I had lunch with my father the other day, and I explained this series as well as I could to someone who didn’t start programming when he was 11. His immediate reaction was, “Why are there so many different formats? Why can’t everybody just agree on a single format? It is political, or technical, or both?” The short answer is, it’s both. The history of video in any medium — and especially since the explosion of amateur digital video — has been marred by a string of companies who wanted to use container formats and video codecs as tools to lock content producers and content consumers into their little fiefdoms. Own the format, own the future. And when I say “history” — well, it’s still going on. Tried to play a Windows Media Video on Mac OS X lately? The codec and container support is out there, but it’s not baked in. Want to watch movie trailers on Apple.com? Please install QuickTime. And so forth and so on. The only thing that was pre-installed on both platforms was Flash, so when a few startups dipped their toes into the Internet video waters, the ones that used Flash Video won despite it being an objectively inferior codec. (Some revision of Flash 9 added support for H.264 video, AAC audio, and the MP4 container, which is what YouTube HD uses.)

So that’s the politics. But there are also technical barriers. As with all engineering, video encoding is primarily about constraints. I can think of 10 just off the top of my head:

1. CPU capacity for decoding and playing in real time. This is one of the most important constraints, since video is meant to be watched in real time. That sounds simple, but it’s incredibly complex. Every video you’ve ever watched in your entire life had to be decoded and played in real time. Otherwise it stutters and the viewing experience sucks. And we’re talking about video here; if the viewing experience sucks, there’s nothing left. Some codecs are just more complex than others, and that translates into higher system requirements to decode videos in real time. As I’ve mentioned before, some codecs are now decoded by specialized hardware. iPhones have a little chip inside them that understands H.264 Baseline Profile; without that, the iPhone would need a Core 2 Duo processor to play movies, and it would have a battery life of 10 minutes.
2. Codec compatibility. Normal people won’t download codecs or plug-ins just to watch a dog on a skateboard, or even to watch a trailer for a $100 million blockbuster. (Sadly, they will download plug-ins for porn, but those are invariably trojan horses. Or so I’ve read. Moving on…) The phone in your pocket can probably play AMR ringtones, maybe MP3 ringtones, but probably not Vorbis ringtones (unless you have an Android phone) — and you probably couldn’t download new codecs even if you wanted to (which, I must reiterate, nobody wants to). Apple and Real Networks tried for years to corner the web video market, but 99% of schmucks with a browser have Flash, so Flash video won on the web. Meanwhile, Firefox 3.1 will ship with support for the <video> element but will only support Theora and Vorbis in an Ogg container — even if your underlying operating system ships with other codecs.
3. CPU capacity for encoding. Encoding takes a long time. Taking my home movie from iMovie to a DVD used to take 8 hours on a Powerbook G4 laptop. These days you can rip a DVD movie with Xvid in 30 minutes, or you can rip it with a more complex codec with all optional features turned on, and maybe it’ll still take 8 hours. It’ll look better, but will it look 16 times better? If you’re only doing it once, maybe you don’t care. If you’re running YouTube and people are uploading 13 hours of video every minute, maybe you do. CPU cycles aren’t free; at that scale, they’re not even cheap. (That’s a real statistic, by the way; I got it from the page on the Google intranet entitled “What can we tell non-Googlers?” and it’s accurate as of September 2008.)
4. Acceptable delay between recording and delivery. In my own experience, videos I’ve uploaded on YouTube are available within minutes, which is just mind-boggling when you consider the volume. If you’re re-encoding a live stream, even a few minutes delay is probably unacceptable. That means you’ll need a faster encoder, a less complex codec, or lower quality settings.
5. Audience size. It’s not a big secret that lots of video on the Internet looks like crap. Partly that’s because the video uploader uploaded crappy video, but it’s also because most Internet videos are only watched by a few people, and it’s just not a worthwhile tradeoff to spend 8 hours re-encoding it. On the other hand, if you’re mastering a DVD that’ll get sold to 10 million people, you’ll probably use higher quality settings.
6. Screen dimensions. DVDs can’t store high-def 1920 x 1080 video because the standard doesn’t allow for it, which makes perfect sense because it was designed around the screen resolution of standard-def TVs. Blu-Ray ups the limit, but there’s still a limit. Screen sizes vary more for PC video, but there will always be practical upper limits depending on your audience.
7. My bandwidth. If you’re streaming or downloading video, some percentage of your audience is probably living in a third-world country like the United States, with limited broadband access, slow speeds, and monthly bandwidth caps. Larger file size = longer wait to play = fewer videos watched overall.
8. Your bandwidth. Obviously every bit I download is a bit that you upload, and bandwidth ain’t free either. “When I get a little money I buy bandwidth; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” Or something like that.
9. Hard limits on storage size. As I mentioned before, physical media has upper limits on total size. Commercial DVDs can hold upwards of 9 GB, which seems like a lot but really isn’t. Blu-Ray maxes out at 50 GB, which seems like a lot but really isn’t.
10. Patents / licensing costs. Did I mention that most popular video codecs are patent-encumbered? This is why Wikimedia uses Theora exclusively, and why Firefox can ship a native Theora decoder and but won’t ever ship H.264.

