The Google Grants programme has just celebrated its 10th birthday. Launched in April 2003, this scheme has evolved over the years and Google works with registered charities, providing them with grants to spend in Adwords. However, the number of charities that are actively using this suggests that the majority of UK charities are either overlooking the benefits of this, or are simply not aware of the scheme’s existence. This additional resource of up to $10,000 per month can make a huge difference to a charity’s marketing budgets and so although it can take several months for a grant application to be approved by Google, if you have not yet applied, it is definitely worth doing so here.

This grant does come with a number of restrictions, such as that the ads must only run on Google UK, links in the ads must only be to the pre-approved domain, the ads must be text only and not commercial, there must be no adverts on your own site such as Adsense and each bid must cost no more than $2.

The last criterion is a reasonably new update as Google increased this limit from $1 per click at the end of January. However, this increase in bids came with the announcement that all Grant funded adverts would now be featured underneath any self-funded company or charity adverts. So while this change may open your organisation up to being able to target keywords that were previously outside of this bid limit, sites are likely to have seen a decrease in traffic due to featuring lower down the listings.

However, with the changes that were announced to Adwords just a couple of weeks after this, PPC account managers have been given the opportunity to better manage these adverts. By upgrading to enhanced campaigns, you are now able to manage all devices in one campaign, manually adjust the bid for mobile ads and show call extensions on these mobile ads. This shift from legacy to enhanced campaigns is going to be enforced automatically by the end of June for any accounts that have not made the change themselves. Google have since released a tool that allows you to change campaigns in an account in bulk.

Beyond that, Grant accounts should largely be run in the same way as normal Adwords campaigns. These accounts should be maintained (if you do not work on your account over a 3 month period then Google will stop your funding), the accounts should be well structured and you will need to optimise the account to ensure that you are getting the most out of your spend. Ensure that the keywords that you target are relevant to your organisation and the pages that you are sending visitors to are also relevant and contain a call to action in order to get the best return from your spend.

If you are running a Google Grant account, we would love to know what impact have you noticed since these changes were implemented.

In conjunction with the launch of FocusON for PPC month, we are giving away a Google Chromebook to one lucky reader. Simply visit the PushON Prizes app over at the PushON Facebook page and follow the three simple steps to be in with a chance of winning. HINT: You may want to read FocusON: An Introduction to PPC Marketing first!

The post Are You Making The Most Out Of Your Google Grants Account? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This month we’re beginning a new series of posts that we’re calling FocusON. Each month we’ll focus our posts on a different aspect of digital marketing, and we’re kicking off by talking about Pay Per Click advertising.

To celebrate the launch of FocusON, we’re giving away a Google Chromebook to one lucky reader. Simply visit the PushON Prizes app over at the PushON Facebook page and follow the three simple steps to be in with a chance of winning. HINT: You may want to read FocusON: An Introduction to PPC Marketing first!

Keep your eyes peeled on Facebook and Twitter for updates throughout the month, and don’t forget to share this great opportunity to be in with a chance of winning a Google Chromebook with your social chums!

The post Win A Google Chromebook with #PushONPrizes appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Pay per click (PPC) marketing is a catch-all term used to describe paid website promotion via a range of platforms, including search engines such as Google and Bing, social platforms such as Facebook, and advertising networks such as Google AdWords. Today we’ll be focussing on PPC search advertising, but we’ll be delving further into paid social advertising and ad networks here on the PushON blog throughout May.

An Introduction to PPC

PPC search marketing is distinct from organic search marketing in that a company can pay to directly promote their website within pay per click listings. While organic listings rely on thousands of factors when determining what website ranks where for which keyword, the positioning of paid listings (which can usually be found directly above and to the right of the organic results) can be influenced with greater immediacy. Broadly speaking, ad rank (i.e. how highly your ad appears above those of your competitors, for the same search term) is raised in line with the relevancy of the ad to the service it describes and to the page to which it points—and the amount paid for it to be placed.

Any company can set up a pay per click search campaign with relatively little difficulty, but it’s essential to understand how to manage and optimise your paid search campaign, in order to deliver the best possible return on investment.

The three major contenders for your PPC budgets are, as you might expect, Google, Bing and Yahoo. Bing and Yahoo are both managed from the same advertising platform, known as Ad Center, whilst pay per click ads at Google are managed from the much more popular AdWords platform. Google dominate the landscape thanks to a much larger user base than any of the competition, and, as such, campaigns run through Google are likely to produce higher levels of traffic, although not necessarily the highest levels of conversions and ROI. It’s worth trialling your campaigns across each network to see what works to create the best ROI for your site.

