This is great recognition for lots of hard work and dedication from all departments.

We obviously celebrated in style with a little help from Brewdog

More information can be found here

http://www.latitudegroup.com/blog/latitude-wins-best-ppc-and-seo-agency-at-how-do-awards/

and here http://www.how-do.co.uk/north-west-media-news/other-media/how-do-awards-2012-and-the-winners-are…-20120427100957146

For over 10 years we have continued to hone our skills and best practice on tools and platforms such as AdWords, Facebook and Google Analytics allowing us not only to advise our clients on getting the most from their online business, but also offer expert in-house online marketing training and consultancy.

The main areas which we provide training are detailed in our training section, however we will always put together bespoke training to suit a company’s business needs and requirements. Therefore, we can cover a mixture of all of the training sessions we offer, or a selection if this is more suitable.

We also offer training for Affiliate Marketing, Display Advertising, Writing Web Content and Facebook & Twitter.

Recently we had a Social Media Training day at Salford University in Media City, Manchester with Mark Johnson (Head of Training at Latitude) and received some very good feedback from all the executives who attended the event.

Last day of #ilmeast and we’re kicking off with hyperlocal.

#ilmeast interview with David Hornik about his investments in local media services.

Time for the Ted Leonis keynote

Online local political advertising

Social media platforms and their impact on publishing

Attempting to create better version of local search than Google

The Boom in Social Local Media

Talking about “Big Data”

Social Advertising

Big session on Mobile and Local

National Advertisers, Targetting Locally

Time for +Nitin Mangtani to talk about Google Offers

+Christine Merritt talking about Google actively encouraging SMEs to work with partners rather than Google direct.

Follow our tweets, G+ posts, FB posts tomorrow for more live updates!

The Case for Local Advertising

AMEX  and the social media platforms

AOL Local  and Patch

Exploring the Deals Marketplace

Beyond deals – Loyalty and Big Data

Boston.com and the Boston Globe

Follow our tweets, G+ posts, FB posts tomorrow for more live updates!

These changes are only for those singed into Google.com and searching in English – but Google will let you know when the changes apply to you, you’ll see this:

The new format could make life easier, as you’ll be seeing more targeted content, as you’ll see privately shared links and listing from friends and family. This will be combined with content from across the web, but now it will all be in one listing, rather than two.

What’s it going to look like?

The listing are based on your own behaviour and social connections, there will also be content that has been shared with you through the Google+ social network.

The new toggle on the right hand side of the screen will allow users to switch between personalised and non-personalised results.

Another change to the results page is, people with Google+ accounts will see it Google+ content more heavily highlighted on their search result. For those logged in, you will be able to see friend and family.

There will be more room on the results pages, dedicated to displaying material from the Google+ profiles, such as pictures and recent updates.

What are the concerns?

Many people would welcome the changes; however some are concerned about privacy issues.  The main worry is that privately shared content will be publically accessible on the search page, Google have said this is not the case; although it may appear public because it is on the results page, it will only be published on your results page. The new format might also cause concerns, as it is making private content more visible to friend and family than sharing may have initially intended.

The changes will happen by default, as Google have adopted an opt-out approach. They think it will make for ‘a much better user experience’. You can permanently opt-out through the Search Settings area on Google. You can also opt-out on a per-search basis by clicking the globe on the toggle.  This means the users will still be able to see ‘normal’ results, if they want them.

Wherever your views on Google, adding a social element for user interaction seems to be the way forward, as we have seen with Facebook + Spotify. Although Facebook and Twitter feeds are not yet on search results pages, watch this space; the next step seem to be uniting personal, private, public and social!

Pinterest attracts almost 12 million US and UK-based users a month (up to 80% are women aged under 45) Australian and Asian consumers, too, are now flocking to the site. Interestingly, Pinterest has little attraction among teens so it’s a good platform to target young technologically savvy adults.

How does it work?

Pinterest is best described as an online bookmarking site that allows users to pin pictures/videos/articles they find on the web that they find interesting. All the likes, comments, pins and re-pins are recorded on your profile, known as a pinboard, thereby connecting people based on their interests rather than friendships or professional networks.

These boards are arranged by topics, could be anything relevant to your company for example “Meet The Team” or “Favourite Products”. Most importantly, this enables businesses to humanise their brands by injecting some personality into their offering.

