Google through changes
No Country for Google+
Google has been refurbishing and improving it’s social media effort for nearly a year now (June 30th is G+ birthday). While one of the digital rules states, that work on project is never done, Google’s changes can be considered going far beyond cosmetic improvements.
Mixed feelings
During latter period, the network has grown to over 170 million users to date, with nearly 30% of the audience engaging daily and 60% returning at least once a month according to Google. Though don’t let statistics fool you, these figures are boosted up by visits fluxed by bounce rates and clever positioning near Google’s powerful products. Average Google+ user actually spends only 1,5 minute.
With last changes, to address latter issues, Google has not only made its platform look simpler and more beautiful moving towards a very minimalist design. It has also taken on notable steps to pushing users in one way or another to join Google+.
+Plus buttons all around the Internet and integration into such popular services as Youtube has caused a backlash among the users.
People say that Google should stick to innovation and new products and not trail existing projects and ideas.
We couldn’t agree more and though there is no real point in counting Google plus users in the Baltics (simply because most of them a virtually unactive) - the future for Google+ is not quite written.
The Misspelling effect
We’ve all seen the common corrections that Google applies to search results if mistype appears. Well, in 30 days Google will roll out a change to the way their algorithm reacts to “Exact” and “Phrase” match types in organic search results.
At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling and the longer the query, the higher the rate. Thus, two people searching for the same thing often use slightly different variations of the phrase.
Starting in mid-May, Phrase and Exact match keywords will match close variants including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations.
Google claims that this change will be broadly beneficial for users and advertisers.
On average, the new matching behavior increased AdWords search click by 3% with comparable CPCs.
Clearly Google expects to achieve an increase in clicks for most advertisers. While 3% may not seem substantial, it can quickly lower the overall effect of Adwords advertising. Even with more clicks leading to an increase of visitors to your site, there is still the need to review the quality of these visitors. While Google may be fulfilling “user intent” by connecting misspellings and stemmings, you will have to track closely in your analytics whether these visitors actually turn into buying customers or just increase your page views and bounce rate with no increase in sales.
