On Tuesday, March 5^th IMI invited some of our local clients in house for an exciting thought-leadership event sponsored by Google called Google Engage. Our clients watched a compelling 2 hour live broadcast from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. As a partner agency to Google, we were delighted to be included in the first ever Google Engage for Agencies event.  Speakers such as Lisa Gevelber, Google’s VP for Americas Marketing, discussed how businesses can grow in this digital age and reach more customers online.  Below are the key takeaways from this event.

Reach Customers at the Zero Moment of Truth

During the session, we were introduced to ZMOT – the Zero Moment of Truth: that instant when customers open their laptops, pick up their smartphones or their tablets, and search the web. They may read a review, look for a coupon, watch a video, or read a blog before making a purchase. With the right digital marketing strategy, you can reach shoppers more often at the right time, in the right place, and with the right content.

At the Zero Moment of Truth, today’s shoppers bounce back and forth at their own unique way in a multi-channel marketplace. They switch devices to suit their needs at any given moment.

The challenge for businesses today is to meet customers where they are online with exactly what they are looking for. For example, regarding YouTube videos, it is a much younger audience curating the content and determining what is cool. So if your target audience is on YouTube, running True View video ads would be a good way to reach them.

You also want to make sure your brand messaging is consistent across TV, tablets and mobile phones and create a good experience on all devices.  So, what can you do to appeal to this growing tablet audience at ZMOT? Find ways to give shoppers the information they want at the time they want it online. Do they want reviews and ratings? If so, a simple way to reach them is to write ad copy that boasts, “Five stars on Yelp.”  You want to give the users what they are looking for by answering  their questions in your content and ad copy. You can also build relationships with your customers through videos, Google Plus hangouts, and social media.

Reaching Your Customers through Mobile and Tablets

Website traffic from tablets and mobile devices increases every day. Therefore, you want to be sure to create tablet-friendly ads and use them in tablet-targeted campaigns. As the Google Mobile Playbook notes, a paid ad that states: “Shop now from your tablet” is a stronger call to action than “Shop online.”

While images on iPhone listings are very small, they also play a big role in leading to conversions. Through eye tracking, Google researchers could tell that users would pause on a listing with positive reviews, then look at the image before making their decision to click or not.

MAT™ – Multi-Attribution Technology

With customers finding your website through so many different channels, it is essential to segment out where they are coming from and trace the click path they used to see what made them buy a product.

If you’re just relying on the last click, you’re missing out on a whole lot of information about user behavior.  Our MAT™ , or multi attribution analytics tool  tracks all the marketing sources that customers are exposed to before making a purchase, thus measuring the success of each digital campaign.

Couples Resorts is a client of ours who has a successful fully integrated digital marketing campaign with Display, SEO, SEM, and Social Media campaigns.  Through using our MAT™ technology, we found that display media is a great introducer to the website.  MAT™ helps us understand the performance of each digital marketing campaign by reporting on the introducers, the influencers, and the closers.

How Our Google Partnership Can Help You

So what can IMI as an agency help you with?  We work with our Google Reps to help our clients reach their goals. Google provides us with a vast amount of data, tools, and education.  Our Google reps help IMI by providing us with their own market research and data of online habits across many industries. We use this information to create a strategy that leads to optimal results for our clients.  For example, Google researchers found that users really pay attention to social signals like reviews.  They found that listings that averaged three or more stars in reviews took 41 out of 47 clicks. Also, the volume of reviews matters. 29 of 47 clicks went to listings that had at least four reviews.

As Google releases new tools and research, we are the some of the first to know.  We help our clients implement these new trends and tools and link their campaigns together across multiple channels.

We also help businesses to engage with their users. At IMI we have a comprehensive data-driven approach to internet marketing.  With our tools, partnerships, and expertise we extract data from all of our clients’ digital channels to help understand user behavior, create content that meets their needs, and ultimately increase ROI and bottom line.

At our Google Engage event, our audience walked away with valuable knowledge and enthusiasm. We look forward for the next Google Engage event and hope to see you there.

