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I'm excited. Tomorrow I'll be speaking at the Marketing Forum's Digital Symposium event in New York. I'm really chuffed that they have asked Steak to participate. What will I be speaking on? How Search can be used beyond Search Marketing. It's a topic I'm very passionate about as I've seen first hand how the insights that search data provides can help drive a brand and a business forward and I'll be sharing those experience with the audience. Here's what my session will be covering:

Search is more than just a direct marketing tool, it's a strategic tool. By using the intelligence of search across all communications both online and offline, you can create a successful, cohesive marketing strategy.

Search engines are the world's largest market research tool; you can use them to guide both your business growth and marketing messaging based on consumer demand. Search intelligence is powerful as it is the only pull advertising medium. People are telling you what they want and how they think about your brand and category, rather than being a push medium where marketers are trying to give a message.

• Learn what data from search campaigns can be used by businesses and their agencies to understand how people search and interact with their brands.
• Using paid search as a test-bed for your creative brand messaging , product or service offerings, price points or landing pages or all of these with real customers and gather search data.
• How analyzing search behavior helps you make informed decisions on how to segment or prioritize what you are selling or what new products you could be offering.
• The value to using search across all marketing activity both online and offline and from media to design.
• Using client case studies you will learn how to drive your business forward by putting search at the heart of the marketing mix.

The Marketing Forum's Digital Symposium event is taking place on Thursday 25th September 2008 at The Westin, Times Square, NYC.

I can't wait!  

Well done to everybody who climbed this weekend, and thanks to everybody who went along or helped make the weekend memorable – both at Steak, the British Army and JSMTC Indefatigable at the Nuffield Centre.

 

 

Despite heavy rain, low visibility and gale force winds, all the Steakites present reached the summit and also camped at the Nuffield Centre despite the weather, turning down the offer of warm accommodation on the base.

 

 

We were hiking (and in my case, falling over) for two charities: one for UK service personnel suffering from psychological disability as a result of their service, Combat Stress, and one working to help children in Afghanistan develop reading skills, the Afghan Reading Project.

Please consider donating to support these charities and our forces via Just Giving.

Our next challenge is the Four Peaks hike next year – you are all invited!

 

 

We decided to give our brand a facelift after an amazing period of growth. Since opening our doors in 2005, we have grown rapidly and all of our clients and suppliers have played a key role in this success. Thank you! We couldn't have done this without you.

Over the last 3 years, we've opened offices in London, New York and Melbourne, and also expanded our services. From our origins in search we've grown into a full service digital agency offering search, media and design.

Going forward we will describe ourselves as the search-inspired communications agency - and just as Steak, as we are more than a search agency, more than a digital media agency - we are a full service digital agency.

Steak's search-inspired communications approach:

• Search data is powerful. The search engines are the world's largest marketing research tool - through them we know how people search for your brand as well as what they are searching for.
• We believe that these insights from search can be used across all communications - both online and offline and from media to design.
• It's why we call ourselves the search-inspired communications agency.
• Our creative and design arm has a new name, too - Open. Open offer a range of creative and design services including web design, landing pages, corporate ID development and related creative services.

We'll be launching a website on steakdigital.co.uk to reflect this move away from only offering digital media buying later this summer - and as you may have noticed, our logo has already changed.

Got a question? Why not contact us or come and see us at OMS tomorrow.

Updated: broken link. 

Linking a Google AdWords account to Analytics adds the ability to track AdWords account information within your Google Analytics visitor and conversion stats.

Frequent problems linking accounts include:

• Analytics account not being available
• AdWords campaigns / accounts not being available within Analytics
• In order to avoid any issues, follow the following steps:

Create an Analytics account for your project/client

• If you already have an analytics account make sure the profile isn't linked to another AdWords account)
• Go to Access Manager, and add your AdWords email address account as an administrator
• Log out
• Log in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com/ (Analytics cannot be linked with an MCC account, so make sure you are logged into a client account.)
• Click the My Account tab and make sure Tracking auto-tagging is enabled
• Click the Analytics tab.
• Click I already have a Google Analytics account.
• From the Existing Google Analytics Account drop-down list, select the name of the Analytics account you'd like to link to. Can't see it there? Go back to the start and check your steps again.
• Keep the checkboxes selected on this page, unless you're sure you'd like to disable auto-tagging and cost data imports
• Click Link Account.

