Hey there Mozzers! Today I'm going to talk about how to link your new Google+ Business Page to your Google AdWords account so you can start utilizing the new social extension feature.
As we all know, Google+ has been hard at work lately trying to increase their user base and trying to close the gap between them and Facebook. Over the past few weeks they have moved one step closer by rolling out their Google+ business pages - basically the equivalent to Facebook business profiles.
Now, before I go any further, I want to state a quick disclaimer; social extensions are brand new within AdWords and the folks over at Google are still ironing out the kinks. There are still many questions around how they will evolve over the next several months, but for now I will do my best to explain what social extensions are, how to set them up, and what they can do for your PPC performance.
Social extensions within AdWords are Google's way of annotating your Google+ follower count to your PPC ads. Here's what it looks like in action:
Pretty cool, eh?
Now there's 2 types of Social Extensions that Google rolled out with, Personal and Basic. The example above is a Personal social extension. It shows you how many people within your Circles who have +1'd either the landing page or the Google+ Business Page. When the Basic social extension is shown, it will show you how many people across the web have +1'd the landing page or the Google+ Business Page. For example, if Roger Mozbot does a search on robot wheels he might see an ad that has the Basic social extension, "300 people have +1'd this". That means that 300 people across the web have either +1'd the landing page or the Google+ Business Page.
1. Setup your Google+ Business Page
The first thing you need to do is setup your Google+ Business Page, if you haven't done so already. Our Chief Community Wrangler, Jen Lopez, set ours up and told me it was quick and painless. But, if you need some help on how to set up your business page, check out this article by Search Engine Land.
2. Verify your site
In order for Google to verify that you are the owner of the Business Page, you need to do two things.
3. Activate social extensions in your AdWords account
After completing the first two steps, go in to your Google AdWords account and click on the "ad extensions" button, then make sure you are viewing "social extensions" and click "new extension".
Now you'll have to paste your Google+ Business Page URL in to the box:
After saving the new social extension, it may take a few days for Google to approve it. It will say "pending review" until it has been approved and then the status will change to "eligible". Now your ads should start showing social extensions. W00t!
So now that you have everything set up properly, you're probably wondering what type of impact the social extensions will have on your ad performance. I can tell you that I have seen a nice bump in CTR on all of my ads that have been shown with the social extensions. The data is pretty preliminary since Google is only showing social extensions on a limited basis, but so far, the results look very good.
After setting up everything correctly in your AdWords account, if you want to see how the social extensions are performing, follow these simple steps:
In the above screenshot you can see that while we only had a handful of impressions showing with the basic social extension, it has a much higher CTR then our standard ad. I reviewed some other ads within our campaign and am seeing a significant bump in CTR on all ads that were shown with either the personal or basic social extensions!
We know that these social extensions are still in their infant stages at Google, and I'm sure Google will be making some tweaks to them as they gather more data. But for now, there are several unique advantages you will have by turning on social extensions in your AdWords account.
SEOmoz.org had 13.8mm visits from 6.25mm unique visitors last year (2011). Those numbers are pretty exciting, but what's not exciting is the external perception created by third-parties like Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Doubleclick and Google Trends for Websites. These sites report massively lower and wrongly trending data - and SEOmoz isn't alone in experiencing this frustration. We're among dozens of sites I've talked to who've gotten emails and comments lamenting our poor growth or crummy year thanks to these horrifically inaccurate services.
Here's a screenshot of our actual traffic from Google Analytics:
Now let's look at the comparison to each of those services:
Above is Alexa's estimate of SEOmoz's web traffic for the past few months. It's hard to tell how accurate they are, because they're not showing any exact numbers, only "percent" of "reach." They do correctly note that traffic was down in December (the last two weeks of the year were very slow for us due to the holidays, which is a good thing - even SEOs deserve a break) :-)
Historically, Alexa showed a much longer timespan and much more inaccurate data, at one point estimating that our traffic had dropped year-over-year since 2009. I've had well respected VC funds reach out and ask why we were struggling and whether we felt the SEO market was drying up because of those charts... Now, Alexa's ranking us as the 472nd most popular site in the world, which is definitely way, way off.
Next up is Compete.com's estimate of SEOmoz's traffic. They're much more specific, but tragically, way off the mark. For a time, I'd hoped Compete would be a much better competitor to Alexa, but those hopes died a few years back. This chart isn't just wrong, it's directionally backward (we grew when they showed us shrinking and shrunk where they show us spiking at year-end) and off by almost two full orders of magnitude (our daily traffic is about 2X what they estimate our monthly traffic to be).
How anyone can trust that data is beyond me, since you can easily compare many site who publish their traffic details (as we do) against Compete and see this discrepency. To be fair, I've heard that for the top 1-2,000 most popular sites on the web, they're not bad, though I can't personally confirm this.
Quantcast's estimate of traffic looks equally terrible to Compete. It's directionally wrong and off by multiple orders of magnitude as well. Quantcast's saving grace is their "Quantified" program, which shows actual, truly accurate and measured numbers for sites that opt-in. I wish they'd stick to that model exclusively rather than providing these random guesses on sites they've not included in the program, though. I'm also really struggling to understand how 17,671 unique people could create only 11,005 visits... That's a brain teaser.
