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Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies. The main changes are that:

  1. Now nearly all Google products are covered by one privacy policy.
  2. Information you give Google’s various different services can be combined.

Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn’t announced that it’s collecting information it wasn’t before, just that it’s combining what it has differently. You can preview the new policy here.

According to Forbes, combining information between Google services has been allowed by the privacy policies since 2005. But this didn’t stop the FTC complaining of privacy policy violations when Google used data from Gmail accounts when launching Google Buzz in 2010 – Google’s policy at the time also said “If we use this [personal] information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The new policy instead says “We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.” Still, the FTC complaint may be a factor in why Google is trying to be very clear to its users about what it’s doing with their data, as it starts to treat all of its products as parts of a single unified service.

And now, some speculation on what this may or may not mean for PPC and SEO:

So you’re advertising on Google, but you want to branch out to Bing? There’s a new audience for you there, with less competition and less cost!

Microsoft adCenter is in many ways similar to AdWords. Your ads appear on searches that match your positive keywords but not your negative keywords. Your account contains campaigns, which contain ad groups, which contain keywords and ads. Your ad’s position and the price of a click are determined by your bid and previous performance. But there are many differences – here are some of the most important ones for when you’re starting out.

Markets and Locations

In adCenter, there are separate options for Market and for Location. The Market determines what language you can use and which websites your ads appear on. Location determines where the users are.

So if your Market is ‘UK – English’, and you target all Locations, then your ads will appear on English websites like uk.msn.com to visitors from anywhere in the world. If the Market is ‘UK – English’ and the Location is United Kingdom, the ads will be on the same websites, but only visitors from the UK will see your ads.

The current Markets are USA (in English or Spanish), Canada (French or English), UK (English), France (English) and Singapore (English). You choose a campaign’s Market when you create the campaign, and it can’t be changed afterwards. Location can be set at campaign or ad group level, and can be changed at any time.

Typing cat*
2011 has been another very busy year on the SEOptimise blog, with nearly 400 posts generating over 400,000 visits and well in excess of half a million pageviews (oh and one best blog award).

With the year drawing to a close, and Christmas just round the corner, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try and summarise the best and most popular posts of the year, and hopefully give you a few early SEO Christmas gifts. While I am personally not a fan of list posts, judging by the most popular posts a lot of you are. So ever eager to please, here is a list of the 58 best/most popular posts of the year.

Our 10 most popular posts

What better place to start than the most popular posts of the year? Between them, the posts below generated almost 100,000 pageviews. So, working on the basis that 100,000 people (ok, maybe not people) can’t be wrong, there must be some awesome SEO gems contained within them.

  1. 30​ Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011 – the first post of the year is also the most popular, with Tad’s post about what was going to happen to search and social in 2011 receiving over 17,000 pageviews. As you would expect, there were a few predications that didn’t come true, but a fair few that did.

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There are many misconceptions about the kind of skills and traits you need in order to find a job within the Search Engine and Social Media Marketing Industry (hereinafter referred to as ‘SE & SMM Industry’). In order to dispel most of these misconceptions and to provide a guide-like resource to anyone looking to make their first step into the world of search and social, I have listed eight tips that would keep you in good stead in your job search including how to answer the dreaded “what prior experience do you have in Search and Social Media Marketing?” question.

If your ads display on irrelevant searches, then either you get clicks and waste money (as the searchers are very unlikely to convert), or you don’t get clicks and CTR drops (which affects Quality Score and therefore your CPC).

So how do you stop this? Part of the answer is choosing keywords carefully – be careful with general terms and use modified broad-match where appropriate – but for the best performance possible you need negative keywords to target your traffic properly.

1. Search Query Reports
The most obvious way, but also the most important. Look at your search query report and see what terms your ad is actually displaying for.

Earlier in the week I ran a poll to ask if people thought Google AdWords remarketing was a great marketing tactic, or just annoying.

There’s often many mixed opinions when talking about this, which fall into two groups:

  1. People who find that they are constantly being re-marketed to and almost stalked across the web, often to the point that it puts them off making a future purchase from a brand because the ads are so annoying.
  2. Advertisers who find that AdWords remarketing yields a positive ROI and is a great marketing tactic to re-connect with potential customers, who didn’t quite make a purchase last time they visited your site – but are likely to in the future.

