position2

position2

Category: Paid Search

  • Google Panda 4.1 – Implications & Learnings

    It’s now official, the new update to Panda is here. This follows Pierre Far’s post on Google+.

    Google Panda 4.1 – Position2 Blog

    This has been named Google Panda 4.1 as it comes close to about 4 months from when Google announced Panda 4.0. We at Position2 had shared our thoughts on Google Panda’s implications for SEO & we are now back to shed light on the implications & learnings from 4.1

    Implications of Panda 4.1

    As SearchMetrics’ SEO Visibility tool points out, this is a slow roll-out and will continue over the next few weeks. Google Panda 4.1 is expected to affect about 3-5% of search queries depending on geography.

    Taking a sneak preview at sites listed below, one thing is for sure – Panda 4.1 is in line with the previous updates and is intended at sites which have poor or plagiarized content. Typically, websites which do not produce their own content & re-publish content tops the list of losers.

    Domain-Losers   Before    After 

    Change(%)
    Yellow.com 16383   3413 -79%
    similarities.com 118771  25197 -79%
    free-coloring-pages.com 12268 296 -76%
    dwyer-inst.com 13225 3229 -76%
    issitedowwnrightnow.com 69354  18376 -74%
    updatestar.com 13232 3766 -71%
    office365.com 29365 8781 -70%
    findthebest.com 30848 93937 -70%
    homewyse.com 14161 441 -69%
    adlaide.edu.au 20351 6537 -68%

    Domain-Winners

    		 Before After Change(%)
    comdotgame.com 2632 38231 1353%
    hogkiat.com 132 68372 406%
    rd.com 8963 42916 379%
    babble.com 17209 71434 315%
    mediagames.net 6839 27876 308%
    hotelguides.com 8563 32957 285%
    yourtango.com 30624 109148 256%
    moreofit.com 6431 22864 256%
    celebritygossip.net 10727 38068 255%
    spoonful.com 2813 89573 218%

     

     

     

     

    Source:Forbes.com

    This is a classic case of how adherence to Google’s Guidelines is recognized & rewarded w.r.t. quality, original content. Other sites like simplyrecipes.com & Glamour.com have reaped benefits from this algorithm update.Whereas,sites with original quality content stand out to gain from these updates. Noteworthy to mention is Babble.com, which was one of the top losers with Panda 4.0, is now on the winner’s list.

    The overall conclusion here is that News, Content Sites & Portals which offer downloads emerge as clear-cut winners – thanks to original content again. On the other hand, websites which have lyrics, games & aggregator sites need to pay the penalty owing to re-published content which Google terms as “thin-content” sites.

    Learnings from Panda 4.1

    • Have a unique content strategy for your site. Make it as friendly to users.
    • Always have original, quality content on your site; forget content duplication.
    • Content updates should be periodic and should cater to latest happenings in the industry. Efforts should be to evolve as an industry “thought-leader”.
    • Be very careful when re-publishing content, always cite sources whenever required to share content.
    • Avoid guest-blogging, Google considers this as a spam technique.
    • Stick to social channels for content-syndication. Create content useful for your visitors e.g.: infographics, Quick facts, etc. Make your social platforms more engaging and audience friendly.

    Are you seeing any differences in your website performance over the past few weeks or if you are a target of content duplicity, check out for the same on your Webmaster Tool dashboard. Do let us know your comments in the section below.

    Make way for Panda 4.1 – Enjoy spam-free, superior content online!

  • Google Updates Technical Webmaster Guidelines

    The Googlebot that crawls all the web pages could until now only understand textual content and not image based content, CSS or JavaScript. But all that is going to change now, thanks to a recent Update to Google Webmaster Guidelines. Now you will have to optimize your site not just with respect to the textual content but also with respect to the images and the JavaScript too. You will have to do extensive optimization for your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) too because the Google Spiders will now recognize them.

    If your website settings are such that your robots.txt file is preventing the Googlebot from accessing your Java files then you are at a loss and Google advises you to render access to the bots.  The Google Panda algorithm will negatively view your content if it is not up to the mark with respect to JavaScript or CSS file.

