Google Adwords shows competitors performances

Google has recently announced a new “Analyze competition” feature onto the side panel, under Opportunities within Google Adwords. At the moment the feature is limited to the UK, however, it is soon to be rolled out further. This tool allows you to see how you are performing in comparison to your competitors, as suggested by the name.
You will be able to see how you are performing compared to other advertisers in the same category. It uses categories from your products to your services keywords to give a perspective on how well your competitors are doing in each category. The data shown is refreshed every 2 weeks, so that data shown is always up to date.


The tool will allow you to see whether you are performing above, below or on par with your competitors. All the data displayed is anonymous as the data is aggregated and averaged, so you will not be able to compare individual activities. The data will be shown in a simple bar graph of your individual performance compared to the average performance of competitors. Hovering over the data in the 'Competitive Range' column will enable to view more details such as the size of your competitive range, the mean performance levels. Adwords will never reveal information about the advertiser’s identity

Added Value
By being able to see competitors performance it can show you exactly what you need to change to be more efficient, is exactly what ‘Analyze Competition’ offers. By seeing how your competitors are doing it can give you that little extra motivation to change your keywords choice and review their budgets to ensure that you are on top.

Key Benefits
There are many advantages to having some competitive data on the Adwords tool. The feature can help you to understand if your performance is up to the same standard of other advertisers in the same categories. By doing this it also point out where your performance can be improved through optimization changes. Finally, the feature allows you to explore new opportunities to grow your account, therefore becoming more competitive in your market.

Alternatives to Analyze Competitors
An alternative to Google Adwords Analyze competitors feature is called SpyFu. This alternative has two main features. One allows you to see what traffic keywords are getting and the other, more importantly, shows what keywords your competitors are going after. This allows you to see which keywords are likely to perform well.


Summary
This new ‘Analyze competitors’ feature on Adwords now gives you a unique way of viewing your advertising ecosystem. It predominantly allows you to make more optimized decisions based on your market performance. This is yet another piece of information which will allow you to focus your keywords further.
To make the most out of the ‘Analyze Competitors’ feature you can click on the ‘Explore Ideas’ button to see some automated ideas for your campaign. By using the ‘Analyze Competitors’ feature you will be able to easily analyze against your competitors enabling you to focus on aspects of your campaign that need improving. Just like other aspects under the Opportunities tab, ‘Analyze Competition’ will uncover new ways for you to improve your Adwords performance.

Foursquare - The Hottest New Social Networking Site?

Keeping in touch with friends wherever you are has become has become a necessity for a young socialites life. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter now provide people with the opportunity to update their current status anytime, anywhere with the help of mobile technology. With many people now familiar with always having the internet available in their pocket in the form of a smart phone, it has become the norm to continually connect with others on the go.

What is Foursquare?

Foursquare is the latest social networking platform to take the social media community by storm. Only launched last year, this location based platform combines a friend-finder, local city guide and a ‘game’ which allows you to update your whereabouts by ‘checking in’ to local places via your phone. You can ‘check in’ to bars, restaurants, art galleries, stations, in fact any place that is registered on the Foursquare map! Once checked in your whereabouts becomes visible to your friends allowing them to track you down to join you.

The ‘game’ part of the programme comes when you check in to a local building. Depending on how often you visit the establishment, you can receive offers and coupons direct to your phone or even freebies if you are the current ‘Mayor’. The Mayor of the establishment is decided by choosing the most loyal customer. By becoming the Mayor, you can receive freebies for you to enjoy whilst in the building and once you are gone, a new Mayor is found. This adds a sense of competition to the game and has been very popular in the United States.

If you can’t beat them....Join them!

In the ever expanding Social Media network, it has become more a matter of synchronisation rather than competition between the big players. Foursquare seems no exception with Twitter already making it clear they are happy to work with Foursquare to provide a more holistic platform. In order to a head start, you can also link up your Foursquare and Twitter accounts to find all your friends who are already using Foursquare.

You can use your Twitter stream on Foursquare and vice versa to let people know where you are and what you’re doing. Foursquare has outdone its rivals however by allowing its users to choose how often they link up their location and Twitter status, therefore allowing you to stay under the radar when needs be!

What’s great about it?

Foursquare is different in the fact that its primary use is to track down your friends to have face-to-face contact rather than sitting on Facebook or Twitter and communicating via statuses or tweets. It also combines the social interaction with a ‘real-time’ competitive game which has tangible rewards. This is good both for local businesses and their customers by encouraging loyalty and reward you for your efforts in brand loyalty.

Another differentiating factor about Foursquare is it can also act as a guide to the city, with people being able to leave tips and hints for the local area. As a user you can add your own tips to a local venue to let both your friends and the general public know of the best places to go and things to do. For example, if you are sitting in the local winery and find the best tasting French chardonnay, you can let the world know of your discovery. Others can then save these tips on a ‘to do’ list allowing them to generate their own personal check list.

Will it be a Big Player in the Social Media Monopoly?

Having only been live since March 2009, Foursquare already has over 1 million users and is rapidly growing showing great promise. Predominantly found over in the States having originated in New York, Foursquare has all the ingredients to become a worldwide success.

Foursquare relies heavily on users registering popular locations and businesses verifying ownership. Once verified the company can offer its customers great rewards for loyalty and therefore is great for encouraging people to visit time and time again. However, Foursquare has the great advantage of remaining intimate despite having such a huge following due to people being incredible choosy on who they let see the geographical location.

This has led to concerns over people’s privacy on Foursquare. However, the argument could be made that all social media sites have some elements of privacy infringements. The advice being giving by the makers of Foursquare is simply to only add your friends whom you wouldn’t mind seeing your whereabouts rather than a My Space everyone’s-a-friend style.

