About Grant Macfarlane

Grant has a wealth of new media experience having started his career at DoubleClick in 2000. He then joined Google Inc. in 2002 as Google UK’s 5th employee, and first Ad Words hire outside the US. He was instrumental in launching the ad words platform in the UK, and taking it to a market place dominated by agencies.

Google Plus Opens to all…

September 20, 2011 By Grant Macfarlane Leave a Comment

Today Google finally announced that it would now open up its Social media project to all. I have been testing this over the last few months and do like a lot of the features especially the privacy settings and your ability to share various information with selected groups or circles. The group Video chat is also really handy and great for conference calls and group discussions. Its very Mac looking and no wonder as the man behind this was originally from Apple!

If Facebook made it easy to post to G+and Vice a Versa then I would definitely start to integrate but thats not going to happen in a hurry! How do you switch your whole user behavior and more NB your contacts and friends over to another platform?

I guess we will see what happens now that its officially open to all.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , ,

Search, A science or just keywords?

September 12, 2011 By Grant Macfarlane Leave a Comment

I was having a conversation last week about the state of the SEM market place with a few seasoned practitioners and  we all seemed to come to the same conclusion, search is now more than ever a complex and scientific beast! You might be saying to yourself, “Anyone can write ad copy and come up with keywords” and you only have to look at the number of PPC agencies who claim to be experts to see that your initial thoughts would be 100% correct! Almost anyone can come up with the basics.

However search has really evolved over the last few years and its seems like every few weeks Google is releasing a new ad format or bringing out a new Beta. I will try and not be biased here but unfortunately the others just dont seem to keep up. Search strategy and planning is now becoming more and more of a science and skilled job as agencies now need to consider all the extra ad formats available and combine these with their existing SEM efforts to create a holistic SEM approach.

New Bid to Location Mobile Beta

I have chosen to go into a little more detail about a new mobile Beta we are testing which allows you to upweight your bids depending on the distance of the user from your store/location. Let me put this into practice. Say you are looking for a Local Gym and so you fire up your iphone ( Biased here as I have one) and search for “gym in Wandsworth”.  Through a traditional mobile PPC campaign you could display your Gyms ad with a unique phone number  and  a map and location through Google places which we will cover off another time.

However the new mobile bid to distance ad will allow you as an advertiser to up weight your bid and therefore position the closer the potential client is to your store or in this case gym. This is extremely powerful.It stands to reason that that user will be more likely to convert the closer he/she is to the gym. This would be even more powerful for restaurants, movies and other local services and goods.

This is only one of many of the extensions to search marketing. Smart agencies are staying abreast of these and testing them when the fit is right. Over the next few weeks The Media Image account mangers will give a detailed overview of the various Google ad formats and how they can be used to drive your online and offline business to new heights

Filed Under: SEM Tagged With: , ,