All posts by Shaad Hamid

Shaad Hamid is an experienced SEO, PPC and social media consultant. He is a self confessed 'search geek' passionate about all things search. Get in touch with Shaad on the social networks below:
facebook a/b testing

Facebook account management best practices

Account Structure introduction

Facebook advertising is still more labour intensive than search advertising due to its limited platform functionality and interface. Therefore, it is imperative that ‘account structure best practice’ is adhered to in order to maintain control, improve efficiencies, increase ad effectiveness, and make sure anyone who takes over the account can get a grasp of the account hierarchy quickly and easily.

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Campaigns are the second tier that sits under the ‘account’ level. It’s at the campaign level that ads are held and daily budgets are assigned.

Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creatives, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it is best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads, as it makes reporting, analysis and managing budgets much easier.

facebook account structure

There comes a time in the life of an in-house marketer when they need agency support in order to implement and manage offline and online campaigns. However, building a solid working relationship between the two parties can, at times, be quite challenging, especially for those with little experience. I spoke to two senior in-house marketers: Dr. Gill Whiteman, head of online content and strategy at GTI Media and content manager of targetjobs.co.uk and Shalini Seneviratne, Global Brand Manager – Lifebuoy at Unilever, about sharing their experiences and advice on working with agencies and what to look for from an in-house marketing perspective. The following is the list of questions I posed to them along with their responses:

Google has announced a major update to its AdWords advertising platform, with the introduction of ‘enhanced campaigns’. According to the AdWords blog, it is meant to help advertisers manage ad campaigns more simply and smartly in today’s multi-device world.

What are enhanced campaigns?

Enhanced campaigns let you manage bids across devices, location and time, allowing you to bid higher or lower based on the user’s proximity to you, or the device that they’re using.

A few years ago, this blog brought you ‘Online marketing tips for Santa‘. Well, this year (to guarantee our place on the right side of the ‘naughty or nice’ list), we’ve looked again at how he could improve his online presence.

Frankly, it’s not looking good. Father Christmas needs to rank for some incredibly competitive keywords, like ‘Christmas’, ‘present’ and ‘Santa’. So does the jolly fat man need to ditch his old routine and find a dynamic new online identity that’ll be easier to drive up the SERPs? For a bit of fun and for a bit of a laugh, this article takes a tongue-in-cheek look…

Every year for the past 4 years the SEOptimise blog has predicted trends within the online marketing industry.  In keeping with this tradition, I’ve listed 25 trends that I think we’ll see becoming more and more mainstream in 2013. Considering the rate of change within the online marketing space, most of these listed may not even be new. So, without further ado, here’s my list of online marketing trends for 2013:

Facebook advertising
I usually get asked this question quite a lot: “I want to advertise on Facebook, how much of a budget would you recommend?” and thought I’d share with you my methodology of how I estimate and recommend budgets to potential clients who have never advertised on Facebook before.

1. Figure out target audience volume

The best thing about Facebook is that it provides you with audience volumes. Therefore, before you calculate estimated budgets, you’ll need to obtain information on the different target audiences such as locations, age, gender, and other interests. Ideally the target audience profiles should be something like this:

Married women who live in the UK and are 40 years or older, who like, ‘The Daily Telegraph’, ‘Homes Under the Hammer’, ‘Location, Location, Location’, ‘Grand Designs’, ‘John Lewis’, and ‘Ocado’.

Christmas content

Whether you’re decking the halls, or trying to pretend it won’t happen this year, Christmas is fast approaching. For marketers of all kinds, it’s a topic that’s impossible to avoid if you want your content to appear timely and relevant to your readers.

But if you want to cash in on the Christmas rush, you can’t wait until the turkey’s in the oven to start publishing festive content on your website. Not only that, but you need to be equally ready to move quickly once it’s all over, in order to get your website ready for the new year.

A website that’s still Christmassy by January is sadder than an empty tin of Quality Street.

We are live from Brighton, and we’re really looking forward to hearing the insights and thoughts of all the speakers (all 19 of them!) Doors opened at 9:00am and the first speaker is scheduled to speak at 10:00 am. Stay tuned.

We don’t have fancy auto-refreshes so you’ll need to refresh your browser to see the updates :-)

10:01 am: The first speaker is on stage, Dave Trott – Executive Creative Director at CSTTG will be talking about “Predatory Thinking”. Sounds intriguing. Must be similar to “Guerilla Marketing”. Dave’s using an analogy of pure maths and applied math with pure creativity and applied creativity.

Journalists have been frantically learning SEO and social media techniques over recent years, so they can stay ahead online. But now some of them are so skilled that SEO teams could learn a few things from them too. From writing clickable headlines, to using Twitter to network, here are all the journo skills that I’ve learnt by following (no, not stalking!) some of the best in the business…

Monitoring and Targeting

Like most blogs, news sites tend to cover a number of different subjects. For the main newspapers, these tend to be major topics such as politics, finance, property, jobs and so on. However, within those ‘channels’, similar stories often come up again and again – interest rates, house prices, unemployment figures, that kind of thing.

Journalists and editors use analytics programs to check how many readers are visiting each section and which stories are grabbing their interest. That means that they can give more coverage to the stories that really interest their readers, and move other stories further down the hierarchy. This also allows them to maximise click-throughs from their front pages because they know what stories get readers excited.

Recently, I read an interesting blog post by Barry Adams titled “The Adversarial Relationship between Google and SEO“. He argues that Google’s not an SEO’s friend but rather an adversary and cited quite an interesting patent filing by Google titled ‘Ranking Documents’. If you’re an SEO I’d strongly suggest you take the time to read this document in full. Also, Bill Slawski provides an excellent analysis of how this new approach will affect a page’s rankings.

In layman’s terms, this patent document specifies how Google intends on making rank changes to its search engine results pages (SERPs). Instead of allowing the algorithm to use its ranking factors to decide how documents (or pages) are ranked, Google will randomly initiate a “transition” period between when a rank change happens.

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