You may not know where all your calls are coming from, but with AdWords Call Metrics, at least you can find out which ones are coming from your ads.

Using the technology behind Google Voice, Call Metrics assigns a unique phone number to your campaign. When your ad appears, your phone number will too as an additional line of ad text. Then, when you log into your account you can see the number of calls that came from your campaign, along with more details including call duration. Once you know which campaigns your calls are coming from, you can shift your advertising strategy to get even more calls. AdWords Call Metrics, currently in beta, is available to a limited number of advertisers. To learn more about Google Call Metrics and call tracking, visit Google Ad Innovations.

Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling notes that Google Call Metric is for both Mobile Phone and Desktop/Laptop campaigns, but while mobile marketers can buy calls, the option is not yet available for Desktop/Laptop targeting.

Google Call Metrics – Integrated & Free Call Tracking for Adwords is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant

Conditional bid management automation is a well received tool and up until now, its either cost you for need of software/systems development or for need of paying for a solution from a third party provider such as Acquisio.

Today I was delighted to finally see the prompt from AdWords that the new Automation tool has reached the UK. I have not had much time to test it as it has only appeared for me today, but I will certainly be taking it for a test drive.

Used in conjunction with the ‘Experiment’ tool, this may well make for a change to the strategic landscape. One thing is for sure, it’ll help feed the Shareholders.

What are AdWords Automated Rules?

Google AdWords Introduce the UK to Automated Bid Management is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant

Transcription:

Sometimes when you’re searching, having information from people you know can be really useful. Like when you’re planning a trip. Wouldn’t it be great to see recommendations and opinions from your friends and contacts?

When you’re signed into your Google account and you do a search, you’ll start seeing results from people you’re connected to on Blogger, Twitter, Flickr and publicly available sites. Beneith these results, you’ll see the names and profile photos of the people who share or published the information.

Let’s say I’m planning an upcoming trip and I’m thinking about going hiking.

I see my friend Mike tweeted about his great hike in Yosemity… “That looks like the perfect trip for me”.

Now I need to figure out where I’m going to stay… When I search for campsites, I see my friend Jill’s Flickr Album from her trip to Yosemity, “the view from her campsite looks amazing so I’ll try to stay there”.

Seeing her photos reminds me that I need to get a better camera for this trip. When I search for cameras, I see a blog result from Aariana. Hovering over her name, I see that she is a professional photographer that I follow on Twitter… “I’ll click over to her blog and see what she recommends”.

Go try it out for yourself. You can get ideas and recommendations from people you trust right in your search results. If you want even more content and recommendations, you can link to your Twitter, Flickr and other accounts. It’s all the goodness you’ve come to expect from Google, plus the opinions of your friends, family and others on the web, just when you need them the most.

Google Social Search in It’s Race With Facebook is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant

There are several circumstances in which I might buy an aged domain but two stand out from the crowd. This short post will give a quick overview of these two uses and what you should look out for when purchasing an aged domain name.

Buying an Aged Domain name to rank for a target keyword or search phrase

As I’m sure most readers will already be aware, having a domain name that matches the search phrase exactly that you would like to rank well for is a big winner. Google trusts the domain enough to give it a boost for rankings when the exact search phrase being searched for is an exact match for the domain name. For example, if I bought ‘specialwidget.com’ and hosted the domain, all things being equal or let’s say ‘unspoiled’, it would be relatively easy to get that new domain to rank for the search phrase ‘special widget’. More details on what I mean when I say ‘unspoiled’ further into this post.

Buying an Aged Domain to rank a different web page on another domain

Once again, as most of you will be aware, quality, relevant links will boost the position of your website’s pages for the search phrases that the link-building exercise has been targeted toward. In other words if you link to your ‘special blue widgets’ URI on your domain, from a website all about (special) widgets, with the anchor text ‘special blue widgets’ then your target URI will be more likely to appear higher in the SERPs.

Since we can buy and own domains that are keyword rich, we can also host them and link to our ‘money site(s)’ from those domains (with any anchor text we choose). The big difference between buying a regular domain name and an aged domain is that the aged domain will probably have links already pointing into it, thus having greater visibility by default and more trust from Google. There are many tools that can be used to check back-link volumes. Check SEOMoz’s Site Exploter and MajesticSEO.com.

