Christmas is coming: Black Friday arrives on November 25th

By Matthew Kinlin

This year, we will see Black Friday arrive on 25^th November and with it comes a wave of excited shoppers looking to grab a great bargain.

Black Friday is the annual date that marks the start of the Christmas shopping season. On this day, a huge amount of retailers will offer promotional sales and bargains to kick off the Christmas season.

The following week will see the start of the Christmas shopping period with shoppers flocking out to find the best presents for Christmas. The start of the week has been named ‘Mad Monday’ to announce the arrival of the crazy shopping season.

This means that shoppers will be able to find some great sales to start the season. They can pick up specific items for reduced prices and track down some bargains.

This will help to kick-start the shopping season. Buyers want to get in there early and find what they want whilst stock lasts. Reduced prices will encourage buyers to start looking early for Christmas.

Black Friday is the official launch for retailers. It marks the moment they will officially start pushing Christmas products. Offering reduced rates will get people in the shops and on their websites looking for what they want.

Large online retailers, like Amazon, are offering a ‘Black Friday Deals Week’. This will feature hundred of deals and millions of pounds of savings for online shoppers.

With the official launch of the Christmas season, online shopping will become a much busier place and just like in shopping centres, the internet should be well prepared for this huge influx of custom.

Google Analytics updates visitor tracking

By Matthew Kinlin

Google has updated the way it tracks its sessions per visitor in Google Analytics.

Previously, a session would end when a user closed their browser. However now a session will complete based on clicks. So a user can click through and then return to Google and click on another site, and Google will recognise these as two different sessions, without the browser being closed.

Google Analytics has now changed their model so a session will end when any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid.

This will benefit Google Analytics as it allows for more accurate sourcing. Previously Google would only recognised Ad Words and if a user returned to the site and click on something different, then the first Ad Words would only be recognised.

Now Google Analytics can base sessions on clicks. This means more accurate attribution information and should reflect more accurately how visitors engage with the website.

Google releases ‘Google Plus One’ button

By Matthew Kinlin

Google has recently released a new social tool called ‘Google Plus One’.

The tab is presented as a ‘+1’ button and works in a very similar way to the Facebook ‘Like’ button. In the words of Google, the button is a way of saying: ‘you should check this out’ to other people.

By clicking the ‘+1’ button, you give your recommendation to a web page. There is an option to keep the your ‘+1’ recommendations as a private record of your web highlights, or you can have them as public and recommend pages to your friends and the rest of the internet.

However unlike Facebook, the Google ‘+1’ tab has one vital additional app: Google-enabled search.

Google has placed the ‘+1’ button in two places: on the Google search listings next to each search result and at the top of individual web pages. Content providers have been encouraged by Google to add the ‘+1’ option to their web pages.

To use the tool, the user is required to have a Google account. Once the user is logged into their account, the ‘+1’ options for search results and web pages will be made visible.

It seems likely that Google will collate feedback to sort out good content from bad. Social data will probably be used to indicate popular, useful sources of data and these will be integrated with Google search.

In other words, they rise straight to the top of Google’s search page.

Review your PPC with Adrac Ltd

Bu Jackie Yeadon
 
Most small businesses believe that by running their own pay per click (PPC) campaign they can save money – they are not paying an agency to run it, they understand their own business like nobody else and, actually, they are getting some profit from the whole exercise.
 
There a good enough reason to try an agency, even if this is the case. Your PPC activities may well be bringing in some profit but with the right help, this could be so much more.
 

PageRank: how ugly is your SME website?

By Jackie Yeadon

Beauty is only skin deep, right?

Google updated its PageRank this week, so webmasters and SEOs will no doubt have been checking where they stand and where their clients are ranking.

It’s not like Miss World or Mr Universe, where only the top three positions win and everyone else is forgotten; or even the Beautiful People dating website that shunted 30,000 people off its database after a virus had allowed them membership normally elected by the consensus of its existing, gorgeous subscribers; PageRank doesn’t set websites against each other, but gives an assessment of the authority of their site, not a beauty competition but a beauty consultation.

Google’s search ranking, which PageRank has a small influence on, sets its own standard of attractiveness – meaning, if it fancies redheads, we must all dye our hair; similarly, if Google’s algorithm lusts after the one-eyed, frizzy-haired troll, we must all emulate the one-eyed, frizzy-haired troll.

Smaller search platforms attract traffic too

By Jackie Yeadon
 
Search engines going after some of Google’s share were successful in May, according to figures from Experian Hitwise.

Its recent Search Engine and Social Analysis showed that Google and Yahoo! both lost market share in terms of searches in May 2011, while Bing, Ask and others made “significant gains”.

‘Silver pound’ could be spent on social networks

By Jackie Yeadon
 
Paid search advertising managers will be taking note: the silver pound is strong; meaning businesses who want to expose their products to older generations should be looking to use channels currently considered to be solely for the younger generations.

According to figures published by MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, around a fifth of grandparents over 60 have an active social networking account.

NetMovers seminar review: search engine penalties

By Jackie Yeadon and Tariq Ahmed

There is no substitute for the seasoned SEO agency. While knowledge is power and content is king, experience is a honed blade.

Adrac’s Tariq Ahmed, one of our natural search boffins, recently delivered a presentation to City financiers about search penalties. This group of business people have an interest in how the internet can affect investments, for good and bad.

One of the examples that Tariq used was that of property portal NetMovers. By the mid-noughties, thanks to excellent optimisation and link building, the property portal was enjoying page one success with a regular fourth position slot just beneath the big sector names like RightMove.

How to focus terms for precision natural search results

By Jackie Yeadon

This week, Manchester SEO blogged a concise post which looked forward to the SEO landscape after Google announced its personalised search function.

Now, I work alongside our natural search and PPC/CPC experts, who feed into the process of keywording websites and landing pages by showing me what works for their clients and what does not. Their advice is sometimes surprising – the terms that people actually search for, as opposed to what my journalistic experience tells me should work.

Edits, cloning keywords and split-tests in AdWords

By Andrew Burnett

Every search professional interested in Google scrutinises the small things. It has become apparent over the years that Google tests potential changes and new services on select groups without drawing much attention to it; the ensuing “what’s going on here?” on forums and in chat rooms blows the whistle. Sometimes the new feature or whatever-it-is stays, sometimes it simply vanishes.

Over the past couple of weeks Adrac Ltd has noticed a tweak to Google AdWords. A small number of our older accounts have not had a feature added, but curtailed. Our AdWords managers have asked on Google help forums if anyone else has noticed this and what they think is happening: there have been no responses, meaning that either nobody else is having this issue or nobody know what is going on.

It’s all to do with keyword matching. If you’re a PPC/CPC manager you’ll understand totally; if you have no idea, I’ll put the following in simple terms for you.

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