Fresh off the boat

Social media is a hot topic as we all know. Professionals, journalists and practitioners talk about the benefits, debate the ability to measure its success and the ways to manage it effectively. It is recognised that social media is a core element within a brand. It is integrated into the business strategy, it manages the brands community, gives the brand a voice and personality. If it’s not recognised, then your brand will cease to exist online and will therefore lose out on a lot of marketing potential. The bottom line here is social media is here to stay. It is not a choice but a necessity. Get to grips with that and make sure you jump aboard before it’s too late.

Everyone knows that social media has grown rapidly and that there are many social networks out there.  But does everyone appreciate its importance and how to use it effectively? I’m not convinced the answer is yes. I don’t believe brands are grasping how crucial it is to stay engaged with their audience and keep up to date on terms, conditions and advertising regulations. Not everyone knows where to go looking for their target audience and people are adopting social media practises blindly.

Sink or swim? It’s an age old issue

It is a debated fact that the older generation are still yet to fully understand the benefits of social media today. There are many senior executives and marketers out there who do not understand the effects of social media on brand reputation, image and perception. Some companies are not taking it seriously enough and simply letting interns deal with it purely because they’re young and have a Twitter account. What the older generation lack, is the knowledge of who is using it, what it is used for, why it’s being used and how to measure its usefulness. I am suggesting they go find out the answers and that they appreciate they need to be asked.

Social Media is an essential part of every company, it is the hub. It embraces the culture of the company and the ways in which they communicate with their customers and associates. The older generation must recognise that it is a community and a place where their customers will talk about them and share information about them with the entire world.

The issue, as I see it, is if the older generation don’t see sense in social media and don’t hire someone who does, they will fall behind. It’s easy to be stubborn and think that it’s not needed; after all Social Media is no more than 10 years old. But with online rapidly progressing, the older generation must alter their perspectives.

For those that recognise this shift to digital, recognise also that they need to hire the know-how. A community manager should be sourced or hired and become a part of the marketing team being made fully aware of strategies and campaigns etc.

Jump aboard!

It’s seems with 67% of internet users on social media and with more people using it in 2013 than 2012, that would be proof enough that this area of marketing must not go untouched.

A social community manager is an in-demand role in the marketing industry. A community manager is designated to manage social media platforms on a daily basis. Having this role is a crucial investment. It’s within this role to create good, sharable and engaging content for followers and potential consumers. It is imperative that the community manager is aware of the brands personality and strategy as it will be their speciality to implement this effectively. A strong foundation can thereby be created and a community will flourish.

Source: beautifulnationproject.org

Lego put their managers on a social media day course which had both a practical and theoretical exam. Their director of social media, Lars Silberbaur, said this training was necessary as it is important to be able to connect with customers. They wouldn’t be so well known for their good use of social media communications if this course wasn’t taken.

Whatever floats your boat

There are multiple social platforms that can be used to shout about your organisation, endorse your product and reach out to your client base, but are different networks more effective for different industries? Which network is the best for promoting your company?

It’s easy enough for a company to get excited in all the social networking excitement and start building profiles on all the platforms they can think of. This isn’t wise because it’s pointless and time consuming. If your target audience aren’t there, then you shouldn’t be either. In order to stop creating profiles on all the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and more, a lot more!) and to understand best practises, all companies need to learn how to manage social media responsibly. This is where the social community manager role comes in handy!

Each social network has its own unique features. Businesses thrive on Twitter, LinkedIn is great for networking and Facebook is brilliant to advertise and activate campaigns. Each network has the ability to strengthen a brand. This is only possible when the right platform is chosen by the community manager.

Source: tuffillvernerblog.com

Heave-Ho

The main point I am bringing to light is simply that not everyone ‘gets’ the hype. This group of people should now know that even if they aren’t on the social media bandwagon, they need to hire someone who is. This is the way to build a community for their brand and a great marketing tool to have at their dispense. The possibilities are endless and please reflect on how much has become available in the past 10 years! It can only get bigger and better.

Definition

Big Data (noun): For the purposes of this article I am referring to “Big Data” as companies collecting data that has accrued over the years of its existence in an attempt to find significant customer behavioral insights.

How can the Hadron Collider potentially help us use and understand the benefits of Big Data? This month I wanted to explore the topic that has been creeping into marketing journalist’s headlines at a rapid pace. Big Data has been making a big noise of late and I decided to look into its potential applications (if any) and what it might mean for the future of marketing.

What I found was not all that surprising and actually turned out to be a lot of sermonizing from big IT companies or outlandish theories from journalists making bold claims as to how Big Data would change the face of marketing. And though these ideas are interesting, and part of me wants there to be real potential behind it, the reality is somewhat different.

Lost in the Big Data

The current state of big data

Big Data is not a recent phenomenon and has actually been around since the 1970’s. The market is currently valued at $4.8bn (as of 2012) and is growing rapidly. The amount of information created in 2011 was 1.6 trillion gigabytes and 90% of all time data has been made in the last two years.

The term itself is an attempt to put a “sexy” spin on it probably created by management consultants to scare-monger large enterprises and marketing agencies into outsourcing their data. In return you get overly complex software that can take giant amounts of data and turn it into pretty graphs. The value proposition is an alluring one– leverage pre-existing data and generate game-changing customer insights that will put you light years ahead of the competition. One good example I saw was Crunchbase (http://www.crunchbase.com/) which has recently come up with a software that makes running reports on huge amounts of data doable on basic hardware (the kind you would find in most SME’s rather than hiring football pitches of servers).