Google's my last, best hope, and since they capture such a large percentage of sites' traffic in Google Analytics, I'd expect they have a pretty excellent data-modeling system to work off. Apparently, that belief is mistaken. Google's by no means as bad as Compete or Quantcast (and possibly better than Alexa), but it's still way off. The directional data is sort-of close, but the daily unique visitors count shows at ~200K in December. Our analytics says it's ~47K daily or 722K for that month.
Since Trends and Doubleclick are both under Google's operating umbrella, you might be tempted to think they use the same data... In fact, Doubleclick Ad Planner's estimate of Moz traffic and Google Trends for Websites appear to have at least slightly different numbers (hard to tell for sure based on GG Trends' incomplete graphs). One thing I can tell for sure - neither is accurate, nor even directionally correct.
The over-time charts don't quite match each other (though they're close-ish); it looks like Doubleclick is showing higher traffic to SEOmoz generally than Trends for Websites. The closest data point is their estimated time on site, but I'm not sure I can give them credit for that. If you put on a blindfold and throw enough darts, one of them will probably get close to the board. It's hard not to feel that way about these numbers, too.
Now here's the rub:
Recently, Ani López wrote about Comparing Google Trends for Websites vs. Google Analytics Data and showed a few examples that suggested greater accuracy than what we see with SEOmoz (and OpenSiteExplorer, too FYI). Thus, I'm asking for two favors from you to help get a better sense for the relative usefulness of these tools.
The first is to take the quick survey linked-to below:
please take me! (opens in a new window)
The second is to, if possible, take screenshots of your own analytics vs. Trends/DoubleClick/Compete/Quantcast/Alexa and share them in the comments below. For anyone who puts together a compelling side-by-side, I'll happily include links in this blog post to your site and to the images showing your traffic vs. what these third parties report. Hopefully, that incentive can help spur transparency from those of you willing and able to share some broad site stats.
Thanks as always for your help - looking forward to getting a broader view of these tools' performance. For now, I'd remain highly skeptical, but we might revisit the topic if we get very compelling data in the survey and the in the comments (otherwise, I'll just update this post at the end of the week with the survey results, and since they're anonymous, provide full data).
Source:- seo-theory.com
It's 2012, and that means we get to revisit our expectations for 2011 and prognosticate for the year ahead. In keeping with tradition, I'm first going to evaluate my predictions from last December before determining if I've got the cred to make some for 2012. Here's the rules:
For each prediction, we'll grade using the following points system:
The rule is - if the score is lower than +1, I'm not allowed to make predictions for the coming year. Cross your fingers for me!
Last year, I made 7 predictions:
When we tally up the numbers, it's +5 and -4, leaving me with +1, just barely enough credibility to make predictions for another year :-)
This year, I'm making 8 predictions (rather than 7). The goal with each is not just to share an opinion, but hopefully to provide some action (implied or explicit) for marketers on at least a few. I'm also aiming to have each prediction be verifiable at year's end, so that I can, once again, check my work.
According to Comscore, Bing + Yahoo! have ~30% market share in the US to Google's ~65%. I personally think these numbers are relatively bogus and put much more faith in those generated by sources like Statcounter (which look at traffic sites receive rather than queries performed by a sample audience). Statcounter shows Google at ~82% and Bing+Yahoo! totally to ~16%. I'm guessing those numbers will be pretty similar come January 2013.
The biggest reason, IMO, isn't necessarily just brand loyalty and inertia for Google, but their continuedsuperior performance on long tail queries (note: plenty of the comments in the linked-to Reddit thread are worth a read to get a sense of how "early majority" searchers feel).
Already, we're seeing SEO and social media marketing become intrinsically intertwined, but in 2012, I believe we'll see SEO without social fade, just as SEO without link building did from 1999-2000. It's not just that social signals are making their way into the ranking algorithms (in both direct and indirect ways), but also that social is becoming the dominant method of both sharing and discovery for web users. The link graph will remain useful for years to come, but the social "sharegraph" is chipping away at its ability to illustrate what's new, interesting, useful, relevant and high quality.
This trend could well be part of what finally weakens the title of SEO (though I think the practice/tactic will remain strong) and forces those of us who've used that name to describe our profession for over a decade to migrate to something broader.
One of the major weaknesses of Google (and Bing, to be fair) is their continued over-reliance on links as an overwhelming ranking signal. Just recently, I took up a friend's offer to point some obviously shady links from sites Google should clearly be discounting at several webpages. We saw dramatic results within 24 hours - #1-5 rankings that have sustained for several weeks (more news on this experiment to come). This shouldn't be the case and Google's webspam and search quality teams know it.
In 2012, I believe Google's search quality folks will roll out algorithmic changes in how they value low quality links that help them regain pride in their work. The embarrassment and quality gap caused by linkspam is egregious and, if left to stand, gives competitors an opening while simultaneously weakening searchers' trust in Google's results. Just as "content farms" took their hits in 2011, I think link spam's up for some blows in 2012.
