The growth of mobile web and the associated usage trends indicate that consumers are adopting a four-screen approach to content consumption. TV, PC, Smartphone and Tablet are used in sequence, with time and location being key factors determining which screens take priority. The iPhone dominates the ‘mobile screen wars’ with  huge 70% of all mobile visits now arriving via an iPhone device, followed by 24% of consumers using an Android device to access the mobile web.

“The first quarter saw the fastest growth in mobile web traffic to date”, commented Alex Hoye, CEO of Latitude. “Yes – mobile is growing rapidly, but what is even more exciting is the way consumers are using and engaging with Mobile and Tablet devices. There’s a huge difference in the way PCs, Tablet and Mobile are being used to access the web, ranging from the solidary, task-based user experience of the PC to the localised, personal browsing experience of the Mobile.  Both Mobile and Tablet Cost-Per-Click rates are still lower than desktop, creating fantastic opportunities for advertisers to acquire high quality traffic at a reduced rate. It is crucial advertisers also think about messaging that is relevant and consistent throughout the different devices.”

Download the Q1 2012 Latitude Mobile Review.

Google’s Paul Coffey started off the day with introducing guests to Google + and explained how it aims to make sharing on the web more like sharing in real life. There were tips on how business can benefit from the social network platform and a live hangout with the singer Daria Musk from the US east coast and her fans from all over the world.

Next up on the stage was Bruce Daisley, Twitter’s commercial director in the UK, who highlighted Twitter’s changing role as not just a social network, but an information network. According to Bruce, a massive 1 billion tweets are now being sent every 3 days. In addition, Bruce pointed out that Twitter often finds the right answer before the user knows what question to ask, and adduced examples of Absolute Radio, American Express and British Hear Foundation and their efficient use of Twitter.

The duo then joined Darran Kilburn from the online retailer Get The Label for a panel discussion ‘Social marketing: where UGC, hyper-relevance and pageviews collide’ where the panellists discussed the future of social marketing.

After a refreshment break the event broke up into two different streams. The data stream saw Kevin Telford, Callcredit Strategy Director talk about monetising data, and Craig Carr from Lifestyles Online sharing his opinion on Lead Generation.

Meanwhile in the digital stream, Paul Kennedy from Callcredit focused on geo social services looking at, among other things, the correlation between checkins and likes. His presentation was followed by the ‘Getting personal’ panel session chaired by Latitude’s own Holly Wilde and her guests Dax Hamman from Chango, Biren Kalaria from Invite Media, Andrew Morsy from Struq and Niki Stoker from Tribal Fusion. The big part of the discussion was the effect cookie law will have on retargeting in the UK, with the panellists agreeing that the next generation of consumers will most likely not be so hung up on online privacy.

The streams were again joined after lunch, when the main stage was taken by Zoe Palethorpe, the Data Assets Director from Trading Floor and Callcredit’s Managing Director Chris McDonald, who covered the topic ‘Big data: big picture – building a 3D view of the consumer’. The presentations were followed by ‘Single person view – digital and data glued’ by Kevin Telford and a panel session with Alex Willcocks, VisualDNA CEO, moderated by Antony Gegley from Database Marketing. Richard Gregory, Latitude Chief Operations Officer then grabbed everyone’s attention by declaring that ‘the desktop is death’ while presenting statistics of smartphone usage, mobile display and tablet growth. The end of the day was spiced up by COI Director of Direct Marketing and Evaluation Marc Michaels who shared a word on an integrated multi-media approach to behaviour change.

The conference was followed by reception drinks, when the guests shared views and experience of the day, networking and soaking up the magical atmosphere of BAFTA venue.

If you missed out on all the news and statistics, you can download the presentations from Performance 2012 by clicking here.

Back in 2010 I blogged about Google entering the credit card comparison search space, but this update and modification sees a new type of ad-unit integrate smoothly within the Google search results. I think it looks great, but it isn’t going to slot in without an impact on the search space. It is worth pointing out too that at the moment this is only being triggered though desktop and laptop devices, so tablet and mobile devices aren’t impacted (yet).

