Being a digital marketing company, the vast majority of the work we do involves helping our clients market themselves more effectively on the web, managing search engine optimisation campaigns and pay-per-click accounts. However, we’re extremely pleased to announce that were recently appointed by the Scottish Tartans Authority to help plan and develop a business model and strategy for the online advertising opportunities they offer to their members.

This is something of a poacher-turned-gamekeeper role for us and one we believe we can bring significant value to through our experience of working with advertisers and understanding exactly what they’re looking for in an advertising product and by working closely with the STA to help them bring their offer completely up-to-date and make the most of the thousands of visitors they attract every month.

Focusing primarily on display advertising, we’ve worked with the Authority to develop a business model, ensure their new site (still under wraps unfortunately) has the capability to accommodate the adverts and select, set up and manage a suitably robust ad-serving platform.

After a detailed assessment of a range of systems, we selected the tremendously powerful OpenX system and we’re very excited to be working with them using their Community Hosted product, which is a perfect match for the Authority.

Speaking of the appointment, Brian Wilton, Director of the STA said:

“Mackerel Media was highly recommended to us and I have to say that Nick Craig’s patience in explaining (more than once!) the complexities of online advertising is above and beyond the call of duty. It’s very reassuring for technical trogladytes such as to have such expert advice on tap.”

If you are a publisher looking for advice on improving your product, or if you’re an advertiser looking to get the most out of your online activity, please don’t hesitate to contact us -we’d be delighted to help you out too.

Following on from a seminar conducted a few months ago, I’m delivering a day-long training course on SEO at Netresources in Edinburgh.

The course is designed for attendees who are new to SEO and will give them a grounding in a variety of principles and techniques that can be used to improve and optimise a web site. Some of the topics being covered are:

• Semantic HTML
• Web Development Techniques for SEO
• Researching & Planning SEO
• Writing effective, optimised content
• Building Links
• Techniques to Avoid

The course takes place on Thursday the 3rd of December, runs from 10am to 4pm, includes lunch and costs £300 + VAT per person. Note that the course is ILA approved.

For more details on the day and to book a place, head over to the Netresources site or call them on 0131 477 7127.

There are just 8 places available so if you’re interested you’d best book your place as soon as you can.

Hope to see you there!

- Nick

Following on from the SEO campaign we’ve been running for Glengoyne over the last year, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of their completely overhauled and revamped Online Whisky Shop.

Designed and developed by the chaps at The Weather, the new shop builds on the tremendous success and popularity of the previous incarnation, focusing in particular on sales of the Distillery’s excellent Personalised Whisky Bottles that are despatched daily to customers around the world. The new shop is powered by the very flexible Magento ecommerce software, replacing a bespoke system developed a number of years ago.

Our role was to ensure the new shop is as well-optimised for search-engines as possible and to ensure that  - from a search perspective – the migration from old shop to new went as smoothly as possible. We’re also carrying out a link-building campaign to get the shop in front of as many prospective customers as possible.

With the nights drawing in and Christmas fast approaching, there’s nothing quite like settling down in front of the fire with a good book and a dram of beautiful whisky. And where better to buy that whisky than direct from the distillery? Get on over there!

The word ‘integrated’ is used a huge amount these days by anyone and everyone in the marketing industry and a lot of the time it doesn’t really mean much at all. However, I saw a superb banner ad for Seasick Steve’s new album this morning and realised firstly how good banners can be and secondly, how good a real integrated campaign can be.

For those of you who have been under a rock (or a rusty ol’ combine) for the past few years, Seasick Steve is a blues guitarist and singer who made his first major public appearance on the Jools Holland show back in 2006. Since then his ‘authentic’ and pared-down music has found favour with a massive audience around the world. I saw him in Hyde Park earlier in the year and was hugely entertained by his sliding, twanging and hollerin’.

Read more →

We’ve been a little lax here in keeping the blog up-to-date with our new clients wins and completed projects, so in the spirit of more frequent announcements, we’re extremely pleased to announce Welcome to Scotland as a new search engine optimisation client.

Owned and operated by Landmark Press – the group also responsible for the Landmark Visitor Park, Inveraray Jail and Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura – WelcometoScotland.com is the country’s premier tourism portal, featuring over 11,000 providers of accommodation in Scotland.

We were approached following the redevelopment and re-launch of the site to assist with a broad search engine optimisation campaign aimed at promoting the site and the many businesses it features to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who make Scotland their destination of choice every year. With the recent upsurge in holidaying at home, the campaign focuses on the local, national and international markets, a combination that presents an intriguing set of challenges, namely the need to promote a huge range of accommodation providers including Hotels, B&Bs, Self Catering, Holiday Cottages,  Caravan Parks and Hostels.

Already the signs are looking good, with a number of excellent ranking positions secured for prominent keyphrases. Watch this space though – we’ll keep you updated on progress.

If you ask any PPC expert for the one thing that make their life easier they’d probably say “more accurate conversion tracking”. In an attempt to deliver this, Google have today released a new ‘View-Through Conversions’ metric for their AdWords platform, providing advertisers with an additional means to measure the success of their campaigns.

The new tool is used exclusively with display ads featuring on the Content Network and is designed to track how many conversions result after a user has seen an ad rather than clicked on an ad. If you think about it for a moment, this is a significant development and one that is actually far more important than on first impression (if you excuse the pun).

The benefit of the metric is that advertisers will begin to develop an understanding of the visibility that advertising on the content network can bring and the conversions that can be generated as a result. After all, users might not necessarily click on an ad but rather read the ad and remember your brand name for later. All well and good. but what this doesn’t account for is the users who saw your ad but know about your brand or company already. For example, I know about Apple and I know that their site is at www.apple.com. If I’m feeling flush I might go on there and order myself a brand new Macbook Pro. That purchase is entirely influenced by my past experience and knowledge of Apple and is nothing to do with advertising. But if I’ve been on a page somewhere (let’s say the Mac News Network) that features content network ads for Apple, there’s a good chance my purchase will be recorded as a View-Through Conversion, which is an entirely false assessment of the effectiveness of the ad.

