Do you click on Google’s AdWords advertising, or do you ignore the ads?

I ignore the ads. And Google knows I ignore the ads based on my browsing history.

Google appear to be experimenting with the positioning of its Google AdWords advertisements based on your personal ad-clicking history. They know your propensity to click, of course, through cookies or even through your Google personalised account.

If you’re not a clicker, then they are not displaying the ads at the top of the screen, but moving them to the panel on the right.

One explanation might be that users will be better served if ads are not pushed at them that they just don’t want. Another explanation is that we’re getting blind to the ads, and a bit of variety might spice things up.

I did an experiment: I searched for “solicitors Nottingham” using a computer without any cookies on it (so they didn’t know who I am) and then repeated the search logged onto my own personal Google account.

The assumption is a “stranger” might click on ads, but Google knows for a fact that Susan never does.

The “stranger” receives the blue sponsored ads horizontally at the top of the search results.

Non-clicking-Susan receives all the ads in the vertical panel on the right.

“Stranger” results:

The identical search, this time logged on as “Susan the non-clicker”’s ; note there aren’t any horizontal AdWords across the top of the results, and even the top ads are over on the right

So, if you’re advertising on Google AdWords, what might this mean to your campaign? Fewer clicks? Fewer, better clicks?

Watch this space….

Date: 18th September 2006

Time: Afternoon

The SfEP Conference will take place at the Jubilee Campus of the University of Nottingham on Monday, 18 September 2006.

Successful Email Marketing

Great email marketing is not just about promoting and selling. It’s about building trust and loyalty, and developing long term profitable relationships with your customers.

Email marketing may be a low cost solution, but if it’s not done right then your efforts will flounder and your well-intentioned plans may backfire.

This presentation will cover the basics of successful email marketing and provide you with practical examples of successful campaigns.

Presentation Content

• How to plan for a successful email marketing campaign
• Email marketing and spam: ensuring your messages are well received and not harassment
• How to craft an email masterpiece
• What to expect: costs, what response to expect, tracking results, testing your campaign
• How to find prospective customers, how to rent third party lists, and how to build and maintain your own in-house lists
• Other ways to conduct email marketing

Learn more about the conference at the SfEP website.

Social bookmarking is an online tool which allows people to organise, rate and share their favourite sites on the Internet. You categorise your favourite sites using tags, which describes the content of the page.

Other people who are interested in the same tags can browse through your selections, based on your recommendation, choose to bookmark the page themselves. Now, put on your search engine optimisation hat:

Social bookmarks = links
Tags = keyphrase

Social bookmarking should form an important part of your internet marketing strategy. Bookmarks generate links, and bookmarks generate traffic.

Social bookmarking is also being considered carefully by the major search engines as a valuable source of vetted, highly recommended sites.

There are literally dozens of social bookmarking sites, including Del.icio.us, Shadows, Yahoo’s MyWeb, Furl and newly launched Diigo.

You can embed a link to these social bookmarking services on your webpages, encouraging readers to bookmark til the cows come home.

However, you could end up with a plethora of icons cluttering up your page with links to each specific service.

There’s a solution.

At the bottom of my blog articles I have now inserted an icon link to the Socializer service, which gives my readers quick access to any of their favourite social bookmarking services.

It works like this:

So, your actions are:

• start experimenting and get experience with the social bookmarking services
• consider whether you want to include social bookmarking “calls to action” on your web pages
• plan how to get the social bookmarks rolling