The Google AdWords ad scheduling setting lets you specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your PPC ads to appear. Ad scheduling can give your PPC campaign a better 'bang for your buck' by improving your ROI by making sure that your ads only run when it makes the most sense for your business.

If you are from a B2B context you might schedule your ads to run only during business hours - let's assume only weekdays say from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. targeting business hours when you think your audience is looking for your products/services. Setting up the ad scheduling is easy as ABC - or B2B! Simply log in to your AdWords account, go to the settings tab, then advanced settings and there you find the ad scheduling settings.

But how can you be certain your scheduled ads actually target your audience effectively, that you are spending your cost per click on your desired audience? This is where your Google Analytics account come into play. Google Analytics Custom Reporting can help you take out the guesswork in ad scheduling when your audience is looking for your products/services. Let your website visitors, who are your audience determine when to target your PPC audience.

By setting up a custom report you can find out how visitors are behaving on your website at what hours of the day, at what days, pages per visit and bounce rate. With this information you can adjust the PPC ad scheduling and budget accordingly.

To set up custom reporting simply login to your Analytics account, click on custom reporting in the left menu and in the top right corner click on "create a new custom report". Nothing needs to be installed or verified.



In the left menu called 'Metrics' click on 'Site Usage' and drag-and-drop 'Entrances' (along with good traffic quality indicators 'Time on Site', 'Pages per Visit', and 'Bounce Rate') one by one across to the 'Metric' boxes. Then do the same thing with 'Dimensions', click on 'Visitors' and drag-and-drop 'Day' over to the 'Dimension' box and 'Hour of the Day' over to the 'Sub-Dimension' box.



Then rename your custom report to whatever you want to call it by editing the title. Click the 'Preview' button to see your custom report and if you are happy with the report then finally click on 'Create Report'. Now you have created your custom report!

With these metrics in your custom report you can in more detail find out how visitors behave on your website, during what hours of the day and at what days. Based on the information you get from the report you might want to refine the PPC ad scheduling.



In the example above the majority of entrances to the website happened in late afternoon between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm and on Mondays and Fridays. From this example scheduling the PPC ads to run only on 8:00 am to 6:00 pm on only weekdays would be advisable.

Set aside a couple of hours to learn Google Analytics custom reporting. Apart from creating a custom report in Google Analytics to refine PPC spend and strategy you can create a custom report to help you optimise your online leads and conversions. More about that in another blog post.

Looks like Google is trying out some new ways of displaying SERP URLs.  In this image (taken by @robhammond), Google is sharing the location of a results page within a site by including the page's breadcrumb string instead of just using the first 51 URL characters.




The Renault UK results page (#7) has matching breadcrumbs on the destination page:



Today, a search for mobility provides the same results with "normal" URLs:

So what does this mean?  Should we all style out our sites with Hansel and Gretel in mind?  Keeping Google's usability priorities in mind, I think bread crumbs should be a mainstay in any site anyways.  Also, I do believe this is a feasible full time change we may see some time in the future. 

Displaying breadcrumbs in SERPs clearly maps out for searchers what section of the site their query result is located within; this will enable searchers to better read those URLs and have a clearer idea of whether or not that result is appropriate for their query. Also, if this is a going to be a major SERPs change, it's important the breadcrumbs don't go too deep since as always, there is limited character space.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this alteration plays out - if you see any more examples shoot them to me @ChelseaBlacker or chelsea.blacker@baseonegroup.co.uk .

Mid February this year people in the search industry spotted a change in how Google returned search results for certain types of keywords, a change giving "big brands" a push in Google search results. Following discussions on blogs and forums Matt Cutts (head of Google's Webspam team), on March 4th finally confirmed a change had been made. The update was dubbed the "Vince update" (no sorry, not a Vince Neil update)

More on the "Vince update" later on and now a brief history of important updates of Google's search algorithm.

The "Florida Update"

On November 16th 2003 Google made a major update on their search algorithm. Named the "Florida update", it had a major effect for a very large number of websites at the time and came to change the course of search engine optimisation.

