The recent release of Paid Site Links is a powerful way for strong brands to buy up premium real estate on the SERP’s, pushing the competition further down the page, ensuring that more of those clicks go to the ad in that lonely position 1.

“But what is it?” I hear you ask! Well I will tell you.

Google have given selected advertisers the option to add up to 4 additional site links to their PPC ads for selected terms, empowering the advertiser to tactically steer the customer to a specific product offer or even informational pages. This gives the searcher 5 choices when confronted with the Site Links ad – the headline link plus the additional 4 links which show beneath.

This tactic is not only good for enhancing CTR but furthers the chance of conversion, improving the option for the searcher to navigate straight to the point of conversion. So an increased CTR and an increased conversion rate should allow advertisers to invest more of their hard earned money into more competitive keywords (most probably on Google).

It doesn’t stop there, Google allow advertisers to list up to 10 site links in order of priority and should one of the links under-perform, it will quickly be usurped by the next link on the list. For each link the advertiser can provide up to 35 characters to describe the page, provoking prime opportunity for some good old fashioned testing.

Of course, you can’t simply add it to those highly competitive terms and expect to be buying premium real estate on high volume keywords and laughing all the way to the bank. No, your ad must consistently appear in first position with a high quality score (preferably 10), making this perfect for your brand terms.

This should allow the advertiser to push more brand-led and offer-led messaging in their ads with the safe knowledge that the site links will still allow searchers to quickly find what they are looking for, even when the specific message is not of interest to them. However, whilst the searcher may be clicking on one site link they can also be made aware of different products sold and moreover, what is being offered at that time.

Google’s Paid Site Links option will be best utilised on those non-product specific brand terms where user intention is not shown. The advertiser will now be able to provide the product choices before the click, rather than after it and long gone will be the need to waste precious ad space telling the customer what they sell.

So another great innovation from Google provides a chance to increase CTR on paid ads where the main competition is well…the natural listings. Increased CTR means increased clicks and increased revenue for Google but as long as more clicks mean more conversions, I’m sure advertisers will be happy.

Wrong.

With the achievement of the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant and now a Google Conversion Professional accreditations - we were invited to attend the 2009 Google Analytics Authorized Consultant Summit at the Google Head Office in Mountain View for an insight into the new features and how we can take Google Analytics to the next level. It kicked off with an excellent Keynote by Dan Siroker the Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign entitled “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election”. Leveraging the power of just Google Analytics and Google Website Optimiser Dan’s team were able to help raise a campaign war chest of over $656 million compared to McCain’s $201 million. Powerful stuff.

Well that powerful stuff just got even more powerful, intelligent, and flexible with a suite of new enterprise features that once again closes the gap on the paid for analytics packages on the market. We were lucky enough to be there as they were announced to the summit. Here are our thoughts.

The new features include multiple goals, engagement goals, mobile tracking and reporting, advanced analysis, multiple custom variables, analytics intelligence and custom alerts.

20 Goals!

It has always been quite common that websites have more than 4 primary and secondary objectives which meant that many profiles must be created to manage conversion rates of these objectives. Google Analytics now allows 20 goals per profile, each separated into 4 goal sets. 5 goals per set now allows easier aggregation of specific goal sets. You might like to group similar or related goals in each of the 4 sets for your reporting.

Engagement Goals

This is an awesome new feature that includes 2 new ways of measuring a goal, pages per visit and time on site. There are any number of ways this may be useful but blog sites have for a long time suffered from poor methods of measuring or defining a conversion – time on site is an excellent new feature that I am sure we will see many bloggers utilise and now utilise this in analysis to improve user engagement and increased ‘conversions’.

Websites that do not follow a specific call to action model have been waiting a long time for this powerful new tool.

Mobile Tracking/Reporting

PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX are now supported methods for data collection in Google Analytics which can now be utilised by Mobile Platforms. Mobile has often been an that marketers fail to account for, but with over 1.2 billion handsets expected to be sold in 2009 alone this feature has come along at the right time.