When people hear of Google, an iconic image of the six colorful letters, simple search bar beneath and “I’m Feeling Lucky” tab usually pops up in people’s heads.

But for those people who are familiar with social media, search engine optimization and all the perks that come with the worldwide web, they know that Google is making headlines everyday to make our Internet experience safer and easier. Google makes its way to daily newsfeeds and it is becoming a well-known fact that the powerful company is becoming more important for your website or blog.

So what are the most recent changes? Substituting the home page’s logo with fun keyboard games during the Olympics isn’t even half of it.

Catching the Internet Pirates

If it hasn’t been publicized enough in the past year, Internet piracy has emerged as major problem. From illegally downloaded mp3s to bootlegged films of summer hits, Google’s has recently declared that they are cracking down on this piracy that’s infecting the web. The company’s core web search engine will be relegating websites that often host unlawful copies of films and music. It will take into account the copyright infringement notices a site has received and then alter the link’s ranking.

Google’s head of engineering claims that in the past 30 days, more than 4.3 million URLs have been submitted containing possible copyright infringement. It may seem like this makes it more difficult for us to download those EPs we so desperately want on our iTunes, but Google’s proactive approach to eradicating Internet piracy is a huge feat for the entertainment industry. It establishes Google’s power beyond the world wide web too, making it appear unstoppable.

Google Plus’ New Addition is a Plus

Google has also achieved new internal accomplishments. This is for all you Google Plus members. If you joined this social networking site, owned and operated by Google itself, you will know the URL can be overwhelming on the eyes and just hard to remember. To access a typical Google Plus profile, you will have to put in a URL looking something like this: http://plus.google.com/109299348960895456083/.  Now, custom URLs are finally coming to Google +. This user friendly approach will enable URLS to look more like Facebook URLs, but with a nifty little algebraic plus in the web address (i.e. http://google.com/+paulmccartney or http://google.com/+nissan). Currently, a user needs to fit the criteria to acquire such an exclusive custom URL, but overtime, the unique web addresses will be accessible to Google Plus members worldwide.

Travelling on the Web Made Easier

For all you businessmen, Google has invaded your world too. The company announced on August 12^th that it will be purchasing Frommer’s travel guides to enhance its local and travel searches. Since purchasing Zagat last year, which specializes in restaurant reviews, Google has expanded once again, and is becoming a more relatable, media company. It will make your travel planning easier, giving you the results you want and optimizing your search even more.

So if you are a music guru, social networking fiend, or daily businessman, Google’s news is becoming more and more relatable to a wider spread of Americans.  The powerful corporation is taking bold moves and in turn, taking headlines and making news.

Google’s search ranking has added new filters that should affect your daily search. If you’re in any way affected by SEO or any kind of internet marketing, you will know how much Google rules the world wide web. If Google penguin and Google Panda updates weren’t enough to keep you busy, Google’s taking action on DMCA requests as well.

DMCA, Hollywood and Pirates

An odd grouping of words when first looked at, but DMCA, Hollywood and pirates have all come together in regards to Google’s newest update. DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Acts, are requests that can be made by users against sites that contain alleged “copyright infringement”. Now who would be a large target for copyright infringement? Thats right; Hollywood.

The entertainment industry has pushed criticism towards Google to stop the copyright infringement of their music, videos, shows, movies, etc.

The tough thing about filtering infringement is it can’t be recognized through a simple algorithmic formula. Copyright infringement has to come through review by either users or a more authoritative source. To officially be deemed containing copyright infringement, a court of law has to review such material. Google’s new update takes valid DMCA requests against a site to lower it’s Google rankings. This is aimed at taking down rankings of websites with pirated material and give some money back to Hollywood. 

But I’m Innocent

Google by all means is trying to do some good here by ridding its search results of infringed material on web pages that probably contain spammy ads and are potentially harmful to your computer. The one problem with this update, like many other things, is it can be abused by users looking to do harm for whatever reason. A valid DMCA request is simply a user filling out all the right paperwork and submitting it to Google without a counter-challenge.

