Google announced its new feature for Gmail users called Priority Inbox last week, and there has been lots of comment and discussion about what it means for email. Essentially the new tool works out (using a secret algorithm of course!) which of your emails are important to you and then puts them at the top of the special new inbox (the old-style inbox will still be available) so you don’t miss them. It’s a pretty simple tool; no customisation or implementation is required. Once activated, Gmail will ask you if you want to enable the service. You can then set a few preferences (e.g. certain contacts you always want to include), but apart from that, it just works!

So what’s in the algorithm?

That’s a very good question and it’s not all clear yet, but things like how frequently you open and/or respond to emails are ranked as well as who the sender is, how often you read messages with a certain keyword, whether the message is solely addressed to you or if you are part of a wider mailing list. You can also educate the system, by using little arrows to indicate whether a message has been inadvertently prioritised. Feedback from those that have trialled it is generally positive, with many users being impressed with how intuitive it is. Some have complained that it’s sometime difficult to know exactly why a message has been prioritised (Google doesn’t give any indication).

So what does this mean for email marketers?

The first thing to say is that this move isn’t particularly surprising. Hotmail’s sweep feature already does something similar and, at a recent DMA conference I attended, a Yahoo spoke about their plans for deliverability being increasingly based on user engagement. Not to mention the fact that many of us already have filtering options in place, for example, I have a separate folder where I put non-work related emails so I can read them after hours. Despite this, the move is clearly still big news for email marketers. Gmail has around 200 million users worldwide. The danger for marketing emails is that they won’t be flagged as important by the new system. I have no doubt that email marketers, as they get more used to the system, will start to see if there are ways round it or at least ways to make their messages more likely to be prioritised, much in the same way that SEO can be used to increase search rankings. However, the user is still in ultimate control as a message can merely be flagged as of no importance and therefore relegated forever.

It’s back to basics

At the end of the day, it’s the spammers who send out thousands of untargeted, irrelevant emails that should be worried by this move. Those email marketers that spend time and effort collecting recipient data and segmenting their lists have nothing to fear and, indeed, should welcome the new service. It makes the inbox less cluttered, leaving only the emails that are targeted, relevant and engaging to the users, which can only be good for your results. The best thing is, this is easy to achieve with the variety of tools available out there. What do you think? Have you tried it out yet?

As inevitable as the summer season in England only lasting four days, Google has changed their Trademark policy in the UK to align with the US.

From 14th September 2010, advertisers will be able to use third party trademarks in their paid ad text, even if they don’t own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it. So if you were selling smartphones, for example, you could put ‘Buy the iPhone here’ in your ad text.

But why did Google decide to make this change in the first place?

“We believe that this change has helped both our users and advertisers by improving the usefulness of text ads on Google.com and across partner sites in the U.S,” explained Google Product Manager, Dan Stokeley, in an official blog post.

But is there another reason behind this change?

“For example, resellers of jeans have been able to highlight the actual brands they sell in their ad text making their ads even more specific and relevant for users,” said Stokeley.

Yes, as Dan suggests, adverts will become more relevant, but in addition, everyone will be bidding for that brand name, which means the price will rise and Google will make a larger margin.

Any restrictions?

However Google isn’t completely opening the field and this policy change does have some restrictions.

For example, you can only bid against a trademark name on the basis that your site is actually selling the item, components of the item, offers to repair the item, or is an informational site about the item.

If you’re concerned about this policy change, the SEO agency team here ar dotSEO suggests the following:

1.    Monitor your brand terms now. If your CTR starts to decrease you will be easily able to detect the impact of this change on your brand.

2.    For direct retailers, keep open communication with your resellers to keep them happy and so as not to increase the cost of your brand terms.

3.    Have a chat with your search team or SEO agency; they should be aware of this change and can advise accordingly.

4.    Don’t panic! The new policy changes don’t apply to competitors. So, with some persistent enforcement, you will still be protected.

So, in summary, yes Google is allowing ads to be more targeted, but it is also increasing the cost of trademarked terms and putting more money in its pocket!

If you want to find out more about these changes then give the dotSEO team a call!

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Why do you use one search engine over another? Is it by chance, by choice or do you change on a regular basis?

In 2008, Google reported a turnover of £2 billion generated purely from clicks on Adwords adverts, but what about Bing and Yahoo?

