A quick disclaimer before I go any further: Periscopix are not solicitors and this blog post is in no way intended to serve as legal advice. This post is merely intended to relay some of the points made during the ICO’s presentation and to provide some further guidance regarding potential solutions that have started to emerge.

And so to begin…

Despite a significant amount of resistance (see http://nocookielaw.com/) it’s clear that the directive now commonly known as the ‘EU Cookie Law’ is not going away. The latest round of written ICO guidance(1) was issued in December and it is worth recapping the key points from that document.

Essentially the document states that those setting cookies must:

• tell people that the cookies are there,
• explain what the cookies are doing, and
• obtain their consent to store a cookie on their device.

Additionally the guide advised that the only exceptions to the law were cookies:

1. for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network; or
2. where such storage or access is strictly necessary for the provision of an information society service requested by the subscriber or user.

i.e. cookies that are strictly necessary for the site to function e.g. those used for shopping carts. 

What is the latest ‘View from the ICO’?

Having attended Dave Evan’s presentation there were two things that struck me:

1. Dave appears to be a very pragmatic man, looking to take a pragmatic approach to enforcing this law.
2. The cookie law landscape is still very much in flux.

I appreciate that this doesn’t give a great insight, so here are some bite sized chunks… 

No silver bullet

The ICO will not be providing a ‘one size fits all’ solution that ensures full compliance. They expect site owners to assess and implement solutions on a case by case basis, ensuring the best fit with the technologies being used and the cookies that are being dropped. 

Browser based permissions are not sufficient (not yet anyway!)

The variation in user and browser capabilities means that, for the time being, this is not an acceptable solution. The law states that consent from the browser depends on a user having taken some form of action. Unfortunately, a survey completed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PWC)(2) indicated that 37% of users were still unaware of how to manage cookies on their computer which is 37% that would not (by the definition above) have granted consent for cookies to have been dropped.

As browser technologies and user understanding increases this view is likely to be re-visited, however it does pose the question: why is more not also being done to educate users in how to amend their browser settings? Surely an educational ad campaign on the BBC or splash pages on the leading browsers could help to rapidly reduce this 37% and help to improve peoples’ understanding of cookies? 

Analytics cookies are not exempt

Contrary to recent rumours, it was confirmed that analytics cookies are not exempt from the law. However, the ICO advised that this is not the same as saying that the law requires an opt-in model. It should be noted that regardless of whether consent is opt-in or implied it should be obtained prior to an implicated cookie being set. This guidance is included within the ICO’s December communication, although a note was also included that states that if this is not possible then the time between the cookie being set and a notice being served must be minimised. The solution implemented on the BT.com site appears to be applying this second approach.

Further guidance to follow

In anticipation of a multitude of questions regarding what constitutes implied consent and how this approach could be implemented, Dave advised that the ICO will be issuing further guidance before the 26th May. This additional guidance will also include more information regarding the ICO’s priorities for enforcing the legislation.

Not in the slide pack

For anyone interested, the ICO’s ABC Interaction slide pack can be found at http://www.abc.org.uk/PageFiles/1487/David.pdf. In addition to the detail within the slides, Dave advised that:

• The ICO appreciate that implementing robust and workable solutions takes time and are happy for solutions to be worked into already planned development cycles (within reason). Consequently whilst they will be ‘expecting more’ from site owners with regards compliance from the 26th May, an immediate cutover may not be required.
• The ICO confirmed that whilst it is probably easier for the content publishers to inform users of a cookies’ use, it is the party setting the cookie that is ultimately responsible for gaining consent. This means that publishers and 3rd parties will need to work together to deliver workable solutions and that there is likely to be a raft of contract re-writes to set out each sides responsibilities.

So what should we be doing?