A new type of ad

This isn’t PPC or Natural Search listings being displayed differently – it is a new, third type of ad unit now being displayed in Google’s competitive search results. It isn’t currently appearing for all credit card, savings and current account queries, but we would clearly expect this to be the case as the initial launch is extended to cover more marketplaces for each of these three products.

In the past Google has always been very keen to stress that their search results represent ‘unbiased and objective’ results, but this sponsored comparison ad unit clearly presents advertisers with an opportunity to pay for inclusion of their products. More paid for real estate in the search results. This is undoubtedly the first real change in the SERPs evident since the Google acquisition of Beat that quote back in Q1 2011. We knew it would come, but didn’t really know when.

In the screenshot above, we can see that Barclaycard now have a very strong double listing in the paid and comparison spaces combined. This is a new opportunity for advertisers undoubtedly, but from a search engine marketing perspective – it presents an even greater challenge to those running PPC adverts and those looking to optimise their content to rank naturally for these product queries.

How have the Search Results changed?

-          There are now only 2 traditional PPC listings at the top of the results for these queries

-          The third is replaced by the comparison ad units

-          The fold in the page on a smaller laptop display only displays a single organic listing (moneysupermarket.com)

How might this influence your search campaign performance?

-          PPC click through rate (CTR) could be negatively impacted by users being drawn to the new ad units

-          Price comparison websites might become more aggressive via PPC to capture or compete with this, pushing up CPCs from this perspective

-          A poorer CTR in higher positions could negatively impact quality score (although this could be relative and apply to the whole marketplace)

-          If PPC advertisers drop their presence and focus on these new ad units – average CPCs could decline, presenting an opportunity for some to be more aggressive than they have been historically, mixing it with the big boys

-          If you don’t have a PPC or natural search listing which has been enhanced by PPC ad extensions or seller reviews,  then overall campaign performance, CTR and volume could well suffer

-          Organic CTR from natural results is also going to be skewed, given that organic results have been pushed further down the page, predominantly below the fold

-          If you are occupying an aggressive position in the PPC listings, you might consider looking at a strategy to double face using this new ad-unit

-          Desktop only

What about your wider campaign strategy?

-          A traditional heavy reliance on the price comparison websites which deliver consistent volume for these products m might now change considerably once this rolls out fully

-          Will this force some price comparison sites to review how much they are charging for business volume?

-          If your product is able to stack up against the competition in this space – then you might consider reallocation of spend to this area, or away from traditional PPC

-          The traditional benchmark indicators for product competitiveness become all the more important here:

• 0% Balance transfers
• 0% on Purchases
• Representative APR

If you don’t want to compete in this space, you might well avoid some of the so called “rate tarts” in the marketplace, but ultimately a new channel has emerged here – and your likely to want to be part of it rather than miss out on that volume to your competitors.

Is it an abuse of Google’s position as the dominant channel in search? This isn’t a channel open to all in a fair manner – it eliminates the price comparisons websites ability to compete. Maybe it is unfair, to them… but a Barclaycard might disagree!

More to come on this, no doubt.

Personalised Pandas and Penguins in Venice

The first of these big updates, Panda  came last February but you can track it’s history back to Eric Schmidt’s famous comments in October 2008:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem.  Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

Panda

Google Panda destroyed the idea of sprawling websites made up of cookie cutter pages as a viable option for SEO rankings.  Google introduced Panda to counter the spread of low quality content what was detrimental to user experience.  At the time, Panda was cast as an algorithm update that would raise the quality of content that people saw when they used Google to find information.  The way Google introduced Panda , and advised webmasters what to expect was telling:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

Content Farm websites which built up massive numbers of thin pages by paying fractions of a penny per word took a big hit.  Deservedly.

Penguins

More recently, and still in the same vein, we had Penguin.  Penguin’s not about the quality of the page you’re looking at, but the reliability of the pages that link to it.  The right response to Panda was to invest more in your user experience, improving the content on your website to increase the level of trust and authority that it held within a niche.  Great content attracts links, because it’s the kind of thing that people are willing to “share with a friend”.  But unless people can find that content in the first place they can’t.  The unintended consequence of Panda was to push the low quality content into an invisible tier of the internet where it was used solely for the purposes of building links.

