Now Google has decided to bring the same benefit to Google’s ads with Instant Previews for Ads. Instant Previews for Ads is rolling out to US users in late April and will be rolling out internationally over the coming weeks. The Instant Preview icon will appear next to ads on Google.com allowing searchers to preview the adverts landing page. Instant Previews allow your customers to quickly preview a page to see if its content matches what they’re searching for.

This allows any potential customers to preview your landing page before they arrive, Instant Previews helps you get even more highly qualified traffic to your site and can maybe reduce the number of bounces and improve conversion rates. Instant Preview clicks are free of charge – you’re only charged if a user clicks through to your actual landing page.

The update is intended to demote sites which scrape content from others, to the UK and other English-language Google users.

A number of prominent UK technology news sites have seen their Google rankings drop substantially but some sites – including Google’s own YouTube and the video site Vimeo, as well as other technology sites including Techcrunch and Mashable, and newspaper sites for the Mirror and The Independent – get a boost.

The update hasn’t worked perfectally though as a number of original content sites were hit, including the British Medical Journal.

1. You have to play to figure out the rules
2. People succeed best when their unique talents are recognised
3. You can’t recover from a really bad start
4. Different problems require different specialists
5. Blowing something up isn’t necessarily felt everywhere
6. Most improvements are incremental
7. Just because you’ve mastered one task doesn’t make you master of all
8. You can never do the same thing exactly the same way
9. Some goals require more birds
10. There is more than one way to win

Read his full research here.

These figures reveal that the value of internet advertising has grown by 12.8% in 2010, therefore breaking through the £4bn barrier.

A study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the accountants PwC found that internet advertising spend grew three times as rapidly as in 2009.

It has also outpaced the rest of the advertising market, which has recovered slowly after dipping during the recession.

Chief executive of the IAB, Guy Phillipson, said: “Major brands restored their advertising budgets in 2010 and online was a big winner.”

The largest growth area was display advertising on social networks such as Facebook, which has grown by almost 200%.

Read full story here.

These new laws will come into force on the 25^th May 2011, and they state that companies that use cookies to track their visitors must get “explicit consent” from their users.

The European e-Privacy directive which comes into force in late may has a section drawn up to protect users privacy and in particular limit how much a company or website can use data for any behavioural advertising.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has setup a website to help users understand exactly what behavioural advertising is and how they can stop being tracked by cookies (if they choose to).

Behavioural advertising is where users are tracked across the websites they browse to create a profile that dictates the type of adverts they could see. Essentially this means adverts are more relevant to what the user may want to buy. For example if you do a lot of research into buying a new TV you should notice that a lot of adverts on other sites will start advertising TVs to you.

Users do have to understand that the data collected for behavioural advertising is anonymous, and if a website tracks login information and passwords with cookies then you will be informed about it.

What are the Problems with This Directive?

Many experts are explaining that governments are not ready to enforce this directive, as none of them have even drawn up any guidelines on how to do this.

Industry experts are also explaining that this e-Privacy directive will be detrimental to the web, cookies are used everyday on websites, to track how many visitors a site gets and to remember your login information.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) have said that this new law “is potentially detrimental to consumers, business and the UK digital economy”.

Due to the new law users will have to confirm they do or don’t mind being tracked, this could mean lots of pop-ups appearing all over the web again. Nick Halstead said “Old versions of Internet Explorer used to warn you about cookies, but they stopped because people found it too annoying.”

The question many online businesses are asking is “Has this directive been pushed through after complaints from privacy campaigners?”



That’s the message to Dorset businesses from the digital marketing boss at one of the world’s biggest companies.

Allister Frost is head of digital marketing strategy at Microsoft and he made a visit to Bournemouth University to be keynote speaker at the fifth annual Mike Warne Marketing Communications Lecture.

Discussing  in particular social media.

“It’s about the evolution of companies, from shouting what they want to say to conversing with customers on their terms. There are many companies, especially SMEs, who have not realised how fundamental the shift is.”

“I think it’s the biggest opportunity that SMEs have had for a long time.”

Read the full story here.

Google states that its main objective is to trawl throughout the web to find the most relevant content for its users search terms, so does Google really believe that J C Penny was the most relevant site for all these terms?

The New York Times asked an online search specialist, Doug Pierce to ask this question to. He discovered that J C Penny had a lot of paid links coming from sites that had no relevance to the link. For example the phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com.

A spokesperson for J C Penny said “J. C. Penney did not authorize, and we were not involved with or aware of, the posting of the links”

When the New York Times showed a list of these paid for links to head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts “I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,”

On Wednesday 9th February at 7 p.m. Eastern Time J C Penney was No. 1 in searches for living room furniture and Samsonite carry on luggage. Two hours later they were No. 68 and No. 71 respectively.

J C Penney was unhappy with this outcome and sacked its search engine consulting firm for employing the Black Hat Techniques in the first place.

For users everywhere the mobile web era has already begun. So why are most businesses so slow on the uptake of using this medium?

The opportunity for businesses is enormous and Google want everyone to be able to take part in the mobile web.

This week Google will host an event called “Think Mobile” where they will look at some of the most noteworthy trends in mobile and clarify why it’s “not too late for businesses to still be early” in this mobile space.

Read more here.

Bing hasn’t denied any of this and as a result it looks like Bing’s relevancy is potentially improving (or getting worse) on the back of Google’s own work.

During May last year (2010) Google started to notice that Bing was doing exceptionally well at returning the same sites as Google when unusual misspellings were entered.

Due to this Google’s engineers manually changed some results for junk terms like hiybbprqag or mbzrxpgjys, so a website would show for these terms even though it had no relevance.

Soon after Bing started showing the same websites…

Read full story here.

As of 1st March 2011 online marketing communications on a companies’ own website and on other third party sites under their control, such as Google AdWords and Facebook will have to adhere to the non-broadcast advertising rules as set out in the CAP Code.

This marketing awareness campaign – which has featurde prominently on the IAB website until 1st March – calls on businesses to ensure their online marketing messages are legal, decent, honest and truthful. It also ask businesses to make sure their websites observe the new rules by seeking help and advice via CAP Copy Advice.

This two phased campaign was formed with the support of the UK advertising industry, with AMV BBDO and OMD UK providing their services on a pro bono basis. This campaign relies entirely on free space that is donated by online media owners.

Read full story here.