As detailed in the ICO most recent guideline, the first point of call is to complete a cookie audit for your site. This will provide a clearer picture of the cookies that are being set and their associated risk. There are several plugins to help with this such as attacat for Google Chrome and Firecookie for Firefox and the data gathered can be used to author a more detailed privacy policy (see the BBC for an example http://www.bbc.co.uk/privacy/bbc-cookies-policy.shtml).

Once this is complete, it’s time to start looking at and implementing a solution. Whilst it may well be worth waiting until the ICO’s implied consent guidance is available before reaching a final decision, a number of companies do have solutions available. To help, we’ve put together a quick guide on four solutions that we have looked at: Optanon, CookieQ, Cookie Control, Wolf Software and OKcookie (thanks to the support teams at each of these vendors for their speedy responses):

Click image to expand.

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In summary

There are still lots of gaps and unknowns regarding the law and the ICO are aware of this. However, they are working closely with industry and their European colleagues to establish examples of best practice with which they can drive adaptation forward. In the end I am still hopeful that a healthy balance can be struck that both ensures people’s privacy is respected and avoids a 90% loss in measured site traffic. Until then, let’s see what’s in the forthcoming ICO guideline...    

References:

1. Guidance on the rules on use of cookies and similar technologies
2. PwC Internet Cookies final

1. Plot rows

Seeing inexplicable spikes in your trend line data? No problem: have a guess at what might have caused it - plot it on the trend line to find out.

Here we have picked two of our higher volume blog posts to explain two spikes in blog traffic two months apart.

These are represented by the orange and green lines in the trend lines below.

2. Sophisticated Table Filters

GA V5 has brought the same include/exclude functionality from profile level filters to table level filters. This allows you to build very detailed filters to include or exclude by exact match, ‘contains’ or even regex level.

Here I am applying 6 filters to two dimensions (primary and secondary) and one metric to get all of the keywords landing visitors on our Google Analytics Training page that don’t contain our brand name and have a high bounce rate. (Note I could get the same results by reducing the keyword filters to 1 regex filter) The flexibility here to apply include AND exclude filters at both exact and regex level is beautiful.
 

3. Table/Profile Filters

Filters again: what if, after creating the above filter you find that this is a piece of analysis you’d like to do more frequently? Well because now that the logic and functionality matches that of profile level & dashboard level filters, you can do one of three things:

1. Recreate this filter at profile level, it will work exactly as you hope with no need to test and wait 24 hours to see if it worked. (Olly’s top tip: if creating any dimension level filters at profile level – test them in the report data table first to make sure they behave as you expect.)
    
2. Hit save to dashboard and the filters will be preserved and transformed into a dashboard widget for you to view each time you open up GA*.
    
3. Copy the URL from the address bar. The new GA V5 report structure will allow this URL to persist with all filters and conditions and filters currently applied so that next time you click the link, voila! You get the same report again. This method can also be used to quickly and easily share reports between yourself and clients or colleagues.

*Note in this case metric filters aren’t carried across to dashboards.

4. Dashboard Quick Links

Did you know that a blue title in a dashboard widget turns a widget into a quick link or shortcut to the report it represents? The quick links are set automatically when creating a widget with the ‘add to dashboard’ function in any report or can be done manually by entering the report breadcrumb into the box at the bottom of the widget creation popup.

You will then have a lovely new widget with a blue, clickable title. Enjoy.

5. Dashboard Share

Built the dashboard of your dreams, but want to use it in more than one profile? Colleagues envious of your dashboard magic? Now you can easily share your expertise with them by hitting the ‘dashboard share’ button at the top of any dashboard page. 

You will then get a message as below. Simply copy the link and send to your friend, colleague, aunty who will then be prompted to choose a profile and dashboard to save it in.

So, here are my 5 favourites. What are yours? Let us know in the comments!

So What's New?

The interface now shows if your expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience are average, above average or below average. These new ratings allow us to see the performance of a keyword compared to other advertisers.  

It is important to note that your keyword can have a high quality score but a below average rating in any of these factors.  This is because there are numerous factors which are considered when calculating the quality score of keywords in your account and each of these will have have different weightings.