Rather than fill their own website with thousands of pages of garbage, publishers created networks of content that they could reuse (spin) multiple times in order to use it for links.  This worked pretty well, and until comparatively recently, you would see many questionable websites ranking for big money terms.  This false authority in Google creates yet another trust issue.  If it’s easy to rank simply by using garbage content and posting thousands of links in a gigantic network, then you have a situation where users can’t really trust the search results.  Spun content is content which has had individual words and phrases changed to differentiate it from the original version.  You can do it automatically, which means it’s cheap content, and it’s also a lot easier to spot than a lot of people think.  Here’s an example:

Starting with this:

Once upon a time there was a young SEO professional called James who joined an agency called Latitude to make a name for himself in the city.

You get this:

A long time ago there was a youthful Search Engine Optimisation specialist named James who entered a consultancy named Latitude to become well known in the city.

Which evolves into this:

A lengthy period in the past there was a spritely seek motor improvement doyen baptised James who inserted a troupe termed Latitude to develop legendary status in the conurbation.

Spun content is easy to spot because it stops making sense pretty quickly the more you adapt it.  Google have a big database of language that makes sense because they have a big database of content that demonstrates authority and is trusted by users.  By comparing the garbage level spun content that you find on a lot of sites, it becomes easy to wipe them out.

Penguin appears to be a filter that spots trash and discounts it and the links that come from it.  It’s not been widely welcomed by a lot of people, because it appears to throw false positives a lot of the time – although as the filters get refined, it will get better.

Venice

Google’s been getting more and more personal over the past few years.  You only have to look at your ad preferences page to get a feeling for what they know about you as a user.  We’ve had personalised results based on location for a while, but the recent Venice Update changed things a lot.  Rather than the older version of the localised results where you’d see a number of map listings inserted into the results page, these are now indistinguishable from the rest of the search results for selected queries.

Useful?  Well, as noted above, Google have a lot of search history data from a lot of people.  They measure interest in different search terms over time, and iterate their algorithm based on that.  If people weren’t refining their searches based on local preferences (eg: “taxi”, “taxi Warrington”) then Google wouldn’t be able to assign a local bias to the results.  Venice results are useful for users and give them better results when they search for a keyword where a local business provides a more appropriate answer.

In the past, a challenge like Venice, would inevitably have elicited an SEO response of building multiple pages to target all the different neighbourhoods in the country with a dedicated page, although in a post-panda/post-penguin era, this isn’t an option.

The challenge for an SEO campaign is that Venice makes the traditional idea of rankings obsolete.  Personalised results in general mean that different people will see Google in different ways, and that’s generally a good thing.  As any advertiser will tell you , the more appropriate your audience is, the more likely they are to buy from you.

Venice is interesting because it genuinely is the final nail in the coffin of absolute rankings as measured by a tool like AWR as a metric of success.  Ranking software isn’t everyone, and isn’t everywhere.  It’s a stateless piece of software sitting on a proxy that hides its location from the real world, and although it gives an indication of where things are heading for a website, the picture it paints becomes increasingly inaccurate as results become more focused on individuality, and take no notice of the social relationships and recommendations that people make to each other.

Penguins, Pandas, and romantic Italian Cities are all lovely fluffy things, and in many ways appropriate to the kind of social layer that Google is applying to their results. In a personalised world, the only way you can measure success is at the bottom line: more people buying more things.  With Google’s recent changes and the changes to come, the only way to encourage that is to provide an amazing experience for your customers and be the company that they can trust.

Speaking of lovely fluffy things, here’s a picture of a search engine spider courtesy of my 3 year old girl:

Search Engine Spider

The How-Do awards celebrate innovation and success within the digital and media industries. Latitude, who has recently acquired a string of accounts including beer brand BrewDog and signed a partnership with web hosting  company 1&1 and Trinity Mirror , is proud to have been recognised for its expertise.