Your two accounts should now be linked.

A few notes:

• Analytics reports in general are not real-time, and report data is usually available 4-6 hours later.
• AdWords data usually takes 12-24h to propagate into your account, and will only be available from the day you link accounts onwards.
• If the accounts are linked correctly they should share your AdWords account timezone.

The standard FAQ is here.

This is the last in our Analytics mini-series, but we will post tips and tricks occasionally in future.

This week we will be looking at for how long Google Analytics tracks visitors and how you can change the default settings for the lifetime of a cookie.

Default Cookie Expiration

By default, Google Analytics uses a 6 month cookie lifetime. Depending on your needs you can extend the setCookieTimeout function in the Analytics script:

_setCookieTimeout(15768000)

The Analytics cookie length (in seconds) will affect how return visitors are counted and more importantly affect how long a referrer is kept when tracking conversions.

You can also change the default session timeout in a similar fashion:

_setSessionTimeout(1800)

If your time to conversion goals are longer than 6 months or if you want your sessions to last more than 30 minutes, these are very handy tweaks.

Next week: Linking Adwords and Analytics

By default Google Analytics will credit the last referrer as the source of any conversion, in some cases this can be problematic.

Imagine the following scenario:

1. You're a retailer and you run a paid search campaign for a range of pyjamas.
2. A visitor finds your site through the keyword "blue striped pyjamas" by clicking your PPC ad and lands on your website.
3. The visitor has a think about the item, and decides to not buy straight away.
4. The next day, the visitor returns to the site by searching for the site name and clicking on your PPC ad for your brand term, and purchases the pair of pyjamas.

By default, the second visit will overwrite the previous referrer in Google Analytics, so the conversion will appear to be coming from your brand term keyword, rather than "blue striped pyjamas". This means that any decision to lower spend on this keyword (or switch it off) will be poorly informed; if not incorrect.

The solution is to use the little known utm_nooverride=1 variable in your URLs as part of your tagging.

This prevents GA from overwriting the previous referrer if one exists and correctly identifies which keywords are driving your sales; the last-click-but-one is credited with the sale.

This is useful - but not perfect, as it doesn't show the full research path of the consumer - unlike E2C reports from Doubleclick, Google's recent acquisition...Let's hope we see further developments in this area in future, so keyword bidding decisions can be fully informed.

There's no formal documentation on the Google site of utm_nooverride=1 variable; but blog posts here and here are useful.

Spam, spam, spam. We all know it's not going anywhere. Despite the warnings, despite all of the anti-spam filters, despite white lists and black lists, spam gets through.

Like the BBC's article states, spam and anti-spam efforts are an arms race. Spammers know that most of their messages will get deleted, but a few will draw a response - and the low cost of transmission means they will make a profit. These guys know ROI as well as any agency. And they don't have to worry about the law or winning clients.

So how do you avoid getting spam - or at least limit it? Here' some tips based on my experience:

• Do not post individual email address on the web. Ever!
• Use an impersonal address (e.g. domains@) for domain registrations and opt out of public whois records if possible. The impersonal address can have stricter filtering applied to it or be chucked away if it receives too much spam.
• Never put an individual's email address on press releases or anything that might be published on the web. Ever!
• If you need to put an address on your website, do so as a linked image, or protect it using JavaScript. Never, ever as normal text.
• Unless you really want to receive them, opt out of newsletters and 3rd party offers and websites (to reduce the risk of your address being sold on).
• Never, ever buy from spam. Respond once and your address may be sold on at a premium because you are known to respond.
• Never reply - doing so means they know you address is real. So they can sell it on for a premium. Don't do their list cleaning for them!
• Keep your computer secure with a firewall, security patches and anti-virus - so it can't become a botnet drone used to send spam without your knowledge.

Most of these points are about not publishing your address on the web. Why? Spammers often use harvesters or crawlers that visit websites and extract email addresses. This isn't random - they may target websites that appear in search results for a particular search, for example. They will have your address within days - if not hours - of it being placed online.

Once they have a company address they can use this to guess the format of addresses and then generate thousands of combinations of first and second names and spam them, seeing which ones don't bounce - increasing their lists in size.

So do not publish your email address on the web - ever!

Here's wishing spam a horrible belated 15th birthday - and hoping that in 15 years, "spam" will only mean canned meat.

