The Clique Hunter from Majestic just helped me find 125 new link opportunities that I have somehow managed to miss in a tight niche.

I have been working for this client for around 18 months and our link building has been very successful and their traffic has grown significantly over the period but this was a stark reminder that it is necessary to diversify the tools that we use for linkbuilding.

I have heard lots of great things about MajesticSEO over the years but never really given them a proper try. I actually went to use the site explorer tool today to run some more general checks on a few specific domains and stumbled upon the Clique Hunter.

Here are a few ways that the Clique Hunter is useful:

Understanding the landscape in a new niche

Any online community or sector pretty much mimics the offline world in that there are many interrelationships between the various players in the sector. If we were to map out the SEO industry there would probably be four major groups of sites:

• SEO Tools such as Google Webmaster Tools, SEOMoz, Ontolo, Raven, MajesticSEO, Citation Labs, Screaming Frog etc
• SEO Blogs such as Search Engine Watch, YouMoz, SEO by the Sea, Kaiser the Sage and Point Blank SEO etc
• SEO agencies and consultants such as Distilled, Branded3, SEO Gadget, Eric Ward etc
• SEO forums and info sites such as Inbound.org and alltopSEO

If you were to collect all of the links from every site in the SEO community there would be many links between the sites; I would be very surprised if the blogs and agencies listed above do not link out to any of the tools listed above.

Let’s have a look; I entered 10 well know SEO tools into the Clique Hunter:

Which gave these results:

This visualisation just shows a few of the top domains (the bolder the lines the more links between those domains) but below this there is the full report that you can flick through:

An important column in the report to look at is the “matches” column as this shows you how many of the 10 domains that you ran the report for are linked to by each of the domains featured. The report includes all domains that link to at least 2 of the 10 sites.

The great thing about this report is how it so clearly gives you a picture of the link landscape for a specific industry. You cannot see it in this screenshot but there is the functionality to apply a number of filters right in the tool so that you can drill down to the most important sites. You can filter OR sort by the number of matches, the Alexa rank or around a dozen other metrics.

Get the report into Excel

Like most reports with a large amount of data they are best visualised and manipulated in Excel. For our client we just deleted any sites that were already linking to them and then sorted the data by the number of matches, as the assumption is that if a site is linking to 5 competitors then they are not likely to be resistant to linking to you too. You can also sort by Alexa rank and Majestic’s trust scores – use a custom sort to arrange by two or more values:

Of course you can always use filters too in order to prioritise your outreach to only a select few sites. The following screenshot are sites that link to at least 5 of the SEO tools and that have an Alexa rank of less than 50,000:

I know that I would love to have all of these sites link to us so for the SEO industry I think that this is a pretty good example of some of the top blogs, news sites and agencies. Interestingly a number of the tools are here too.

Why is this useful

• Particularly when you are new to an industry this is an invaluable analysis; whenever we pick up a new client we need a quick way to understand the landscape of the important blogs, industry news sites, tools, providers, directories, forums etc within an industry we look to a solid competitor back link analysis and this tool is the best I have yet found to fulfil this job.
• You get a large number of solid link opportunities.

Dipping your toes in the water

OK, so competitors’ back link’s may not exactly be the most creative of link building strategies but really this kind of analysis and link building is unavoidable if you want to become a significant player in your market. If you create a SEO tool then you want to be on the sites that people go to for reviews of tools or on the big industry blogs and forums and the chances are that the leaders in your market have a lot of traffic from the most relevant sites.

I always find that this is a nice introduction to an industry and a good way to get a few quick wins.

Spin off analysis

You may discover competitor sites or sites in the industry that have lots of links to them through this analysis so you can run a more detailed analysis of the links to each of the queried domains or alternatively the linked domains that you have uncovered.

It is always useful to understand the link building strategies of your competitors as there are usually variations of the same strategy that you can employ yourself.

For example; we recently did an analysis in the business insurance space where we found that a site had build a very large percentage of their links through encouraging their clients to put a proof of insurance badge on their site which links to a certificate on the insurance site to help the bade wearing site with the trust of their customers.

Regardless of how Google treat this kind of link it will bring a lot of referral traffic through and as far as we could see it did support search rankings too. How this is executed could be varied  - it could be a widget that includes some industry news (assuming link targets are within a single industry) as well as the badge so that it gives some added value to the website owner.

Most sites I have analysed have 3 or 4 active link building strategies that they employ and the rest happens naturally; the idea is that over time the “happens naturally” takes over, as is the case for market leaders like SEOMoz. In the meantime, understanding what all your competitors are doing is a good source of creative linking strategies as suddenly a lot of your assets become strangely visible.

Here is the explanatory video for the tool by MajesticSEO:

The post Link building with Clique Hunter from Majestic appeared first on Deep Footprints.

Warning: this post is a bit more technical than most of our posts as we go into some depth on Adwords scripts. BUT – do not worry – if you follow the post through you will hopefully be able to just follow the instructions and achieve what you need to achieve with no coding at all. It is aimed at getting ALL PPC marketers using a basic Adwords script to track quality score.

About 6 weeks ago I read this brilliant post by Frederick Vallaeys where he gave up a simple Google Adwords script that allows you to track the Quality Score of an Adwords account every day in an automated fashion by keeping a daily log in a Google Document.

This was my introduction to Google scripts as to be honest I am not a coder and apart from basic HTML any kind of code scares me a little. However – Frederick gave the instructions and the code so all I had to do was copy and paste it into my clients Adwords accounts – the screen shot below shows you where this needs to go in your Adwords account. On the left hand menu go to:

Bulk Operations >> Scripts:

I started collecting the data and within 1 day I had a strong desire to track the quality score of campaigns and ad groups. I did a lot of digging around the Google Adwords developer forum for scripts and eventually found another blinding post on quality score tracking by Martin Roettgerding of Bloofusion.

In this post Martin explains how to track the quality score of your most important keywords over time – up to around 100 of them.

This was a step in the right direction BUT I really felt that what we needed for our clients was the ability to track campaigns and ad groups as that way we can prioritise time and effort efficiently. For example if a specific campaign makes up 20% of the total Adwords spend and it’s average quality score is just 5 then it is one that needs attention as there are large cost savings to be made.

Martin kindly gave me some advice after I left this query on his post and directed me to some Adwords scripts. I spent a frustrating morning trying to hack together scripts into a working format and unfortunately got nowhere. Luckily one of our team is far more adept with scripts than me and took the reigns. Within a few hours he had a working script that did what we wanted – it tracks quality score at account, campaign and ad group level.

Today we will be sharing that script with you.

Caution: Adwords scripts time out and break if they do not complete within a few minutes so if you have hundreds of campaigns and thousands of ad groups you will not be able to track everything with this script. The way we have been using it is to track the campaigns with the most spend and to then dig into those that have the lowest quality score on an ad group level so that specific actions can be taken – improving ad copy relevance and developing negative keywords, splitting out keywords into separate ad groups etc.

Step by step guide to tracking Adwords quality score by account, campaign and ad group

Step 1 – prepare a Google Spreadsheet

Here is the spreadsheet template – click on this link and then click on “Make a copy” to copy it: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0At6gVZSGVZXTdC1FdFNHcFZyWlQ2cUxUOWxVQjRCZVE&usp=sharing.

Make sure that the Account tabs contains Account name in 1^st column, Campaign tabs must contain Campaign names in 1^st column and Adgroup tabs must contain Campaign and Adgroup names in 1^st and 2^nd columns. This way you can decide which Campaign and Adgroups you want to track. This is important as if the account size is too big the script might time out as Google allows script run time to be only 30 minutes. In the sheet, I’ve included names such as Campaign-01 but they need to be changed with actual Account, Campaign and Ad group names.

