I am yet to find many examples of ways in which companies have implemented their Cookie alerts on their website.

This is probably not surprising as it’s yet to come in but the day is drawing near.

Here are some examples.  I will add more as I find them.  Please feel free to suggest your own.

BT.com

Quite sneaky here.  BT have popped the box at the bottom right hand side of the page.  Be quick though as it disappears after 20 seconds.  Also you need to have a lot of time on your hands to decide which cookies to accept and which not to.

Zebedee Creations

These guys have had their policy in place for over a year which is quite surprising.  It reminds me of the moment in Blackadder II where on a voyage of discovery with Captain Rum the water runs out aboard ship and they have to turn to drinking their own urine only to find out that Baldrick has been drinking his own for a year already – he prefers the taste!

Nice simple solution though.

www.eu-cookie-law.com

Simple solution, which disappears after about 10 seconds.  Presumably they think that not actively agreeing is presumed acceptance? Is this legal?

So, what’s the problem?

Nothing, if you haven’t been massively over-zealous about how well optimised your website is. Being vigilant and up to date isn’t a problem, the issue Google is trying to fix relates to those link-fiends who have over-used their ‘white hat’ so much so, that is has turned a miserable shade of grey (In case you’re confused, I refer to this post).

Okay, so what is ‘over-opimisation’?

In a nutshell, it’s the act of doing everything that is possible to optimise your website, in a non-human and bot-like way.

Examples?

Sure, over optimisation can include (and will probably be identified by inclusion of ) any of the following:

• Scraped, copied web content
• Too many ads on the page & not enough original content and copy
• That fact that your website loads faster than the speed of light
• When all links that are inbound and have identical anchor text
• Infinite forum links
• Hidden text (in a colour that matches the background, so it can’t be seen)
• Sites linking to you that are dodgy or malicious in any way

This list is not exhaustive as there are many more examples of things Google might suspect & then penalize you for.

Below, I’ve included a helpful video from SEOMoz’s very own Rand Fishkin that does well to explain what changes should be made to save your site from dropping in the ranks and possibly fading into obscurity online after Google’s next update:

Parting words?

Good luck!

1. Less is more

I could write you a list (but I wont) of the number of photo sharing applications, tools, add-ons and features the internet has to offer, that didn’t just sell for $1 billion dollars to Mark Zuckerberg. So what made Instagram so desirable?

To answer that question, we must look at what it actually does:

• Instagram is a free photo sharing program that allows users to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it online.

That’s it? Yep, that’s it! Whilst many developers often try to create something so innovative, exciting and unheard of, that it is often unnecessary. It’s popularity proves that all people really want to do is upload cool looking pictures to the internet and have people “ooh” and “aah” at them.

2. The company you keep speaks volumes about you

It’s true. It’s been true since you were old enough to know what street-cred meant and cheeky enough to be selective about what shoes your parents bought you for school because the popular kids were wearing them.

Once Instagram attached itself to the iPhone, it was the inception of something brilliant. In business, you are not trying to reach everyone on the planet because that is impossible. Greatness is often born out of a niche. That is exactly why Tesco and Waitrose can exist in harmony – each business appeals to the pockets of a particular consumer and does that really well. That’s all you really need; to please your niche consistently.

3. Make changes before completely giving up

Kevin Systrom created Instagram only 2 years ago in 2010. However before you call him an upstart that got lucky, consider his earlier attempts with Photobox in 2004 that allowed you to send large images to a friend online, followed by Burbn, a useful HTML project allowing you to update people on your location and then Instagram. Each idea was a good one, but Instagram, was and is a great one! Kudos Kevin!

The new directive is a piece of European Union legislation that has been adopted in the UK. The government have now updated the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, which now means that the EU directive is now UK law.

This law requires all website owners to get consent from their website visitors before they can store or retrieve any information on their devices including computers, tablets and mobile devices.

The ICO Updated Guidance For Website Owners

When Does The Law Come Into Force?

The new law comes into force on 26th May 2012. A 1 year grace period was given from May 2011.

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are files that are stored on your computer or device that store information about the user, that websites can use and retrieve at a later date. This may be information such as personalisation options, search history, purchase history, log-in information, and browsing history.