UPDATE: Mailinator allows you to create free, throw away mailboxes and email addresses - ideal if you need to publish an address. I'd not recommend using it for anything sensitive, though. You can also protect addresses using JavaScript using this site.

Google Analytics offers a free way for marketers to experience the power of analytics packages without spending a lot of time or money on setup and customisation. Originally aimed at smaller publishers and SMEs as Urchin, Google Analytics is gaining ground as an enterprise level analytics solution due to its integration with other online marketing channels, good reliability, and the low cost to implementation due to the fact that Google offer this for free.

This is the first of a mini-series of tips and tricks put together by Chris, one of our developers.

Script Upgrades

Google updated their analytics tracking script in October 2007, and are starting to roll out beta features using this script. This includes the new beta benchmarking facility rolled out two weeks ago to all users and the event tracking facility launched in private beta.

To see if you are using the latest scripts, check that you are using the below in your source code:

...src="http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js...

rather than

...http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js...

Both versions will work for now, but publishers are recommended to upgrade to access all the features when they are launched for all account holders.

New Event Tracking

Event tracking is still in limited beta, but looking at a demo I was quite impressed at how it can work much better than assigning virtual pages to track outbound clicks and actions.

With event tracking, any action can be sent to GA, along with meta transaction information (such as song played, banner clicked, etc). This can then be reported through the events reports.

This coudl be a very useful feature websites with complicated conversion points that rely on more than just knowing an action occurred.

Beta Industry Benchmarking & Data Sharing

Industry benchmarking enables you to see how your site data compares to others in available industry verticals.

In order to participate, you need to agree to share your visitor data with Google.

Google then "buckets" the data into industry verticals and then anonymises and aggregates the data, meaning no sharing of your actual data to competitors - everybody sees an aggregate.

In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site's Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites.

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Next Week: Last referrer conversion issues

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends allows you to review past search trends for specific keywords (up to 5 at once) and also review how many news stories have featured them. Results can be focused by country, and in some cases, data stretches back to 2004. Data is not available for all countries that far back, because of when Google launched country-specific indexes and websites per country.

What's Google Trends Useful For?

In my experience, Google Trends is most useful for:

• Analysing interest in a topic over time

Barack Obama is a classic example - a spike when he was first elected, a long quiet period, and then a build up of momentum as he entered the Democratic nomination race - and some international searches as press coverage grew.

• Comparing search or click volumes to news coverage or other offline events

The deaths of famous people, sporting events etc are examples of this - or the "credit crunch" / "sub prime" events in the US

• Reviewing seasonal trends

For example the decline in finance searches from January onwards in the UK (this graph hides the September increase many finance companies expereince)

• Reputation Management - has a company's name or product brands seen an increase as a result of positive / negative coverage?

Enron, Blu-ray and HD DVD (note the multiple spellings of Blu-ray), the iPhone or toy recalls are all good examples of this

Limitations of Google Trends

It's important to understand the limitations of Google Trends - or you may find you have drawn incorrect conclusions or created a presentation that can be easily ripped apart in meetings (never fun!):

• Data is a few month's behind the current day (its an engineering challenge to record, analyse and then publish this amount of data, so it can't be done daily)
• Data is not available for all keywords; only those with significant volumes
• The time period available varies by country
• The news index is small and mainly US focused (i.e. not very useful)
• The regional data showing the leading cities/regions for an area is in accurate

The last point seems to be because Google tries to geo-locate searches, but often only resolves IP addresses back to data centres or similar telecoms infrastructure - for example it often reports that Bletchley Park (Population: 33,950) is the most popular source of many UK for searches. In fact this is because there is a lot of telecoms infrastructure there, a hangover of the WW2 use of the area for code breaking.

Hot Trends (Google Zeitgiest)

Google has published search trends for several years as the Google Zeitgeist (Yahoo and Lycos have been doing this for even longer). In 2007 they added "Hot Trends", which reports 100 searches in the US. This is not the top 100 overall - that would be dominated by generic words like "cars", "loans" etc - but the 100 searches which have shown sudden surges in popularity - for example because of a news story, event or due to seasonal trends. Hot Trends is a Google labs project at the time of writing, so hopefully it will offer country-specific data in the future.

Google Current

Google also contributes to Current.com (Google Current) and its TV Channel. Current.com, in its own words: "..is the first fully integrated web and TV platform users can participate in shaping an ongoing stream of news and information that is compelling, authentic and relevant to them".