Half-Geek

new adwords interface coming

Google is introducing a new interface for adwords. This is a big deal for Google, the adwords product is still an unrivaled revenue stream within their business and they have not made any significant changes to the existing interface since 2003.

The official launch for the big change is at SES NYC on March 24, however, those who are interested can sign up for the new adwords beta and have a play with the new system, switching between the old a new interface at will.

The new interface incorporates a number of updates including:

• New 'account tree' style navigation
• In-Line editing of keywords, bids & ad placements
• Integrated reports on campaign management pages
• Roll-up views of all keywords, ads & placements in a campaign
• Ability to filter data faster
• Performance summary graphs to help pick trends faster

A little bit of research suggests that the new interface has already been tested by our English counterparts late in 2008. Have any of you had a play yet? If so what are your initial thoughts?

bacon for link bait

At Tribal DDB we have a number of FMCG clients and we are often presented with the challenge of creating a high level of online engagement for quite basic consumer products such as mayonnaise.

With mayo on the mind, one of our talented developers picked up on an interesting website from the States, its all about a product called baconnaise. The link was sent round to our team as a sort of joke. I mean bacon flavoured mayonnaise? Only in America.....

But as I surfed the website of baconnaise inventors J & D, I began to realise that these two bacon loving yanks had something that we all strive for when launching new products - a real point of difference. One of my early online marketing mentors introduced me to Seth Godins Purple Cow, and I soon realised that the internet and e-commerce as a lone combination would not be the source of my fortune, I needed a remarkable offering. You don't get a lot more remarkable than bacon flavoured mayonnaise, well in the FMCG world at least.

This power of a unique offering was only re-enforced to a greater extent when I put a link to the site in my Instant Messenger status. My network of friends picked up on the link and proceeded to engage in chats with me asking me how I found out about this bacon flavoured product.

This whole experience led to me thinking about how much more powerful a unique offering really is. I mean bacon flavoured mayonnaise really is more link worthy than plain old mayonnaise. Is there a lesson in how to market FMCG products online here.........?

The New Way to Search?

Not long ago I came across a new search engine that I thought I just had to share. Unlike the thousands of other search engines popping up all over the web, this one really did catch my attention. It's called Viewzi, and in my mind its changing the way we search.

In your typical search engine, whether you are searching for videos, or a new fridge for your home, typically you get the same standard text list results returned, which I am sure all of you are familiar with. Now I know Google is trying to lead the way with blended search, however what Viewzi does takes it to a new level.

Unlike the other search engines, including Google, Viewzi doesn't display search results like you are used to, it does it quite differently. Think about it, like in my example above, searching for a video is quite different to searching for a product to buy online, so doesn't it make sense to display these two different types of searches in different formats?

How Viewzi works is it creates many different ways of viewing search results, depending on what you are searching for, by having a number of different views to choose from. Once you perform a search, you are then able to choose how your search results are displayed. For example you can choose to use the 4 Sources View, which will return the top 4 rankings of your keyword from Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN, and list them as thumbnails, on the one page. This gives you the ability to quickly scan the larger search engines, while using only the one search engine. There are many other views to choose from, but will let you check them our for yourself .

So you may ask then, if this is so cool, is it now my default search engine? While I do believe this is a great new way to search, my answer is no. While I do enjoy viewing search results in different formats like Viewzi offers, the search results returned are not highly relevant to what I am looking for, mainly because of the fact I am based in Australia and as of yet Viewzi does not seem to have any country specific search options.

So while it doesn't replace Google as my most used search engine, I do believe these guys are heading in the right direction, and I bet you any money the likes of Google will be heading down this road in the very near future.

Broken Links - Thanks Google

As a webmaster, one thing I am always doing is fixing broken links on a website. Everyone knows that having a broken link on your website is no good for anybody, as if a user does click on one they are very likely to leave your site and never return. So I assume by this point most of you are agreeing with me? Right? OK so now what about broken links on external websites? For example someone is nice enough to link to you from their website, however the link is broken. Is this just as bad?

If you ask me I will tell you yes, I think it is just as bad for two reasons. One is that again the user will have a bad experience by arriving to your site only to realise the link was broken, and two, when a search engine such as Google crawles your website you are unlikely going to get credit for the link!

Now in the past it was pretty much impossible for you to find these broken external links, unless you randomly came across the website and noticed the link was broken, or were told by a user. However now thanks to the guys at Google  you can easily find these websites, using a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools. If you login to Webmaster Tools and view the "Not Found" and "Errors for URLs in Sitemaps" reports, you will see there is an added field called "Linked From" which lists the number of pages that link to that specific url. Clicking on the link opens a new window which shows you the websites where they are coming from. Now all you need to do is send a nice email to the webmaster of that site and ask them kindly to fix the broken link by providing them with the correct one!

Doing this and fixing any external broken links will take up a bit of your time, however if you know the importance of inbound links you will know it is time well spent.

new zealand page rank update

Whoaaaa half-geek has definitely been feeling the love from Google lately. My search traffic has received a nice boost. The page rank of my home page has stepped up to 4 from 3. It's a nice little reward for my hard work in 2007.

