James Ward

Another new release from Google AdWords this week allows advertisers “whose ads meet a certain high quality threshold” to add sitelinks to their text ads when they appear on Google properties. These let searchers get straight to the content on your site that is most relevant to their query. (more…)

Google are enhancing their paid results listings in all sorts of ways, presumably to increase the click-through rate (and their revenue, of course…). (more…)

Facebook launched new payment options yesterday, increasing the number of currencies in which advertisers can be billed (it was US$ or nothing before). But beware – there seem to be a few teething problems. (more…)

Your favourite search engine is Google, right? Or is it…

A Microsoft employee (working in his own time) has developed a ‘blind taste’ challenge where you compare the results from three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the recently launched Bing. You choose your favourite set of results to reveal which search engine they came from. The results can be surprising. In my tests I found that I preferred Bing’s results almost as often as Google’s, with Yahoo! coming in a poor third. (more…)

The UK got its first look at ‘Street View‘ in Google Maps today. After various sightings of the Google car over the past few months, they have now launched the feature for a few major cities and the results are pretty breathtaking (take a look at Old Broadcasting House, where I work).

Like many people, I wasted a couple of hours looking around places I know spent some time researching the product. The detail and quality of the images is quite incredible (even if the face recognition software sometimes blurs out the wrong thing). Whilst oo-ing and ah-ing over it with some of my coworkers, we discussed what motivates Google to invest in products like this and how they plan to make any money out of the service (or any of its other free offerings). (more…)

Whilst watching Comic Relief Does The Apprentice last night, Sir Allan referred to the comment made by “some schmuck on Dragon’s Den”:

“Profit is sanity; Turnover is Vanity.”

It’s exactly the same in the world of search marketing:

“Conversions are sanity; Traffic is vanity.”

It’s easy to be seduced by the ever-increasing traffic that comes to a site as a result of improving on your search engine optimisation or buying clicks on the pay-per-click platforms. But if that traffic isn’t converting to something tangible – sales, enquiries, sign-ups, downloads, etc than you have acquired nothing more than boasting rights.

The moral? Make sure that you always idenity at least one action that you can track as a ‘conversion goal’ within your stats and measure your site’s performance against that. Don’t look just as the volume of traffic.