Google Adwords has been adding features left, right and centre – and at the end of April, they added another ‘ad extension’ option, this time to help you promote your apps.

The idea behind it is, that perhaps your customers, or potential customers, might not be aware that your business has an app. It also offers your business another way of differentiating itself from its competitors, because the extra link and information helps it stand out.

The choice will be to either click through to your website through the title (as per usual), or click directly through to the app on the ad extension. The app link will be to the app page on the app store (Google Play or Apple App store).

This new extension is just that – an extension. If you want to promote ONLY your app, and not your actual business or store, then you might prefer to use the Click to Download  ad type, which uses the app store URL in it’s display URL, prompting people to click to download your app.

To enable a mobile app extension, just add it like any other extension – note though that your app must be on sale in either the Google Play or Apple App stores.

However, people who are worried that nobody is listening to them can calm down. A testing group in New Zealand are already using a new feature called “Highlight”, which has been designed for Facebooks end-users. If you’re a member of this group you can ensure more friends see your posts, photos, status updates and links. Depending on what version of the test you see you’ll either “highlight” for free or Facebook will charge you around two dollars payable with credit card or PayPal. Your posts aren’t formatted differently, they may just appear higher in the news feed of your friends, stay visible for a longer time and will be shown to more friends and subscribers.

This new feature has the potential to fundamentally change Facebook, as it influences their algorithm which determines what you can see on your wall.
Facebook gives you, on the one hand, the opportunity to point out posts you really want your friends to see, like “I’m renting out my apartment”, but on the other hand it opens the doors to market yourself by using money, instead of authentically engaging.

This new feature may help to repair Facebook’s image as a sound investment considering their previous uncertainty with regards to future advertising revenue streams.

What perfect timing, just before their flotation!

At the end of April, Google updated it’s search algorithm with code name Penguin. This should not be confused with other updates around the same time , including Panda 3.5 and the over 300 small changes made to the Google algorithm (with a focus on local search).

While Panda and the other little tweaks were focussed, as Google updates usually are, on improving search results for users, the Penguin update is actually thought to be the update Matt Cutts had previously alluded to as the overoptimisation penalty.

This means that the Penguin update made changes to rankings, not based on which sites are most relevant for users, but rather based on what their link profiles look like. If the link profiles look like they have been significantly manipulated, then the Penguin update aims to either;

a) Penalise them, making them drop or

b) Devalue the dodgy links they have coming in to them – thus making the sites drop

Either way you look at it – a penalty or a devaluation – the result is that sites with manipulated link profiles should be less visible in search rankings. In theory – this should be a great results for White hat SEO’s, removing the power that manipulated backlinks had given their rivals. However, in the short term it seems that a mix of sites have been hit – some with crazy link profiles, and some not, while some obviously spammy sites are now sitting at high positions in Google.

In the long term, this will undoubtedly be better for users, we just have to get past the collateral damage that has occurred.

The thing we should be slightly worried about now, is how to protect your site from malicious link building against your site.

Google Adwords has been making a lot of changes recently – from allowing misspellings and plurals in phrase and exact match, to providing more information about Quality Score.

They also have a new feature called ‘labels’, which you can see in a number of places:

1. On each of the campaign/adgroups/keywords/ads tab, it is a dropdown above the statics table

And

2. On the Dimensions tab it is a new view option.

These labels can be used at the campaign, adgroup, keywords or ads level, to allow you to compare segments within your account.

How could you use this? We’ll give you an example at each of these levels;

Campaign Level Labels

Say you had a number of campaigns in your account for two countries (which often happens here in Australia). So, for example, we might have the following campaigns;

• New Zealand Search
• Australian Search
• New Zealand Remarketing
• Australian Remarketing
• Australian Content network
• Australian demographic
• Australian Dynamic Search Ads

If I added a label to each of these campaigns – either NZ or Aus – then I could go into the dimensions tab and quickly and easily compare the performance of the two countries as a whole. Note that it will also show a line “Everything else” in case you have campaigns which don’t fit either of those labels.

Adgroup Level Labels

Lets say you have campaigns for Australia, New Zealand and China, and each of these campaigns has adgroups for hats/shoes/scarves.

By labeling the adgroups as either hats/shoes/scarves, I can easily compare the performance of these products as a whole across all campaigns, on the dimensions tab.

You can also compare them by country by showing the ‘campaigns’ column on the dimensions tab – so that you can see, for example, how hats sell in NZ vs Australia.

