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Capitalising on Viral News Stories For Your PPC Campaigns

By Andrew Redfern @ 17th July 2011 5:40 pm adWords

It’s difficult to go a day without seeing, hearing or reading about some interest-grabbing headline story in the news. As we go about our daily lives, we’re bombarded with up-to-the minute happenings of the most popular stories fronting newspapers the globe over. The current digital age means that these stories and names aren’t restricted to a physical paper anymore – we see it on our journeys across the internets every day. From checking emails to reading tweets, it doesn’t take much for stories to go viral.
Now this is unremarkable in itself, however, the interesting part comes when we realise it’s possible to take advantage of these news stories in our Online Marketing strategies; in particular, our PPC campaigns.
As you can imagine, Rupert Murdoch & News International has been smack bang in the centre of the public eye at the moment, people are talking about it and most essentially – searching for it. One advertiser made use of this traffic in an interesting way:

Another advertiser used the buzz around the Haye / Klitischko boxing match to their advantage:

Or how about the Carlos Tevez transfer?

By being creative with your PPC campaigns, it is possible to increase clicks and traffic by harnessing the power of the viral news stories. Your ads will find less competition and you’ll get huge impression rates. It’s unlikely you’ll find a great deal of conversions from these ads, but the knock-on effect could be great. Your primary targeted keywords and ad copy could see a boost, as people see your branding more often.
The opportunities change daily, so being reactive is key. These campaigns will have a short shelf life as all news stories tend to lose interest quickly, but while it’s trending there’s a great potential for garnering more traffic.

Choosing the Right AdWords Agency

By Andrew Redfern @ 18th March 2011 12:48 pm adWords

Google AdWord’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) system is one of the most effective methods of online marketing. To achieve full potential out of using AdWords to reach out to the millions of people online each minute of the day every day, it is important to have the correct Google AdWords management system in place.

Google AdWords is a simple and effective way of maximising return on investment with minimum effort. AdWords is an extremely focused way of internet marketing, with the correct AdWords Management; your Ad will appear at the top of searches for topics and terms relevant to your product and can promise great results.

Online marketing agencies with specialist knowledge and experience of PPC management, especially Google AdWords is one solution to finding the correct AdWords management system. It may be more convenient and economical for your business to have an external agency looking after your internet marketing. The agency will carry out a thorough website review and analysis; this will enable them to gather the information needed to run the campaign successfully including the approximate cost per click and monthly cost of the campaign. This can be used to develop and create customised strategies for your account focusing on your budget and target audience.

The AdWords management process is ongoing; the account requires regular checking and analysing of results. A good agency will report back to you with these results regularly offering total transparency on the whole process and how your investment has been spent within your account as well as forecasting future trends. Strategies should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure the campaign fits the demands of both the client and the customer.

When choosing your Google AdWords Management agency, it is important to look for PPC companies that provide long term strategies and they must have a specific goal in mind for the campaign. You should be the agencies number one priority throughout your campaign; they will probably put an account manager in charge of your campaign so the same person deals with all of your PPC activities. Agencies should be client focused and concentrate giving them the best return on investment possible throughout campaigns.

A trial period when recruiting agencies will allow you an insight to what it is like to work with them before committing to a long term contract. It will allow you to discover what their methods of AdWords management, software, reporting and their results are like, as well as their approachability and what thecommunication is like between you and the agency.

These are all important factors to consider when choosing an agency to successfully manage your PPC accounts. Agencies that focus on clients and return on investment will provide a better service around your campaign and generally through these agencies you will see better over all results.

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Hit Search Online Marketing: Paid Search Predictions for 2010

By Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2010 12:07 pm adWords

It is widely expected that the amount of money invested by businesses into the paid search market will grow significantly over the next 12 months. This means that the need for campaigns to deliver an ever-increasing return on investment (ROI) is greater than ever. Digital marketing community Econsultancy has posted its predictions for the paid search market in the next 12 months.

• High keyword prices will force marketers to try new strategies

According to research carried out in the US, two-thirds of marketers see their biggest challenge in the paid search market as high prices for keywords. Despite the growth of paid searches beginning to slow down, advertisers are continually pumping more money into the industry, and as a result, keyword prices are becoming more expensive.

Because of this, marketers will need to focus on careful keyword management, testing, and targeting, in order to increase the ROI on their campaigns. Quality Score optimising will become a priority; this will bring costs down whilst simultaneously driving conversions up.

Geographic and demographic targeting will also be more widely used this year, with these strategies reaching out to national advertisers and retailers.

• Paid search will be more integrated

Although search marketing accounts for more than half of digital marketing budgets (representing tens of millions of pounds for the larger companies), most search marketing programmes are still managed separately from traditional marketing departments. This year, organisations will look to integrate their paid search operations more tightly into the business, rather than running them as a standalone unit.

Integrating systems will make search marketers change the way they report and organise their KPI’s, leading to a big shift in how this information is communicated upwards in the business. Search marketers will therefore need to adjust to new processes, using dashboards and proposals for investment. In return, they will be looking to see more executive support and therefore larger budgets.

• Paid search will go multichannel

Google recently found that over half of online shoppers research their purchases on the internet before eventually buying the products in-store. On this basis, search marketers are currently missing out on credit for half of the revenues their campaigns are driving.

