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Have You Planned Your Digital Afterlife?

April 17th, 2013

No, not one of those adverts that interrupts your day to day life to remind you of your impending death, but a new service opened by Google. The search engine giant has launched a tool to help users plan for their digital afterlife, allowing them to control what happens to everything from their emails, to blog posts and photos in the unfortunate event of their death.

Most of us are much too busy in our everyday lives to think about what will happen when we die, least of all to our virtual possessions- the content and pictures we post on social media sites for example. But have you given any consideration to how your friends and family may feel should the worst happen?

Google has. Under the not so creative name of “interactive Account Manager”, Google has set up a scheme that is triggered if you haven’t logged in for 3, 6, 9 or 12 months (you decide), then deleting your data or sending all selected elements to a nominated person of your choice

The new tool comes following concerns from families who have had trouble accessing or shutting down online accounts and Facebook profiles after the sudden death of a loved one. With the use of social media becoming more and more popular, it is evident that there is a need for relatives of the deceased to be able to gain access to these accounts.

A usual, Google has stepped up, with Andreas Tuerk explaining that “we hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife in a way that protects your privacy and makes life easier for your loved ones after you’ve gone.”

A nice sentiment, however Google is insisting that it won’t be simply giving out access to relatives of the deceased- instead the system will only be valid if set up by the user. Looks like those who don’t want to leave their internet data to chance when they’ve gone had better start thinking ahead.

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Posted in Google, Industry News |

How Facebook Lookalikes Could Help Make the Most of Social Media Advertising

April 9th, 2013

Facebook has announced that it’s launching the lookalike audiences targeting tool for advertisers, allowing marketers to reach potential customers who share similar characteristics with their current customers.

The new tool uses a targeting feature called ‘custom audiences’ and lets marketers take their current customer’s lists and show ads to those people on Facebook – using interests or demographics to show ads to people who share common attributes.

Facebook predicts that it could help achieve a lower cost per checkout, lower cost per acquisition, larger purchase size as well as faster and increased return on investment.

It’s an option that marketers have been waiting for and allows businesses to be able to target the most valuable and worthwhile audience for them – meaning most importantly that they’re not wasting money on customers unlikely to respond to their brand.

Facebook has over one billion global users and an average of 618 million people use Facebook on a daily basis, with 23% checking their news feed five times a day or more. As well as this, 488 million users use Facebook on the go.

By tapping into Facebook paid search, you open up your brand to a huge audience, who are more likely to come across your advertisements as they browse their news feed.

Another way of attracting the Facebook audience is by setting up a company brand page and interacting with consumers by positing regular updates and posts as well as setting competitions.

However, a recent study by Recommend.ly revealed that more than two thirds (70.1%) of Facebook brand pages are updated less than once a month. This was despite evidence that brands need to post frequent updates to maintain their engagement with fans.

To make the most of the Facebook audience, you have to be willing to put in the time and effort to get the right results. You also need someone that has looked at social media for ecommerce research and understands the best ways to connect with consumers and drum up interaction – encouraging customers to explore the brand further. This could be delegated to somebody in house or you could commission the services of a social media manager to oversee your page. You can still have control of the content that goes on the page by maintaining contact with the manager and being open to new ideas.

Social media is a huge part of business now, and it’s vital not to ignore it.

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media |

Unsurprisingly Less Shopping Results Appearing on Google’s Searches

April 3rd, 2013

A new study has found that less shopping advertisements are appearing on organic listings since the introduction of Google’s paid shopping listings. The drop in shopping ads appearing in natural, free results has coincided with the introduction of Google’s paid shopping listings.

A new report by Searchmetrics shows that in January 2012 shopping results appeared in 20 percent of universal integrations, however by December this year this amount had dropped to a very small amount – just 5 percent.

Unsurprisingly the steepest decline occurred in October, which was also the month that the search engine launched their paid shopping searches. Overall findings showed that the proportion of keywords with at least one universal search integration declined throughout 2012.

The study also looked at what brands appear most frequently – again unsurprisingly – Google or a partner appeared the most frequently on its own results. Google consistently accounted for more than 50 percent of the shopping integrations during 2012, only challenged by Amazon at 10 percent.

Furthermore Google also continued to favour its own brands in other searches such as video always favouring its own YouTube with at least 75 percent of all results displaying videos from the site.

The study looked at several million keywords analyzed over the course of 2012 and studied the first five pages of every search results.

The findings come as little surprise – Google was never going to allow free shopping ads to appear as before after introducing a paid version. The search engine giant will also always favour its own such as YouTube over other competitors.

In light of this many retail outlets have been forced to rethink their online promotion tactics – either opting for pay per click or moving over to long term search engine optimisation schemes.

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Posted in Google, Industry News, New Developments, PPC, SEO |

How Facebook Lookalikes Could Help Make the Most of Social Media Advertising

March 28th, 2013

Facebook has announced that it’s launching the lookalike audiences targeting tool for advertisers, allowing marketers to reach potential customers who share similar characteristics with their current customers.

