New Compare Ads now out in the wild
Following on from yesterdays post about Google launching new comparison ads in the UK and the US, we have finally seen the ads now out in the wild
The terms seem to trigger on quite specific terms at the moment such as
- Compare credit cards
- Compare savings accounts
- Compare Bank Accounts
- Compare current accounts
- Cash ISA
The ads themselves knock the organic search results down quite significantly, and on many screen sizes sampled now make the organic results sit below the fold, which is likely to impact significantly the likes of the GoCompare’s, Moneysupermarkets etc should the scope of these ads roll out to a wider keyword set, which lets face it is likely to happen at some point in the near future.
When one clicks on the ads, the user is sent through to the ‘product level’ page, rather than the client whose logo is displayed. This will display any partners who have signed up – and currently works on a CPA model – similar to many other existing comparison models in the market at present. At present, it would appear Google are dealing direct with clients in many instances.
One would have to conclude – that this is the cat well and truly thrown in with the pigeons – particularly if – and more likely when this expands to a greater resultset
Is Google about to shake up the finance marketplace?
Google may well have truly thrown the gauntlet down to the big finance aggregators with the launch of new financial comparison units on a number of finance related terms. The comparison ad concept themselves is nothing new, however rumour is rife that much of this will use the Beatthatquote technology that Google acquired back in 2011 – something that would really have significant consequences for the wider comparison market as a whole – and potentially impact on Beatthatquotes’ ex competitors such as Compare the Market, GoCompare etc.
The fact this may happen is not a surprise. Google is not the type of company that spends near £40 million on the acquisition of a comparison and then leaves it to one side. The potential rollout of this is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly and foremost it is likely to utilise the Beathatquote functionality and drive the user straight through to the users site. Secondly it is likely again to take up a sizeable chunk of real estate on the search page for hugely competitive phrases such as credit cards, savings accounts and the like.
Given again the fact that aggregators play a big part in many of these market places either via the paid listings or more often than not via the organic ones, this could really play a big part in migrating traffic away from these sources – many of which Google would probably argue do not provide real value to a consumer.
According to the money.co.uk site, Google will launch new financial comparison ad units between 5-6pm (UK-time) today. As of 17:31 today, we were still to see anything….
Venice – more than just local extentions
As part of our day to day campaign management at Mediacom, myself and my colleague Ryan McKay have recently been looking into the wider effect of the recent Venice update on the search rankings – as well as other updates such as Penguin/Panda etc. To many it would seem the effects of the recent update have been lost to many, certainly some recent on the subject suggests many seem to associate this to merely the greater integration of localised results into the Google search results – in fact a presentation from SMX suggested that it was merely Google changing ‘the rules for how places-results are displayed in websearch’. For those more familar with Venice, it is certainly more pronounced than this, and effects the resultset in a much more significant way.
Now certainly, the resultset would appear to be far more impacted by local results if some recent Sistrix data is to be believed. From the study run on German result sets, the percentage of hybrid search results (the local + traditional organic results) had increased from 1.0% to 3.5% of serps sampled. This represents quite a significant number of queries overall if one considers the volume of queries run by Google during any one day.
The announcement of Venice was announced by Google back in February 2012 (27th) amongst a raft of other changes including ‘iotfreshweb’/Freshness, Link Evaluation and new variants of the Panda update. The notification itself sat around 20 or so in the list of changes
However the impact of Venice has been quite pronounced if one starts to look at individual resultsets. If we take for example a branded term such as ‘Co-Op Travel’:
In Blackpool (which is where my address relates to (actually its around 40 miles to the East but anyhow)), we see the resultset below. In particular the following are of particular interest.
- The Cooptravel.co.uk includes a fourpack sitelink result
- The second co-operative result includes a refernece to a Blackpool airport result.
- Positions 5,6,7 are all localised
- It includes a three pack local result just after result 4.
Now we perform the same query in London. A significant change is now visible:
- The sitelinks are now 6 results deep.
- The local listings have now disappeared
- The localised resultset for the airport result on result 2 is now replaced by a generic result.
- The localised results have now been replaced with many of the results we saw down at positions 6 – 8 in the Blackpool result.
