inevitable comparisons to Google, but the creator of this new search tool – physicist and software entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram – has discouraged these types of comparison as the new website serves a different purpose. Regardless of this, it’s an impressive new resource.

Despite all the press hype, Wolfram Alpha⁸ isn’t a traditional search engine. You can’t use it to find any type of web content online, but instead it can be used whenever you might be looking for a direct answer to a question. Stephen Wolfram has said that the site’s brain is built on content sites like the CIA World Factbook, US Census reports, Wikipedia, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library.”

The Home Page of the site provides example searches that can be done on Wolfram Alpha, plus there is further page of examples⁹ to give users the idea of its strengths. The team behind this search service have done well to collate all the data that it draws upon, but it’s only a small fraction of what’s available on the whole of the web and it may prove to be initially confusing or disappointing to people who are now so used to Google to find information online.

Wolfram Alpha’s main target audience will be mathematicians, engineers, and scientists – as well as students or journalists – because it’s based on Wolfram Mathematica, a software package that can do complex calculations. And being a “computational knowledge engine”, rather than a pure search engine, there are 5 main things that it can do better than traditional search engines, namely performing complex queries; localisation; precision; calculation and comparisons.

This is its main advantage, in that is can make calculations on the fly and present results based on the requested search. It can solve difficult equations and makes decent graphs for lots of specialised enquiries. This can also be its ‘Achilles heel’ however, as it encourages specialised search queries and it takes a bit of practice learning how to phrase queries so the engine understands the input.

Although it’s still early days and will surely improve, it’s currently too picky about syntax and not intuitive to work with. For example, if you enter a query it doesn’t understand, it just returns the text “Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know what to do with your input.”

Therefore despite exhibiting some interesting new technology, Wolfram Alpha isn’t intended to revolutionise search engines. Instead, it aims to add a useful new layer to them, not by trying to beat Google at its own game, but by complementing the traditional search engines and providing an alternative, specialised service to try bridging the gap between search engines and reference libraries.

If you’d like to know more about this new search engine, please contact us for further information.

During May, Google’s search team announced the launch of the new Search Options Panel within Google’s main search results. This gives the searcher the ability to filter, refine and further explore the standard search results to help them find exactly what they need. These options are very useful to ‘slice and dice’ the search results for greater focus.

The new search options panel has been launched with limited fanfare and has probably been missed by most Google searchers. It can be accessed by clicking on the “show options” link on the top left hand side of the standard search results and reflects the type of filter options seen in Google News.

The main search tool options now allow users to break the results down into smaller categories of videos, forums or reviews. Other options include looking at results by recency, using a number of different date ranges, or by looking at the images from pages of results. There are also several more in-depth features such as related search, the “timeline” and intriguingly named “wonder wheel”.

The related search option displays other possible search phrases that the user might want to consider and extends the range beyond those now usually displayed at the bottom of a search results page. This function can also be used to check possible search terms for SEO or PPC campaigns, at a very basic level.

The timeline search option enables the selection of a time frame for results so that the chronological order and numbers of documents relating to the search can be viewed. This would be useful to examine the timeline and size of a news article, or how events have proceeded on a particular story. The wonder wheel is an excellent visual map for exploring related topics. It’s also possible to view topics related to the original search not by a visual representation, but by related searches by clicking on the link on the left hand side.

These changes appear well timed by Google to provide more search options in the face of new search engines from Wolfram Alpha (below) and the imminent launch of the new Microsoft search engine – Bing – which we will review next month. It also gives searches new functions to improve the range of results being displayed, although Google should probably do more to raise awareness of this new function. They have apparently put considerable resources into researching eye-tracking and usability studies about how people understand the options in the panel and interact with it, so it is a well-researched, user-friendly method of searching which aims to benefit the user by allowing a much greater level of depth into search results than was previously attainable.

To find out more about the Search Options Panel and how it can help to increase the marketing opportunities for your website on Google’s search results, please contact us now for more information.

The use of Keyword Matching in Google Adwords is an important concept for advertisers to understand for fine-tuning a keyword list so that targeting and bid management can be improved. Without it, much of a budget may be wasted by casting the advertising net too widely or too narrowly.

