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I think that’s 31 days between posts, what can I say, I’ve been busy! Busy building. Building relationship, building products, building teams, and building strategies which will hopefully lead to the building of an empire!

Oh, and I have been out and about speaking a little too. Once again for the Fresh Business Thinking guys and their excellent Hit Me Summit. Below is the presentation I gave on Holistic Search: How to Combine PPC /acronym> and SEO Effectively, it made a lot more sense with the commentary but might be of use for those who were there.

Set for launch in January 2010 and and unveiled last week, the UK Online Measurement Company (UKOM’s) Audience Planning System is aiming to enable marketers to more effectively target their online advertising campaigns based on accurate audience metrics for publisher sites. This is a big step for online display advertising as up until now there has been no industry standard, non-biased view on a particular websites audience demographic. It will undoubtedly help digital media planners to more accurately hit target demographics and user groups across the web and whilst in its infancy and still to narrow in its approach (it is based on panel data from just 35,000 web users) it is without doubt a positive development.

It seems clear to me however from the article written in Marketing (21st October) that traditional brand marketers, and digital marketers from traditional marketing agencies, seem to be seeing this as a way of justifying continued spend on large budget, online branding campaigns based around “building awareness”. In my experience what this means is that they can once again propose extremely extravagant and largely expensive digital media plans without needing to worry about return on investment, tracking, optimisation, or any of the other facets of online advertising that make it so different and more appealing than offline activity.

In the past few years most display advertising planners have realised that they can no longer hide from the accountability of online. As tracking technology improves and companies get more attuned with online and what they should expect, brand based marketing has declined and advertisers are looking for accountability from all of their ad spend, and this is how it should be. The worry with some of the comments in the article (some contained here but not the full detail) are that this could mean that once again, media planning agencies are able to get away with controlling large brands online budget in the name of “brand building” and aren’t held accountable for their actions.

Its not that I do not believe online campaigns can build brand awareness, just that this too needs to be measured. Tracking technologies have advanced to the point where effective conversion attribution is possible and all touch points down the online conversion chain can be monitored. Yet too many large brands continue to persist with untracked, or badly tracked, online campaigns in the name of brand building and offline conversion. With or without the new UKOM audience planning, media buyers need to understand that it is conversions and measurability that drive online adaption and growth, not hiding behind the banner of “brand building”.

They claim it is the evolution of communication, the best bits from email and microblogging, “an unbelievable, powerful demonstration of what is possible in the browser”. The world of twitter was abuzz with talk of invites, delays and initial reactions. But is Google Wave going to live up to the initial hype and revolutionise Internet collaboration and communication? Lets look at the good points and the draw backs:

Whats Good about Google Wave?

I have only played around with it a little, but here is what I would say are the good points:

• Collaborative Group Communication:  Very useful for collaborative group work.  The ability to invite people to conversations, drop in files, links, maps and gadgets, all make for a useful conversation tool.
• More flexible than messenger: Remains available once you close your browser, can easily drag and drop files, links and users.
• More Real Time Than Email: Pretty cool to be able to see people typing in a conversation in real time.  But more than cool it is actually useful.  Also in comparison to group emails this is a much more efficient way of communication as you have a real time dialogue and aren’t waiting for responses.
• More Privacy Than Twitter: Only those invited see the conversation, therefore has the conversational feel without the mass broadcast of information.

Why Won’t Google Wave Take Off?

• Who’s Using It?: OK so a short term one until uptake and invites grow, but not everyone has access to Google Wave, which limits its usage.
• Do We Need Another Tool?: Ive noticed already that very few people who I have a connection with who are on wave are ever logged in.  Twitter, Messenger, Facebook, Email, Yammer, do we need, or have we got time for, another tool?
• What Do We Use It For?: Nobody I have spoken to seems to have a solid use for it.  Yes, collaborative working, but not everyone had an invite, or stays logged in enough to collaborate!
• Its Not Different Enough: This is going to be the key.  It doesn’t do anything I cant get done through another tool.  OK so it might be smoother and cooler, but it doesn’t have a significant advantage which would want to make me change.

What do you think of Google Wave?  Will it take off or wipe out?

Heres oneof the better videos I have seen about its uses, one which covers the main features and one where somebody got a bit creative with it, enjoy.

Ive seen some matching errors in my time in search engine marketing. It used to be one of the best sales tools, and still is in a less obvious way, to take screenshots in advance of a pitch, or sales meeting, of a prospects PPC /acronym> ads appearing on keywords which are unrelated to their product or service.

But if there is one company you would expect to be able to understand and control their matching system, it would be Google themselves. But apparently not! A search I performed on Google recently for the phrase “marketing jobs” brought up a PPC /acronym>ad for Google Adwords. At first I didn’t realise what had happened, but then it clicked, and a search on the single word phrase “marketing” brought up the Google ad also. Google are broad matching and haven’t included the term jobs as a negative keyword!

Now you argue that they don’t really need to as they wont be paying for the clicks anyway, but surely they should be practicing what they preach!?!

And while I am at it, the ad text isn’t to impressive either. Disappointing effort Google, shame on you!

PPC broad matching" src="http://www.robweatherhead.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/google-adwords-creative-error.jpg" alt="google makes error in PPC broad matching" width="605" height="243" />

…..or at least its search box does. as announced on the Official Google Blog yesterday Google is increases the size of its search box, and also the text font of your search query and its own search suggestions. A slightly strange thing to do given there ws little wrong with it in the first place, so what could be the reasons for doing this?

• Aesthetics – It could be a purely aesthetic change.  Anybody involved in web design (or any other form of design for that matter) knows how picky designers can be.  So it could just be that Google’s design team got together and decided that it looked a lot better a font size up.
• The Bing effect - Lets face it the Google homepage (unless you are using iGoogle) is pretty bland.  This has been made even more apparent by the Bing design and the user love for the daily background image.  Is this the start of a Google move to combat this?
• Search Suggestion Focus – Although Google have increase the size of the whole box, and search font and the search suggestions font, it could be the latter which is the driving force behind the move.  Google could be looking to place more emphasis, and promote the use of, its suggested search queries.  In theory the more these are used, the more accurate they should become (if Google is doing the smart thing and tracking their usage).  The more accurate they become the more useful for Google users, so perhaps this move is aimed at emphasising them more.

Before and after image below (click for larger image), any other reasons they could be doing this?