What Are Cookies? – The BBC

Does My Site Use Them?

Almost certainly yes. 92% of UK websites currently use cookies in some capacity, and the vast majority are breaking the law. If you’re using website analytics software like Google Analytics, advertising networks, or e Commerce software then the overwhelming majority of these will be using cookies to store user information.

How Can I Comply?

In order to comply with the legislation your website must obtain explicit clarification before you can store information about them on their devices. An exemption has been made for cookies that are deemed to be vital to the operation of a website. Advertising, analytics and personalisation functions are not exempt however.

Must Try Harder On Cookie Compliance Say ICO – ICO News Release

Key points set out in the amended cookies advice include:

• More detail on what is meant by consent. The advice says ‘consent must involve some form of communication where an individual knowingly indicates their acceptance.’
• The guidance explains that cookies used for online shopping baskets and ones that help keep user data safe are likely to be exempt from complying with the rules.
• However, cookies used for most other purposes including analytical, first and third party advertising, and ones that recognise when a user has returned to a website, will need to comply with the new rules.
• Achieving compliance in relation to third party cookies is one of the most challenging areas. The ICO is working with other European data protection authorities and the industry to assist in addressing the complexities and finding the right answers.
• The ICO will focus its regulatory efforts on the most intrusive cookies or where there is a clear privacy impact on individuals.

EU Cookie Law – 4 Examples Of Sites Already Implementing It – Malcolm Coles

EU Cookie Law, 3 Approaches To Compliance – EConsultancy

Cookie compliance: Econsultancy analyses the latest ICO guidance – EConsultancy

The Cookie Law And Google Analytics

For most non-e commerce website owners the biggest impact is going to be on sites using analytics packages such as Google Analytics. Google Analytics currently sets 4 automatic cookies.

Unfortunately there is no official statement from Google as yet.

Google Analytics EU Cookie Law – Cookielaw.org

Google Analytics and the EU Cookie Law compliance could vary from country to country within the 27 state member areas. The more likely cookie law analytics solution will come via modification of the current Google analytics code, and/or an add-on, special dispensation from the requisite ICO office in that country or a browser solution through Google Chrome for instance. The UKICO office has already published information on using cookies.In time, Google might ask site owners to update their privacy policy, browsers may be engineered to include a universal consent or opt out button, similar to Do-Not-Track (DNT). Admittedly anything is possible.

In the past the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive applied to user data, and this was largely interpreted to relate to e-mail data storage. The  ‘EU cookie directive  builds on this – no surprise you might say in light of the huge increase of seller side platforms (SSP), demand side platforms (DSPs), retargeting, tracking, ad-optimization and real-time bidding and personalization.

Cookie Law – Anaylics Are Illegal, But We Won’t Prosecute You, Probably – Silktide

“Although the Information Commissioner cannot completely exclude the possibility of formal action in any area, it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given to focusing on uses of cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals.”

“Provided clear information is given about their activities we are highly unlikely to prioritise first party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action.”

Google Analytics and The New EU Privacy Law – Advanced Web Metrics

How Will Compliance Affect My Site?

There are some probable negative affects of complying with the new law.

• You may see increased bounce rates from adding warnings to pages, most of your visitors probably won’t even know what a cookie is.
• You will lose valuable analytics data
• Website personalisation will be affected
• Other marketing areas such as email marketing and use of advertising networks will be altered

How the EU Cookie Law Will Affect Email Marketing – Cite

82% of digital marketers think the EU cookie law is bad for the web – EConsultancy

Stupid EU cookie law will hand the advantage to the US, kill our startups stone dead – Techcrunch

What Will Happen If I Fail To Comply?

There is a maximum £500,000 fine  if a breach of the law has caused “substantial damage or substantial distress. It is worth noting that there is a clear distinction to be made between first party cookies set for your own site and third party cookies often used to track behaviour across multiple websites.

“There will not be a wave of knee-jerk formal enforcement action taken against people who are not yet compliant but trying to get there”. – ICO Blog

Ultimately the decision to the actions that you take in order to move towards full compliance has to be your own after reading all of the facts and making a reasonable risk assessment.