This all sounds great right? Well in actuality you must have the pre-requisites of human intuition and excellent critical thinking to generate anything meaningful. Graphs mean nothing unless thinking has gone into their construction and even then what do you do with them?

The kind of thinking we are talking about is probably best shown by physicists, astrologists and theoretical mathematicians. They begin with a hypothesis (a hunch) which you then apply to astronomical amounts of data and test,test,test. The chaps at the Hadron Collider did not run real time analysis on the several hundred million molecular collisions occurring every second , kick back, make a spreadsheet and have a “eureka!” moment. You really need to know exactly what you’re looking for before you start (ok so the Hadron physicists were looking for a needle in a haystack the size of Texas without ever having seen the needle before. Marketers looking for these insights will not necessarily have any idea the shape or nature of them when they begin analysis.)

“I thought there would be more explosions”

But where does this apply to marketing?

The divide between the techies and the creative minds is notorious and perhaps one of the best examples of this is John Hegarty. He gives the example of the Tesco horsemeat scandal as a reason Big Data is doomed to go nowhere. Tesco collect a huge range of customer behavior data from their transaction history recorded through loyalty cards, and yet end up serving them Seabiscuit in ready meals. He makes a good point, getting lost under tidal waves of data can make you lose sight of the bigger, more immediate picture.

The Matrix theory 

At the opposite end of the spectrum to Sir Hegarty are those who predict an Orwellian future for marketing: that the level of competence with automated marketing will reach a point that will dehumanize the whole experience. Whilst it’s true that there are commonly automated functions in marketing (such as remarketing), this dystopian view of data and automation is ridiculous. Firstly it completely negates the idea that customers are capable of choosing which website/shop/television they want. Customers are tuned in to the technological advancements around them; they are smart and expect brands to do them the courtesy of delivering excellent content/products/services/etc. Secondly remarketing requires constant monitoring and a good deal of input from a sentient being. The machines are not coming, people.

The real challenge will not be manipulating the data to deliver interesting content to the customer. To go back to what Sir Hegarty has always said it’s about “reaching the space between people’s ears”. I think the real point here is that spontaneity cannot be scripted and so those who hope to be able to create moments like the “Pregnant Man” poster by running massive data analysis will be sorely disappointed.

If this is too harsh on Big Data and we lower expectations to just being able to create algorithms from the data that can intuitively create fun and interesting remarketing ideas, it still will not have revolutionized anything. In fact there is a danger brands will lose touch with their customer by spamming emails and messages and generally delivering what you think is custom content but is actually just noise. It will end up driving people away from their website or social media sites denying themselves a chance to really engage.

Big Data: Big News or Big Con?

It’s clear Big Data is around to stay, at least for the medium term. As to being the “future of marketing” I cannot see that happening for a long time, if ever. If I walked into the Nike village with a fuel band on and it came up with a “Hi George, check out our new running shoes” because I go jogging it would irritate me. It’s a very shallow form of personalization. A better application of personal marketing is to offer people with decent running shoes, discounted fittings or newsletters of upcoming running events and deliver useful information and services to them.

What is crucial is brands must be very careful about how they use customer’s personal information. When it comes to putting the customer first nothing has changed and in fact it will become more important than ever to focus on them. It’s true that consumers will be looking for more individual approaches because that’s just the world we live in. However that works both ways and if the customer begins to engage with you more don’t be surprised at the higher cost of getting it wrong. Most likely this will result in a social media storm and forums lighting up with poor comments.

Marketers have been talking about building a rapport with the customer since the term of “consumer” fell out of fashion. Perhaps Big Data will help with that, but at each stage of the process, if you are trying to use customer’s personal information, include them. Online forums in which customers and brands can barter for a decent return on divulging their personal information would work. There needs to be a lot more of this transparency rather than brands mercilessly collecting information and then blasting you with emails generated from your transaction history.

Closing thoughts then, Big Data – watch this spot, but not too closely.

Despite the best efforts of search providers, link spam is a self-fulfilling, guaranteed income.

SEO has become a dirty word these days. When people think of SEO they often think of shady practises such as comment spam, scraped content, horribly written outsourced text and so on. It’s not just within the SEO community either. There has been mainstream coverage about how SEO is dead and nobody needs to do it.

Do I agree? Actually, I agree with the majority of what is being said. Aggressive SEO is dying. Black hat SEO is dying. ‘Grey hat’ SEO is dying. Heck, even a lot of the stuff that people refer to as ‘white hat’ SEO is dying. The fact that it’s dying is probably a good thing.

But spam is NOT dead. I keep seeing people getting banned for spamming, only to then buy a new domain and get right back on the spam train. I saw a website ranking #1 for ‘SEO Company’. They got banned, and four weeks later, they have a new domain that’s also #1 for ‘SEO Company’. All their clients got screwed. Yet the blurb reads ‘100 % WHITE HAT! 100% SAFE!’

To claim this when you just got your clients and your old domain heavily penalised is essentially fraud; and let’s not forget that nobody, anywhere, could EVER claim their service is 100% safe. You have no idea what Google or Bing might pull out their hat tomorrow. You can claim to be white-hat if you actually follow the guidelines the search engines release (and follow them to the letter). But you still can’t claim you’re ‘100% safe’ or ‘future proof’.

