Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug » Pay Per Click (PPC)

Love is all around us

turan — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:33:34 +0000

Valentine’s Day is just a week away. For marketers looking to take advantage of the holiday, Google and Microsoft adCenter have provided several ideas based on what users are already searching for.

Among the top searches people are conducting on Google you can find:

valentines day meals
diy valentines gifts
valentines day border
valentines day drinks
valentines day baskets

And below is the list of top products that benefit on Valentine’s Day:

Flowers
Chocolates
Lingerie
Travel/Short Trips
Jewellery
Dating

And just a bit of statistics. According to Google daily “valentines day” related searches have increased 35 percent over last year. Across relevant categories, jewellery is seeing a 42 percent increase in mobile and desktop queries compared to January of last year; gifts jumped 27 percent, and flowers saw an 18 percent spike.

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Rumour has it

turan — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:58:56 +0000

The ban of side placements of brand keywords search results in the US turned out to be just a rumour.

Google has confirmed that there was no change in policy with regards to the placements of brand keywords search results. Ads still can appear at the top, on the right hand side and at the bottom of the page. That applies to all countries.

Google suspects that the confusion with regards to the placements of the brand keyword searches came from the November updates. As of November ads that have previously shown to the side of the results started in some cases appear below them. The space on the side is taken over by maps, local business locations and Google +.

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Focus on the User

Faye — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:51:03 +0000

Since the launch of Search plus Your World, Google has increasingly come under fire for acting in its own best interests and edging out other social networks from its search results.

So much so that engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have teamed up to create a new tool, or bookmarklet called ‘Focus on the User‘. by using this tool, which runs in chrome, Firefox or Safari. Users can see search results from a wide range of social networking sites from LinkedIn to Crunchbase instead of being automatically met with Google+ results.

How it works:

The bookmarklet’s creators had this to say on how it works

When you search for “cooking” today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie’s Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago. Is Google’s relevance algorithm simply misguided?

No. If you search Google for Jamie Oliver directly, his Twitter profile is the first social result that appears. His abandoned Google+ profile doesn’t even appear on the first page of results. When Google’s engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right.

So that’s what our “bookmarklet” does. It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+

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Start a conversation in the Search results using Google+

Nick — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:09:25 +0000

I’m starting to think that Google actually had a plan when they launched Google+ and even better than that – they are sticking to it and rolling it out bit by bit. OK it’s still early doors for Google+ but its starting to feel less of a flop than everyone was predicting.
I believe that Google’s new SSL search launched in the US, which makes searching anonymous when you are logged in to a Google property, is in fact a pre-emptive attack on any legislation in the future that might suggest that Google has too much data on an individual when all Google + plans are finally revealed…
The latest evolution is that you can now comment on a search result within Google+ How long before you can comment on the search platform itself…
Read more about Google’s integration of Search and Social here

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Facebook Sponsored Stories in the News Feed

turan — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:55:54 +0000

Facebook has begun rolling out Sponsored Stories in the news feed. The ads started rolling out gradually from the beginning of January, allowing brands to reach users whose friends have interacted with their pages – for instance with a like, a comment, or another action.

“You will only see Sponsored Stories in your news feed about your friends or people you are connected to,” Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson confirmed. She added, “We want to be really thoughtful about this, so we’ll have a lot of rate limits in place. We hope to show people no more than one Sponsored Story in their News Feeds per day and we’ll clearly label the story. They’ll also be of the same size and treatment as other stories in News Feed.”

The new ad placement could lay the foundation for Facebook to finally begin advertising in mobile.

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Apple Education Announcement

Nick — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:50:15 +0000

Rumours are spreading that Apple is going to digitize textbooks. The iPad will become the classroom’s computer – notebook – textbook(s). Seems like the right way forward to us. The announcement has just started in the US – will keep everyone posted with the latest that come out of it. Related posts:Apple is plotting its [...] Related posts:

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SEO predictions for 2012 – The impact of social signals on rankings

janina — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:55:25 +0000

Hello world of search!

This is my first blog post here at Tug. I’ve read quite a lot of SEO predictions for 2012, the most common being “Change of the search engine’s algorithm in favour of social signals”.