Keyword Level Labels

Lets say, you want to compare the conversion rates of your keywords which have action words in them like ‘buy’ vs those without. Or those with ‘buy’ vs those with ‘review’. You can label all those keywords appropriately, and then compare them in the dimensions tab.

Ad Level Labels

You can use ad level labels to test the various versions of your ads. For example, you might want to compare the performance of ads with certain display URLs, or those using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Seeing the overall performance of your ads by different aspects could help you to build better ads in the future.

Although information similar to this is available in the Google Help Centre – in my opinion the help is not that great because it fractures the two steps in tracking subdomains in Google – the code change and the setting up of a filter. Even now, with the new help centre at Google Developers they don’t give you all the advice you need in one place.

So – here we will outline the very easy steps to identifying subdomain traffic in your analytics account.

You might notice that in the normal Google Analytics set up, your content reports show your pages from the trailing / after the domain.

So, pageviews of

moomumedia.com/services

will show up as

/services

This is no good if we have subdomains. For example, say I had an English subdomain and a Chinese subdomain, and both had the same subfolder

cn.moomumedia.com/services

en.moomumedia.com/services

Google Analytics would put that traffic for both these pages together under

/services.

To be able to separate them out you need to take 2 steps

1. Change your site-wide analytics code snippet

2. Set up a filter

Change to Analytics Code

If you are using the new asynchronous code (not so new anymore), then you need to insert the part in red

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.moomumedia.com.au']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

If you are using the old code

 

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._setDomainName(“.moomumedia.com.au”);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
}catch(err){}
</script>

 

Create a Filter

Then what you need to do is create the filter. I recommend creating a new profile  (and then using it in all subsequent profiles you create), just because I like to create new profiles when ever I use a new filter.

The new filter should look like this;

Filter Type: Custom filter -> Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Hostname -> (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Request URI -> (.*)
Output To -> Constructor: Request URI    /$A1$B1
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

 

This will mean the URLs will now show up in Google Analytics as the complete URLs ;

en.moomumedia.com/services

cn.moomumedia.com/services

If you wanted to isolate the traffic to each subdomain, and make them show in separate profiles, you should make multiple profiles using the above filter and then you can use custom filters on each one of those profiles, to include or exclude the subdomain traffic as you need;

Filter Type: Custom filter -> Include
FIlter Field: Hostname
Filter  Pattern:  ^en\.moomumedia\.com.au$
Case Sensitive: No

That is so, according to Pew Internet who released some very interesting research on this topic earlier this week, (unfortunately, just for the USA).  Nevertheless, here in Australia we probably have more in common with US searchers than some other countries, and it is especially relevant if your store or business services USA based customers.

Check out this graph – showing that search is most popular among, younger, highly educated, affluent users.

Another very interesting graph shows the rapidly increasing use of social media over the last few years, but that it is still being trumped by search. In turn, search is being just slightly trumped by email, but then much of email is work based, I would imagine.

Thanks to Pew Internet for all this interesting information. It’s good to have these reminders of how massively important search is!

Currently, with “phrase match” and [exact match] anything inside [] or “” has to match exactly. Meaning that if you want to use only “” and [] terms, your keyword list will have to be pretty long to include typos, plurals and misspellings.

I loved Broad Match Modifier, where you put a + in front of a word in a broad match search term, and it meant that the search term had to have that exact term (or closer variant) in the search term. This would have covered typos, plurals, misspellings and very close variants. Broad Match Modifier meant you could expand the reach of your campaign, while ensuring that all search terms included specific terms.

Starting mid-May, phrase match and exact match rules will be changing to allow for close variants like misspellings and plurals. This change is to help advertisers by reaching more people with fewer keywords, and to help users who might not be the best typers or spellers! Google says that at least 7% of queries have a misspelling (although I would have imagined it to be more).

When the new matching roles out, you will be automatically opted in, but will be able to opt out on the settings tab at the campaign level – See Advanced Settings.

Broad Match Modifier will still have a place in your keyword lists, especially for any terms longer than one word.

e.g. the broad match +microwaves may soon have the same intent as the phrase match “microwaves” – that is, allowing plurals, singular, typos, etc.

But the term “cheap microwaves” will still mean that the words have to be in that order, whereas the keyword +cheap +microwave would show for

Cheap Microwave
or
Microwaves cheap

Once the changes go live in Mid-May, I would keep my eye on the “See search terms” report, just to make sure it is matching what you want it to. Then, after a month or so, if it is working ok, you can start tidying up your keyword lists, by removing unnecessary misspelling and variants in “” and [].