The new tool uses a targeting feature called ‘custom audiences’ and lets marketers take their current customer’s lists and show ads to those people on Facebook – using interests or demographics to show ads to people who share common attributes.

Facebook predicts that it could help achieve a lower cost per checkout, lower cost per acquisition, larger purchase size as well as faster and increased return on investment.

It’s an option that marketers have been waiting for and allows businesses to be able to target the most valuable and worthwhile audience for them – meaning most importantly that they’re not wasting money on customers unlikely to respond to their brand.

Facebook has over one billion global users and an average of 618 million people use Facebook on a daily basis, with 23% checking their news feed five times a day or more. As well as this, 488 million users use Facebook on the go.

By tapping into Facebook paid search, you open up your brand to a huge audience, who are more likely to come across your advertisements as they browse their news feed.

Another way of attracting the Facebook audience is social media management such as setting up a company brand page and interacting with consumers by positing regular updates and posts as well as setting compeititons.

However, a recent study by Recommend.ly revealed that more than two thirds (70.1%) of Facebook brand pages are updated less than once a month. This was despite evidence that brands need to post frequent updates to maintain their engagement with fans.

To make the most of the Facebook audience, you have to be willing to put in the time and effort to get the right results.

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Posted in Facebook, PPC |

Just How Valuable is Mobile Search?

March 19th, 2013

Mobile search is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with and is rapidly increasing with the influx of people using smartphones to answer queries.

According to recent research from Google, 77% of mobile searches occur at home or at work, while 17% of searches happen on the go. Three out of four mobile searches will trigger follow up actions such as research, a store visit, phone call or purchase and 55% of conversions happen within one hour. Shopping queries are also twice as likely to happen in store.

Mobiles account for 31% of site traffic in the UK and is vastly growing. Mobile commerce grew by 254% between 2010 and 2011, and then a further 300% between 2011 and 2012.

With these statistics in mind, clearly mobile search is becoming more important than ever before and optimising your website for mobile use is a vital asset to attract customers and lead searches into conversions.

If a website cannot be used easily on a smartphone, you risk driving away customers who become frustrated at trying to access the information they need. Key information such as locations, services and contact information should be easy to find and access if you want to make the most of mobile search.

Another way of accessing the mobile market is to develop an App for your business. In fact, a recent report by Compuware suggested that consumer preference is strongly in favour of apps (85%) ahead of mobile sites. Apps were seen to be more convenient, faster and easier to browse.

Whatever your approach, making sure your website it optimised for mobile use if one of the best way attract more conversions for your business.

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Posted in New Developments, PPC, SEO |

Google to Take Action against Bad Merchants

March 13th, 2013

Although most of us are more than happy to window shop online, are we as comfortable parting with our cash on the web as we would be on the high street? Figures suggest no. Whether the result of a bad experience or through word of mouth of someone else’s mishap, some people are still hesitant when it comes to making a purchase on the internet.

As usual, Google is straight on the case. The web giant claims it wants to protect searchers from bad retailers and suggested it may get tougher with culprits later on in the year with changes intended to prevent these merchants from ranking so well.

In response to concerns over bad merchants outranking their competitors, Google’s Matt Cutts claimed the company have a “potential launch” later this year and that “we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.”

But haven’t we been here before? Back in 2010 The New York Times ran a feature on sunglasses merchant, Décor My Eyes, in which the owner claimed people complaining about his site online helped boost his positions. Within days, Google made changes to prevent this situation from happening again and the site dropped.

So if Google already has a system in place to penalise bad merchants, why are we still seeing cases where some are achieving high SERPs?

During the SXSW Conference in Austin, Matt Cutts claims they are working on the issue by looking for “other signals that we can use to spot whether someone is not a great merchant.”

Naturally there has already been a level of speculation over what this could mean. The continued growth of fake reviews has been at the centre of much discussion, suggesting this might be the area Google chooses to tackle next. If so, it will be interesting to see how it goes about this and how accurate it is in its actions.

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Posted in Google, Industry News, SEO |

Does it pay to Be Organic?

March 4th, 2013

The digital marketing world is one moving at an incredible pace. New developments, strategies and discoveries are appearing all the time and it can be hard for online companies to keep up. In our bid to stay ahead of the game however, it can be easy to forget that our consumers may be even more overwhelmed than we are.

In fact new research carried out by Bunnyfoot shows that many people are unaware of the difference between paid and organic search listings, with 40% oblivious to the fact that the top few listings are adverts. 81% of users clicked on AdWords listings as opposed to natural search results and believed that in doing so they were simply clicking on the most authoritative sites.

This surely begs the question that if more people were aware of the difference between organic and paid search listings would they still be clicking on paid search adverts? And is this news likely to affect how marketers distribute their budgets? In all honesty, probably not. The fact that so many people are using paid search listings is enough for many people to carry on making the most of Google’s paid search platform. Those who need fast, guaranteed results will always turn towards this method.

Perhaps more to the point should be our perception of our audiences’ digital marketing knowledge. When we become pre-occupied with the finer details of SEO and PPC, it can be easy to assume a certain level of familiarity that may not be altogether too accurate.