Setting Up Your Pay Per Click Campaign

In terms of an account set-up, it’s important to have an appropriate email address for your login purposes. To use Google as an example, if you intend to share your new AdWords account amongst other people, it wouldn’t be advisable to use your personal email address, since the AdWords account would then be linked to your Google Main and Google Plus accounts, etc. As is always the case, think of scalability.

Once you’ve signed up to an advertising platform, you’ll have to select your billing options, to pay the search engine for click spend. Options include invoicing and payment, manual payment when your notice that your balance is running low (you’ll need to be efficient and operate a good diary for this!), or automatic payment when your balance dips below a pre-set threshold. On the subject of budget, you can control your spend by setting daily limits on each of the campaigns that you build out. Whilst the advertising centre platforms are fallible and may well cut off some time after the daily limit has been exceeded (if it ever is), they do a pretty good job of turning things off and closing the wallet soon after the budget has been exceeded.

You’ll also need to obtain the unique advertiser tracking code from within your account, and paste this into the code on all of the pages of your website whose activity you wish to track. This is far easier than it sounds, as the steps are outlined within the platform.

The following diagram illustrates the basics of an account setup. The overall account is broken down into campaigns, in which are contained ad groups. The keywords and ads are then contained within these ad groups. Your destination URLs are the bread and butter of your data collection, as they track the user’s click through from the search engine, on your ad, and to your website. You can set destination URLs on either your ads or your keywords. You need only complete this step at one of these levels, and it needs to be consistent across the whole account.

It’s All About Relevancy!

As mentioned previously, the smart way to structure an account is to keep each keyword and each ad relevant to your product, service or offering. Google in particular will reward this relevance, over time, by affording you good levels of visibility in the paid space for less money. Another way to control spend is to make use of the different match types. Again, we’ll apply this to Google, as the match types are more profound with this advertising provider. The following is taken from the Google AdWords help Centre, and serves to outline the difference in match types:

It’s legitimate to set up accounts with the same keyword spread across different match types. It would, however, be advisable to gauge which of these performs after a month or so, and pause anything that is spending money without incremental gains i.e. conversions.

In terms of the amount that you pay per click, you can set a maximum CPC (cost pet click) per keyword, or you could set this at ad group level, to apply to all keywords within. We’d advise setting everything at keyword level, as this approach will enable you to tweak bids as and when enough time has elapsed for you to draw meaningful conclusions from the data that the account has amassed.

It is this point of data interpretation that sorts the winners from the losers in the paid search game. Optimise your keywords and ads based on their performance, and know what your own KPIs are in terms of cost per acquisition or order. In this way, PPC moves from behind its smokescreen to become the measured, controllable activity that it is.

The post FocusON: An introduction to Pay Per Click Search Advertising appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Engage 2013

Engage 2013 took place this week in London at the Hilton London Metropole hotel.

If you were lucky enough to attend or watch on the live stream, social updates were being published using the hashtag #Engage2013.

This social event included top speakers from companies such as Twitter, Nestlé, KLM, SAB Miller and Adobe.

Here are a few of the top talks we enjoyed in the PushON office:

Jan Rezab, CEO of social media analytics company Socialbakers. Jan talks about how social media has evolved in the last few years and where will be heading in the future.

Lionel Lassalle, Social Marketing & Co-Branding Manager at KLM, explained the successful social strategies that have proven invaluable for KLM. Lassalle also demonstrates the social tools used and future innovations with software and campaigns used to combine social with the flying experience.

‘Happy staff = better service = happy customers’. #Engage2013

Jeremy Waite, head of social strategy at Adobe, talks about The “Like-Cycle” in social media. The “Like-Cycle” encourages 5 social media challenges, Insight, Content, Loyalty, ROI and Media, with an emphasis on a solid social strategy. The slides can be found here.

Mozilla PENALISED by google

Mozilla the company behind most notably Firefox internet explorer, Thunderbird and other apps were penalised by Google.

The reason, according to a penalty notification:

“Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site.”

Spam in this instance resulted from spammers abusing the blog section for the Mozilla.org site. John Mueller of Google suggested a need for spam filtering and comments being monitored before they go online. Mozilla had 12 megabytes of spam from 21,169 different comments, Matt Cutts (Google celebrity) said those spam comment pages ‘cause users to complain to us about’ and thus ‘action’ was required. 

Although Mozilla got fined by Google, they were never told which page was causing the offence which seems like an incredibly frustrating policy if the offending site has many pages. This is yet another example of Google flexing its muscles in its fight against spam!

