It’s only natural to want to know who is visiting your online store and what they are looking at. With Visitor View in Contextured AdTime you can now see who is looking at what and much more.

Figrue 1. Contextured AdTime Visitors

Visitors are more than just a number and following feedback about our existing realtime interface, we have switched the focus from your pages to your visitors. So rather than looking at who is on each page, we show you who is on your site, and what pages they are looking at. You hope you will find that both views provide different uses.  As always, please let us know what you think.

FAQs

Q. Is this hard to install or understand?

A. No, it is very easy to install and understand. Installation is adding a snippet of code to your existing website, usually in the footer. The system is extremely easy to understand plus there is help available online, via email and on the telephone.

Q. Does this track everybody on my site?

A. The tracking works with javascript so it will not track the less than <1% of users who turn javascript off in their browsers.

Q. What can I do with this information?

A. You can use the information to improve your website and your sales. By seeing how people enter, move around and ultimately exit your site you can better understand your customers.

Q. Privacy concerns?

A. The tracking data that we collect is totally anonymous and this data is only available to you the website owner.  Contextured is registered with the Information Commissioners Office in the UK.

Q. Anything else I should know?

A. The setup process is very simple and provided you can add a couple of lines of html code to your websites footer, in under 5 minutes from now you could be seeing who is on your website. Get started today with a 14 day free trial.

Originally published on the Contextured blog

AdTime |  AdWords Ads | Adwords Help

Startups 100, organised by the startups.co.uk, the UK’s most popular website for small businesses, celebrates the 100 most exciting, promising, disruptive new businesses and entrepreneurs shaping the start-up market right now. See the full list here and find Contextured here.

Why it made our list

Contextured allows small businesses to run their own online advertising more effectively. Among other things it allows websites to monitor pay per click traffic in real-time and track the ads, keywords and networks delivering paid visitors. The software took four PhD engineers nearly two years to develop. Co-founder Michael has worked on software projects for companies such as Lastminute.com and BP, while former journalist and academic Rajesh turned down the chance to work on the Hadron Collider to start up Contextured.

“We’re incredibly proud to have Contextured on our list of the UK’s most innovative and dynamic new businesses and look forward to watching its continued success.” Sara Rizk, editor, Startups.co.uk

We are equally proud to be included in this list and apologise to anyone shocked by the photo of founder, Michael Oxley. A face for radio for sure.

Originally published on the Contextured blog.

AdWords Help |  Realtime PPC |  Ads for AdWords

This type of targeting has more control than broad match and greater reach than phrase match. Take a look at this picture to understand where it sits in the match types.

(click to see full size)

So how should you use the broad match modifier in your campaigns and how does Contextured AdTime help?

If you are already using broad match keywords, using the modifier is a good way to improve your performance. Broad match has always been notoriously broad and if you don’t regularly run keyword reports and setup extensive negative keywords, you can find your ads being shown against some unexpected search queries e.g. dog is broadly related to cat

If however you are the sort of marketer who starts small (phrase match) and uses  a keyword report to find new keywords then the broad match modifier is a good way to speed up that process whilst still keeping a semblance of control.

In Contextured AdTime you will start to see something like this when creating new ad campaigns:

Our natural language relevance engine will automatically suggest suitable broad match modifiers alongside the existing keyword suggestions. All keyword suggestions are highly optimised to ensure the maximum quality for landing page and advert.

What we have found in the two months or so since the broad match modifier became available is that its usage results in a higher volume of converting traffic compared to campaigns that do not use it.

Modified Trademark, Product and Brand Names?

We are still evaluating the best way to use the broad match modifier in relation to product and brand names and will roll this out in a future product update. Until that time our broad match modifiers will be suggested cautiously and we will favour a combination of phrase and exact match by default.

Originally post on the Contextured blog.

All of the answers are publicly attributed to an author and peer reviewed.  The quality of answer is very impressive, not suprising given the pedigree of those answering questions.

You won’t find the same sort of stuff as on Yahoo! answers (all sorts) or Stack Overflow (techie) and that’s to Quoras benefit.  Only time will tell if the quality of answers can be maintained as the site grows.

I’m scratching my head to think of the right sort of question to give Quora a try with, but in the meantime I’m enjoying learning from some of the great Q&As posted by others.

The changes are due to go live on September 14th so what should you do to prepare?

Well obviously you want to be ready with a new campaign containing trademarks as keywords and also ads with trademarks in the headline, description and display url fields.  You should start by looking for landing pages on your site that already contain trademarks as quality score rules still apply. Now that you can include the trademark in your ad text it should be possible to lower the CPC of trademarks due to increased CTR and quality score.