I personally don’t feel obligated to make Google’s search results prettier. My beef with black hat SEO is not that it upsets Google. It’s that it destroys the websites of innocent bricks and mortar companies that have invested too much money in building a brand to buy a new domain and start again. For the black hat people spamming away to promote their own sites, selling their own products, I don’t really care unless they inflict their risk on others.

The one type of business that can afford to take risks with link spam is the spammers themselves:

In this way, spam self-fulfills. Google’s fight against spam is a fight against market forces. I do believe Google COULD eventually ‘win’ (in that, for most people, spam will not be worth the risk) but I also think that people will be able to get (temporary) results with spam for years to come. Maybe forever.

The temporary nature of spam doesn’t pose a threat to churn and burn SEO’s. Affiliate marketers will still hand over their life savings to the black-hat SEO people.

Cleaning up the acronym!

SEO is not link spam, because link spam doesn’t involve optimising anything. However, when the average Jo or Jane gets their fingers burned, how are they going to know the difference? In all honesty, link building is not really SEO either. A great no followed link from an awesome website will get you traffic that is unaffected by Google policy. So it doesn’t help SEO, but it gets you traffic.

“But it’s comment marketing…”

Let’s be honest. Doing -just- SEO wastes other opportunities. Seriously. SEO can get you free additional traffic from search engines. Paid search will get you visitors too, and get results very quickly. UX will get you better conversions from the same amount of traffic. Link building will get you extra traffic that’s not dependent on search engines, AND help your search traffic. Social media will help your PR and push your brand at a wider audience. Email marketing can get you some loyal business interest. PPC advertising on non-search channels can make a nice return as well.

How many SEO’s out there have never done some of this stuff? It often makes sense to attack from all fronts. When SEO is part of the marketing mix it helps extract more value from your other marketing. And I think that’s where SEO belongs and will continue to belong for a long time.

An offline parallel to SEO: library science.

Tangent time: It’s true that SEO is related to marketing and somewhat related to web development; however, it’s actually more closely related to archival/library science or information retrieval system development than anything else. This flies in the face of the consensus but I think it’s true.

If you dig through the annals of SEO history to the time before SEO was something anyone knew about (and before the existence of Google I might add) you had people such as Eric Ward, who didn’t know about tricking Google then, and who happily admits he doesn’t know now. It doesn’t matter, because he has a background in library science, and as a result, understands a lot about the categorisation of information, information retrieval, and other fundamentals of search. Google ‘link-building expert’ and see what happens!

The analogue SERPS have always been a bit more of a hassle to navigate

Let’s say you are an author that specialises in a certain topic. You want to get more exposure at the library. Let’s imagine your topic is engineering. One way to dominate the engineering section of the library is to get a book into as many categories as possible. That involves writing a lot of books – one about structural engineering, one about electronics engineering, etc. That is some pretty time consuming stuff! This is okay, as each book is an investment that will bring more readers.

The real issue here is that the books have to actually be good enough to get into the library in the first place – which means two things:

• The content needs to be completely new

OR

• If it’s not completely new, it has to be a more useful resource than its competing equivalents.

To put my metaphor out of its misery:

• ‘Books’ are webpages
• ‘Categories’ are niches
• The ‘library’ is the search results.

This is how I visualise it when Google and others say to ‘act as if the search engines aren’t there’. The search engine is the shop window, and you’re trying to optimise for the customers peering through it. Search engines are just robotic interfaces for finding stuff, and robots don’t buy anything.

..not your customers

As more and more data is being electronically stored and retrieved, there is a need for search expertise, even when completely separate from marketing and even from the web. Academic libraries and online journal depositories (such as JSTOR) need excellent search functionality and information organisation. Social networks, recruitment sites, eCommerce – not every search is conducted on a search engine. So even in a search engine vacuum there are areas where thinking logically about search can add value to an organisation.

Passion is not enough if it’s not delivered in a way search engines can see

Moving back to the web, the mantra of ‘ignore SEO and just create amazing content’ is the message you will get from a lot of people. But that’s not useful. ‘Create amazing content’. It’s a bit like saying ‘start a successful business’, or ‘become a musical genius.’ Creating amazing content is really difficult, and time consuming. It’s not enough on its own either!

If you can categorise & schedule your content according to the wants & needs of your audience, your website will get traffic. However, you will be unlikely to get the full potential out of your content unless you think about SEO, as whilst your content could well be great, your site might just not be optimised for search engines. That’s that crucial letter O making its appearance!

The following activities will always be valuable:

• Identifying what people are searching for
• Identifying the gaps in the content that is available
• Creating content that fills those gaps

Also valuable:

• Going through existing content and making tweaks to bring it in line with the sorts of things people are searching
• Going through existing content and making it’s topic more obvious to search engines
• Coming up with core topics to target based on your levels of existing visibility

Also also valuable:

• Thinking about ways of encouraging people to link to you
• Thinking of ways to optimise your site for crawlers, getting rid of pointless duplication of pages, making sure you redirect things properly, being standards compliant, following search engine guidelines, and keeping your site updated, etc.

Spamming is no use for real companies. Google only want to count genuinely editorial links and they are getting better at making this a reality. They have actual PhD mathematicians working on this, and nobody is going to win at outsmarting them in the long run. That said, in the short term, spam is king.

