Oxford Digital Marketing

EU Cookie Law Update

Simon — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:09:16 +0000

As we approach the deadline for the new law and new and useful ideas are emerging, I have recorded the video below which I hope will help you to implement a good cookie policy for your website. You will find Links below to the resources I mention in the video. Please leave your questions below and share this page with friends and colleagues who may find it useful.

Below are links to the additional resources I mentioned in the video.

The Government Guidelines are here and also has some good examples of Cookie Policies.

The Internationational Chamber of Commerce Guide (which takes a much more stringent view of Analytics cookies), the Econsultancy Guide and the interview with Dave Evans from the ICO. Also take a look at how BT have implemented their compliance at www.bt.com.

The Firecookie Plugin for Firefox which allows you to simply audit the cookies you are using on your website.

Right click and Save As to download an MP3 version of this video which you can listen to on an iPod or iPhone.

Preparing Video for the Web

Simon — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:14:51 +0000

There are a series of things we do to prepare our videos for the web and the video below goes into these.

Automating Your Lead Follow-Up

Simon — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:28:15 +0000

90% of companies stop following up before most people are ready to buy.

Spending money on Lead Generation and then failing to follow-up those leads, is one of the ways that companies waste money and lose enormous opportunities for growth.

A few years ago I was invited to attend a European product manager’s meeting at Hewlett Packard in Geneva. We were there to discuss lead tracking. About half way through the meeting, the main budget holder turned to me and said quietly “I spend millions of Euros each quarter on leads and I don’t know what I get in return. I think of it as a black hole which I can’t afford to stop pouring money into.”

Whilst I appreciate we don’t all have lead generation budgets the size of Hewlett Packard, I certainly know what he means.

The problem I find is that the busier I get, the more difficult it is to stay in contact with people who have enquired into the business. Some people enquire at a very early stage of their buying process. They may not be ready to buy yet. I want to nurture these to the point where they become customers.

If you’d like to understand how we think this through please register below to join us for a webinar on Tuesday 28th February at 4:30 to find out more.

How to use the canonical link

Simon — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:29:15 +0000

The canonical link is used to tell the major search engines which URL you would prefer them to use when you have more than one URL pointing to the same page.

Here are some examples of the sorts of URL’s we are talking about.

www.example.com/product.php?name=shoes&color=black&brand=clarks
www.example.com/product.php?brand=clarks&color=black&name=shoes

If you simply add a tag to specify your preferred version of the page’s URL inside the section of your page then the search engines will treat all variations of the URLs to that page as pointing to the one you specify. So for our examples above you would add the following into the head of each page:

If you are using a content management platform to manage your site (e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.) then these platforms can be configured to insert a canonical link into every page automatically.

If you are worried about that your site structure is negatively effecting your search engine rankings, then please use the contact us form and we’d be delighted to see what we can do to help.

For more details on how Google uses the canonical link go here.Similar Posts:

How to use the canonical link is a post from: Oxford Digital Marketing

EU Cookie law and Google Analytics

Simon — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:32:56 +0000

The Google Analytics team have broken a surprisingly long silence regarding the EU Cookie Law and Google Analytics (GA) and how GA will continue to function legally using cookies.

The solution that the UK ICO propose to conform with the EU legal requirement, resulted in a 90% drop in data gathered when they implemented it on the ICO website.

The following question was asked on the latest episode of the Google’s Web Analytics TV series, which is hosted by Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski from the GA team.

The video opens with the following question “It’s now a legal requirement in the EU to get permission before sending cookies. Google Analytics, without accurate eCommerce tracking would be useless. Does Google have plans for a server-side working around, since PHP APIs for posting data already exist?”

Avinash’s reply is as follows: “This is a good question, Matt. Along with other companies, like Microsoft and Yahoo, and Omniture and Webtrends, the team at Google is working with the various entities in the EU to figure out what the implications are.

“Because some clarity is missing as to what applies in individual countries across the entire EU. At the moment that process has not concluded, but when the process is concluded we will post guidelines on the Analytics blog, analytics.blogspot.com. So stay tuned there.

“I did want to emphasise that the word ‘workaround’ is very sensitive in this scenario, so hopefully there are no ‘workarounds’. Google as well as all the other companies are going to follow the laws that are applicable in the individual countries.

“But as to what they are, and what the implications are, we’ll post them on our blog. As will our peer companies in the industry, so watch out for that.”

EU Cookie Law and Google Analytics are not good bed-fellows

I cannot see how the new the EU Cookie Law and Google Analytics will make good bed-follows. I also do not understand how the ICO will be able to enforce this law as millions of websites will be illegal in the UK following its full adoption in May 2012. Let us hope someone sees some sense and repeals the law as it is very disruptive for businesses during this tough economic period.Similar Posts:

EU Cookie law and Google Analytics is a post from: Oxford Digital Marketing

Finding My Twitter Voice

Simon — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:32:54 +0000

Even though it’s only 140 characters long, for all its simplicity, finding my voice on Twitter was an interesting challenge.

IBM’s social computing guidelines are considered to be amongst the best in the world. In them IBM recommends a simple idea: “Speak in the first person. Use your own voice; bring your own personality to the forefront.”

I find that when I speak directly to other people on Twitter, three interesting things happen.

I get more re-tweets, more followers and generally more feedback.

Also, during our monthly SEO and Social Media seminars, we regularly hear Twitter users say they hate being on the receiving end of people who are obviously just automating their tweets.

Will you share your voice by adding a comment below? I’d love to know how you have found your voice on social media.Similar Posts:

Finding My Twitter Voice is a post from: Oxford Digital Marketing

To Twitter or not to Twitter

Simon — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:34:24 +0000

People who attend our SEO and Social Media Marketing seminar who are not yet using Twitter, frequently ask us whether they should start to use Twitter in their marketing. There is a little doubt that Twitter provides another way to engage with your audience and it allows you to initiate a relationship with people who you might not otherwise be able to contact. Growing numbers of people are also seeing some of those relationships develop into business.

