Leaving Ireland in 2 months, looking for a new challenge.

// January 25th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // work

Press release
For all who didn’t know yet (or don’t speak Dutch) a short summary of the press release that went out last week: Tribal Internet Marketing is changing its international strategy and relocating the German, Irish and Belgium activities to the office in Amsterdam – the Netherlands. Relocating the different offices will reduce overhead costs, creates a more efficient work-flow, improves the quality of work, is easier to manage etc. The old strategy focused on following clients into different countries by opening offices and hiring locals to do the work, a strategy that’s hard to keep up with. You don’t need an office in Spain to hire a Spanish native person, especially in a city like Amsterdam you find people from all over the world.

How do I feel about this?
I fully support the decisions made and see the benefits of one bigger international office against three rather small local offices. Not only should this result in an even better quality of services, but it also creates a great working environment; having people from all over the world in one team. The decision wasn’t easy to make,  especially from a personal point of view since I always expected to stay in Ireland for at least 3 years. After discussing everything extensively, I could only conclude that relocating the Irish office is the best way to ensure a healthy growth of Tribal’s international activities. When you look at the bigger picture it means certain investments only have to be made once in stead of three times (e.g. staff, training, office locations) there will be a stronger focus on the international clients with  more dedicated team members plus executive management and the communication lines will be shorter. The goal date to have everything transfered to Amsterdam is 31st of March so that still gives me over 2 months in Ireland.

What’s next for me?
This was a really hard decision but I’m leaving Tribal and will not join the Amsterdam office. I’ve always loved working for Tribal but after more then three years I feel it’s time for a change in my career, I want to broaden my work experience and look for a new challenge. I’m also not yet done with my international adventures and would like to move somewhere else in the world, meet new people, different cultures and explore a new country. I’ll write a blog post soon about the type of job I’m looking for, right now I’m still working on my CV and am not even sure where I want to go. All suggestions are welcome off course! I’ll be working with Tribal till the 31st of March, take the month April off (finalize things if needed) and hopefully start a new job at the beginning of May.

Tribal’s Birthday party

// December 2nd, 2009 // 1 Comment » // fun, work

Wie jarig is trakteert! from Tribal Internet Group on Vimeo.

Me and My Colleagues

// October 23rd, 2009 // No Comments » // work

The special occasion was the celebration of our company being in business for a decade! Read more about 10 years of Tribal on the website (Dutch only).

We are still number 1 for “search engine marketing” in the Netherlands

// September 4th, 2009 // No Comments » // fun, work

As most people know, I work for Tribal Internet Marketing in Dublin. The focus of our Irish office is Search Engine Marketing, we do a lot off Pay Per Click advertising but also some Search Engine Optimization. I spend most of my time looking at the Irish and UK markets these days, but this afternoon I was checking some of our Dutch competitors to see what has changed for them in the past few months.

One of our competitors launched a new website and I immediately noticed the screenshot from Google on their homepage. The screenshot shows that they are number 1 in the organic results for the keyword “zoekmachine marketing” (dutch for “search engine marketing”). At first I was shocked because we had that position for a long time, it looked like they did a better job then us. The screenshot:

After taking a closer look at the screenshot I realized that there are a few things wrong with it:

• There are no Adwords ads showing up, highly suspicious for a popular keyword like this one.
• The page title says “search engine marketing” and not the keyword they used “zoekmachine marketing”.
• Their brand name shows up bold and Google only does this for the keyword they used in the query.

The only conclusion I can make from these facts is that they used Photoshop (or a similar program) to make it look like they are number one for this important keyword (especially if you are in this business). I think they used a screenshot from a search on their brandname to make sure they would be number 1. Is this misleading for their (potential) clients or not?

A quick search in google confirmes that we still have the number 1 position in the Netherlands for what we do best, search engine marketing!

Paying more for AdWords then ever before

// August 12th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // work

Google changed their AdWords advertising program about two months ago with a new functionality called “extended broad match”. I was warned by several people that this would give me not-relevant clicks and views. I changed a few of my campaigns by including negatives and changing keywords to phrase and exact match, but I left some running as they where. I’ve been analyzing the data today and see a spending increase of up to 50% for some of the accounts… and guess what, the average conversion ratio dropped. My conclusion is that Google users get less relevant ads. Isn’t this something that contradicts with their policy and philosophy?

I’m now updating all my campaigns by adding negative keywords, changing broad to phrase/exact and changing the bids. If you have the same problem (speak Dutch) and are looking for more possible solutions, read “probleem van extended broad match (en 7 oplossingen)” on the TIM blog.