Blog for Anduro Marketing
Jul 27th, 2010 by jeff
TD Canada Trust recently conducted a survey focusing on their “small business happiness index”.
Calgary had the highest score in Canada at 30%. Kelowna has the lowest at 21%.
For details see article on the Calgary Herald: http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Calgary+happiest+small+businesses/3327101/story.html
Jul 21st, 2010 by jeff
We look at many websites every day.
Here is one that is interesting: http://www.waxpartnership.com/
Check out “See What We’re Doing”. Lots of fun in every area of their office.
The site doesn’t work well with the search engine but they are an ad agency – they probably don’t care.
Enjoy!
Jun 21st, 2010 by damon
The execution will be Twittered, apparently.
Regardless if one thinks this was done in poor taste or not (I think it was), its seems people still have not grasped the power of Twitter to potentially backfire and blow up in their faces when wielded incorrectly. That is the peril of a tool/toy that encourages “stream of consciousness” narration – especially dangerous for politicians and other people in public positions.
These tools were created under the category of (and are still labelled as such) Social media – but businesses and politicians have begun wielding these applications to broadcast business communications and political platforms to the general public instead. Of course the freedom of this medium has resulted in occasional quandaries, as people in the spotlight continue to put their foot in their mouths through poorly crafted and hastily released messages.
We’ll see how it turns out. The tools will obviously evolve over time – but for now, expect even more gaffes.
Jun 18th, 2010 by Stefanie
Flipping through the Website Magazine, I stumbled across an article called “Flexing Your Marketing Muscles with Google Product Extensions” by Brian Lewis.
This article is about Google Product extensions which are putting an end to the 70-character ad text which is incredibly restricting, the ‘one landing page per keyword’ rule and the fact that image ads are not available on the search network.
Amazing! Unfortunately, this product is only available in the U.S. for the time being but I am sure Google will roll it out world wide once all the bugs have been dealt with.
So, what exactly are Google Extensions? Simple! Instead of simply one ad being displayed for a company/product, the ad appears with a + sign inside of a box underneath it which can be expanded and displays a list of other products featured by this same company. Brilliant!
Where does this extra information come from? The company needs to enter information into Google’s Merchant Center and the information is pulled from there. If a customer then clicks on one of the products listed in the expanded product extension, they are taken to the appropriate page (specified in the Google Merchant Center).
The article goes into great detail about the strategies, costs involved, tracking and whether there will be an impact on SEO (since once all of the extensions are expanded, the first organic listing falls well below the fold) but for sake of simplicity, I have just covered the basics.
Check out the full article here (with a subscription), on Google or contact us at Anduro for more information on this. Remember though, this is only available in the U.S. for the time being.
May 26th, 2010 by Stefanie
I read an interesting article today in regards to Google’s number one spot and how much value there is to it.
I was definitely intrigued by the post which is why I am sharing it but the more I think about it, there are a lot of missing components here. The article How Much is a Google Top Spot Worth? posted on the SearchEngineWatch blog is definitely interesting.
To sum it up, there are some graphs and pictures and stats that show how important the first spot is and how much more traffic a company gets if they are in the first spot as opposed to the 2nd and 3rd etc. While it is our goal in life to get people in these top positions on Google, there are definitely some things to point out here.
I am in no way, shape or form trying to diminish this article or argue with it. It is definitely important to be in the top spots in Google – if it wasn’t, Anduro wouldn’t exist how we do now. And I agree that the top few positions are where the eyeballs are but there is a point that is being overlooked.
What about conversion rate? I agree that you want traffic but if it is unqualified traffic because everyone is just clicking on the first result since we all trust Google to know what we are looking for, maybe it is better to be a bit further down on the page and catch those people who are really, truly searching. Maybe those people are more qualified. Of course, it makes sense that the chance of getting a conversion increases with more traffic but I think this study is inconclusive. There are other factors to consider – conversion rate being one of the biggest ones.
Have a look at some of the comments under the post. Pretty interesting to see the different reactions from people.
What do you think?