Please note that if you have an account name that contains spaces e.g.

My Account Name

rather than

MyAccountName

then you will need to simply add single quotes around the account name in the spreadsheet.

e.g.

‘My Account Name’

Then you should have it working. Google Adwords Scripts handle spaces in spreadsheet references in a funny way it seems.

 2. Go to Google Scripts

In your Adwords account you should see on the left hand menu an option called “bulk operations” – click on that. There are 3 options; under scripts, click on “create and manage scripts”

There will be a green button that says +create script – click on that.

You should see a screen like this:

3. Paste in the script

Paste in the following script ensuring that you replace any other script in the box in the Google interface;

do not copy the opening and closing code tags in square brackets:

[code language="text"]

var spreadsheet_url = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0At6gVZSGVZXTdC1FdFNHcFZyWlQ2cUxUOWxVQjRCZVE&usp=sharing";
var email_address = "myemail@mycompany.com";

function main() {
var matches = new RegExp('key=([^&#]*)').exec(spreadsheet_url);
if (!matches || !matches[1]) throw 'Invalid spreadsheet URL: ' + spreadsheetUrl;
var spreadsheetId = matches[1];
var spreadsheet = SpreadsheetApp.openById(spreadsheetId);
var account_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName('Account');
var campaign_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName('Campaigns');
var adgroup_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName('Adgroups');
var account_sheet_values = account_sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
var campaign_sheet_values = campaign_sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
var adgroup_sheet_values = adgroup_sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
var result_range = new Array();
var adgroup_result_range = new Array();
var account_alert_text = new Array();
var campaign_alert_text = new Array();
var adgroup_alert_text = new Array();
var campaign_history = new Array();
var account_history = new Array();
var adgroup_history = new Array();
var currentTime = new Date();
var today = (currentTime.getMonth() + 1) + "/" + currentTime.getDate() + "/" + currentTime.getFullYear();

//Account QS Starts

for(i = 1; i < account_sheet_values.length; i++){
if(account_sheet_values[i][0] == "") continue;
result_range[i] = [today, 0];
var account_name = account_sheet_values[i][0];
var latest_check = account_sheet_values[i][1];
var old_quality_score = account_sheet_values[i][2];
var totalImpressionsAnalyzed = 0;
var totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = 0;
var keywordIterator = AdWordsApp.keywords()
.withCondition("Status = ACTIVE")
.forDateRange("LAST_30_DAYS")
.withCondition("Impressions > 0")
.orderBy("Impressions DESC")
.withLimit(50000)
.get();

while (keywordIterator.hasNext()) {
var keyword = keywordIterator.next();
var qualityScore = keyword.getQualityScore();
var keywordStats = keyword.getStatsFor("LAST_30_DAYS");
var impressions = keywordStats.getImpressions();
var qualityScoreContribution = qualityScore * impressions;
totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed + qualityScoreContribution;
totalImpressionsAnalyzed = totalImpressionsAnalyzed + impressions;
}

var accountQualityScore = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed / totalImpressionsAnalyzed;
var FinalAccountQualityScore = accountQualityScore.toFixed(2);

// Save account quality score for results
result_range[i][1] = FinalAccountQualityScore;
// for the history we note the change
if(old_quality_score > 0) var change = (FinalAccountQualityScore - old_quality_score).toFixed(1);
else var change = "NEW";
var column = [FinalAccountQualityScore];
account_history.push(column);
account_alert_text.push(FinalAccountQualityScore + "\t" + old_quality_score + "\t" + change + "\t" + account_name);
}

// write results to spreadsheet
result_range.splice(0,1);
account_sheet.getRange(2, 2, result_range.length, 2).setValues(result_range);
// write history to spreadsheet
var history_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName('Account QS history');
history_sheet.getRange(2,history_sheet.getLastColumn()+1, account_history.length, 1).setValues(account_history);
history_sheet.getRange(1,history_sheet.getLastColumn(), 1, 1).setValue(today);

//Account QS Ends

//Campaign QS Starts

for(i = 1; i < campaign_sheet_values.length; i++){
// make sure there is actually some data here
if(campaign_sheet_values[i][0] == "") continue;
result_range[i] = [today, 0];
var campaign_name = campaign_sheet_values[i][0];
var latest_check = campaign_sheet_values[i][1];
var old_quality_score = campaign_sheet_values[i][2];
var totalImpressionsAnalyzed = 0;
var totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = 0;
var keywordIterator = AdWordsApp.keywords()
.withCondition("CampaignName = '" + campaign_name + "'")
.withCondition("CampaignStatus = ENABLED")
.withCondition("AdGroupStatus = ENABLED")
.orderBy("Impressions")
.forDateRange("LAST_30_DAYS")
.withLimit(50000)
.get();

while(keywordIterator.hasNext()){
var keyword = keywordIterator.next();
var current_quality_score = keyword.getQualityScore();
var keywordStats = keyword.getStatsFor("LAST_30_DAYS");
var impressions = keywordStats.getImpressions();
var qualityScoreContribution = current_quality_score * impressions;
totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed + qualityScoreContribution;
totalImpressionsAnalyzed = totalImpressionsAnalyzed + impressions;
}

var CampaignQualityScore = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed / totalImpressionsAnalyzed;
var FinalCampaignQualityScore=CampaignQualityScore.toFixed(2);

// save quality score for results
result_range[i][1] = FinalCampaignQualityScore;
// for the history we note the change
if(old_quality_score > 0) var change = (FinalCampaignQualityScore - old_quality_score).toFixed(1);
else var change = "NEW";

var column = [FinalCampaignQualityScore];
campaign_history.push(column);
// if we have a previously tracked quality score and it's different from the current one, we make a note to log it and send it via email later
if(old_quality_score > 0 && CampaignQualityScore != old_quality_score){
campaign_alert_text.push(FinalCampaignQualityScore + "\t" + old_quality_score + "\t" + change + "\t" + campaign_name);
}
}

// write results to spreadsheet
result_range.splice(0,1);
campaign_sheet.getRange(2, 2, result_range.length, 2).setValues(result_range);
// write history to spreadsheet
var history_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName('Campaigns QS history');
history_sheet.getRange(2,history_sheet.getLastColumn()+1, campaign_history.length, 1).setValues(campaign_history);
history_sheet.getRange(1,history_sheet.getLastColumn(), 1, 1).setValue(today);

//Campaign QS Ends

//Adgroup QS Starts

for(i = 1; i < adgroup_sheet_values.length; i++){
// make sure there is actually some data here
if(adgroup_sheet_values[i][0] == "") continue;
adgroup_result_range[i] = [today, 0];
var campaign_name = adgroup_sheet_values[i][0];
var adgroup_name = adgroup_sheet_values[i][1];
var latest_check = adgroup_sheet_values[i][2];
var old_quality_score = adgroup_sheet_values[i][3];
var totalImpressionsAnalyzed = 0;
var totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = 0;
var keywordIterator = AdWordsApp.keywords()
.withCondition("CampaignName = '" + campaign_name + "'")
.withCondition("AdGroupName = '" + adgroup_name + "'")
.withCondition("CampaignStatus = ENABLED")
.withCondition("AdGroupStatus = ENABLED")
.orderBy("Impressions")
.forDateRange("LAST_30_DAYS")
.withLimit(50000)
.get();

while(keywordIterator.hasNext()){
var keyword = keywordIterator.next();
var current_quality_score = keyword.getQualityScore();
var keywordStats = keyword.getStatsFor("LAST_30_DAYS");
var impressions = keywordStats.getImpressions();
var qualityScoreContribution = current_quality_score * impressions;
totalQualityScoreAnalyzed = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed + qualityScoreContribution;
totalImpressionsAnalyzed = totalImpressionsAnalyzed + impressions;
}

var AdgroupQualityScore = totalQualityScoreAnalyzed / totalImpressionsAnalyzed;
var FinalAdgroupQualityScore=AdgroupQualityScore.toFixed(2);