You should also consider using the ™ and ® symbols where appropriate in your ad text as they can really make your ads stand out from the crowd.

If you put your campaigns live on September 14th you can use the Contextured realtime dashboard to instantly see how effective these changes are. Whilst your trademark competitors are waiting for upto 3 hours to get feedback in AdWords, you will have already refined your trademark campaigns with the actual search keywords, any new negatives and updated ads.

Contextured maintains an extensive, but not exhaustive trademark, brand and product keyword database  as part of our semantic knowledge.  We will be updating our algorithms in light of these policy changes so you should see new keyword and ad suggestions in the AdTime dashboard in due course.

More information on this change and the new brand rules can be found here:

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=186124

https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=145626

https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=177578

This post was originally published on the Contextured blog.

Figure 1. Beta features available in Contextured AdTime

Firstly, the name menu title “Pages” is not the intended name we plan to launch with.  At the moment it’s a place holder, but we hoped you would understand that it relates to your website pages.

The functionality here is designed for online merchants, e-commerce stores and people selling products.  It is designed to let you see all of your products that Contextured has identified from your website.

In this section you should see all of your products from your existing website.  Currently there are no category pages shown, just individual product pages.  The point of us extracting your products is so that we have structured information such as name, description and price.

This structured information is very useful for search engines  to understand your page and help shoppers find your products. It is also very useful to Contextured AdTime so that we can give the search engines a helping hand, in bringing visitors to your shop.

Bringing visitors into product pages is often termed “deep-linking” and can play part in a cost effective pay per click strategy.  Please give these beta features a try and let us know what you think.

Figure 1. Creating a new PPC advertising campaign

So whats special about this? Well Contextured will automatically expand your ads and keywords into the optimal ad grouping and keyword match types. So if you write two ads and two keywords, this could result in two ad groups, each containing three keywords (broad, exact and phrase match) and two ads – so four ads and six keywords in total.

Good search marketers with a lot of time know how to best structure a ppc account like this. But we assume you’ve got better things to do with your time so the Contextured algorithm will do it for you. You can of course override these settings should you wish to.

Contextured AdTime is available now.

Figure 1. Control which ad groups have realtime enabled

This granular level of control allows you to easily test the value of Contextured AdTime during your trial period. You can increase the realtime coverage to all of your campaigns over time or immediately.

If you have any feedback or suggestions please email info at contextured dot com as your opinions are important to us.

Figure 1. Realtime traffic – visitors by source

With Contextured AdTime you can see in realtime how many people are on your website, and importantly how they got there.  This is the first step to being able to increase the visitor numbers from each channel.

London, UK. 27 July 2010 – Contextured Limited, a UK-based technology start-up, announced today the launch of an innovative software service called AdTime, which offers real-time pay-per-click campaign management on Google and other search engines.

Website owners will now be able to watch in real-time as visitors arrive at their site and see the keywords and adverts which brought them. Owners can then instantly edit their keywords, adverts or bids as they watch the live traffic so as to take advantage of trends and correct potentially costly errors. Currently website owners must wait at least three hours to see the results of changes to their campaigns on AdWords.

As co-founder and CEO, Michael Oxley, explains: “Three hours is a long time on the web. It’s enough time to spend a lot of money on the wrong keywords and adverts; a three hour information delay might as well be a three day delay.”

Oxley adds: “With Contextured’s AdTime PPC service, you’re in control from the moment you start your PPC campaign. Expensive, irrelevant keyword matches can be eliminated, while relevant ones can be expanded, and advert text can be optimised based on click through rates. All this can save a lot of your advertising budget and get your campaign off to the right start, delivering you the right kind of traffic from the word go. Campaigns can now be tuned and optimised within the first three hours of their going live.”

Oxley confirmed: “Like many breakthroughs, our real-time PPC proposition was born out of necessity. While managing other web campaigns, our team found that a lot of money and opportunity was being lost in the early stages of an advertising campaign. Our aim is make web marketing instant and interactive, and therefore deliver significant cost savings.”

The Contextured service also provides historical traffic data for trend analysis, a fully-functional interface allowing multiple campaign creation and editing, keyword selection, and budget setting. If any trend is spotted, such as a particularly poorly or highly performing keyword, its budget can be limited or extended, with changes going live immediately and the results being instantly visible.

Furthermore, multi-platform integration means advertisers need only create campaigns once and publish them simultaneously on both Google and Yahoo.

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