// Dali

Track And Measure Social Success With Google Social Analytics

There are over 300 social tools. Socdir have listed about, well almost all of them. Which tool to use will mainly depend on your well defined social goals, and what are you trying to measure. Reporting, tracking and measuring social media outcomes can lead to extremely powerful results. With well selected social tools a company is able to:

  • Measure campaign effectiveness and its progress
  • Gather real-time data
  • Track results of every dollar spent
  • Determine what social media efforts work best
  • Help social media strategists adjust efforts to generate substantial revenue

There are payed and free-based social tools that offer a clear view of customer reach, volume and impressions, specific to business particular needs. If you or your company is confused which tools to use to track and measure social success, have a look at free Google Social Analytics tools.

Track & Measure With Google Social Analytics

Google Social Analytics introduces a new feature for tracking, analyzing and measuring basic, yet very essential social behavior online. The parameters are based around four main elements, which according to Google Analytics define your social impact. This includes:

Sources & Pages: Identify networks & communities where people engage with your content.
Conversions: Measure the value of social by tracking your goals, conversions and e-commerce transactions.
Social Plugins: Measure your on-site user engagement.
Social Visitors Flow: Compare traffic volumes and visitor traffic patterns through your site.

With the new social reports you can analyze how social media impacts your business. Its overview helps you follow on-site and off-site user interaction, you can see how much conversion value is generated from social media channels and it helps you follow social visitors behavior and flow. For example, you can track the social behavior from the moment you start running a campaign.

To set up Social Analytics reporting you should first have Google Analytics account. Then, before you start tracking and measuring you need to have a clear statement of social goals and determine key metrics. This will help you easier set up social analytics report, measure and track the most important social efforts, and it will help you better justify spent money on a campaign, or time spent with social media marketing efforts.

Article by: Daliborka Krstic

// Dali

Facebook Newest Launch for Businesses – ‘Deals’ down & ‘Offers’ up!

Facebook is launching a new service: ‘Facebook Offers’ for Businesses.

Facebook ‘Offers’ is a way for businesses to share special coupons directly from a Facebook Page. It is free, easy to use and everyone who “likes” the brand can receive their special Offer. Directly from a Facebook page, a business can post to its wall unique offers, discounts and promotions. Offers can be distributed through the News Feed (to fans) or promoted on their brand’s page.This is how it works:

  1. You ‘like’ your favorite brand on Facebook.
  2. A business post an offer discount on their Facebook.
  3. You receive the Offer in your NewsFeed.
  4. To claim the offer click ‘Claim Offer’ headlines.
  5. When clicked, next to the ad a small pop-up will appear with details of the deal which will be emailed to your email box.
  6. To finalize the process print off or show on your MOBILE phone at the business to redeem your discount.

Facebook ‘Offers’ Advantages

For a business, this is a new and free social media marketing tool which enables their marketing efforts to spread fast, with likelihood to reach a large group of audience and get their Offers VIRAL.  As soon as fans receive the email they will have an options ‘Share Offer’ button (sharing is possible on Facebook Twitter and Email).

Advantages: potentially millions of people are able to see new offers, promotions and coupons and spread them even more when ready to redeem them.

When it comes to fans, with the Facebook ‘Offers’ service fans are in direct control over the offer they see. They can also receive latest top-notch offers from their favorite brands by either visiting their already ‘liked’ brands on Facebook, or by viewing the latest Facebook NewsFeeds posted by brands (those brands they ‘liked‘ previously).

Who Can Use Facebook ‘Offers’ Service?

The most recent offer which generated a good amount of buzz was posted by Macy’s. The offer was: “Get 25% off your purchase of $100 or more.” However, at the moment the beta Facebook ‘Offers’ is offered to a limited amount of business, in New Zealand, Japan, Turkey and Singapore and Australia. Here is about the Facebook newest service launch:

Offers are available in beta to a limited number of local business Pages. We plan to launch offers more broadly soon.

Often, good promotions spread easily and fast especially if they are attractive to a larger group of audience. Will finding and sharing offers on Facebook become easy, time will tell?

At the moment one thing is for sure, businesses have a chance to promote their unique offers with possibilities to get viral in a ‘split of a second’ with this new service. Reason is obvious, as soon as a fan claims an offer, a story will be added to his / her profile (timeline). By default, this story is visible to friends and their friends (this can change) and it can be shared not only on Facebook but also on other social media platforms.

Article by Daliborka Krstic

// Laura

Last month’s Google Updates

Google’s search quality updates in March have been available now for over one week. There has been updates, or tweaks, for example in anchor texts, image search, navigational search and indexation of profile pages.