Spam and SEO are going to have to coexist for some time. Unless something is done to combat spam more effectively, the only thing that’s going to die is SEO’s reputation.

We were struck by the news that Google is to end their long-running Google Reader RSS feed service in July.

We created one of our trademark mini-infographics or minfographics as a fitting, albeit slightly morbid tribute to the history of Google Reader.

It’s demise opens the floodgates for other companies to establish their dominance in this market. With the rise of smartphone and tablet usage, getting consolidated streams of news on the move will be a very lucrative area and it’ll be interesting to see who will reign supreme.

Embed the minfogravestone on your own blog!

<img alt="Minfographic: Google Reader by Passion Digital" src="http://www.passiondigital.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/google-reader-full-size.jpg" /></p> <div>Brought to you by <a href="http://www.passiondigital.co.uk/" >Passion Digital</a>.</div> <p>

Chariots of File

It’s been 3 years since Google started taking site speed into consideration when deciding what pages to include in your search results. Since then, the landscape of internet browsing has changed in such a way that optimisation of your website in terms of page load performance is more important than ever. As mobile browsing on devices of various sizes and resolutions is on course to overtake the traditional method of fixed browsing from desktop or laptop computers, sites need to perform well on mobile browsers.

Google offers a tool for measuring the performance of a specified page on your website according to their PageSpeed metric and gives a helpful breakdown of where optimisation is needed. You can generate a report based on desktop or mobile browsing.

At Passion Digital, we’re currently working on the re-invention of our own online abode, with a lot of thought and planning going into the creation of a responsive web experience, which will look and perform great on all imaginable devices. Part of the strategy for this will be to establish some best practices in terms of optimisation using Google’s PageSpeed Insights as a guideline.

One of the biggest contributors to the overall performance of your site is the use of images; in this article, we’ll take a look at image optimisation and also see where things are headed in terms of using graphics in web design and development.

Opt-In

According to pingdom’s website monitoring tools, our home page weighs in at 3.4MB, which takes approximately 3 seconds to load on a test server in Amsterdam. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tells us that we could make a significant saving of 345kb by optimising all the images on the page. So how do we go about doing this? Running the Google PageSpeed Insights extension for Google Chrome actually gives you access to optimised versions of your image files it creates for you.  You can then upload these files back onto the server. You can access these via an additional module that it creates within Chrome’s developer tools (accessed by pressing F12).

Pingdom Tools

There’s currently no way to batch download these files, so for working with a larger quantity of files, there are a number of online tools that you can use. Yahoo’s SmushIt has been a popular choice for many years, providing a bulk uploader and the ability to download all files back as a zipped archive, retaining the directory structure that the files were originally uploaded within.

A relative up-and-comer, Kraken offers more flexibility and arguably, more power. You can select lossless or lossy optimisation, the former meaning your files will not degrade in quality and only useless pixel information is purged from the image, whereas lossy optimisation results in smaller files but a degraded image. The browser extensions it offers for Chrome and Firefox looks for the entirety of image URL’s on a page and uploads it to their server straight from the page itself as an automated version of the URL paster.

Another great service that Kraken  provides is the API that allows developers to integrate the optimiser into their own applications. I’d love to see something like this integrated into WordPress’ default themes as part of the ‘crunching’ process.

Using Kraken to optimise all the images on our home page, we saved 387.16KB which is even more than what Google was suggesting. Our page size now comes to 3.1MB and takes only 2.11 seconds to load. This has also resulted in our PageSpeed Score increasing from 75 (72 on mobile) to 86 (84 on mobile).

Kraken Results

To deliver even more speed we could have hosted all our static image files on a content delivery network such as Amazon’s or MaxCDN.

Future Imagery

What does the future hold for the use of static image files in websites? The way sites are being designed and developed has already been re-thought for the problem of catering to many different viewports and resolutions. The responsive design philosophy is being practiced by an ever-increasing number of companies, from the tech savvy start-ups to more traditional and significantly larger organisations.

This approach addresses layout well and has also got developers thinking more about how to better serve up the elements that are contained within them to the new breed of browsing devices – particularly those with high-resolution displays – while keeping file sizes down to a minimum. Displays such as those used on the Nexus 10 or iPad tablets demand high resolution imagery (around 200 – 300ppi) posing a massive obstacle to optimum page load speeds, even if your site can serve the appropriate resolution file to each device.

Thankfully, browsers are shouldering much of the responsibility of rendering web graphics such as UI elements and sprites using CSS3. Tools such as CSSHat and the new Photoshop CSS3 update for CS6.1 make it much easier design and develop with this fact in mind. CSS3 is being used to create increasingly complex illustrations and iconography, covering bases which extend just beyond the realm of the site’s native UI. The age-old format of SVGs are also seeing something of a revival beyond vector cartography.

Sportlobster’s very clever, infinitely scalable, vector logo

There is certainly more to page speed optimisation than is covered in this article; we hope to get into more of the gritty details as we continue work to redevelop our own site. In future installments of this little series we’ll look at further optimisation techniques such as using Gzip compression, and share some insights as to the effect it has on our visibility. Watch this space! For now though, we hope this helps you resolve your own site’s sluggish performance. If you have any further queries or want us to cover a specific aspect of site speed, please ping us a comment below and we’ll see if we can include something in the next installment.

