Google Blog Posts

The True Value of PPC Ads

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Google, PPC

As a PPC Analyst, I often get asked about the true value of advertising via paid search ads, especially when a client may already have a strong presence in the natural organic listings, particularly for brand-related traffic.

The common misconception by many PPC clients is that a large proportion of search traffic generated through sponsored links may be effectively cannibalising the traffic that may have otherwise been generated organically, and by simply stopping the PPC campaign, the loss in traffic would be absorbed by the organic traffic. (more…)

The Future of Google+

Monday, August 8th, 2011

Google, SEO

At the end of June, Google launched Google+, which appears to be the search engines answer to Facebook. Even after a few months, social media enthusiasts can’t seem to get enough of it.

When Facebook launched in 2004, it gained 20 million users in 3.5 years; Google+ reached it in just three weeks! The main reason for this astonishing growth was the large user base Google already had. While the amount of users Google+ has generated up till now is amazing, given the short space of time, it still doesn’t compare to Facebook’s astounding 750 million users or Twitter’s 200 million users. (more…)

Google: Get Specific Pages Indexed Quickly!

Friday, August 5th, 2011

Featured, Google, Industry News

On Wednesday Google announced on their Webmaster Tools Blog that you can now directly ask Google to crawl a specific URL – and it should be crawled in about a day!

When you submit a URL in this way Googlebot will crawl the URL, usually within a day.

Of course, there’s always been the general Submit Your Site To Google feature – but this only works at a TLD level and there’s no suggestion of how long it will take them to crawl a site – or if they will. (more…)

Google Plus: A Marketing Triumph?

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Featured, Google, Industry News

Google hasn’t had a quiet couple of months. From the latest Panda update, the SERP redesign and installation of the +1 button, the Googlers have been hard at work hunched over their keyboards. However, all of this pales in comparison to the launch of Google Plus, the social network that has enjoyed massive coverage over the past month on digital marketing sites like ours.

The internet titan had many of us in the digital industry fairly perplexed when it failed to deliver the PR storm we were waiting for. However, Larry Page and Co knew exactly what they were doing, beginning with a fizzle and ending with a deafening bang. (more…)

Attribution Modelling – Why Weight?

Monday, August 1st, 2011

Conversion Rate, Google Analytics

Traditionally we try to measure the impact of advertising so that we can understand the return on investment.  Moving to digital has allowed access to specific metrics such as cost per click and cost per sale, which allows us to see very accurately the return on our investment.

If you are measuring the cost per transaction, or goal, in Analytics then you are likely optimising toward these metrics.  The transactions in Analytics are fully attributed to the last advert a visitor clicked, but this is not the whole picture. (more…)