In my opinion this is a fairly safe prediction with Google heavily pushing their own social network Google+ (“Search Plus Your World”) and both Google and Bing having already confirmed that they take social signal into account. Even though we don’t know for sure how/if social signals have a direct impact on rankings there has been confirmation by some research that social signals have a correlation with higher rankings (but remember: correlation ? causation… There are some fairly plausible reasons why websites that are being liked, tweeted, +1ed etc. rank better even if those signal aren’t an offical ranking factor (e.g. they are usually updated more frequently). It would be interesting to measure this correlation and see if it increases over time.

So what will happen if social signals have more of an impact on SERPs? That probably depends on how big that impact actually is. Let’s just imagine that in 2013 Panda had devaluated most low-quality links and it has become harder obtain links that push the rankings. Social signals have become the new ‘link gold and all webmasters and SEOs put their efforts into getting those social signals to improve their rankings. Would this put a stop to SPAM like Google hopes? I doubt it, I think it would just take on another form. There will always be ways that those who chose to wear dark headgear will try to manipulate rankings by spamming. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a hunt for likes, +1s, comments etc. for rankings. Whilst this would not necessarily be a bad thing, just as some ways of link building are not (link bait, high quality directories, links earned by giving free stuff away or donating to charity etc.) there is always room for abuse. We already see competitions that can be entered by tweeting, liking etc. and I’m sure we will see more of that – much more. Whilst this will certainly be considered white hat, I don’t see why some people wouldn’t try to “buy” those signals from influential people in their industry (I assume authority will measure the value of those signals. No doubt if it happens we will get the benefit of many more tools and rankings that measure social signals)…

Another possibility I could see is that certain websites only allow you to access certain content of their site if you give like, +1, tweet (…) them, just as with paid for ‘pro’ content. In that case it might become hard to participate in a lot of stuff on the web for those who decide to not sign up on social networks (I’m sure there are still a lot of people who don’t like them for privacy or other reasons. Certainly not many people in the SEO industry but I’m thinking of the average Internet user).

It used to be keyword stuffing and then link spam that black hat used to manipulate their rankings. Of course I don’t know, but predictions are fun when you look back to them after a year and see what actually happened – whether you were right or wrong…

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Axe Launches New Fragrance with a Comic Book

hannah — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:06:02 +0000

Axe has gone for a new original approach for the launch of its new fragrance line, Anarchy. The brand is introducing two scents, one for men and one for women, with a graphic novel, which is to be generated via the input of Facebook fans.

I’m not sure it would make me buy it but it’s an interesting idea, have a look…

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Tug win GOLD at the DMAs with milk&more!

Faye — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:47:28 +0000

Last night Tug scooped the gold for Best Use of Search for our milk&more campaign at the DMAs.

Great team effort for everyone involved on milk&more and congratulations to Dave, Hannah, Ollie, Juan, Faye, Rainelda and Neil who have all worked so hard to make it the winning campaign!

Judge’s comment:““This campaign really pushed the boundaries, taking a functional search strategy to another level. Not only did it demonstrate the full potential of what search can achieve, but it delivered depth within each aspect, driving some fantastic results.” Phil Nunn, Draft FCB

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Littlewoods advert…I like it

hannah — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:03:43 +0000

So I don’t know if you have seen the Littlewoods Christmas advert this year but I like it. It’s a children’s nativity all about presents and gifts. Sounds pretty normal. However it has been plagued with hundreds of complaints. Mum’s and Dad’s are accusing it of ‘ruining Christmas for kids’. Their Facebook page and the ad on YouTube have been hit by numerous comments requesting that the advert be banned.

“What a great example to kids to know that what makes a mother a good one is how much over-expensive bling she buys them at Christmas.”

Littlewoods is attempting to keep the damage to a minimum by disabling the comment option on YouTube and apparently censoring its Facebook page – although it has denied this. They are maintaining that the number of complaints in comparison to the number of views is minimal and the positive response overshadows the minority.

Encouraging consumerism or just another Christmas advert encouraging people money?

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