// save quality score for results
adgroup_result_range[i][1] = FinalAdgroupQualityScore;
// Note the change for the history
if(old_quality_score > 0) var change = (FinalAdgroupQualityScore - old_quality_score).toFixed(1);
else var change = "NEW";
var column = [FinalAdgroupQualityScore];
adgroup_history.push(column);
// if we have a previously tracked quality score and it's different from the current one, we make a note to log it and send it via email later
if(old_quality_score > 0 && CampaignQualityScore != old_quality_score){
adgroup_alert_text.push(FinalAdgroupQualityScore + "\t" + old_quality_score + "\t" + change + "\t" + campaign_name + "\t" + adgroup_name);
}
}

// write results to spreadsheet
adgroup_result_range.splice(0,1);
adgroup_sheet.getRange(2, 3, adgroup_result_range.length, 2).setValues(adgroup_result_range);
// write history to spreadsheet
var history_sheet = spreadsheet.getSheetByName('Adgroups QS history');
history_sheet.getRange(2,history_sheet.getLastColumn()+1, adgroup_history.length, 1).setValues(adgroup_history);
history_sheet.getRange(1,history_sheet.getLastColumn(), 1, 1).setValue(today);
//Adgroup QS Ends

// Send Quality Score Changes through Email

var message = "The following Account Quality Score changes were discovered:\nNew\tOld\tChange\tAccount\n";
for(i = 0; i < account_alert_text.length; i++) message += account_alert_text[i] + "\n";
message += "\n" + "The following Campaign Quality Score changes were discovered:\nNew\tOld\tChange\tCampaign\n";
for(i = 0; i < campaign_alert_text.length; i++) message += campaign_alert_text[i] + "\n";
message += "\n" + "The following Adgroup Quality Score changes were discovered:\nNew\tOld\tChange\tCampaign Name\Adgroup Name\n";
for(i = 0; i < adgroup_alert_text.length; i++) message += adgroup_alert_text[i] + "\n";
// Include a link to the spreadsheet
message += "\n" + "Settings and complete history are available at " + spreadsheet_url;
MailApp.sendEmail(email_address, "AdWords quality score changes detected", message);
}

[/code]

4. Change email address and spreadsheet URL

In the first few lines of the script you will see a spreadsheet URL and a dummy email address. Replace the spreadsheet URL with the URL of the spreadsheet that you created (after copying ours). Then also put in your email address (you can use multiple addresses if you want to send reports to multiple people – just separate with a comma).

The script is divided in 4 parts – Account QS calculation, Campaign QS calculation, Adgroup QS calculation and Email sending. You can see in the script where each part starts and finishes.

The logic of calculating account, campaign and ad group QS is based on http://searchengineland.com/how-account-quality-score-can-guide-adwords-optimization-148595. As you know the original script for tracking keyword QS was written on PPC Epiphany. http://www.ppc-epiphany.com/2012/08/14/an-adwords-script-to-track-quality-scores/

5. Authorise the script

Before the script will run you will need to hit “Authorize now” button in the Authorize bar.

6. Run the script

Click run and the script will run. If it times out then check how many campaigns and ad groups you pasted into the spreadsheet to track and consider reducing a little.

Check your spreadsheet and you should see the data there and it should then be possible to set a schedule for the script to run every day or week so that you can monitor changes based on your account management as well as to prioritise your time effectively.

Having a high quality score can save you loads of cash – read this post to find out more on quality score.

We hope that you get a lot of benefit from this script. Much appreciation has to go to the guys mentioned above who really helped out us and the rest of the Adwords community by pioneering some early scripts to track Adwords quality score.

The post Adwords Script to track Quality Score on Account, campaign & Ad Group Level appeared first on Deep Footprints.

I would be lying if I said that my behaviour online was completely reflective of my offline behaviour. To be honest I do not think it is possible to behave in the same way online and offline effectively as the circumstances are so different.

But manners remain incredibly important and I think that it is something which is frequently overlooked.

I try to always speak my mind but at the same time remain respectful in all situations. But for some reason, when I am pissed off by someone I have a slightly sharper tongue online (speaking mainly about emails here) but with social media I am more guarded.

With social media I usually give a bit of thought to what I say as I realise that the potential audience is large and that things can be easily misinterpreted. When in person with close friends I find it is fun to say ridiculous, stupid, extreme, controversial things and mess about as they know that I am messing about but online things can easily be taken the wrong way and you do not have the opportunity to read the recipients facial expression for clues on their interpretation of what you just said.

As well as this, related to online manners I noticed that in business social circles there are often clear hierarchies developing where some, more popular and well known individuals seem to feel that they do not need to be as polite in terms of saying thank you to others that help them in small ways, perhaps because they feel that they do not need the help or perhaps it is not bad manners, maybe they simply do not have the time to say a simple “thank you”?

I started wondering how others feel about manners online and put the following question to 6 well known bloggers:

Q. How important are good manners in todays online world? Do you have any personal examples of how good manners (saying thank you, doing a small favour) have benefitted your business?

Roxanne R Roark

“Manners are absolutely important online! In the “age” of social media, people tend to pay more attention to you if you are being engaging and friendly; saying thank you for the Retweet or comment on Facebook.

Being friendly and generous on Twitter has built my business and actually led to potentials becoming clients, as well as building a wonderful network of (now real-life) friends that help me if I ever need it.  ”

@r3socialmedia and http://www.r3socialmedia.com/blog

Jay Baron

“Manners don’t mean a damn thing online today. Everyone is out for themselves and they don’t care about anyone. Consider Triberr as an example. We have thirty members on our Tribe yet no one can spend the time to answer a question of the day, and here is why. The only thing they care about is getting shares, tweets, and likes on the content they create and not helping others create valuable content or sharing.

People on the internet today are looking out for themselves and only want to do what will benefit their rankings, traffic, or website.

It’s rare today to find people that do stuff just to help others such as guest posting (without asking for a link), leaving a comment on a blog without trying to get something in return later, or following someone on Twitter in hopes that they will follow us back.

Manners are important and we do need them online, but it seems they are all but missing.”

@jaysbaron and http://www.madtowndesigns.com/blog/

Lena West

“Good manners are always appropriate and in order. 

That doesn’t mean that people exhibit good manners online these days, but I look at that as a benefit. 

What I mean by that is I believe that how you do anything is how you do everything and so when people express poor manners, I just take it as that’s how they do everything and I know that it’s not a fit to work with them.

I always try to be cordial and respectful and people do notice. I can recall one instance where someone said something very complimentary about my work and wanted to book a time to talk about consulting with me.

In my initial reply, I focused only on booking the appointment, but when I realized what I had done, I emailed back immediately and thanked her for saying such nice things about me and I included a line like, “where are my manners!?!”

She wrote back immediately thanking me for sending the extra note and she ended up being a Private Coaching Client because she said she “liked my style”.

How you do anything is how you do everything.”