…and that’s the short list.

All of which leads me to the Zen of video encoding, which is this:

There is no right or wrong. There is only what works and what doesn’t.

If you can find even one combination of tools, delivery devices, and target platforms that satisfies your constraints and still accomplishes your goals, congratulations. You’re ahead of 99% of the people who’ve tried.

The most important consideration in video encoding is choosing a video codec. A future article will talk about how to pick the one that’s right for you, but for now I just want to introduce the concept and describe the playing field. (This information is likely to go out of date quickly; future readers, be aware that this was written in December 2008.)

When you talk about “watching a video,” you’re probably talking about a combination of one video stream, one audio stream, and possibly some subtitles or captions. But you probably don’t have two different files; you just have “the video.” Maybe it’s an AVI file, or an MP4 file. These are just container formats, like a ZIP file that contains multiple kinds of files within it. The container format defines how to store the video and audio streams in a single file (and subtitles too, if any).

When you “watch a video,” your video player is doing several things at once:

1. Interpreting the container format to find out which video and audio tracks are available, and how they are stored within the file so that it can find the data it needs to decode next
2. Decoding the video stream and displaying a series of images on the screen
3. Decoding the audio stream and sending the sound to your speakers
4. Possibly decoding the subtitle stream as well, and showing and hiding phrases at the appropriate times while playing the video

A video codec is an algorithm by which a video stream is encoded, i.e. it specifies how to do #2 above. Your video player decodes the video stream according to the video codec, then displays a series of images, or “frames,” on the screen. Most modern video codecs use all sorts of tricks to minimize the amount of information required to display one frame after the next. For example, instead of storing each individual frame (like a screenshot), they will only store the differences between frames. Most videos don’t actually change all that much from one frame to the next, so this allows for high compression rates, which results in smaller file sizes. (There are many, many other complicated tricks too, which I’ll dive into in a future article.)

There are lossy and lossless video codecs; today’s article will only deal with lossy codecs. A lossy video codec means that information is being irretrievably lost during encoding. Like copying an audio cassette tape, you’re losing information about the source video, and degrading the quality, every time you encode. Instead of the “hiss” of an audio cassette, a re-re-re-encoded video may look blocky, especially during scenes with a lot of motion. (Actually, this can happen even if you encode straight from the original source, if you choose a poor video codec or pass it the wrong set of parameters.) On the bright side, lossy video codecs can offer amazing compression rates, and many offer ways to “cheat” and smooth over that blockiness during playback, to make the loss less noticeable to the human eye.

There are tons of video codecs. Today I’ll discuss five modern lossy video codecs: MPEG-4 ASP, H.264, VC-1, Theora, and Dirac.

MPEG-4 ASP

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile.” MPEG-4 ASP was developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2001. You may have heard of DivX, Xvid, or 3ivx; these are all competing implementations of the MPEG-4 ASP standard. Xvid is open source; DivX and 3ivx are closed source. The company behind DivX has had some mainstream success in branding “DivX” as synonymous with “MPEG-4 ASP.” For example, this “DivX-certified” DVD player can actually play most MPEG-4 ASP videos in an AVI container, even if they were created with a competing encoder. (To confuse things even further, the company behind DivX has now created their own container format.)