There are few items that stand out, and we will have a look at those more closely.

Anchor text tweaks

There are two items on the list in regards to tweaks in anchor texts: tweaks to handling of anchor text and better interpretation of and use of anchor text. The first one talks about how the specific classifier has been turned off, and the second mentions a new way of determining anchor text relevance.

Word-to-word from Google’s announcement:

Tweaks to handling of anchor text: This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.

Better interpretation of and use of anchor text: We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.

The both explanations are very unclear, so we have to just keep guessing what Google exactly means by these updates.

Image Search Changes

You can spot a couple of items from the list that are related to image search, more specifically to the quality of the pages on which images appear: more relevant image search results and improvement to image search relevance. The first one talks about how lower quality pages with relevant images are rewarded; the second one talks about how images on better quality pages are rewarded.

More relevant image search results: This change tunes signals we use related to landing page quality for images. This makes it more likely that you’ll find highly relevant images, even if those images are on pages that are lower quality.

Improvement to image search relevance: We’ve updated signals to better promote reasonably sized images on high-quality landing pages.

Again, sounds complicated and quite unclear how these changes should actually be interpreted.

Other items

There were few other items that raised my attention as well. These are:

Better indexing of profile pages: This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing: We generally ignore punctuation symbols in queries. Based on analysis of our query stream, we’ve now started to index the following heavily used symbols: “%”, “$”, “\”, “.”, “@”, “#”, and “+”. We’ll continue to index more symbols as usage warrants.

Fewer undesired synonyms: When you search on Google, we often identify other search terms that might have the same meaning as what you entered in the box (synonyms) and surface results for those terms as well when it might be helpful. This month we tweaked a classifier to prevent unhelpful synonyms from being introduced as content in the results set.

Improvements to freshness: We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries.

As you can see, Google doesn’t provide us with very clear explanations regarding these updates. It is just us who need to guess how to react to these changes and how to start implementing them.

If you are interested in checking out the whole list, you can find it here.

// Dali

Pinterest Sharpens Terms of Service

Pinterest is a new social media networking site and currently one of the hottest and most addicting visually-pleasing social ‘Pinning ‘site. In March 2012, Pinterest makes Hitwise’s list of the top ten social networks, sitting at #5 just behind Yahoo Answers and surpassing big names like Linkedin and Google+.

While individuals are Pinning and sharing with other ‘Pinners’ their, attention-grabbing photos and products they love, companies are using Pinterest as a particularly effective Internet marketing and SEO tool.

Just few days ago, this image based social network had rather standard terms and conditions, mainly: Pin it. However, after receiving many criticisms including copyright infringement concerns by users, Pinterest responded fast and decided to make few changes. Two days ago, on March 23, 212 Pinterest updates and sharpens their Terms & Privacy.
In the newsletter, the Pinterest CEO Ben Silberman explains reasons for updates:

“We think that the updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Privacy Policy are easier to understand and better reflect the direction our company is headed in the future.”

Also, original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. In the new Terms it is explained that:

”Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.”

Among other things, the updates respond to how Pinterest can commercially utilize the information users post on the site, what you can pin and the use of copyrighted material. To read the entire update, visit Pinterest Privacy & Policy page. The new Terms will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012.

Therefore, “If you receive a notification that a Pin has been removed due a copyright complaint, it means that the Pin’s content has been deleted from Pinterest at the request of the content’s owner. If your account receives too many copyright complaints, you may lose the ability to Pin new content on Pinterest, and your account may be disabled completely.”

Successful Pinning!

Article by Daliborka Krstic

// Laura

Watch out with overly SEO’ed sites!

The head of Google’s search spam team, Matt Cutts, announced that Google is releasing an algorithm update specifically to target sites that are overdoing their SEO.

According to Matt Cutts this is Google’s attempt to “level the playing field” between webmasters that build quality content versus webmaster who are just simply doing aggressive SEO.

Barry Swartz quoted Matt Cutts in his article in Search Engine Roundtable:

“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

There has been complaints of ranking changes this week, even though Google has denied any updates of any sorts. Maybe it is just Google testing the becoming update…

You can listen the audio recording from the panel Matt Cutts was on at SXSW about a week ago, when they were discussing about the new update.

// Katrina

SEO in Poland

Search engine marketing (SEM), especially search engine optimization (SEO), is developing and growing very rapidly in Poland. There is a growing competition for SEO in the Polish market since more and more people are involved in SEO.Search is the perfect place for promotion: over 90 % of all Internet users are using search engines like Google.