    If in case you are not sure JavaScript and CSS is getting indexed or not, then you can do a manual check by the following process.

    Google fetch

    You need to first select Fetch option under the Crawl tools and then you need to enter the URL of the site that you want to check. If you want to test the homepage then you need to leave the field blank. Press Fetch and Render button so that the Googlebot will begin to crawl your website. Once the crawling is complete you can press the Submit to index button to see the detailed results of the indexing.

    Previously Google used to advise webmasters to check their content on text only browsers like Lynx but now with this new update you will have to check the content on regular browsers to see to it that the site is optimized keeping the new Google update in mind.

    Google offers the following advice for optimal indexing of your website.

    • Be sure to use only the most popular technologies on your website that support the maximum number of browsers.
    • Speed is an important factor for the Google indexing hence avoid all roadblocks to swift indexing like large downloads, et al.
    • Club your various CSS and JavaScript files together and also compress them for better and easier indexing.
    • Handling of full JavaScript and CSS can be tough at times due to various issues and hence optimize your website so that all these additional formatting styles are easily indexed at all times.

    Let us know how this new Update from Google will affect your SEO efforts, going forward.

  • How to Improve your Digital Marketing ROI Using Big Data

    Today we are in the middle of a radical shift in the way we interact and communicate with one another. Factors like democratization of data, mobile computing, broadband Internet ubiquity, faster and cheaper computing prowess have all contributed in making big data so momentous today. Big data might happen to become as important as Internet itself to businesses and the society in general in the not so distant future. You don’t need to be intimidated by big data as that is clearly not going to help you in any way. All you have to do is implement these big data essentials to enjoy better ROI for all your digital marketing campaigns.

    Use Data Analytics

    You can find exactly how your website is faring using any data analytics that is available online. Google Analytics is a very useful tool if you want to get an accurate feedback on your website. All you have to do is register for Google Analytics and you can begin monitoring your website. It gives you an accurate idea about how many people visited your website and how long they stayed. You can find out how exactly they landed on your page i.e. the external site that directed them here. This is useful if you are already into digital marketing since now you know which are the campaigns that are working for you.

    Go for Retargeting

     

    retargeting

    Image Source

    Today it is not enough if you track your users on your website, you need to keep tabs on them even after they leave your website. It is an essential part of retargeting wherein when they go to some relevant website you can again target them and have better chances of converting them to customers. Since the user has already seen your ad before, he is more likely to reciprocate positively to your ad this time around. But for this you need to use cookies in order to keep track of your user whenever he is online.

    Exploit Social Media

    The explosion of social networking sites is one of the hallmarks of the Internet since the rise of the search engines during the early part of the millennium. Today everybody is connected via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, et al. This makes your job easier since all you have to do is find out what these people are saying about you and your competitors thus offering you a lot of insight into customer opinions and proclivities. You can then dovetail your digital marketing strategy accordingly and make the most of this new found knowledge.

    social media

    Image Source

    Learn from People’s Searches

    Learning from people’s search queries can be a very rewarding experience for you if you do it analytically, diligently and persistently. This can throw light on what people are demanding and what are their expectations from any product or service. Google Trends is a very good platform to delve into people’s search patterns. You might not get too excited in the beginning since it is a whole lot of data that you have to sift in order to get anything valuable out of it.  But if you do it with perseverance then you would be surprised to find out how much insights you can gain about your customers both existing and prospective. You can get a detailed list of what people are searching, the frequency with which they are doing it, the websites that they click on the results page and such other useful nuggets of information.

    Put your House in Order

    Before you go about looking for data anywhere on the World Wide Web do organize the data that is lying in your own data centers. This can be immensely helpful in ways you would have never imagined possible. You can do detailed research about your customers and profile them as per their past interactions with your website and the result that it delivered to you. You can compare two instances where you received different results and find out the exact reasons for such a disparity; sales is one parameter to consider here.

    DBMS (Database Management Systems) from marquee names like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft cost prohibitively high and are beyond the reach of small business enterprises. In such a scenario, you can consider buying the software from small suppliers who differentiate themselves by focusing on niche markets. You can even try Linux operating system as a database platform since it is an open source product. According to Forrester Research’s product evaluation, open source databases viz. Ingres, PostgreSQL and MySQL come out as some of the best.