MPEG-4 ASP is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered through the MPEG LA group. MPEG-4 ASP video can be embedded in most popular container formats, including AVI, MP4, and MKV.

H.264

a.k.a. “MPEG-4 part 10,” a.k.a. “MPEG-4 AVC,” a.k.a. “MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding.” H.264 was also developed by the MPEG group and standardized in 2003. It aims to provide a single codec for low-bandwidth, low-CPU devices (cell phones); high-bandwidth, high-CPU devices (modern desktop computers); and everything in between. To accomplish this, the H.264 standard is split into “profiles,” which each define a set of optional features that trade complexity for file size. Higher profiles use more optional features, offer better visual quality at smaller file sizes, take longer to encode, and require more CPU power to decode in real-time.

To give you a rough idea of the range of profiles, Apple’s iPhone supports Baseline profile, the AppleTV set-top box supports Baseline and Main profiles, and Adobe Flash on a desktop PC supports Baseline, Main, and High profiles. YouTube (owned by Google, my employer) now uses H.264 to encode high-definition videos, playable through Adobe Flash; YouTube also provides H.264-encoded video to mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Also, H.264 is one of the video codecs mandated by the Blu-Ray specification; Blu-Ray discs that use it generally use the High profile.

Most non-PC devices that play H.264 video (including iPhones and standalone Blu-Ray players) actually do the decoding on a dedicated chip, since their main CPUs are nowhere near powerful enough to decode the video in real-time. Recent high-end desktop graphics cards also support decoding H.264 in hardware. There are a number of competing H.264 encoders, including the open source x264 library. The H.264 standard is patent-encumbered; licensing is brokered through the MPEG LA group. H.264 video can be embedded in most popular container formats, including MP4 (used primarily by Apple’s iTunes Store) and MKV (used primarily by video pirates).

VC-1

VC-1 evolved from Microsoft’s WMV9 codec and was standardized in 2006. It is primarily used and promoted by Microsoft for high-definition video, although, like H.264, it has a range of profiles to trade complexity for file size. Also like H.264, it is mandated by the Blu-Ray specification, and all Blu-Ray players are required to be able to decode it. The VC-1 codec is patent-encumbered, with licensing brokered through the MPEG LA group.

Wikipedia has a brief technical comparison of VC-1 and H.264; Microsoft has their own comparison; Multimedia.cx has a pretty Venn diagram outlining the similarities and differences. Multimedia.cx also discusses the technical features of VC-1. I also found this history of VC-1 and H.264 to be interesting (as well as this rebuttal).

VC-1 is designed to be container-independent, although it is most often embedded in an ASF container. An open source decoder for VC-1 video was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project, and the resulting code was added to the multi-faceted ffmpeg library.

Theora

Theora evolved from the VP3 codec and has subsequently been developed by the Xiph.org Foundation. Theora is a royalty-free codec and is not encumbered by any known patents other than the original VP3 patents, which have been irrevocably licensed royalty-free. Although the standard has been “frozen” since 2004, the Theora project (which includes an open source reference encoder and decoder) only hit 1.0 in November 2008.

Theora video can be embedded in any container format, although it is most often seen in an Ogg container. All major Linux distributions support Theora out-of-the-box, and Mozilla Firefox 3.1 will include native support for Theora video in an Ogg container. And by “native”, I mean “available on all platforms without platform-specific plugins.” You can also play Theora video on Windows or on Mac OS X after installing Xiph.org’s open source decoder software.

The reference encoder included in Theora 1.0 is widely criticized for being slow and poor quality, but Theora 1.1 will include a new encoder that takes better advantage of Theora’s features, while staying backward-compatible with current decoders. (Info: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, source code.)

Dirac

Dirac was developed by the BBC to provide a royalty-free alternative to H.264 and VC-1 that the BBC could use to stream high-definition television content in Great Britain. Like H.264, Dirac aims to provide a single codec for the full spectrum of very low- and very high-bandwidth streaming. Dirac is not encumbered by any known patents, and there are two open source implementations, dirac-research (the BBC’s reference implementation) and Schroedinger (optimized for speed).