Did you know that there are over 40 million people who speak Polish and it is the second largest Slavic language after Russian? This group of 40 million people could be your potential clients, and majority of them can be reached by being visible in search engines.

Internet advertising in Poland has so far turned out to be immune to the crisis. The industry grew by 25.4 % during the first half of 2011. Poland spent more money for SEM than Finland and France, around €250 million during the first 6 months in 2011, which is almost as much as Czech Republic, Sweden and Germany.

Participation in the types of advertising

2009

2010

2011
display 50 proc. 45 proc. 40 proc.
SEM 26 proc. 30 proc. 34 proc.
sdvertisments 15 proc. 17 proc. 18 proc.
e-mail 6 proc. 6 proc. 7 proc.

sources: IAB Polska, Raport AdEx 2010, AdEx 2011H1

Written by Katrina Gajewska 

// Dali

New Facebook Timeline For Brands – Cover Photo Don’ts

Starting from 30th of March Facebook will officially provide a new Timeline layout for all brands. The new features bring few changes, for example you cannot any longer have the default landing tab to create a welcome tab, and the wall has now become your Timeline.

Even though you cannot longer have the welcome tab, you can have a rather big cover photo. Another great thing about the Timeline design is you can go back in time and share events or stories from your company’s history, chronologically.

When it comes to the cover photo, the advantage is its size. The cover photo dimensions are 810 pixels x315 pixels, which enable you to use the photo as a social media marketing billboard, thus tell visually your brand story.

Through the new look of the cover photo it is possible to create more dynamic pages by publishing more visual content like images and videos. This is said to help brands refresh their social media strategy and engage their followers by telling their brand story in a more entertaining way.

For example, you can have an interactive cover image or a cool photo strip with a mixture of your members that is fully interactive. Coca-Cola and Red Bull are few of many well-known brands to successfully change their brand page, especially the cover photo.

Anyhow, with new  and cool features, there are also new DON’ts rules to follow. So, before you hit the “PUBLISH” button make sure you follow these cover photo rules, established by Facebook.

Facebook-Timeline-Cover-Photo-Don'ts

The new Facebook Timeline format will have a great impact the way brands use to engage with their followers. All you need to do is make sure your design creativity is “all-in” and that you “FOLLOW” the new Facebook requirements especially those related to the Facebook Timeline cover page.

Article By Daliborka Krstic

// Laura

Google Panda 3.3 Update confirmed together with 40 search updates

Again new Google Panda update confirmed. Together with confirming this new 3.3 Panda Update, Google announced 40 search updates that happened in February.

This article will point out few of the search updates I find most important and explain what Google says about the newest Panda update.

Google Panda 3.3 Update

“This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.”

So basically, this update sounds very similar to the update that Google launched mid-January, Panda 3.2. This update was described only as a “data refresh” and not related to new or changed ranking signals.

You can check again this infographics to see the full background of the Panda update that Google introduced 1 year ago.

Evaluating Links

Google has been using for years a certain link evaluation signal. Now it will be getting rid of that, surely causing some discussion:

“We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.”

Google is reluctant to give away too many details about ranking signals and the company has indicated that the blog post says everything they want to say.

Local Search Rankings

Google says that traditional algorithmic ranking factors are playing bigger part in improving local search rankings.

“This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.”

Since Google launched its Places Search in late 2010, traditional SEO has played a bigger part in Google’s local search. This seems to be even further enforced.

According to Google’s post local results are being improved because of a “new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.”

More accurate detection of official pages

Google has made an adjustment how they detect official pages by using codename “WRE”. By this adjustment Google wants to make identifications more accurate.

“We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.”

Improvement to Freshness

Google introduced its “Fresh” algorithm change in late 2011. The purpose was to make search results more fresh, more current. Now Google wants to improve this algorithm change:

“We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.”

Other Google Updates

I won’t recap all the 40 search updates in this post, but you can find them here. There are some thing pointed out that you should pay attention to, such as:

  • “Site:” query update
  • International launch of shopping rich snippets
  • Updates related to sitelinks and related searches.
// Laura

Videos to illustrate how SEO works and tips for planning your AdSense

I have recently posted articles about SEO Ranking Factors and Google’s new Page layout algorithm. The purpose of this article is to show with videos how search engines work to rank websites and give tips how to plan your content and using AdSense.

The infographic about SEO ranking factors is very detailed. Maybe this video simplifies and helps to understand the very basics on how search engine algorithm works to rank websites:

The next video gives you some tips on how to plan your content and ads on your website to avoid getting penalized by Google because of the new page algorithm update:

You can read about the different SEO ranking factors more detailed from Search Engine Land’s infographic.