UK Government passes Instagram Act – Now All your pics belong to everyone

As of this week, millions of amateur and professional photographers that upload their work on the Internet will be stripped of their rights to their images. The new Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act passed by the UK government amends the copyright law to allow commercial exploitation of images that contain no information identifying the owner. Most digital images floating around on the Internet today contain no metadata, making them ‘orphan-works’, meaning they can now be exploited for commercial use so long as the user performs a ‘diligent search’.

To keep from being ripped off, photographers will have to either remove their work from the Internet, or register it, a costly and time-consuming activity.

Will this new Act make you think twice before uploading photos to social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter?

Tweetdeck apps closing may 7th

This week, we heard news that Tweetdeck mobile app’s are officially closing on the 7th of May and disappear from the Google Play store, according a blog post from the TweetDeck team. Along with this the twitter team will also remove Facebook integration from the apps.

That’s the end of our RoundUP for this week - we will leave you with exciting news for May! Keep your eyes peeled for our competition this month:

Please tweet us @pushonltd or write a comment below, see you next week!

The post Digital RoundUP 29/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Let me tell you a story. However unlike other stories you have read, or been told, this one will not contain any lions, witches or wardrobes. I shall not weave tapestries with my words of knights in shining armour or dragons that must be slain. Which I suppose is a shame really, as I’m sure some out there would find that a far more interesting read for a Friday afternoon.

It’s as I type this second paragraph that I realise I may have taken Nichola Stott’s talk at ionSearch yesterday a bit too literally. You see one of the key takeaway points from her talk for me was that when you choose to follow the much championed “content led” model or strategy for your business, the content you produce must tell a story in some way, shape or form. As by telling a story you create engagement with your target audience, which is the key to making your strategy work.

When this little gem of wisdom was revealed to me, I asked the obvious question. “What’s a story?” Obviously it’s not what I started to write at the start of this post, even though that’s the traditional thing you think of as a story. A story nowadays, in the context of creating great content for your audience, tends to be things that measure things or are evocative or emotive. What’s great about thinking like this, which Nichola pointed out as part of her presentation, is that you can use your clients existing “stuff” to create these stories. Nichola suggested that people find out what their clients are doing currently, find their USP and look at consumer groups. If at all possible use all of this to give people “the warm fuzzy wuzzies” as part of the story.

One great example Nichola gave as part of the presentation showed how you can create something out of nothing if you dig deep enough. One client they had sold thermostats, not exactly the most evocative of markets. Yet upon digging further they found that they were selling thermostats to the NHS. The NHS was in turn using these thermostats in the production of incubators for babies. This all meant that they now had a fantastic, emotive story that they could create content around to share and gain both visibility and (hopefully) links.

Now while all of these great hints and tips were shared with us all at ionSearch, and in turn I have now shared with you, I couldn’t help but notice something. A lot of what Nichola had been talking about sounded to me like traditional PR work. Now this does go hand in hand with the way I believe offsite SEO to have been heading for the past two years, and the way I have been working here at PushOn, but it does lead me to wonder if PR’s and SEO’s can continue to cling to their love/hate relationship. Or will it cause them harm as the few who can let go and just love each other tear ahead of the competition. Simon has shared his own opinion on the matter here at the wallblog, which seemed to cause quite the ruckus, and it’s well worth reading both the piece and the comments to form your own opinion if you haven’t formed one yet.

Hm, I think I can see my next story to tell you on the horizon.

If you want to read a general overview of ionSearch day one, there’s a fantastic one here, written by my colleague Jonny.

Images courtesy of the BBC and me.

The post ionSearch – Let Me Tell You A Story appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This past week Google announced that it will give its users a ‘digital will’ option for their online data. The premise behind it being that users can decide what happens to their online account after they die.

It has been dubbed “data-after-death” and lets users tell Google what to do with emails and other data if their account becomes inactive.

Google email and YouTube posting can be deleted after three, six or twelve months of inactivity. Alternatively they can choose to give access to the data to specific people.

This got me thinking, what happens to all your data when you have gone? What about your Facebook page or Twitter? Social media usage has been increasing at an exponential rate but no one has considered the implications to the data on there.

Both Twitter and Facebook have policies in place to allow users to request that an account be deleted in the event of users passing. Twitter users can obtain a permanent backup of all tweets from a designated account.

What if you do not want to close your Social Media accounts? How about carrying on your social media activity even after you have died?!

Here are a couple of options;

Dead Social

Dead Social enables a user to send out messages after death from various social media accounts.