Advanced Analysis

The new advanced analysis features in GA will allow users to report on more advanced metric combinations including additional pivoting options. GA have also included better table filtering which will reduce data exports and allow more on the fly analysis. These may also allow embedding within your custom reports and may alleviate your tedious weekly data crunching tasks which could previously only be done through your Excel spreadsheets with large elements of manual labour.

Multiple Custom Variables

A long awaited feature from Google Analytics and really adding to the sophistication of the tool. Previously GA only allowed for a single custom variable which could be used to segment your users. With the addition of multiple variables, we will start to see more advanced segmentation and no doubt we will start to see some creativity in how they can be applied. The feature will bring increased flexibility and proof that Google Analytics is certainly a powerful enterprise class web analytics package.

Analytics Intelligence

Many of you might have already seen this feature pop up in your account. Finally we have automated intelligent alerts in our reporting.

As an agency, Latitude have already started to implement automated alerts for 100’s of profiles - normally quite manual and difficult to detect. You can start to flag fluctuations in traffic, increased referrals domains etc. Get creative! Google Analytics will now have the capability to auto-detect various fluctuations that might have otherwise been missed.

As you can see below, a feature has been added to set to a varying degree of deviation/sensitivity on your data allowing you to flag reporting to your own specific needs. Brilliant!

Custom Alerts

Custom Alerts also allow you to set trigger emails to users to flag activity that may be of importance – another excellent feature when dealing with multiple account/profiles.

There will be a staggered release of these features in the next few weeks. If you have not already got hold of the features in your account yet, keep checking - they shouldn’t be too far away.

While you wait - I would highly recommend reading further into these features on the Official Google Analytics Blog,  and remember, you cant improve what you don’t measure.

We were recently accredited with Google’s new Conversion Professional status, becoming one of the only companies in Europe to make the grade. Google’s program helps companies boost marketing ROI by improving on-site conversion. We had to prove to Google that we can use a variety of techniques, tools and methods to identify conversion issues and optimise accordingly. This accreditation came after the team gained no less than 3 others from Google and Yahoo in 6 months.

Following this festival of accreditations was SMX East in New York where I was speaking about how advertisers can get actionable insights from their analytics data for PPC campaigns. Despite my northern English tones I was able to get my point across that it is no longer acceptable for PPC professionals to just look at conversions and visits as metrics for success. The full presentation is available here www.prezi.com with the username “conversionanalytics@latitudegroup.com” and password “smxeast09”.

There was a full section of the conference devoted to conversion and analytics on the first day and I spent most of the time in there. The highlight was Scott Brinker, President & CTO of ion interactive giving a fantastic presentation on Site Usability. This is an area we feel many website owners under value in their analytics mix and it was great to see some Stateside counterparts with the same passion.

There were many other good sessions, but my other highlight was the Cross Media Attribution Battle hosted by Sara Holoubek the President of SEMPO. This panel was interesting after my recent blog post. This truly was a battle; with some panellists claiming to have solved the problem through ad serving platforms, while others like Tony Wright of WrightIMC believing attribution can only be fully understood by listening to customers. He even referred to the John Wanamaker quote I used by saying it is a fact that half of your marketing dollars are wasted, but pure fiction to think that attribution technology will solve this. The fiery debate spread to the crowd for questions, and it was great to see such open topical discussion. No clear winners though!

Skip forward 24 hours and I managed to rendezvous with the rest of the Conversion Analytics team for the 2009 GAAC | WOAC | USAC Summit in Mountain View California. Each year Google invites representatives from its analytics partner schemes to their HQ to collaborate, learn, network and progress as ambassadors for the products.

Each day was jam packed with knowledge, insight and new features. A highlight for the team was meeting with Avinash Kaushik, Google’s main product evangelist, author and renowned “Rock Star” of web analytics. He did an excellent passion filled session at the beginning of day two, where he addressed some of the hurdles and opportunities for the space in 2010. He challenged us to look at how the web is changing, and to recognise how web analytics must also change to accommodate it. In a world where content is no longer just consumed by users, but also created and distributed through the many available channels, how will marketers judge the value of their campaigns using traditional methods such as Javascript?