Beta, beta, beta! That’s the cool phase to be in isn’t it? Ask any ‘web entrepreneur’ how their site is coming along and the usual vague response is:

“We’re aiming to be in beta by April.”

So that’s June or July then, I think to myself.

“So you’re in alpha phase at the moment then?” I ask.

“Well that comes after beta doesn’t it?”

I head to the bar, by myself.

While I understand it’s easy to get whisked away in the excitement of launching a new web business, I’m not convinced that the 1^st and 2^nd letter of the Greek alphabet has suddenly switched around. After all, we call the alphabet ‘alphabet’ not ‘betaalph’!

The website release life cycle should be built into the foundations of your strategy. You may feel rushed to launch before someone else does but if you haven’t given yourself enough time to test your website thoroughly then you’re giving any competitors a head start straight away. You might be first past the post but running a successful web business is a marathon, not a sprint. Slow and steady wins the race.

Pre-alpha Testing

From the moment you scream “Eureka!” to yourself in the shower to the moment you ask your friend to be the first person to try your site, you are in the pre-alpha phase. It encompasses everything from designing the first wireframes or conducting the requirements analysis, to developing the code or integrating a social network’s API. When you’re ready to show the dev site to friends or marketers, pre-alpha is done!

We recommend that during this phase a ‘Coming Soon’ landing page is hosted at your web domain with an email data capture for visitors to show their interest in. This also gives marketers a conversion to achieve.

Alpha Testing

Now it’s time to start testing internally. You are happy with the site and you want to get it to the masses as soon as possible so you can call your new pal Mark Zuckerberg to arrange a tech billionaire’s lunch. Before that happens though, really use the alpha testing phase to get all friends and family trying the site and giving you feedback. If you’re on a tight budget, check out the W3C Validator for code compliance, Go Mo for mobile optimisation or WebPageTest for a free general performance test of your site. If the angel investors have just loaded your pockets, professional testers are essential. They are professionals for a reason.

Beta Testing

As it famously said in the Godfather, “We go to the mattresses.” In other words, it’s time for war! Beta testing is when you show your cards to the public and it’s understandable to go into this phase with some trepidation. Fear not, that four letter word gives you a wealth of forgiveness from your early adopters. The start of beta is commonly private or “closed” where you will invite people who have already shown interest to register and have a play. It’s important to encourage feedback from these first users. Although they are unlikely to inform you of any technical issues, they will give you valuable opinions on usability.

When you decide to open the beta you can encourage your established user base to invite their friends or you might take your marketing strategy up a gear to drive fresh traffic, it depends what your objectives are. It’s important to make full use of this phase. There is no rush. If you receive a swell of new users this is a good opportunity to see how your site handles with real volume. As with the closed beta, be sure to encourage feedback from your users; as the end of beta testing draws near, consider incentivising your customer base to continue using your site.

Release Candidate (RC)

This phase is also known as gamma testing. You will now have a beta version of your site you are happy to attribute a ‘1.0’ to. Usually, at this stage your site will not need any new source code, so can be declared “code complete.” Now that you are at the end of beta testing, it is important to migrate your customers cleanly to your first release so adjustments and tweaks can be made. However, you shouldn’t be making drastic changes – if it needs more than minor tweaks, it’s not yet at the RC stage.

Release to Marketing (RTM)

This phase name makes it sound like now is the time to start marketing. Although this may be the case in some instances, marketing usually should have started earlier. In RTM you have the first version of your website ready for any customer that comes your way. All significant issues arisen in testing should now be ironed out. Now it’s time to drive growth and you should know by now if that will happen.

General Availability (GA)

Congratulations! You’re flying! Your email inbox should now be filling with suggestions rather than complaints. Brand advocates and influencers will start to emerge from your customers who should be rewarded accordingly. All launch marketing will have been completed and your targets are being met. You have successfully completed alpha testing, beta testing, RC and RTM and can change your LinkedIn job title from ‘Professional Procrastinator’ to ‘Web Entrepreneur’.

To The Bar

Knowing and understanding the website release life cycle from conception to completion will make the development and growth of your website much easier. Giving yourself enough time for each phase to be completed will not only give you better sleep but your investors will appreciate it too as you will have a clear picture of when and when not to spend money.

So if we meet at the next industry drinks and we start talking about your web startup, I hope that when I get the drinks in, there’ll be a pint in there for you too.

Cheers!

In case you haven’t heard already, this morning Google announced some absolutely mega epic changes to the AdWords platform. They claim the changes will empower smaller businesses to ‘more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns” across multi platforms. In actual fact, they are forcing all advertiser to advertise on mobile (unless you opt out) and as a result the CPCs on mobile devices will most likely rise to the levels they already on desktop devices.

To state the obvious, mobile technology is evolving incredibly quickly. Last year in the UK 45% of internet users used their smartphones to access the internet and a whopping 25% of all internet users ONLY use their smartphones. In the states on Cyber Monday – 13% of all online sales were made via a mobile device!

With that in mind, I read  a crazy stat the other day (from the IAB) that said over 40% of brands still don’t have mobile optimised sites – that’s quite frankly ridiculous and a massive opportunity/missed revenue stream for those medieval brands.