@lenawest and http://www.influenceexpansion.com/

Carol Lynn Rivera

“Manners are important anywhere you go in life, whether that’s online or offline. People don’t always exhibit the best manners but they always notice when they’re on the receiving end of poor manners.

I think to some extent, poor manners has become the norm to the point that when you meet someone who is kind and polite, it comes as a pleasant surprise. That can be a good thing for those of us who do mind our manners – we get noticed.

Answering a tweet, sharing a blog post (without expectation of reciprocation), answering an email on the same day you receive it – all those things that once may have been common courtesy now make us stand out as people that other people want to know and do business with.

Beyond common decency, it has had a noticeable impact on my business. If I hadn’t chosen to answer someone’s email within ten minutes, but had either ignored it or waited a few days, that person would not have been pleased and impressed and we would not have begun the type of relationship we developed and I would not have closed the contract that I did.

If I hadn’t thanked, shared, retweeted or extended any number of common courtesies, I would not have built the relationships I have, would not have grown a community of people who are also willing to help, thank, share and extend courtesies to me.

I’ve closed jobs, I’ve grown my subscriber list, I’ve improved my traffic and conversion rate – in some cases clearly through a simple act of kindness or courtesy.

People recognize good manners. People also recognize – and remember – bad manners. Being known as rude, unapproachable or unhelpful is not likely to win you any fans or customers. 

There is also the simple fact that acting with poor manners is a reflection of you and your business ethics. It’s impossible to choose to be rude or dismissive online but then preach good customer service and attention to detail “in the real world”.

(And I use the word “you” in that global, general sense!)

You represent yourself, your brand and your company in every small interaction and every thank you. They do count!”

@CarolLynnRivera and http://www.websearchsocial.com/

Ryan Baron

“I find that good manners are highly Important Online.

I personally reach out to people on Twitter and actively try to help people with problems that I know can be a quick an easy solution.

Do I ask for anything out of return? Of course not, but 9 times out of 10 those people follow me and are more than willing to share my expertise and links.

Spending the time to help others and just being nice can yield amazing results online.”

@MightyZombieTX and http://www.mightyzombie.com/

Brett Dixon

“Manners online are important, although they don’t come very often. A simply +1 / Like or share of a post is a good way to thank people and we should try and give thanks were its due.

I recently built a great relationship with an up and coming business – we both have a love of all things tech and simply engaging and commenting on each others posts here and there has developed into a close relationship where our businesses help each other out whether its just sharing posts or recommending clients – all because of good social media etiquette and some thanks were it was due!”

@BrettDixon and http://www.dpom.co.uk/blog

I just want to thank all six of you for helping me with this question; your manners are impeccable.

I am in two minds after hearing everyone else’s opinion. I strongly believe that manners are important online and that doors can easily be closed through poor manners or simply a lack of gratitude. At the same time good manners can create incredible opportunities with people that you have never even met in person.

I am now starting to ponder the question of why some people, including me, occasionally forget their manners online? The answer may be that it just comes down to specific circumstances. If I have a shitty day then I am less bouncy and jovial in all of my transactions with other people regardless of whether they take place on or offline. But then again, perhaps online I worry less about keeping up appearances?

The post Do you ever forget your manners online? appeared first on Deep Footprints.

I spend a lot of time studying and obsessing over the quality score of our clients in their Adwords account as I know what a difference it can make to performance. Here and here are some previous posts on Quality Score. Over the past month or so I have become acquainted with someone who is perhaps even more of a quality score geek than I am, which is kind of reaffirming to discover.

Chris from Ten Scores has even been kind enough to answer some questions for the Deep Footprints blog about quality score; there is some fantastic insight for all readers here so I hope that you enjoy it. I have also checked out the TenScores tool which is all about helping you to understand and improve quality score and am impressed. I suggest that when you are done with this post that you take a look too.

So; here is the meat:

1) Hi Chris, please could you give us a little background on how you got involved in PPC Marketing?

It started in 2007 when I was still living in Belgium. I had an idea for a website that I wanted to create but I needed to know if there was interest before I went full steam building it. I set up a quick email capture page and when it came to traffic, I played with adwords and facebook ads. I got fascinated about how changing one word in an ad would dramatically improve my CTRs and conversions. I was hooked. A year later, I moved to Canada to attend university. Needed some extra cash to pay for high international student fees and that’s when I discovered affiliate marketing. My world flipped over and it hasn’t been the same ever since.

2) You recently developed a product called Ten Scores that is designed to help PPC Marketers improve their quality score and consequently get a better return on their ad spend: so for anyone who is not a seasoned PPC marketer; why is quality score important?

Quality Score influences how much google charges you on every click and it influence how many of those clicks you can actually buy. So if you have high Quality Score, you’ll be rewarded with cheaper clicks and you’ll get more of them. Those are the two main reasons but there are more. I like to think of Quality Score as the heart of your Adwords account (as opposed to conversions which are the brain that make advertising work). Low Quality Scores is a sign that your heart is sick and if it goes as low as 1/10, Google stops sending you traffic, it’s like a heart attack, you die.

3) In your experience can a keyword with a low quality score (2 or 3) ever be improved to the extent that it has a QS of 9 or 10? If so what are the first steps?

Not every keyword can get to 9 or 10. But almost (I said almost) all keywords can get to 7/10, even from 2 or 3, which is the objective any advertiser should shoot for. To get 9/10 and 10/10, you have to be a really really great advertiser in a really great market. Nines and tens are achieved through exceptionally high click-through-rates. Click-though-rates that are 2x, 3x or more than any other advertiser in your market. That is easy to accomplish with brand terms, for example if someone is searching for deepfootprints and they see an ad from deepfootprints.co.uk, the probability that they will click that ad rather than another is insanely high. With that said, we have a number of customers using Tenscores that have over 100,000 non-brand keywords and are still able to average quality scores of 9 and 10/10. You have to be really really good… or really lucky to be in an easy market.

4) I have a feeling that re-searches are an important indicator of poor relevance but it seems to be a factor that people do not mention much, what would you say are the most important influences of quality score? And to what degree of importance are they?

A lot of times people want to guess what factors are important for high Quality Score and they speculate. The thing is, there is no secret and Google has provided the factors that influences it over and over again.

First you need high quality and relevant landing page. What Google means by ‘high quality’ hasn’t always been straight forward. In my experience, if what you’re selling is evident within one click, you have information about the business (about us page, contact us page) and what you do with users data (privacy policy), you’re good. Then the ‘relevant’ part for landing page means that the ads and keywords you’re using are closely connected to what you’re selling on the landing page.

Second, you got to have high relevancy between your ads and keywords. There are two components to this. Google has algorithms that compare your keywords to your ads and determine if they correlate. However, Google also uses their users to tell them which ads are relevant and which are not through the evaluation of click-through-rates.

Which brings us to the third and most important factor: click-through-rates (CTR). CTR is evaluated everywhere. At the keyword level, at the query level, at the display url level, at the geographical level (where the ad is shown), at the device level (desktop or mobile) … anywhere there’s a CTR, you can be sure Google is using it to reward or punish you high or low QS. Focusing on CTR is 90% of the work of increasing QS and when you do that, significant results start to show.

5) what would you say are the most common mistakes that businesses make with Adwords?

Wow, there are many. Let’s talk about businesses that are starting out with Adwords and then ones that have been using it for a long time.

The businesses that start out make the biggest mistake of not optimizing their sales funnel well enough before advertising. I see this happening all the time. When you focus on optimizing your sales funnel first, it forces you to measure results, track those results and sets the foundation to high ROI advertising.