The key features are;

• Send messages directly to your private Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin account
• Send out a final message and / or series of scheduled messages
• Release unseen video and audio messages

DeadSocial covers all the post-death social media options, scheduling public Facebook posts, Tweets and even LinkedIn posts go out after someone has died. The free service will publish the text, video or audio messages directly from that person’s social media accounts or it can send a series of scheduled messages in the future, say on an anniversary or a loved one’s birthday. For now, all DeadSocial messages will be public, but the company plans to add support for private messages in the future.

LivesOn

This caught my attention because I read about the service and watched an episode of Black Mirror that contained very similar themes.

Essentially LivesOn analyse’s a user’s tweets and learns about what is frequently tweeted and the style of tweets. The idea being that in time a tweet from LivesOn would be identical (or as close) to what the original user would tweet. Tweets will begin to populate on your LivesOn feed. A user has to nominate an executor for the account and they can decide whether to keep the account live.

LivesOn’s slogan is;

When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting

Legacy Locker

The previous two examples specifically dealt with social media accounts, Legacy Locker deals with your online presence as a whole. Legacy will manage your Facebook, Paypal, Linkedin, iTunes and Gmail to name but a few.

There are different levels of accounts from free to $30 a month. The free account will store and hand over 3 logins to one beneficiary and send out a farewell message to your loved ones, the top tier account has unlimited access.

Would you be interested in any of these services? It would be great to know your thoughts.

Please Tweet us @PushONLTD

The post When life logs you off, how to stay online appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Twitter Music

We were given a glimpse of Twitter music over the weekend but only via the site – http://music.twitter.com. On Friday, rumours were going around about the launch of the new Twitter Music app, with Wiz Khalifa, Black Shelton, Soft Reeds, Pete Yorn, The Glitch Mob and Ryan Seacrest all saying how good the new Twitter music app is. The launch was expected to be on Friday, however, updates suggested that the weekend was the target, to be launched with the on-going Coachella festival.

If you now try to log into the site, you can grant access to your account but then the site will take you back to the original page.

What will the Twitter music app look like? Will it spell the end for Spotify? Only time will tell, we can’t answer any of these questions until Twitter release some more information about the App.

Blab - Social Media Conversation Predictor

News broke this week about an exciting new tool called Blab that can be used to predict social conversations that would emerge within 24,48 and 72 hours of them happening.

Blab can also track real-time conversations in any language and allows you to see what content, images and videos are being shared most within your social audience.

Using this information, Blab can improve key areas that your brand can benefit from, including Consumer Insights, Content Marketing, Pre-emptive Brand Protection and Search Engine Optimisation.

We look forward to testing this tool out, and predicting the social trends for the PushON social audience.

At Blab we’re mapping the conversation canvas to give you the most up-to-the-minute understanding of your brand’s audience—who they are, where they are and what they are talking about. Then in 24, 48, and 72 hour time frames, we’re accurately predicting how those conversations will grow and where they will migrate.

Foursquare 6.0

The latest update from Foursquare (6.0) adds an ‘Explore nearby’ search box and map to the main page of the app. This works perfectly to help find out what your friends are doing and shows what’s going on within the local area.

The update also allows for more accurate check-ins and trending popular locations while recommendations and further away goings-on are shown in a separate section.

Universal Analytics

Online marketing and off-line marketing collides. LovesData have hosted hack day using the Google Universal Analytics beta. The applications they have demonstrated strongly suggest that ‘big data’ will rule the roost in not just online, but also offline marketing very shortly.

Google – Map Maker

Google expanded its Map Maker edit tools to cover the UK this past week.

The software allows users to add details to specific sections of Google maps such as information about buildings, national parks and other details that may be of interest to its users.

Any suggestions or amendments are reviewed by other users and Google itself before they are accepted.

Map Maker users can edit and add four types of content:

• Places – such as a restaurant, gym, cinema
• Roads, Rivers and Railways – such as bicycle routes
• Building outlines – use of 3D images for houses, monuments
• Natural features and Political Boundaries – lakes, parks and natural structures

Another feature called Map Maker pulse allows users to see real time updates and displays submissions made by other users. The more users are active they get more ‘confidence’ which means future submissions will be subject to less inspections. 

This is another example of how crowd sourcing has cut costs to map areas by its own users rather than paying to get it done from a company.

That’s the end of the RoundUP for this week, we will leave you with this – GOOGLE STREET VIEW Hyperlapse: This tool allows you to creates a warp-speed Street View back and forth between a pair of points on a map. Give it a try!

