New options for understanding Performance by Ad Position

Value/Importance: [rating=3] Source: Inside Google AdWords & RKG Blog

Our commentary

For years now you have been able to use Google Analytics to garner insights on what position your ads were in when they were clicked and so evaluate the impact of position on click volume, quality and revenue. It's important to understand the impact of bidding on position to target the right position which maximises volume against quality shown by conversion rate. We recommend this article by RKG which walks you through a way to test performance by ad position to bid at the right levels to maximise conversion and ROI. This is a summary of their test results:

The RKG analysis is made possible by an update from Google Adwords which we also wanted to…

Covering Basic SEO, Social and Mobile SEO

Value: [rating=4] Source: Internet Advertising Bureau Guide for Retailers Our commentary: Running online retail sites presents a whole raft of specific complexities for businesses, whether its systems, process or marketing related . While only focusing on the marketing (specifically SEO, PPC & Social aspects of running a retail business) this guide from IAB is a very nice simple suite of tips & best practice guidance for running retail sites. There is a fair bit missing from the guide in terms of what you can do with SEO for retail sites, but if a guide covered everything it would be enormous & not actionable. The simple, sector-specific approach from the iab is what makes this a useful piece of content. To give you a flavour, here a a couple of  less obvious tips from the guide: …

If we agree that engaging with brands in social media is a good thing, then how can we do it better?  With participation in social media being a key area to in building brand reputation, Weber Shandwick offer their nine tips to build brand sociability. Anything that you would add?

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Mobile email marketing popularity statistics

New in-depth mobile device usage statistics - October 2011

Comscore have released an intriguingly titled report Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits. This adds to data presented below from earlier on mobile usage of email. Although the report title references the US, there's also data from elsewhere in the World too. In fact this is one of the main insights from the report. This is an in-depth report which is worth downloading if you're working on a mobile marketing strategy. These were the 3 main highlights for me: 1. The importance of mobile (and tablet) access to email and web will vary dramatically by country. I included this chart since as well as showing the country differences, it also shows the breakdown between mobile and tablet which is the majority of the darker "non-computer device traffic" shown here. Tablet…

UK DMA's survey reveals key insights for email marketers

One of the challenges for email marketers is to stop thinking like email marketers. A lot of assumptions about best practices are based on our collective view of just what's going on inside consumer inboxes. But this view is biased by what's going on inside our own inboxes. If you're an email marketer, you're probably an online regular with a heavy duty email account or accounts. The same can't be said of the proverbial man and woman in the street: the people who typically get the actual emails. Our email experience is not their email experience. Or is it? Truth is we don't really know. Surveys of end users can, however, help correct our misconceptions. They provide important insight into how we might adapt our email campaigns to the reality of end-user inboxes...to the benefit of the email bottom line. The UK DMA, fast.MAP and Alchemy Worx recently …

Major changes to how products are sold defined in 10 new consumer rights

Value/Importance: [rating=5] For transactional sites - retail, travel, etc Recommended link: EU Official summary

A summary of the new directive

We're alerting you to this EU press release of 10/10/2011 that has a good summary of theses 10 new consumer rights which will affect all transactional sites. You can also read a full description of the new directive. The most significant changes are: Pre-checked tick boxes opting into additional products banned (I was a recent victim to this - a hotel cancellation insurance for a booking - it’s that sort of thing) 7 day purchase refund period extended to 14 days Total costs have to be displayed (low-cost airlines beware)

Timing

The new directive was first discussed as a proposal in Oct 2008. Following publication of the final directive governments have 2 years to implement the rules at national level. So there is…

It seems infographics are popular, but they have a flaw - they're instantly out-of-date. Well not any more. Thanks to HTML5, if your data sources are updated, the infographic can stay up-to-date too! This is a great initiative by Online Schools which also uses HTML5 to add interactivity - check it out - it's one of the best examples of the power of HTML5 we've seen:

Created by: OnlineSchools.org (link removed by request)

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Using Tweetreach to find out your main influencers in Twitter

I’m writing this post to share a neat, free tool which as it says in its strapline answers the question How far did your tweet travel? I’m prompted to write this summary since I was recently asking this question after Chris Soames, one of our Smart Insights writers, wrote a popular post on finding the best harshtags in Twitter which was widely shared. To answer the question of who is influential in sharing your tweets, Tweetreach provides a great simple, tool to help with this. If you enter the URL for the page your tweet links to, it will show you Retweets, new tweets not referencing the original and most usefully which Twitter users contributed the most "impressions": You can see that this post was successful because it was shared by several…

Facebook releases new marketing advice for businesses

Value: [rating=4] Recommended link: http://www.facebook.com/business Our commentary: In the first week of August, Facebook announced "Facebook for Business". While this sounds like an attempt to compete with LinkedIn or Google+, in fact it’s just an update to their guidance notes which has been lacking for quite a while.

10/10/2011 update - New Facebook Page Insights guide

We advised last week that Facebook that was introducing two new features and it hasn't taken long for Facebook to roll these out. The main change is that Facebook Page admins will see a new "People Talking About This" measure on the page and in Facebook Insights: This measure gives you an overall idea of conversations about a brand within the past 7 days. Facebook have introduced a new guide on Page Insights (below) which explains this measure and how…

A New way of reviewing keyword and landing page relevance

Value/Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: Source - Official Google Announcement

Our commentary

Yet another algorithm update from Google, this time relating to Pay Per Click. The new updates are to help Google set a better Quality Score based on keyword relevance & landing page relevance. Just as a reminder, it's well worth quizzing whoever manages Adwords for you about Quality Score - ask for a distribution of Quality Score for your keywords. Its importance is shown by what Google state in this release: Campaigns with better-performing ads for user queries will continue to see higher Quality Scores, lower average cost per click and higher position on results pages. Google say you can expect a good few fluctuations within your campaigns over the next few weeks, so be sure to wait for things to settle back down before starting to change things. The quality score for a particular keyword remains based…