For businesses that have been around Adwords for a long time, the biggest mistake is that they’re not picky enough with their keywords. Most of them have a few highly profitable keywords and a ton of low performing keywords that they let sit in an account without ever evaluating their performance. That results in a lot of wasted spend. A keyword is like an employee, if it’s not working to make a profit, it has nothing to do in your adwords account. Remove it.

6) Could we now do a bit of maths. If you have an Adwords account spending on average £5000 per month with an account level QS of 5 – how much would the account holder save if they managed to increase the average account level QS to 7 without impacting conversions?

I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. Even if I tried I’d be wrong because there’s simply too much going on when advertising that predictions like those are hard to make. However, we do give very broad estimates in Tenscores using the following formula that was provided by Google a while back:

Avg. CPC = [(AdRank Of Advertiser Below)/QS] + $0.01

You do the math

[ insert your math here... hehe... ]

JC – OK; I like a challenge – The important assumption here is that all other things remain equal – i.e. just because we manage to improve our quality score through ad, keyword and landing page optimisations I will assume that the competitors quality scores remain unchanged. The reality is of course that by improving our quality scores there will be some impact on the competitors, but for now let’s ignore that.

Using an example of how ad rank varies based on QS we can get a rough figure:

Your Ad Rank (position) is determined by Maximum CPC Bid X Quality Score. If your ad rank is higher than your competitors then your ad will show above theirs.

This table shows how, for a fixed bid of £1.20, quality score affects your ad rank.

as we know, Quality Score ranges from a low score of 1 to a high score of 10.

Max Bid	Quality Score	Ad Rank (position)
£1.20	1	1.20
£1.20	2	2.40
£1.20	3	3.60
£1.20	4	4.80
£1.20	5	6.00
£1.20	6	7.20
£1.20	7	8.40
£1.20	8	9.60
£1.20	9	10.80
£1.20	10	12.00

 

I will need to assume a starting average CPC, so for that I will assume £1.20 as shown in this table. With a quality score of 5 on average our ad rank averages our at 6. If we can improve QS from 5 to 7, then we can use a simple formula to estimate the average CPC needed to achieve the same ad rank.

6 (ad rank) / 7 (new quality score) = 0.86p

This means that if we improved QS from 5 to 7 AND we also bid down so that our average CPC dropped from £1.20 to 86p then we would still maintain the same average position. It’s a 28% saving 

Now; I just want to say that I am not new to public humiliation; so if this is horribly wrong then please feel free to correct me in front of the Deep Footprints readers.

7) Can you give us any (non-sensitive) examples of how Ten Scores has helped businesses to increase their quality score by a factor of 20% or more?

We’re actually going to start featuring customer success stories on our blog. The most recent I have numbers for is Philip Sander from dedukta.dk. Within a few days of using Tenscores, they were able to increase their overall account QS from 3.3/10 to 5.4/10 which resulted in a 31% reduction in CPC. They still have some work to do to get it to at least 7/10 and rip all the benefits, but they’re on the right track.

8) Anything else you would like to add?

Well, thank you for this interview Joel. I like very much the interest and your recent research on Quality Score. For readers who want more information about QS, we recently created an interactive page about Quality Score. And for those who want to optimize, Tenscores.com makes it easy.

Wow – thanks Chris. Really really enlightening responses that are clear and easy for business owners to understand. We really appreciate you taking the time to contribute.

The post Interview with an Adwords Quality Score junkie appeared first on Deep Footprints.

With Google Adwords (or SEO for that matter) when you find a keyword that converts well and that gives you good orders/leads at a great cost per conversion you want more from it. You want to squeeze as much traffic out of it as possible as you know that the more traffic you get the more sales you will get.

Unfortunately this can sometimes be tricky – sometimes you can bid up a keyword into position 1 but even once there it’s click through rate (CTR) remains pitiful. You check that you are not abusing your customers in your ad copy and see what some of the other competitors are doing with their ads and you find that (as objectively as possible) that you have strong ad copy. So wassup?

Today we are going to look at the process you should go through when you find yourself a bit stumped as to why your click through rate (CTR) is so damn low, and we will of course then give you some pointers on what you can do to improve it.

First up – What is a good click through rate for Adwords?

This does vary greatly with each keyword, and in fact each auction as there are many influencing factors e.g. a domain that is almost synonymous with a specific product (think Amazon on book related searches), or whether or not there are product listing ads within the results, and if so where they are positioned etc etc.

all of that aside there are some general averages that are typically called upon at times like this data gathered by Accuracast:

You will probably have an idea of the specific auction peculiarities for your top keywords so can adjust due to this to work out whether your CTR is poor or not.

Here is a keyword that we were confused by this week for one of our clients:

Although the keyword is running in an average position of 1.5 the CTR is just 3.74%. Using the above table we can see that this is well below average for this position. The cost per conversion (£12.97) for this client is very good so we want more traffic; it looks like we cannot get into a much higher position and the issue is obviously CTR. Here is the process that we went through to figure out why:

Make a list of potential reasons

• Ad copy is poor compared to competitors
• Ad copy is not relevant to the keyword or to the intent of the searcher
• If broad match keyword are we getting irrelevant searches?
• Do we have a low impression share through day parting and compete aggressively at that time?
• Are we also running on the search partner network – how does performance vary?
• What about ad extensions – are we missing any critical ones?

Review ad copy

Here we refer back to best practices – see this infographic on how to write the best PPC ads. In this case the keyword is exact match so we know that all of the searches are relevant to the ad we have written. We looked through all of the competitor ads and could not see any reason why ours were losing – we had a good clear attention grabbing headline, strong call to action and ads that were focused to the searchers intention with this keyword.

Reviewing Adwords Auction Insights to see what competitors are doing

Another report that was released in 2012 is the Auction Insights report, this allows you to compare some of your performance indicators directly with specific competitors – at first glance it can be a little confusing but with a little interpretation a fair amount can be learned from this report. To get the keyword insights you need to select an individual keyword and then click on “keyword details” and then choose the option “Auction insights” as shown in the screenshot below.

Here is the auction insights report for the keyword in question:

The first thing to look at here is the “position above rate” as this shows you who is beating you and how much of the time they are beating you. You can see here that 2 of the competitors have a position above rate of 99% so this means that when our ads are shown together they almost always rank above us.

If you now look at the impression share column you can see that we had our ads served for 100% of the available impressions for this keyword whereas the 2 competitors that are beating us have a much lower impression share – this could be because they are only running ads at specific times of the day. It could theoretically be because their bid is too low to get all of the available impressions but that does not make sense considering that when they do show they always show above our client.

So; in order for us to show above them more of the time we will need to bid up during peak trading hours.

Determining where our impressions are coming from? Google Search or the Search Partner Network

The next thing that we looked into is the network that we are running on and it quickly became apparent that our CTR in Google search was very good when our ad was shown in the top positions above the search results; this perhaps accounts for the good quality score of 10/10.

However; most of the impressions came from the search partner network when we were in lower positions. Unfortunately it is not possible to split the search partner network targeting into a separate campaign to better understand the performance and also to bid differently so we are forced to just bid appropriately for the two together.

Checking Ad Extensions

another reason why CTR may suffer is if you do not use relevant ad extensions: For example if you are a restaurant and you do not run call extensions to allow mobile users to click to call or if you do not link up your Places extension to show address details then you could lose clicks and sales. In Adwords you can check on the part of your ad or ad extension that was clicked – in the example below you can see the comparison between the headline, the product extension and the ad sitelinks.