There are three types of keyword matching available to AdWords advertisers: broad, phrase and exact matching. Broad matching is the default setting for all keywords included in an AdGroup list of search terms, unless otherwise specified by the advertiser. With this type of match, the sponsored link advert will appear when a searcher types in the targeted keywords anywhere within their search query. With a phrase match, the advert will appear if the searcher types in the keyword phrase in the same order, even if they include additional words before or after it. With an exact match, the searcher must enter the same word or phrase appearing in the keyword list, with no additional words before or after it.

Therefore by using exact matches in an AdWords campaign helps to reduce the potential number of advert displays generated by common words and phrases because they cause the advert to be displayed less often than through a broad or phrase match. For example, the use of a broad match for the term ‘jump start’ (used to sell vehicle jump leads), would cause the advert to appear each time someone queries anything with ‘jump’ and ‘start’ in their search query, which could have no relevance to what’s being advertised. Searchers would see the advert, but not click on it, thus reducing the clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword, which would also reduce the Quality Score⁷ and increase the potential cost per click. So, by enclosing [jump start] in square brackets as an exact match, the advert would only appear if both words are used in the correct order and nothing else was included in the query, thus improving the relevancy of the ad to the searcher and also the chance of achieving a click from a prospective customer.

Phrase matching, by using quotation marks around a search phrase of 2 or more words, would cause the advert to appear only when “jump start” was queried in that order, with other words either before or after it. Therefore ‘jump start my car’, or ‘how to jump start’, would lead to a relevant display of the advert that searchers are more likely to click upon, especially with a fairly specific phrase such as this. It is a good balance to achieve between the number of times an advert is displayed and its relevancy to the search query.

Broad matching is the least targeted method of search term selection and can pull the CTR percentage down quite dramatically if not used carefully with common or general words. If the term ‘jump start’ is used in the keyword list with no brackets or commas surrounding the phrase, then the advert would appear every time the words ‘jump’ and ‘start’ appears in any length of search query and in any order. Thus the advertising would be targeting a much wider audience, but with a lower chance of the advert being clicked upon, as the search queries may have nothing to do with starting a car.

Therefore by fine-tuning a keyword list with these types of matching, it helps to improve the targeting of the PPC adverts to particular types of searches and also helps to provide more information on how searchers may be using the search terms in a query. It also allows more flexible bid management around a search phrase to target these different uses and to try to focus on the right intent of the searcher, thereby making substantial cost savings possible and a more effective, targeted campaign.

If you’d like to know more about how keyword matching can be used in your Google AdWords campaign, please contact us now for advice and recommendations.

Google has made a number of notable changes to their search results in the past month. The first development has increased the frequency of local business listings being displayed within the first page of the search results, which has a significant benefit for local advertisers. The second enhancement concerns the inclusion of additional ‘sitelinks’ below selected search listings, which offers the searcher more opportunities to enter the listed website at different points.

The recent change that Google has made to the use of the Local Business Listings means that the small map and accompanying business listings for up to 10 companies are now appearing across more search results, rather than ones that specifically include a location within the search phrase. Google is trying to recognise typical search phrases that would have a local search intent (such as ‘plumbers’ or ‘accommodation’), even if the searcher has not included a location term in their search. When this happens, Google will display the business listings below the top 3 ranking results and bases the map and location details on the recognised IP address of a searcher’s ISP (Internet Service Provider).

The intention is clearly to focus the results to meet a searcher’s intended need and although the method of targeting is by no means a perfect solution, this is an important enhancement that may improve clickthroughs for companies listed in the local business listings. Therefore it’s now more important than ever that companies who are targeting a local market ensure that their business is listed on this section of Google and is optimised as effectively as possible to increase the chances of being found.

The second recent change to Google’s rankings concerns the ‘sitelinks’ displayed below selected websites in the ranking results. These have been visible for some time for large websites or when a specific business website is searched for, with the intention of giving searchers an idea of what the site includes and also more opportunities to click directly into a prominent section of the site. Previously these were displayed as a short list below the main ranking result and for the first search result only. Google has now introduced an expansion of these sitelinks into a single row of links, which will be displayed even for results that aren’t in the first position. This will help to show searchers some relevant sub-pages within more sites and potential increase the opportunities for people will clickthrough into the ranked website.