The brand recently told Mashable.com that Pinterest is “absolutely” driving traffic to its website, but that the team is still working to determine the best metrics for Pinterest – although this isn’t a challenge limited to Pinterest. And while the creators of the platform haven’t yet come clean on how they plan to make money from the site, they do have a few rules, including ‘try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion’. But marketing savvy brands should be able to use it easily. Some of the big brands like Coke, Ogilvy, Burberry are very active on Pinterest.

Latitude Express started its Pinterest account very recently too, follow us on Pinterest!

Impression Share (IS) is the percentage of impressions you received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Eligibility is based on your ad’s targeting settings, approval statuses, bids, and Quality Score.

Changes to Impression Share Metrics in Google AdWords

Up until recently impression share metrics were only available at campaign level in AdWords. At the end of January 2012 Google rolled out Ad Group Level Impression Share for both the Search and Display Networks. This new feature enables advertisers to better understand how individual ad groups are performing as well as identify ad groups which are not capturing the majority of available impressions and therefore require more funds.

With the introduction of ad group level Impression Share (IS) there are three new columns that can be added to the ad groups tab within AdWords. These are: IS, Lost IS (rank) and Exact match IS. Lost IS (rank) shows the percentage of impressions lost due to ad rank and Exact match IS the percentage of impressions you received for searches that exactly matched your keyword divided by the estimated number of exact match impressions you were eligible to receive.

In addition to bringing the Impression Share (IS) data to ad group level Google have also updated their algorithms it uses to calculate IS metrics. All existing campaign-level information has been updated back to May 2011 which means that you will no longer be able to see IS data prior to this time. The new updated algorithm will also make for a more accurate campaign IS since it is now being updated once a day around noon Pacific Time, so depending on when you run the report, the impression share data may not reflect the reports for the current day.

My name is Andrew Harris and I am the operations director for Latitude Express. We are a digital marketing agency based in the North West and we are keen to support local university to grow and recruit the best talent. However, based on personal experience while I was looking for my first job since graduating (it wasn’t that long ago!!) I found many hurdles which I needed to overcome before being accepted. The main hurdle was that most companies are looking for individuals with experience. Most students have minimal experience, especially when the industry (digital) is so young. This issue is one of the main reasons why Latitude Express is keen to promote and support the following opportunity:

The Online Marketing Challenge 2012 powered by Google

The competition is open to all students and the global winners have a chance to win a great prize – a trip to Google headquarters in California. More information about this challenge can be found here

http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/

Free support from Latitude Express

If you are keen to take on this challenge, contact  your University, form your group and then contact me at Latitude (andrew.harris@latitude-express.com) and I will arrange for some free training. Our training will give you some best practise guidelines and the tools you need to succeed.

Benefit

There are many benefits for taking up this online marketing challenge. Firstly, you will have some free training from Latitude Express.  You will then gain a great chance of winning a cool prize if you are successful, but most importantly, you will gain some great experience. This experience will give you a great chance to land that perfect role in any digital marketing agency.

Some key dates

Key Dates for GOMC 2012

Professor registration:

November 15, 2011 to May 1, 2012

Student registration:

January 31, 2012 to May 11, 2012

3 Week AdWords campaign or 6 Week Google+ Page window:

January 31, 2012 – June 8, 2012

Deadline for uploading campaign report:

June 15, 2012

Global and regional winners announcement:

Late July, 2012

Social Impact Award winners announcement:

Late August, 2012

Social Media Award winners announcement:

Late August, 2012

The Manchester Digital Talent Day was a non-profit event organized by Manchester Digital on 22^nd February at Manchester Town Hall from 12 30 pm to 3 30 pm. Latitude has attended several such events in the past but this was the first time we witnessed such a huge volume of students. The best part about this event was, all the students who attended either had a digital marketing background or were interested in digital marketing. Most of the students were knowledgeable and asked really intelligent questions which were very impressive. The venue was very grand and all the big names in the digital marketing industry were present there. It was also a good platform to network for businesses in order to grow their client base or develop new business relations. The whole event was a big success but the only person who we missed was Express Eddie, but unfortunately he was sick so couldn’t attend the event with us.

For pictures from the event and more information about latitude or just to have a chat, log on to our Facebook page and follow us on twitter.