    You can find out the exact reasons why you could not convert your leads to sales in a particular scenario as you are now backed by compelling data from your own database. This shall help you fine-tune your digital marketing strategy saving you precious resources by offering you better insights into conducting highly targeted campaigns.

    Position² Point of View

    Today we are living in a world where information is generated at an unprecedented rate and off-the-shelf raw computational power is getting better by each passing day. Now these are the two parameters that make big data so widely popular and sensational. You might love it or you might hate it but you just cannot ignore big data. The field of big data analytics is still in its infancy. The explosion of data in today’s world is really mind-boggling to say the least. Data scientists today are the new age rock stars (excuse the metaphor). There is highly valuable information out there in all that raw data that is zipping from one end of the globe to the other in the blink of an eye. Though it is still nebulous as to where we are headed in terms of exploiting big data to our advantage, one thing is for sure that big data analytics has evolved today from being a business initiative to a business imperative. The faster you realize that, the better it is for the fortunes of your company.

  • Social Media for Enterprise [Infographic]

    Today if your brand is not present on social networking sites you are unwittingly losing out to your competition. Companies around the world are investing heavily in social media marketing in order to ensure favorable customer engagement. Here’s a quick primer of what the social media world looks like in terms of enterprise participation. This might just spur you to take the plunge and actively incorporate an integrated social media strategy backed by real-time analytics, to power your digital marketing campaigns.

    Social Media for Enterprise Infographic

  • AdWords Targets Users Making In-app Purchases

    App marketers can now target users who have purchased a particular app or made an in-app purchase through the Google Play Store. They can do this by targeting AdWords for the Google AdMob ad network. Thus the marketers can now show their ads to people who are more likely to buy their app or an offering within their app. These ads are basically display ads served within the Android apps. This is a new feature from Google wherein ads will be served to users based on their previous interaction with an app. It offers better ROI to digital marketers and it also benefits the users since they will be offered products or services which makes sense to them.

    Consider a user who has bought Dropbox cloud data storage. Now this user is a very good target customer for the Amazon Cloud Storage S3 (Simple Storage Service). So this new AdWords targeting lets you serve Amazon S3 ads to anybody who has subscribed to the Dropbox Cloud Storage service. That way Amazon has a higher click-through rate at a lower ad budget.

    Using Google AdWords to serve specific targeted users will definitely send you lesser leads but the chances of your leads getting converted to sales is higher since you have qualified leads now.

    Is this new feature from Google worth your attention? Do let us know.

  • Pinterest to Get More Ad Driven

    Pinterest is getting more assertive with each passing day when it comes to pushing ads on its platform. Its test launch of Promoted Pins some time back this year went down well with both the advertising fraternity and the user community. The scrapbooking site now wants to scale its revenues by upping the ante as far as advertising is concerned. Pinterest opening up its advertising platform to all businesses is imminent.

    Pinterest initially beta tested Promoted Pins in May this year with only a small group of advertisers. Today Pinterest is a force to be reckoned with in the digital arena controlling 23% of referral traffic to e-commerce sites across the web. This has caught the fancy of digital marketers who now want a slice of this booming ad platform in order to draw more sales and brand value alike.

    Setting up Promoted Pins on Pinterest is quite easy. First you pick a pin that you want to promote. You then specify which search keywords you want to attach to it. You can choose geography, language, user demographics for which you want your advertisement to be targeted. You only pay when somebody clicks on your ad to visit your website. Hence, this is a Pay Per Click model and advertisers bid against one another with no minimum bid price needed, as of now. Pinterest is a product and image driven environment where users actually embrace brands. It has proved so far that it has a huge power over online ecommerce which will only grow in the days to come.

    Pinterest offers Analytics Dashboard to digital marketers building ad campaigns on its platform. Advertisers can check which Pins and boards are driving the most clicks and conversion to sales so that they can specifically concentrate on them. They can get a detailed report about which of their Promoted Pins attracted the most impressions and repins.

