I have always had an issue with brands or domains that are ambiguous in their spelling or interpretation. I don’t think it helps consolidate a brand identity and for that reason I feel it’s something that branding or design agencies should note.

According to the trending data from the last 30 days, Google Plus trends higher than Google+ in search. The trend reverses in the news index where website content refers to it the correct way rather than as Google Plus.

Geographic Trends

When it comes to geographic differences, there are some distinct trends.

In countries such as India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, Google Plus trends higher. Whereas Far Eastern countries such as Taiwan and Hong Kong refer to the correct spelling.

Correlations

When measuring correlations using Google Correlate, Google+ correlated strongly with Google Plus in the US.

However in the UK, Google+ correlated most strongly with Dobara - a Hindi film, and Zelda Williams, daughter of comic actor Robin Williams!

We’d love to hear any explanations of that correlation!

By installing social extensions, all your +1′s from your Google+ Page, your AdWords ads, your website and search results will get added together and thus appear as a single total. It means that consumers will be able to view all of social recommendations outside of Google+.
Last week Google announced that it was giving AdWords customers the ability to connect their Googe+ Pages and AdWords accounts using “Social Extensions”.

By installing social extensions, all your +1′s from your Google+ Page, your AdWords ads, your website and search results will get added together and thus appear as a single total. It means that consumers will be able to view all of social recommendations outside of Google+.

Prior to the roll-out of social extensions, AdWords ads only showed +1′s when people had +1′ed the landing page relevant to that ad, which meant that there was significantly less likelihood that someone who viewed the ad also had a colleague or friend who recommended it.

With the failure of Google Buzz and the relatively recent launch of Google+, it’s no surprise that Google is pulling out all the stops to increase its “share of social”. We know that the power of social advocacy or recommendation plays a huge role in consumer decision making and Google is utilising all of its assets, particularly search and search advertising, to encourage this. In the long term, this will improve customer experience and encourage better value from advertisers.

Furthermore, it wouldn’t surprise me if Google eventually aggregates +1 data and uses it as part of its quality score algorithm as it knows that sentiment analysis is a critical factor to consider.

But in my view there’s another more political motive on Google’s part. Currently, Google+ has around 40 million users (according to Google!), something like 5% of Facebook’s user base. Whilst the demographic breakdown between both social channels is slightly different, Google still knows it has a huge task in building critical mass.

Given its massive dominance in the search marketing and online advertising space, Google wants to leverage this in favour of building critical mass around Google+. It wants to encourage AdWords customers to create Google+ pages as in the long term this will encourage better ad performance through positive social sentiment. And the by-product of this will be to increase Google+’s share of social.

Expert Opinions

We were interested to hear the views of industry experts and asked Greig Holbrook of Oban Multilingual and Matt D’Alton of Navigate Digital their opinions:

Greig Holbrook, Director of  Oban Multilingual says:

This is yet another recent example of Google shifting their focus to social metrics, try to improve the results they serve to their users. Social networks are now one of the first places that people go for recommendations on products and services, and as the Google blog post says: “71% of shoppers say that recommendations from friends and family impact their purchasing decisions”.

This aspect of their algorithm is becoming increasingly sophisticated and sentiment analysis is coming into play more and more, whereby Google can recognise good or bad reviews and rank sites accordingly.

It will be interesting now that they have started integrating +1’s and annotations into AdWords whether these good or bad reviews could begin to influence things like ad placement and quality score and leave those businesses with the worst service paying the most for their clicks.

Matt D’Alton, MD of Navigate Digital says:

In theory it all sounds like a great move from Google. It’s good for users:  rather than shoppers having to visit review sites before a potential purchase, social extensions will bring friends and family’s recommendations straight to the Google search results page.

It’s good for advertisers that have a) bothered to build a Google + page and b) have gained plenty of +1′s as this will help distinguish their ads and provide them with an extra element of credibility. Depending on the take up by advertisers there is also the potential for +1′s to influence the order in which ads are ranked.

Until now quality score in particular has been all about relevance, however friends and family recommendations could be seen as a more important factor, giving way to a different kind of quality score – “the people’s quality score”.

There is however one big ‘if’ – in order for this move to have any significant impact Google has a lot of catching up to do with Facebook. It wasn’t long ago that many offline ads contained a call to action to “search X” or “google Y” for consumers to find out more. This now seems to have been largely replaced with “visit our facebook page at facebook.com/brandname” as brands have learned the benefits of using Facebook pages to engage with their consumers.

