From Australia to Switzerland it’s interesting to note that in Google Zeitgeist’s shapshot into search there are many global commonalities such as Facebook and Youtube appearing as favorites and the untimely death of Heath Ledger taking the number 5 position in the global fast rising searches.

You can download our PowerPoint presentation on the e-consultancy website or to help make it even easier, here’s an embedded version below.  If you didn’t get a chance to speak with us, and would like to know more then feel free to drop us a line with any questions you may have.

Other than being good for Google’s pockets this has had some negative effects on the industry as a whole. Some larger agencies have been running accounts at little or no cost to the client to win business, and even discounting poor performing accounts with kickback they receive. All of this is a false economy as there’s a lot more to paid search than just who is the cheapest. How about sales and ROI for starters?

Another area of concern was larger spending clients switching agencies every quarter and getting their account run for free or even getting paid from the agency for the privilege as the effect of having them as a client meant the agency would achieve their quarterly BPF target which meant a higher rate of kickback across their entire Google spend.

Now that’s not really pushing ‘innovation and industry growth’ is it?

So, moving on…..The ending of any kind of kickback from Google was always on the cards. It was just a matter of when and not if. If you look at the whole situation, Google has used the UK as a testbed for the past 4 years or so to hone their PPC model of which learnings they would carry to other larger markets such as the US, who have never had any kind of agency funding and to help saturate a lucrative market forcing a high level of dependency.

So what will happen in 23 days? Will there be a big client exodus? Will 2009 be the biggest rally of PPC pitch lists ever?

Lets look at the effects on agencies in particular. Things are happening already. I’ve seen certain agencies downsizing in staff over the past 6 months. I’ve also experienced them raise their minimum spend on PPC accounts they will accept to the extent of turning away business in order to achieve the management fees required to support these accounts. This is already having a positive effect on grass roots industry growth as these smaller clients are being passed to smaller agencies.

So will clients have to pay more in fees?

So far, Bigmouthmedia, the Search Works and Greenlight have all indicated that the disappearance of the BPF will not affect their current clients. Great news for clients. But with the potential loss of a large part of income there must be some effects on the agencies currently receiving BPF right? Well, as i already mentioned, the first signs are downsizing and raising the minimum client level spend for new clients.

There’s two ways to look at the bigger impact, firstly larger agency clients may become unserviceable financially based on negotiating lower management fees from the outset which will be re-addressed upon contract renewal, and hopefully service won’t suffer in the meantime as a result of re-shuffling agency staff. The second is that smaller clients will need to find new homes at a new agency as they’re not needed to make up the pool of spend on Google anymore and management fees are too low for larger agencies to service in relation to overheads.

What will happen to the clients?

Without subsidies and potentially higher fees there’s a little bit of panic obviously. However with a number of the larger agencies promising there will no increase in fees, i think we’ll not be seeing the panic pitching sessions we initially anticipated in Q1, but instead I believe this will be a constant flow of change throughout the year as contracts expire and agencies decide on whether to increase fees or not. Also, very interestingly, I’ve been speaking to a number of large recruiters recently who advise that there has been a large shift in briefs received from clients wanting to take search staff in-house.

I believe the overall effect of this move will fragment the market away from just large agencies dominating the PPC market and spread clients more widely across smaller-medium sized agencies who have never had reliance on BPF. This can only be positive for the industry as every agency brings new thoughts, technology and innovation to the table. It may also improve skills as agencies need to work harder to continue client and agency growth.

What does it mean for Make It Rain and our clients?

Well, being a new agency does have it’s benefits! Make It Rain was set up specifically not to rely on Google BPF and kickbacks. With full transparency and smaller overheads, each client will continue to receive the same high level of service as always. Additionally, we focus on end to end solutions helping clients with all areas of their online business so we’re not reliant on just specialising in PPC. The industry is changing for the better and it’s time to look at things from a new perspective.

However, it’s probably worthwhile to point out that, at this point, the feature is only available while you are logged into your Google account.

We’ve broken down SearchWiki into its four main features so you can get to grasps with it:

1. Move search results up and down or delete them all together
2. Add a search result
3. Add personal notes to a result
4. See other peoples comments

Choose your own rankings!
Once you are logged into your Google account and have entered a search query, you will be able to customize your results. The idea is, if you regularly do the same searches you can move the results you want up (by clicking the upwards arrow) or remove them (by clicking the X) to make searching more effective for you.

*Note: These will only be seen by you (However, you can view other people’s moves & comments) Read on!

Add a search result
At the bottom of your page you will see a ‘add a result’ link. Click on it and put in the URL you would like to see next time you search for ‘covent garden restaurants’.

Ad personal notes
By clicking the ‘speech bubble’ on the result you can add comments and notes about the listing. By clicking make this public your note will be able to be seen by people who click ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’. A word of advice; make sure this doesn’t come back to haunt you by making a comment about a ‘dodgy’ site for the whole world to see!

See other people’s comments
At the bottom of your results you’ll see a ‘see all notes for this SearchWiki’ link. By clicking this you’ll be able to see other peoples moves and notes as in the image below.

What does this mean for SEM’s?
Check out our next blog post when we’ll explore how this will affect the two areas of Search Engine Marketing; SEO and Brand Reputation Management.

Check out all the pictures on our Flickr account!

It’s a model developed in partnership with the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which found a correlation between the number of flu-related searches and the number of people who actually have the flu. These searches form patterns or trends of flu outbreaks in real time so that outbreaks can be identified 1-2 weeks earlier than previously. Although it is not a new concept with the appearance of similar sites like whoissick.org and Health Map; it is the first of its kind to do this on such a mass scale.