This data does not mean that site links are bad – they probably help the CTR overall as they allow your ad to take up more space on the page and to say more about your offering but the fact that most people click on the headline is probably more down to the nature of how people are used to using a search engine. It does look like the product extensions help the click through rate as when they are shown we get a better click through rate than on the headline as people are interested in specific products.

Looking at this I cannot see any action that needs to be taken.

Other things to examine

A number of the factors we have looked at here in this post can be found under the “Segment” option on the keywords tab (shown in screenshot below).

Play around with the different reports under here to see if and where any data stands out.

Considering what we have found through the auction insights data it would be interesting to know the performance of this keyword by time of day; unfortunately the smallest unit of time available under segments is by day. Under the dimensions tab you can get a performance report by hour of the day but this is at ad group and campaign levels only, so you would need to put a keyword in it’s own ad group to work out at what time of day the CTR is suffering.

Conclusions

From this analysis we have the action points of:

1) Keeping a close eye on the performance of the search partners vs Google Search.

2) Test a slightly higher bid to try and get more top of page impressions.

It’s important to remember that ads can always be improved too and to keep testing.

The post Why is my CTR so damn low? appeared first on Deep Footprints.

There still seems to be a lot of confusion about what is a reliable link building process that can be trusted not to fall foul of Google and also that will improve traffic.

I have given a basic outline of our process in the following, and epically long infographic. I am not really sure that it can be classed as an infographic as it is really just a blog post split up into easy bite sized chunks. I read a post about using Powerpoint for Infographics by Hubspot so thought I would give it a go. I need to outsource design work!

If you suffer from any sizing issues – i.e. it coming out too small then you can see the SEO linkbuilding 14 step infographic here.

The post White hat SEO Linkbuilding – 14 step process infographic appeared first on Deep Footprints.

This has given me a headache – there are a lot of spreadsheets coming up so brace yourself.

I set up a new clients account last week and was taking them through it when a question that they asked gave me an idea.

Just take a moment to check the QS of the keywords below:

We were looking at this screenshot and they asked me why there was such a variance between the quality scores of these keywords in the same ad group. Bear in mind that the keywords have never run; they have been freshly loaded in so there is no performance history on them, they all share the same landing page and the same ads.

From experience I know that performance in terms of click through rate is a key determinant of quality score. I have no idea how important it is compared to other factors though, just a vague feeling that it is the most important factor based on past experience. I know that the accounts I manage with high click through rates benefit from high quality scores.

One thing that I noticed here was that the keyword with the highest quality score was “wholesale polo shirt” with a QS of 7. It was also the keyword that I used in the headline of the ad – in fact it is a proper phrase match.

I started to wonder if I was on to something and as this is a new account it was a great opportunity to try and reverse engineer Adwords quality score formula. In retrospect that is an undertaking that I am vastly under-qualified for but my analysis gave me some key insights that I will share with you here in the hope that others can take this further.

Let’s start with Google’s explanation of how they calculate quality score:

Now, considering that I am running this analysis on an account that has no history we can discount many of these in trying to understand the variances in quality score that my clients keywords had as shown above. Basically we can put it down to 2 things:

• The quality of your landing page
• Your keyword/ad relevance

There are a number of considerations here:

Quality of the landing page considerations

• how the keyword is used in the page heading
• how the keyword is used in the body text of the page
• image alt tags, video content
• page load speed, layout, HTML markup quality

There are a number of things that come into play; I didn’t go into this much detail as it would require a lot longer than I have available and also I am not convinced that I would get my hands on anything conclusive without doing the exercise on multiple accounts. Therefore I just considered the target keyword usage in the page text, URL and headings.

Keyword/Ad Relevance considerations

• Headline relevance to keyword
• Description Lines 1 and 2 relevance to keyword
• Display URL relevance to keyword
• Destination URL relevance to keyword

In fact for this experiment I discounted the relevance of description line 2 as the ads in this account contain a generic call to action in desc line 2 rather than anything related to the keywords in the ad group, but I looked at all of the other parts of the ad’s relevance to the keyword.

The background on this Adwords account

The client is a wholesaler of T-shirts, sweatshirts, bags etc that are to be used for printing. The account only contains keywords that define the website as a wholesaler and not a B2C retailer – otherwise we would obviously not be getting a great conversion rate. Each ad group focuses on a product type and then the keywords use that product name + a defining keyword e.g. “wholesale” or “blank”. There are 7 defining keywords used in the account:

• wholesale
• blank
• bulk
• for printing
• merchandise
• promo
• promotional

How we conducted the experiment

The account has 337 ad groups and 4,653 keywords. All ad groups contain each of the 7 defining keywords. I downloaded all keywords into Excel and then downloaded all ads into Excel and used the vlookup function to match the ads to the keywords based on the ad group.

I then pulled out the key defining term for each of the keywords and the ads and also pulled out what type of product the keyword related to as this would then allow me to determine the landing page relevance to the keyword. In the example above you can see that the keywords in each ad group only varied by the defining keyword so that is the basis for the analysis.

I then ran a series of pivot tables to look at the average quality scores across the account based on different factors but largely based on the quality of the landing pages and the ad to keyword relevance.

First up I looked at the average quality score by defining keyword to see if there were any patterns across the account. As you can see there is clearly a variance here with the words “promo” and “wholesale” getting significantly higher quality scores (6.28 and 6.12 respectively) than the term “blank” which had an average quality score across the account of 4.64. Why? That is the point of this piece of analysis.

After seeing these variances the first question I had was on the websites relevance to these 2 terms – as a crude measurement, were they used more heavily in the content on the site than the term “blank”?

It is not an ideal analysis of the website relevance but I checked the keyword density and it actually showed a negative correlation – the word “blank” was used more than the terms “promo” and “wholesale”.

Quality score by keyword match type

Google quality score is supposedly set on exact match keywords/terms and as we have both exact and broad variants of many of the same keywords in the account I thought that I would double check this:

Looks close enough to me.

Quality score by looking at relationship between the keyword and the ad headline

First of all I looked at the relevance of the keywords defining term to the ad headlines defining term. Basically; what I wanted to see was whether or not, on average, did the keywords with the term “wholesale” in them for example, have a higher quality score when the corresponding ad also had the keyword “wholesale” in the headline of the ad.

Answer: No

One interesting thing that I found here was that having the term “bulk” in the ad headline consistently gave a higher quality score across the whole account. This was interesting as “bulk” is not a term used at all in the website’s content so I have no ideas on why this may be? However – what I was hoping to prove didn’t come through – there was no link between the keywords text and the ad headlines text effect on quality score.

What about the ads description line 1?

There does seem to be some relationship here although the data is just not really enough to prove statistically that there is a connection or exactly how strong that connection is.

*You are comparing horizontally.

One takeaway is that perhaps having the users searched keyword in the description line 1 is more important than in the headline because the headline should be more about grabbing a users attention, so may not necessarily require the same keyword to signify relevance whereas the description lines 1 and 2 are more about qualifying relevance so require the keyword – see this infographic we created on how to write great ppc ads for more on this.

What about the display URL & Destination URL?