“Latitude has been a pioneering agency in Search Marketing since our conception”, Richard Gregory, COO of Latitude, commented. “Being recognised for this award reflects our constant drive to develop and keep at the forefront of all things digital. The success of our PPC work both internationally and in the UK alongside the pre-emptive measures we took to ensure our SEO clients were fully prepared for the launch of Google Panda, are only a fraction of what we have achieved in the last 12 months. Latitude continues our evolution in everything search and digital.”

The battle took place in Manchester and gathered voluntaries from 20+ agencies. Latitude staff members Lloyd Cooke, Richard Linley, Ashley Westwood, Paul Stevens, Craig Murphy, Craig Jackson, Nicholas Taylor, Chris White, Mark Johnson and Jack Finlay were all there forming two teams thus increasing the chances of Latitude winning (cheeky!).

And oh boy! Was this a fight! Everyone fought bravely and although other agencies had some tricks up their sleeve, our boys were determined to succeed. The battle was a close one, but in the end Lloyd’s team used all of their power and skills to beat other teams and came first.

After the tough game they restored to childhood by running around shooting each other with laser guns at laser quest! (Boys will be boys).

The team won a trophy which is now pride of place in the Warrington office. Impressive, isn’t it?

Well done to everyone that was involved, great effort!

Cynics may be forgiven for thinking this is just another Google lever designed to increase traffic and therefore, increase Google Adwords spend. They may also point out that Yahoo already did this with their Standard Match but then the Search Alliance will ensure that Google stand alone with this notion, so good timing really!

Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?

Ok, so we may not need to worry about the children but what about the small businesses who have less time to spend on managing their Adwords accounts? They could be the ones that suffer unaware of the increased traffic heading their way. However, they could benefit also and short of heading straight for the Latitude Express website, the near phrase and near exact matches will save precious time in ensuring they have covered all relevant keyword variations with Google’s matching technology doing the leg work.

But I Just Restructured My Google Account!!!

Yes, this could mean a re-think on your account structure but all is not lost – you can simply opt out by trawling through your campaign settings and navigating to…well see the image below:

On the plus side, the notion that less is more can really be applied here. All those misspellings you generated; the careful categorising of singular and plural variations; the meticulous grouping of keyword stemmings and the clever pursuit of acronyms no longer need to be catered for. Why analyse 50 keywords when you can analyse 10? Just be sure that that keyword performance of one variation does not vastly differ else you will lose a degree of control.

Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth!

It might be best not to look a gift horse in the eye either if you watch the Apprentice but I digress. Google say, “We’ll use your exact keyword, and not close variants, to determine your Quality Score and first page bid estimate”. Great! If you have a singular version of your keyword with a lower Quality Score than the plural, then that sounds like a quick win to me and should make for some pretty easy decisions when it comes to refining keyword selection.

The Glass is Half Empty

So what about negative matching? When the time comes you will be able to see your search term match types described as ‘Exact match (close variant)’ and ‘Phrase Match (close variants)’ in search query reports. This will give you the opportunity to assess what you are being matched to and allow you to apply negatives accordingly. This will also help you identify which other keywords in your account are being cannibalised so you can develop your account accordingly.

Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You!

Google could have announced that this would be rolled out on the 15^th May but that would have been too exact, so expect it sometime in mid-May and be sure to monitor your account. Latitude certainly will be monitoring how this develops and we’ll tell you exactly what we think about it…or near enough.

Having recently secured management of a series of MENA clients’ digital activities, Latitude has seen an increase in the number of companies looking for experienced digital marketing agencies.

“Latitude has been involved in the UAE market for a while now”, commented CEO Alex Hoye. “This is a particularly great time for us to move forward with our expansion strategy as we feel the market has a burgeoning demand for high quality digital marketing expertise. The marketing spend towards digital in the European and US markets is now larger than traditional print advertisement and the UAE market is surging to catch up.”

The services provided by Latitude include Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay-per-Click (PPC), Display Advertising, Affiliate and Social Media Marketing. Latitude are market leaders in the advanced European markets and with 20 native speakers – ranging from Arabic to Japanese and European languages – on board, they have the tools to work with campaigns within the UAE and internationally.