The Dirac standard was only finalized in 2008, so there is very little mainstream use yet, although the BBC did use it internally during the 2008 Olympics. Dirac-encoded video tracks can be embedded in several popular container formats, including MP4, Ogg, MKV, and AVI. VLC 0.9.2 (released in September 2008) can play Dirac-encoded video within an Ogg or MP4 container.

And on and on…
Of course, this is only scratching the surface of all the available video codecs. Video encoding goes way back, but my focus in this series is on the present and near-future, not the past. If you like, you can read about MPEG-2 (used in DVDs), MPEG-1 (used in Video CDs), older versions of Microsoft’s WMV family, Sorenson, Indeo, and Cinepak.

According to Facebook, 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news blogs etc) are shared each month on the social network, with no sign of slowing.

But how can you manage the flood of information? Here’s is a list of tools and services available, which help you manage your websites and blogs. If I’ve missed any obvious ones, or indeed obscure ones, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Blog Grader shows you how effective your blog is at marketing your brand and see how you stack up against other blogs out there.
• Blogtronix is an advanced social networking tool and micro-blogging site, which helps people in a community, company or group exchange short multimedia messages across the web. Blogtronix is best suited for internal communities, such as companies who are looking to help their employees connect, ask and answer questions, and share work and content.
• Disqus is a social-commenting tool. Disqus allows your readers to include media such as YouTube videos in their comments, receive alerts when their posts have been responded to, and reply directly from their email.
• FeedBurner is a popular analytics package, now owned by Google, which allows you to analyse, optimise, publicise and monetise your RSS feeds.
• Google Analytics, although not specifically for social media, it can provide invaluable insight into which social media channels are driving traffic to your site. In the latest version Google now provide scripts and reports to track Facebook Likes, Twitter “tweet this” and Google +1.
• IntelBuilder Social Media Platform is a service that allows you to manage your website or blog by automatically updating your social networks when you update your website content, distributing to RSS feeds, submitting to bookmarking sites and tracking your readership.
• IntenseDebate, much like Disqus, is a comment system that enhances and encourages conversation on your blog or website.
• Janrain is a tool that allows visitors to your site to easily share your content across their social networks. Janrain also lets visitors sign in to your site with their Facebook, Twitter or other social accounts and tracks their behaviour to help you provide a personalised experience for each visitor.
• Sharetronix is run on the same platform to Blogtronix but is more suited to external communities. In addition to being a micro-blogging site, Sharetronix integrates with Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds, allows for one-click publishing and is SEO optimised so that your content will be easily found by interested parties.
• Twitterfeed is a tool that monitors your RSS feed and updates your Facebook and Twitter accounts when you have a new blog post.

Page Speed analyses the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster. Page Speed is available from any browser. This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.

The suggestions are divided into High, Medium and Low priority. The test, appropriately, runs in a matter of seconds. This site scored well with a grade of 91 out of 100. Here’s what Google suggests should be done to make up the 9 points:

That’s an analysis of desktop page speed; you can select to also run a mobile speed report.

There are also page speed extensions for Firefox and Chrome, as well as other code and instructions for developers on that page.

Anticipating the need to find video content online, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) have created their own video search engines. These spider the web for unique video content and publish it in their video sections.

An interesting and cool result of this is that, instead of posting normal text listings, the search engines publish thumbnail screenshots of the videos on the search engine results pages (SERP). The thumbnail enables users to see what kind of video they can expect to see, before actually viewing it.

Universal search — a system that blends image, video, news, blog, local and traditional search to form a more complete experience and result set — is now integral to all three major search engines. Listings that have video thumbnails have been proven to receive a much higher click-through rate than traditional text listings.

So, how can you get your pages listed with video thumbnails?

1. Embed your video onto your web page using any number of methods. For example, you could use Flash video, Windows media video, Quicktime, Ogg Theora amongst others. As a point to note, you shouldn’t use a third-party video site — such as YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion — for this; the video must be unique to your website.
2. Create a thumbnail of the video for indexing.
3. Create four meta tags on the web page that displays the video:

   <meta name="medium" content="video" />
   <meta name="video_type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" />

   Replace application/x-shockwave-flash with whichever video format you’re using.