I think the biggest benefit will be in campaign structure – allowing more streamlined keyword lists.

They divide internet ‘interference’ into a few categories;

Political  - regarding censorship of opinions, and freedom of speech

China, Syria, Burma – they are all mentioned here for having pervasive political interference.

No evidence countries included all Western countries, as well as (maybe surprisingly), Algeria, Tunisia and Afghanistan. Egypt was also ‘clean’ in this respect, even though in the Arab Spring of 2011, The Egyptian Government shut down all major internet linkages in the country.

Social – related to Government interference on certain topics, such as sexuality, gambling, drugs and other topics which could be conceived to be ‘offensive‘

China was slightly better on this one, but still had substantial interference. The most pervasive were Middle Eastern countries, including the UAE.

Italy was rated as having ‘selective’ censorship, due to a courtcase where Google was found guilty of violating privacy for not removing content from their Video site.

For now, Australia has a ‘no evidence’ rating, despite mentions of the Labor Governments filtering plans.

Tools – interference of websites which provide services, such as email, VOIP and hosting.

Again, Middle Eastern countries were shown to be the most pervasive. The Guardian report stated that in the UAE, websites are blocked, social media is monitored and technology which allows private browsing has been clamped down on.

Conflict and Security – Interference with content regarding disputes and borders

China was shown to have the most pervasive interference in this regard, in the world. Particularly regarding any Tibet issues.

Transparency – How open are they about their filtering methods?

Russia, China and many of the ‘Stans’ get bad marks here, with low transparency reported.  In 2010, in Russia, apparently a local court tried to ban YouTube because it had an ultra nationalist video on it. In 2009, several bloggers were arrested for anti-Putin remarks.

Consistency – How consistent are they with their policies on internet censorship?

Russia had the lowest marks for consistency, along with Indonesia and even Italy.

Apart from Italy, the Western World seemed to pass the Guardian’s test with flying colours – with No evidence of filtering and high transparency. With the idea of the Australian internet filter in the pipes, and Australia even having banned some Wikileaks pages, it seems strange to imagine that all the West is truly so ‘whiter than white’ as this report seems to insinuate.

Now, this post isn’t for the normal SEO folk out there. This post is so I can send a link to all the people I know who ask me why Google doesn’t give them the results they want. Rather than blaming Google, I want to teach them how to make it give them what they want. Sure you can use the Google Advance Search tools – but these search operators are a lot quicker, and can be combined to really get some cool and specific results.

Note that these search operators can also be used in YouTube to help you narrow down your video search.

These are some of the more simple tricks;

Exact Terms

If you want an exact phrase in your results, and not variations, use quotation marks

Must Include

If you want your results to definitely include something, for example if you are looking for labrador puppies and want only pages about labradors, use a plus sign in front of the word labrador. Then all your search results will include the word labrador.

Excluding

If you don’t want it to include something, put a minus sign in front of it. For example, if you don’t want your search for puppies to include dalmations;

Search only on one site

Sometimes you want to search only within one site, but the search function on that website isn’t great…so, preface your query with site:

Fill in the Blanks

You can use * to fill in the blanks in a sentence. For example;

Combining Search Operators

I often combine my search operators to help me find things fast. My most common example is when I am looking for a recipe, I want to use my favourite site, and some essential ingredients

Use Image Results

This isn’t a search operator, but another tip I also give my friends and family is to use image search.  A lot of people don’t usually use it, but it can be handy, especially for things like fashion, cooking – things where you want to see what something looks like. E.g. I want to cook an apple tart, but which kind of apple tart? By using image search I can easily pick through recipes to find the kind I am after

 
The ruling was based on four ads which had appeared on the Google Australia website. Advertisers had used the names of competitors as keywords to trigger their own ads appearing. The court found this was likely to mislead individuals who were searching for information regarding those competitors.

 
From what I gather, the direct accountability for misleading or deceptive ads hosted on the platform lies with Google. This is relevant to paid search results where Google as the ad provider had staff and technology which helped advertisers “take full advantage of the system” according to ACCC Chairman Ron Sims. The involvement of Google is found in its technology, Google’s response is misleading, though the keywords are selected by the advertiser, “what is critical to the process is the triggering of the link by Google using its algorithms” the Court said.

 
Pending Google’s appeal in the High Court, there appears to be a certain amount of insulation for advertisers using the Adwords platform and the open use of branded keywords. We shall see what amendments Google makes. We have not heard the end of this.