The email marketing industry is actually surprisingly small, with a limited number of email service providers (ESPs) all vying for attention. If you compare their features, at a glance there isn’t a huge difference in terms of product differentiation; most of the big players supply the essentials required to run and measure an effective email marketing campaign.

However, for me, what makes Campaign Monitor really stand out is, firstly its attention to detail when it comes to its highly user-centric SaaS (software as a service) interface, and secondly, a handful of  features that add that extra pazazz (yes that’s the technical term).

I’ve cherry picked 5 features, that make me choose Campaign Monitor every time:

1. Compare Previous Email Campaigns – model your future email activity

Comparing previous email campaigns is by no means exclusive to Campaign Monitor, but I’ve chosen this feature regardless.

Email marketing is a process of continuous improvement; modelling, measuring and modifying email campaigns based on previous results can make all the difference in ‘outcomes’.

Campaign Monitor makes it easy to compare multiple campaigns offering graphical and tabular data as well as a handy export function should you need it.

2. Worldview – view your geographical reach

The Worldview screen is certainly one of Campaign Monitor’s sexier tools.

Once you have broadcast your emails, the Worldview screen presents a real-time global map with pins indicating where your emails were opened or clicked, as well as the email address of the subscriber.

The Worldview is a simple snapshot of your global performance and visually very appealing. You also have the ability to zoom in on countries or regions.

3. Social tools galore – social sharing within campaigns

Nowadays, a truly integrated email campaign will often include a social marketing element to it. To fulfil this, Campaign Monitor offers two social media tools that answer this need.

Social sharing within email campaigns

Firstly, you have the ability to embed Twitter and Facebook social sharing widgets within your emails.

This is carried out with considerable ease within the WYSIWYG editor. Anyone receiving your email then has the ability to ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ it, with Campaign Monitor providing you with a social interaction report.

Prior to this feature being available, I remember having to URL encode each social sharing link within the email, which was slow going and often prone to errors.

My only criticism is that more social sharing services should be made available, particularly LinkedIn and Google+.

Promote your email campaigns via Twitter and Facebook

Secondly, Campaign Monitor offers marketers the ability to share campaigns via Twitter or Facebook using a shortened URL .

This is a handy feature allowing the use social channels to increase reach. And, as above, uptake can be measured within the social interaction report.

4. Manage client accounts – perfect for agencies

Campaign Monitor was conceived in 2004 by Ben Richardson and David Greiner, whose web design background led them to develop a service that was ideally suited to web designers and agencies looking to run client campaigns. Nowadays over 100,000 companies (agencies and clients) use the service.

If you’re a marketing or web design agency looking to broadcast on behalf of your clients, Campaign Monitor gives you a range of customisation options allowing you to maintain a branded experience. And, furthermore you can customise your clients’ permissions from the draconian viewing of campaign reports only, to the ability to upload, broadcast and pay for campaigns with less agency involvement.

The beauty of a well designed interface is that the service works equally well for both agencies or clients, without interfering with the software’s user-centricity and ease of use. A classic case of form follows function.

5. A/B tests – means continuous improvements

Continuous improvement should be at the heart of any email marketing campaign. A/B or split testing functionality is one way of achieving incremental improvements in outcomes be it open rates, click-through rates or other metrics.

Whilst A/B testing is by no means exclusive to Campaign Monitor, its interface allows easy testing of subject lines, from addresses or variations in design. Once you’ve selected your testing criteria, Campaign Monitor will serve each version to a pre-defined number of test subscribers.

A winning version will then automatically be selected based on your pre-defined criteria such as open rates, total unique clicks or total clicks on a selected link.

The software will then wait for a period of hours or days (again defined by you), before sending the winning campaign to the rest of your subscribers. Just what marketers need from an industrial strength ESP.

Well done Campaign Monitor and thank you!

If you’ve played around with Google Analytics advanced segments (as below), you may have noticed that some of this data is already available.

But having it so readily available in AdWords is definitely a bonus as it is far more accessible.

How does it help us?

As you can see using the above example from Google, the additional data let’s us gain further insight into user behaviour in SERPS and contributes to refining our listing position strategy.

In the above case, we can see that top Google search ads have a better CTR of 2.43% versus 1.67% for side ads. In our experience, top ads tend to have a better CTR, although this depends on the sector and the competitive landscape.

What about conversion rates and cost per conversion?

When it comes to conversion rates, sometimes we can see the opposite effect where side ads convert better despite the lower click volume (see below)

As part of a listing position strategy, you may want to experiment with your ad position to see if you can increase your campaign ROI.  You may find that lower positions give you better ROI in the long run despite attaining less clicks.