We all know this is just the beginning for Google and it will be interesting to see what is the next infectious disease they decide to tackle with the power of collective intelligence behind them.

We felt it was about time we celebrated the launch of Make It Rain, so we will be holding our official launch party in Soho on Thursday, November 20th 2008.

It’s sure to be a great night attended by our friends, clients, members of London’s Online Marketing community, the press and of course the Make It Rain team. Invites are on the way so make sure you RSVP, and we hope to see you there!

Well, it’s possible; say hello to ‘Google Subscribed Links’, an extremely powerful service that allows you to control content within the first page of Google’s (sort of) natural search results.

So what’s the catch? There always is one right, let’s face it.

Well, the catch is that to see your search results in Google, the user has to first click a button on your website. Oh,…. and they also have to be logged-in to their Google account at the same time, hm. But don’t let that get you down. The simple fact remains; this service has serious applications, and with a little foresight now, Subscribed Links may have the potential to bear fruit for you in the future.

So before you begin to subliminally demote Subscribed Links in your list of projects for 2009, it might be worth taking a few seconds to think through the implications.

Firstly, lets deal with the negatives. Personally, I wouldn’t get too hung-up over the fact that the user needs to be logged into Google to subscribe to your service. We should remember that it’s predicted Google Mail will overtake Yahoo! Mail by 2010 (and who would doubt it), meaning a significant percentage of your potential subscribers will soon have an existing Google account when they reach your webpage. We should also remember that Google are very clever in keeping their members logged-in to their account, even when the client PC is left idle or in hibernation.

So what should we do? We could either wait until Google has a large enough share of the web mail market before we act, or, investigate it now so that we have plenty of time to examine where the service can be applied to our online existence in the future.

Well, that’s up to you. All I would say is that if you manage to define a compelling case for your website visitors to sign up to your Subscribed Links, then the service has the potential to be a real winner.

OK, so, to demonstrate how life changing Subscribed Links can be, lets look at Make It Rain’s service as an example.

So, imagine this; your browsing the web one day, looking for a website that allows you to keep up to date with the latest innovations and developments within the Internet Marketing industry. That’s when you stumble upon make-it-rain.co.uk, a website that’s packed full of interesting commentary on the Internet Universe. You think to yourself: “This website’s fantastic, wouldn’t it be useful if the latest articles from make-it-rain.co.uk would appear in Google’s search results, each time that I enter ‘Internet Marketing’, ‘SEM’, ‘SEO’ (or one of the service’s 97 other keywords) into Google Search.”

You then see this button on the site that allows you to do just that.

Go on, be brave, click the button!

All you need to do it confirm, and that’s it; you’re subscribed! So now every time you enter one of our 100 keywords into Google Search you will see make-it-rain.co.uk in the forth slot. How good is that?

So, how does it work from our end (or your end potentially)? Well, it’s very straightforward to set up, as you would expect from a Google service.

You simply need to define your search terms, the contents of your listing (or advert whichever way you want to look at it), and the URL (it feels a lot like creating an AdWords advert I must say).

You then need to add the button to your website (the code of which is generated for you of course). And that’s it, you’re ready to start thinking about how to convert your visitors into Subscribed Linkers.

If you decide to incorporate Subscribed Links into your online business strategy, let me know, and I review it in my subsequent ‘Subscribed Links’ blog.

Can’t wait.

The data says one click, one sale, but the reality is that the user could have moved from their work station to their home laptop, meaning we lose the cookie data and are left with one click, one sale.

The heavy focus on analysis means we are now forced into having conversations at keyword level when we should be looking at the performance of the campaign as a whole.

Let me get one thing straight; this does not mean you don’t have to optimise your accounts. There is always room to improve.  What it does mean is that deleting a keyword should be the last resort and not the first. Search Engine Marketers (SEM’s) are often trigger happy while focusing on the keywords bringing in the sales.

In most cases they find that once they delete the so called underperformers, the sales fall for the top performers. Funny how that happens! As long as keywords are relevant to your business they have a part to play.

There will be some keywords that generate traffic but no direct sales, does this mean they have no place in your account? I’ll let you decide, but, before you do, make sure you tick all the boxes before deleting!

What are the boxes? That’s for another time, but same place!

PPC tracking today

We know that the benefits of PPC are endless; but has the heavy focus on measurability finally come back to haunt us?

• PPC is highly measurable
• You can monitor the performance of every keyword

However, shouldn’t the most important benefit be that the masses are actively looking for you and your offering online?

Not being online is like having a store that never opens. Users know what you offer but if you’re not online (or open) then they can’t buy!

I think it’s fair to say the tracking landscape has changed alot relative to what it was 5 years ago. Now, we wouldn’t dream of activating accounts until tracking is in place! Not only has the market moved towards tracking performance, we now track click journeys which provide rich information and great insights for our clients, but are we missing the full online picture?

We now track everything including:

• What keyword did they use to find us?
• What keyword did they use to convert?
• What message was the user exposed to when converting?
• How many visits did it take before the user converted?

All the information that these answers above provide undoubtedly gives PPC the edge against all other marketing channels. This is where the market is today and rightly so. In the current climate where budgets are tight the benefits of PPC will be ringing around meeting rooms all over the world.

Nonetheless, there are some holes in our data that prevent us from seeing the entire picture. Where are the holes in PPC results? All will be revealed in Part 2.