Expected Clickthrough Rate

The expected clickthrough rate is a prediction and is different from the actual clickthrough rate you see in your account. It is derived from the performance of the keyword in your account and across all other accounts that contain that keyword.

Ad Relevance

The ad relevance rating shows how closely matched your keyword is to your ads. 

Landing Page Experience

This rating shows how useful the landing page is for people who click on an ad. The naming of this rating suggests that this is not just linked to content of the landing page but also usability, layout etc.

Is It Useful?

Yes it is useful.

By giving these factors a relative rating you can start to see how your keyword performance stacks up against other advertisers.  It should also help to highlight areas that you can focus on improving to get even better performance from your campaigns.  

Is It Really useful???

Well...That depends.

We would love to be able to determine an approximate weighting that each of these factors have on a keyword's quality score.  These new ratings could give us the ability to do that by monitoring how the ratings given impact the quality scores of keywords across a range of different accounts.

If the information provided is consistent, then this will be very useful! 

Conclusion

It is great that we have more information to base decisions on but the real test of how much this improves our ability to manage campaigns is still to come.

What's so good?

AdWords has introduced the ability to tag any campaign, ad group, ad or keyword with a label. This is a feature we've been wanting in AdWords for quite some time, for one reason: you can filter on it.

By having a "tag" that goes with each item but doesn't affect the item in any way, you can create custom filters to quickly and easily navigate to groupings that don't match up to your account structure.

Imagine that you have your campaigns split up by geographical targeting, but within those campaigns are three different products. You might want to see your overall performance split by product. Previously this was tricky to achieve and required massive amounts of effort devoted to naming conventions to be able to filter correctly.

Now you can simply apply "Product 1", "Product 2" and "Product 3" labels to each ad group, ad and keyword in those sections. Hey presto you can immediately filter for each of those separately, and view them in the dimensions tab.

Source: Inside AdWords blog

What's bad?

At the moment there is no word on whether we'll be able to have more than one label per item. We'll update as soon as we know.

There is also no ability to apply a label to more items than fit on one page in the interface. That's a 500 item limit.

For a large account where this would be most useful, 500 is woefully too small.

We need to wait for AdWords Editor and the API to update to include this feature to let us easily mass update entire swathes of keywords all at once.
 

The conclusion

This is a great new tool, that at the moment is too limited to be broadly useful. Once this is more mature, it should become a best practice for all campaigns to use labels for reporting structure, and focus on campaign splits purely for settings/targeting reasons.

What are breadcrumbs?

No, this has nothing to do with fish fingers. In the world of websites a breadcrumb trail is a navigation feature for illustrating the location of a page within a website's hierarchy. On our website for instance, my profile page, would have the following breadcrumb trail:

Home > About > The Team > James Carswell

My profile page is contained with The Team subcategory which itself is within the About category.

Likewise, our PPC management page would be:

Home > PPC > PPC Management

How will these be displayed in PPC ads?

Breadcrumbs will automatically start to show in the display URL of AdWords ads assuming certain criteria is met:

1. The ad must appear in the banner position (top 1-3 ads above the organic listings)
2. The ad must be displayed on desktop search (the feature will not be available in mobile searches, initially at least)
3. The ad must only have the top level domain set as its display URL (an ad with the display URL www.example.com/something would not be eligible to show breadcrumbs)
4. The landing page must have markup from which Google can extract breadcrumb information

The last point is key. Google need to know what breadcrumb links to display. This means marking up your website correctly with rich snippets for breadcrumbs. Google has plenty of information on this on their Rich Snippets help page.

Here is an example of how breadcrumbs will be displayed in ads:

Each link in the breadcrumb trail can be clicked to take people to a different point within the site's hierarchy.

A click on a breadcrumb link will be charged at the same CPC as a click on the ad headline.

