Facebook is probably the webs most fascinating advertising platform and they are investing heavily in making it easier for advertisers to measure ROI. The latest change is a new conversion tracking system similar to Google AdWords as well as a feature that allows you to track customers who see your ad on Facebook (but don’t click on it) and then buy a product from you later.

This feature is likely to be a bit controversial because it’s very easy to get a lot of impressions on Facebook and just because an ad loaded on a page doesn’t mean somebody actually looked at it. We did a campaign last week on a CPC basis and got about 3 million impressions in one day for £150. If we were selling a mainstream product then quite a few people who saw the advert would buy a product in the future and Facebook could look like a very high ROI source.

I’m convinced that Facebook will one day merge their ads more into the content and suddenly everybody will be advertising on there just like with AdWords.

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Facebook adds “view through” conversion tracking

I’ve never understood why Google Analytics shows percentages rather than actual numbers in the “Goals” report when you are looking at traffic sources. The information below is good but it’s a lot better to just see the numerical amounts.

Luckily there is an easy way to show the amounts, if you are at home using custom reports. Simply set up the report using the dimensions below and the information will be available straight away.

The screenshot below shows the final report.

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How to view actual goal numbers rather than percentages in Google Analytics

We work as outsource link building partners for quite a few big companies who have a good level of SEO knowledge in house but don’t have the resources to do high level link building.

Normally we just charge by the day (£750) but recently we’ve launched a new offer for in-house teams whereby we don’t charge anything for our time, we just charge for the links we get. Best of all we give the option to preview and look at the links before we actually get them.

I’m not going to go into detail but what I can say is that some of the links we can get will make you fall off your chair – they are the holy grail of links.

I also want to make 100% clear that these are not paid links, they are 100% natural, non paid links. The only money you pay is to Branded3 to cover our effort in sourcing the links for you. In view of Googles crackdown on paid links recently these are the exact sort of links you need to be going after.

If you are interested in learning a bit more then please get in touch and we will arrange for an NDA to be signed so we can explain this fully. I’m sure you appreciate why I’m being vague in this blog post.

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Special offer on links for in-house teams

It’s not often that a premium .co.uk domain with mass market appeal gets auctioned but mobilephones.co.uk is currently being auctioned on Sedo, the current bid is £25k and the reserve has been met with only one bid so far.

Apparently phones.co.uk was sold for £175k a couple of years ago so it will be interesting to see if this reaches the £1m mark. What do you guys think, how much will this domain get sold for? Could you use the exact match domain to rank for “mobile phones” as a keyword or is the brand algorithm too strong in this sector?

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Mobile Phones .co.uk up for auction

For those of you into paid links and blog/guestbook spamming this is probably going to be bad news – Google has apparently got a new linkspam algorithm and they are actively seeking reports to test it with.

Google has been working on some new algorithms and tools to tackle linkspam and we’d like to ask for linkspam reports from you. If you’d like to tell us about web sites that appear to be using spammy links (e.g. paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers, etc.), here’s how to send us more info. Go to

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

and tell us about the site that appears to be employing link spam. Be sure to include the word “linkspam” (all one word, all lower-case) in the textarea (the last field in the form).

Now we’ve all heard about Google trying to crack down on paid links before but they have failed for a number of reasons. The main reason is that a lot of sites with top rankings have thousands of paid links. Other people see these links, assume that they must be working and then go out and replicate them. There are some clever people who understand that these links might not actually be helping but most people don’t know how to really test whether a link is passing weight.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this one. Perhaps this new algorithm is going to be part of the caffeine update which we are still waiting for.

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New linkspam algorithm from Google

Branded3 is enjoying a bit of a boom this year with a new SEO client pretty much every week since mid-January. Because of this we’re on a recruitment drive to build the best team of on-site and off-site SEO specialists in the UK.

If you have experience in the industry and want to work with some of the UK’s biggest online brands then please get in touch with us and we can arrange an interview. We’re particularly keen to hear from people who have previous in-house or agency experience.

The positions we have open are:

• Search Strategist
• Link Analyst x 2
• PPC Analyst

Salaries depending on experience. No agencies please!

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We’re hiring, again

This is great news for agencies – Google Webmaster Tools now has an easy way for clients to give access to their data without having to upload a meta tag or an html file.

All you need to do is enter the email address you want to give access to and as long as they have a Google account they can get access straight away.

Small changes that make our life a lot easier. Now all we need is a similar system for the Local Business Center and I will be happy.

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Google Webmaster Tools makes giving access to accounts easier

For the last couple of years we have been badgering Google to start emailing webmasters to tell them that their site has been hacked and now the feature is finally live – no more having to use Google Alerts!

The system reports on hacking and abused user generated content as well as comment spam amongst other things. The only drawback is that you have to set up the email forwarding feature otherwise you won’t get a notification – why can’t Google just use your registered email address?

More from the Google announcement:

Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we’ve detected on their websites, including:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google’s search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.

A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:

Good news all round.

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Google finally adds hacking notifications to Webmaster Tools

Most news sites are reporting on the Google anti-trust allegations today after the European Commission launched an anti-trust investigation against Google after three online companies alleged that the internet giant’s search functions were penalising their businesses.

This case has a lot of background (you can read about Foundem here and here – they recently got a 10,000% search traffic increase overnight after Google apparently lifted some kind of penalty) but the interesting thing for me is that at least one of the sites wanting to take action against Google is one of the webs largest link buyers. I have a number of emails from them blatantly trying to buy links and their link profile to deep pages is probably made up of 90% paid links.

My suggestion is that if you are violating Googles guidelines in any respect you should probably keep quiet.

You can read Googles point of view here.

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Looking at the Google anti-trust investigation

The worst page on a website is the last page that a visitor looks at before they leave and unless that’s the final page in your checkout process you need to be looking at ways to improve it.

An easy method to identify pages that are causing your visitors to leave is to order your Google Analytics content report by “% Exit” but this doesn’t really help because you get loads of pages with 2 visitors and one left straight away giving a 50% Exit Rate.

What we do is to add a filter to only include pages with more than 50 page views which results in a nice list of your worst performing pages. The next step is to identify the problems with them which we will address in another post.

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How to identify your sites worst pages