Things to consider when buying an aged domain name:

1. How many back-links does the aged domain have and what quality/traits do they hold?
2. What used to be hosted on the site? Pills? Let’s hope not, because this kind of ‘neighbourhood’ is considered ‘spoiled’ and untrusted. Use WayBack Machine to check.
3. Is there a market for the keyword/search phrase you are considering buying? If not, the domain name may be less valuable then you thought. Use Google’s keyword Tool to check.

How do I buy an aged domain?

There are several places that offer the search and an ‘auto-bidding’ service. The problem is that often, the domains will be available for ‘back-order’ from only a couple of the businesses offering this service and therefore requires a lot of time to go to each of them in order to run the searches, consolidate the options and then go back having made your decision. Just imagine how time consuming this would be if you had to also look at the history of the domain (as you now know you should) and what if you also had to do back-link research for them all?!

Then there was DomainFace!

DomainFace.com offers a service that does it all for you. No longer do you need to spend hours doing all the research manually because DomainFace offers the following:

• Fine grained control to restrict the words and other characters that appear in the domain name
• Search by PageRank, Alexa rank, backlink counts, directory inclusion and more
• Continuing development to offer more and more search options over time
• Restrict which sources and types of domain names to include in searches
• Search by price using your own preferred currency – DomainFace will do the conversion for you
• Restrict results to domains that are of a minimum age specified by you
• Metrics are linked so you can click through to the source of the data for further analysis
• Support for NameJet, SnapNames and other domain auction websites

I really can’t express how valuable I have found  DomainFace to be, as it has literally saved me many, many hours.

So there you have it. A quick overview of why and how aged domains can be leveraged to gain market share directly, or indirectly.

Why Buy Aged Domains & How to Rank Using a Domain That has Age is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant

Have Google lost their AdSense?

Some of Google’s search results pages in the UK are no longer using the old pale yellow background colour for displaying it’s AdWords ads into and are now using a more expressive green ad format. I would not go so far as to say that this is a case of old Google ad colour vs new ad colour but I must admit that I have often felt that the old format was a little too subtle and perhaps a little too understated for a great majority of internet users and has certainly been so to an even greater degree in the past. On this note, I like the new format for two reasons:

1. The fact that the paid search ads have become more pronounced will only increase the level of transparency that was previously lacking between the visitor, the middle-man and the trail of cash that those prominently poised spots go for.
2. The colour suits the more colourful nature of the new search page. It’s still ‘friendly of them’.

These changes are quite big for the search giant, known to be reluctant to make many changes to their search page design.

If this were a question of old AdWords colours over new AdWords colours though, I would imagine an extremely swift switch-back to the yellow if it dents their bottom-line. Nothing is more important for Google than its profit margin.

Is Google turning to the ‘bling side’?

Will we miss the old Google search pages? Will we miss the yellow? If it works for Google by yielding similar or higher results for them then I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t keep it or any other colour. After all, click-through rates are all that it’s about. Just imagine what goodies Google could mine if they temporarily allowed users to personalise the background colour of the ads displayed to them…

Video of the difference in AdWords background colour

Recorded and uploaded with the HTC Desire:

Google ‘Bling’ Search Ads Get a Colourful Makeover Alongside Its New Interface Design is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant

14,000 tweets in one day

This was the effect of Gordon Brown’s blunder when he referred to Gillian Duffy, a long-time Labour party supporter a “bigoted woman”. It is a moment begging the question: what role does the internet play in informing voters about what really matters to them? And what are the online consequences following blunders or unmasked Television programming? It has been one of the most unusual elections in many years and social media is on everyone’s lips these days but when we get back to basics and take a look at what is it that has been driving people’s investigations and what is it that seems to be shifting opinions in cyberspace, we find compelling signals.

Search Suggestions

Google suggests that the Liberal Democrats’ ‘policies’ has been the most likely search one might want to make if ‘liberal democrats’ has been typed into its search box. ‘party policies’  comes in 5^th when typing ‘Labour’ and Conservatives delivers it’s ‘policies’ second only to ‘.com’, suggesting that the conservative and Liberal Democrats researchers are more driven to the party policies than the Labour party researchers.