The scario was often consistent through a number of other serps we analysed namely that:
- Many non-London results saw significant breakthrough of localised results particularly at page level
- Local packs were more visible and did appear on a greater number of searches
- Positions 4-8 were impacted significantly by personalisation and localisation issues. My personal perspective is that the local results were a bigger factor here on many searches.
With many updates taking place at the moment, the first assumption to jump to can often be to blame the latest Google update. This shouldn’t however be the first port of call. I was looking at a result this morning to do with eyecare and noticed the London result had disappeared for a site which had previously dominated that SERP, however localised results remained unaffected – however did highlight a number of significant local differences many of which shared traits with those above.
What these changes do suggest is a more overarching strategy is a must if the nature of your product is in anyway localised – much as it would be if you were advertising in traditional press. The days of a one size fits all strategy are limited, and as SEO’s we will need to consider the impact of our strategies at a more granular level – one where local is an increasing part of the overall strategy.
How does Google work
Well obviously your not going to get the full answer here, however Matt Cutts has posted a nice little video as to how Google used to work and currently works (at a very top level) – what else what you would expect?
In it he goes through
- How Google used to work
- Google and crawling
- How Google evaluates content
Much of it isn’t necessarily brain science but its worth a watch all the same.
Can Pinterest really help your business?
Have you heard of Pinterest? It is a relatively new social media network where users get to “pin” photos and videos that pique their interest. The website offers a “pinmarklet”, a bookmarking widget that allows users to pin their content without the need to copy and paste links. Pinterest, with its by invite only membership, have managed to expand its platform into over 10.4 million registered users. And as companies embark into social media marketing territories, a lot of businesses are on the run on making their own Pinterest page. But wait! Before you add another social media account to your business, it is important to make sure that joining Pinterest will be for
the best interest of your business. Here are 5 reasons why Pinterest may not be a good network for your business;
1. Pinterest is not an arena for B2B organizations.
If your business requires more technical explanation than just attractive photos, then it will be hard to sell your service or product on Pinterest. Part of the site’s biggest strengths is its aesthetic value and its capability to showcase visually appealing images. Moreover, other businesses are on the website not to look for suppliers or partners but to sell their own products. If you are into B2B leads, you better spend your time on other media. Nonetheless, if you can find a use for Pinterest in your business e.g. attracting individual attention to call out to companies that cater to them, that will be a nice way to stand out.
2. You do not have the time and resources to make a Pinterest strategy.
Lindt Chocolate did not make it to the Top 20 list of socialmediadelivered.com for nothing. Lindt used the social media to make a campaign for autism. The company donates $1 for every #Pin4Autism pin on the website. Pinterest is more than just beautiful photos, companies can use it for their causes, too! However, these campaigns take time and resources and therefore there must be someone in your organization to take charge.
3. Your target market are males.
Friedmansocialmedia.com reports that 68.2% of Pinterest users are females. Because the website attracts mostly women, it will be hard to showcase your car battery products, for example.
4. Your market does not fall in the 25-44 age bracket.
Half the users of Pinterest are between the ages 25 to 44. This market is relatively young, upbeat and bursting with zest for life. The average time spent on Pinterest by users are 15 minutes, and with that amount of time, you are competing with a mix of individual and business contents. If your pin is not as interesting as a form of visual art or as heart-warming as a cause, better spend your Marketing money elsewhere.
5. You need a brand page to properly present your business.
Pinterest does offer a brand page for companies. So for those who bank on their brand for strength and share of voice, it will be hard to make noise on Pinterest. Moreover, brands who use Pinterest are willing to share content not directly related to their brand in order to engage their customers. If you do not have anything more to share other than what you do, it will be better to explore other social media networks for your business.
Experian reported that Pinterest is now the third most popular social network after Facebook and Twitter. With its growing membership and its ability to go viral easily, Pinterest is one hot media for businesses. However, the site is not made to suit all businesses. So before you jump into the pinning bandwagon, evaluate your business and resources first. And if ever you decide on getting on it, make sure to formulate a good strategy! Happy pinning!
Author bio:
Jessica Francisco is a cheerful 25-year-old with an odd sense of fun. The least of her broad range of hobbies include swimming, hiking and listening to the music of Michael Jackson. Jessica is also one of the editors of Luke Roxas a renowned Business Tycoon from the Philippines. Luke Roxas on Facebook.