EU Cookie Law: UK Government ‘break’ the law they imposed – Code Blog

Datadial sign with Lengow, providers of Multi Channel Software 

I am pleased to announce that Datadial have agreed to provide an automatic feed to Lengow’s powerful multi-channel marketing platform as standard functionality within Datadial’s e-commerce software.  This will now be made available for all new Datadial clients.

Who are Lengow?  Lengow provide a comprehensive multi-channel marketing solution for those clients wanting to trade their products on Ebay, Facebook, Google Shopping, Amazon or many of the other 3rd party shopping channels.

Lengow allows you to manage all your products feeds from one source as well as track ROI.  You no longer need to log on to each distributor’s interface to find out the performance of your various feeds. The Lengow solution takes care of centralising them for you.

Number of clicks, sales or ROI… the Lengow feed management solution gives you a 360° view of your data in real time.

This is just another piece of the jigsaw in making our e-commerce software the most search engine friendly and most marketing friendly software out there.

For more information contact me, Robert Faulkner

PC World teeside park serps

I’m still very intrigued as to how this happened, but after some digging around I think I’ve found a reason why (which I posted on Barry’s post).

1- It’s showing up for ‘mothercare teeside park’ as well (suggesting it’s not ‘one way’). Both results show a Google Places result with the same address and a phone number: 01642 618325

2- A quick search for ’01642 618325 pc world’ returns http://uk.wowcity.com/hartlepool/?what=digital+camera+consumer+products

3- On this page the first result for Mothercare links through to PC World’s homepage (although the details are correct for Mothercare). Note this passes through an internal tracking script and isn’t a direct link.

This looks to me like an error in Wowcity’s listing as the cause of the problem, and probably isn’t anything to do with the folks at PC World or Mothercare (or the agencies they may be working with), but is an interesting fine nonetheless.

If my theory is correct it begs the question- Does Google Places trust it’s citation sources too much? Would love to hear your comments (particularly if you work for PC World, Mothercare and Wowcity!) below.

Their intentions were probably honourable but as the law is a mess but they are happening and YOU DO NEED TO TAKE NOTICE.

The law comes in on May 26th 2012.

There is a £500,000 max fine for non compliance.

It”s all about cookies

Why do cookies always come with consequences? If it isn’t calories you’re trying to avoid it’s breaching someones privacy – you just can’t win!

What are cookies? In short they are a method for tracking what you “do” on a website and where you go afterwards, how you got there etc.   Most cookies are essential for a website to work.  Some admittedly are a bit suspect and it’s not entirely wrong to be doing something about them but the sledgehammer approachby the EU is not the solution we feel.

The new shiny piece of legislation is being enforced as a solution; a way to protect you from the prying eyes of the web owners.

We’re not going to rewrite all the great articles out there already so here are pointers to finding out more about the Cookie Law

• Here’s the official ICO site http://www.ico.gov.uk/
• Here’s a nice well written PDF   Click here to read the PDF on new EU Cookie Law’s
• Just in case the above PDF is too much to bear, you can check out this informative video that breaks the new rules down in just under 3 minutes:

• Here are some examples on how to comply with the law and implement solutions on your site http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9202-eu-cookie-law-three-approaches-to-compliance
• Make the pain go away: For a small price these guys will tell you what  to do and how to do it, and you don’t have to learn anything legal. I think they will be busy this summer http://www.cookielaw.org/

Biting of more then they can chew?

Before you get collared by the EU police you can refer them to their own website which is used to announce the legislation and has been criticised for breaking the very same laws they intend to enforce as pointed out (and illustrated with pretty pictures) by the good folks at Code Blog here: “UK Government ‘break’ the law they imposed“.

So, to summarise: This legislation will apply to nearly everything on the web, will probably reinforce the much dreaded “pop-up” and seems to be an overall nuisance.

Undoubtledly it will affect the big boys first.  They, at the moment, are just playing a waiting game to see what everyone else does.  Noone it seems is going to voluntarily prevent people using their website until the user agrees to their cookie policy.

