by Michael Cropper | May 14, 2011 | News, PPC, SEO |
As I am sure anyone in the SEO game is familiar with the Google AdWords Keywords Tool that shows the popularity of various search terms. What you may not be aware of is the cheeky actions Google is doing for people arriving at the keyword tool from Bing.
So here is the normal actions for when you arrive at the Keyword Tool from the Google SERPS and search for “Broad Match” information
Then when you select the “Exact Match” (aka, useful information) you get to see the data that can be acted upon
Now when you try and repeat the above process when entering the keyword tool from Bing’s SERPs you get an all together different result.
Then when arriving at the tool, everything seems normal to begin with when the default match type is set to “Broad” (aka, worthless data).
Now the interesting part comes when selecting to view all of the information on the “Exact Match” type
Yes that’s right, Google is doing a cheeky redirect to users who are arriving at the keyword tool form Bing. Google is forcing Bing users to sign up with Google AdWords to view the same information that is publicly available when arriving at the tool from the Google SERPs.
Is this right for Google to be doing this? Who knows. But they are and I am sure they will have some metrics which show how effective this has been. Maybe Bing should remove this URL from their SERPs in response to this? Seems crazy how Bing would be showing results for their competitors advertising platform, when instead they could promote their own better.
by Michael Cropper | May 14, 2011 | Thoughts |
If ever there was a reason needed to not rely on external information for business, this is one – Google Deprecating APIs
Have these affected your business? This is going to affect an awful lot of people, and looking at some of the 158 comments already on the official blog post from Google, this is not going down well….
That said though, any serious business should never be relying on external companies / data / APIs for any critical systems. Now I can totally see the power of API’s and I absolutely love them, but for any core business needs it can be a little like putting all of your eggs in one basket.
Unfortunately for many large organisations this always seems to be the route taken, the easiest and quickest route which rarely has the long term benefits. My philosophy is always to do something right from the beginning as this saves countless hours in the long run.
As for the Google API’s, well there are still a lot more available to use for the foreseeable future. For the API’s being deprecated I can foresee a lot of further abuse of these prior to these being shut down, such as using the services and storing the information which in most cases in against the guidelines of the services.
Well for now, time to build something more robust in-house – Maybe a scraper which accomplishes the same task 
by Michael Cropper | Jan 14, 2011 | Digital Marketing |
China is an enormous place and will soon be one of the largest economies in the world. What this means for online businesses is that there is a huge potential to tap into this growing market, although this post is not about all the wonderful things about China (there will be another one for that!) here are some interesting facts;
- China accounts for 20% of the online population
- There are 1,331,460,000 people in China (give or take)
- Around 300,000,000 internet users in China, giving an extremely low 22% internet penetration rate.
It is OK tapping into this market to get traffic but if they cannot pay on your site then this leaves you with lots of traffic but no bottom line.
The Chinese market is very odd to western eyes in many ways, including how they pay. In the western world we are used to paying be credit or debit card online and having the money come out of our account within a couple of days, and other methods would include PayPal which was made famous by eBay (very cleverly done since they own both! ).
In China the methods of payment differ slightly and as you would expect from a Chinese market, the payment methods are, well, Chinese. Chinese companies that is.
Here are the main 4 methods of payment online in China
And here are the approximate market shares of each method (part information from IResearch);
This post is designed to be a brief introduction to how different the Chinese market is online in terms of how they pay for goods and services. If you are aiming to break into the Chinese market this is one of the (many) things that you will need to consider. It is so important not to try and push western ideas into this market, you need to adapt to suit your new customers.
There are some great articles by Steven Chow about the methods above which provide a greater understanding and background behind each payment method outlined above if you require anymore information.
Thanks Michael! This was absolutely helpful! Hope to hear more about China ????