After a huge advertising campaign, a lot of hype and a considerable amount of technological expertise, on June 28^th 2011, Google+ was born. The plucky new challenger stood up against (if you can call anything with the backing of the world’s most popular search engine that) the mighty behemoth of Facebook. This was a chance for those with their social networks covered in pointless status updates, endless photos and incessant pokes to start again and enjoy a much cleaner network that you could be much more engaged in.

To begin with, Google made the strange decision to launch it as a work in progress, a project; it began very stripped down with just a stream service, photos, hangouts (which got much better as time went on to be fair) and circles. There was an awkward party feel when you got there. You hear it’s going to be great but then you get there and it’s just a small group of friends you always see, and everyone else who turns up merely announces their arrival and then sits down, waiting for something to happen. It felt a little silly at the time, and I have to confess I had a hangout with my flatmate… while we were both in the living room. For most people that’s where the relationship ended, and after a week or so everyone went back to their crowded Facebook because at least it wasn’t lonely.

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For an online retail store the top spot of a search engine results page for any product you sell is the holy grail of online marketing, it is like having the prime spot on the high street or the biggest and best shop in the mall. Of this lucrative cherry there are also two bites, organic and paid listings.

One online company seems to have achieved this lofty goal in fairly short order, namely one worldstores.co.uk.

In an apparently shrinking market of home and garden furniture Worldstores.co.uk is thriving and last year boosted revenue by 70%. So how did they do this?

First some background information.

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I recently gave a talk on behalf of GBM as part of their Video Solutions day at Vison+Media at MediaCity. Since the talk I have had several people request some of the case studies I showed, so I thought I would collect as much as I could from that talk into a blog article.

A few years ago we took a major decision at Red C to push our digital video offering, this came about after we read an article in Campaign Magazine, which highlighted that the agency that could successfully deliver low cost video solutions to clients would have a larger share of the future. Which is true when you consider all the places now where clients can use video, from video adverts on the internet to video embedded in magazines on iPads to narrowcasting in Petrol Stations and Taxis… and of course video on YouTube and Vimeo.

Rather than highlight our own work; at the talk I highlighted several video case studies that over the years have impressed me. Together with the videos, I highlighted the responses the videos have received as well as reasons why I think they have been so successful… so here they are:

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Technology. It does not like to stand still does it. In fact it makes me smile that if we grabbed someone from ten years ago and dropped him or her in the middle of the Technology for Marketing & Advertising Expo at Earls Court in London… they would probably think they were at least 100 years in the future.

It’s very easy to walk round here and look at some stands and just say ‘Wow, that’s clever’. It’s also very easy to attend some talks that really get your mind racing with the possibilities for your clients… so it’s probably a good job I’m spending today and tomorrow here then!

Thanks to it being painfully slow to get in, I missed the special keynote presentation from Google. From what I could gather, they are saying mobile phones are the future and they were amazed how many people relied on mobile browsing during the ash cloud crisis of 2010.

Anyway, despite missing that talk, here’s what I did manage to listen in on, on day one.

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I’ve got a confession to make.  I’m a PPC turncoat!

I’ve changed sides in the last 12 months on one of the most controversial issues in PPC marketing.  It’s a debate that’s generated a lot of virtual column inches in the search engine forums, and I’ve done a complete u-turn during 2010.  The issue is whether you should be bidding on your own branded terms, and I can recall throughout 2009 passionately arguing that clients shouldn’t pay for clicks that they would get anyway – for free – through being number one in the organic listings.  They would simply be cannibalising their own natural search traffic.

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A great opportunity to get a postcard pin-up in a blog article

25 – 35 – 35. These are not the vital statistics of some ill-proportioned beauty contest winner. They actually refer to the number of characters we, as Adwords advertisers, have to play with when trying to get a message across to a potential customer.  Needless to say, when it comes to writing Adwords ads, every character counts.

What makes a good ad?

The first and hardest rule is relevance. If your ad is not relevant to your user’s search query you’ll miss out on a lot of potential clicks. So how do you make your ad relevant? Well the first thing to do is ensure your keyword or phrase appears in the ad headline – and once in the content as well, ideally. This will ensure your keyword/phrase appears in bold on the search results page, helping your ad stand out from any non-optimised ones.

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I’ll admit it to you all… I love Star Wars. And I’d love to have the powers of a Jedi. If I did, I’d use my Jedi mind-trick powers to stop unwanted ad clicks. Or better, I’d use my mind-tricks on an imperial storm trooper and get him to tell people to move along.

Ah well a man can dream… a man can dream.

Google does have a few tools, however, that we can use to help us direct our PPC ads at the people we want to see them and hopefully by-pass the ‘looky loo’s’, saving us money and improving our return on investment.

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What's not to love!

Monopolies are a bad thing, we all know that. It is a universal truth that greater consumer choice creates competitive pricing, innovative products and a fairer world for all. Giant corporations that merge, acquire, undercut and annihilate their way to total domination are looked upon with fear and distaste. I remember, as a student, reading ‘No Logo’  by Naomi Klein and being enraged by the plight of the independent coffee shops, delicatessen’s and family run enterprises that had been crushed by the giant corporations.

As a result I, like most people, have an instinctive predilection to root for the plucky underdog as a response to the dominance of a competitor. It is this basic human instinct that companies like Virgin, Apple and Airbus have used to their advantage to become the global corporate giants they are today. In all areas of my life I will always give the little guy my business, even if it takes more of my time and comes at a premium. All areas, that is, except for the search engine I use. When I’m looking for anything online I’ll always choose Google.

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Google Analytics is a fantastic FREE tool for showing you everything you would need to know about your website: who’s viewing it, how many are viewing it, what they are looking at, how long they are looking at it and whether your advertising campaigns are working. But with so much information available at your fingertips it’s difficult to see what you should be looking at and how you can use it.

Below is my detailed guide that should help make things clearer. It shows the top reports you can get through Google Analytics and more importantly how they can provide insight that will help when making important business and marketing decisions.

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On a recent scouring of the web for marketing news, I stumbled across this fabulous story about copywriter Alex Brownstein. Fed up of not being able to get in front of some of New York’s finest Creative Directors, he devised a PPC strategy to get himself noticed by the likes of Scott Virtrone and Ian Reichenthal… by playing on that egotistical moment when these guys would Google themselves!

Marketers have for a long time now realised that by focusing on long-tail keywords that have less competition, not only will you pay less per click, but you will also have a higher conversion rate. In fact this conversion rate can be as high as 200% when compared to short-tail, or generic, keywords.

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