Google says that, just like the previous sitelinks, the new one-line sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the decisions on when to show them and which links to display are entirely based on the expected benefit to users. Therefore site owners can’t tell Google which links to include, but they can block some or all of these links if there is any reason they may not want to show them. This can be done through a Google Webmasters account, but removing these links is not recommended in most cases because the inclusion of these additional links will probably increase the visibility of, and traffic to, a website, whilst also improving the experience of users.

To find out more about increasing the marketing opportunities for your website on Google’s search results, please contact us now for more information.

n our continuing series about how to get the most out of Google Analytics, this month’s newsletter takes a look at the Motion Charts feature. This recently added report allows you to compare visually the performance of several keywords over time and adds a new angle to the analysis of a marketing campaign.Usually, when viewing keyword performance from the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics, it’s not possible to see a graphical depiction that compares individual keywords, although by clicking on the ‘visualise’ button above the graph, this is now possible. By doing this, keyword data can be analysed at a glance, over a specified time period. Any number of keywords can be selected and the time line can be moved to clearly see how particular keywords have performed over this period. For example, with ‘time’ selected on the X-axis and ‘visits’ on the Y-axis, a comparison of the number of visits each keyword has generated can be viewed and compared.

The parameters for comparison can be changed from visits to bounce rate, conversion rate, average time on site and more, so by selecting the ‘trails’ feature, the dots can be joined by a line, which shows the flow between them. The colour of the dots can also be changed to show the chosen parameters, which adds another dimension to the amount of data shown. To add yet more data to the comparison, the size of the dots can also be changed to represent any of these parameters. It’s therefore possible to see visits, bounce rate and average time on site over this period, and any other combination, including conversions and per visit goal conversion, which is a quick way to determine which keywords regularly produce the most revenue for a site.

The Motion Charts feature is a valuable tool for comparing different keywords’ performance on up to three parameters at a time. This enables a quick analysis of which ones are performing best and which are not doing so well, enabling the bids for those to be adjusted accordingly within Google Adwords. Over time, this quick comparison tool could lead to large cost saving within an advertising campaign.

If you’d like to know more about how this particular tool, or how Google Analytics could be used to enhance your website’s performance, please contact us for further information.

One of the most heated debates in the search engine marketing sector can be generated by Google’s PageRank and specifically the green PageRank indicator shown on the Google Toolbar – is this really a useful indicator of how Google views each web page, or should it be completely ignored as an irrelevant distraction? The question is also raised as to what purpose this indicator serves for most web users and why Google even bothers to display this.

Google’s trademarked ‘PageRank’ algorithm and underlying technology is one of the main foundations of the search engine developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and was also a core factor that enabled Google’s search results quality to stand out from existing search engines when it first launched in the late 1990′s. Google’s own corporate pages describe PageRank as follows:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

The underlying PageRank algorithm is a complex mathematical formula, which is then simplified by the short indicator bar on the Google Toolbar, where the green colour filling the bar indicates the PageRank ‘score’ between 0/10 and 10/10. New sites will start with a completely clear bar with no score and then develop a higher PageRank as the site gets indexed and starts attracting links from other domains.

The PageRank score on the Toolbar is a snapshot and an occasionally updated figure – Google’s Matt Cutts recently alerted people in his blog that a new update was being posted and back in 2006 had provided more information about the Toolbar indicator with answers to some readers’ questions. It’s clear that it would be wrong to place too much emphasis on this Toolbar figure for each website and web page, but it’s also short-sighted to dismiss it completely when it does provide some degree of information from Google’s perspective.

So the Google Toolbar shouldn’t be a figure of primary concern but a useful indicator of relative performance and potential development. It does give website marketers a view of their own and competitors’ web pages and how pages within a site hold different PageRank scores. It shouldn’t be a core driver of an SEO strategy but perhaps confirmation of how the search marketing support for a site is developing its potential performance on Google.

If you’d like to know more about Google’s PageRank system or the Google Toolbar, please contact us for more information.

Last month Yahoo! announced the launch of their new ‘Smart Ads’ programme, which enables advertisers to fine tune the delivery of banner adverts to a particular audience, based on their known interests and preferences.

(more…)

Google has recently been adding new options within the reporting function on the AdWords PPC system that can help advertisers achieve different insights into the way their campaigns are performing.

(more…)