Funny thing is that I have been so busy at work in 2008 that the issue of page rank has been the last thing on my mind. Many search marketers will suggest that this is a good thing, they say page rank doesn't matter anyway.

But I have to say I was pretty happy when I eventually noticed......

It all started with my noticing some healthy rankings around some reasonably competitive terms like "facebook" and iPhone. The ultimate impact of higher search rankings is obviously higher traffic levels from search.

Has anyone else been feeling some google.co.nz page rank love lately? I'd really like to know the actual date the update happened...

eternal digital foot prints

The issue of digital foot prints has been top of mind with me of late. Mostly due to:

a) a discussion I had with someone re: creating a facebook account for your unborn child

and

b) the tragic suicide of a prominent US advertisng agency exec that I learnt of recently and have since been following online

So I have been thinking a little bit about both these things and I suppose that this post is just a brain dump around both a) and b):

a) Pre birth digital foot prints

So you are going to have a baby, is it ethical create a facebook account for your un-born child? On one hand, it is nearly inevitable that the said child will one day have his or her own facebook/bebo/whatever social network account.

So one could argue that it is a new parents obligation to be pro-active in creating a safe environment for their child, but does this rule apply in the context of the virtual world?

My opinion is that like baptism and circumsition, let the kid make up his/her own mind. Let the child choose whether they want their own facebook profile. I feel quite strongly about this given the facebook terms and conditions that are pretty clear in stating that they can do whatever they want with your data once you have signed up.

b) The suicide played out online...

Recently, a well known DDB executive based in Chicago (tragically) decided to take his own life. Being quite a high profile chap within the advertising industry meant that the whole tragedy of his death was played out online, particularly in the blogosphere.

I have no opinion in regard to this fellow and his actions, I don't feel qualified to comment. I do naturally feel extreme sorrow for his wife and two daughters.

Reading the heated comments on the RIP post by agencyspy was very interesting. Agencyspy seems to be an anonymous blogger with heavy opinions on the local US advertising agency industry. He had previously been very critical of the fellow who had taken his own life in an earlier post. He was apologizing and almost suggesting that he may have played a part in the suicude.

A flaming match between the sympathizers and the cold hearted ensued. One particular comment really caught my attention:

"At first, it struck me as odd that so many of Pauls family would be posting on this obscure industry blog. Cousins, In-laws, etc. Weird, right? Then I realized something. They are just googling him. Google Paul Tilley and all this crap comes up. Fucking internet. When Pauls kids are teens these fucking posts will still come up. We will forget and move on. They will forget and move on. But not the internet. From now on, most everything we do and say is recorded for all time. So now maybe we should all think about what we do and say."

Whilst the extremety of the language in this post is not ideal, I think this guys makes a good point. He is effectively talking about the digital footprint of someone in their death. Similarly to the example of a facebook profile for an unborn child, this fellow has no choice as to what information about him is posted.....

adwords quality score kicks in

It was almost a year ago when I posted about Google's new adwords quality score algorithm. Not surprisingly, a number of switched on marketers in the states have been keeping a very close eye on the impact that the quality scoring system has made to key adwords metrics such as CTR (Click through rate).

The idea for this post was sparked by a great post by LeeAnn over at Efficient Frontier that talks about the various search advertising networks and their comparative click through rates over the last year. These are very interesting statistics alone.

Jonathan Mendez made the same statistics even more interesting with his additional Google landing page quality & CTR insights. He has aligned the implementation of further adwords landing page quality score factors with a significant jump in CTR metrics from search based adwords campaigns.

From a kiwi perspective, this information is extremely valuable. These US based industry gurus are beginning to establish clear trends as a result of the changes that are being made to the way important tactics such as adwords work.

The sheer weight of numbers that are generated by the campaigns that these guys are running are not even comparable to even the largest Google advertisers in New Zealand. New Zealand businesses will always struggle to identify meaningful trends quickly in this type of fashion- they just cant generate enough clicks to analyze and make factual conclusions quickly & confidently.

Every so often we get an opportunity to leverage the knowledge that has been gained in the US (where applicable). The lesson in this instance is to ensure that your adwords campaign landing pages are extremely relevant to your ad creative. It's going to help your CTR which means more clicks which should mean more conversions....

2008 prediction number 1

One of the things that I have been looking forward to since starting half-geek earlier in 2007 is making a bunch of predictions for the new year. It's going to be interesting to look back in January 2009 and see how accurate my predictions were.....

So what I have decided to do is make 4 predictions for the web 2.0 space in New Zealand for 2008. These predictions are made with business strategy at top of mind. Please comment away and tell if you think I am right wrong or whatever!

This post will detail the first of my predictions and the following three will follow (one each day finishing on friday). So here we go

Prediction # 1 - $$ Adwords $$

The hard cores may not understand why I want to talk about adwords. To those who have been involved in online marketing for a while,  adwords is a staple ingredient of their online media mix. My first experience with Adwords was way back in 2003, yet to most of the New Zealand business community, the core advertising product that has made Google what it is today is still an un-tapped gold mine.