In line with the increased usage of internet (and therefore search) on mobile devices, Google have continuously been under pressure to capitalise and monetize this increase. Similar to Facebook’s problems it’s been a little harder to advertise on mobile devices. This is, amongst other things, down simply to the size of the screen and therefore lack of space for ads. But a change like this should really not come as a surprise; Google are simply desperate to increase their market share in this ever growing space that is ‘mobile’.

The changes are rolling out slowly starting today over the coming weeks, with all campaigns to be ‘enhanced’ by June this year.

A pessimist’s view might be that Google are merging mobile and desktop advertising in an attempt to increase their revenue. Historically, mobile CPCs have been much lower than the same keywords on desktops as mobile visits were deemed to be less valuable. This change will almost certainly up the mobile CPC to align with desktop. This will almost certainly increase the revenue Google are making on their mobile ads. Bravo.

Bearing in mind I’m yet to see the changes in action and therefore have no data to back up my thoughts, the following pros and cons are merely my knee-jerk reactions to the announcement:

Pros

• Power to small businesses that manage their own AdWords campaigns whilst running a restaurant/flower shop at the same time. It’s like AdWords express – but with more features*.
• Sitelink level tracking and ad extensions at the ad group level – this is great, although I’d heard rumours they were rolling this out anyway last year at some point.

Cons

• No mobile only campaigns
  We already have separate mobile campaigns – which are arguably easier to manage. You can see stats for mobile and desktop at a glance separately.
• Forcing you to advertise on mobile
  If you want NOT to advertise on mobile – you have to decrease the mobile bid adjustment by -100% so that your ad’s won’t show up on mobiles. A bit long winded if you ask me. By default you will advertise on mobiles.
• Loss of control and granularity.
  With this so called ‘simplification’ you actually lose a great deal of control, granularity and transparency. This might be fine for your one-man-band selling cupcakes but for agencies managing huge accounts it’ not idea – we need that granularity!!
• Default bids will now be set at the desktop/tablet level.
  Tablets and desktops are effectively now treated as the same thing – Google claim that their data shows search behaviour to be almost identical on tablets as with desktops. Not according to the data we can see!!
  We know for a fact that for some of our clients targeting tablets has generated much better return for particular campaigns – these have also tended to be at lower CPCs – now we will be forced to pay desktop CPCs which are usually a fair bit higher; therefore reducing the ROI.
• No targeting by OS
  We’re losing the ability to target people via their operating system. The only part of this that will remain (but at the mercy of Google’s automation) is if you have a click-to-download app ad, Google assure us they’ll only show these on devices that can download the app.

NB: This is only my knee-jerk reaction to the announcement – without actually using or experiencing the “enhanced campaigns” myself. Once we get access – we’ll have a play around, get some actual data and report back then. Maybe I’ll have to eat my hat!

On Friday 25^th January all of our charity clients received an email from the Google grants team notifying them about two significant changes.

Here was that message:

News about your Google Grants Account and Optimisation Tips

We are writing to let you know about a few changes to the Google Grants programme.

As part of our ongoing efforts to grow our advertising programme for nonprofits, we are making two changes to the Grants programme. First, as of January 28, 2013, Google Grantees may bid up to $2.00 USD on keywords. This is an increase from the previous CPC bid cap of $1.00 USD and may allow your ads to enter auctions previously unavailable at the $1.00 bid cap. Second, to balance the interests of businesses who pay to advertise on Google search, your ads will now appear below the ads of traditional AdWords advertisers.

Our thoughts?

Upon reading this email for the first time I wasn’t overly apprehensive. The initial excitement of the max bid being doubled from $1 to $2 (roughly £0.64 to £1.27) was quickly cancelled out by finding out that grant accounts will always show below paid advertising. Two things sprung to mind; firstly, that it was about time they increased the max CPC for grant accounts above $1. It was a convenient and sufficient amount 4 or 5 years ago when the PPC market was very different. However, we have seen typical charity keywords increase steadily in estimated average CPC’s and minimum first page CPC bids over the years. The outcome being that average positions have fallen over time. Secondly, it looks very much like Google decided to make a self-serving commercial decision and are attempting to conceal this by increasing the max bid.

What are the implications?

I would suggest that firstly everyone looking after a grant account adds an annotation to their analytics account for Friday 25^th when the email was sent out just for reference. We would also suggest adjusting your bids to $2 as soon as possible.

As of 4pm GMT, 28/01/2013 we have not successfully been able to increase the bid value. We attempted to do this for at least 20 of our UK based charity clients and many US based NFP’s too.

This is the message we saw:

UPDATE: As of the morning of 29th January – the AdWords system is now accepting bid changes up to $2.

I have applied for over 50 Google grant accounts successfully since the project was launched and as you can image, if you are managing $100,000 + of Google grants each month then the cumulative effect of a change like this can be substantial.

I fear that the increase in max bid is likely to be considerably over-shadowed by the demotion of grant accounts against traditional paid-for ones. The significance of this will obviously depend on the sector and market in which keywords are being targeted. A well-built Google grant account will always require creativity, well written ads, quality and appropriate landing pages as well as a comprehensively built structure and quantity/quality of positive and negative keywords. The manager of the Google grant account should be doing the above regardless of maximum bid value but the latest change could increase strain on account managers. For our larger charity clients we run a standard paid AdWords account in combination with the grant account to capitalise on those important keywords that we previously couldn’t get visibility for at $1. This balance will need to be very closely monitored over the next few weeks as I’m sure many keywords will be moving back and forth between paid and grant accounts. The goal here when running dual accounts is to never pay for a click that you could get free via the grant account!

