The Gravytrain Team Shows Off Their Pink

Posted in Charity, News on October 31st, 2011 by Angelina

Last Friday the Gravytrain team got involved in “wear it pink day” to show our support for breast cancer research.

The mission Breast Cancer Campaign has, is to fund innovative, world-class research to understand how breast cancer develops, leading to improved diagnosis, treatment, prevention and ultimately, beating breast cancer.

“Wear it pink day” was a really fun and easy way to raise money for this wonderful charity, we all wore something pink and donated £2 to Breast Cancer Campaign. We also got extra donations by selling pink cupcakes and doughnuts, getting the office involved in the competitive sweepstake that was included in the fundraising pack and shouting about it around Hampton Hill to encourage the local businesses to donate.

Breast Cancer Campaign currently supports 105 research projects, worth over £17.3 million in 31 centres of excellence across the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

The office looked very pretty in pink! If you would also like to make a donation and help Breast Cancer Awareness You can make a donation here.

Too Broad or Not Too Broad? That is the Question!

Posted in PPC on October 26th, 2011 by Matthew Read

One thing we love here at Gravytrain is proper thorough analysis, especially when it comes to saving money on PPC. So, one of the more common pieces of analysis we conduct is looking into all the Broad Match keywords in our clients’ PPC accounts and the actual search terms they are coming up for.

Too often we see PPC accounts where Broad Match keywords have been simply paused because although they were getting a high volume of clicks they were converting at a very low rate and just wasting lots of money. But there is another option to pausing them.

It is crucial, with Broad Match keywords, to not just look at them specifically but at the actual Search Terms behind these keywords that have been generating the clicks, as Google can sometimes have you appearing for some quite interesting and irrelevant searches.

What Am I Actually Coming Up For?

Last week we did a full search term analysis, over a 60 day period, for one of our Insurance based clients, in order to find search terms that were generating impressions and clicks but not actually delivering any conversions, and what we found was quite remarkable!

Over the 2 month period we found that our Insurance based ads had not only appeared for but had actually had clicks on searches such as “la senza in store returns policy”, “rugby ball shops”, “buy iphone 4 online” and “cher lloyds clothes”.

Now, I know that the idea of Broad Match is that it is ‘broad’ and brings your ads up for anything that includes one of your keywords, but some of these are still very baffling. “buy iPhone 4 online” could have been picked up by a keyword including “online insurance”, whilst “la senza in store returns policy”” could have been picked up by a keyword that included “Insurance Policy”, but “Rugby Ball Shops” and “Cher Lloyds Clothes” are even more broad and very far removed from any aspect of Insurance!

How do I stop this?

Well, the obvious solution is to add some of these search terms to the negative keyword list. Being insurance based, we were comfortably sure that by adding terms such as “la senza” and “iPhone 4” to our negative keyword list that we were not going to miss out on any conversions!

However, even if you do this analysis every month and add a bunch of negative keywords each time there is still the possibility that you will come up for others broad searches that are just as irrelevant (this wasn’t the first time we did this investigation!), and you can’t negative match every single phrase and word not related to insurance!

The other option is to not use Broad Match keywords at all. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “that’s mad” and of course I don’t think it is sensible to go and turn of all your Broad Match keywords and just have Phrase and Exact Match, as Broad is the best way to bring in a high volume of clicks and appear for a large amount of relevant search terms. But there is a compromise.

Broad Match Modifier

Yes there is more to PPC than Exact, Phrase and Broad Match! By simply adding a + symbol in front of a keyword you can make it a Broad Match Modifier. What this means is that you Google will show your ad for the exact keyword you have and close approximations.

For example, if you were to use the keyword +Car +Insurance, with the Broad Match Modifier, you would be able to appear for searches such as “Car Insurance” and “Cheap Car Insurance” but have no risk of coming up for searches such as “Car Parts UK” or “Home Insurance” which you may well have done if it was just a general Broad Match keyword.

Basically, the Broad Match Modifier gives you more reach than Phrase Match but without the random mess of searches you can get with simple Broad Match. So no more “Rugby Ball Shops”, “iPhone 4s” and “Cher Lloyds Clothes”!

“I’ll share my Klout if you Influence me Later…”

Posted in Social Media on October 19th, 2011 by Angelina

Since Klout, the online measuring tool for social influence, was launched in 2009, over 100 million people now have a Klout score. Everyone has an opinion about Klout, whether it’s good or bad, but it’s hard to ignore and not get sucked into it…

What is Klout anyway?