The advantages of breadcrumbs

One big advantage of showing breadcrumbs in ads is that the display URL will take up more space and help your ad to stand out from competitors who are not displaying breadcrumb trails.

Another advantage is that it will help direct users to the most relevant page on your site for them. People don't always search in a very obvious way - so giving them the to option to view a wider range of products or services may help to increase clickthrough rate.

Note that if you are about to set up rich snippets on your site to take advantage of this, you will also benefit from the fact that the rich snippets can also be used by Google when showing your site in the organic listings. Breadcrumb trails have been showing in organic snippets for some time now and have obviously proved useful to searchers.

Here's an example of a non-paid search results snippet showing breadcrumbs:

Viewing performance and reporting on breadcrumb clicks

It will be possible to view the overall total number of clicks on breadcrumb links with a new segmenting option in AdWords. To see this, go to the Ads tab, and segment data by Click Type. In addition to the current "Headline" and "Sitelink" stats, you will be able to see performance stats for "Breadcrumbs".

It will be interesting to review performance of Breadcrumb clicks, especially in terms of conversion rate. If you see a higher conversion rate for Breadcrumbs than you do for Headline clicks, this may indicate that for this set of keywords you are not sending people to the best landing page. Maybe the page you are sending searchers to is too specific and causing them to miss out on the wider range of products that you offer.

Google has information about the enhanced display URLs here. Start preparing your website and ads for this change now and make sure to keep an eye on your account over the next week or so for the changes to start taking effect.

Finally, if you enjoyed reading this article, please consider sharing it below...

How did it used to work?

Google Analytics works really well with AdWords. If the two accounts are linked, you don't need to do anything to tell GA all the information about the search. That's not the case with all traffic sources though. In fact on both Yahoo and Bing in the past you needed to tag your pay per click campaigns.

Campaign tagging is a practice of adding query strings to your landing pages. So instead of pointing people to "http://www.mysite.com/page" you'd instead point them to "http://www.mysite.com/page?traffic_source=bing" or equivalent. Adding the material after the question mark doesn't change what page loads (the software on your server typically ignores everything after that point) but the code on the page (in particular the GA script) can see that and use it.

Google Analytics supports certain query parameters, and if you use those it understands what you mean. It will convert those into real visit parameters before the data hits GA, so instead of seeing a page like "http://www.mysite.com/page?parameter=value" you'd just see the actual page, and that visit would be associated with that value.

The query parameters GA understands are:

• utm_source: this gets used to populate the traffic source
• utm_medium: this tells Google what type of traffic it is, e.g. referrer, cpc or organic
• utm_term: keyword, if applicable
• utm_content: what ad variation you're using
• utm_campaign: what ad campaign this traffic is coming from

What's the issue?

In the past you would set up these tags on your landing pages on Yahoo and Bing so that GA could identify the correct traffic source. But now that the same campaign runs on both, you need a slightly more complex tracking mechanism to be able to differentiate between the two.

Regular expressions

Regular expressions are a programming tool supported by Google Analytics that lets you test if a piece of text matches something you set, and extract portions of that text if necessary. We're going to show you how to set these up on filters in GA to be able to get your Yahoo and Bing traffic tracked.

Step 1

First make sure that your campaign is tagged correctly. Use the GA URL Builder if necessary.

Set your source to be something like yahoo-bing.

Set your medium to be cpc.

Set your campaign term as {keyword} - this ensures that the keyword in your PPC campaign is tracked correctly.

Set the campaign name to match your campaign, and the optional campaign content only if required.

Step 2

Create a new profile in GA. We're going to change the filters, which changes the raw data that gets stored by your profile. Always have one profile left unfiltered, for comparison.

In your new profile we're going to create some advanced filters. 

Step 3

Create a new filter, choose "Custom Filter", and choose "Advanced".

You then need to set up the three fields that have appeared underneath.

1. Campaign Source: (yahoo-bing)
2. Referral: https?://([^/]+)
3. Campaign Source: $A1, $B1

Set both field A and field B to required.