We will be keeping a close eye on the effects of this change and keeping this blog post updated with our findings…Let us know how this changed has affected your charity in the comments below.

A final point:

Google don’t have to offer charities free advertising! We have seen many charities completely turned around through the use of Google grants, so we have a lot to thank Google for. I’m sure they have reasons for making these changes (whether they are commercial or not), at the end of the day there’s not a lot we can do so in my eyes we just have to adapt and work harder to get the maximum value out of the accounts.

UPDATE – 30/01/13

So we’ve had our first full day of results since we increased bids on all our clients from $1 – $2 and paid account ads took preference over grant accounts.

A few things to note about the data below:

• Data includes all keywords including brand related
• Data is gathered from more than 1 million impressions
• Each account has a similar number of impressions
• We haven’t weighted average positions because total impressions are very similar across all accounts

Comparison of Google grant data – Tuesday 29th January 2013 compared to Tuesday 22nd January 2013

Google Grant Data – Click to Enlarge

Findings:

• Impressions up 96% – this is what we would have expected
• Clicks are up 21% – we didn’t necessarily expect to see this, it’s rather exciting
• CTR is down as you would expect with a 96% increase in impressions
• Average CPC went from $0.69 – $1.05
• Average positions didn’t really change

Each account will vary considerably based on the competitive nature of the keywords and sector.

It is positive to see that, on first impressions, overall clicks are up.

Note: We have not yet analysed the quality of these clicks yet, but we will do this when we have more data collected.

UPDATE – 04/02/13

Following the interest that was generated through this article and the last little bit of data we published I thought it would be worth another udpate with more data.

We compared the data from Tuesday 22nd January – Sunday 27th Jan Vs. Tuesday 29th January – Sunday 3rd February:

So, what’s changed since the last update?

• Impressions have reduced after the first day but are still 68% up in total
• Clicks were 21% up and are now 8% up
• CTR has remained consistently around 30-40% down
• Average CPC went from $0.65 – $1.08
• Previously we hadn’t noticed a significant change in position but now we notice a drop from 3.65 to 3.18
• Only one of the sample of accounts noticed an overall increase in CTR
• Only 2 of the 6 accounts had an increase in clicks but this increase (31% & 35%) was significantly greater than the drops we saw in the other accounts

Overall, these findings are quite interesting. The most important figure to the client is the number of clicks (as long as they are good quality) and our study shows these have increased in total. However, 4 accounts have decreased and 2 increased by a larger amount. Clearly the sector of the charity and keywords present in the account will play a large part in what the outcome of this google grant change will be.

The other interesting thing we have noticed is that many of our keywords are clearly still appearing higher than non-charity advertisers. Regardless of how low the bid on that keyword is for the non-charity, they should still be ranking higher than a charity using the grant account to advertise on that keyword according to the initial email from Google. If the full effects of this change haven’t come into effect yet we don’t expect the results to be positive when they do!

In case you hadn’t noticed, or you haven’t had enough of your Facebook friends comment on it, it’s snowing!  And who doesn’t love it when it snows!? At Passion Digital, we’re snowmantics but that doesn’t mean we’re nice to each other when we have the impromptu lunchtime snow fight!  Upon our return we thought we’d make a snow infographic!

So like a snowball to the face, here is THE NIPPY GUIDE TO SNOWY DAYS infographic, as brought to you by a cold and bruised Passion Digital Agency.

If you’d like Passion Digital to create an infographic for you contact [email protected]

 2013: The latest manipulation based strategy that will ping you to the top of the SERPs (for a while) [UPDATED!]

Disclaimer: this is something I noticed yesterday (Jan 10th) – I have not had time to do a proper analysis to absolutely confirm this beyond all doubt.

Every once in a while someone figures out a new way to manipulate search rankings and makes a load of money from doing it, then Google figure out the loophole, close it, everybody gets banned and there is much gnashing of teeth on the Webmaster Forums. I feel we are about to see another bubble burst.

So the other day I was just cruising through the SERPs and I saw a result that grabbed my attention. It was a typical black-hat sounding website – “guaranteed rankings in 4 weeks or money back”, etc. I checked out the site – really nice design, so it certainly looked legit.

There was the usual spam line up:

• Social bookmarking
• EDU links
• Directory Submission
• Drip feeding
• Web 2.0
• High PR Blogs
• Article Marketing (shudder)
• Link Wheels

So in short “how to get banned from Google 101”. Except this site wasn’t banned- it was ranked very highly for some mega short tail stuff. Not only that, they have testimonials from real websites, and those websites are still ranking very highly for their core terms. Plus, they have been there for 6 months and survived all the Google Panda and Penguin onslaughts.

What on earth is going on? I took a look at their backlinks, and I noticed something very odd. A good 75% of their links were nofollowed. A good 75% of their client links were nofollowed.

Before we get to it, we need to do some back story stuff.

The ‘Nofollow’ Attribute

Conventional wisdom dictates that a link that has the ‘rel=nofollow’ attribute assigned to it should pass no value back to that site. The ‘nofollow’ attribute was introduced to allow webmasters to stop passing PageRank to third party sites if, for example, they were selling banner advertising. As Google don’t like paid links that pass PageRank, this allows people to sell banner ads without getting busted for algorithm manipulation. Equally, people will ‘nofollow’ their blog comments to stop passing PageRank on to third parties that shove links in the comments, etc.