    Promoted Pins is a very robust advertising model because people interact with these pins in very much the same fashion they interact with Pinterest. There seems to be an alignment between what users would like to do on Pinterest and what advertisers would normally want them to do. People want to discover new things on Pinterest. They repin things they like in order to save for later use or to share with somebody. That way Pinterest is unlike Facebook or Twitter as far as digital advertising is concerned. People explicitly use Pinterest boards to save stuff they would like to buy! Now that is manna from heaven for any digital advertiser worth his salt. This has made Pinterest a very lucrative platform for advertising in the digital world, without a smattering of doubt.

    Are you excited about Pinterest Promoted Pins? If yes, kindly let us know what you think about it.

  • The Google Tag Manager gets an Update

    The Google Tag Manager is a very useful tool not only for the IT fraternity but also for the digital marketers. You can make the whole process of tag management more predictable and tailor-made for your specific needs. Some of the features associated with the just released Google Tag Manager update are as follows:

    • Customizing the Tag Manager to your unique needs using new APIs
    • A user friendly interface that can launch and edit your tags quicker and more efficiently.
    • A host of other third party templates that makes tagging easier than before.

    A tag is an HTML code that executes on a web page or a mobile app. Without an integrated tag management solution you have to manually add the individual tags to the source code of your site. The Google Tag Manager Update (GTM for brevity) helps you manage how tags are deployed on your website or mobile app making the whole process hassle-free. You just have to specify the tags you want to use and the GTM will do all the hard work. You get a powerful set of tools to control how these tags are fired and how your tag data is handled using triggers, variables and a data layer.

    GTM for the web is deployed using a single container code snippet that you can place on all your web pages. For the purpose of mobile apps you can use the Tag Manager SDK. These container snippets will handle the deployment and execution of various entities like Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Floodlight ( A Floodlight tag is an HTML tag that you place on your website to track conversions, such as a consumer making a purchase or completing an online form), and other tags that you might be using.

    The GTM platform is intuitive and structured making it easy even for first time users to take control. The Google Tag Manager API helps you better manage your web interface. You can easily manage bulk users and set up role-based permissions and the API will provide the right level of access to the right users. You can use the API to generate master container templates to make variations with respect to domain and campaign ids.

    Tags could be used for a variety of purposes but most of the tags in GTM are used to send data from your site to a third party site. GTM uses triggers and variables to decide how and when your tags are fired. Tags are deployed based on events and are executed when a page loads or when there is some kind of an interaction with your web page.

    You can decide when exactly to execute a tag depending on a specific customer interaction on your website, example, somebody clicking on a download form or a submit button. Thus, you can get specific data regarding the customer behavior on your website which helps you analyze how your digital marketing campaigns are performing. Based on these insights you can tweak your campaigns to improve your digital marketing strategy.

    Will you be utilizing the Google Tag Manager update for your websites and mobile apps?

  • Facebook Raises the Ante in Mobile Ad Space

    facebook audience network

    Facebook has officially launched its mobile ad platform called “Audience Network” which lets digital advertisers to serve ads on third party apps. Now this is just an extension of the Facebook advertising program and it even involves the same ad inventory that serves ads on Facebook’s own site and its apps. For long Facebook has been struggling to monetize its database of over a billion users without much impact. Now this launch of its mobile ad platform will give a fresh boost to Facebook’s advertising capabilities. It is a simple way to augment its advertising reach across the burgeoning mobile apps category to improve targeted advertising. This will no doubt be beneficial to advertisers but at the same time it offers value to the users and the app publishers as well.

    This Facebook platform immediately serves two purposes. Firstly, it helps Facebook to leverage its treasure trove of user information without putting more pressure on its already existing ad programs. Secondly, it gives advertisers an opportunity to display their ads to more people based on specific demographic needs. With the launch of Audience Network, Facebook will now be able to compete directly with Google AdMob, Yahoo Flurry and Twitter MoPub in the mobile advertising space. A major chunk of Facebook’s revenue today is coming from the mobile space and hence the social media giant wants to bolster its position in this arena lest the search engine giant Google permanently renders it to a distant second place.

