SearchPath Blog
SearchPath Internet Marketing Blog - Thoughts, ideas, humour, information and more ...
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
It's always interesting to see how external factors affect people's use of the Internet. Internet traffic in the UK usually spikes during bad weather - but what happens when the sun starts shining as it has this April?
Well, people go online and start searching for garden tools and furniture, with searches for these areas trebling in the sunny week of 31 March.
The 10 most searched items were:
- Black and Decker
- Lawn Mowers
- Flymo
- Black & Decker
- Petrol Lawn Mowers
- Petrol Lawnmowers
- Petrol Lawnmower
- Cheap Garden Furniture
- Lawnmower
- Lawnmowers
New figures from Hitwise show that Twitter is now the 50th most visited site in the UK, receiving more UK Internet searches than RightMove, the Daily Mail, MSN UK Search, Directgov and many retail sites.
The largest source of traffic to Twitter was Facebook, as a result of their close integration. Twitter of course sends a large amount of its traffic to other websites, which meant that it was the 36th biggest source of traffic to other websites in the UK.
You can now also follow
SearchPath on Twitter and keep abreast of Internet marketing and web developments.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Interesting figures from a recent industry survey...it found that companies are increasing their search budgets, as they look for measurable and transparent ROI in this difficult economic climate.
The annual UK Search Marketing Benchmark Report found that more than half of companies intend to increase the natural search budgets this year.
Google dominated companies' use of paid search, with 85% using Google for their paid campaigns, well ahead of yahoo at 44% and Microsoft at 30%.
The report also found huge growth in investment in social media which 65% of companies said they use as part of their marketing mix. Twitter was used for marketing by 49% of those surveyed, compared with just 3% a year ago.
A recent report from the European Interactive Advertising Assoc backs up these findings, showing that 70% of European advertisers intend to increase their online ad spend this year as budgets are shifted to online from traditional media, as a result fo the recession.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Google Labs has been hard at work looking at new features to build and test, one of which is the Google News timeline.
Google News Timeline shows search results in a graphical timeline from a wide range of sources. You can search and browse results from Google News, YouTube videos and archival newspapers and magazines.
You can browse through time, you can specify a date in your search, drag the timeline of results, or set the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or even decades.
All quite cool stuff - if you want to see more, visit the
Google News Blog.
Google introduced Sitelinks a while ago, with the aim of helping people navigate your site better.
Until now, Google has only shown sitelinks for the first search result. Google has now expanded its Sitelinks by introducing one-line Sitelinks which can appear for results that previously didn't show Sitelinks and also for results that are not in the first position.
Sitelinks are still automatically choosen for your website and Google's algorithms aren't perfect and sometimes Google assigns the wrong Sitelinks to a website. You can't tell Google which pages to choose, but you can block pages - if you need any help with this, let us know.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
So it's arrived, the new Adwords interface, in what seems like aeons in the making. My verdict - it's pretty good. Here are the main benefits I can see:
1. The graphs visible on every screen, displaying CPC, CTR and related metrics. These graphs were previously only available on the "Account Snapshot" screen, and were only available for the account as a whole, not for individual elements like ad groups.
2. The process of making changes to your account has been greatly speeded up. If you want to change bids, add keywords or write a new ad, for example, you no longer have to wait for various screens to reload as you go through the process. Instead, the changes are made "in screen", with no re-loading required. This greatly speeds up the account mangement process, and is a pretty cool feature.
3. Another major change to the interface is the way Google now allows a "top-down" view of the whole account, in terms of viewing the top performing keyword, ads and ad groups in the account. Before, if you wanted to view and compare the top performing elements of a campaign across thw whole account, you had to go into each ad group individually. Now, you can have a snapshot of the whole account. This makes analysis and decision making in a "macro" view much easier.
Despite these positive changes, there does seem to be a few teething problems with the new system - it seems to be running quite slow at the moment, plus I've notices a few graphical glitches. However, I think that these will only be temporary issues, and will give the new interface the thumbs up.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Currently, if you type "Swindon pizza" into Google, the venerable search engine will give you results that reflect the locality of the search terms, and will give you a local search box that gives details of pizza restaurants in Swindon. Do a search for "curry Swindon" and you will get similar results.
This week Google announced that it would be geo-targeting searches when they type service queries that don't specify a location. So, if you type just "pizza" into Google, the search engine will attempt to locate you (homing in on your IP), and show you results that are supposed to be from your area.
My experience of the geo targeting in this instance is similar to other examples of Google geo-targeting elsewhere (such as in Adwords), in that is generally not great. For example searches for non-local services (such as pizza, flowers and curry) carried out on my machine prompted a local result box from "near London", which, if you consider that fact that we are based in Cirencester, near Swindon, is not hugely accurate (at least its in the South, I suppose).
The problem with this type of geo-targeting is that it is based on IP-targeting, which is inherently innacurate. The problem is that when Google attempts to locate users, it homes in on the location of their IP address, which is the unique identifier of their PC. However, IP's can be registered any where in the country, not necessarily in the users vicinity. This makes the practice of IP-targeting often innacurate. You must question why Google is using this method of serving local results. It can only be the lack of suitable alternatives that is leading them down this road.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
We've just completed some work revamping the Trade Account area of the
TV Brackets Direct website.
This was a fairly complex piece of work, with most of the complexity hidden in the background of working out variable prices, quantity discounts, setting up user accounts and storing details and integration of the payment system into Protx.
The site can be seen at
www.tvbracketsdirect.co.uk.
We've just launched a revamp of
Swindon Lettings Agents' website to reflect their new brand and to improve the site's functionality. As with most estate agents' sites, this one is integrated with 3rd party property listing sofwtare. We also integrated it with Yahoo Maps so site visitors can see the locations of property.
We're also working on optimising the site so they're found for phrases such as '
houses to rent Swindon' & '
flats to rent in Swindon'.
