Monthly Archives: April 2019

How secure is your password?

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Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) – where the UK spooks provide signals intelligence to the UK’s government, military and Military Intelligence and the Department for Digital, Media and Sport (DCMS) carried out their first UK Cyber Survey and the results didn’t make for great reading.

Apparently

  • 42% of us Brits expect to lose money to on-line fraud
  • 23.2 million worldwide victims of cyber breaches used 123456 as their password
  • 15% say they know how to properly protect themselves from harmful on-line activity
  • 33% rely on friends and family for help with their cyber security
  • Young people are the most likely to be cyber aware, privacy concious and careful of the details they share on-line
  • 61% of internet users check Social Media daily, 21% say they never look at it
  • More than 50% use the same password for their email that they use elsewhere
Hacker Inside

Dr Ian Levy, NCSC Technical Director said “Using hard-to-guess passwords is a strong first step and we recommend combining three random but memorable words. Be creative and use words memorable to you, so people can’t guess your password.” whilst Margot James, DMCS Minister said “We shouldn’t make their (cyber criminals) lives easy so choosing a strong and separate password for your email account is a great practical step. “

Most Regularly Used Passwords

RankPasswordTimes UsedPasswordTimes Used
1.123456 23.2mashley432,276
2.1237567897.7mmichael425,291
3.qwerty3.8mdaniel368,227
4.password3.6mjessica324,125
5.11111113.1mcharlie308,939

It’s a shame that the top password list hasn’t really changed for at least 10 years – it shows how complacent a lot of us are with our on-line security.

I used to have 3 passwords, a simple one that I used really casually for newspaper sign-ups etc – name123 (not my real passwords, merely examples) a medium security one that I used on shopping sites, n@m3123 and a more secure one, used for banking etc – c3ler0n! (and all of the ones that I used feature on the Have I Been Pwned list).

log on box

About 5 or more years ago I switched to a Password Manager. I have 801 log-ins and 801 different passwords. All of them are at least 16 random characters long and comprise upper & lower case letters, numbers and symbols (where permitted).

My Password database is stored securely in the cloud and is replicated on my PC, Phone and Tablet and accessible from my Chromebook too. I use LastPass but others exist and here’s a review of some of the top ones.

As you can see, I do my best to stay on top of my security but if you feel adrift, or need some help, just give me a call on 01793 238020 or email andy@enterprise-oms.co.uk for a free chat.

You’re thinking of PPC Advertising – but where should you place your money?

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In my experience, when thinking about advertising on the the web, most people think of Google and Facebook Ads and that’s about it but there’s a wide range of Pay per Click (PPC) opportunities available and the key to success is deciding which are the platforms most likely to deliver the best results.

In this post I’ll be looking the top 8 platforms that you should think about,

  • Bing Ads
  • Facebook Ads
  • Google Ads
  • Linkedin Ads
  • Pinterest Ads
  • Twitter Ads
  • Yahoo Ads

Bing Ads

Run by Microsoft, Bing is the search engine that seems to be forgotten but is in daily use by millions of people. My experience is that clicks are cheaper than those from Google and frequently of better quality. It gets better because if you have a Google Ads campaign, Bing Ads have a tool that will import all of your campaigns at the click of a button.

Bing also powers the Yahoo Ad network so you’ll have the added benefit of your Ads appearing across Yahoo too.

Look hard and you’ll also be able to take advantage of £100.00 credit to get you going (there are terms, of course but essentially, it’s free advertising)

Facebook Ads

Facebook, largest Social Media platform on the internet. 2.2Bn users worldwide and about 32m in the UK so why wouldn’t you want to advertise here. Well, if you have something to sell to consumers then you should give it some thought. You can have image ads, text ads, video ads, sponsored updates and much much more. 

Not only that but you can target specific audiences and markets through the demographic data that Facebook hold, making it a far more targeted campaign than other platforms.

However, if you are in the Business to Business market, Facebook may not be the ideal platform for your ads.

Google Ads

Not the longest running Ad platform but certainly the most well established, the most popular and the one with the greatest reach, with more than 3.5Bn searches taking place on Google every day!

Google ads can be placed on Google, YouTube, the Content Network as well as Google Search Partners.