Klout is an online tool that measures the social influence of a person or brand across a number of social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and more recently, YouTube which was added in August and Google+, which was added last month.

Based on your ability to drive action, Klout scores you between 1 and 100 (with 100 being the most influential). It uses data from the range of social networks to measure your true reach (how many people you influence), amplification (how much you influence them e.g. when people respond to your messages and share it) and your network impact (the influence of your network). In short, it measures whether people trust and like you enough to respond to the things you talk about.

Should you care about your Klout score?

Klout has always been something I’ve looked at and have had fun with whilst comparing scores with different people in the office on a personal level, but nothing more. However, while managing our client’s social media accounts and recording who is following them, I’ve taken their Klout score into consideration. The bottom line of Klout is that it gives me a good indication of how our social media efforts are working out.

It also helps me discover who the big players in our client’s industry are, follow and engage with them and have them follow us back.

But it should be taken into consideration that it shouldn’t be used as the only tool to decide who to follow as we do come across people who seem to have a very high Klout score – but only post spam or advertising, so we know that Klout can be gamed (as with many other things on the internet) and Klout can’t measure every type of influence, so it’s not the be all and end all and, perhaps, should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Other benefits of Klout?

After Klout took to the spotlight more recently, I discovered ‘Klout Perks’ which are used primarily by US brands who offer exclusive products or experiences that you can earn based on your influence. Previous examples were gift cards from various online retailers, tickets to events and hotel discounts.

But when accessing these perks, I got excited to see that a perk was available to me – a free sample of hair gel from Axe. However, the tagline on the ad was ‘Finally… a strong hold that she’ll want to touch’… hang on a second… then I read the spiel “When it comes to a guy’s hair, male and female satisfaction are often at odds…” I am definitely a girl, and I thought that Klout would be able to find this info using Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn’s API.

Anyway, I ignored this and tried to claim it anyway, but a message popped up saying “This perk is for US residents only” which is a fail, considering that information is on my Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn and Klout has access to the API’s for these social networking sites.

A bit of an anti-climax and obvious room for improvement from Klout, but I am hoping that UK companies will jump on the Klout bandwagon soon.

At the moment I have a Klout score of 51 (just over half way there to getting the perfect score of 100 like @JustinBieber), and for an unknown reason Klout tells me I’m influential about hotels and the Maldives (might have tweeted that I’m going on holiday there in the past), so I have my fingers crossed that a company will give me a free holiday one day.

At the moment, Klout is fun and can be useful, but we don’t need to become slaves to this measurement tool yet. Only time will tell whether Klout will be 100% reliable, we will just have to wait and see!

Google PageRank Panic

Posted in SEO on October 7th, 2011 by Angelina

Two days ago some people may have noticed that their PageRank toolbar started to only bring back values of N/A or 0. It got tongues wagging about the web and people were wondering whether it was a glitch, a new update, or if Google had disabled PageRank scores altogether.

After reading SEOQuake’s tweets this morning, it turns out that Google has simply moved the tool bar query URL.

To fix the PageRank on your SEOQuake tool bar, go to your preferences, on your parameters tab, select ‘Google pagerank’, edit and change the word ‘search’ to ‘tbr’.

Before -

[NAME]=Google pagerank
[TITLE]=PR
[URL_R]=http://toolbarqueries.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch={gchecksum}&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:{url|encode}
[REGEXP]=Rank_.*?:.*?:(\d+)

After -

[NAME]=Google pagerank
[TITLE]=PR
[URL_R]=http://toolbarqueries.google.com/tbr?client=navclient-auto&hl=en&ch={gchecksum}&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&features=Rank&q=info:{url|encode}
[REGEXP]=Rank_.*?:.*?:(\d+)

Then select ok, clear your cache and restart your browser.

PageRank is a measure of the volume and quality of links pointing towards your site, but it shouldn’t be used as the only comparison to how your website is performing. Other factors include the relevancy of the domain, page and domain authority and also the age of the website. We always hear of people who say “SEO’s should ignore PageRank”, but it’s hard for us to ignore a domain if it has a score of 8, for example!

Link building is a main technique used by many SEOs which some people believe may eventually be killed off by Google and its future algorithms, but there’s no need to panic… not just yet anyway…

October 2011