Therein lies the problem – with View-Through there’s simply no way to assess whether someone converted because of the ad or despite it. If you optimise your AdWords campaigns based on these conversion statistics, you may well be lowering their effectiveness and putting your budget into campaigns, sites or activities that simply don’t work.

To effectively measure the effectiveness of these ads you would need to run a control on the campaign, looking at how many people who didn’t see the ad bought something anyway. Only then would you start to have an accurate understanding of whether the investment was worthwhile.

Despite that, there’s no doubt it’s a very useful addition to the online marketer’s armoury, albeit best taken with a dose of scepticism.

At long last Google this week confirmed what most of us in the industry knew already – meta-keywords are not used in organic search rankings. No real surprise there to be honest! Although, what those who still sell it as a service will do, we have no idea.

The announcement was made in a post on the Google Webmaster blog the other day and has triggered the usual speculation and discussion that surrounds Google’s regular dissemination of information, most of which involves the usual picking apart of the statement looking for hidden meaning. Perhaps Dan Brown’s latest book is stirring up the SEO industry in its week of release?

Our View on Meta-Keywords

Our view on keywords has always been simple and straightforward: don’t bother. We have seen no difference in ranking ability of two pages that possess and lack keywords respectively, none whatsoever. Likewise, we have never seen any impact on ranking come about as a result of meta-keyword tweaking.

Meta-Descriptions Make Sense

The post also mentions that Google has not used the Meta-Description field for ranking purposes for a number of years, however, our experience is that the description field can actually aid matters as it plays a crucial role in determining the click-through rate of a listing on a search engine ranking page (SERP). Our view is that the higher the CTR on a link, the likelier the associated page is to rank more highly. Furthermore, the higher the click-through rate of a page, the more traffic you’re likely to attract, so a well optimised and written description can really make a difference.

If you don’t include a meta-description then Google will select a snippet of text from your site, which might not work as well as a bespoke one. We use the meta-description field to display the Mackerel Media phone number on the SERPs page, as you’ll be able to see here. Neat eh?

Looking to the future, we can only hope that now Google has cleared keywords up, they’ll move swiftly on to link spam blogs, dubious paid link vendors and all the other fun issues that keep us busy. Hmm…perhaps we’re a little too optimistic.

We read some interesting research out this week from Chitika in Massachusetts, claiming that iPhone users are the least likely of all mobile users to click on an ad on their device. This contrasts starkly with their tandem finding that iPhone users account for 66% of mobile web browsing.

The survey was conducted over 92 million ad impressions and showed that in overall terms, mobile users are roughly half as likely to click on an ad than non-mobile users. The average click-through rate for iPhone users followed in the survey was a rather poor 0.30%, compared to an average of 0.8% for non-mobile users. Palm users demonstrated at CTR of almost 1%.

The view from Chitika (and it’s one we share) is that mobile users are generally unreceptive to ads as they are usually looking for quick answers to a question, looking for directions or a phone number, rather than being in a ‘browse’ mode. Perhaps there’s also something to be said of the intrusiveness of ads in the iPhone’s otherwise pure and controlled interface?

Whatever the case, it makes for an intriguing outlook, especially given the enthusiasm with which mobile advertising is being pushed by ad networks, agencies and advertisers large and small.

I’m a keen reader of the excellent research that Hitwise produce and was very interested to ready today that Twitter has overtaken myspace in the UK to become the (drumroll please) 27th most popular web site in the country, one ahead of News Corporation’s myspace. That means in the last week (23rd to the 29th of August) a staggering 1 in 400 internet visits in the UK were to the microblogging service.

Within the Social Media space, this places Twitter at a very respectable fourth, behind Facebook, YouTube and Bebo. Digging a little deeper into the stats, we see that Twitter experienced usage growth of over 1,600% in the last year against myspace’s comparatively low 5%.

Interestingly, it seems that as so many users access Twitter via their mobile phones and other applications, the real usage level may be higher, but the stats are skewed towards the number of people visiting the site’s home page.

There is a countervailing view on Twitter, with other recent reports “revealing” that around 40% of tweets are ‘pointless babble‘ and a number of other respected outlets claiming that the Twitter fad won’t last. It’s fair to say that 1,600% growth can’t continue for ever, but there is room for a huge amount of expansion in the months and years to come.

The industry rumour mills have been red hot over the last few weeks, covering the will-they-won’t-they submission of the Spotify iPhone Application to the iTunes Music Store. Well, the news just out is that is has been approved, and it’s fair to say a lot of people are very pleased indeed.

Concerns were raised over whether Apple would approve the new application, given it has the potential to cannibalise the iTunes Store music purchase model (as we wrote about sometime last year) and given the ongoing (and somewhat mysterious) spat over the Google Voice application. However, it looks like those fears are unfounded as approval has been granted.

What’s interesting about the decision, and what we think people will realise, is that the potential loss in iTunes revenue is only a single piece of the puzzle – there are in fact a number of economic considerations for Apple:

1. The Spotify App will influence consumers’ decision to purchase an iPhone: more iPhones sold = more product revenue and more subscription share from the networks.
2. More iPhone owners may well lead to more Apple owners in general.
3. Apple may use their relationships with Record Labels to build on the service offered by Spotify. In fact, there are already a number of iTunes tracks on offer through the service.

The way we see it, this is just another super-savvy decision on the part of Apple – all credit to them.