You visit Google because you have a need – a need for information or a product and any salesman will tell you that if you identify the need you’re half way to selling a customer a solution. That’s what Google does – it offers solutions; advertisers pay to be seen as the solution providers – visitors come to click on their ads. Everybody wins; visitors fill a need, vendors sell a product, Google makes ad revenue ($36.5bn in 2011). As more advertisers enter the market they out bid each other forcing the click price up for advertisers, giving Google even more revenue… and that will continue for the foreseeable future (despite a surprise 8 per cent decline in the average cost per click in 2011).

You visit Facebook because… well why do you visit Facebook? Boredom? At a lose end? Usually I’m in a queue or about to snuggle up in bed and am curious to see what my friends (past and present) are up to. See a sales model there? Nope – which is why Facebook are trying to persuade the business world that ‘Facebook users influence each other’s buying decisions’. It’s true that they could of course, but I rarely see it on Facebook; you’d have to assume that people either already had a need for that recommended product and needed a nudge, or were holding spare cash and were easily persuaded to change their ‘Facebook boredom’ mindset to a ‘I need to buy something’ one. Indeed recent media coverage has talked of companies closing their Facebook stores  “..it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.” General Motors has announced that it would be pulling its paid advertising from Facebook, saying that it had too little impact.

That puts Facebook in the same place as most media companies – ad space as a distraction from looking at something else – they sell ads based on demographics because their readers are ‘the target audience’ but distraction banners average a ‘click through’ of 0.2% whereas Google’s ‘need targeted’ sponsored ads are at least ten times that and usually MUCH more (the Firetop campaign average is 5% plus).

All I really check on Facebook now is my newsfeed and for the most part news feed updates that I see are either:

• Comment on breaking news / music / memories
• Comment on the weather
• Comment on kids and pets
• Photos of nights out / weddings
• Funny pictures (most of which stopped being funny via email years ago)
• General moaning (work, in-laws etc.)
• Subtle gloating ‘life doesn’t get much better than this’

As for the status updates from things that I’ve liked (note the tense) – I’ve hidden ALL of those from my feed because they interrupt the flow of miscellaneous trivia being generated by my ‘friends’. I like or liked those companies or products, but I don’t LOVE many of them now… so a promotional post is VERY annoying. Of the Facebook ‘company’ pages that I have been involved with, the ‘Facebook Insights’ data shows that after 3 months most posts are only seen by around 33% of those who originally ‘Liked’ the page (despite the best efforts of all involved). Independent research “found that (in a review of 4,000 Facebook pages) the average page post is only reaching 17 percent of the page’s fans”. That’s quite telling – if a page says it has 10,000 fans, it’s likely that 8,300 of them have already hidden any communications from their visible Facebook news feed. They took whatever special offer was running to make them ‘Like’, and then blocked out the irrelevant follow-ups… that’s what company promotions are within a social context, they’re irrelevant, and anything else just doesn’t make direct money even if it gets engagement.

Where’s this all leading? Well I have been paying attention for a number of months to web traffic data gathered by Alexa.com (“Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources“.) Alexa shows some interesting trends when comparing Facebook with Google – trends which investors should be aware of.

Firstly as we entered 2012 the number of Facebook visits starting AND ending with a single page view (known as the bounce rate) are gaining and have now matched the same level as Google. This is a worrying sign because Facebook needs ten times as many page views as Google in order to generate the same number of clicks (and ad revenue). At the same time Google’s bounce rate has fallen marginally – suggesting improved repeat search and user experience. Winner? Google.

Secondly between 2010 and 2012 Facebook’s average daily time on site has dropped from around 33 minutes to around 20 minutes. Now 20 minutes is a substantial amount of time per day but it’s 39% less time than was being spent two years ago. Is the decline indicative of visitor apathy? Google’s time on site is largely flat (start to end) over the same period at 12 minutes per day. Winner? Google.

Thirdly the number of pages being read per day on Facebook is falling – it’s down from 15 per day to 13 per day, for Google the total is largely flat at 12 pages per day. Facebook needs to put a zero on the end of it’s figure to compete on ad revenue. Winner? Google.

Finally from Alexa’s ‘clickstream analysis’ we can see that 7.52% of Facebook visitors are on Google.com before visiting Facebook and 7.54% immediately after visiting Facebook. On the flipside 4.29% of Google’s users are on Facebook before coming to Google, and 4.02% return afterwards. One could also surmise that if 7.52% of Facebook.com users going to Google.com represents only 4.29% of Google’s upstream visits, Google has an ACTIVE user base 75% larger than Facebook. In June 2011, comScore put Google’s worldwide reach at 1 billion unique visitors, if that’s 75% larger than Facebook it puts Facebook’s active monthly account usage at 572 million (600mn in Feb 2012 so down 4.66% in 2 months), not the 800 million frequently quoted in the media. Winner? Google.

