Archive for May, 2011
Paying for Directions – Is it a Money Grab by Google?
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
Google has officially announced that it will now be charging for directions in Adwords where advertisers have location extensions activated for their ads. Myself and all my clients got the email notice today. Needless to say my clients are asking how it will effect them.
Honestly, I’m left scratching my head over the value of this to advertisers.
How Do You Track It?
Google will be reporting those clicks via the click type segment. Fine, we can track the clicks. But from that point what are you tracking? How do you gauge how many of those clicks where a user wanted to see directions to your location actually end up at your door. Off hand I can’t think of any way to track that. It’ll be the mystery ROI. Which is great for, as Google puts it in the email, helping you meet your marketing goals.
Every marketer knows that invisible goals are the best goals. amiright?
How Do You Turn it Off While Keeping Other Parts of Location Extensions?
Location extensions are great. From my testing they significantly improve click through rates as the ads appear even more local, thus relevant, to the user. This for normal web clicks to a landing page. Plus it shows phone numbers which can entice a few phone calls. Particularly in mobile ads the click to call functionality of those ads for smartphone users is a very significant part of mobile PPC. The juicy part even.
But what if you wanted to opt out of directions? It looks like you can’t. Either use location extensions or don’t.
What About Services that Come to You?
Plumbers, painters, air conditioning contractors, carpet cleaners, pool cleaners, taxi cabs, etc… There are all kinds of service based businesses where users have zero need for directions to the business location. Granted it should mean very few ever ask for directions to those kinds of businesses. But clicks will happen and they will be a complete and utter waste of money for those advertisers.
I wonder how this applies to businesses that have defined a service area in their places account AND have chosen to hide their address. Is that what it will take to disable the directions clicks?
Is it Simply a Money Grab for Google Adsense?
How will I be charged for “directions” clicks?
Over the next few weeks, “directions” clicks will be charged the same as a click on your ad’s headline. In general, “direction” clicks are a small proportion of the ad clicks, and we do not anticipate this change will have a significant impact on your account’s total cost.
I think, in my cynical mind, what they really mean to say is : Don’t worry about it. In general, it’ll only cost you a few bucks here and there. But there are millions of you, and that adds up to millions of dollars, here and there, for us.
We’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out. I’ll be paying close attention to my clients PPC accounts to see how many direction clicks they get.
Anyone else have thoughts and opinions on the new direction clicks? Comment form below is for commenting. AND your comments can be longer than 140 characters!!! (that’s a hint you should be contributing to the conversation here and not on twitter.)
Photo via Flickr by Ian Ransley Design & Illustration in San Francisco
The Power of Meta Descriptions
Wednesday, May 4th, 2011A long held belief amongst SEOs is that meta descriptions, on their own, have no bearing on search rankings. I believe that to be the case. But I also believe that well crafted description tags can have significant impacts on click through rates, regardless of were you actually rank. Compelling text shown in the search result snippet is bound to pull more clicks than something not compelling, not descriptive and plain un-interesting.
I now have data, that I think, proves this point.
My wife launched her little recipe blog side project just before Christmas last year. She loves to cook and wanted to blog her recipes so I set her up with Wordpress, gave her a few pointers and let her fly at it. I tried my best to tell her some basic SEO stuff about her content, page titles, linking, etc… but whenever I try to bring it up she just starts shouting “LA LA LA LA LA” and does not want the hear any of it. “You’re the SEO guy, you take care of the computer stuff and I’ll just write what I want to write”. Ok, fine. Ultimately that is Google’s key recommendation.
She posts one or two recipes per week and the content is growing. Traffic is growing, slowly, but not fast enough for my liking. Checking what key phrases are sending traffic then doing that search to see how things appear in the SERPS pointed out a serious flaw, in my eyes. Google was basically pulling the first line or two of text right out of the content to display as the description snippet. Sometimes it contained a word or two of the key phrase but was largely un-descriptive of the page. So I went about doing something about that.
Since my wife had no intentions of making use of the All in One SEO Pack plugin I installed, which would allow her to write custom description tags, I went about customizing the plugin to do the heavy lifting for her.
Here is an example snippet from her Kid Friendly Meatloaf recipe before meta description customization;
And here is the same result after Google re-indexed things;
What would you rather click on?
I created a basic template description and dynamically insert the recipe titles into it. The description is relevant via the recipe name, often its primary keywords, and stating that it is a fabulous recipe and easy to make at home makes it more compelling to click on.
And here are the traffic results;
You see the point, red arrow, where I added an annotation in Analytics on the date I made the change. Over the following couple weeks (weekly data in chart) traffic surged ahead as more and more pages got re-indexed with better description tags.
Now over that time period more posts were added, each of them attracting a bit more long tail queries (long tail is long in recipe land), and the site attracted a couple new links, so maybe there was a slight improvement in rankings as well. But to me the time frame of that big increase points to the better meta descriptions and an increase in click through rates.
Google webmaster tools, though really limited in what it reports and its time frames seems to lend support to my suspicion the meta tags are giving the biggest boost here.
Over the period of March 26 to April 30th it reports a 94% increase in impressions (some new posts and maybe some improved rankings for some posts) and a 250% increase in clicks. The site is new and competes with the likes of food.com, allrecipes.com and other heavyweights. Many of the new posts rank for a little while due to freshness factors then slowly slip back to page 2, 3 or deeper. Some stick on page 1 better than others. Again, I’m very confident the description tags are primary factor.
Some SEO’s are leaning towards user actions as a possible ranking factor. If not in place yet, certainly something that may be coming down the pipe (or maybe it’s riding on the back of a Panda). So get your meta descriptions doing their job of influencing click troughs from the search results. It will get you a larger share of traffic out of your current rankings and maybe, just maybe, the increase in click through’s will indirectly turn meta descriptions into an actual ranking factor.
If this post made you hungry and you’re wondering what to have for dinner tonight- check out some of my favorites;
- Oven Pulled Pork – don’t have a smoker? Do it the oven.
- Potatoes Anna – my new favorite form of potatoes as a side dish.
- Pork Tenderloin – mmmmm, sesame seeds and soya
- Clam Linguini – simple, classic, and so flavorful