   <meta name="video_height" content="280" />
   <meta name="video_width" content="460" />

   Replace the height and width dimensions with those specific to your video.

4. Create a video sitemap and submit it to the search engines. Google and Yahoo have a clear video submission process, whereas Bing does not, so you should submit to Bing in the normal way.

If your page is already in position one for a keyword, that listing will gain a thumbnail once you have optimised it for video. You’ll also get increased time on site and possibly page views, afterwhich you can develop a better conversion-rate strategy.

Define the Objective

Don’t let Nestle’s Facebook Page issues happen to you. Determine how you want to portray your brand socially. You should also develop a plan for engagement in more routine situations. This includes knowing the goals, knowing the business and knowing the voice.

Before beginning anything, the first step is discussing the goals and objectives at the highest level. It may sound simple, but the most important attribute to display here is the ability to listen. Then base the strategy around several big ideas that help solve the challenges unique to each project.

Consider these scenarios: when a blogger raves about your product, how do you turn this goodwill into collaboration that benefits both parties? How do you create customer advocacy programs? How do you internalise and execute on feedback about your, or your competitor’s product? How do you deal with disaffected customers? What about irate bloggers? You need to think through all these scenarios and figure out how you will activate the right resources within the organisation.

Decide Where and What to Monitor

The notion of the social customer should reflect not only your current paying customers, but also potential customers and industry thought leaders. Monitoring can help you figure out where these people are, and therefore what channels are best for you to listen to and engage.

Monitoring is keyword-based, and thus selection of the right keywords is important. At the very least, you should be tracking your company name, brand names, product names, names of key executives, competitor names, competitive product names, industry keywords, and your tagline or most recent marketing efforts (e.g. Did you run a special promotion for St Valentine’s Day, Mother’s day or August Bank Holiday?).

Implement

Even the best plans go unrealised without resources. Implementation is something to think about on the front end. Many people consider social media “free”, but in reality it’s a real commitment and requires a lot of time and attention.

Test and Track

After you implement, you need to make sure you’re paying attention to successes, failures and your brand perception.

Conversations are happening across many channels and social networks all over the world. To make matters even more complicated, the signal-to-noise ratio is not in your favor. This is why your monitoring must be intelligent and actionable. You should be triaging all the social media messages that come across your field of vision, so that you can focus on what’s most important.

Some good tools for keeping track of your brand online include:

• Alterian
• Brandwatch
• Google Analytics
• Radian6
• Sprout Social
• Trackur
• Visible Technologies

The decision to utilise a sub-domain, sub-directory or even a microsite is simply an architectural decision, but one that is often compounded with a marketing decision. In general, sub-directories are used to describe what individual pages are about while sub-domains and microsites are used to describe what an entire site is about.

When to use sub-directories

• Sub-directories are useful for organising content into meaningful groupings with descriptive URLs. If you have a meaningful taxonomy, then sub-directories are a good way to make your URLs more search friendly.
• For relatively small websites, i.e. not the BBCs and CNNs of this world, keeping your content in one place will help your website build trust and authority. The more trust and authority a website is able to garner with the search engines, the easier it becomes to rank new and related content.
• For the less technically savvy, sub-directories are easier to manage than sub-domains since they are generally created as part of the website’s page hierarchy. Furthermore, many CMSs don’t support the ability to publish across different domains out-of-the-box.
• Google Webmasters tools allow you to set basic geo-location preferences to sub-directories. The idea is to create new pseudo-website listings that also include sub-directories. For example, the www.domain.com listing could have www.domain.com/uk for the UK, www.domain.com/es for Spain and so on for each geographic location.