Google to sell tablet PCs via online store
To many this is just a natural evolution of what Google already did with the Nexus one , however it would appear from stories doing the rounds that Google are ready to enter the tablet market to sell c0-branded tablets directly to consumers through an online store. Googles ambition to become the modern day skynet appears to continue unabated if this is to be confirmed.
It would make sense. Through Android Google already own a significant share of the mobile market – and their operating system is already common place on many of the best selling tablets on the market today including Motorola, Sony and Samsung. Further to that, that share of Motorola they own would provide a fantastic basis for any potential venture into this space.
Google did try selling direct to consumers before, however that its online portal in 2010 but that closed down fairly quickly despite the fact Android sales have been fairly good since then. That deal with smartphone manufacturer HTC, would probably be very similar to any potential partnership with a tablet provider – so the chances of success here are perhaps 50/50 if previous history is anything to go by.
What this may do is add to the downward pressure on the price of Android tablets made by other companies and potentially be a good way of taking a significant market share of the tablet market where the Apple IPads are towards the top end of the market. Further to that they now own about 10% of the US market and have an established name in terms of mobile software.
It does however further extend Google’s reach not only into your search behaviour but perhaps into the wider hardware landscape
Not provided – coming soon to a Google search engine near you.
In a move that will surprise very few SEO’s Google today announced that it will be expanding their SSL privacy rollout to “local domains around the globe”. Ironically for an organisation which doesn’t appear to be as bothered about my privacy when it comes to lining their own pockets – this represents a significant step for Google – and one which we can expect to impact on a high % of potential searches through the Google search engine.
Many SEO’s have been very vocal about this in the US, with many prominent UK search marketeers expressing their concern at the rollout of the not provided framework then – and thus its going to be interesting seeing the reaction to this.
No confirmed dates have been set as yet (bar the next few weeks) – but one would expect to see the changes rolled out sooner rather than later.
Don’t forget the silver surfers
I was interested in reading a piece of resource over the weekend which suggest that round a 5th of all internet users in the UK were 55+, thus making it the largest age segment in the UK at present.
This already suggests a 2% increase on the figure recorded just over a year ago and one which dispells the myth that the internet is the domain of the youth. The age groups of 6-14 and 15-24 only made up 29% in total (12% and 17% respectively)
That 20% figure equates to around 8.6 Million potential customers out there. If you arent using the internet to target these segments, perhaps nows the time to start thinking…..
SEO is PPC, PPC is SEO
There are a couple of ex-colleagues who are going to have a little snigger at the above headline, however the headline hides an interesting manouvre from Google in terms of shaping their PPC inventory moving forward and how these display on site.
Sitelinks through PPC have been a recent improvement from Google, and something even as a SEO I have been very keen on. They allow advertisers to target messaging much more effectively than in the early days of PPC, and furthermore allow us to create particular paths and functions for consumers which often vary from channel to channel
So lets take for example the current sitelinks incarntaion
The current framework allows for around 6 sitelinks for PPC managers to communicate with potential consumers. Whilst these ads are limited to headline snippets they are small and dont take up a lot of page real estate. As of the 14th February however this is likely to change and with it bring a new round of challenges to both SEO’s and PPCs alike.
New enhancements from Google could significantly change much of the landscape for advertisers using existing sitelink functionality but utilising creative from other parts of the Adwords campaign.
To be eligible for the extended sitelinks, advertisers must have:
- A valid Adwords campaign and an ad with sitelinks appearing within the Google search results
- Ads relating closely to the sitelinks in the campaign.
In testing for the ads, Google mentioned clickthrough rates were significantly higher than the previous 2/3 line sitelinks. One would argue that is hardly surprising givent he real estate that these new ads take up, and that in itself presents more interesting scenarios to SEO’s who are already under pressure with many of the changes Google has made to its search results set. Further more these results bear many similarities to those of the sitelinks already in place within organic search results.
More real estate to PPC which this undoubtedly will mean, should mean yet more traction for PPC results, and less visibility on organic results potentially resulting in the following scenario
- More advertisers using PPC as organic visibility is being throttled
- Competition within both PPC and SEO significantly increasing as the battle for no1 increases significantly organically and the increased competition means CPC etc are going to be significantly tested
- Differentiation between SEO and PPC diminishing further
- Advertisers utilising more personalisation factors to try and influence eyefall where possible
Its an interesting time, and again its disappointing to see yet more real estate being taken up with yet more PPC. The balance between the two channels has always been a defining factor of Google, and its interesting to see them move away from this as the chase for increased revenue continues unabated.