The interesting thing here is that the bags and the vests; the ones with the highest quality scores had the most tightly themed keywords and also the least keywords. This suggests that tight ad groups are important; but that’s nothing new really – PPC marketers have been suggesting that for years.

and the destination URL’s

There is something interesting here shown under the product types – basically for the same keywords we are using 2 landing pages – one for the broad and one for the exact ad group. One is specific to a group of T-Shirts and the other is the homepage which has all T-shirts on it. The landing page that relates in theme to the keywords has a higher quality score. This is something that we could easily test more comprehensively byt creating multiple ad groups and just switching the landing pages for the same keywords (DO NOT TURN THEM ON) to see the effect on QS. It’s only about a 6% improvement in QS but it is something at least. This is not conclusive enough to say that keyword relevance to landing page is 6% of the QS formula but it is at least a hint that it is important.

I plan to take this research further in the future as I think that the concept is good but I just lack the brain and the necessary time to properly reverse engineer the importance of these various factors towards the keyword quality score. I would love to hear about any experiments that others have been doing and your findings?

The post Crudely reverse engineering Google Adwords Quality Score Formula appeared first on Deep Footprints.

Google Adwords is a highly intelligent and well built marketing tool. But because it has evolved over a number of years with layer upon layer of new functions, a well constructed campaign is usually pretty complex. Some of the considerations we have to go through when we start working on a new account are:

• Geographic targeting – should we split out campaigns for different regions/countries and target differently/bid differently?
• How do we handle different devices – do users search for this companies products/services differently on different devices? e.g. click to call on mobiles.
• What types of extensions/sitelinks are relevant for this business? Are they are a locally based bricks and mortar business needing location extensions or do they have great reviews so can leverage reviews extensions?
• What types of conversions do they have on their site? leads, sales, phone calls? What is the best way to track these and apply bidding rules to them?

On top of that you have all the basic structure questions: should we base it on website hierarchy (common e-commerce structure) or on the ways people search for the product/services (common service type structure)? How do we conduct keyword research, what business information do we need for the ad building etc etc.

Why does it all have to be so complicated?

We have noticed that our clients are just confused and so really do need professional help with their Adwords accounts.

This is an issue for all parties as many businesses that have a go themselves, fail, and then may determine that Adwords is no good as a marketing tool and give up. This of course affects Google’s bottom line, reduces customers for PPC agencies and most importantly leaves small businesses failing to sell as much as they could. Adwords should really be accessible for small business owners as not all businesses are in a position of being able to afford professional support – most businesses are 1 person micro businesses.

I am guessing that this was the impetus behind Google’s introduction of enhanced campaigns, which they announced last week.

Here is what Google said about Adwords enhanced campaigns in their announcement:

“People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.

With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place. Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.”

You can read the announcement here, and here is their dubious video explaining it:

Google’s videos are usually great but I am not convinced that this makes the product any clearer for advertisers. Not to worry – we are going to go through it now.

So what are Adwords Enhanced Campaigns?

Currently many advertisers split up their Adwords accounts into very complex set ups so that they can understand how different factors interact. For example – how does geographic location affect sales of different products? How do sales differ by mobile, desktop device? Should I bid lower/higher on mobile devices?

The current answer to these questions is to split up campaigns by region, device and product type. For example if you have 100 products, selling in 50 countries and on 3 devices (mobile, tablet and desktop) we have 15,000 variations. Sam Owen wrote a good article about this over at PPC Hero.

With enhanced campaigns you can now adjust bids based on location and device so there is no need to split them out into different campaigns.

Roll out of enhanced campaigns will occur over the next 4 months with completion by July 2013.

Here is a screenshot that Search Engine Watch took of the new set up – none of our accounts have the functionality yet!

Wait; there is more:

Changes to Sitelinks

A major frustration with the Adwords sitelinks extension has been that you cannot get data on the performance of the individual sitelinks – so it has been impossible to optimise the sitelinks other than by using a bit of nowse and a best guess. This will now change and as well as that we will be able to set sitelinks at an ad group level rather than a campaign level.

I am excited about this as it will allow great opportunities e.g. retailers will be able to have sitelinks for their best selling products with much more flexibility.

New Conversion Types

In their announcement Google gave one specific example:

“Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.”

As well as this the calls that result from a click to call ad have been charged at a fixed fee of £1. According to Search Engine Land this is now free – another great little bonus.

Tracking calls that last 60 seconds plus as a conversion sounds quite sensible on the face of it but you will need to monitor the types of calls you are getting as businesses with complex products or services may require more than 1 minute to identify relevance so this type of conversion may just be confusing for that type of business.

What needs to be done by advertisers to prepare for Adwords enhanced campaigns?

If you currently have campaigns separated by device and by Geographic region then you may want to consolidate them; in fact for device targeted campaigns you will need to combine them as you will be opted into all devices by default. If you are 100% sure that you do not want to run ads on a specific device e.g. mobiles then you can reduce bids for mobiles by -100%.

Combining campaigns will mean that when you are running tests on different ad copies or sitelinks etc you will be able to reach statistical significance much more quickly. This will allow you to develop and improve performance more quickly.

If you are not currently separating campaigns by device or region then nothing really needs doing but you should be aware of the new possibilities open to you – run a geographic report in Adwords using the dimensions tab and a separate one by devices so at least you will know where you are.

If you have never done this before then you will find it quite enlightening as there are normally regional and device variations - specifically mobile targeted campaigns usually require a lower bid so you can save a bit of money through separating them out – but obviously do not bother going to this trouble now as you will be able to achieve it through simple device specific bid adjustments once enhanced campaigns is released for your account.

Concerns about Adwords enhanced campaigns

All in all I believe that this is a positive step forward by Google, especially for the less experienced advertisers as it will make life a lot simpler for them and will allow them to take advantage of the optimisations that more advanced marketers have been using for years.

However – my concern is that the simplification will lead to murkiness. What I mean is that with separated out campaigns we can clearly see where we are but with the combined campaigns we will need to run various reports and to cross reference them to get a clear picture of what is working and why. For example – you find that you are getting better conversions on a campaign and need to understand why – you will need to analyse:

• which keywords
• in which locations
• on what devices

are helping you. Most advertisers just will not bother so will become less aware of what is working and what is not unless they find themselves struggling to get their account to perform.

Also – what if you want to bid keyword 1 up in location A and down in location B but they are in the same campaign?

There are a lot of unanswered questions that i am sure will become clear on roll out and also the update of Adwords editor that will accompany the change. I look forward to seeing this new functionality in action and testing it. What do you think? Good or bad move for advertisers?

The post Getting your head around Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns appeared first on Deep Footprints.

This is a bit of a diversion from my usual posts on practical PPC or SEO to something more newsy – as I spend a lot of time in Japan I thought it would be interesting for you all;- please let me know what you think?

I was in a meeting with a client in Tokyo last week and we were discussing the growth of social network sites and he started talking about a site called “Line”.

After a couple of minutes I had to stop him and ask what he was talking about.

He started laughing as I was perhaps the last person in Japan to hear about the fastest growing social network ever (in Asia).

Line began in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake when all telecoms providers collapsed and communication was lost. At that time I was teaching a lesson in a Japanese primary school and no-one could contact anyone – land lines and mobiles all down. However, I could call my dad through Skype.

Developers at the Japanese arm of the large Korean search engine Naver (NHN Japan) recognized this as a serious issue/opportunity and quickly put together the bones of Line.

The network launched on 27th June 2011 and within 1 year had 45 million users, 20 million of which were in Japan. Last week Line hit the milestone of 100 million users worldwide with the vast majority shared between Japan and Korea, dwarfing the other big players, Facebook, Mixi, Gree and Twitter. They are claiming around 3 million new registered users each week.

There are 10 million users in both Thailand and Taiwan and it is fast becoming popular in South America and Eastern Europe.

