However, one criticism that has often been raised against Google Analytics, mainly by rival software companies, is that it is not in Real Time and there is a delay between activity on site and it registering in Analytics.

Real Time Analytics

Well Google has now come out with a new Real Time update that shows Analytic users exactly how many people are currently on their website, what pages they are currently viewing, what country they are visiting the website from and how long they have currently been on the website.

On the surface this sounds like a revolutionary new aspect to Google Analytics as it brings a new dimension to how users can view the data they are gathering from their website. But is it actually useful or just a fun PR stunt?

Google Gimmick

Don’t get me wrong, Real Time Analytics is fascinating to watch, as you can see in Real Time as people come on and fall of your website and at what point they do so, but this is just a small amount of data over a minute or so and it would be foolish to base any new website alterations or data conclusions on such a small amount of analysis.

The other 2 options are to sit and watch the Real Time Analytics all day to gather enough data to come to a useful conclusion on user activity or use the normal analytics to look at the previous day, week, month or year in an instant and use that to base your changes on. Now I don’t run our company but I’m pretty sure my boss would prefer me quickly looking at the last month worth of data as opposed to sitting at watching Real Time Analytics update all day long.

Useful Tool

However, although I think that Real Time Analytics is useless for any in-depth analysis, there is still one or two situations in which I think it could be useful. For example, if you want to see the immediate impact of a Tweet, Email Shot or new Blog Post etc, you can use the Real Time feature to see if it has lead to an instant increase in traffic to the website and how long that increase lasts for.

This could be especially useful with Social Media campaigns as it will help gather information about what is the best time to Tweet and the impact of different types of Tweets, e.g. ones containing @mentions, Re-Tweets or just plain links.

But, having said this, I still think that the idea of sitting and watching Real Time Analytics will lead to no real groundbreaking analytical conclusions but rather just waste time watching it go round. It does answer a lot of critics of Google analytics and offers a new perspective for monitoring social interaction, but Google Analytics most useful purpose is in-depth analysis of site performance, which I think we already had and do still have available to us with the original Analytics data.

A couple of months ago you couldn’t move for posts about Google+, with everyone talking about its rivalry with Facebook, its sudden influx of 20 million users and hundreds of debates about how it was going to completely change the game! But now when I look around SEOMoz, Econsultancy, Search Engine Land and the rest I see barely a few mentions of this ‘revolutionary’ new social network.

To be fair, I am no better than the rest, when Google+ first came out I was straight on it and published 2 or 3 posts about how it could topple Facebook, change the way we connect online and add a huge new element to SEO, but now I am paying about as much attention to it as I am to AOL.

The fact of the matter is, so far we have seen little to no impact on SEO by Google+, and although it has 20 million+ users I haven’t seen a fresh update from any of my circles in weeks! Meanwhile, Facebook continues to roll out new features, such as the subscribe button, and both Facebook and Twitter are still much better places to interact with friends, fans and customers.

So where do we go from here?

A couple of months ago everyone was discussing how Google was becoming much more social and how we need to adapt to that and move away from traditional SEO tactics. However, in the last month there has been very little impact from Google+ and Google have not renewed their deal with Twitter, effectively losing some of their social element, rather than increasing it.

So should we just forget about Google+ and social networks altogether? Well no, social is obviously still very important for online marketing, with Twitter and Facebook being excellent mediums for creating brand awareness, customer interaction and content distribution, but I do think it is fair to say that the initial hype over Google+ was a bit much and that, although a move into social is good, abandoning traditional SEO tactics in favour of a social only approach might be a bit too presumptuous.

There has been so much written about social media lately, it is of little surprise this week that we again find ourselves discussing who’s shaking up the world of social networking. Week after week it feels like the three big players, Twitter, Facebook, and of course now, Google+, are trying to out-do one another. Each wants to reign supreme as the number one social network – especially when it comes to attracting business.

They are also, naturally, trying to expand and grow, and move with the times. So what are they all doing to woo business to interact with their platforms?

Google+ Business Pages

To begin with, let’s look at how Google+ has attracted millions of users, and is currently trialling its business pages. In its short life Google+ has already gained over 20 million users worldwide, and whilst businesses were told to stay away from it as a marketing platform, Google has been working hard to build a business friendly field whereby a company can host a business page in order to then generate further brand awareness and, of course further business. Business pages, such as the one Ford have been lucky enough to secure, are rumoured to have an impact on how well the brand will rank in search – something which will no doubt motivate many businesses to sign up when they are allowed.

“Facebook For Business”

Facebook last week announced the introduction of its “Facebook For Business” site, and, on the face of it, it seems to be a way by which they plan to maintain a presence and influence. This is, somewhat cleverly, aimed at smaller businesses rather than huge brands. The reason I believe this to be a clever move by Facebook is because smaller (especially local) businesses will be more willing to give it a go in order to see if it helps their business grow, whereas large brands may decide to disregard it in favour of more traditional goals such as mass reach and search rankings.