With such a new platform it is near impossible to determine how much potential this media has, although from the first few stats, the future is looking bright for Foursquare!

Google’s Ad Extensions Tab

Google recently introduced the new ad extensions tab to selected PPC campaigns. This new tab allows you to add map listings, phone numbers and Google Products in a drop down box underneath your PPC ad copy.
These extensions are not shown with every ad and are only showed intermittently as decided by Google at the moment. From our experience so far we’ve found that when these location extensions are shown, our already good CTR have increased dramatically, by over 70% in some cases.
Here you can see an example of one of our client’s ads with the location drop down, when clicked on the small plus box opens the map drop down, dramatically increasing the proportion of the front page of Google that your ad commands.
And below you can see an example of the shopping result ad extension. This allows you not only to add pictures of individual products but to also add an individual link to each product underneath, dramatically increasing the number of links that you ad has and relevancy of each, which from our experience has had a profound effect on click through rate.



The phone extensions work alongside the location extension option when a user is searching on a compatible smart phone device such as an IPhone or Android phone. When searching within a Google browser or any of the Google apps, where applicable and when compatible the phone extension will be shown as below.



Once you click on the number you are taken to the below screen. Once here you can simply click on the call button and you phone will dial the company within the ad, a quick and easy way to get through to the desired business without having to enter the webpage, find the number, remember, or copy and paste the number and then call this manually.



What does this mean for PPC advertisers?
It seems from out research that these ad extensions are somewhat few and far between at the moment, but then the frequency of them showing could be a contributor to this. With no control over when these extensions are shown the power seems to be out of the hands of the company and into Google. We predict it won’t be long until everyone is capitalising on the ad extensions introduced by Google, and with more coming along each month, including financial information extensions, such as that shown for a natural listing below, it becoming every important to stay on top of Google’s constant innovations.



Review extensions
And another ad extension that could be timidly entering the water is a review ad extension. This comes in the format of a grey line of clickable text that will take the user through to the review site. It seems though that these are being added in a different way to the previously discussed ad extensions, in that they seem to be added without any input on either agency or client part. Something to watch in the coming weeks and any ideas on how this particular ad extension comes about or any of the others discussed here please let us know you thoughts and ideas.

Top Tips for Video Optimisation on YouTube

The importance of Universal Search has this month sky-rocketed to new heights. With Google’s new redesign, the results page will now show multiple forms of data within the main search results. This has resulted in a combination of web pages, maps, videos, shopping results and images all being shown on the first page of the query result. This highlights the importance and need for companies to provide their information in many different forms in order to rank well across all mediums.


The most prominent of these would be videos. When Google bought YouTube back in 2006, it was expected there would be an increasing amount of integration and we have not been disappointed. The prominence of videos on the Google results page has significantly increased for a number of search query categories. YouTube has also received a facelift and many of the processes associated with Google have been replicated on YouTube. YouTube has now become the video equivalent to Google and is creating a huge market for businesses to work within.

Recent reports state that over 5.5 billion videos were watched in the month of February 2010 in the UK and 24 hours of new content is uploaded every minute of every day! YouTube currently has around 48.2 million users signed up worldwide and this figure does not account for the number of non-users casually browsing the site. Therefore there is a wealth of opportunity to advertised your business and generate new leads.

The big question though is HOW to reach your potential audience. With such a wide variety of users on YouTube, you need to find ways of getting your videos to show under the right search queries to reach your potential customers. This is something that is becoming as complicated as getting high rankings on Google.

How to optimise your YouTube videos

Video optimisation is incredibly important in getting your video to show under the right search queries on Google and there is no better way to do this than through YouTube. Currently, the most important aspects of video optimisation are the Page Title, Tags, Description, Number of hits and Rating of the video. In order to access this information, you need to log in to your You Tube account and select edit video. Below you can see the box in which you can edit the page title, description and tags.


The Page title needs to be optimised to include specific keywords you want to target. As YouTube is now using the ‘suggestions’ box similar to Google’s, this will help list your video under specific keyword suggestions. One thing many YouTube videos do not have is a keyword rich description. You have up to 5000 words to play with on each video and this allows for many keywords to be added in, which ultimately will assist YouTube in rating your video ‘relevant’ to the search query term.

Tags are also very important in video optimisation and should also target all the keywords you wish your video to show for. You have 120 characters to play with here so keep adding until you run out of space. These tags should also be used if you are linking from another site to your YouTube video page.

Something which is slightly more difficult to achieve is ratings, hits and comments.


The more people that view your video, the better! This will tell YouTube and Google that your video is worth watching and many people have found it useful. Once you have people watching it, it would be ideal if you could get them to comment and rate. The more comments you can get, the more interesting YouTube thinks your video is, and this will also improve the ranking of your video. Think of views and ratings in a similar way to links in traditional SEO.

One way of getting viewers is to embed the video onto your businesses website. This allows you to reach a relevant audience and also increases the traffic to your website. If these videos are embedded on relevant pages, it will help Google to determine the content of that video. If the page also contains the keywords found in the title and description of the video, it will make your video look even better to the Google bots.

PPC videos on YouTube

Another way to get people to watch your videos is through ‘Video PPC ads’. Promoted Videos on YouTube work the same way as PPC advertising on Google and allows you to pay to show your video for specific keywords. This is brand new and works with your Google AdWords account to generate adverts with your chosen video.

With Google and YouTube changing so rapidly more and more different methods will become available to help you optimise your video and it will be increasingly important to keep up with these changes. Who knows, in the near future we may be able to link all our PPC adverts with our Promoted Videos and provide our ad information through a whole variety of search tools!