When it comes to online business Wales is lagging well behind its UK neighbours. Google recently provided figures which show that only 60% of Welsh small & medium enterprises (SMEs) have their own website and, of these, a paltry 33% are set up for ecommerce. With more and more of Britain’s shopping taking place online, Welsh business could suffer if it fails to modernise.

Fortunately the Welsh government and Google have now teamed up to help Welsh SMEs get online and get profitable. The 12 month programme will organise over 1000 free e-skills seminars and free consultations across Wales, equipping local businesses with the skills they need to improve their online presence.

According to the Welsh Minister for Business, Enterprise, Technology and Science, Edwina Hart: “We want Wales to be a truly digital nation…We welcome this initiative to help companies gain maximum benefits from using and exploiting digital technologies to innovate, grow and access new markets, driving business growth.”

“Digital technologies and online services have the potential to revolutionise the competitiveness of business and I hope as many as possible take advantage of the expertise on offer from Google.”

Meanwhile, Adrian Clark, chairman of Cardiff & Co, agreed that: “Getting online is one of the most important marketing tools for businesses…You don’t need a huge investment to win a share of the online market but you do need the skills.”

These skills do seem to be lacking in Wales but, if you know where to look, there is a whole seam of skill and knowledge to be found in the country. In fact, part of the Google initiative involves linking web novices up with top digital agencies and online marketing services across Wales.

The year-long programme will also see the popular Google Juice Bar touring the country, bringing online business experts to less web-savvy companies from Cardiff to Caernarfon. The Google Juice Bar will be offering complimentary 1-2-1 sessions that will show SMEs how to increase traffic to their websites and build a profitable business online.

This year is seen by many to be the year that Wales goes live. The project will kick off in Cardiff on March and will tour South Wales for a further 3 months before taking on online business in the rest of the country for the rest of the year. If you’re in the South this March, make sure you attend the Google Juice Bar launch event on the 6th.

In the meantime, you can improve your web presence and online skills using your own initiative. The first step is to source great advice and real expertise to help you on your way. Liberty are the largest and fastest growing online marketing agency in Wales, with a wealth of knowledge and specialist online marketing services designed to get your business booming online.

To find out more about how we can help and our online marketing services, call the Liberty team today on 029 2076 6467.

As Liberty is on the Google Engage for Agencies programme, on Wednesday, our Pay Per Click advertising manager Chris had the pleasure of attending an event at their UK HQ.

The main focus of the event was to understand how best to improve the visibility of small businesses online.

There were some very interesting topics discussed and some great insight into search trends. Here are the highlights from Chris’s notes on what Google was saying:

Changes to AdWords

There are quite a few changes in AdWords ad extensions this week. You will soon be charged for clicks on your location extensions, such as people using your advert to find directions to your premises. Google realises these are useful and lead to more interaction with your business, so want you to pay for it.

Video extensions will be the next big thing for AdWords extensions, where videos will be playable from within the sponsored ads section of the search results. This is currently a beta test and only rolled out to major film companies for the time being.

Google is removing the £5 activation fee for new AdWords accounts. This is great news for small businesses, providing less of a sticking point – it’s even better if you have an AdWords voucher, meaning you really can now try it for free!

The Google Checkout button is being removed from the ads, though it will still be seen within the Google Products shopping results.

Getting British Business Online

This is a big focus area for Google and Getting British Business Online is something they want online marketing agencies to help them push. In the UK last year, 17pence in every £1 was spent online – which highlights why a new or small business without a website needs to seriously consider an online presence. For one-man-bands or those dipping their toes into the web, the great part is that after a simple registration process, you will get the following from Google:

- Free. co.uk domain for 1 year
- Free easy-to-update website for 1 year
- Free email address @yourdomain
- Free support

If you or any small businesses you know want to take advantage of this then let us know and we will happily point you in the right direction.

How big brands are being innovative

Using Google AdWords with other Google tools - like Trends & Insights - can help you find and attract cheap traffic that your competitors aren’t targeting. See this great example from Converse.

Is YouTube the next major destination for online shopping? Check out how fashion retailer French Connection turn videos into ecommerce opportunities via links within product videos.