In conclusion, you can choose to do the following:

• Implement the new functionality to comply with the law ASAP
• Delay the implementation as long as possible
• Ignore the law

What do you think?

Last week Website Monitoring shared some interesting research showing the overall demographics for Google+ users, and whilst the findings are fascinating I wanted to find out how these averages differed by country. Having identified the US, India, Brazil, UK and Canada as being the top five countries based on the estimated number of users, I’ve looked at the relationship status, interests, sex and age of Google Plus users based on the locations stated in their profiles.

This has produced some interesting statistics, such as:

• There are almost as many Indian men as there are Female Americans
• 76.02% of sampled Indian Google+ users are single, and are more interested in forming relationships and dating combined than networking
• Brazilian Google+ users have far more ‘it’s complicated’ relationships than the other four countries sampled
• The trend of 18 – 24 year old users being the most popular age group within Google Plus’ userbase appears to be true across the top five countries sampled, however there is a larger percentage of 18 – 24 year old users in Brazil (69.90%)
• Plus a whole number of other interesting nuggets!

Thus I present:

Embed this- Sharing is Caring!

Google Plus Demographics Infographicfrom Datadial

It is often cited that these star ratings can improve click-through rates by as much as 30%, which will not only increase both organic and paid visitors, but an increase in PPC click-through rate is also likely to reduce your overall cost per click.

Now, while the effects of these are obviously positive when dealing with generic searches, consider the impact on organic brand traffic when seller extensions appeared for one of our clients brand searches.

As you can see, organic brand traffic fell by around 49%. Overall brand traffic remained around the same level, the client was now just paying for a much larger proportion of it via their own PPC ads.

The obvious solution in this case is to turn-off the PPC ads for brand search terms. However in this specific case the situation is compounded by other (legitimate and non-legitimate) companies bidding on their brand term, this includes Amazon, an approved distributor who also benefit from seller extensions  in their own PPC ad, so turning-off the client brand ads would probably result in a large share of their own brand traffic diverting to the Amazon result.

So what can be learnt from this?

• Seller extensions have a dramatic uplift in click-through rate
• Protect your brand/trademark results from unauthorised bidders
• Prevent affiliates from bidding on your trademarked terms
• Google are making a lot of money from selling companies their own brand traffic

Image Source

I just think that not enough people are seeing the silver lining. Sure, they see the pouring rain right before they complain about catching a cold after trawling the high street for 5 hours on a Saturday. I think it’s great, maybe even a blessing, that people grumble about the horrific conditions – for online merchants wanting to capitalise, it’s not far from terrific and I’ll tell you why:

• Road Traffic
• Parking Charges
• Nowhere to actually park
• Lack of public toilets
• Wayward germs flying about the communal air
• Being bombarded with enough promotion and advertising to last you a lifetime
• There not being a basket left, or having to use that tyrant shopping trolley with wheels that have a life of their own
• Screaming children zooming about the floorspace
• Queuing for longer than should be legally possible
• Having to put up with some idiot using a card for a less than £2 purchase
• Having to deal with being classed as the idiot for using a card for a less than £2 purchase

You get the idea…but, if you do get the idea, why is your site still a part of the problem, rather than the solution? The points above may highlight the things that make people more Scrooge than Santa over the holidays, but if my virtual reality mirrors my reality in terms of these horrors, you’ve just doubled my stress. Let’s explore this with equivalents:

• Road Traffic
  

Overload of traffic causing your website to crash

A different kind of traffic, but even though I’m not stuck in my car in the middle of the A4, I still cant get to where I want to with your substandard server. Upgrade, to a service that doen’t fail under the pressure of more than 100 people accessing your site, or I wont be coming back.

_____________________

• Parking Charges

Hidden charges (VAT, delivery, overseas)

After a swift parallel park into a spot so tight Hamilton would be impressed, the one thing to ruin that triumph is the £2.50 p/h charge for the space, up until 8pm (even on a Sunday these days) when I know that I’ll be at least 2 hours and when I know that the shops close at 8. I’d be happy if council understood that since I’ll be blowing my wages in this area in that time, clearly promoting the district, parking should be free, or reasonable, or well communicated. In comparison, only too many times have I bought something online, only to be faced with a tubby postman telling me I can’t have the product unless I cough up another 20 quid. Again, I won’t be shopping there again.