So I am making what I consider to be a very safe opening prediction: 2008 is the year that New Zealand businesses will spend up large on Adwords and properly adopt this marketing tactic. I appreciate that their are already a number of businesses that consider their spend on Google Adwords to be significant. I am not suggesting that they aren't significant enough. What I am suggesting is that the key 'spenders' in the online media space (The corporates) are going to rapidly adopt Adwords in 2008 and this will have somewhat of a 'tipping point' effect for the Adwords product in New Zealand.

My predictions are supported by the fact that Google now have a significant presence in New Zealand. They have a sales team based in Auckland and they are officially on the war path, hunting for business from the top online media spenders in New Zealand.

It must be so great to be a sales person for Google in a place like New Zealand. Credibility would not be an issue, you would almost be instantly considered as an expert based purely on your business card (and google's highly respected recruiting policies).....your offering a measurable advertising product that is backed by infinite case studies of success....You have no competition (in the NZ market)......

Another point that must be noted is the rise and rise of the traditional agencies' awareness of the importance of the Adwords product. The demand for experts in this space is high. The big name agencies here in NZ have recruited internationally, dragging back kiwis who have first hand experience in this 'new media' from places like London and New York.

Whilst traditional agencies lack the depth and breadth of experience in Search Engine Marketing and Adwords, one thing they do know how to do well is SELL. They have guru like master salesman that can pitch and sell ice to Eskimos. This will, of course, boost the buzz around the Adwords product. The question is can these agencies control the Adwords budget line, or will Google New Zealand take the lead of their European strategy and angle towards cutting agency commission and dealing directly with big Adwords clients?

I am predicting big things for the bottom line of the Google New Zealand P & L in 2008.

give me back my google

Have you noticed that your searches on google, particularly for consumer goods (like electronics), are often cluttered and/or dominated by price comparison engine sites? I have to admit that this is not an issue for most kiwi googlers. Price comparison engines are not a huge factor here in New Zealand (although I am willing to make a bet that they will be in the future).

If you shift your focus to buying retail consumer products using google in the United States, the issue of cluttered search results is all of a sudden far more apparent. The thing is that sometimes you don't want to see search results that are dominated by price comparison engines such as Kelkoo, Pricerunner or Bizrate.

The answer for you in this situatiion is GiveMeBackMyGoogle. This is a great little site that was recommended to me by a friend recently. I have to say I love the concept of this search engine.

Unfortunately for the developer of this new tool, it is highly unlikely that he will be able to build a successful business strategy around this product. For one, it is still based on google's core search technology (he/she has just used a syntax to display search results minus a huge number of price comparison sites). And secondly, it is likely that Google will launch a feature to address the issue of cluttered results in the near future anyway. My post about Googles new mashed up search talks about this as does my post about Google testing Category grouped search results.

But still, I like this new tool.

For the kiwis out there who are interested in doing a bit of price comparison shopping online in New Zealand, why not try Pricespy. It has always amazed me that Pricespy has not grown to be a more significant force in our local e-commerce space. So much potential, yet the site seems to have been quite stagnant for some years now since it won best small business website in the 2003 Netguide web awards. They seem to still be running a adsense based revenue model?

Some also may argue that trademe is the kiwi answer to price comparison online. Maybe trademe will look into features that head more down this track in the future. New product reviews would need to be included, however, this does shouldn't be too much of an issue for trademe to implement.

What do you guys think about price comparison engines for the New Zealand Market?

googles new mashed up search

In typical Google fashion, the nature of organic search is about to change and a whole new benchmark will be set for Google competitors such as Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search. Google is starting to leverage their new technology, not to mention their recent key acquisitions such as youtube.

There is a lot of talk around the industry about Google search 2.0 (well thats what I'm calling it anyway- works nicely with my blog's keyword targeting but some are actually calling it Google 3.0 which is probably more accurate).

Google 2.0/ 3.0 search is basically the new and more complex search results that Google's foundational organic search engine is rolling out to users. Search results in Google are now not just limited to the old page of 10 hyper links to specific URL's with a headline and two lines of descriptive text.

There is now a new search experience for Google users. The core principle of relevancy remains, however, the search results content is being beefed up with video content, maps and other real time information via key industry players (e.g fedex tracking information). It's awesome.

It takes a little while to get used to seeing this new information in Google, particularly given the fact that the flow of the traditional Google search results interface is effectively 'broken up' with various types of information. The most important thing though, as any search master will tell you, is the relevancy of the search results and Google are the search relevancy masters. The new Google 2.0/3.0 search is no exception to this rule.

Danny Sullivan (the un-official search master) has done a great job in creating a diagram that visually demonstrates the changes that are afoot in the Google search results. Click on the image at right to get an enlarged view of his cool graphic.

Whilst all of this 'Google mashed-up search' will be new to most of you, the hard cores (that's me I suppose) out there may have been aware of this roll out due to Google's un-official search technology beta site searchmash. Keep an eye on this site as it will often give you some insights into what Google may be up to in the future.

In terms of how this new Google search will effect online marketers and in particular SEO's, only time will tell.  Dave over at 500 hats has some interesting insights and ideas on how the Industry information results (like the fedex tracking results) may be influenced......