Stellar Search Blog

Over the last few years we have been doing a lot of advertising in Europe for some of our clients. What we found is that Google is not always the first search engine. There are several other engines where advertisers could really benefit from lower Cost Per Clicks and good quality traffic. On this series of articles we will share our finding for several European search engines/portals that we think are worth a try depending on the product.

Today we start with an interesting engine called  Seznam.cz (which means list in English). Is the most visited website in Czech and Slovakia with 12m visits per month.  Seznam is the most often displayed page in the Czech Republic, in contrast to the rest of the EU where Google dominates. In the Czech Republic Google is fifth.

 

Seznam run their own PPC program called Sklik and its based on the Google model with their own algorithm. The interface is pretty easy to use and the payment system again very easy. They also offer other forms of advertising such banner and video. Moreover for their non paid listings Seznam uses its own ranking scale for web pages, called S-Rank. It is a similar to PageRank with a range from 0 to 10.

Seznam offers a great alternative for a European market where Google is not the number one choice!

 

Google announced that as of yesterday, interest categories are now available to all AdWords advertisers. Interest categories are a good way of exposing your content campaigns to more users within the display network. We always recommend that client set up a re-marketing in order to get more data and understand the creative performance

How interest categories work? According to Google “the system looks at the types of pages a user visits, taking into account how recently and frequently those pages have been visited, and then associates their browser with relevant interest categories. Using these categories, you can show ads to the people most likely to purchase your products or services, and you can reach them across all types of sites in the Google Display Network in addition to contextually relevant sites.”

There are over 1,000 interest categories from very niche to very broad interests/themes.  Once more Google is helping advertisers to use the Google Display Network.

The latest version of Google Analytics have been live for some time now and the main advantage is speed! The graphs load fastr and the new menu is a lot more user friendly. Something that changed last week and I personally think is a great new addition is the Map Overlay. You can now see region level maps of over 170 countries! In order to access the map go to Visitors > Demographics > Location report. You can then see the regions for the country you are interested.

 

To go a level deeper to cities, just click “City”.  Another great feature that Google Analytics rolled out recently — a magnifying glass that appears when cities are clustered closely together. Great addition as in the old interface it was very hard to differentiate areas. For example when looking into London it was almost impossible to see the different areas.

A great infographic on Facebook by Namesake on the subject of IPO. Is Facebook goign to raise money through initial public offer? According to namesake yes in 2012.

 

 

The worst thing as an iPad user is when you visit a website and by default it directs you to a mobile page which is set for mobile phones.  Suddently the images dissapear, the menu has changed and you cant do anything about this. The webmaster decided that iPad is a mobile and that’s why they should see the low resolution website with an option to call. A good example is WorldHotels.com, Accoring to their website: “Worldhotels is an exclusive collection of the world’s most unique independent hotels. Under the banner “Unique Hotels for Unique People”, it now has almost 450 affiliate properties in more than 250 destinations and 65 countries worldwide.”

Overall a nice looking website with a clear structure and to the point:

 

In terms of traffic again WorldHotels.com gets about 49k unique visitors with 150k pageviews .

 

When you visit though from an iPad this is what you get:

 

 

In this case WorldHotel do offer an option the user. again not a great way for an iPad user but at least better than others. We do hope that in the near feature web developers will put more thinking into the iPad users. We have noticed that in the past few months the traffic more iPad devices hasn increased alot. Below you can see a graph taken from GA for one of our clients. The iPad traffic has increase more than 10,000 times year on year with over 50k visitors. Something that you cant ignore any more!