New Tweets

Twitter haven’t exactly been quiet either, recently announcing a tweak to their sponsored tweets to make them simultaneously more prominent for advertisers, but less intrusive to users. Being able to engage a visitor with advertising, without putting them off using the service, is a critical challenge for any social website.

In addition, the update Twitter has announced will put every Twitter user on the same platform, those that are still using an older interface will therefore be forced to upgrade. This can go one of two ways: either those forced to upgrade will dislike the very fact that they didn’t get a choice and thus switch off from Twitter, or they will prefer their new interface and their experience will be enriched.

Final Thoughts

These are just some of the latest examples of how social networking has clearly become such a key component to modern marketing. Online social media is expected to continue booming for years to come, with some 52% of all internet users expected to have a regular social media presence by 2013. With the increased take-up, and increasing time being spent on social media, advertisers will play a key role in shaping which platforms thrive, and which ones fall away.

Google investors will also be happy as so far, revenue for Google is estimated to be up by 28% compared to the prior year. Investors polled by Thomson Reuters already expect the search engine to report net revenue of £4 billion.

Here at Gravytrain we managed to get invites to Google+ this week and have been getting to grips with the new social network. Like everyone else in the digital marketing community, a few of us are excited about the new social network and see its strong potential to rival Facebook, while others see Google+ as no competition to the current social media giants.

However, the main feature that most Google+ users seem to like is its privacy settings, which shows that the way we use social media could be changing.

While other social networking sites such as Facebook have seen innovative advances and an increase in popularity around the world, it doesn’t reflect how we actually interact with other people in real life. In real life, we don’t tend to share personal thoughts or content with everyone that we know. We’ll usually share certain things with certain people.

As mentioned in a previous post about Google+, the social network allows us to have different ‘circles’ of people where we can share different content with each group, whilst keeping other information private. Some people will use different social networks to connect with certain people, for example, Linkedin for work, Facebook for friends and family and Twitter for a mix of both. With Google+ and circles, it brings all these different groups into a platform that we can manage in one place, without embarrassment or worry over who sees what!

Arguably, Facebook does allow us to create lists where we can group different people, but to be honest, they are quite fiddly, weren’t really promoted and not clearly visible. Google enables us to have a social network that we can control ourselves, restrict the content that we receive and share information with certain groups, mirroring our online behaviour to how we socialise in real life.

Analysts however, have suggested that Google+ still has a long way to go before it matches Facebook’s popularity. Facebook announced last week that it had over 750 million users and is looking to enable video chats through its joint venture with Skype, which sounds quite similar to one of Google+’s video chat features, “Hangouts”. However, it’s still early days for Google+ and only time will tell whether the project will be successful.

So far, the increased popularity of Google+ shows that they are doing something right; it demonstrates that Google is driving towards success within social networking. Google+ could potentially be something that catches on with individuals and become very powerful, which other social networks should keep in mind.

In the past, Google used Twitter for faster indexation of content, to power real time results and also for use in their ranking algorithm. It has been reported that Google removed real time results from Twitter and other websites such as their News and Facebook. However, Google plans to reinstate real time results using Google+.

Even though Google+ is different from Google+1, with each having their own unique functions – they do connect with each other. Users who have a Google+ account or a normal Google account will be able to click on the Google+1 button, which will essentially allow users to vote for their search results and see which websites other connections or friends have “+1ed”. Therefore, the result’s rankings will not only affect you, but also people that you are connected with through Google.

Some of Google+’s features

The main feature of Google+ is the Circles feature, which is similar to Facebook and Twitter Lists. Circles allow you to allocate contacts to Circles e.g. Family, Friends, Snowboarding Group, Acquaintances and whoever else you want in the Circle. You can then publish content to specific Circles or specific individuals, because as Google states, “not all relationships are created equal”.

At the moment, there seems to be more control over privacy on Google+ compared to Facebook. You can share photos with your family in one post, and then publish something publicly in the next post.

Hangout is another feature of Google+. It’s a group video chat feature where you can invite members of a certain group by sending them a notification. An additional feature of the new social networking site is Huddle, which is a mobile group chat service which could also become available from your mobile phone in the near future.

Sparks is an online sharing engine where you can create a topic of interest and share links with group friends who also have the same interests. E.g. you could share results of Snowboarding in France with your “powder chasing” friends.

Why Google+?

Some people may wonder why Google has bothered launching Google+. The reasons are because nowadays, search is about real-time information, people and the relevance of information to them, not just about pages.