Sometimes the innocent is “filed” as guilty. Google is trying to combat this in their update by offering “counter-notice” tools to help protect sites with proper copyrights. Just like Google Panda and Penguin updates, you might need to do some work to keep your site up their in the rankings.

What can I do?

This update can seem scary if your website has material that could be seen as borderline infringed material. So is Google going to make you vanish from the search engine because of some DMCA requests against you? No. While your website may suffer some rankings for a time, you will not completely disappear from the record. Again the counter-notice tools will help to protect your site, and you can file counter-challenges against requests.

While this might seem like a lot of work, Google says they will be making adjustments as the update goes on. If you receive less requests overtime, Google will bump you back up in the rankings. So stay calm, ride your site of any infringed or potentially infringed material, and stay vigilante about requests against your site.

Google+ burst onto the scene just over a year ago and has since been integrated into almost every facet of Google. From the Google+ SERP integration with Search Plus Your World to the integration of Google Places, brands are wondering what the potential impact on their business will be as a result of adopting yet another social network.

Google+ Ripples has been introduced to provide a deeper insight into the social reach of public posts and “re-shares.” The problem is, it is only on a post per post basis and fails to pinpoint the many aspects of user engagement that are captured with tools like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics. Google+ Ripples lacks the usability and depth of these other tools including exporting functionality, date sorting, gender and age demographics, topic trending and geographic reporting. SEMPO released an eye-opening study in February that revealed Google+ averaged only 3 minutes of monthly user engagements compared a staggering 405 minutes on Facebook from September 2011 through January 2012. On the flipside for Google+, users tend to engage primarily via thought leadership on the site, which is beneficial to brands with large numbers of circles because they are much more likely to share posts circling that brand.

Andrew Devine, Senior SEO Strategist at Covario in San Diego, outlines the potential pros and limitations to Google+ Ripples in “Google+ Ripples: Insights & Limitations.” He notes that while Google hasn’t released any tools specific to Google+, users can still isolate the impact a Google+ profile has on a brand’s site by using any standard analytics platform. Simply by isolating the plus.google.com sub-domain, traffic statistics can be collected and compared over a specified date period. The problem here is that it isn’t possible to narrow down to the referring keyword, making it difficult to pinpoint which keywords are driving large amounts of search traffic to a company’s specific Google+ post.

Devine wraps up a few actionable insights into tracking your businesses web visibility until Google releases an on-page analytics solution for Google+ profiles. He recommends using referral reports in your analytics software to monitor traffic to your site that is being driven from your Google+ profile and use Google+ Ripples on a post-by-post basis to identify industry influencers. As Google’s 250+ million users increase, the Google+ social platform will likely provide deeper insight for businesses tracking their brand’s web visibility.

What do you think about Google+ Ripples? Is it an adequate solution for brands tracking their visibility on the web?

If your looking for something new to put that spark into your business’ SEO, changing your business name isn’t an easy direction to head. Changing your business name is going to require a lot of SEO work just to maintain your current Google ranking and user traffic. Be forewarned, unless your willing to put in some hours of SEO for your company name change, you could be looking at penalties from Google, lost customers, less traffic and confused users.

Don’t Touch that Domain Name

Your domain name is going to hold a lot of your search engine traffic, so switching that domain name and your going to take a serious dip in Google rankings. Changing your domain name will result in having to accumulate new links and social sharing signals. You’re going to need a good internet marketing strategy in place, like a PPC marketing, to get that website traffic going again. This is going to mean more money and time from you.

Keep Current with Your Business Contact Info

Along with the many things Google does, using an algorithm to correlate phone numbers, addresses and names (or NAP) to your business is one of them. Correlating these factors will determine your rank for local search inquires. In order to keep your rankings up there your going to need to update your Google+ Local, Bing Local, Yahoo Local accounts, and any other local listing account.