Other interesting facts

The number of people making decisions in stores has halved, which is mainly down to product reviews online. Your potential customers have the ability to browse the web almost everywhere – via pc, laptop, mobile and tablet. The key message on the day was make sure you and your products can be seen and make sure you manage your reputation online.

Also, 1 in every 3 Tweets now has a YouTube connection.

Social network ad spend has been rising steadily over the last few years with marketers extending their online pay per click and banner advertising beyond the seach engines to include the social networks as well. It is estimated that during 2011 marketers in the US alone will spend £3.08 billion on social network advertising. eMarketer predicts that US ad spend will be up 55% on 2010 when marketers spent $1.99 billion, and that worldwide social network spend will be up 71.6% in 2011 to $5.97billion.



Facebook, by far the largest social network, is clearly having the greatest impact on this growth through a year-on-year increase in Facebook advertising. Facebook therefore contributes up to 65% of the 2011 prediciton. eMarketer predicts that advertising spend on facebook will hit $2.19 billion in the US alone in 2011 and over $4 billion worldwide. That's more than double the total spent in 2010!


So as we move further into 2011 social networks are poised to absorb an even greater percentage of all online spending making them difficult to ignore for any business serious about their online marketing. We will be watching eagerly to see what developments Facebook has planned for the forthcoming year.

In a clean-up of its services, Yahoo! is about to remove a number of “underperforming” websites, including a few very well known brands.

Those of us who have been involved in search engine marketing for years will remember when Altavista was the Google of its day. Anyone involved in social media marketing will undoubtedly have spent time on the bookmarking website, Delicious.

In addition to these two sites, AlltheWeb (another search site), Babelfish (a translation service), Buzz (a news aggregation site) and MyBlogLog (a social media network, similar to Facebook) are all also likely to be taken off the web.

For the sake of posterity, here’s a screenshot of Delicious:

 

A Yahoo! spokeswoman said “Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond...We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months...We will communicate specific plans when appropriate."

The company is also planning on cutting its workforce by 4%, which equates to about 600 jobs.

If your website receives traffic or has links pointing to it from any of the Yahoo! properties that are going to disappear then put measures in place to limit the impact. Start taking advantage of other social media, bookmarking and blog sites ASAP, to strengthen your link profile and the number of referring sites.

Whether you are a fan of Google's new Instant search or not, if you are running a PPC campaign then this post will be of interest to you.

There appears to be a glitch in Instant search that could be costing top spot advertisers dearly. Whilst Instant search is turned on, if a search returns Adwords ads above the organic SERPs and you hit enter twice in the search field you will automatically open the number 1 Adwords result. This costs whoever is in the top spot, but the user won't have made the choice to click the ad, so what will they do? Click back, because they were expecting a Google search results screen.

This will have a detrimental effect on top position bounce rates and could be wasting a great deal of advertiser's budgets.

Currently running in Beta test mode, Google are testing video extensions that will be shown with their Adwords ads.

The plan is to have an "expandable plus-box" directly beneath the normal PPC text ad in which video extensions will play. Users will be able to watch the video before deciding whether or not to click-through. This sounds interesting for users, but the current cost of this service for advertisers is less appealing.

Once viewers reach the 10 second mark the advertiser will be charged the same maximum cost per click as if their ad had been clicked, regardless of whether it is clicked. So will this lead to a flurry of 10 second ads or are the search results becoming more and more cluttered, as with Google Preview?

Google has suggested that video extensions could be of particular use for product demonstrations, previews and trailers.

At present, there are no plans to roll this service out in the UK.

Google has now launched “Instant Previews”, which provides a preview of the organic search results without a searcher having to click through to the site itself. These previews appear on the right hand side of the Google search results screen when you click the little magnifying glass icon next to the search results.

This new addition comes hot on the heels of Google's launch of Google Instant. Unlike Google Instant search, Google Instant Preview is by default turned off, the magnifying glass must be clicked to activate this new feature. The preview istself is a graphic overview of a search result that highlights those sections which are most applicable to the search term used making it easier to see whether a site is worth visiting or not.

Google Preview will start showing up from today, 9th November 2010 and should be available in 40 languages and to all users within a couple of days. Google claims that during the testing of Google Instant Preview, those using Instant Preview stated that they were about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they clicked. This new visual comparison seems set to change the way visitors evaluate websites and choose whether or not to visit them.