What it does

This filter accomplishes several steps. First it checks if the campaign source is equal to yahoo-bing, the setting we determined earlier. We don't want to do the next steps on any traffic except the yahoo and bing traffic.

Secondly we extract the domain of the referral URL. Whenever a visitor comes to the site, the browser remembers what page they came from. What we care about here is the domain of that page, whether it was Yahoo or Bing.

Finally we take our domain, and insert it back onto the end of our campaign source.

This means that traffic from Yahoo will eventually look like: yahoo-bing, www.yahoo.com

Make sure that the settings for Field A Required and Field B Required are set to yes, and that you have chosen to override the output field. 

The result

In your Google Analytics account, your Yahoo and Bing traffic is now split into two distinct traffic sources, just like it used to be.

You can run any set of reports you need as normal. Analyse your traffic by source and hey presto, you get your Yahoo & Bing PPC campaign traffic back.

Increase your exposure

Think about linguistic communities.

If you’re running international campaigns, or targeting customers that work or live abroad, then you should consider using advanced language targeting settings.

If, for example, you’re a UK company targeting a native audience with an English campaign, and if your audience is based in Switzerland, then you should be using English, French, German and Italian language targeting.

The reason for that is if you’re targeting the English language only, your advertising messages won’t show to customers whose language preferences are set to French, German or Italian. You will be missing out on relevant traffic from a large international community based in Switzerland.

A wide range of B2B and B2C industries may benefit from this strategy. Below are a few examples.

• Moving & relocation companies
• Expat assistance specialists
• Travel insurers
• Hotel booking websites
• Foreign currency exchangers

Increase your performance

We’ve been using advanced language targeting settings for our international campaigns, and overall performance has improved significantly. Traffic and conversion volumes have increased up to five times in less than three months, while average costs per conversion and click through rates have remained pretty much unchanged.

Our recommendations are to create a duplicate campaign and target languages other than English. That way, you will be able to assess the new campaign performance compared to the “original” one and adjust your strategies and spend based on your targeted audience. This is really important if your budget is limited, if you want to track performance separately or if you want to “preserve” the original account performance history.
 

Increase your opportunities

In order to better interact with your worldwide customers, your ads and keywords should match the language spoken by your targeted audience. When appropriate, you should also customise your ads and banners so they sound more “local”.

In Switzerland for example, a significant proportion of the population speaks Romansh. This is a niche market, however people are likely to respond well to “local” ads, leading to higher conversion rates across the board.
 

What’s changed?

Previously Google’s best practice suggested creating a theme with 5-10 keywords per ad group. Results were always shown at ad group level only so you didn’t really know how the keywords were working together to form the contextual advertising ad group.

Google recently released the Display Network tab in beta and pretty soon this will roll out across all campaigns.

How will the display network tab affect your campaigns?

Keywords will now be judged individually and you’ll see data at keyword level. This is fantastic for the display network as we’ve never been able to see this level of data before.

Why am I so excited about this? Well, now we can optimise at keyword level! While previously if one ad group was not working we would have options such as lowering the bids and eventually the option of pausing the group, now we are able to keep that ad group running and identify which specific keywords are leading to the high cost per click/CPA and more importantly, which keywords are converting so we can push the bids up on these keywords.

This is happening in the background of all campaigns at the moment so it is worth thinking about already even if you’re not on the beta at the moment.
I ran a test in one of my accounts to test out the effectiveness of broad match across the similar keywords horse & hound and horse and hound.
Results Below:
 

Interestingly both keywords received traffic, but horse and hound received many more impressions and has also received a higher click through rate.
I’m testing similar things with other terms to see the differences with things such as singulars and plurals so will report back when I have more info but there could be some very interesting changes coming soon to the way we build display campaigns!

Building a display campaign at the moment?