You can have simple text ads, image ads as well as responsive ads targeted at mobile phone users.

Google Ads is also a great way to waste money if you don’t think carefully about where your Ads are displayed, to whom they are targeted and the way your search words are formatted and used. Campaign management (either in-house or outsourced) is essential to get the most from your Ads investment.

Linkedin Ads

Linkedin is home to over 520m professionals and so if your business is focussed on selling things to, or providing services to, a business market place than Linkedin is the natural home for your ads.

You can focus your ads on almost any of the demographic metrics that Linkedin collects, whether geographically, job title, seniority, job role and much more.

Traditional ads are shown on the right hand side on your Linkedin home page and across the top whilst promoted posts appear in the newsfeed and hate works best are hints, tips and white papers.

Pinterest Ads

Pinterest is quite new to the paid advertising market but is rapidly catching up, as demonstrated by it’s initial valuation before going public on the 18th April 2019 at $19/share valuing the company at $12.7Bn.

With more than 200m active, monthly, users who are researching trends, looking for ideas and inspiration it’s an ideal place to sell “things” – especially if your target market matches the key Pinterest demographic with 70% of Pinterest users being women and 40% earning more than $100,000 or more

Twitter Ads

Twitter is used by 330m people every month and is recognised as a key source of breaking news. 

Unlike a lot of the platforms mentioned here, Twitter ads stay on Twitter and so can be particularly effective and remain fully under your control. Your ads can be simple text but photos work better and videos are event more effective.

Yahoo

Yahoo was one of the original sellers of search ads and was the model that Google based Adwords on. Yahoo still stumbles on as part of the Oath network (Yahoo, AOL, Huff Post and Tumblr). 

Yahoo has a partnership agreement with Bing which means that your Bing Ads will also be displayed on the Yahoo network (and vice versa) and your ads can be simple text, images, video and any other supported media across the network

Conclusion

There are numerous Ad networks fighting for your advertising spend. My advice is to start small, test AND measure. If, after a couple of months, it seems that one of the platforms isn’t working for you then stop and switch to a different one until you find the right platform for your business.

And, if you need any help, I’ve been doing this since 2003 so give me a call on 01793 238020 or email andy@enterprise-oms.co.uk for a free, initial chat to see whether I can improve your existing campaigns or help you launch something new.

What to do when launching your new website

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It’s a scenario I come across almost every month, a website gets relaunched after a major rebuild, perhaps the migration from an old site to something that’s (finally) mobile friendly or that’s the result of a corporate rebranding or a migration to e-Commerce or, or……well, you get the picture.

Then the problems start. Google Analytics starts reporting high Bounce Rates, the site falls down in the search engine results and visitor numbers start falling.

So, what’s happened?

Unless your relaunch is carefully planned, there’s a lot that can go wrong but one huge problem is Google. Your old site might have built a lot of respect with Google that hopefully translated in to great results when people were looking for you. However, if you just launch a fresh new site it’s highly likely that all of that respect is lost.

Not only that, but your old pages will keep popping up in search results, people might have added your old site to their favourites and when they visit – they are met with a 404 (page not found) error

404 Error

What you need to do

And yet, it’s so easy to prevent this. Before you press “go” to launch your new site you need to create a list of all of the pages on your existing site.

Next thing to do is to remove all of your previous site from the internet (or just make it inaccessible). You can do this by deleting your web files or simply by copying them to a new folder. Keeping a copy is essential, just in case anything goes wrong with your new site you can always revert back to your old one provided you have a copy of it but you need to take it off line to avoid any confusion.

Next thing you do is to map your old pages to new. So, for example, mywebsite.co.uk/about on the old site should be mapped to mywebsite.co.uk/about-EOMS on the new site. I use a spreadsheet with two columns to make this process easy to manage.

Then you ask your web developer to put “301 Redirects” in place that map the old pages to the new. What now happens is any visit to one of your old pages will automatically transfer the visitor to the relevant new page.

Not only that, but a 301 redirect also carries forward a fair percentage of that Google respect I mentioned earlier,

If you need some help with the relaunch of your new website, need a new website, need help with your SEO or anything else to do with your online marketing then don’t hesitate to drop me an email andy@enterprise-oms.co.uk or give me a call 01793 238020