Meg has opened up a discussion on the growing trend for bloggers in Australia to receive pitches from companies seeking to form relations with bloggers and use their blogs as a vehicle for product promotion.

Co-incidentally the same weekend there was a heated debate on the issues of payments and disclosure as they apply to bloggers. The story centres around a Microsoft ad that features quotes from several prominent bloggers. The quotes all answer the question “when did you know your business was people ready?” with “people ready” being a phrase promoted by Microsoft to describe their business philosophy. The bloggers received payment for providing the quotes and their ethics in doing so were questioned by valleywag. There were mixed reactions with some agreeing with valleywag that it somehow crossed a boundary and broke readers trust in the bloggers. Others claimed it was a storm in a teacup, it was clearly an ad and should have been apparent that the bloggers received payment.

So, why does it matter?

There is a perception that bloggers provide a personal, unbiased opinion and, in the eyes of their readers, this makes them more trustworthy and credible than mainstream media and corporate websites. It’s not surprising that companies seek to capitalise on this trust.

It can be a fine line for bloggers to walk particularly for those who run ads on their blog or who provide paid reviews. It makes sense (and is covered by the law in some countries) to disclose when payment is received for a blog post. The reader can then take this additional information into consideration and in fact it might not make any difference if enough credibility and trust has been established. There are quite a number of grey areas though, for example posts that are not paid reviews but that mention a company advertising on the blog or with whom there is a business relationship. There are also other motivations for writing something which might not be apparent to a reader and which nevertheless provides some tangible benefit. Link baiting can fall into this category.

It’s good that these issues are being discussed and I expect that more bloggers will publicise disclosure policies. My opinion is that it should and will be self regulating. Individual bloggers can decide where they stand in terms of incentives for blogging and how and when they should disclose payment. The audience will in turn make up their own minds on the trustworthiness and credibility of the blogger. I’m in the camp of believing honesty and transparency is the best policy and I think it’s the best business decision as well as the fairest. I would be stupid to assume that this is the case with every blog I read though.

Be careful when using broad match keywords in a Google adWords campaign.

On the positive side, broad matching means that ads will run for variations of your keywords without the need to specify what all these variations might be. So in the example given in the adwords help file, the keyword web hosting might trigger ads for the search phrases web host or web hosting company.

However broad matching incorporates expanded matching so not only will ads show for variations in word order, and queries with additional words to the keywords, but ads will potentially show for synonyms and other related variations.

This might not be what you want and there may be times when the expanded matching can be much broader than you might expect. In a campaign I recently set up, a broad match on a generic product name triggered ads for search queries for a manufacturer name, very specific model numbers (not relevant to my client) and other products sold by the manufacturer.

There are two main ways to deal with it.

1. Build up a list of negative keywords and add them to the campaign

• use the keyword tools (particularly the adwords keyword tool as this will indicate potential expanded matches); extract the words that are not relevant and including them as negatives in the campaign
• run searches and seeing which words and phrases come up in the search listings and ads to uncover potential negatives
• analyse your website logs to extract non-relevant search queries or words that can be input as negatives
• run the new search query performance report to see which search queries triggered ads and what negatives are necessary in the campaign

2. Opt out of expanded match by using phrase and exact matching

By doing this you know when the ads will be triggered and you eliminate the instances of unwanted expanded matching.

1. Search in google.com

No bias towards Australian websites

2. Search in Google Australia

Google Australia is biased towards Australian sites - you’ll see more .au sites in the top 10

3. Select “Pages From Australia”

“Australian” pages only based on the domain name (.au sites) and the hosting location (.com sites hosted in Australia are usually included)

4. Personalised Search on by default

If you are logged into any Google account such as gmail, gtalk, adwords, analytics etc then you will get results biased towards your search history. Personalised search is activated by default.

5. Natural Fluctuation

The top 10 for any given search fluctuates all the time due to algorithm changes, changes to web pages and even different Google data centres delivering different results.

6. Universal Search Arrives in Australia

It doesn’t look like universal search has fully arrived yet for searches in Google Australia. When it does, expect a different top 10 for many searches.

There was never an easy answer to the question “How do I get in the top 10 in Google?”. Now even the question itself is making a lot less sense. I’d like to see Gord Hotchkiss follow up on this post “Planning for Personalisation“.

Edit: When i wrote this I tried to find stats on the numbers using google.com.au compared with google.com. I couldn’t find any so i emailed Google Australia and got this reply.

” We don’t disclose specifics, but the vast majority use google.com.au.”

20 to 25% of search queries that Google gets in any one day are unique. The queries have never been seen before. This statistic was given at the recent Google searchology event.

I spent some time analysing the searches that resulted in a visit to my website during the previous month. Here are some of the stats:

• 42% of queries were unique
• 85% of queries were made up of 3 words or more
• The longest search query was 17 words!

The figures aren’t surprising. Having a blog means that I rank well for a large number of longtail searches on the subject of adWords, pay per click or Google. Search queries are getting longer and queries with 3 words or more are much more common now than they were previously.

Some observations:

Keyword analysis is a good way to uncover hot topics and common questions or concerns

For example, quite a few people came to my blog because they searched, in different ways, on the topic of adWords being expensive. It’s interesting to know this and I can take action by writing more on the topic or addressing it in a frequently asked questions section.

Of course I had to have written something on the topic in order to rank for the combination of “adWords” and “expensive” in the first place. There are obviously a range of other popular topics that I haven’t written about and therefore the search phrases don’t appear in my log files. However, blogging is a great way of producing a variety and volume of content to get visibility for those long tail phrases in the first place.

Did people get the information they wanted with the long tail searches?

People phrase things awkwardly, or use odd combinations of words, in an attempt to get information on something they don’t know a great deal about, particularly when the topic is complex. I tried out quite a few of the searches trying to assess the experience from the perspective of the searcher. Sometimes I thought there was a good chance they got relevant information. Sometimes the content probably didn’t cover what they wanted to know and just happened to contain the same words as the query but in a different context. That’s going to happen and the searcher may just leave immediately to try again. Maybe they weren’t part of my target audience anyway. However, it really made me have another look at overall usability and reminded me how important it is to have clear navigation and help people find what they want.

Details are good but focus on the overall trends

I love the detail in analytics and could happily spend hours pondering some puzzling aspect of the data. There are always a few puzzling things as well. One of the keywords someone used was the single word “Australia”. I’ve no idea how someone arrived at my website from that because of course I don’t rank anywhere for the word Australia (I checked :-). The details are interesting and can offer insights. However, overall trends and some key pieces of information are what is important.

On that note, I’ll finish with a link. I just ordered Avinash Kaushik’s book on web analytics.

I was sent a copy of Search Marketing Standard. It’s a quarterly publication and is solely devoted to search engine marketing including pay per click, organic and social media.

I enjoyed reading it. There are some good quality articles and it made a pleasant change to be browsing through a magazine rather than reading online.

The publishers are in New York and all of the advertising and the conference guide is aimed at a US based audience. Having said that, the articles are varied enough and relevant to make it a worthwhile read here in Australia.

The current issue has articles on:

• Web design
• Mobile marketing and usability
• Paid search quality scores
• Link bait
• Local search
• Blogging
• Search engine friendly HTML
• RSS
• SEM training and certification

Here’s a link: search marketing standard