A question over at Small Business Brief made me think how good it would be to share the information I have gleaned on how to cut your advertising spend.

I think it was John Wanamaker that said “Half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half”, well the technology of the web allows you to find out which half, or, in other words, it can multiply the ROI no end, as wasted money is wasted!

How many people that run adverts containg a link to their website, simply add www.yourdomain.com without any thought of ad tracking whatsoever, without any thought of page targeting whatsoever? If you do this, then your throwing away a golden opportunity to track the effectiveness of your advertising choice, and your adverts individually.

One of the best things you can do is evaluate your advertising returns properly, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to ask the visitor where they came from.

When the telephone rings, you speak to your customers, and, at the end of the conversation, one of the last things you should do is ask them ‘where did you get our number’? If they say ‘yellow pages, local newspaper etc, ask them why they chose to call you’ you do this because many people will pick up yellow pages to look for your number after having been referred to you by a friend, asking the ‘why’ question will give you the actual source rather than the vehicle for finding your number. If your not doing this THEN DO IT!

But how can we transfer this online?  for sure we get referrer logs, but they will simply show up as direct referrer IE, they typed your URL directly into the browser with no search engine or link page involved .THIS is where the real power of online offline comes to the fore. Simply give each of your adverts a unique URL, and your direct referrers from your logs will tell you how many people have visited as a result of seeing that advert, or having been referred to it by word of mouth (WOM). It really doesn’t matter how they got there, be it first generation or WOM, the initial response will be as a result of THAT ad in THAT publication.

I would definitely recommend sub-domains for this, as people will start typing from the beginning of the URL, and as such will add the sub-domain, and not leave off the sub folder details, as they will sometimes with sub-folders. We use a combination of add tracking and publication tracking sub domains (all excluded with robots.txt to prevent the possibility of their getting confused with doorway pages), and it works a treat!

By doing this we have been able to weed out the poorly performing publications, and increase the spend in those which work best, while finding new publications and refining ads. Sub-domains are perfect for this. 

Yellow Pages is a perfect example. Many people have multiple adverts in YP, take for example a wedding car hire and limousine service. (this is a true life example of one of my clients). They advertised in

wedding services
Chauffeur driven car hire
Limousine Services
Specialist travel Services
Airport Transfer

They did not know which of these adverts were working, and at almost £1000 a piece per year it was crucial they found out. by using sub-domains of
weddingS.ourdomain.com 
Chaeuffeur.ourdmain
limo.ourdomain.com etc.
we were rapidly able to identify that two of these adverts were bringing in ABSOLUTELY no business whatsoever. enter a saving of £2000 per year to spend on other things. At the same time we identified that one of them was performing very well, so we increased spend on that one, and totally worked on the advert.

I can not tell you how important it is that you grasp the fact the world wide wen, is NOT an advertising tool, it is a marketing tool. Use it as a marketing tool and you will increase your business. Look at entry and exit pages at least weekly, identify where people are leaving your site and find out why1 identify potential problems with that page, correct them, and get them back into your site. 

I had a client who made bespoke bridal gowns (posh names for wedding frocks ) I was able to tell her which of here designs were the most and least popular. She was amazed and asked me how I could possibly know that! I pointed out to here that it was simple, as the click throughs from the images of those gowns told us that. We changed the images, removing the underperforming ones and replacing them with softer styles, and business went up.

Log stats reading is a boring as hell, but it is the key to success on the web.
 

According to stats released over the last few days, Google has STORMED ahead in its share of the UK market. If searching in the US is known as googling, then in the UK search IS Google.

Google is now BY FAR the biggest, in fact TEN TIMES BIGGER than its closest rivals in terms of search volume in the UK market.

Google 77% (US = 44.7%)
Yahoo 7% (US 28.5% )
MSN 7% (1US 2.8%)
ASK 5% (US 5.1%)
others 4% (work it out for yourself I am too lazy, but Time Warner (AOL etc) got 5%)

Stats provided by Hitwise May 2006 with the US stats from comscore

So for anyone who thinks google is not that important in the UK, THINK AGAIN

At Long last Google have decided to give webmasters the option of not using the ODP titles and description. In a blog post at the official Google site-maps blog Vanessa Fox a Google engineer said:~

“One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project, or ODP. Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and we’re happy to let you all know we’ve added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.”

