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 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 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.

PPC analogy
 
Here is a useful analogy: you car needs a full service. You know this but you have a lot in your diary, money is tight, and so you make the decision to just ask the mechanic to do an oil change. Everything is okay so the next time, you also ask the mechanic just to do an oil change. Your car still runs, but it does not seem either as efficient or as smooth as it should. It gets you from A to B though.
 
After a particularly nasty winter and many unreliable starts, increasing fuel bills and general motoring sluggishness, you relent and get a full service done, including a cleaning of the fuel system. The change in the car’s performance is startling: better fuel consumption and economy, more reliable starts, more pleasure to drive.
  
Adrac’s efficiency
 
It is possible for Adrac to achieve better efficiency and profit from a PPC campaign for 99% of new clients. Just signing up makes an instant improvement to the cost per click (CPC, the price you pay Google/Bing/etc each time someone clicks on your advert).  This is because Adrac has a master account which it brings all its clients into so they benefit from the advantages this offers.
 
So, already, an online advertising agency like Adrac is ahead.
 
We also employ all the techniques listed below (and more) to help our clients achieve an improved return on investment. But the beauty of the way the Adrac business model works is that it does not cost the client more than their budget: the payment we receive is a percentage of the saving we make.
  
PPC campaign
 
Conversion Tracking
 
Our team tracks each enquiry/sale that comes via your campaign. Through the use of the conversion data, our team start to optimise your campaign to lower the cost per click (CPC) and improves sales.
  
Keywords
 
Using Google Tools, we advise on the best keywords to use for your campaign. All keywords are monitored and non-performing keywords are taken out of the campaign.
  
Ad Text
 
Our team will write the ad text to be as relevant as possible to the target search and link each keyword to the most relevant landing page of your site.
  

Testing PPC effectiveness
 
Adrac will put a sample test advert live on the internet to enable you to see descriptions, positions and costs before you make a decision. The sample is free and there is no obligation to sign up with us.
 
If you do decide to let us improve your PPC campaign, we will never seek to tie you into a contract or sneak hidden costs onto your bill. Clients are kept fully updated with monthly reporting and transparency of charges and overall PPC savings.
 
You can contact Adrac’s PPC team on 01254 304030 for more details, or email website@adrac.co.uk.
 

A train of thought led me to pondering over natural search and how effective we are at doing it, as users rather than SEOs and business people. Over the years I have picked up some bad search habits. You have too, admit it! I’m sure schools teach ‘proper’ internet skills now (Reading, ‘Riting, ‘Rithmatic and iReasearch?), though when I was at university, Tim Berners-Lee had not yet invented the world wide web.


How people search for keywords

The tips under the cut are, apparently, the right way to do it; my article was researched using Google, Bing and a range of advice pages for cross-referencing and validation. It would be fascinating to know how many people used the official tips and if they felt this improved their experience of natural search results the way the main search engines intend.


AND|OR

You don’t need to put the word AND into a query; search engines insert it themselves for queries of more than one word, so save your fingers. OR (using capitals, again) can help you focus your search. The | symbol can be used instead of OR.


“Quote marks”

This used to be a standard for a phrase – and still is. It does limit the search to the exact wording and their order, so beware – it might not be the best tool at your disposal for every research task.


Being pedantic

This is used like the “use of quote marks” above. Search engines have a vast dictionary of synonyms, misspellings and also understand that a word may sometimes, or some times, be presented as two. This means the search results will sometimes include more information than what you were expecting, or require. If you want a definite search of a specific word or phrase as you have typed it in, just add a plus+ sign straight after it.



Site: search

You can search within particular websites by choosing from a range of operators.

The simplest is the use of site: as in tea site:bbc.co.uk, which will return pages about tea only from the BBC’s website.

You can also use the colon with domain tags like .edu, .co.uk, .fr, .gov, .org and the like. For example, if you wanted to find the official health line on tea, you might run a search on tea site:nhs.uk or tea site:.gov. You can also use contains: as an operator, as in nhs contains:tea.

Also available are the search filters inurl: and filetype:pdf; for pages which link to, say, the BBC, type in link:bbc.co.uk. The tag intitle:xxx will search for a word in a web page title; while inanchor:xxx – will find a term in html links.


Excluding some keyword terms

You can use a minus sign (love the logic!) to tell the search engine algorithm to ignore a particular term. The minus sign must be used directly in front of the word you want ignored, for example Giggs -Imogen; Bing will also use NOT as a filter (in capitals).


Getting wild

The wildcard feature is activated using an asterisk*.  The asterisk can help to probe a broader query for ideas within it.

Google uses the example of Obama voted * on the * bill, which will return stories about different votes on different bills.


Not all search engines will use exactly the same kinds of tricks to help you focus a search, though the Boolean functions like OR and +/- are worldwide standards.

It is possible that by improving how we use search engines as searchers, their development will be fine-tuned to match our needs and they will be even better tools than they currently are: a symbiotic,  people-led evolution.

Each AdWords account has a dictionary of keywords, terms and phrases, created to maximise exposure for the adverts, attract quality (paying) traffic, while keeping the cost per click (CPC) as low as possible to maximise profits. Each keyword in this dictionary is tested, tracked and tweaked by account managers regularly. The keywords have different filters or variables, like for example “mobile phone” can be used as a broad matched term or as a phrase. There is, in the world of AdWords, a difference.

Normally the “mobile phone” keyword (or any keyword of your choice) can be edited to adjust the variables; so if I want to set the term “mobile phone” as a broad match, I can; if I want to change it back to a phrase, I can; and so on. Except that on some of my older accounts, like I said, now I can’t. If I go to edit the key term, I am denied access with an error message.

The only way forward when edit rights are denied is to create a second “mobile phone” keyword and set this with the opposing variable. In actual fact, it is good practice to split-test using cloned keywords in the way that AdWords is now forcing upon these accounts – it is something we do for all our clients on a daily basis: rather than edit, we are able to clone (or copy) the keyword and subject it to tweaking independently. In this way, a keyword can be paused if it has not been performing, in order for us to work out why.

All is fine then! But oh hang on, surely this means that, as I’m adding an extra keyword, my account is going to become more expensive to run? Indeed: as an advertiser, you could end up spending more, because you have added another keyword to your dictionary – which could incur more clicks.

Whenever Google makes a change, it tests it; whenever it makes a change, it is in order to make more profit, of course. However, at this point, as we have no further corroborative information, we can still only hypothesise as to whether removing the edit function will become a permanent fixture.