The network is more than just online text now though – you can also make free calls through Wi-Fi or if you are on a flat rate plan to any contacts on your phone who are Line users and there is a timeline that pulls in group communication abilities.

Line requires a unique telephone number for every user, although registered users can now download a desktop version of the app too.

The great thing about it being tied to a unique telephone number is that when you log in to Line it automatically scans all of your contacts numbers to check who is on Line at that time. You can then message them, have group chats and call directly. You are instantly connected to all of your important contacts, this is something that no other social network has achieved.

So what about that aggressive post title?

With the title of the post I am not just trying to get attention, the growth of this network is one signal that it is set for good things, but more than that I have always felt that the social site which will beat Facebook to the number one spot will need to be very different, Google+ has some fantastic features but it is not different enough whereas Line, being 1) Focused for mobile devices and 2) Requiring a unique telephone number, has capabilities that are just out of reach for Facebook, Twitter, Google or most other networks.

If you have not yet used it then you will be laughing at my naivety at this point. Well, we will see.

When you join, Line scans your friends of friends to suggest people to add as contacts on Line. You can add in all your friends from Facebook and instantly marry up with your contacts based on telephone number – quickly everyone is nicely tied up. As the vast majority of the population are now using Line in Japan, text messaging and calling have essentially become free for many people. Although most people are actually on unlimited data plans for texts anyway, the calls cost a fair whack in Japan so there is a financial incentive to use the network too.

What is Line’s business model?

With the user base they have there will be a number of opportunities and it seems that this is still being figured out but one of the key aspects of Line is that there are a wicked range of “stickers” or emoji that you can send. Stickers are elaborate emoticons and there are thousands of them available.

Line allows brands to upload branded stamps that users can purchase for a dollar or two. This may be an aspect that is unique to Asia but they are incredibly popular and consumers are happy to shell out to send Doraemon or Crayon Shinchan stamps to their friends.

There are Line business accounts, which unlike Facebook or Twitter require a joining fee and then a monthly subscription fee.
With a business account you are able to sell stickers, send messages to your contacts, distribute coupons and run competitions.

Lawson, who are a large chain of convenience stores in Japan messaged their 1.5 million contacts through Line in August 2012 with a coupon offer and 1 million of the recipients redeemed in store!

There are also “Official Accounts” which allow users to communicate directly with famous figures that are on Line.

The timeline allows you to share updates with all contacts in a similar approach to the Facebook network.

There is also a Line photo application and many games within the app.

Line can be downloaded in the App store on all popular smart phone platforms and is available in Japanese, English, Chinese and Spanish.

The post Line – the social network that will topple Facebook? appeared first on Deep Footprints.

I guess I kind of threw you with that title? To be honest it threw me too; who would ever have guessed that Hannibal, BA Baraccus, Face and Raving Mad Murdoch had the secret to SEO link building in 2013 up their sleeves all those years ago.

I was having a conversation with another SEO (Tim Grice) the other day about how SEO has evolved and become more difficult for small businesses due to the increasing onus on linkable assets (great content, tools, brand equity, relationships etc).

I am not talking about technical SEO here – technically things have not changed incredibly of late, there have been additional considerations such as open graph protocol, structured data and page speed becoming much more significant but essentially things have been moving on a consistent trajectory.

On the other hand link building and off site SEO has undergone a sea change, and one for the better good of the internet (IMHO).

It’s not really a change of direction for any of the search engines; they have always been trying to achieve what they are now finally achieving – i.e. a situation where the sites that genuinely are the most relevant and appropriate are being surfaced for users searches rather than sites that have been gamed for positions using things like exact match domains and mass linking from low quality sites with exact match anchor text.

For many SEO’s the game has always been about trying to beat the search engines, find loopholes and ways to trick the search engines into thinking that you have the most appropriate content. This does not go for everybody in SEO – there are many link builders such as Eric Ward who have always taken an approach of building connections that could have occurred naturally and that make sense and just encouraging those relationships to actually happen.

But now that the easy life is over SEO’s need to be a lot more creative and experimental in their thinking and planning – again a big positive for the industry.

Not that we were ever short on creative minds in SEO, but now that things have evolved at least those that have taken the longer and steeper road will not have to glance sideways at competitors who have a backlink profile straight out of the landfill site and have second thoughts about the approach we are taking.

It’s tough when you have clients/bosses asking for the logic on your slower, more costly content-based strategy when it is plain obvious you are being beaten by a much easier strategy. Thank god those days are coming to an end.

Anyway; back to the A-Team.

If you are a young whippersnapper and are unfamiliar with arguably the best 80’s show to ever grace the TV screen then get into your Dad’s old cabinet and look for these chunky brick sized items that have tape in them – those are called videos – find one with the A-team written in faint biro on it, grab a penguin bar (small chocolate biscuit) and settle on the sofa for a televisual extravaganza like never before.

Oh and it may be worth switching your imagination on, the special effects in those days were not what they are nowadays.

Here is the intro to the show:

Assuming that we are all up to speed on who the A-team are I want to talk about the last 15 minutes of every single show.

This is the bit when things are looking really dismal, the chips are down and the bad guys have pretty much taken over. Hannibal and his team then lock themselves in a garage and quickly audit the available weaponry – usually just old bits of wood and metal and there is always a welder.

They then assemble the available resources into a mega weapon vehicle – It bursts through the splintering side of a barn wall and picks out the army of bad guys one by one to claim a victory against all the odds.

That is what SEO link building is now all about (if you are a small business).

Sorry – they disabled embedding on this one so you will need to head to YouTube to watch it (but don’t get distracted there – I am just getting to the good bit):

http://youtu.be/H7zc1iySY1I

What does this have to do with SEO link building in 2013?

I think that the process for SEO in 2013 has to look something like this:

1. Analysis of business, it’s place in the market, strategic goals and KPI’s along with a clear understanding of budgets and CPA targets.
2. Technical site audit and changes
3. Content audit

• This is the A-team strategy. Websites can sometimes be a like a box full of lego, or indeed a warehouse full of corrugated iron and pieces of wood and a welder.
• SEO’s need to fully audit the linkable assets of a company; blog, industry reports and research papers, tools, whitepapers, infographics, images, well known staff, people they sponsor, corporate relationships/partnerships, charitable work, video content, buckets full of sharp tacks and sticky oil etc etc.

4. Identify target sites to get links from

• This can be done in many ways but I find that with new clients it helps us to understand the industry well if we look at the backlinks of a number of the key companies and also informational hubs in the space and map out commonalities as well as links that make sense which have been gained through unique and creative strategies.
• Identify the key influencers in the space – best tool I have used for this is Little Bird (still in beta and pretty pricey), Followerwonk is also good and not too pricey (especially if you are an SEOMoz Pro subscriber) and even Twitter can be pretty good when you run searches for specific keywords.
• Identify the sites the influencers are talking about and linking to.
• Find out where your customers hang out on the web – just ask them to list their top 5 websites within the industry.

5. Match the inventory of linkable assets to the target sites – i.e. What is the most appropriate asset you have which can be used to approach target site A to ask for a link? This needs to be done objectively as if you do not have anything that could benefit a target site then you are going to need to create something new.

6. When planning and creating new content it is good if you have a group of target websites in mind for it so that you get the most bang for your buck. Guest posting is often a good investment but it only typically gets you one link so you need to choose the site carefully so that you get a good level of traffic from your time investment.

So that’s it – The A-team approach to SEO link building.

Thinking about it – I could have used MacGyver as well:

The post Bloody Hell – The A-Team knew the secret to SEO link building appeared first on Deep Footprints.