Aaron Wall from SEObook says: "The Google Florida update was the first update that made SEO complicated enough to where most people could not figure out how to do it. Before that update all you needed to do was buy and/or trade links with your target keyword in the link anchor text, and after enough repetition you stood a good chance of ranking."

Pre-Florida update prominent search engine ranking could be quite easily achieved by doing basic reciprocal link-building, on-page keyword stuffing, and using repetitive inbound anchor text in links.

Post-Florida update a huge number of pages, many of which had ranked at or near the top of the results for a very long time, simply disappeared from the search engine results altogether.

The "rel=nofollow tag Update"

In January 2005 Google contributed to changing the structure of the Internet when Google proposed a link rel=nofollow tag. Originally it was introduced to only stop blog spamming but was shortly afterwards also affecting link buying. In the eyes of Google you are considered a spammer, and risk getting penalised, if you were buying links without using rel=nofollow on them.

In a URL the tag looks like this: <a href="http://www.baseonesearch.co.uk" rel="nofollow">Base One Search</a>

Plenty of prominent websites have adopted the use of the nofollow tag, sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and most blog platforms support the tag in the comments section.

"By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines)." (http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow)

The "Universal Search Update"

In May 2007 Google launched their Universal search update. Universal search means that search engine results are blended with selected content from Google's "vertical search databases". The vertical search content is blended directly into the organic search results. Before the "Universal search" update Google gave a list of 10 text-based search engine results.

The "vertical search databases" Google blend into the organic search engine results are: News, Videos, Products, Maps, Images, Books & Blog posts

Today optimising your website for Universal search is important, (e.g. by adding alt-tags and keywords to your images, listing your business of Google Maps, creating videos and optimising title, description, tags etc.), you can increase your chances of achieving prominent search engine rankings.

The "Vince Update"

In October 2008 CEO of Google Eric Schmidt gave a hint of things to come, i.e. the "Vince update". In an interview he talked about "brands", he said:

"The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted." He continued: "Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool." "Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component." (http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=131569)

The "Vince update" has caused a bit of outcry in the search community because with the update it's believed (and proven) that Google is now favouring brands/corporations for core category keywords. Aaron Wall from SEObook in his blog post proved changes had been made in the search engine results, evidence big brands getting favoured. An example is in mid-January three major US airlines all of a sudden began getting top rankings for "airline tickets" (see below)
 

(http://www.rankpulse.com/airline-tickets)

Addressing it as a "minor change", Matt Cutts says the change is about factoring trust more into the algorithm for more generic queries rather than pushing major brands to top search engine results.

So does this latest Google "update" - "minor change" mean that big brands/corporations can take a back seat and receive top search engine rankings in Google by default? I think not, the "Vince update" may well be just a minor change. Google is continually tuning its algorithms to give most relevant results for users.

For navigational-type searches (aka research queries, "going through the front door in the shopping centre") such as cars, airline tickets etc. brand/corporation sites are maybe what searchers are looking for? In the above illustrated example, shouldn't there be a couple of airline companies in the results when you search for airline tickets?

Once upon a time, in cyber space, a lone spidercrawled the world wide web. It crawled the web in order to find the most relevant content to feed to the enormous and  knowledge hungry  Googlesaurus. The gigantic Googlesaurus was getting more and more picky about the web pages it would eat, if it wasn't exactly to the Googlesaurus taste he would simply spit it out to its supplementary index, where it was lost forever.

The people who wrote the website content, needed the little spider to find their web pages.  And more importantly;  needed the spider to feed the content to the Googlesaurus . The struggle to know exactly what the Googlesaurus wanted from day to day got harder and harder.

 

But there were chosen once, looming in the darkness,  who understood the Googlesaurus.  The chosen ones had the capability of miraculously knowing what the Googlesaurus wanted, and needed to get bigger and stronger. These chosen ones were called:

 

SEOs- "the knights of the web".