PPC : change nothing and nothing changes

I've helped a lot of organisations over the years optimise their digital advertising campaigns. This means I've seen a number of different ways of setting up and configuring paid search in services like Google AdWords, Microsoft's Bing Ads (previously Yahoo's own Search Marketing efforts) and others.

In several notable examples the PPC (pay per click) campaigns had seemingly reached their peak and the organisations concerned were happy to carry on doing the same thing day after day. In nearly every case the person managing the activity was happy to spend a very similar amount each day or month and deliver the same amount of visitors. (If I'm honest, they were almost scared to make changes once they found a set-up that worked).

Unsurprisingly, this infuriated the heck out of me for various reasons:

1. There is never an optimum way to build PPC campaigns. If you think you're doing the best paid search you ever could, then you're sadly mistaken.
Note: If your digital marketing agency says there is and that they've found it... They are trying to either get an easy ride or hide something

2. Google, Microsoft and the rest of the search engines never stop evolving their products, so failing up change your paid SEM will only risk leaving you with outdated approaches and techniques.

3. New competition comes into the market all the time (and some leave) and the current ones get smarter or more determined. More competition for the same terms will therefore push the bidding price up in systems such as AdWords.
Note: Your clever competition knows that change is good and how it can help to improve customer acquisition costs... Do you?

4. Websites change and therefore variables such as Google's Quality Score vary over time. If you're directing prospects to a site where the content and catalogue information is changing all the time, you can bet your QS is fluctuating too (it might even be changing when you have a static site!).

But more importantly than all if these should be the urge in every online marketer to improve on what is there... Not necessarily by making huge changes to your PPC account on a daily basis, but by the use of incremental changes and small experiments that test new ways and wording.

After all... Don't you want to learn and find out more about paid search? Do you want your skills to stand still in a market place that rewards talent? Don't you want to compete against your peers out there, all intent on bettering those CPC and conversion rates ?
(Or are you just happy to take your employer's or client's money for the short term?)

Does Facebook Places mean the end for Foursquare?

As regular readers and followers of my Twitter stream will know, I'm a frequent user of the Geo-location based application Foursquare. I've been using it for most of the year now and I like its combination of gaming (I am currently having a competition with a fellow nearby user to be the Major of our local Pizza restaurant) and tips... where I have been know to give the odd negative review.

However, Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement last week that Facebook will now extended the availability of its geo-tagging service Facebook Places to the UK (and Japan).

Facebook Places has up until this week only been available in the US, but it is now live here in the UK and already seems to be building up users (if my friends are anything to go by). The service is already built into the iPhone Facebook application, however other mobile users (Blackberry, Android, etc.) will have to wait for their developers to catch-up and for now can only use the service via the 'touch' version of the site accessed with a mobile browser.

But with the launch of this service, I am sure I'm not the only Foursquare UK user who thought "hey, why use two applications when one will now do?". Or to put it anther way, given the 500 million Facebook users, does this spell the beginning of the end for Foursquare?

Possibly... but I have an idea... sell the product to a bigger company right now!

But who? Well.... if:

• Google has Latitude & Places
• Facebook has errrr Places
• Yahoo has..... mmmmm... actually Yahoo hasn't done much since it failed to by Foursquare back in April. But it did go and buy a little Indonesian Geo-location service called Koprol which it has integrated, plus it has a 'geocoding API' called.... PlaceFinder

So who's left to buy up little old Foursquare?

Microsoft?

Perhaps. Although it also failed to buy Foursquare in April for the assumed $100m+ price tag, you can't help but think that Foursquare's value may have decreased a little now that Facebook has entered the market.

News International starts blocking search engine spiders....

.... but only the ones it can afford to set its lawyers on.

Today we have had a further development in the ongoing battle between news aggregators and Rupert Murdoch's News International company. In fact its one that aggregator NewsNow has felt strongly enough to issue a Press Release about today.

For those who aren't familiar with NewsNow's service, it spiders news sites in a similar way to other search sites such a Yahoo and Google News. It then builds links to these articles from its own site, thereby sending traffic off to the content it finds (helping them build visitor traffic, which sells more adverts, which makes the sites more money).

News International has previously stated that it will delist itself from search engines in 2010. We're all watching for them to make themselves invisible to the search spiders of Google and others (but not Bing.com, assuming News International and Microsoft get into bed together as rumoured).

So as I've stated before, the easy way to do this is to make changes to a simple file called a robots.txt which sits on the server displaying the content. If you use this file to tell the spider not to index the specific site it won't, its as simple as that. You can even go so far as to tell the spider (e.g. Google's Googlebot) that you specifically don't want it to look through all or part of your site.
I have done this in the past when I've had a particularly fragile site that could not take all its pages being indexed at once and some site owners do this when they don't want their content read & stolen... which is fair enough.

So what have The Time Online done? Well, if you look at their robots.txt file you will see that they have entered the line:

#Agent Specific Disallowed Sections
User-agent: NewsNow
Disallow: /

Now for those who don't speak fluent search engine spider, I'll translate...

"Dear NewsNow spider, go away"

I'll leave you to decide if The Times are playing fair in this matter. However NewsNow's boss Struan Bartlett is fairly clear on the matter:

“The question remains whether News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines, is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news online."

I personally want to know why The Times has not done the same to block the Googlebot. Could it be it brings in far too much reveue for them right now?

The battle continues!

SEO in demand

As digital industry observers may have noticed, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a skill that has been in constant demand throughout 2009.

There has been a continual rise in awareness of the term SEO by most businesses and it now not just the domain of the marketing/technology hybrid (so-often labelled a "geek") that it was several years ago. Now it is a defined market sector in the Internet industry and one that requires its own skill-set and experience, has its own terminology and mainly tries to keep to best-practice rules & guidelines. Overall the main purpose of the SEO industry is to ensure its clients get maximum and ethical benefit from their sites within the organic (main) results on web search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.).

A year or so ago, stories of the SEO market place dying out emerged, partly fueled by the opinion that as all sites became standardised there would be no difference between them.
This viewpoint, in my opinion, is greatly exaggerated or incorrect.

1. As new junior talent comes into the web development industry (and others leave) and as the search engines change the algorithms their very engines are based on - which affects the placement of the results - thus there is always lots to learn and improve upon.
2. Not all web agencies are created equally - some still don't develop to standards or test, test and test again
3. Different sites require different approaches. Some need instant recognition at the top of one or two specific keyword searches, others need a more general or volume-based approach.
4. Search habits change, either as vocabulary and names come to prominence, or as users get more proficient and specialised in their search terms.

So what is your company doing about its constantly-evolving SEO requirements and how are you going to find the right SEO agency to help you with this in 2010?