You’ll have to make sure all your old local listings are updated because old business listing can show as duplicate content and NAP corruption to Google, thus hurting your traffic and rankings more. If you change your business phone number you have to make sure that is also updated or you’ll face the same problems. Also (though it may seem obvious) make sure you change the name on your website, this is probably the easiest change you’ll make but a vital one to say the least.

Tag up that Title

If your going through the whole trouble of changing your business name you might as well put some keywords and/or locations of your business in their. By incorporating names and location in the title your increasing your SEO value.

An example of this would be “Coronado Eye Doctor”. Also take into account the title for social media benefits, does it have a ring to it?

Keep The Customer Informed

With all these changes and updates going on make sure that your customer gets the heads up on whats going on. On your website and/or your facebook page give your customers an alert that you’ll be changing your business name soon. This will help lessen confusion and keep those loyal customers.

So if your dead set on a new business name, be prepared for what might seem like a daunting task and hope that new business name is a winner.

Google is always making changes to their algorithms, whether they are officially announced to the public or kept under wraps. The main algorithm changes, Panda and Penguin, have hit some websites pretty hard and negatively impacted rankings. These updates have had multiple versions released or data refreshes where the update was run again, and these updates usually are claimed to affect around 1% of search rankings (i.e. Panda 3.9). While this percentage may not seem like much, it is a significant number given the immense number of websites and searches out there. Unless you are extremely active and knowledgeable in search engine optimization (SEO) it is difficult to monitor changes in Google’s algorithms. If you are not one who is deeply immersed in SEO, have no fear, as SEOmoz recently released Mozcast. Mozcast is a daily weather report based upon the changes or “turbulence” for Google search engine rankings to indicate algorithm changes.

Google makes hundreds of changes to their algorithm each year (516 changes in 2010) indicating that being aware of when these changes are occurring can be extremely beneficial to anyone involved in internet marketing. As a top internet marketing company we stay on top of Google updates and continuously monitor rankings, but Mozcast seems to be a great tool for anyone who may not be as up to date with the Google algorithm changes.

What Does The Weather Report Mean?

The daily weather report is based on the changes noticed in search engine rankings over the past 24 hours. The hotter and stormier the weather report, the more Google’s algorithm and search engine rankings have changed in the past 24 hours. An average day is roughly around 70°F so weather reports above 70°F indicate higher than average changes and lower temperatures indicate a lower than average amount of changes. Depicting the changes as a weather report is more for fun, but it also makes it extremely easy for anyone to understand the amount of changes occurring within the past 24 hours. The temperature in the weather report is converted into an icon for one of the five following severity levels:

The weather severity icon is based on the temperature, so stormier icons such as rain will coincide with higher temperatures (more change) and sunnier icons will typically coincide with lower temperatures and less change.  The weather severity icons are considered to be a at-a-glance view while the actual temperature is more of a refined view. The temperature is calculated based on the metrics that measure change which we will explain later in this post.

Current, 5 Day, & 30 Day Reports

Upon viewing Mozcast’s page you will see the current weather report in the center of the page with a large icon depicting the type of weather and temperature.  The current weather report is actually for the previous day because the report is generated based on the previous 24 hour history of Google algorithm changes. To the left of that you will notice a sidebar weather report on the left, which gives the weather reports for the previous 5 days. This gives the weather icon, temperature, day of the week, and date for easy reference. Also below the main weather report the page shows a bar graph that gives the weather report for the past 30 days. This only shows the temperature, but the temperature is really the most important measure of algorithm changes.

How Does It Work?

Every 24 hours the creators track a set of 1,000 hand-picked keywords that are deliberately chosen to be depersonalized, delocalized, and evenly split across 5 “bins” of search volume. The results are tracked from the same location and same time everyday to keep the system as controlled and consistent in execution as possible.  Then for every keyword the creators pull the top 10 Google organic results and compare them to the results from the previous day to calculate the rate of change or “delta.” From there two metrics are used: Delta 10 and Delta 100.

What Are These Metrics?