At this point Google Preview doesn't extend to Google Ads, even though every Google Ad ends up at a web page. Google has thought about the option, but isn’t including it in the initial launch. Although incredibly fast and powerful, Google Preview still finds including sites created in Flash difficult with the majority of flash sites not yet being turned into a preview. Unlike Google Instant, which shuts off when your web connection slows, Google Instant Previews is available even on poor internet connections.

With Microsoft Advertising adCenter now providing all paid search results for Yahoo! Search and Bing in the US, and Bing supplying the organic search results for Yahoo! Search, they have just announced that this will be rolled out in select markets across europe and the UK in early 2011.

The european transition will begin with the UK, France and Ireland with all of europe expected to be completed by early 2012.

Current advice is to continue using adCenter as normal but to expect further information regarding the pending changes approximately 3 months prior to any changes taking place.

In a report published today it was revealed that the internet in the UK alone is worth £100 billion to the economy, representing more than a 7% share of total national income.

The study, carried out by the Boston Consulting Group on behalf of Google, the internet’s most successful company, places a value on the UK internet market for the first time.

If it were an industry in its own right the internet would be more than twice the value of the UK hotel and restaurant market and nearly as big as the financial sector, which accounts for 9% of Gross Domestic Products in 2009.

However, the research did find that there is a digital divide in the UK, with certain parts of the country – namely Scotland and Northern Ireland – lagging far behind London and the south-east.

In an interesting twist in the report, it turns out that British consumers are more willing to spend money online than can be typically seen elsewhere. E-commerce drives a large section of the internet’s expansion; as a proportion of retail sales, online transactions in the UK are high.

To emphasise this point, the UK has the largest e-commerce market in the world when measured by the amount spent per capita. The popularity of buying goods and services has also fueled a boom in the amount companies are prepared to pay for online marketing as heavy spending can help attract users to their sites.

The online advertising market in Britain is worth £3.5 billion and is the biggest anywhere outside the US.

It is forecasted that the internet economy is to continue to boom with 10% year on year growth projected for the next 5 years. If this trend comes to fruition then the internet economy will contribute up to 13% of GDP by the year 2015. For an idea of scale the current internet economy is already larger than the utility and transport industries put together.          

The report also highlights the success of small firms using the internet to increase global sales. The UK now exports goods and services which are worth £2.80 for every £1 it imports. Google’s annual turnover was £23.6bn last year which encompasses very nearly a quarter of the £100 billion contribution the entire internet made to the UK economy in 2009.

The first half of 2010 has seen a dramatic rise in the total spend by British organisations on online advertising, up 10% from last year to £1.97 billion.

The bi-annual online advertising expenditure study produced by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers, puts the increase down to a large surge in the video and social network advertising budgets of many small and medium sized companies.

With a current market share of 24.3% of the total UK advertising spend; online advertising is now becoming a major consideration for many businesses. The 10% increase in online advertising is within a context of a 6.3% rise in total UK advertising spend to £8.1 billion, which shows positive signs relating to the increasing confidence in the economy.

The highest spending could be seen in the entertainment and media sector, which has always relied heavily upon advertising within the digital sector. This accounted for 14.4% of total online advertising spend in the UK, followed by finance and fast moving consumer goods.  

In what was a largely positive study, figures reflected a sense of optimism in the industry which has not been seen for the past couple of years. Even retail, a sector which has been hit disproportionately severely by the economic collapse, experienced an increased online advertising spend from 7.1% in the first half of 2009 to 8.4% in the same period of 2010.

The chief executive of IAB, Guy Phillipson, commented: “The return to double digit growth in UK online advertising spend is characterised by increased investment by major brands, particularly in fast moving consumer goods and entertainment. The effectiveness of social and video ads for classic brand building is reflected in these formats enjoying exponential growth”.

The report indicates a number of drivers for the recent surge in growth, one being the increase in online users within the UK, mainly due to the proliferation of devices such as Smartphones.

The way people spend their time on the internet is also changing with the IAB claiming UK internet users are currently spending 23% of their time online using social networks and blogs.