Now that Google AdWords has dropped position preference, you can modify your listing position by varying your keyword bids.

What about localised search?

If your sector is very focussed on localised search, your side ads will be dominated by the Google Place search map top right.

Given the dominance of the map, it’s even more important to monitor top versus side ad performance, especially as ads disappear underneath the floating map as you scroll.

We’ve seen the launch of the Google+ project in addition to seeing +1 buttons appear in organic search results and next to AdWords ads (if you’re logged into your Google account).

This is of huge significance to marketers as there will be countless debates about the +1 button’s impact on search rank and click through rates in addition to its persuasive effect a la social commerce.

Google also announced that Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools have added new social monitoring tools tracking the impact of +1′s, Twitter tweets, Facebook likes and other social actions on your website traffic.

Google Webmaster Tools +1 Metric

+1 Metrics in Google Webmaster Tools publishes the impact +1 buttons have had on your search performance.

The search impact report illustrates the number of +1 annotated impressions by page in addition to CTR (click through rate) with and without +1 annotated impressions.

+1 annotated impressions refer to the number of times a user saw a page in SERPS with a personalised annotation. The metrics will quickly highlight the impact of social advocacy in search results.

Google Webmaster Tools also publishes an Activity report indicating how many +1′s your individual web pages have received; and an Audience report illustrating demographic and geographic data about the people who have clicked on the +1 button on your web pages.

Google Analytics Social Tracking

As if that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, Google Analytics (the new interface) now publishes Social Engagement reports enabling marketers to see a plethora of social data such as how visitors shared your website content via social actions. This could include Google +1 button clicks, Twitter tweets, Facebook Likes and Del.icio.us bookmarks.

This is a welcome addition to Google Analytics and not surprising as Google seriously ramps up its social offerings.

Before we look at the 2011 update, let’s mind ourselves about the original 2009 results (illustrated below).

The top 5 ranking factors contained 4 link building factors, with only one position in the top 5 pertaining to on-page content (in this case keyword use anywhere in the title tag).

Top 5 Ranking Factors from 2009:

The more notable points from the 2011 update are as follows:

• Social signals cannot be ignored as a ranking factor – they are highly correlated!
• For Twitter links, authority counts more than number of links; whereas for Facebook, number of shares is more important than authority of sharers
• The importance of page level linking metrics has increased
• The influence of exact match domains has declined considerably
• Number of linking root domains is consistent as a ranking factor
• Keyword based factors are generally less well correlated compared with links
• Longer documents may well rank better than shorter ones (but what about usability?)
• Long titles and URLs should be avoided
• Linking IP addresses and C-blocks cannot be ignored as a ranking factor
• Number of Google AdSense slots on the page is a negative ranking factor as is response time and domain name length
• Nofollow links may well help with ranking!

Before looking at the presentation, bear in mind that this is early data taken from 132 SEO professionals. And furthermore, as stated on slide 4, opinions are not facts!

Ranking Factors Data 2011: SMX Elite Sydney

It’s a bit like Google Trends or Google Insights for Search in reverse where users can enter a query and receive search trends by time and location. With Google Correlate, users enter data and get back a list of search queries which follow a similar pattern. Hence the name Google Correlate. Clever eh!

If you’d prefer, you can even upload your own data or draw your own line chart and Google Correlate will try to publish the same correlation search data as your own. But that’s for later.

Keyword research for search marketers

So I’m a keen cyclist and I wanted to know what correlation data existed around the search term “cycling”. Google found the following correlations after entering “cycling”.

The results may not be particularly surprising in this instance as search terms like “road biking” and “road bicycle” are obvious synonyms of cycling. But nonetheless, this is useful when carrying out keyword research for your search marketing activity.

And it’s one step up from the Google Keyword Tool we all know and love.

Google Correlate will also output either a line chart or a pretty cool scatter plot showing correlations by time (which you can zoom in on by selecting a time period):

If you want a better understanding of correlation data by region (currently US only), Google Correlate will accommodate:

Interestingly, in this instance, Google Correlate chose to correlate cycling with cycling clothing regionally, possibly due to climate differences across the US.

Draw your own line chart and find correlation data…

Turning Google Correlation in reverse, you can draw your own line chart and Google Correlate will find correlation data that matches. This took some attempts on my part and eventually I came up with the following results from my drawn series.

Not a bad tool amidst a dizzying week of announcements including the launch of  the Twitter “follow” and Google +1 buttons. But that’s for another blog post…

Anyone involved in digital marketing will know how much performance data is available to assist in tracking online marketing campaigns and ROI.