Delta100

Delta100 is the first metric used in the temperature calculation process. Delta100 measures the changes in top 10 rankings for any two days. The Delta100 metric gives a number ranging from 0 to 100. The number of the metric is calculated based on these rules:

+0 if the rankings for the keyword stay the same.

+|#| if the ranking  moves within the top 10.

+10 if the ranking drops out of the top 10.

When a ranking moves the “#” refers to the number of spots it moved. To make this easier to understand, if a URL moved from #1 to #5 then the “#” is +3 which gets added to the Delta 100 for the keyword. This is calculated for all the URLs in the search results for the given keyword to get the Delta100 for the keyword. Delta 100 is calculated for all 1,000 keywords and is used to calculate Delta 10.

Delta10

Of the two metrics used to determine the weather report, Delta10 is used to calculate the temperature of the weather. Delta10 is essentially the rate of change across the entire top 10 results. Delta10 is calculated by taking the square root of Delta100 for each keyword. Delta 10 is based on a scale of 0 to 10 respectively, because Delta100 is on a scale of 0 to 100. Then the creators take an average (non-weighted) of all Delta10 figures to use in the calculation for the temperature. At this point, Delta10 is multiplied by a fixed multiplier to calculate the temperature (numerically in °F) of the given days weather report. The fixed multiplier is currently 28.0, but this could change as the tool is still in its initial stages and will likely receive some revisions.

Wrap Up

Mozcast is updated around 7:30am PST and also includes Events and News pages. The News page will showcase the product updates to Mozcast and the Events page includes a list of recent algorithm changes and their respective weather scores.

Now that SEOmoz has provided everyone with a valuable reference point, its important for everyone involved in this field to be aware of it and to utilize it. Although it will not tell you what changed in the algorithm, it is a good indicator of when Google updates are taking place. So go check out Mozcast and let us know what you think.

After recently posting revenues of $1.18 billion, Facebook has beaten second quarter estimates. This small bump in revenue calms some people’s nerves as fears of the company’s success were still looming over their heads after an abysmal IPO. The site’s large majority of revenue came from advertising at $992 million, beating expectations by $71 million. Facebook reported that there were jumps in daily, monthly, and mobile users of 32%, 29%, and 67% respectively.

This news comes as relief to many, not only investors, but also to the rest of the industry as many companies have begun investing in social media, with Facebook being the main priority. Recently, the whole notion of content is king, and an emphasis on social media along with connecting with consumers has taken the forefront for many internet marketing companies. These positive reports from the popular website may be a precursor of something to come in the future. Social media has become more important over the past year and is said to even be good for ranking within Google. Is this the beginning of social media exploding into the internet marketing world?

Many tactics and processes that were once prominent with SEO and internet marketing have now become obsolete with the new Google updates. Many marketers and companies have turned to social media sites such as Facebook as another avenue for reaching their target market, especially as popularity has increased among these types of sites. Will we see Facebook increase its revenue in the future with more and more companies pouring their trust into the social platform? Or will we see it all come crashing down?

Big news in the world of SEO, PPC, SEM or really anyone associated or affected by internet marketing, Google has rolled out its newest Panda Update. It is approximated that Google Panda update 3.9 will affect about 1% of Google’s search results, which for the world’s largest search engine is a noticeable change.

Since Google’s first Panda update back in February of 2011, Google has implemented a number of updates trying to sort out who really deserves the top ranking spots. Though the updates are supposed to be “minor” changes to Google, over the past two years website owners have had to adjust to conform to the updates or suffer a drop in the rankings.

Pandas are Harmless Right?

Though a panda bear may be cute and cuddly, a Google Panda update can be a fierce beast to your website if you are not practicing efficient SEO techniques. Google will find out if you use duplicate or overlapping articles to boost your search rankings and head you in the opposite direction. Also if your ad content is too great compared to information content you’ll also drop in the rankings. Sloppy or hastily written articles will also be spotted by the newer panda update.