“H.I.T.S – How Idiots Track Success”
Avinash Kaushik 2009

The Answer he tells us; smarter metrics :
1. Engagement
2. Reach
3. Velocity
4. Demand
5. Network strength
6. Activity

He discussed interesting new analytics tools that are cropping up and how their developers are innovating quicker than some of the larger analytics players. It is these guys who will help change the world of tracking and we must assist them.

What really struck a chord with the team was the collaborative nature of the event. GAACs from around the world were keen to share knowledge and experiences, even though we all work in the same space. It gave a positive feel and really emphasised how valuable the GAAC and WOAC forums are to us and our clients.

Finally I have to mention a buzz going around the conference attendees; Conversion Optimisation. Since the Google Conversion Professional program is only available to a limited number of territories in Europe there were jealous glances from some of our US counterparts. It was clear that Conversion Optimisation is a big focus at the minute and more than a couple of times I heard it being referred to as the “new SEO”. Controversial I know, but you heard it here first.

For me, one of the indicators that Christmas is not too far off is the start of the live shows for X-Factor. Love it or hate it, we have come to accept that the Christmas number one single tends to be the winner of the competition, regardless of how good/bad/festive the song is. So the start of the live shows begins about an 11 week countdown to the day itself.

Also, in the past week or so, we were again reminded that many companies are gearing up to the Christmas period with the news of possible Royal Mail strikes, causing businesses such as Amazon to look elsewhere so that they can ensure deliveries in the run up to Christmas are unaffected and sales not compromised.

So what does this mean for digital marketers and online retailers? Well firstly, if you happen to sell any of the products listed in this year’s list, you need to be prepared for the large increases in search volumes after they have been announced and therefore set budgets and bids accordingly.

The graph below shows just three of the products from last year and the massive increases in searches following the announcement of the list on October 15th.

The second graph shows the increase in ‘top toys’ related searches around this date, and therefore expect many similar searches to be made this year when the Toy Retailers Association announce its list on Wednesday 28th October.

If you haven’t already done so, you need to start to consider creating specific campaigns for these products. Although the official list has not been announced there are many websites who are already making predictions. They would suggest toys relating to the Transformers films are going to be quite popular this year as well as toys like Go Go Pet Hamsters and video games such as Wii Sports.

Research and planning are therefore key in the run up to Christmas when running any online retail account. Understanding the search trends of the products you are selling will enable you to ensure you are advertising at the right times. This year even more people will use the internet as a research tool, so understanding when people are searching for a product will also allow you to have your ads present and visible in the important research phase.

I would strongly recommend that, if you haven’t already, you put together a Christmas plan outlining sale dates, product launches, special offers and last day delivery times etc, so you can optimise your accounts accordingly to promote the right message and right products at the right time. Before things start to get really busy!

If you do have any questions, or would like to find out more on what we will be recommending to our retail clients to maximise their ROI this Christmas, then please feel free to get in contact.

Please also check back regularly as I will be posting more retail related blogs in the run up to Christmas.

TripAdvisor discovered from a survey they conducted on 600 Britons, that 68% of British travelers were surprised by the final cost of flights due to add-ons, with 64% also not knowing what their free-baggage allowance was and 77% unaware of the varying fees charged for different payment methods.

The Fees Estimator feature was therefore designed to assist travelers in calculating and comparing the entire cost of flights from the UK to European destinations, by including charges associated with payment methods, fees on luggage and the actual price of tickets once all taxes were included.

The survey also revealed that on average Britons spend three and a half hours researching flight options across six different websites in order to find the best deal. TripAdvisor believe that their new flight search will make this a much simpler and more efficient process.