That in itself brings challenges, due to the way many consumers perceive organic / paid results. Its another interesting move by Google and certainly not the last. For advertisers its certainly time to get clever with managing your PPC ads, ensuring as much targeting and refinement as possible. From a SEO perspective, its time to get clever and start utilsing all the tools at your disposal whether its extending your campaigns into wider contexts such as social and local to simply ensuring your campaigns are now working in tandem. What the new changes do bring is a better way to communicate with consumers more effectively, something which if harnessed correctly could be powerful weapon in the search amoury
The Many Uses of Microsoft FrontPage
Some of us are old enough to remember the early days of the World Wide Web, when we had to hand-code our websites and there were no such things as ‘grid layouts’ or ‘responsive design’.
In this stone age of web development, many companies launched so-called WYSIWYG HTML editors that allowed you to build websites in a more intuitive (i.e. less code-heavy) way. One of the earliest WYSIWYG editors was Microsoft’s FrontPage.
During its 7-year lifespan as a software product FrontPage went from being a time-saving darling of budding web developers to being widely despised and ridiculed for the bloated code it churned out.
It’s been nearly 10 years since Microsoft quietly retired the FrontPage brand name, but it still sees widespread use today. In fact, some developers use it daily. Because, believe it or not, FrontPage still has many uses.
Build HTML Emails
First and foremost, FrontPage is hands-down, bar none, the most effective HTML editor for emails. Due to the wide variety of email clients out there, each with their own peculiar HTML rendering engines, it is notoriously difficult to code HTML emails in such a way that they display correctly in all email clients.
But a HTML email coded in FrontPage is very likely to render correctly in pretty much all email clients out there. That’s because the code generated by FrontPage is so arse-backwards – virtually no CSS, layouts based on tables, and font tags up the wazoo – that even the most pernickety rendering engine will be beaten in to submission by the tsunami of bloated and redundant HTML so that it has no choice but to display the email exactly as intended.
When it comes to building HTML emails, there really is no better editor out there than FrontPage.
Test Websites for IE6
Secondly, FrontPage has a built-in preview function that allows you to view the page you’re building as if it was rendered in a browser. That browser being Internet Explorer 6.
Yes, FrontPage 2003 uses the IE6 rendering engine for its preview function. (Or, if you’re lucky enough to use the older 2000 version of FrontPage, it might even be IE5!) That means it’s basically a perfect IE6 browser testing tool. Now why on earth you’d need to test webpages in IE6 is an entirely different question.
But if for some inexplicable and most likely utterly retarded reason you did need to build webpages to function correctly in IE6, FrontPage is an ideal testing tool. If it works in FrontPage’s preview, it’ll work in IE6.
Slow Down Your PC
It will come to no surprise to anyone that FrontPage, being the product of Microsoft’s Office division in the late nineties and early naughties, is a hopelessly inefficiently-coded monstrosity that will severely slow down even the most modern of PCs.
Now, you may not see this as a useful feature, but trust me it is! Whenever you need to convince your company’s IT department that your PC needs an upgrade, just run FrontPage on it and show your IT guys how horrendously slow your PC responds to even the most basic of interactions.
Your IT department will be unable to comprehend how a modern PC running only one piece of office software can behave as if it’s trying to calculate Pi to the 10 billionth decimal and simultaneously converting a thousand PSDs in to PDFs with Photoshop. The only logical conclusion is that your hardware is outdated and an upgrade is required. Voila, a brand new upgraded office PC will be all yours, courtesy of Microsoft FrontPage!
So there you have it, three highly convenient use cases for Microsoft’s ancient FrontPage product. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not handy to have! If you know of any other effective uses for FrontPage, please do share them with us in the comments.
Barry Adams is a seasoned SEO pro whose experience includes consulting for dozens of SMEs and in-house SEO work for two massive multinational corporations and a large regional newspaper. Currently he’s the Senior SEO guy at Pierce Communications in Belfast, where he deploys his skills in aid of some of the Emerald Isle’s biggest brands.
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