So if you want to kill the DMOZ title and description, then use the following:-

(Read on …)

About a week ago, Google started to roll out an update to their PPC quality score algorithm. That’s right I said ‘update’ not introduced the thing in its entirety. The Google quality Score system has been around for a while now. August 2005 to be precise, when it was announced that the following would affect your bids

Keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) 
Relevance of your ad text
Historical keyword performance on Google
And other relevancy factors (more Google hidden sauce.  

It was updated in December 05 when they started to introduce the landing page into the algo.

All of this is absolutely fine, because after all we expect to find relevant content at the end of a click, be it free or paid listings, relevancy is and always will be king in the world of search. But from around July 4 06 Google twisted the knife by altering the minimum bids of advertisers where they think their Google quality Score is too low. There is of course an almighty backlash across forums as advertisers who bid on low traffic low cost keywords/phrases see their minimum bids raise in some cases from $0.20 to $5.00, effectively pricing them out of the marketplace.

The question on everyone’s lips though is WHY. Officially Google say

“From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we’re launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.” taken from here

Most people are saying that this is a direct attack on poor quality landing pages that are using Arbitrage (buying low cost AdWords, delivering them to a page with AdSense ads on and making money by people clicking on the higher priced AdSense ads.) If this is the case, then WHY are Google not simply removing these pages from its AdWords system? WHY are Google not enforcing the quality guidelines that say do not make pages just for AdSense. WHY are Google not altering their terms and conditions to make it unacceptable to deliver AdWords traffic to pages carrying AdSense? OR simply introduce a system where if the visitor is referred from AdWords then the AdSense click is not charged or credited. ALL of these things would result in this tactic being removed, but NOT A SINGLE genuine advertiser would be affected. 

Another consideration is the landing page quality? Many PPC professionals use highly optimised landing pages (as you should) and part of this results in constant tweaking of these pages until they get to their optimum for the advert. (YES 2000 adverts might well result in 2000 landing pages, masses of work, but when you see the conversion ratio double, triple, quadruple and more, it is well worth it.) As these pages are tweaked, it is possible to have almost identical pages, and, as a result of this, top pro’s block the spiders from them. They are there SIMPLY for PPC, and NOT as part of the organic SEO, they are an SEM tool. SO how then are Google going to run their algorithm on a page they are not allowed to spider?

 I have sent the following request to AdWords support

“Since you rolled out the quality score minimum bid increase that is focused (amongst other things) on the landing page, this has set alarm bells ringing in my head. Although I do not personally run Adwords myself, I do handle accounts for many of my clients, one of which is spending about $30k a month. My main concern is that as many of these landing pages are tweaked and developed to increase conversions, they often become close to duplicate, and anyhow as they are part of the PPC pages we do not want them to be treated as potential doorway pages or as part of the site (as they are not). For this reason we exclude robots from them.

My question is short and simple. How can you evaluate the quality of these landing pages when you are blocked from viewing them by spidering? Will the blocking result in a set score for this element, and will it affect the overall quality score.

I look forward to your reply, and will be posting the reply across the forums to help ease the worries of myself and others.

Regards

James”

Interesting to see what they say about this.

There are also rumblings of unacceptable business practice that might well be illegal in the UK & Europe (companies MUST have a clear and transparent charging structure, charging what you like to different people is not acceptable there) One thing is for certain though, while this might improve the quality slightly there are going to be an awful lot of people large and small who are going to be mighty peeved over the increase in minimum bids.

Odd goings on in the SERPS and various data-centres are leading to some pretty wild speculation around the forums. It all started about 2 weeks or so ago when some pretty wild fluctuations were seen in the rankings. Sites jumped up for competitive phrases, while other sites just disappeared. I have to report that my own and my client sites were those who benefited (which is always nice to report).

Then over the weekend went out the cry of ‘PageRank update’ yippee cried some with any luck I can get another step on the dumbass greenbar and charge people more for my page rank , (oops I mean ‘charge people more for high value advertising real estate and pick your own anchor text but it is nothing to do with link mongering, and of course I would never use the nofollow tag)

PR update was the order of the day. THEN things started happening, whispers in the night!

GOOGLE DON’T DIGG.COM NO MORE

No this was not an ageing hippies convention they were referring to the fact that digg.com was showing a PR ZERO on many datacentres. But digg.com is the darling of the web, say it isn’t so

Then came the rumours, has Google broken the toolbar PR?  is pr reporting the latest SEO tool to go the way of site: link: etc ? it makes sense to this old Welsh bloke that Google should disable toolbar PR as it serves no purpose. For those who don’t know let me explain.  Google has 2 sets of PR

1. Toolbar pr which is a simple snapshot value gathered periodically, and has absolutely no part in the ranking process whatsoever.

