Yes, the click through rates on Facebook Advertising are low, when compared to other online marketing forms such as PPC or SEO. The global average for Facebook Advertising is about 0.038%. But there are things that can be done to buck the trend…

The reasons for the low conversion rate are firstly, because people don’t want to be advertised to when they are actively engaging in social activity. Secondly the advert may not be relevant to the people viewing it and thirdly because the ads themselves are not compelling.

Now, while the first factor cannot really be affected, we can have direct effect on the last two.
 
Relevancy is defined by those who view it, we can have control over this and if when ads were created they are targeted at people interested in areas similar to the product and service offering, it is made relevant. This should be left under review as it is likely that there are further demographic groups that may yield better results.

Regarding whether the ads are compelling enough, it is hard to say until you can see at least two weeks of data. It is important to continue to tweak ads based on user behaviours that appear. This will ensure that we get the very most form the Ads.

What I would say however is that with even a small sized budget millions of people can see these adverts. Now when you compare those figures to other marketing forms you would have to run an ad in a national newspaper, on commercial radio or television to get that type of exposure. Of course these mediums would be a great deal more expensive. So campaigns can be successful in that sense, large amounts of people can be aware of your company, whether they clicked on the link or not.

Also when we talk about click through rates and compare this to PPC or SEO it doesn’t seem like good ROI, however in the case of Facebook ads, the customer has already entered the sales cycle. Whereas with SEO and PPC they still need to move around the site to determine whether the site is relevant or not, before buying product or making an enquiry.

In simple terms, the ads are more targeted and more likely to convert.

Are you familiar with the ‘long tail search’?

It is an important factor incorporated into search engine optimisation, so:

What is it?

A brief explanation – Let’s say you sell ‘Dunlop Golf Clubs’. Would the search term ‘golf’ be a good term for you to target? Yes and No. Sure you would receive a high volume of traffic (if you achieve position 1 for ‘golf’). However, this is a hugely competitive search term, with 384,000,000 competing pages. Optimising your website for this search term could prove very expensive. Additionally, someone searching for ‘golf’ could be looking for a vw golf, a golf course, a golf lesson, the list goes on and on and on.
So it is important to understand the difference between a broad search term and the long tail beneath it.

Broad search term

A broad search term like ‘golf’ has 4,090,000 search queries in 1 month, so the shorter the search term, the more traffic; however the traffic is less targeted.

Long tail search term

A long tail search term would be more specific, for example ‘dunlop golf clubs’ has 1,900 search queries in 1 month. There will be many more search terms, like ‘nike golf clubs’ ‘wilson club clubs’ etc. All of these are more specific and when you add them all together, they can help to form your long tail search strategy.

Also, the advantage of the long tail search term is that it is more specific and it is more targeted. This means that the search engine user is further down the buying cycle.

See the broad search term and the long tail illustrated below:

In my next blog, we will talk about how it can help your business.

We have waited a long time for the World Cup. 4 years to be exact. So the team at Miromedia though it would be fun to give you our view on the tournament. Predictions below:

Ian
Winners: Spain
Top Scorer: Torres

Mike
Winners: England
Top Scorer: Rooney

Richard
Winners: England
Top Scorer: Beckham or Ferdinand

Andrew
Winners: England
Top Scorer: Messi

Roland
Winners: Italy
Top Scorer: Messi

Ric
Winners: Guana
Top Scorer: Matthew Amoah

Julian
Winners: Spain
Top Scorer: David Villa

Micky
Winners: Spain
Top Scorer: Rooney

Gus
Winners: Netherlands
Top Scorer: David Villa

Let’s see who was right.

As you may know, we have had an iPad around the office for a month or so.

Great you may say, and it defiantly has its advantages. But is it really a breakthrough product, I am not so sure? Let’s just say the jury is still out.

With anticipated sales expected to be high, Apple UK have pre-ordered over 70,000 units. However, only 10,000 people took up the pre-order option. Question is, if you have a laptop, or pc, can you justify another £400.

Personally, although I fell in love with the iPad when I saw it, and I do think it looks very cool. It just doesn’t do enough to hold my attention.

I think that the most important feature may well be the apps. Offering software that is useful (at affordable prices) could hold the key to iPad success.

Let’s see how things unfold.

You’ve probably all heard of link building and will have been told many times how important it is. Do you know, however, why we link build? Do you want to know? Well read on.

When you put a search query into Google it does 2 things. Firstly it sorts all of the pages relating to the search query into order of relevancy. Clearly there are likely to be any number of web pages that are equally as relevant to each other. The next thing that Google then does is to sort the relevant pages into order of authority, which is where link building comes in. In super simplistic terms if 2 pages are equally relevant, the one with the greater link profile will appear higher in the search results.

So, thats why we do it!

Google are currently in the process of developing a visual search tool called Google Goggles which will enable you to use a picture rather than key phrases as a search query.

Anna Chennapragada, product manager for computer vision products at Google says “Information coming online right now is increasingly visual, so there are more images and videos being uploaded by cameras.”

Goggles is currently in beta testing. We’ll keep you updated on its release date!

According to Matt Cutts at Google, site speed will now be incorporated as one of over 200 factors that Google use to determine search rankings.

Admittedly it will carry much less weight than current factors such as relevance, topicality and authority but is definitely one to consider. Check out Google’s webmaster blog for some tips on how to improve your website’s speed .

In simple terms… no! For years SEO types have worried about having duplicate content on their websites. Surely if your website contains content from another site you will be penalised by Google for copying!

This simply isn’t the case. Syndicated content has always been an important part of the web and will continue to be so. If a page on your site does use duplicated copy the page may be filtered and not necessarily perform well but your site overall won’t suffer.

This doesn’t mean you should go out to purposely rip content off other sites but if done honestly you really have nothing to worry about.

Nielsen have released their list of the top 100 websites.  The list shows user figures for January 2010 and makes interesting reading.   There are some pretty obvious entries on there such as Google, Facebook & Youtube plus a few less known such as Geeknet & Pornhub!  Take a look and let me know what you think

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/sci_nat/10/internet_treemap/assets/nielsen_top_100_january_2010.xls

According to Net Applications market share figures for January 2010 IE8 has just taken the world’s most used browser ‘top spot’ away from IE6.  The current top 5  and their market share now read as follows;

1. IE8 - 22.31%
2. IE6 - 20.07%
3. Firefox 3.5 - 17.01%
4. IE7 - 14.58%
5. Firefox 3.0 - 5.29%

The change in fortunes for IE6 is thought to be generally due to the decline in use of Windows XP.