Partnering with a local design consultancy compliments Latitude’s service offering and enables the two companies to offer clients a more integrated approach. While North55 has the design capabilities to include aspects like SEO, Latitude looks at projects from a more technical perspective.

“North55 is really excited about the partnership with Latitude. The company’s experience and knowledge of all things digital is really impressive and exactly what the Middle East region is in need of. Add this to North55’s passion for strong creativity and we believe we have something unique to offer current and future clients,” explained Mike Platts, creative partner, North55.

Latitude’s UAE operation will be headed by Account Director Kinloch Magowan and Account Manager Matt Holmes. Both have worked in the digital industry for a number of years and have a wealth of expertise behind them. The pair will oversee Latitude’s development and growth, with Matt managing operations locally.

The announcement follows a successful start to the year for Latitude as they announce a partnership with internet hosting provider 1&1 alongside a major financial client in Dubai. Latitude will be launching a series of workshops in the Dubai region, aimed to inform and educate marketing professionals on digital marketing opportunities.

The How-Do awards celebrate innovation and success within the digital and media industries. Latitude, who has recently acquired a string of accounts including beer brand BrewDog and signed a partnership with web hosting  company 1&1 , is proud to have been selected as an award finalist and recognised for its  expertise.

“Latitude has been a pioneering agency in Search Marketing since our conception”, Richard Gregory, COO of Latitude, commented. “Being nominated for this award reflects our constant drive to develop and keep at the forefront of all things digital. The success of our PPC work both internationally and in the UK alongside the pre-emptive measures we took to ensure our SEO clients were fully prepared for the launch of Google Panda and our continuing investment in the SME market are only a fraction of what we have achieved in the last 12 months. Latitude continues our evolution in everything search and digital.”

The winners will be announced by How-Do at The Point, Lancashire County Cricket Club, on Thursday 26 April 2012.

To best describe what product listings are and how they work, who better to describe them than Google themselves, “Product Listing Ads are search ads that include richer product information – including product image, price, and merchant name – without requiring additional keywords or ad text. Whenever a user enters a search query relevant to an item in your Google Merchant Centre account, Google may automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name.”

The key advantage of product listing adverts is that they can appear alongside a text advert and take up more advertising space on the SERP’s page, if your client also takes the 1^st organic listing then this is a great way to capture a lot of traffic on certain terms that could be valuable to the client. Product listing adverts also allow advertisers to promote all the brands within their merchant centre feed very quickly.

An example of product listing adverts within search results.

Below is quick set up guide for product listing adverts based upon Google advice and our experience of using them over a period of time.

• Firstly set up a new campaign for Product Listings
• Add a new ad group for each brand/product type
• Set up product extensions
• Add a ‘product listing ad’ found under the ‘ads’ tab in Adwords.
• There is an option when selecting the product listing advert to place a promotion which will also appear in your PLA advert alongside the brand the advert is created for.
• For each ad group use auto targets and click ‘add product target’, then choose one of the options depending on what field you want Google to use from the merchant centre feed.
• For our clients we use the brand then add the name of the brand in the box provided then ‘validate’.
• Once you click validate then Google will show you whether it will match any activity within your Google Merchant Centre.
• Product listings DO NOT use keywords, all the information for targeting Google uses is taken from auto targets and applied to the merchant centre feed.
• We found it took a day for the activity to start appearing on Google.

Based upon our experience we have added some best practice and insight points which have resulted in great performance for our clients.

Best Practices & Insight

• Set up a separate ad group for each product/brand category. This will provide more controls for bidding, offer copy and targeting.
• Unlike the more conventional paid text adverts, you have to be in the top 2 or 3 places to get any traffic, so bidding a bit more may be necessary for testing.
• Use negatives like you would with broad match search adverts.
• An interesting side benefit of product listing adverts is that once sufficient data has been accrued you can pull a search query report from the PLA campaign which can be an ace way of finding new keywords (and negatives) for your core AdWords campaigns.
• It is vital to keep up to date with changes to the Google Merchant Centre feed requirements.
• Increase bids after a few weeks for brands that have received no impressions as the market may be more competitive than brands that are receiving impressions.

All information provided by Google on product listing adverts can be found below here.