So I thought it would be useful to run a quick poll to see how these opinions are divided, here are the results:

When social media marketers ran Facebook campaigns that were aimed at driving traffic toward their websites, they had to resort to tools such as Google Analytics in order to measure success or failure of their Facebook campaigns. However, a nifty new addition to the Facebook arsenal is the ‘insights for domains’ feature which has been introduced with minimum fanfare by Facebook. I strongly believe that if you run Facebook campaigns for your website then this is a ‘must have’ tool in order to monitor and optimise your Facebook content consumption.

We tested it out on our website for a couple of months and the information we have been able to gather has not only been extremely insightful, but also helped make better decisions regarding social media marketing strategies and tactics when running Facebook campaigns. This is indeed a phenomenal development, and one that we thought should be elaborated.

Getting started

In order to set up insights for websites, you will need to associate your website with a Facebook page or app that you manage. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click on the green button that reads “insights for your website”.

If you’re already using paid search marketing, how can you improve your results? Here are nine tips for sharpening up your campaigns.

Use conversion tracking & Google Analytics
Which keywords produce what results? Which cause people to make purchases, which result in newsletter sign-ups, which drive traffic to your forum or blog? You need tracking to answer these questions. AdWords (or AdCenter) will tell you what ads searchers click, but it won’t say what they do when they get to your site.

If you don’t have any conversion tracking installed yet, then install it. AdWords and AdCenter have their own conversion tracking, which records a conversion when someone who clicked on an ad subsequently visits a page on your site with conversion tracking code. This is usually a ‘thank you’ page for a sign up, or a receipt page after a purchase – it depends on your website’s goals.

As a self-confessed grammar geek, I’m frequently dismayed by the sloppy standard of writing I am continually confronted with throughout the course of the seven days a week I spend exploring the weird and wonderful world wide web. Whether it’s a blog post, a tweet or even a company website, it seems that a lax approach to grammar has become the norm – even, most shockingly of all, among professional copywriters I’ve hired. The most frequent offender in the huge array of rudimentary English errors is the misplaced or missing apostrophe, a grammar violation which winds me up so much that Stuart Tofts and Kevin Gibbons make a point of including one in every email they send me, just so that they can see my reaction.


Before you ask, no – “Trampoline” is not the name of the shop!

Not long ago, in a moment of above average exasperation, I sent out a tweet which said:

So imagine my satisfaction when the following correction from Google was brought to my attention not long after:

Automating Google Adwords accounts using APIs is a great way to save time and improve efficiency on large and complex accounts. However in my opinion, the success of paid search campaigns lies in understanding the marketing goals of the organisation, having an understanding of the products offered by the organisation, and having an understanding of the target market. This information acts as a guide when researching highly relevant keywords, creating ‘quality score friendly’ keyword segmentations and generating compelling ad copy that communicates the product offerings clearly and concisely, enticing users to click on an ad. I believe that these tasks are done best through human input as opposed to automated feeds.

Automation is useful if there are over a thousand product offerings and the products offered change dynamically within a twenty four hour period. Large ecommerce websites focusing on a wide range of products (such as Amazon and eBay) have such a large variety of products that it is almost impossible to make changes to their accounts manually. Therefore, XML feeds make perfect business sense in making account level, ad group level and ad level adjustments on a live campaign.

However, businesses that offer less than a thousand products and have a pricing strategy that is fairly fixed throughout the year will benefit more from manual intervention, as there would be greater control over changes made to ad copy and it would also be more customer focused. This alone would be a competitive advantage over advertisers who resort to automated paid search campaigns, as there’d most likely be disparity between the adverts and the users’ search query; this would lead to low levels of click through rates, which then lead to higher costs per click due to low quality scores.

For small to medium sized accounts, bulk changes could quite easily be done using Google Adwords Editor. Taking the extra time and effort into making sure every ad and every ad group is customised for the target user will pay more dividends through greater number of quality leads. This is an area that large ecommerce websites miss out on due to large amounts of automation, where the user’s keyword does not correspond with the ad copy and the related landing page. This would prove to be counterproductive, as leads generated would be of low quality. Furthermore, you could apply rules in order to automate bid management and use conversion optimiser wherever it is applicable. These can easily be implemented without the need for XML feeds.

Although introducing XML feeds would make account management relatively easier, I strongly believe that managing small to medium sized accounts manually will lead to better quality ads, better quality leads and will result in low overall spend – which will hopefully convert into higher return on investment.

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