_____________________

• Nowhere to park

Nowhere to be seen

If I cant park, I wont park. If I don’t park, I drive elsewhere, which means wherever I intended to go, changes. If your SEO sucks, I wont find your site. If I don’t find your site, it doesn’t exist, at least not to me. Sort that out, please.

_____________________

• Lack of public toilets

A “timeout/start again” situation

When your bursting for the loo, in a shop, restaurant or wherever and there isn’t one, you’ll find one somewhere…else. The only thing is that, if you need to “go” before you’ve paid, eaten or whatever – and there’s a queue and you leave – you join the end of the queue and you deal with that. You might not join, if you grow annoyed at the fact that establishment doesn’t provide a toilet and the one you found sells an equivalent of what you want. If the website I am on “times-out” too quickly, and I have to keep starting again, I won’t be coming back.

_____________________

• Wayward germs flying about the communal air

Your site looks as though it needs a disclaimer

Someone coughs into the air and does not cover their mouth. Disgusting. There’s a possibility you could catch a cold now, or the flu. Similarly, if I enter your spammy little site and it is complete with badly written (illegal) paid-for reviews where everything has a 5-star rating, something needs to be downloaded in order for the site to run, some software with techy jargon is installed onto my computer and the checkout system sends me to ‘Timbuktu’ to enter my personal details and information…I wont be coming back.

_____________________

• Being bombarded with enough promotion and advertising to last you a lifetime

Adsense, Wordads, Adcenter…

A simple walk through Regent street at Christmas is enough to make you dizzy. Between the flashing lights and the flashing ads, its a wonder anyone  can walk in a straight line. On your site, too many ads on a page is bad for SEO. Google has already sent in the panda a few times to teach naughty webmasters a lesson on this, so why are there still pages like this?

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• There not being a basket left, or having to use that tyrant shopping trolley with a life of it’s own

I can’t carry my goods like this!

My previous post made my feelings clear on the dodgy checkout process online – but I need to get there first. If there are problems with the process of carrying my goods; disappearing basket items, not calculating bulk goods so I lose out on a discount, only telling me there is no stock for that particular product until I am at checkout – I wont be coming back.

_____________________

• Screaming children zooming about the floorspace

I didn’t ask for that noise, thanks

The first thing I do when I load up a site blaring any music at me I didn’t expect or ask for, is click “close.” I don’t want that. I click close for the same reason Vue have created screenings for movies that only over 18′s can attend after a certain time at night -  not because the movie is unsuitable for youngins but more because that crowd doesn’t want to share a room with said youngins. Choice. if you are going to have pop-up videos, music streaming from the site or anything, I urge you to give me a choice of stopping these streams or, I wont be coming back.

_____________________

• Queuing for longer than should be legally possible
• Having to put up with some idiot using a card for a less than £2 purchase
  

Quick and easy please

Amazon’s “1-click” is great because it’s quick. Amazon have blended so many desirable e-commerce features into one site that it’s so easy to spend money on things you wont read or use after the initial excitement of it being a bargain has passed. Sites selling me anything that boxes me into one mode of payment I am not used to, sites being badly configured so that I have to click back & forth, re-enter details or open new pages in tabs rather than a pop-up window, cause me extra hassle. You could only really get away with this before the Amazon’s and the eBay’s of the world were born. Cause me any unnecessary hassle and, I wont be coming back.

_____________________

Outrageous extra’s

• Having to deal with being classed as the idiot for using a card for a less than £2 purchase

If I’m the person being huffed and puffed at because I don’t have the change or don’t want to split a £20 note on something that’s 49p – the huffs & puffs are as far as it goes. If online, I’m buying something for 49p and the shipping is £4.99, something is wrong with that picture. Please allow shipping to reflect the cost of the product in question. People can spot a rip-off from afar and if like me, they feel cheated – they wont be coming back.

Check out the infographic below for some interesting and helpful Christmas e-com shopping stats:

Infograpic by Deals.org.uk

I hope this post inspired you. Happy Holidays!