Bryan Saltzburg, general manager of new initiatives at TripAdvisor and head of the flight search engine says “After successfully launching TripAdvisor’s flight search in the U.S. and helping millions of travellers find the lowest ticket prices the most often, we wanted to bring our award-winning tool to the U.K. Now, British travelers will be able to easily search a large selection of flight choices all in one place and can use TripAdvisor’s integrated Fees Estimator to reveal the extra charges associated with their flight, so there won’t be any surprises at check-in”.

Kenshoo

We constantly seek out the best technology for our clients. When it comes to dealing with retail clients who have a large inventory of products then Kenshoo’s SEM (Search Engine Marketing) platform has many functions that enable effective and efficient campaign management, one of which being its product feed upload function.

By uploading a product feed into Kenshoo, it is possible to use it as a source for generating keywords and ad texts that are focused on the products and long tail. We therefore recommend having as much information as possible present in the feed, such as specific prices and discounts, so that more compelling ads can be created. The product feed function also enables us to pause/unpaused product ad groups depending on stock levels. Time savings made on these often arduous tasks are great which means we have even more time to analyse and optimise the account for a greater ROI (Return On Investment).

Google Base

Another way we utilise a product feed from our clients is by reformatting it to be uploaded onto Google Base. For products to appear in the shopping results on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), the relevancy of the product title and description is very important.

Therefore whilst most product titles in the feeds need only slight tweaks, the product descriptions are often either duplicated content of the product titles (and Google doesn’t like duplicate content) or are a list of all the product’s specifications which are phrases hardly anyone searches on. So by making the product descriptions as unique as possible and ensuring a good keyword density we have been able to rank well in the shopping results for many more product related searches.

A couple of months ago I posted a blog post on Google Plusbox. Once again by ensuring that a product feed has up to date prices, inventory but also product images the feed can be uploaded to Google Base to make use of this feature too.

This was a a great result for us at a time when the marketing industry is in a state of intense change. We feel that this demonstrates our dedication to accelerating this change with over £1m of investment in technology, strong growth in not only our number one-ranked PPC services, but across channels in SEO, display, affiliates and conversion analytics. This is reflected in our recent 10% increase in staffing as we strive to be the employer of choice in the market.

It has been a busy few weeks for us as amongst a number of events last week we also announced the launch of BT SearchSmart. SearchSmart is the fruits of a relationship between ourselves and BT that will bring affordable enterprise quality SEO and PPC to millions of UK companies.

After all this we are now looking forward to Ad:Tech over the next two days, at Kensington Olympia in London, which is a must for all digital marketers as the primary trade show within the industry. We will hopefully see you there!

Following the launch of the Google DoubleClick Ad Exchange on Friday, who better to seek an opinion on this new development than Satish Jayakumar, COO & CoFounder of European Ad Exchange AdJug.

This guest blog post looks at the benefits of online ad exchanges and the likely impact of Google’s entry in the market.

Google is all things to all people, isn’t it? From mapping to telephony and email to radio and TV – I can’t remember being able to live without it.

Over the last few years, Google seem to have become intricately involved in every single market & sector, but it’s starting to become obvious that while a lot of what they do is very nice, there’s quite a lot that just doesn’t make any money. One could argue that they have been flirting with several different products in all sorts of sectors, but nothing seems to stick.

Im not suggesting that Google is just a one trick pony. But I do think they’ve made a few pretty unfocused decisions since their IPO paying $1.65 billion for YouTube, for example.

All that said, I think have got it together again & things are about to get a lot more exciting. Why? Some time in 2007, Google rather unceremoniously went about making their biggest acquisition yet. They coughed up 3 billion to acquire DoubleClick – the world’s largest display ad serving solution. For a while afterward there was a mad feeding frenzy wherein Microsoft bought aQuantive & WPP snapped up 247 Realmedia. I’d confidently speculate that the latter two transactions were entirely meaningless & were borne purely out of fear. For Google however, the acquisition was strategic for in DoubleClick they had plans that would hurtle them to twice the size of business they are today. If you haven’t felt the tremor yet, then hold on because DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange (codename: ADX) has hit the stalls and yes, it’s going to be big.