2. Server side PR. THIS is the PR value that integrates with the indexing and ranking algorithms. This value is in a constant state of flux as pages are indexed, or de-indexed during the daily cycle that is google everflux.

Google has created this monster called PageRank, and like Frankensteins monster before it, this monster has turned ugly. In the early days, people linked to sites because they were a good resource that complimented their own page/site. Then people got the PR bug, and suddenly ‘link to anything with a long green bar’ is the order of the day. Sell high pr links searchking  is en vogue and people pay big bucks for high PR links so they in turn can create more High pr Pages to sell links on, and these high PR links eventually find their ways to made for AdSense pages (another thorn in the side of the web).

 So the question remains, what exactly IS going on at Google, and is everything coming up roses at the plex (or is that just Matts house) ?

Firstly, some of you might be asking, “what is a bad neighbourhood”?
When you link to a site from your own, it is the online equivalent of recommending a business to a friend. If they turn out to give a bad service then YOU catch it in the neck from your friend, and your reputation with your friend is tarnished slightly. 

This is the same online with links. If you link to (recommend) a site, and it turns out that the site is a bad site in the eyes of the search engines, then YOU too will be seen as ‘bad by association’.

More information on Google Quality Guidelines can be found here Google Webmaster Information on Quality
OK SO now I have worried many of you, spoiled your breakfast, or sent you running to your links pages to look for bad neighbourhoods, I guess I should sort of help you identify these bad sites.
You can find a bad neighbourhood by going through the following process. 

1 . Check page rank with the Google toolbar. If this is 0 or greyed out, that is a warning sign (new sites also have this so do not listen to people who say PR0 = ban they are confusing cause and effect).

2. Run a site:www.domain.com search on them, and if they come up with 0 pages in the index then that is also a warning

3. Run a search for their company name on Google and see what is brought up.

4. Check the ownership and age of domain. (this will help distinguish potential banned, from the site simply being new, as the signs are very similar)

5. Finally run a back link check.

This is where we get to the crux of the matter as links are the key. If a couple of year old site has no pages listed and no PR, then there is reason for caution. If however the site is showing no backlinks, then it might well be a genuine case of the site being new to the web.

If however the site is a few years old, has no PR, no pages listed, yet has hundreds of backlinks, there is a fair chance that site has a penalty against it.

These are simple checks designed to help answer the question of ‘am I linking to a bad neighbourhood’?  I can not tell you how important it is that you vet your linking partners. There is a lot of false information about bad neighbourhoods, including stuff like. I don’t link to gambling sites because Google doesn’t like them. Google doesn’t care about the genre of sites, it cares about the specific practices that each site and cluster of sites uses. Sites like ‘William Hill Bookmakers’  are not banned, nor are they bad neighbourhoods, yet they ARE gambling sites. Sure gambling sex and pharmacy sites are more likely to get into bad linking practices and spamming, but if you are in the same business, then they are on topic links.
One last thing though. When linking, keep these questions in mind. Am I linking to and from the most relevant pages of the sites?. Is this link on topic? Will I get traffic from this link? I am NOT saying you have to stick to the sites where you can answer yes to all, but I AM saying that if you CAN say yes to all those questions, then you will have just given your internet marketing a big boost.

I thought I would post this, as it was a question asked in Aardvark business forum that really warmed my heart. The question was simple, do you have any enduring memories from when we were children? Here are my thoughts. Please add yours in the comments if you like.

I remember once being sent to see the headmaster after I misbehaved. I remember taking the long walk with Total dread thinking about his harsh punishment that was totally in keeping with the Boys Grammar school. Only a week earlier, my best friend Dai ‘leg’ Davies had been sent to him for punishment, and Dai STILL could not sit down a week later…..

I remember thinking, as I knocked on the door to the headmasters office.

Please god don’t let him find ME attractive (joke of course)

One of my most enduring moments was being beaten when I misbehaved.

I remember one time going to bed with blood trickling out of my ear.

I remember making swings up the mountain with rope.

I remember making Dutch arrows, running through the ferns on the hillside behind where I lived.

I remember my first proper girlfriend, and the one I was certain i could not live a single day without (but some 30 odd years later appear to be able to )

I remember walking along a stream on a hot sunny day, sun blazing on my skin while the ice cold water cooled my feet,

I remember taking a drink of water from that stream while walking up the mountain, only to find a dead sheep in the same stream a few hundred yard higher up (it didn’t kill me)

I remember How green my valley looked then, even though it was black with coal dust from the collieries that surrounded me.