Get Back up There

If you suffered from the Panda update it’s not the end of your webpage. One of the biggest things Google will look for on your webpage is unique and natural content. Natural or organic search rankings will come from having content that is relevant to your site and using a variety of relevant keywords. Another big one is ad to content ratios on your page. Ads should never take up the majority of your page. Avoid trying to gear keywords and content at what someone would type into a search engine and instead find a happy medium between relevant content and marketing content.

If all these changes are too overwhelming or simply out of your technological grasp, seek the help from a highly qualified SEO company like Internet Marketing Inc.

Following in the footsteps of its recently released redesign of Google+ for Android and iOS phones, Google has now revealed its iPad version of the social media platform. Google+ for iPad was specifically designed to take advantage of the unique features that se the device apart. On the iPad, the news stream filters and adjusts content according to its popularity and the type of story. Brands would be wise to enlist the help of Internet advertising companies to really maximize their opportunities to become more “popular” on Google+, considering its popularity and expansion throughout the whole range of mobile devices. New features include the ability to pinch and expand stories within the news stream itself, providing more real estate to comment, the option to drag posts from the stream to share it with your own friends, and initiating a Hangout on your iPad before transferring it to your TV by way of AirPlay. All of these features facilitate a streamlined interface that makes using Google+ on the iPad a user-friendly and most importantly, fun affair.

In addition to introducing the Google+ app to the iPad, the newly released Google+ Events has been brought to the iPhone. All of the features that make Google+ Events so useful for coordinating parties and sharing the results afterwards can now be accessed on the go, making it even easier to decide if you want to attend without even having to head back home. If it’s not already being done, incorporating social media marketing strategies into a company’s overall marketing package can dramatically improve the brand’s image. This, coupled with a good SEO link building strategy, has the potential to take marketing efforts to new heights. Companies without a presence in social networks are missing out on one of the greatest opportunities in existence.

The much-loved Hangout feature has also gone mobile. Hangout is a video chat that can put up to ten friends into the same conference call with video and make everyone feel like they’re in the same room together, even if they’re miles apart. What’s even better is that it can now be accessed from anywhere, through the iPhone and iPad.

Google+ seems to have a firm grasp on what its consumers want and knows just the right formula to satisfy them. Considering that people access Google+ from their mobile devices more than from a home computer these days, creating mobile versions of the app that play to the strengths for each specific type of device was definitely an intelligent decision, optimizing the functionality and success of the social network.

Google recently held the Google I/O conference, which was an extensive 3-day conference focused on building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies. The conference covered a variety of new technologies relevant to the interests of top web developers and top web marketing companies. One of the most significant announcements was the advancement of Google Analytics to now support analytics functions for mobile applications, allowing developers and marketers to measure the full value of their mobile applications.

Mobile search and application use has grown immensely, which has consequently increased mobile conversions to 8% in the last year. This figure is a staggering 180% increase in mobile conversions from the previous year signifying that mobile applications can be extremely beneficial to companies, developers, and Internet advertising companies alike.

 What does Mobile App Analytics do?

Google released a statement about the new platform, which states the platforms functionality is “designed to measure the entire mobile customer journey – from discovery to download to engagement. This enables the creation of app experiences that are more useful and engaging through data-driven decisions at each stage of the app lifecycle.” The platform is set to provide information on acquisition and user information based on downloads, active users, and new users. Also it includes many metrics to monitor retention, crashes, conversions, sales, in-app purchases, and Google Play Traffic Sources. An example of acquisition and user data is shown below.

Mobile App Analytics also portrays user behavior in respect to loyalty of users, frequency of use, and engagement. Also the platform will tells webmasters to track what type of devices their application users are using to run the app, and visually depicts proportions of their user base based upon this. An example of this device overview is below.

Mobile App Analytics supports many other features yet all of it’s features can only fully utilized by examining an applications performance throughout its entire existence. Many people have regarded the new development of this platform as an official recommendation for mobile search engine optimization efforts, signifying the importance of mobile users. Marketers will now have a more complete toolset and understanding of mobile applications and conversions. Let us know what you think about this new platform.