Short but sweet post. Just found Google Ad Planner. Looks like a really useful tool, great for research as well as actual planning. Google the Broker!!
https://www.google.com/adplanner
Is this the future of search?
A possible Twoogle Future?
Just came across this blog post by Matt Cutts on how to link to a specific section of a Youtube video. Wicked little tip that I know I’ll be making use of.
Just saw a post on the marketing Pilgrim for Google’s Magazine search facility where they aim to provide search results from magazine archives. This got me thinking of a couple of questions which I’ll list just in case Matt Cutts is stuck for something to do with 20% free time at Google!
How long before this covers current magazines and newspapers? Each scanned and tagged by article and image. It would certainly make searching for editorial, brand mentions and column inches a fair bit easier. You could create custom publications with articles only relevant to the sections you choose to read. Perhaps even an opportunity for additional ad revenue through making adverts interactive! I say get scanning Google!
The other question is when do they plan to scan the back catalogue of Isle of Man Portfolio and Manx Tails?
Eerrrm, oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. I helped to build Google… How did that slip my mind until 13 years late… No really…. You have to love it when ghosts come out of the closet to stake a claim on a multi billion $ project. Apparently his wife is Bri(a)n too.
Whilst looking up the new owner of Man City Football Club in Google Images I found this picture of the Sheikh’s Wife. I’m assuming this isn’t his wife (If anybody has met his wife and can confirm this isn’t her let me know) and can only take from this a lesson not to rely on Google Images too heavily when compiling guess the famous person quizes.
Not having the largest blog readership on the web has it’s advantages when it comes to drilling down into the stats. It certainly isn’t a time consuming job on Chewing the Cud! Indextools has a last visitors option which provides a detailed breakdown of individual viewing records and for a small site lets you get a real flavour for overall viewer behaviour and even differences between identifiable demographics.
The image below shows a visit I made to my blog after doing an ego search for myself in Google. It also provides a whole host of data about my viewing, my previous number of visits and my browsing configurations. This level of detail is great from a website development perspective. It is possible from here to identify trends and follow user journeys to identify areas of improvement, regional or configuration variances and any other number of metrics you may be interested in.
A really useful feature is the ability to view a visit path, particularly useful for commercial sites to track the effectiveness of a particular keyword, referrer or campaign. Only just breaking the surface of what indextools can offer yet but the potential data at your finger tips if you configure the tool correctly seems a marketers dream. It will be interesting to carry out a few tests on browser set up and site usage to see how the tool reports data.
On this note I started watching a series of videos with Avanash Kaushik and John Marshal on web metrics and how analytics tools measure them which gives some really important insights for marketers to understand what’s behind the numbers. Only a couple videos in on the series but will certainly be going back to finish of the set of 5.
Search Engine Land recently reported that Google has added a page load time score to its quality score algorithm. Adds another dimension when optimising landing pages for Google Adwords campaigns!
From a marketing aspect, and depending on the importance placed on this metric by Google, it is another important stat to be aware of in relation to other websites in your industry, particularly key competitors. After all, what’s considered fast and what’s considered slow? My take would be fast is quicker page load times compared to competitors and slow is a longer page load time than competitor websites.
I’m sure there’ll be plenty of speculation over it’s importance and method of calculation within the Google algorithm but if you identify websites appearing for your selected keywords and identify landing page load times compared to yours that can’t be a bad starting place to benchmark performance.
I read today about Google’s venture integrating TV advertising into their portfolio. It seems to me they are focussing as much on providing spending opportunities to advertisers as they are content for searchers. With so many industry gurus discussing the end of the TV advertising era Google’s decision to branch out in this direction seems a strange one. Perhaps a purely financial decision or perhaps a very clever move into an industry that the internet is yet to change but on the cusp of revolutionising. How long before our computers and our TVs are interconnected? How long before our web personalisation details can be fed into our TV screens and affect the adverts we are being shown in between programmes? And how long before the programs we watch on television are fed back into the adverts we see on our computer screens?
Didn’t make Matt Cutt’s predictions for 2008 but I bet it can’t be far off!
I’ve signed up for Indextools web analytics which I’m going to get added to the blog in the next week or so. I haven’t looked into setting this up too much yet but don’t expect it will be too difficult. I had a quick look on Google but couldn’t find anything about getting it added to a wordpress blog specifically but I think there is a fair bit of info on the Indextools site so I’ll heck that out. All I could see on the web was around adding Google analytics to the blog which I’ve currently got running. This was easy as I just used a Google Analytics plugin.
I chose to go with an indextools account mainly after speaking with Charlie at SES London. We’d been running it on the site at work for a couple of months and the couple of issues I’ not worked out were quickly sorted after speaking with the guys at the Indextools stand. Since had contact with them by email to set this account up and help set up our account at work and they’ve been great.
I’ll keep the blog updated on the progress of this and show how the stats are looking.