One thing I will say if you are still on the fence, take a look at this social media white paper produced by Michael A. Stelzner. The chart above is reproduced from the report (which is chock full of great analysis) shows how Twitter is still a strong player for marketers using Social Media in their marketing mix.

You will most probably need to dedicate a few hours a week to Twitter to get some payback. Use mobile phones and down time to tune in with your followers.

Some feedback that we are regularly receiving from Twitter users is as follows:

Most Twitter users we ask do not enjoy receiving automated series of tips and will often un-follow people who send them.
When you start out, use a client like TweetDeck or HootSuite.
Use a strong password and change it regularly. If your account gets hacked go to the Twitter support page.
If you are worried about opening a particular shortened url you can use expandmyurl.com to reveal the content before opening.
Most people experience better results when they tweet to (@) another person on Twitter rather than just out into the ether.

Share you pate Twitter hates in the comments box below.Similar Posts:

To Twitter or not to Twitter is a post from: Oxford Digital Marketing

10 Reasons Search Engines Might Not Index Your Webpage

Simon — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 21:25:30 +0000

Websites become listed on search engine results if, and only if, the search engine spiders are indexing them. If they pass right by your pages, and don’t even know they exist, then you’re simply not going to get listed.

Do this simple check. Go to http://www.google.com and type in site:yourdomain.com. You should see a list of the pages from your web domain that Google has in their index. If there are no pages listed you have either made a mistake typing your domain or Google does not have ANY pages off your web domain in their index. If there are less pages indexed than you had expected here are some reasons why.

You May be Inadvertently Blocking Google

1. We regularly help customers who have either a robots.txt file saying disallow robots or some other block on the search engines.
2. Your pages are ‘hidden’ in an HTML frameset.

You Don’t Want Certain Pages Indexed

Some pages are just not meant to be indexed. This may be as you plan it however it’s useful to understand what spiders do and don’t index. Search engine spiders don’t index:

1. Pages only accessible by using a search form i.e. there are no links to the page from other pages on your website
2. Pages that require a log in
3. Pages that require visitors to submit a form
4. Pages that redirect to a different URL before showing content

While some pages are not meant to be indexed, other pages are and might be missed. Pages that spiders often ignore include:

5. Pages with too many outgoing links – try and keep below 100 (see Google’s Webmaster Guidelines)
6. Pages with complex URLs – these often give spiders an error result
7. Pages which are more than three clicks from the home page, often described as “deep pages”

Other factors may prevent your web pages from being indexed by search engines. These factors include:

8. Broken links from your site
9. A webpage that exceeds 105K
10. A slow loading time or a down server.

Finally, if your page is a flash page, search engine spiders struggle to index it as it may have limited content they can scan. As you’re optimizing your website and specific web pages, pay attention to these factors. The goal, of course is to be indexed and to achieve first page search engine results.

Finally Google recommend submitting a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.Similar Posts:

10 Reasons Search Engines Might Not Index Your Webpage is a post from: Oxford Digital Marketing

Collaborate with your competitors

Simon — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 19:34:59 +0000

Collaborating with your competitors can be a good idea. If you have built up a list of people who receive your email newsletter (or even your daily tips;) most of them will never buy what you’re selling. For loads of reason’s they may love getting your material, but most of them will never buy from you. How about approaching a competitor and suggesting that you cross-promote their product to your list?

Now hear me out. I hear your wails of protestation (or is that laughter). But wait a minute. Let’s suppose you have people subscribed to your list and in amongst valuable information you have proposed various of your products/services to them and they have not yet bought from you. There are probably two main reasons why. They don’t want what you’re selling or they don’t want to buy it from you.

Let’s now imagine that you had a meeting with your competitor and said to them “look, I have built up a list of people who are interested in what you and I sell but they do not want to buy my products. Could we do a deal whereby I promote your product to them and if they buy, I get a commission?”

Assuming this discussion worked out well, you could then recommend your competitor’s products to your subscribers and if one of your subscribers did take a look at your competitor’s product and buy it what would this do to you? Firstly it would give you some income which wasn’t there before. Secondly it might raise your status in the eyes of your subscriber. After all, you just acted in some capacity as a trusted advisor (assuming your recommendation turned out well for your subscriber).

Your relationship with your competitor could develop to the point where they recommend your products to their list! Where could that lead? I’m interested in your thoughts. Is this a step too far or actually a good mindset to occupy? What other ways could you collaborate with your competitors?Similar Posts:

Collaborate with your competitors is a post from: Oxford Digital Marketing

Getting Business with Google +1 & Social Media Buttons

Simon — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:20:22 +0000

Welcome. Below, you’ll find the recording from the ODM Coaching Club Open session that we ran on the 12th July 2011 entitled “How using Google +1 and other Social Media Buttons on your website can get you business”. The opportunity for getting Business with Google +1 & Social Media Buttons in general is compelling and I would encourage you to watch the video to understand more about what these relatively new marketing tools can be used for.

Please remember to click one of the social buttons above to share the video with others if you found it interesting and leave your comments and feedback below.

This video is part of our Online Marketing Coaching Club. Please find out more about it by clicking the link.

In the recording we cover:

Facebook’s Like button
Twitter’s Tweet button
LinkedIn’s Share Button
Google’s +1 Button

We also give a glimpse of Google+ and discuss the reasons why implementing each of these buttons could bring you new website visitors which can lead to more business.Similar Posts:

Getting Business with Google +1 & Social Media Buttons is a post from: Oxford Digital Marketing