My advice would be to take your search campaign, remove any of the longer tail keywords and have the different variations of the shorter tail keywords in each ad group. This might mean that you have 100 keywords in an ad group now rather than 5. This approach means you can always narrow this down once you receive keyword level data.

It is still advisable to split ad groups by themes so you can have different ad copy per ad group, the same approach as with search. This change will not allow you to associate different placements with each of the keywords, so if you need to know which keyword is triggering which placement then you could always try splitting high volume ad groups out into smaller ad groups to get this level of data.

What else to look out for

All display targeting options are listed within the “change display targeting” button at ad group level, as shown below. 

While it is very handy to have all these options in one place, we still advise that you use the best practice of splitting out ad groups by the type of display advertising you are doing. This makes it easier for you to see at ad group level what is and what is not working. For example, an ad group per topic, an ad group per interest category etc. This not only allows you to see how each targeting method is working, but also allows you to create more specific combinations, such as the sports interest category with the keyword “football”. If you added many interest categories to one ad group this wouldn’t work. 

We are always testing ways of improving the performance of our display campaigns. Subscribe to our blog to keep up to date with our latest research and advice and please consider sharing this article if you found it useful.

What is ad scheduling?

Ad scheduling (sometimes called day parting) offers the ability to choose specific hours and days of the week within the Google interface that you want your ads to run. Scheduling can be set at campaign level, from the 'Edit Campaign Settings' page.

When launching a campaign the default setting is for ads to run at all hours of the day, every day of the week. As a general rule of thumb, begin by setting campaigns to run at all hours at 100% bid adjustment. This is most useful at the start of a campaign as you don’t yet know which hours/days will provide the most conversions. However, after some time and with the right analysis you may find that you can effectively save the pounds for the times that count.

After your campaign has gathered enough data for analysis, try segmenting your data by time of day. By doing this you can see each metric that interests you and how it performs at certain times of the day. For example, you may see that during your peak traffic times, such as 12-3pm, that your position is slipping down and your click through rates have decreased. You could increase the bid percentage during these hours to maintain your desired position and keep steady clickthrough rates.

Equally, you may find that during certain hours your position is much higher. For example, towards the end of the day the marketplace might not be so competitive, so you can afford to lower your bids during this time to save on your cost per click.

Below is an example of how this would look in your AdWords settings:

The ‘copy to all days/weekdays’ button is very useful here. BUT before you do blanket copy to every day of the week, have another look at your data segmented by day of the week. Ensure you do this over a fairly long period of time to get a good average, and you may spot some trends. For example, in certain ecommerce industries we see an increase in impressions on Saturdays and Sundays but with a very low conversion rate. However, come Monday the conversion rates rocket, indicating that people might have been researching on the weekend and then purchasing while at work on Mondays.

What can you do with this information?

Well, by knowing that conversion rates for your business are lower on the weekend, you can save costs by cutting down the percentage multiplier of your bids during these times and increase them for when the conversions are being achieved. However, tread carefully, as mentioned above many people may be researching first and could return, so you don’t want to miss out on this traffic completely if it is likely to convert in the future. It’s worth taking a look in analytics to see the time lag from first visit to conversion, as it can sometimes be surprising.

Something else to think about is scheduling your ads to only run within your trading hours. For example, if your business only operates within strict 9-5 hours, then you could schedule your ads to only run between these hours to save on irrelevant spend and unhappy customers. However, if you have a ‘request a call back’ form on your website it could still be worth advertising at all times until you see a trend, as people could be researching in the evenings and then call the next day. It’s important to remember that the internet runs 24 hours a day, and if the customers are there then you don’t want to leave your competitors to welcome them with open arms.

Overall, it’s very important to analyse your campaign data by time of day and day of the week on a regular basis. You may find that trends don’t appear for your campaign and you want to keep the scheduling at 100% all the time. But you might just see a time where you can get more traffic at the right conversion rate, or vice versa, so it’s always worth taking a look to ensure you’re spending your budget in the right places.