So, before we all get carried away with investing in an overpriced Facebook IPO, it’s worth remembering that Google’s share price dropped 10% on the NASDAQ in January because investors were disappointed with their MASSIVE $36.5 billion ad revenue. Given that Facebook ads perform 10 times less effectively on click through than Google’s, the difference in visitor mindset, AND the data they have on me is LESS than what Google have, I wouldn’t ever expect Facebook ad revenue to exceed one tenth of Google’s… and with that in my ‘mindset’ I’m off to buy some shares in Google.

Matt Peskett is Online Marketing Consultant at Firetop  and a Twitter addict (@PensionFunds)

As well as WordPress themes, Artisteer can produce themes for Joomla and Drupal, but of course it can’t do everything, if you have any specific creative imagery in mind then you need to start with a decent header layout, and import that into Artisteer. There’s also a need to crop and edit your own png files with varying degress of transparency if you want to use custom icons. Once imported though the ‘suggestion’ buttons work across the whole theme or against individual components (headers, footers, menus, columns) to revolve multiple colour scheme and format suggestions.  This makes the decision making process of WordPress theme design so much faster than hand coding style sheet amends of hexidecimals and processing hundreds of FTP uploads and browser refreshes.

Having now successfully completed a theme, exported and imported it without any issues and populated it with content on a WordPress installation, I can safely say that it is well worth the cost of the Artisteer ctivation code (approximately £85 I think for the Standard edition). I will certainly be making more use of this great application in future and spending less time tinkering with the templates at woothemes.com (although those really are first rate theme designs – it’s where I got the Firetop theme from).

It seems like such a cool product that, having been reading the subscriptions website so much over the Christmas period, I’ve had to subscribe myself to appease my inner child! Now I’m hoping I don’t become addicted to collecting the Pokemon style trading cards. Take a look at the Top Gear Turbo Challenge TV advert on Youtube to see the James Hammond narrated promotion and get a glance at the free Stig gifts:

Despite saying that he was a little tired (understandably having sung with Sir Paul McCartney less than 24 hours before), Jamie seemed very friendly to all and gave us an acoustic rendition of songs ranging from REM and Cold Play (Yellow) to his X Factor trademark audition song ‘Kings of Leon – Sex is on Fire‘. I managed to grab some footage of him singing the Killers – Mr Brightside (with numerous hysterical teenagers) which I’ve whacked on YouTube as below… pretty good for an artist who wasn’t even meant to be playing a guitar when he arrived and just picked it up for fun (which I managed to find out from organisers TMB Marketing and Communications). Funniest moment was being asked if I was Jamie Archer’s manager (I was suited and booted)!

Jamie Archer: Killers – Mr Brightside

Jamie Archer: Cold Play – Yellow

This of course suddenly adds much weight to the usefulness of Twitter for search engine positioning – and the timing is probably just as well because most reports I read in the past two months had suggested that the Twitter novelty factor probably wasn’t going to be enough to sustain traffic… enter Google!

You can see a really short demonstration of the real time Twitter results via the short video below or alternatively the only live example I could find today was on the topical keyword of Copenhagen. I’m glad to see that the position of the Twitter feed has been substantially dropped to the middle of the results page now, during the week I was finding the top location to be rather irritating.

If you’re really interested in Google real time search there’s also a chance to watch the full demonstration of this functionality and various other Google personalisation services including the impressive ‘voice recognition search’. I must admit I tried watching the full Google presentation live but it kept timing out (presumably due to popularity) – there are some interesting announcements in there on youtube now anyway.

This new email marketing tool is Open Source (as usual) built using PHP and MYSQL. We have employed some fairly simple yet effective Ajax and Javascript functionality to generate the informational overlay pop-ups and generate the dynamic email builder preview. Now we just hope that it helps all those RacingPost.com customers get the gift they want for Christmas… instead of one they don’t!

Initially a Google Adwords (local) campaign targeting printer repairs, we have recently moved live two additional campaigns for fax repairs and photocopier repairs. The custom landing page for printer repairs had proven so successful (based upon tried and tested usability principles) that similar pages have now gone live for fax repairs and photocopier repairs to further increase their business leads from search engine advertising.

In some cases we have found that the geographic targeting options within Google Adwords are not 100% reliable, this is because where your computer is and where you actually connect to the Internet are two totally different things – Google can only target the latter. This of course raises questions from clients themselves when they cannot see their adverts whilst Google hungrily spends their budget. However, in Lyndon’s case we are seeing both high volumes and high conversions – all to the good of the bottom line.

We first began working with Penwizard (who like us are Dorking based) back in May 2008. Since then we have worked on the search engine marketing of their personalised calendars and personalised childrens’ books (right). As well as publishing their own kids books, Penwizard enter into joint ventures with leading publishers such as HarperCollins and Ladybird.

We very much enjoyed working with HarperCollins on the search engine marketing of the mymagicalbook.com site – featuring personalised stories involving Noddy, Roary the Racing Car and Fifi and the Flowertots (when you have a two year old it gives you some added interest!). For Peppa Pig enthusiasts the Penwizard/Ladybird site peppapigandme.com is a must too.