Google has been an advocate for real time and social media for a while now, with Google Buzz, Google Places, Google Wave and not to mention the list of its acquisitions of social sites e.g. YouTube and Blogger.com.

The senior vice president who oversees Google’s social product, Vic Gundotra, said “It’s ‘project’ rather than a product because it’s an ongoing set of products and ‘Plus’ because it takes products from Google and makes them better”.

Google doesn’t see itself as a competitor to Facebook or Twitter, as they say that the way people connect online is limited – it’s just a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you.

What’s next?

For now, businesses and organisations have been warned to stay away from Google+. Christian Oestlien, advertising lead on the team behind Google+ explains that the social media site was designed for individuals in mind, “We’re working on building a optimised business experience for Google+ which will hopefully be rolled out later on this year. It will include the ability to connect to other parts of Google such as AdWords and other rich analytics”. However, their main focus at the moment is optimising the consumer experience for Google+.

In terms of SEO, social media won’t replace traditional SEO however, it will indeed help it. SEO practices including link building, content creation, keyword research and targeting will be the foundation for ranking success. Even though social media is gaining more importance and interest, using a combination of both technical SEO techniques and social media are the best steps towards success.

Sadly, we weren’t lucky enough to get our hands on an invite the first time round, but we are looking forward to when we are able to get onboard with the project.

This update had an instant and devastating impact on many content based sites, which lost rankings, traffic and in some cases a huge amount of revenue from the Google ads on their sites. By removing what it deemed to be ‘farmer content’ Google claimed that the new update would help search results be more accurate.

However, although the original Panda update did remove a lot of bulk, low quality content from Google it was criticised for also demoting a lot of original, interesting and useful content from search results, which was supposed to be promoted by the Panda update.

Panda 2.2
After receiving this criticism, Google’s Matt Cutts commented on the update at the recent Search Marketing Expo in Seattle, and said “don’t consider it finished”, proclaiming that the Panda update would be refined throughout the rest of the year in order to make sure it was more effective in singling out poor content.

Well, without warning and to the surprise of many, Google have this week confirmed the release of Panda 2.2, which will continue to penalise content farms but will do this in a more refined way.

Who will win and lose this time?
According to Google, the new version of Panda will still hit content farms but will also put more focus onto sites scraping content. What this means is that blogs and article sites that simply copy content from around the web will start to be completely dropped from Google’s search results by the new update.

Panda 2.2 will also apparently favour sites that have used strong SEO techniques. Basically sites that have large levels of content on say a blog or news page will not be hit, as many were with the first update, if the content is original, fresh, well optimised and not spammy.

So once again there will be hundreds of websites owners holding their breath as they check their rankings this week but at least this time around it should only be those filling search results with useless content that lose out.

The idea behind adding the +1 feature to the Google search results is to make each person’s results more personalised and also more social, promoting sites in their results that they and they contacts have liked with the +1 button.

With the new +1 button directly on sites this idea continues, with people being able to +1 individual pages and pieces of content on a site, as well as the actual site itself within the Google search results. But will people use it?

Competition with Facebook and Twitter
When it comes to the Google search engine, the +1 button can completely dominate as neither Facebook nor Twitter can add their buttons to the search results, and therefore the only option to like or promote a site will be through +1. However, when it comes to actual web pages, the Google +1 button may struggle to compete with the Facebook Like and Tweet buttons.

The idea behind the Facebook and Twitter buttons is to allow users to share the piece of content amongst their friends, through their own personal profiles. So, for example, the web browser sees a great blog post about a new Google feature, Tweets it, which puts a link to the post into their Twitter stream, and then the users followers can go straight to the recommended piece of content.

It is the same concept with the Facebook Like button but with +1 the idea seems to fall away slightly. Yes if you hit the +1 button people within your Google address book will be able to see it but you are not really promoting it on a profile or sharing it in an open format.

Sharing Content or Promoting the Site?
With +1 you are essentially saying you approve of the site and are promoting it in your personal search results, whereas with Tweet and Like you are sharing it. +1 then doesn’t seem to really fall in line with the Twitter and Facebook buttons and so may receive less attention because of this.

In fact, it is only early days, but if you look at sites that have already integrated this new +1 button, alongside Tweet and Like, you can see that it is not generating nearly as many clicks.

Of course as people become more aware of +1 and it becomes common on sites it will be used more, but will people develop a greater affinity to +1 than Facebook and Twitter? Google are dominant in practically every area of online but, for now at least, they are 3rd place in the rankings for social.

The new feature will add a +1 button to the side of natural and paid search results, which will work similarly to the Facebook Like button. As Google put it, you can “Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1’s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.”

So by giving something a +1 you will be promoting it and affecting its position in not only your own personal rankings but in those of your close connections and search as a whole. There is the potential then, for this to have a big impact for SEO and natural rankings.