    What it Means for Digital Marketers

    The mobile app space is growing at a torrid pace but unfortunately there aren’t many organized advertising networks that cater exclusively to this space. Facebook now is trying to bridge that gap. It will no doubt bring its deep expertise of using targeted advertising to create better campaigns in the mobile app space too. Digital marketers like you can take comfort in the fact that Facebook can now use the same targeting options that it uses to push ads on the social networking site such as age, gender, social contacts, buying habits, et al in the mobile arena too. You can now make your ads resonate with the right customer group and command more qualified leads giving you better return on investment.

    Facebook is linking its Audience Network to its existing ad network which means you cannot buy ads on Audience Network without buying ads on Facebook as well. For those of you digital marketers already running News Feed ads on Facebook using this new mobile offering from Facebook is just a click away!

    You can better meet your business objectives using Audience Network like increasing app installation and engagement. The platform supports ads in three creative formats namely banner, interstitial and native. Early tests have shown that the ads on Audience Network offer great value for money and this has got the digital marketers quite excited.

    So, will you be using Facebook Audience Network to get more digital bang for your buck?

  • Google Authorship, Native Advertising for B2B and much more…| Best of the Week

    This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.
    google-authorisation
    From the Position² Blog This Week:
    Google Authorship Axed but Author Rank Endures
    Giving due recognition to authors was the aim but somewhere down the line there were roadblocks. This made Google ditch the Authorship program but Author Rank will no doubt be used by the search giant to reward quality content on the Internet. Read this blog to learn more.
    Top Stories this Week: Social Media
    Top Stories this Week: SEO, PPC and Digital Media
    sherpa-emails-summit-video Best of the Week Video
    Watch this Marketing Sherpa Email Summit Video that talks about engagement being the key performance indicator when it comes to measuring your email program success. Find out how to create engaged recipients.
    White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x
    Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn:

    • SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
    • Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
    • Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
    • How EVA benefits businesses.

    Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

    		 Know more about Enterprise Visibilty Accelerator(EVA)
    If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

  • Facebook “Like” Button goes Mobile

    Facebook has come up with yet another update wherein the ubiquitous “Like” button will now be available for Android and iOS mobile apps too. This has got the digital marketers quite excited since now they can analyze user engagement via mobile apps. The mobile users can directly “Like” the app’s Facebook page or any other object within the app and share it on the social networking site.

    Today more and more people are using mobile gadgets like smart phones, tablets and phablets (phone + tablet) as their primary device for browsing the Internet. In the world of mobile devices the apps rule supreme. So any marketing strategy that does not take into consideration this vital factor is doomed to fail. The Facebook “Like” button going mobile in order to garner the attention of the growing clan of app users is a well-timed update from the social media giant.

    The “Like” button works flawlessly with the user’s Facebook account no matter what device he/she is using to log into the account. This makes liking any piece of content in the native app effortless. Facebook has issued some guidelines for digital marketers in order to make the most of the Like button on mobile apps. They are as follows:

    • Research when exactly to show the Like button.
    • Position it strategically to get the best outcome.
    • Have a riveting Facebook page.

    As a digital market you have data of a whole new segment of consumers using mobile apps, at your disposal. Using the “Like” button you can find out which is the form factor that your customers are most comfortable with and how it converts into more marketing leads. This can give you an accurate picture about which platform is the most profitable. Thus you can pursue a digital marketing strategy taking cue from this new found knowledge.

    Mobile marketing will upend the digital marketing world for good. So you have to be always nimble and on the lookout for new opportunities and threats alike. You need to have a team of technologists with an intuition of future technology, business executives with an eye on the revenues working together seamlessly. Their efforts can then come to fruition using market intelligence apprising you about imminent business prospects.

    It was but imperative on the part of Facebook to bring an update like this since the majority of Facebook users are youngsters. So keeping in sync with the mobile centric demographics that Facebook has, it had to bring its desktop features and capabilities on to the mobile bandwagon thus benefiting publishers and developers on this burgeoning platform.

    So how do you think this new update from Facebook, is going to augment your digital marketing campaign going forward?