I remember seeing thousands of dead fish floating down the river killed by the same collieries that gave our communities life.

I remember playing rugby and football in the mud, kick the tin, hide and seek, and fox and hounds.

I remember kiss chase and wondering how come the good looking girls ran so fast, but thanking god that all girls look the same with my eyes closed

I remember growing up painfully.

I remember going to a party and getting tipsy on vermouth and ending up locked in a bathroom all night with little Deb (who my best mate Tob later married) Sadly but nicely Deb and I talked all night. Later that year Punk was born and we all wore black bin liners and spat!

I remember Leaving home, and coming back to Wales, GOD how beautiful this land I live in is.

I remember our first boys holiday to Corfu. I remember dancing on the shoulders of my mate Dai Rees to Simple Minds ‘don’t you forget about me’ I remember a beautiful midnight Kiss on the beach in Corfu with a young Irish lady from Cork.

I remember growing up, the pain the heartache love gained love lost, money earned money spent, memories made, but never forgotten.

I remember these and much much more.

Well today Google is launching its latest in a long line of online real estate pages.. Oh sorry I mean do no evil useful web applications Google Spreadsheets, you can request to become one of the first here http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets/try_out.html . Personally I will not be using it, as I like the old software on my desktop thing. “Old Welsh guy You’re an old Fart” I hear you say, but in my defence I say I have a 6 3/4 year old, so can tell you that the Krusty Krab, is a diner not a dance (or a sexual disease) Bikini bottom is NOT a prn site, and Snails really do Meow . Yet knowing all this I STILL wonder why a company who have ‘a machine crisis’ would want to place so much more load on those full ole servers. Like Grandad Simpson, one day those teeth will fall out ” you’re no son of mine Homer”

So we currently have Google moving into desktop applications, Microsoft moving into web applications with it’s  ’Live ‘ series of stuff, and Yahoo doing deals with ebay to ward off Googlebase .

I just wonder if all these three might eventually combine to form the great big company, and, if this happens, will we all be woken by an electronic Cockerel that screams MicroOogleHoo .

its a funny old world we live in.

Yesterday I went shopping, while in Asda (Wallmart for you Murcans) I couldn’t find a product I was looking for, so I asked. The assistant was fine, she said ‘certainly sir follow me’. I was then led half the length of the store and taken to the exact spot where the range I was looking for was situated. She then proceeded to tell me they had threeproducts, and told me the pros and cons of each product, she asked me if I was allergic to a certain item, (I was) which left 2 options. I asked her if she had tried them, she said that she had, and that she preferred brand A. I picked them up and threw them in my basket a happy man.

 Now call me a sad man if you like, but it made me think about how online selling should reflect offline selling.

1. I needed assistance to find something, if I could not find it I would not have bought it. (bad navigation can cost a sale)

2. I requested help, and immediately found what I was looking for (a good search facility saved the day)

3. I was delivered to a selection of products (good grouping of your products in the catalogue)

4. I needed help to make my decision to buy (good copywriting information about the products)

5. I Asked for advice and was given it, even down to asking for a recommendation (cover every aspect of the product in your decription, think of any question that  might be asked, and answer it), with regard the recommend, customer comments and/or product reviews would acomplish this.

Here is a question though, and it is one that ANYONE selling online or offline should think about. WHY do I drive 12 miles to go to Asda Walmart having to physically drive past A tesco hypermarket, Tesco Extra supermarket, and a Morrisions supermarket?

I am loyal to the brand, their selection of goods is fantastic, their value for money is great, their range of products vast (although Tesco extra have a far superior range now). I STILL shop at Asda! The staff you see are great, they smile, are helpfull, knowledgable and friendly. The store is well laid out and they rarely move things around so you can’t find them. In short, it is my kind of shop!

Is your online store like this?

I was Moderating over at Highrankings earlier today, when the above question was asked. I gave the standard reply of  as many as it takes but keep it to readable chunks. I was then asked what a readable chunk is defined as!

What is a readable chunk? I would say that it is a section that covers a topic, and finishes when you are ready to move on to the next bit. One or two A4 pages is enough, but it totally depends on the subject matter as well. I mean if you asked me if a film was worth going to see and I droned on and on with a scene by scene breakdown is that too much? On the other hand, if you were to ask me the best way to rebuild a transmission, you would not be happy with ‘get some spanners, take it all apart, replace the broken bits and rebuild it’ would you