Search Insights

Of course we cannot ignore search activity around the manifestos. Despite the Liberal democrats’ competitive leap into the online search-share (as seen in the next graph), their search-share for ‘manifesto’ related queries lagged far behind.

We have been used to a two party race for a long time now and this year, it looks like the British online community are mirroring the general consensus that voters are fed-up with the same old game of ping-pong between the Conservative and Labour parties over so many years. The surge in Liberal Democrat competitiveness online, along with the neck-and-neck split between the Labour and Conservative parties to-date are telling. There were no surprises in 2005 and yet the day after this year’s first televised debate we can see a boost in share of search requests. Liberal Democrats may have stolen the show. In contrast, the conservatives drop down to labour’s share size, despite having almost twice as many Twitter followers; 29k vs 15.5k and the Liberal Democrats with only 18k. Of the various opinion polls, as made available at the BBC’s Election 2010 page, we can see that the Ipsos-Mori poll matches the overall trends we see online with Google’s Insights for Search.

YouTube Suggestions

YouTube searchers certainly signal a troubled online campaign for the Conservative party, with search suggestions appearing upon entering ‘conservatives’ into its search box such as ‘are ignorant’, are retarded’, ‘owned’. That is until we find that the third highest search suggestion for the Liberal Democrats is being ‘owned’ by the Conservative party with a paid/promoted video poised at the top of the results page titled ‘Labour have failed’. This promoted video also overshadows the same search result page but for the labour party with the search phrase ‘labour party political broadcast’. Sneering comments or unusual search behaviour will be revealed by Google’s keyword tool next month, but until then, Google’s suggestions and retrospective Insights make for fascinating perusing.

Nothing like the Obama Girl could have been imagined in the UK and despite being smack bang in the middle of a social media revolution, none of the UK parties have really managed to embrace and then maximise the opportunities available to them online. One nil to USA; unless one of the parties still has a secret viral weapon that could pull them out of the trenches of hand-to-hand combat.

Political Transparency Online

As far as keeping voters informed goes, Labour hosts 5,030 web pages, the Conservatives in second place host 12,800 pages and in first place the Liberal Democrats with not only 22,000 pages indexed by Google but a website I deem as being the best of the three, somewhat confirmed by the data revealed by Alexa, displaying Liberal Democrats as having the lowest bounce rate and the greatest number of page-views per person.

Are we seeing a precursor to a revolutionary change in the way our government will be run? For now, a hung parliament looks like the smart bet and this data does nothing to shift that likelihood but only time will tell  if this turn of events will ultimately lead to a greater level of transparency by the political parties and a more informed voting public, online as well as off.

Update:

08/05/2010

Google Insights Election Day Graph

2010 UK Election Results Share of Vote

In the end it was indeed a hung parliament. The Liberal Democrats are to Join The Conservative Party in a coalition government.

Searching for Transparency – The UK 2010 Election Online Search Behaviour Screams for Attention is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant

OK, so it’s not technically that sneaky, or is it? We know Google has had a major issue regarding it’s service in mainland China and that the Chinese have insisted that Google be responsible for the censorship of its own materials, even though what was supposed to be censored was never actually specified, but would anyone have imagined Google employing such a cheeky technique to deliver results illegally (almost – the jury’s still out on the legality) to China. It seems rather hypocritical to me. I mean, it’s not like they’re doing a little ducking and diving like serving differing content to visitors and spiders. Google aren’t playing a game to see how to squeeze back into a lost market are they? Do no harm, remember? How about (potentially) breaking the law of another country attempting to use a (temporary and potential) loophole in a system? Is breaking a law, going against a legal agreement or bending the rules contrary to it’s own policies? I would expect so. At a regular foreign ministry news briefing, Ms Jiang said:

China like other countries administers the internet according to law.

Yes, it’s law, predictable answer that tells us nothing, but true, none-the-less. Google walk into a country, give the kids a taster and then set up an illegal, or at the very least, unwelcome stall on the borders of the country. When website marketers use technology to game visibility in the search engines in a way  that is contrary to Google’s terms and conditions of inclusion, they don’t waste any time. But hold on! How about a sneaky Kansas City Shuffle? I don’t endorse censorship in any way whatsoever, but Google don’t really think that they could trigger a revolution now do they? So what are they playing at? But all is not lost because at the very least, I’m sure they ‘ll regain plenty of LoveRank

Google conceded to China’s demands in 2006 and owned 30% of the Chinese market. No small potatoes when we know that the chinese search market is said to be worth an ice cool $1bn. Nice, the chinese market is experiencing explosive growth, making for many little clicks on many hugely profitable ads.

Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said that the accounts of dozens of US, China and Europe-based users of its Gmail service who are advocates of human rights in China had been “routinely accessed by third parties”. Does this mean that he thinks it was China doing the spying? If so, how is redirecting requests from China to Hong Kong going to help? Ultimately, China will block the requests being served from Hong Kong and there will be very little Google will be able to do about it. So why bother? With so much money at stake, where on earth will all of this lead to and what, if anything do Google have up their sleeve?

Below is the dashboard displaying the current services available in China at the time of posting this (click the image to view the latest)

I personally think that it is wrong that there is such a mind numbing amount of censorship in China. It makes me feel terrible when I think of just how bad the situation is there and not just in terms of censorship, but this post isn’t about China, it’s about Google, and they are going to win many hearts back again, that’s for sure.

Here’s what Sergey Brin had to say and his sense that Hong Kong was the right step.

China Squeezes Google Out so Google Does a sneaky redirect to Hong Kong Servers is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant

We still hear debates regarding which form of internet marketing is better or more appropriate, ‘SEO or PPC’, even though it has long been demonstrated that the two have a healthy and even symbiotic relationship with each-other.

SEO within PPC

SEO delivers stability and increases brand loyalty but Strong ROI metrics coupled with diligently optimised landing pages pack a huge punch, especially when the results facilitate highly actionable opportunities diagnosed. Synonymizing ourselves via SEO however, allows us to jump even further still. Studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of being visible in the top organic spots as well as the top PPC spots. Increasing conversion rates still further makes this the ultimate combination for a stable and highly maneuverable marketing mix.

PPC within PPC

At the very heart of PPC visibility lies pure commerciality. We pay and pretty soon we receive fame and fortune; at a cost, of course. but we should not forget the long-term implication of running a pure PPC campaign which is not supported with a solid SEO strategy, lest you seek ever-decreasing profitability; an unspoken inevitability built into the bidding model due to the fact that Google dominates the market.

PPC within SEO

Because ROI is always going to be at the heart of a profitable online business, SEO must bow down and give thanks to the accuracies bestowed upon it with PPC metrics. Hand-in-hand with properly established tracking metrics,  SEO along with PPC metrics will accelerate the process of niche domination and ultimately position the business as market leader.

SEO within SEO

SEO has had its roots sunk deep into the very building blocks of the web for a long time now. The dark art is a simple science, a series of tests that aid to direct the search engine’s development. It is an old art that is continually evolving and the effort required to fulfil an effective and long-term strategy can sometimes feel overwhelming in the beginning but ultimately the ROI on a mature SEO solution reigns king.

SEO vs PPC – The Yin & Yang of this Symbiotic Relationship is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant

Google, Google, Google. It’s all about Google but how is public opinion fairing for them these days?

Google’s Superbowl ad features are a reminder of just how flexible and powerful their Universal Search is and delivered in the form of a range of eventful stories. We all know Google give the web a phenomenal amount back but it almost feels like a lost cause for the competing Bing when we consider that they will only deliver about 7.9% of all search queries in the UK (Yahoo! and Bing combined – EU just gave the nod today) compared with the 90% market share that Google hoards. You’ve got to wonder, if Google have already measured such an immense number of things from its monolithic user-base that they surely will have also reached a threshold that will make it next to impossible for any competitor to catch up. By no means am I saying that it is completely impossible but what is undeniable is that it must surely be considered.

The 7 videos created for Google include cute, every-day and even intrepid ideas which strive to give a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. A master-stroke. The lead ‘story’ ‘Parisian Love’, published on YouTube in November has had over 4 million view. Not bad at all, but does this really make 4 million people less concerned with their own privacy and Google’s data monopoly let alone it’s economic cartel?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Why are Google advertising? Is it because everyone hates them now? is a post from: Omar Mossadek - Web Consultant