The impact on SEO
This new +1 feature definitely plays into what appears to be a new social heavy strategy by Google, with Tweets and Facebook likes appearing to have a greater and greater impact on indexation of pages and site rankings.

This new feature also seems to continue the approach of the new Panda update that removed a lot of mass, ‘farmer’ content from Google and the new Blocked feature that allows users to block, what they consider to be, rubbish low value domains from their search results ( a kind of -1).

All in all then this could really change the nature of how websites optimise for Google, with a heavier shift towards social. What’s more, if, as many suspect, Google do purchase Twitter in the coming weeks, then, given the data they will have at their finger tips, a shift to social does make sense.

Problems with +1
However, although +1 does have the potential to make Google much more personalised and social, it is still likely to face one or two teething problems.

For example, if your search results are based on your Tweets, Facebook Likes and +1, what about the people not on these social networks? They exist too! Is it reasonable to base these people’s searches on user behaviour in a sector they take no part in and have no interest in?

Another point is that although this sounds like a great idea, it may just not ever happen. Currently there is no +1 button that people can add to their sites (like the Tweet and Like buttons) which means you have to +1 it in the search results.

Now, if you haven’t been on the site before you won’t know if you want to +1 it. So, this means going onto the site, deciding you like it and then bouncing back off it to +1 it. For some reason, I can’t imagine people taking the time or changing their search behaviour to do this.

If Google +1 works and takes off it could create the biggest social network we have ever seen, trumping both Twitter and Facebook, and completely revolutionise search results.

However, it may well be that we are not yet at the peak of social and that people, on mass, won’t really adapt their search behaviour towards the +1 for a few years.

Google places has many attractive features that can be optimised to meet your requirements, and improve your online presence. You will need to optimise your listings and make them a part of your SEO campaign for more effective results.

Attractive and beneficial key features

1. Google places is now incorporated in the main search engine this shows the importance Google will continue to place on local searches. We’ve noticed some searches now have as many ‘places’ results as regular organic results, Making this an ideal way to promote online presence, particularly for small to medium sized businesses.
2. Claiming your business is the first step. Using city and business keywords within the page title and listing is great for optimisation, resulting in a positive page rank. Your business may already rank so claiming it will only strengthen your positions especially after optimisation. This can really help close out your competitors as well as improve your overall clickthrough share.
3. Google places also comes with a range of tools to help market your business better. Tags are yellow markers that allow you to promote individual aspects of your business, for example, special offers.

The image shows how Google places appears after you have entered a search query.

Mobile phone web users, when downloading Google maps app, searching for any place of interest will automatically bring up local results. This is something I personally rely on especially when visiting a new area in the city. With so many benefits and key features it is hard to believe you have anything lose!

Make Mine Instant!

So Google announced yesterday the launch of a service they are dubbing “search faster than the speed of type”! Calling itself Google Instant, it has had Twitter and the blogosphere flooded with people from the search industry fretting about how this innovation could affect their campaigns.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Google Instant automatically populates the results page (known in the industry as SERPs) whilst you type. No longer do you have to press the Enter key on your keyboard, or the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button to see the results of what you’re searching for. Google themselves estimate that Instant will save users anything up to 5 seconds per search. This may not sound like a lot, but these seconds all add up when you consider how many searches we conduct through the search engine each day.

But let’s face it; Google has done this for several reasons. Firstly, it’s innovative, and part of Google’s brand is based on their innovative and intuitive products. Automatic search suggestion as you type has long been with the three main search engines, but none of them have hitherto showed a full search result based on the first letter typed into the search box!

Secondly, it’s a time saving tool which will lure users back to the Google home page. Google search has been increasingly appearing on different corners of the web for a while (perhaps more prominently, in the right hand corner of our web browsers), and these handy shortcuts have steered people away from using the Google homepage as their search starting point.

This tool is highly dynamic and potentially game changing for those who work in search or even advertise on Google. It means that some Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts may only appear for a split second on the results page, as Google changes the visible results according to what the user is typing. This could affect PPC and SEO campaigns in three main ways. Firstly, it could mean lower Click Through Rates (CTR) on Google Adwords. For SEO, It could also mean increase the importance to rank high on short tail organic keywords. Finally, it could also further decline the importance of misspellings as Instant automatically corrects

At present, Instant is only available to users logged into a Google Account, who are located in certain countries, and who are searching from the Google home page. And because of its current level of restricted access it is hard to see Instant changing anything from an SEO and PPC perspective in the immediate future. But as with all things that Google does, the proof is in the pudding. Time will tell as to how this ground breaking change to Google’s core product will affect those who advertise with it, and wish to rank high in its search results.