When to use sub-domains

• Sub-domains are useful for organising content that is otherwise unrelated. Take Google for example, they have a news product at news.google.com, a maps product at maps.google.com and a email product at mail.google.com. Since they are fundamentally different from each other and Google’s main search product, they aren’t held under the same domain.
• Sub-domains allow you to target regional markets more effectively. Sub domains are easier to market to specific geographical regions. For instance you can assign an IP address to a sub-domain and set a geographical preference in Google’s Webmaster tools for each sub-domain (sub-directories can have their geo-preference set but can’t be assigned an IP in another country, which might also be a signal of geo-location). For example, the www.domain.com listing could have uk.domain.com for the UK, es.domain.com for Spain and so on for each geographic location.
• If you already have a well established domain and want to expand out into other areas not completely related to your main website’s activities then a sub-domain may well be a good option. At the same time, people associate the sub-domain with your main domain’s brand, which means it can be easy to build up momentum on a vertical related to your main site. This is what the web giants Google and Yahoo, Sky and the BBC do successfully, but smaller websites can do the same. You often see this when the third-party functionality is “plugged into” an existing site, such as a payment gateway, events and job boards.

When to use microsites

Like sub-domains, microsites have an important position in the overall debate.

• If you have a new product or service that you potentially want to sell off or brand completely differently from your main business offering, a microsite makes a lot of sense. Microsites are really just a stripped down website, but as the product or service develops, so will the website and associated brand and it will take on trust and authority of its own.
• Microsites offer the ability to completely separate your main brand from the new product, service or promotion. This is useful if you’re pushing a content piece that has little to no association with your site and you don’t want the potential branding confusion or commercial association to hinder link and user growth.
• Microsites can be powerful if you have an exact match domain name for a particular keyword you’re targeting. Google’s preference for and ranking exact-match domains is a very powerful tool to use for SEO.

In Analytics, as in general web terminology, a domain is the name of a website, such as simonwhatley.co.uk or google.com. You should create a separate Analytics account for each domain. A profile, on the other hand, is a set of specifications for tracking traffic on a single domain. You can think of a profile as a single set of rules for Analytics to use in processing the traffic on a domain. Since you can create 50 profiles in a Google Analytics account, multiple profiles are a good way to view your data through different lenses and isolate certain segments.

Profiles are closely associated with filters, which can be used to include, exclude or change the representation of certain information in a report. Filters aren’t necessarily required, but using them will help you define what data you see and how you see it. Since filters affect the way data is displayed in your profiles, it is important to get them set up as soon as possible. Filters added after your account begins collecting data will not affect your old data.

This is semi-advanced stuff, but just remember to leave at least one “real” profile where you don’t filter at all — I generally call this profile “No Filters”. That way, you can work on the others without making mistakes on the data that you are relying on to guide your website decisions.

Profiles and Filters

It doesn’t matter in which order you set up your profiles and filters, but you need to do them in the same sitting.

Here are some important filters I create by default:

1. Banner Adverts — Track visitors who enter your site via your banner advertising campaigns. You can use this profile to compare analytics provided by the website on which your advert is displayed.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: banner
   • Case Sensitive: No
2. Email Campaigns — Track visitors who click through to your site via one of your email campaigns. This is especially useful if you’re using email campaign managers such as Campaign Monitor and MailChimp that allow for Analytics tags to be automatically applied to email links.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: email
   • Case Sensitive: No
3. Direct Visitors — What are the numbers of visitors who directly type your URL into the browser address bar to get to your website? This is an interesting profile since many users automatically use a Google Search as a way to navigate to your website, even if they know your URL.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Source
   • Filter Pattern: direct
   • Case Sensitive: No
4. New Visitors — How many visitors are new to your website is the first step to working out how to “convert” more visitors.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor Type
   • Filter Pattern: new
   • Case Sensitive: No
5. Returning Visitors — An important segment, returning visitors like your website and the content or products it provides.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor Type
   • Filter Pattern: returning
   • Case Sensitive: No
6. Referrals — Where have people come from and in what numbers? Knowing that 1000 visitors came from xyz.com is important for any marketing strategy.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: referral
   • Case Sensitive: No
7. Internal Visitors — “Big Brother” is watching! This profile is not entirely necessary, but is useful for determining how people in your organisation are using your website.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Visitor IP Address
   • Filter Pattern: (Use regular expressions to set rules for different IP exclusion and inclusion scenarios e.g. 192\.168\.0.*)
   • Case Sensitive: No
8. Overall (External) Visitors — Similar to the “No Filters” default profile I have set up, this one serves as a sanity check for visitor numbers that are not part of your organisation.
   • Filter Type: Predefined, exclude, traffic form the IP addresses, match
   • IP Address: (Use regular expressions to set rules for different IP exclusion and inclusion scenarios e.g. 192\.168\.0.*)
9. Organic Search — Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages (SERPs) that appear because of their relevance to the search terms. Understanding how many visitors find your via organic results as opposed to paid results will help you determine where to concentrate your advertising efforts.
   • Filter Type: Custom include
   • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
   • Filter Pattern: organic
   • Case Sensitive: No
10. Paid Search — Commonly known as Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, popularised by Google AdWords and Google AdSense. Websites that utilise these will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere on a content site.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
    • Filter Pattern: ppc|cpc
    • Case Sensitive: No
11. Organic and Paid Search — This is a sanity check profile to include all search engine traffic.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Medium
    • Filter Pattern: ppc|cpc|organic
    • Case Sensitive: No
12. Social Networks — A late addition to my analytics profiles, but an important one nonetheless. The ubiquity of social networks as a communications medium and understanding traffic from such sources is as important as understanding visits from search engines. Social networks such as Facebook and more recently Twitter, include their own advertising platforms and as such understanding the traffic from these sources is important for marketing more effectively.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Source
    • Filter Pattern: bebo|facebook|friendfeed|friendster|hi5|imeem|linkedin|meebo|myspace|orkut|plaxo|twitter
    • Case Sensitive: No
13. Social Bookmarks — This is largely the same as the social network filter, albeit I have chosen to separate out social bookmarking sites specifically.
    • Filter Type: Custom include
    • Filter Field: Campaign Source
    • Filter Pattern: del\.icio\.us|delicious|digg|reddit|stumbleupon
    • Case Sensitive: No

If there are inaccuracies in the above list, just give me a shout, otherwise, I’m happy to hear your own tips and experiences.

For a beginner, Google AdWords can be a little daunting to start with, so below I list some tips and tricks that have served and continue to serve me well whenever I setup and manage a campaign.