So this led to an immediate flurry of speculation concerning using ‘nofollow’ to ‘sculpt’ PageRank. People would “nofollow” their internal links with the hope that they could, by cutting off the supply of PageRank to less important pages, send more of it to pages they wanted to rank.

Fast forward and Google have rectified this loophole by (as far as I can see) down-ranking sites that ‘nofollow’ internal links. I don’t know any more than that – I don’t work for Google. The reality will be more sophisticated than my understanding of it, but take it from me, you don’t want to do this to your internal links today. It won’t end well.

So what is the status of ‘nofollow’ today? Matt Cutts has said that such links definitely don’t pass PageRank. So this we know. I have no reason to doubt him on that as of yet, as I have not seen any site increase its toolbar PageRank from nofollowed links.  However, the notion that Google doesn’t crawl nofollowed links is wrong, as is the idea that nofollowed links don’t pass anchor text. It gets said a fair bit, but it’s still wrong. They might not always follow or pass value, but they sometimes do.

This can be tested pretty easily. You create a blog somewhere. Plonk something on it, and then create a ‘nofollow’ link to it using a silly anchor text term such as ‘iwonderifanchortextwillpassvianofollow’. Don’t create any other links to it at all. You can bet that within a few weeks of creating nofollow links to it with the same anchor text it will appear in search results for your nonsense term. You won’t know which links did the trick but some of them will work if you do enough.

My silly blog in question will be linked to internally by WordPress.com so will get indexed almost by default, but if it doesn’t start to rank for that term in the coming weeks I shall eat my hat.*

To quote from Jill Whalen (who has been doing SEO for far longer than I):

You can follow this discussion over at Sphinn.

So if Google appear to pass anchor text for ‘nofollow’ links, that allows for a curious situation. The Google Webmaster Guidelines are very clear on what you CANNOT do:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
• Excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”)
• Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank
• Building partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site

So essentially, you can buy all the links you want as long as they are nofollowed – and some of those nofollowed links will pass value that can help your rankings.

Bingo!

Well, not quite. I’ve not tested enough, nor gathered enough info to prove this is true for definite.  But it does seem that this quirk of the Google algorithm and its relationship with ‘nofollow’ is a big enough crack for the crowbar of brute force link manipulation to pry open.

To quote from Google’s Matt Cutts:

I have recently seen a lot more than ‘a few corner cases’! Whilst it is unlikely that something as simple as “build as many nofollow links as possible” is going to get you to number one for your chosen keyword (I think getting to #1 for a single keyword is actually a pretty dumb thing to do in terms of results, risk and effort anyway) it certainly seems true that:

• A ‘nofollow’ link can get you some anchor text value
• You can simply splash cash and buy as many ‘nofollow’ links as you want without breaking the Webmaster Guidelines
• Previous link value pooling schemes such as link pyramids etc will still work with ‘nofollow’ links, they will just provide very little PageRank / anchor text as less of the links will count
• As you aren’t breaking the rules, you will survive
• Smash out enough links and you will eventually see results.

Therefore you could build something like the infamous ‘Build My Rank’ link value consolidation network, and get it up and running, and sell and buy links from within it, all whilst staying on the right side of the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

I previously defined White Hat SEO as “anything that gets results without breaking search providers guidelines”. I want to add one caveat: it also includes “not doing stuff that is blatantly going to be included in the list of things you can’t do in the near future” which is why Passion Digital will not be embarking on any forays into this area any time soon – however, ‘Churn and Burn’ affiliate webmasters might take note and get what they can out of this free lunch before the food gets cold.

I’ll probably email Danny Sullivan & Matt Cutts to see if I’m just barking up the wrong tree. If they get back to me (which I highly doubt) I’ll add any details here.

UPDATE! 

Two further examples:

This is a pretty decent case study. It’s not perfect – there is content that is at least partially related to the keywords used- but its an intriguing result nonetheless:

http://www.socialseo.com/blog/an-experiment-nofollow-links-do-pass-value-and-rankings-in-google.html

Whilst difficult to ascertain the full method etc, yet another case of nofollow links seeming to work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GsqWK4yQ6o

Thanks to those who commented below for sending these in.

ANOTHER UPDATE!

So the site I was looking at seem to have been filtered from the SERPs. They no longer even rank for their brand terms. I was discussing the issue with a few people in private – certainly nobody from Google.  So, either they were lucky to have lasted, or someone from Google noticed? I have no idea. However, it is likely that I will be eating my hat* in the near future. We’ll have to see if the other sites I discovered maintain their position. Either way, I won’t be naming names or URLs in this post.

I also emailed Danny Sullivan (who clearly knows his stuff) and he very much doubts that ‘nofollow’ links will work in this way –  although Matt Cutts had seen ‘nofollow’ links send some anchor text, Danny said that these were on extremely rare occasions that shouldn’t scale in the way described in this article.

So there you have it. Whilst people have certainly been doing it, they are getting in trouble for it. No surprise there! Probably worth bleaching the last bit of grey from your hat.**

 *by hat I mean 'cake'.

** this time I really meant 'hat'. Don't put bleach
in your cake. You'll only do it once.