The graph below is fascinating. It shows search engine usage according to how technologically advanced the user is. There’s no surprise that Google wins the ‘Middle Majority’ with a greater overall percentage, but Bing and Yahoo are also leaders amongst certain other demographics.

So when you are developing your online advertising strategy it’s important to understand your audience; how and where they search. Different searchers (and therefore search engines) have different characteristics that will benefit some brands more than others.

Every search engine displays different results, some more relevant than others, but all with the goal of satisfying consumer needs. If it achieves this than that search engine has a greater appeal to that particular customer, leading to a longer relationship. Some search engines will do this better than others depending on what they are looking for.

It’s pretty easy to look at the impact of this on your bottom line too. Looking at your web analytics, you can see whether traffic from certain search engines actually converts at a better rate than others. For example, a client of ours receives only 1% of web traffic from Bing and Yahoo, but the conversion rate from these is 42%, a whole 131% better than the site’s average conversion rate. What does this tell us about users of Bing and Yahoo? Are people that use these search engines more likely to buy from our client?

So before committing online spend, it is worth spending some time properly understanding your prospects in order to spend your money wisely. If you want a bit of a helping hand, get in touch with the guys at dotSEO who will be happy to assist!

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been making the headlines himself recently by revealing plans to de-index his news websites from Google, when they start charging for access to online content.

This follows a long running spat between media publishers and the world’s leading search engine. On the one hand, Google drives substantial traffic to news websites. However, publishers are frustrated by the editorial power that Google is able to wield through its Google News service – power that traditionally resided with publisher/newspaper. They also claim that Google is in breach of copyright by publishing news from their websites in its index.

The counter-argument has always been that if newspaper sites are so annoyed by Google’s actions, then they should just block the search engine from indexing the site. Murdoch seems to finally be putting his money (or traffic) where his mouth is.

The Belgian ruling

Back in 2007, a group of Belgian newspapers successfully sued Google for copyright infringements. And now, Murdoch is hoping to get one over on Google by taking back the power in the battle for online news.

Recent reports have suggested that after removing news from Google, Murdoch will seek to secure a deal with new Microsoft search engine Bing. So how would this affect the balance of power in the search engine war?

How do we search for news?

If we imagine a situation where Bing managed to achieve exclusive access to most of the world’s major news feeds, it’s interesting to consider how that would affect the way we search for news and the way we use search engines in general.

We are used to being able to access anything from any search engine, so would closing off content reduce our reliance on Google et al as the fount of all knowledge?

Even if this did happen (and I think it would be hard for Bing to get ubiquitous control of the news space), Google has such a stranglehold on our online searching that, even if they lost the news battle, they would still be used for our everyday searching needs.

That said, we could see a split in the search market, where if you wanted to search for news, then Bing would be the engine of choice, whereas for everyday surfing needs, Google would still retain its dominance.

It’s safe to say that this battle is only just beginning; it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

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Google Wave launched earlier this month and the surge of anticipation that followed the initial unveiling of the new product in May (see above), only seems to be growing.

Google Wave is a new platform, which the media are calling ‘email 2.0’. Some are even going as far to say this could be the ‘end of email’.

Of course, we’ve heard this all before. Last time it was social media that was going to end email, now its Google Wave, tomorrow it’ll be something else…

But social media didn’t kill email – it’s just another channel and, if anything, smart marketers have developed ways to integrate social media and email to great effect.

Google Wave will be the same. The platform integrates a number of commonly used applications – word processing, spreadsheets, slide presentations, email, real-time live chat and broadcast web conferencing, with a very slick user interface. It’s a great collaboration of collaboration tools and marks a major turning point in the development of communication technologies.

For the many brands beginning to experiment with networks like Twitter, this will be a natural development to their existing marketing strategies, and help them justify why Twitter is important!

But email will not disappear, even if Google Wave gains major traction (and it is way too early to tell whether it will). For marketers, email will continue to be key to their strategies, the same rules will still apply, and the same techniques will still work.

In fact, the good news is that – if Google Wave does take off – email as a technology could experience something of a rebirth, making it more popular than ever and used more frequently.

Brands should also be able to increase real-time interactions with recipients, bringing more social media and 2.0 elements to traditional email marketing.

Whatever happens with Google Wave, you can be sure that we will be on top of developments and the first to communicate best practice techniques to our customers. So, stay tuned, and in the meantime, if you get a beta account do please let us know what you think.

by Tink Taylor