1. Don’t use broad keyword matching — At least not to start off with. What’s broad matching? “If you include general keyword or keyword phrases-such as tennis shoes-in your keyword list, your adverts will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms.” With expanded matching it becomes even harder to know when your keywords will show, because Google will pick them algorithmically. Broad match is usually used by experienced advertisers looking to save time (usually with a long list of negative keywords) or by lazy advertisers, who may not have the time or the inclination to target their campaigns. Broad matching can also be the right way to go for parts of certain kinds of campaign, but wading straight into it can be dangerous.
2. Use dynamic titles in your adverts — Dynamic titles are easy, they don’t cost anything and they usually have a good effect on CTR and conversion rates. The phrase that the searcher uses in their search will come up as the the title of your advert. This saves you having to create an individual advert for each keyword and means that your ad will be more targeted. In the title field of your ad simply put {keyword:your default title here}. The default title is in case the search phrase is too long for the title field or if AdWords can’t display the search for some other reason.
3. Use global negatives to prevent advert duplication — If you’re selling something, you don’t want people finding your advert if they’re searching for free stuff. This sounds obvious, but do some searches and you’ll see it happening. Use the word ‘free’ in your campaign global negatives. You can also use this for other words you don’t want to turn up for. Using negative keywords is especially important if you’re using broad matching.
4. Turn off content targeting and search network — Do you know where to look at these adverts? If the answer is a resounding “no”, leave them alone until you feel confident that you know where they’ll be showing and that you can make them work — get comfortable with Google SERPs first. Conversion rates and CTR‘s change dramatically for each search property, not to mention content targeted adverts. Get acquainted with Google before you move on to the others.
5. Test different advert-copy and positions — How much of a difference will being in the first position, as opposed to the second, third or sixth position make, for your net profit? The answer is that it depends on your creative, industry and who else is bidding on your keywords. The bottom line is that you should know. Test your creative in each position and work out where it will be most effective, from an ROI point of view. Remember also that the AdWords ranking algo works on a CPC x CTR basis (it’s actually more complicated than that, but that gives an idea as to why out of two adverts with similar CPC‘s, one will be higher because of a higher CTR.) You can also test your creatives. Write several different adverts and set them to run evenly (Google will run the one which preforms best by default, but you can set them to run evenly in your campaign settings). The creative which gives you the highest ROI is the one you should go with. You should probably run this kind of test for more than just a day.
6. Optimise your destination URLs and landing pages — The landing page is the page which the person who clicked on your advert will see when they come through to your site. Don’t use your homepage as your landing page unless it deals only with selling the product you’re advertising. For example, if you’re selling widgets, optimise a page on your website with information regarding that widget, this could be a product page on your website, or a specific page for the advertising campaign.
7. Track conversion and ROI — Track everything. Google will track impressions, clicks and click through rate. Just because an advert has a high CTR doesn’t mean that it is making you money. Use Google’s own conversion tracking codes and link AdWords with Analytics. If you don’t know how each keyword is preforming, then you won’t be able to optimise your campaigns. Turn off the keywords that aren’t working well and invest more in the keywords which are.
8. Work out your CPA — How much is each sale costing you? Are your Google AdWords listings preforming as well as your Yahoo! listings? Your Bing listings? Your offline marketing? You should know how much you’re paying for each order, sale, download or enquiry on each channel — only then will you be able to set CPA targets to work towards and know which channel is best for you.
9. Don’t enter into bidding wars with your competitors, find a niche — It is easy to get into bidding wars with your competitors. You want to be number one and so does your competitor. The best thing to do is to take a step back, ten deep breaths and consider how important it really is to be in the number one spot. If you can justify it, fine but otherwise: let your competitor be number one, slot into the number two slot and wait. If you have a better product, your click-through rate will get you to the top – and you’ll still be paying the same as you were in the second position. More and more people are using automated bidding software. This software will update at a set interval to keep the ad in the desired position. Doing battle with this kind of software is even more frustrating and less rewarding than trying to outbid a competitor.
10. Set a weekly budget and stick to it — When you’re first starting out this is really important. AdWords is addictive, and like anything else addictive, it can quickly get out of hand. A keyword may convert like nobody’s business one day and die the next. Make sure you know a keyword is working — more importantly, know why it is working — before you invest more.
11. Geo-target your adverts — Geo-target your adverts to the relevant audience. It can be done when you set up a new campaign and in your campaign settings. If you want to show on google.com that’s fine, but remember that you can geo-target to individual countries and even cities (you can target regions in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the Netherlands). The more targeted users feels that your ad is, the more likely they are to click on it.
12. Organise your adverts into logical groups — This will make it easier for you to know what is doing well and what isn’t — especially a year later. If you’re selling widgets have a campaign not just for widgets, but for each brand of widget, and then an ad-group for each widget model.
13. Keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing — Is your competitor doing something better than you? What keywords do you share with your competitors? Can you discern their strategy? Do they use automated bidding software? Do their landing pages have some magic which you should be emulating? This is the sort of information you can find out and the kind of information that you need to know.

If there are inaccuracies in the above list, just give me a shout, otherwise, I’m happy to hear your own tips and experiences.

If you want — and this is the default setting for WordPress, themes and plugins — you can just download jQuery, put it on your server and link to it from your header.php file in the <head> section.

However, it is better to use the proper wp_register_script() function, which can be achieved in your functions.php file:

if( !is_admin() ) {
   wp_deregister_script('jquery'); 
   wp_register_script(
   	'jquery',
   	("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"),
   	false,
   	'1.4.2'
   ); 
   wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
}

The reason we use the wp_register_script() is to ensure that WordPress and its themes and plugins are aware that the script has been loaded and therefore not to load an additional copy.

I have also used the is_admin() function to prevent conflict and therefore errors, in the WordPress administrator.

Of course, this method is not only restricted to jQuery, you can do the same for other popular JavaScript frameworks such as Mootools.

Further information on the wp_enqueue_script can be found on the WordPress Codex.