The last 4 years have seen Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare and Tumblr all break the 10+ million users mark. In 2012, I give Pinterest good odds for doing the same. Pinterest is also the first major social network where the gender balance heavily favors women (which is, IMO, a great thing).
(above, my sad attempt at a Pinterest board)
Because of this breakout, don't be surprised to see lots more posts like these showing marketers how to leverage Pinterest to help share their content and find potential customers.
There are some pretty crazy things going on in the search advertising world right now. To wit:
On my laptop (which has fairly impressive resolution), I can only see a single organic result, and the paid search markup is incredible. Star ratings, seller reviews, prices and individual items, photos and featured brands are all dominating the page.
Google's own "comparison ads" in the credit/finance world push organic results down even further, as the Google product still allows for three additional full size ad slots above the organic listings.
Perhaps the most aggressive of all is Google's new ability to insert a logged-in users email address automatically into PPC ads, as pictured above. These are still rare, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them roll out in greater force.
My prediction is that in 2012, we'll see the start of "paid search blindness" being studied, reported and impacting the engines' bottom lines. Organic results still garner 80%+ of all clicks, but that percent has been dropping as Google gets more aggressive with paid search to continually meet earnings expectations.
Despite Google's statements that missing keyword data will stay below double digits, I'm predicting that by December of 2012, we'll be looking at a quarter of all searches coming from logged-in (and thus, keyword-anonymous) searchers. Google's working hard to get adoption of Android, Google+, Google Apps and Gmail, all of which will increase the percent of not provided searchers.
While I wish this program would roll back (as there's clearly no real privacy risk or they wouldn't provide the data to paid advertisers), Google's the 800-pound gorilla and the marketing field's counterpoints, while far more valid, likely won't play as well in the media. Google's got the politics sewn up on this one, so our only hope is that they decide to do less evil. Unfortunately, that's not the way they've been trending of late.
The search/inbound marketing industry is in sore need of a program that helps early talent in the field become mature professionals. Today, SEMPO, Market Motive, Inbound Marketing University (from Hubspot),Search Engine College and a variety of others provide this service, but none of them are yet at scale or universally respected by hiring managers and companies in the field.
It's hard to quantify what "the rise of..." means. Thus, I'll predict that by year's end, at least one industry certification has 5,000+ users on LinkedIn (currently, Market Motive leads the pack with ~1,700)
Google's just started to add Google+ brand pages in search results, They're leveraging Google profiles for rel=author tags. They've made Google+ circles and +1s visible in SERPs. In 2012, I think this pattern becomes a concerted effort by Google to tie promotional efforts in organic results to the Google+ login/verification system. This will not only encourage/force usage of their social network, but give them a much greater ability to tie social, ranking and visibility signals together (and probably fight spam + manipulation, too).
The positive for marketers is that closer integration with the social platform will reward those who can successfully manage both SEO and social media marketing. It's also (hopefully) going to be a boon for white hat tactics that help build brand signals while reducing the effectiveness of exploits that manipulate (like exact match domains or anchor text link spam). The negative is that Google's probably going to get even more data about ALL of our online behaviors, making themselves an even more overreaching and powerful force on the web than they are today. We just have to hope they'll also become more benign, though more power rarely leads to less corruption.
I'm looking forward to hearing your predictions (and opinions on the above) in the comments. I think we've got an exciting year ahead.
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-predictions-for-seo-in-2012
Name: Touristlink
Quick Pitch: Touristlink is a social network for travelers.
Genius Idea: Social platform allows travelers to meet others, discover new destinations and connect with experts.
Many turn to friends and family for advice and recommendations when traveling to a new destination. But now you can find all the travel information you need through a new social network called Touristlink, which allows travelers to not only meet and connect with other travelers around the world but also get answers from experts.
“Touristlink is a way to communicate with other travelers and travel experts,” Dr. David Urmann, CEO of Touristlink, told Mashable. “Right now, no other site gives users a means to communicate with them.”
By signing up for Touristlink through Facebook or on the site directly, members can create lists of their favorite destinations and share with friends, suggest new attractions for other travelers and post photos of cities they’ve traveled to in the past.
Touristlink also provides a list of the top attractions in any city based on member rankings and reviews to help users discover new attractions and hot spots.
To ensure all travel needs are met, Touristlink gives its users full access to its network of local tour guides, travel agencies, city tours, hotel owners and private rentals. If you need any help such as finding a luxury hotel situated on a beach, booking a day tour to Mount Everest or scheduling an airport pickup, just post your request and you’ll receive multiple offers from travel experts. Then, you can choose the deal that is best for you.
Touristlink screens each travel expert to confirm their identity before allowing them into the system. Each expert is ranked based on their cheapest rates, services and how active they are.
“The main difference between Touristlink and other travel sites is that we put users in touch with real people,” says Urmann. “Users can ask questions to guides and hotel owners, they can add them as friends and develop a relationship with them.”
The site is free to use, but it adds a 10% service fee when you book anything through the site. For example, if you book a car service to pick you up at the airport and it costs $50, Touristlink will add the small fee.
Touristlink is currently in public beta and has 1,500 registered members. The site will officially launch in May.
Source:Mashable