Regardless of the level of understanding of our audience and whether we opt for organic or paid search however, there are things we should do that will be well received by our audience. Paying attention to meta information, in particular titles and descriptions should always be a priority.

One company that does both paid and organic search well is Amazon.co.uk. It has emerged this week that research in Search Metrics has found the company to be dominating paid search, as well as being the most visible online retail site in organic search results.

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Posted in PPC, SEO |

Instagram – Could Your Business Use It?

February 26th, 2013

Increasingly popular social media site, Instagram is rapidly growing despite the controversy over its policy change. The image sharing website allows users to post photos that they can also edit and apply filters to, so they can create a stylish vintage looking photos. Starting off as an app, it recently launched a website to access the website away from a smartphone.

Paired with its likes, comments, Facebook and Twitter capabilities, it offers an impressive amount of engagement for both individuals and brands.

New data has revealed that 59% of the Interbrand 100 is now using Instagram, up from 54% in November.

Brands are now becoming more invested in the image sharing website, with 41% of brands now posting at least one photo a week, up from 34% in the last quarter. With this, their engagement with consumers is growing, with overall consumer engagement from the top brands increasing by 35% quarter over quarter.

The average brand photo received 4,800 engagements such as likes, comments, tweets and Facebook shares, with the number of brands boasting more than 100,000 followers increasing from eight to ten; this was led by MTV, Starbucks and Nike.

So how can this apply to your business? Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways of connecting with consumers and potential customers. Having a wide integration among the biggest social networks allows greater exposure for your brand as well as demonstrating that you are aware of the latest market trends.

Here are a few tips for integrating Instagram into your business:

  • If you’re a retail brand, take pictures of your stock but don’t overload the feed with every item. Pick key items, new items, interesting items to grab the attention of your potential customer. Try and be creative with the photo, but don’t overload the picture too much. You want the product to stand out.
  • Add some personality to your brand. Include pictures of employees at work and your everyday work environment as well as what you’re doing. Especially exciting projects. It demonstrates an honesty and insight into your business.
  • Try and encourage comments from your followers in your photo caption. Ask their opinion or a question to the description of the image when you post it. Prompting conversation is one of the best ways of interaction.

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Posted in Content Marketing, Industry News, SEO, Social Media |

Twitter – Are You Using It To Your Advantage?

February 20th, 2013

With increasing focus on social media and the benefits for brands, more and more brands are considering how to integrate a social media presence to their company. In fact, with the overwhelming hold social sites like Twitter and Facebook now have on our lives – there is almost no excuse for all businesses and brands not to have some sort of profile. It provides the opportunity to interact with customers and gain an understanding of their audience.

Twitter in particular is one of the most effective ways of doing this, giving a brand the best chance of impact and interaction with their customers. It provides the opportunity to reach a constantly growing audience and integrate themselves in relevant conversations and reach relevant customers.

There are ten million Twitter users in the UK, with 80% of UK users accessing the site from their mobile. These mobile users are also 40% more likely to access Twitter more than once a day.

In fact, 67% of mobile users follow brands on Twitter and 25% of mobile users will follow more than ten brands.

An audience as big as Twitter’s with such a wide net of appeal is vital to tap into. Part of gaining an increased chance of success on Twitter is understanding the users and the optimum way to make the best use of Twitter. One in three people will access Twitter on their commute, so by tweeting between say 7-10am and 5-7pm, you may take advantage of a larger audience.

67% of mobile Twitter users will use be using it as a second screen while watching TV at home, so what are the most likely television programmes to create talking points on TV? Is there a television programme on that will relate to your business? Do you have input? Can you join the conversation? At the same time, does what you have to say have value?

Another optimum time to tap into users is bedtime, 50% of users will access the site then. Could you leave a lasting impression on potential customers?

With the sheer potential of Twitter – can your business afford not be on there?

Posted in Social Media |

Businesses Planning to Spend more on Digital Marketing

February 11th, 2013

A new study has found that over two thirds of businesses are planning to increase their spend on digital marketing technology for 2013.

The findings come from a joint survey by Econsultancy and Responsys Marketing Budgets which investigates how companies spend their online and offline marketing budget. It looked at over 800 companies, mainly from the UK who voluntarily filled in an online form between December 2012 and January 2013. Out of all companies involved 71 percent explained that they planned to increase their digital marketing technology budget.

Unsurprisingly the most popular sector was web analytics at 46 percent followed by CRM at 45 percent. The emphasis on analytics and content management shows that the two sectors remain highly important to running a successful business. After this an importance of social media management systems, email platforms and paid search/bid management ranked.

This is of course great news for digital marketers. With over 70 percent of companies widening their budget on digital marketing the extra spends gives them opportunity to make larger campaigns and target more people and in turn increasing business. It also shows that businesses are really starting to see the power of digital marketing and its necessity.

As a digital marketer, the findings do not surprise me and I am glad to see a large significance placed on it. I believe it is something that will continue to grow as time goes on and even more emphasis is placed on the digital sector.

Posted in Content Marketing, Industry News |

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