So, as the COO of one of the major exchange platforms in the market today, I thought I’d write here to give some insight on what to expect,

What the heck is an ad exchange?

The closest likeness in the real world is a stock exchange. It’s a place where buyers and sellers of ad inventory can congregate in one place and under the right conditions facilitate trading. It will initially deal predominantly with display advertising, but in few years you can expect it to blend into the search product.

What are the advantages of an ad exchange?

Exchanges create pretty ground-breaking advantages,

• They are open markets where skill & know-how create efficiency as opposed to sheer buying power.

• They offer total equality & openness to both parties engaged in the transaction. Supply & demand determine price.

• It is the dawn of a new era where data can truly be leveraged by advertisers to engage directly with consumers. You need not serve ads or banners blindly without knowing if the consumer has any interest in your product/service.

On a stock exchange, the best traders deliver the best returns. They do this with data, bespoke technology, intrinsic know-how & expertise. Similarly the agencies/advertisers who recognize the power of data & can leverage the strength of technology and know-how are best placed to leverage ad exchanges.

What should we be worried about?

Well, that’s a hard one to pin down.

1. Google has a habit of luring us into their using their products by extending discounts & offering great returns – this is true to advertisers as well as publishers. Then when they have sufficiently weakened the competition & achieved a majority share in the market, they set about recouping their losses. We’ve all seen this happen and in search and unfortunately, we will see it happen in display as well & the final blended search/display product that will come about.

2. Doubleclick has and is the preferred ad server for most advertisers. This puts Google in a position where they totally understand the sites, times of day, type of pages, etc that are most likely to deliver conversions. Of course they will strongly deny using any of this data, they have to. But I put this to you – if it were your company, would you?

What features are going to have me excited?

For starters there’s search remarketing. For instance, a user searching for “used cars” will be targeted on other sites with ads for used cars. You will be able to buy user segments or users who have expressed an interest in a particular product. Google calls this “interest-based” targeting, the rest of us call it search remarketing.

Then there’s real-time bidding. Advertisers who have data on users who have performed actions on their site i.e. a user who left at the shopping basket stage of a e-commerce site can be specifically targeted with a specific “come back” creative whenever he/she appears on a site within the Google ad exchange. In short, display will start to make up what search loses.

Will this be the end for agencies?

Hardly. People have been predicting the death of the agency model for years & its just not going to happen. They may come under a bit of margin pressure, but that’s about it. The other important thing to note is that search is very different to display. In search, the demand for a keyword exceeds the available clicks for the keyword, which makes it easy to increase price. In display, there is no shortage of impressions available to advertisers. Those that are able use relevant technology to sift through those billions of impressions to target users more effectively will be winners in this process.

Display is tough game with some seriously big companies entrenched in the sector. It will be interesting to see how Google copes with the challenge of entering an industry as the underdog.

Mr. Brown might have managed to predict the lottery last week, but his most impressive trick in my mind is the adoption of the latest social media trends to engage with his audience.

Having a keen interest in Magic, suggestion, NLP and hypnosis myself (along with SEO), immediately after the first “How To Win The Lottery” my curiosity sent me online to gauge the reaction of viewers. Hundreds had beaten me too it and were already engaging in 140 character rants, arguments, praises and condemnations of the show on Twitter, where Derren’s number of followers had surged to well over 40,000 followers.

Within minutes of the Lottery Prediction show ending, the social networking site was awash with Lottery related tweets and Derren was trending for two related keywords (an impressive feat considering the show was only shown in the UK).

The Influence of Television And Social Media On Search Trends

Google UK Insights for keyword “derren brown” since 2004, overlayed with his TV specials.

Above is a graph showing Google Insights for Search for the keyword “Derren Brown” since 2004, overlayed are the TV broadcast dates for each of his specials. There is a perfect match between the rise in search volumes and TV broadcast dates, the result of an increase in viewer interest having watched the show and wanting to find out more.