The post Digital RoundUP 15/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Top 5 April Fool Digital Jokes

1. Bing

This is what happened when you searched for ‘Google’ on Bing:

2. YouTube – ‘YouTube’s ready to select a winner’

YouTube released a video saying the service would be coming to an end and they will be picking the “best video”:

3. Google

Google were to introduce a search-by-smell feature called Google “nose”

4. Google Treasure Map

Google added a new feature onto the Google Maps page, allowing for the World to be viewed in a ‘Treasure Map’ format.

5. Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic launches a glass-bottomed plane

Mashable created a list of the 2013 pranks, which can be found here:

The Ultimate Roundup of 2013′s Biggest April Fools’ Day Pranks

Facebook updates

Facebook’s messenger app has added VOIP which has now become available in the UK, following on from the US and Canada.

The option appears on active Messenger users’ profile page as ‘Free call’. I have checked this and it has not arrived on my screen yet but I imagine it will be rolled out soon. The call will be placed via WiFi or 3G.

Although the idea is great in theory in practice it will take a while before it takes off, why would you use an app to call and text when there are plenty already out there?

Will you be using it?

Facebook Phone

Screenshots of a phone rumoured to be announced by Facebook has been leaked ahead of an event on Thursday.

 The hardware will be produced by Android and have dedicated ‘Facebook’ style graphics and homepage.

The post Digital RoundUP 02/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

We’ve all been there. For the past couple of years it’s been a nightmare for us developers to spend hours either changing our CSS or HTML mark-up just so Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) can render our webpages correctly.  Since the launch of IE7 back in 2006, web technologies and web standards have changed significantly. Whenever I develop websites for clients, I usually don’t have any problems in regards to testing it cross browser, 98% of the time my websites work seamlessly on pretty much all the modern browsers until I’m asked to test it on IE7.

It is understood that most developers (including myself) still optimise websites for IE7, simply because there happens to be a small minority of users who still use that browser. Latest stats as of February 2013 show that usage of IE7 has dropped to less than 4% globally. The question we need to ask is, is it still worth putting in the effort to optimise websites for IE7 for this minority of users?

Based on my previous experience, it takes an enormous amount of time to make a website or web application optimised for IE7. Due to these problems, and the very small percentage of people who even use the browser, it doesn’t make it worthwhile as far as time, effort and money is concerned. Yes, it would be nice to have a website that is compatible with all browsers, but what are the chances of your visitors (target audience) accessing your website using IE7?

Why should we stop optimising for IE7?

Big name websites such as Google and Facebook officially announced last year that they no longer support older browsers like IE7 because they don’t have the capabilities to handle today’s modern web browsing needs. Google has urged people to update their browsers for a better and safer browsing experience. Facebook’s timeline has been completely phased out from IE7. When users visit their Facebook profile page they won’t see the timeline, but instead will be presented with the old profile page.

Some ecommerce websites have even started charging an ‘IE7 tax’. Australian retailer www.kogan.com was one of the first websites to come up with the idea of charging their users with an extra 6.8% tax. The website detects when visitors are using IE7 and issues a pop-up warning about the tax if the users purchasing goods from their website. The purpose of this approach is to encourage their users to upgrade to a modern browser for a better browsing experience of their website, thus avoiding the extra charge at the same time.

Why are people still using IE7?

One of the biggest reasons people are still stuck with IE7 is because some of them are still using Microsoft’s older operating systems. IE7 came pre-installed when Windows Vista was first launched in 2006, an operating system that many PC owners still use. Microsoft has also used several methods in an attempt to get its users to upgrade, but some organisations find it very expensive and time consuming to get all of their PC’s upgraded to modern standards. Most importantly it is our fault as developers as in the past we have spent hours optimising websites for IE7. This has only encouraged IE7 users to continue their browsing experience with IE7.

What can we do encourage users to upgrade their browsers?

• We can use similar tactics like the Australian retailer “Kogan”.
• Create landing pages that can detect if the users are using IE7 and provide them with a warning and upgrade solution.
• Use badges and small banners somewhere on your website to encourage users to upgrade. Last year a website called “The IE7 Countdown” launched to dedicate the countdown of IE7. They provide code snippets that can be easily embedded on your website to display tiny badges and banners. www.theie7countdown.com

I think it is time to stop spending unnecessary time fixing IE7 bugs and instead using that time to do something more productive.

The post Is it time to bury Internet Explorer (IE7) for good? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Facebook Layout Update

Facebook are at it again, once we get used to their changes on the website, they bring out another one and it takes some getting used to.

The post Digital RoundUP 11/03/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.