The Digital Lookout

People have speculated for a while about Google analytics affecting your pagerank and hences your search engine positions and website traffic (example here).  I always thought of them as being one of the many conspiracy theories which come along with being as successful as Google has become.  But whilst sat at this weeks Google - Above and Beyond conference in Dublin one of the speakers made a statement which made me doubt my prior judgement.  The discussion was not about page rank (PR) but about quality score (QS) and how Google uses the information available to it to make a judgement on quality and also utilises a rule of averages on user judgement to allow the best sites to profit in the long run.

What caught my attention were the comments about using the information they had available to judge quality.  The speaker was obviously talking in this instance about impressions, clicks, creative copy, keywords, landing page content etc, but it just made me think that analytics fell under that same category.  It is information that Google has to hand to judge your website and it allows them to throw in elements like bounce rate and conversion rate into the mix for elements affecting PR and QS.

The response I got from Google representatives when I approached it with them is that it would be unfair to use analytics as not everyone uses it.  Elements such as meta data, inbound links, website content, ad content and keywords are free and open for everyone to use as they wish so it is fair game.  But not everyone has Google Analytics so to make a judgement on an individual website based on its use, either positive or negative, would be unfair.  That is a  valid point, but doesn’t actually satisfy my question really, I don’t necessarily think that Google would shy away from its use completely for this reason alone.  After all it contains valuable information about a websites usability.

Hopefully I will be able to prove once and for all soon enough, I plan on trialling a new anlytics package very soon on The Digital Lookout and am looking for a case study from a quality score perspective, watch this space!

While we were all sat about discussing when the changes to the Google quality scoring system would come in place and what impact they would have Google snuck in the release! Sneeky, sneeky.

It finally happened on Tuesday and we are now running on the live quality score system, first page bid estimates and quality score spectrum out of 10 (screenshots below). The first impressions of this change is that it should help search marketers understand the quality score system better and enable more changes for the better in terms of campaign performance. Having a quality score out of 10 allows for better understanding of this metrics and will help to see improvements on a more granular level. First page bids also allow you to see what you may need to spend to hit page 1 (and thus tempt you to do so as I blogged about previously!).  Conversely though, I did see a keyword which had a first page bid of £56! and wondered how this might affect advertisers, does it mean:

a. The system is still bedding in and is not 100% accurate

b. it is accurate and will dissuade some advertisers from using PPC altogether

It doesn’t seem to have affected the market significantly yet and on the whole I think it is a good thing for search engine marketers who are willing to put in the effort and use the changes to their advantage.

I have decided I don’t like the new iGoogle homepage.  Well, to be specific, one feature of the the new iGoogle homepage.  I like the way you can expand your widgets and make them full screen, that’s pretty useful.  But what I hate is the way it automatically displays an excerpt from the feed articles without giving me the ability to minimise them.  In the old version you just viewed the title and had the option to expand it to see an excerpt, which was good.  But by enforcing the excerpt I can no longer easily see a snapshot of feed headlines without scrolling and concentrating far harder than I would like!  Do me a favour Google, change it back!

The announcement of Google’s geographic reporting for your campaign is good news for international search advertisers, the ability to accurately (?) measure where your paid search clicks are coming from by city and region should make for a far more efficient and accurate pay per click campaign.  Not to mention the ramifications for businesses in knowing where their products work best online allowing them to focus their whole model on a particular region if necessary.

But the problem with this sort of technology had always been that although it works well in the large open spaces of the US, it is simply not accurate enough in the relatively confined spaces of the UK.  Case in point below, I tested this theory using the Google gears demo application that tells you where Google thinks you are.  I ran the application whilst at work in Warrington and low and behold, Google was out, picking me up as being in Lambeth, Greater London, a full 204 miles away!

Which brings me to my question, is geographic targeting ever going to be accurate enough to make it useful in the UK?  I am yet to see an example where it works effectively and consistently in this country, or are we just too small fry for it?

is google location targeting ever going to work in the UK?

Google has today launched some changes to iGoogle homepage to some of its users (exact figures unknown).  The changes, according to the google support page take 3 major forms.

1. left navigation introduction - the introduction of a left navigation which will show all your gadgets and widgets as well as you favourite links.

2. full page gadgets viewing - if you want to see more information from one of your gadgets you just click it from the left navigation and it becomes full screen on your homepage allowing you more room for expanded text and information.

3. instant messenger functionality - this is the big one, instant messenger functionality allowing you to chat to all your friends who are also using iGoogle.

On tp of these it is also clear to see that Google has changed the format slightly so that there is no longer the need to click the plus sign to see a snapshot of an article, it is automatically displayed in the feed.

So what are the purposes of these changes? Easy, stickiness.  in the old format to see a full article you had to leave Google, not anymore, you can see all you need to without leaving Google.  Why is that so importnant I hear you ask?  Well if your within Google, you going to use Google, the search box is ever present at the top and so if you need to perform a search and you spend all your time on iGoogle who are you going to use?  In case you forgot, Google is a search engine and this is where they make their money, just in case you forgot.

The more a portal can keep a user within their realms, to more money they make from them.  On top of this Google can all the time gather information on the users and serve them ads and results based on their needs, again making them want to come back for more.

With Chrome, 85% search market share, and now the expansion of iGoogle, Google will be hoping that there will come a day when users are using Google for everything they do online, complete market dominance.