The same applies to search engine optimisation where SEO’ers are provided a constant deluge of campaign data be it from web analytics or specialist SEO software.

At the most basic level, the setting up of Google Analytics ecommerce tracking (below) will reveal whether or not your organic performance is providing good ROI or not.

Given this, you’d think that accountability wouldn’t be an issue as the truth is often seen in the numbers.

In-house or outsource?

Having personally run hundreds of SEO training courses over the last few years, it never ceases to amaze me how many businesses are still being left high and dry by their SEO agency or web design suppliers.

One of the most common reason organisations want to take SEO in-house is that they cannot justify the on-going costs of running an SEO campaign using an agency, when the rewards are not proportional to the financial outlay.

Poor quality link building practices

One particularly popular recurring complaint is that “my SEO agency has been acquiring irrelevant links that has cost excessive amounts of money with little in the way of reward”.

Having recently carried out an SEO audit for a large chain of hotels, I was privy to astonishing examples of links that had been purchased from contextually irrelevant, low quality websites or directories. To add salt to the wound, the agency had not only charged the client for their labour but had also considerably marked up the net cost of the links.

Measuring link velocity from tools such as Majestic SEO is one way of measuring accountability, as you would expect to see a steady growth in link uptake, but of course they have to be the right links.

Getting the basics right

Link building is only one of many examples where agencies need to demonstrate accountability.

Getting the basics wrong such as error 404′s, missing metadata, no sitemaps, domain canonicalisation issues, poor quality content, bad site structure (the list goes on), is simply not forgivable and makes you wonder what agencies are actually doing when running SEO campaigns?

Tools (above) provided by SEOmoz allow marketers to regain that control by providing easy-to-understand dashboards and reporting. Organisations hiring SEO agencies should be privy to the software they are using in order to maintain complete transparency and trust.

Education is key

Whilst SEO agencies have a moral responsibility to run search campaigns ethically and to the best of their abilities, the blame for poor performance (or at least poor bang for buck) also falls into the lap of the client.

Having worked agency-side since the mid-90′s, the adage “the output is only as good as the brief” rings true. Managing your agency, or should I say challenging your agency, is key to any successful relationship.

But herein lies the problem. If you can’t challenge your SEO agency due to your own lack of understanding of the intricacies of running SEO campaigns, then inevitably you may well not be getting the best out of an agency.

SEO, like any other digital strategy such as PPC and email marketing requires constant testing and measurement to identify cause and effect. Challenging your agency will encourage such testing which otherwise may have been put on the back-burner.

Yesterday, I had an alarm crisis. Thankfully, it didn’t include anyone attempting to break into my house, but involved a constant bleeping in my front room.  Upon calling the information number on the alarm box, I was informed that they couldn’t help outside of standard office hours. When I requested any guidance in help with the matter, I was told to look in the Yellow Pages.

This astounded me on three count:

• Firstly, does anyone actually use the Yellow Pages any more? Had the support team member not heard of Google?
• Secondly, what a missed opportunity this was for affiliate marketing to come into play. I would personally like to phone the emergency alarm support services in the area and alert them to their missed business opportunities.
• Thirdly, is this really the progress of our customer service operations now?

In many cases now, the customer journey is often thought out to within an inch of it’s life. We design websites that are created purely to help the user navigate through the maze of information we want to relay. We use eye tracking and heat mapping techniques to ensure we have the right balance of imagery and call to action on the page.  We try to always ensure best practice in Search Engine Optimisation techniques so that our wares can be easily found, and passed on to others. And we engage in user testing and conversion rate optimisation to incrementally increase our website performance.

Yet, as with this example, a brand can fall down by failing to join up the whole brand experience. At Emarketeers, we talk about the benefits and business advantages of having Affiliate partners. In the instance of last night, I would have been very happy to have opened my door (literally in this case) to a trusted partner of the aforementioned Alarm Installation company.  This would have extended my relationship with, and loyalty to, the Alarm Manufacturer, and resulted in a new relationship developing which undoubtedly could have had positive revenue benefits for all parties involved.

Finally, a call today from them to enquire as to my safety and progress with the situation, may have helped to recover what has now become an untenable and dissatisfying relationship. In the words of Bill Gates: “Your unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”.

In addition, an additional page on the Alarm Manufacturer’s website with emergency information would have helped to deliver a most positive and productive experience.

In my view, joining up the dots in our desire to please our customers is as key to business success, as having the right product.  With the customer revolution well and truly established – these principles will allow the strong brands to flourish, and the weak to be vulnerable to their competition.