What’s interesting is the 5 fold increase in search volume traffic after “How To Win The Lottery” compared to each of the previous specials. The average volume of searches for each of the specials has remained relatively constant between 2004 and the middle of 2009, but the latest show is a big exception.

Explaining The Sharp Rise In Brand Searches

Why is the volume of searches for “Derren Brown” five times greater than after previous shows? Here are some possible explanations.

• Derren Brown’s reputation has grown (not likely) - He has become more famous with every show he has done, and more people are aware of his existence. However, search volumes after each special up until mid 2009 have remained similar. Therefore, his popularity is not likely to have contributed much to the recent surge.
• The Enticing Show Title (possible) - Any show called “How To Win The Lottery” is going to create a great deal of buzz, both online and offline. Far more seductive than any of the previous titles, and naturally appealing to people’s greed, this one is going to hook people in.
• Derren Brown’s Social Media Campaign using Twitter and a Blog (highly likely) - Derren Brown set up a Twitter account on 20th March 2009 and has a blog dedicated to “The Events”. These have been regularly updated and added to, keeping followers in the loop continuously.
• An Increase In TV Publicity (possible) - More advertising by Channel 4? The sharp rise in searches directly after the show indicates that people were not searching after seeing adverts, but after seeing the main show. And there hasn’t been much more advertising than previous shows.

The current mix of TV and online marketing make dissecting what contributed to the search volume increase and by how much difficult. No doubt everything helped. However, I would argue that the existence of the blog and Twitter accounts is a MASSIVE contributing factor, and clearly shows the power of social media in action, when used correctly.

As the tweets continued to flow into the early hours of the morning after the show, news of Derren’s accomplishments had already reached a worldwide audience. Many non-UK Twitter users were left bemused wondering who this mystery man was. No doubt they searched to find out!

Did Derren Really Hit The Jackpot?

Search volumes for “Derren brown tickets” in the past 20 days

Judging by the volume of searches for Derren Brown tickets after the show, yes. He has also been steadily releasing tickets for his Enigma show every few days via Facebook and Twitter links. A fantastic strategy to ensure a sell out tour, now that he has 40,000 Twitter followers and 69,000 Facebook friends.

The Danger Of The Instant Feedback Loop

If you are going to promote yourself through mediums that are constantly being monitored by thousands of people every second then chances are any chinks in your armour will be blown wide open - fast. As a magician, that makes Derren’s job much tougher.

The day after the prediction show a YouTube video by mutatedmonty explaining one possible explanation of the Lottery trick went viral. As of today, the video has been seen by over half a million visitors, a figure sure to increase as the rest of “The Events” series continues.

The story was also picked up major UK newspapers such as The Guardian, The Telegraph who aggregated the buzz and sculpted summaries of events, including links to the explanation video.

With social media your brand can be damaged just as quickly as it is built. Any negative brand buzz, no matter if it is true or merely rumours is going to permeate the web just as fast, if not faster than positive news. And there’s little you can do to prevent it.

Summary and Takeaways

Social media has becoming a highly effective method of getting building your brand. You can reach audiences globally by generating local buzz, which then gets investigated by others. It is fast, can be done on a shoe-string budget, and can produce fantastic results when you know what you are doing.

Paid search has always been praised for its granularity, transparency and flexibility and this is what led to its meteoric rise as an advertising channel, with market share overtaking display advertising within a few years of its inception. However, I’ve always believed that display advertising could offer the same benefits. Unfortunately, in the early days of online advertising, most practitioners of display advertising were from the offline world and employed offline techniques for planning, buying and managing display advertising.

At Latitude we recognised early the benefit of applying the science of PPC campaign management to other online channels, such as display advertising. Over the last two years have delivered granular and targeted display campaigns through some of the new more innovative networks from the realms of search (Google Placements), social media (Facebook) and ad exchanges (AdJug).

All eyes will now be watching the growth of the Google ad-exchange to see if the auction based model for buying search pervades through the whole display advertising industry.