However, the tools for measuring across channels are now much more accessible to businesses, whether it’s linking phone numbers to keywords, or taking in-store surveys to see how the customer learnt about the products they’ve purchased.

These tools will make it much easier for firms to make properly informed decisions on the allocation of their search budgets, and also make sure that they are driving both online and offline conversions. Learning how offline buyers are researching their needs will allow multichannel traders to find new, low cost keywords to drive profitable expansion of their paid-search programs.

• Facebook and Twitter Will Give Google a Run for Its Money

Social networking sites like Facebook, which currently has over a billion queries on its site every month, will extend their own search technology to allow users the ability to query the content in their news feeds. This will make it much easier for users to get recommendations from their friends on anything from restaurants and mobile phones, to films and TV programmes.

Advertising money for keyword placements is sure to follow suit, therefore search marketers will need to alter their campaigns to account for a more social set of keywords. This will enable them to catch consumers earlier in the consideration process than they could on traditional search engines like Google or Yahoo! And since these users will still in the research phase of purchasing a product (ie, placing a lot of value in word-of-mouth recommendations) these clicks could be very valuable.

While it will be difficult to incorporate all of these changes into campaigns, those marketers who can capitalise on some of these trends will most likely be a step ahead of the competition.

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Managing Brand Online: Eurostar miss the AdWords Boat

By Andrew Redfern @ 22nd December 2009 6:04 pm adWords

Eurostar’s nightmare Christmas continues. First it was the fluffy French snow causing it problems and now Eurostar’s marketing that is coming under the microscope. Eurostar’s competitors are seeing there own Christmas joy and reaping more misfortune by bidding on the companies Adwords adverts.

The screen grab below shows Eurostar are not bidding on there own brand leaving the only paid advert to appear from Sea France.

Eurostar Adwords Blunder

Naturally this means that Eurostar are missing out on future business through not bidding on their own brand – What is the lifetime value of customer worth to Eurostar? Also praise to the PPC team who run the Sea France campaign.

If you are interested in learning how protecting your brand online then contact Hit Search, Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click experts, on 0845 643 9289.

AdWords Search Based Keyword Tool: Your 1 Minute Guide

By Andrew Redfern @ 21st December 2009 12:25 pm adWords

The Google AdWords crew today posted a new video outlining the Adwords’ New Search Based Keyword Tool.

An offical blogger for Google commentedAs the end of the year approaches, you may be thinking about how to drive more traffic to your AdWords campaigns and in turn, to your website.

Millions of people use Google each day to find products and services by searching on various keywords. This means that by including all keywords that are relevant to your product or service in your campaigns, you can ensure you can ensure that you will reach a greater set of potential customers. To help you do this, you can use the Search-based Keyword Tool to quickly identify relevant keywords which aren’t yet included in your AdWords campaigns.

Spotlight falls on Bing’s PPC policies after report on online drug paid ads

By Andrew Redfern @ 6th August 2009 11:05 am adWords

Interesting report on SearchEngineLand today. They quote a report by LegitScript and KnujO that reveals that the overwhelming majority of pay per click ads featured on Bing for online pharmacies lead to what official guidelines would term “Rogue” sites.

This controversy has echos of the furore in November 2008 when Baidu was found to be carrying, and in fact favouring, links to bogus hospitals in China.

The report claims that of the online pharmacy ads featured on Bing’s adCenter Pay-per-click advertisting system almost 90% were for drug suppliers that fall into the categories of:

Those that facilitate the sale of prescription drugs, including controlled substances, without requiring a valid prescription.
Those that sell drugs from sources that are not licensed as a pharmacy in any US jurisdiction.
Those that illegally source unregulated, unapproved prescription drugs from outside of the United States.
Those that are otherwise deceptive or misleading.

This study was carried out in the last two months and shows how disreputable companies can simply side-step all the excellent work carried out by the search engine’s alogrythms in weeding out sites like this from the natural organic listings.

Interesting this report comes out on the same day that Facebook announced it was tightening up it’s advertising guidelines.

A few weeks ago Hit Search were asked to contribute to an ongoing BBC investigation into how the Google adWords listings were being used be bogus ticket agencies. It show the a PPC budget is, in some cases, the perfect shortcut. Whilst it is extremely difficult for disreputable sites to climb to the top of the natural listings without resorting to an expensive, time-consuming black-hat link building campaigns.

Google has always steered clear of allowing sectors such as online pharmaceuticals and adult website to use it’s paid search system, Google adWords. Until recently it would not allow any advertising to do with alcohol and gambling however it relaxed these rules in certain geographic areas last year.

Microsoft and Yahoo Look Set To Anounce Online Search Marketing Deal

By Andrew Redfern @ 29th July 2009 11:15 am adWords

The year long rumours look to have been well-founded as industry speculators expect an announcement within the next 24 hours. The news has been broken by Kara Swisher who cites confidential sources.

It is rumoured that the last sticking point was a request by Yahoo for an initial payment of several hundred million dollars in addition to a guarantee of a certain revenue for years to come with the potential to run into the billions. A resolution was found and the agreement has now been drawn up.

Yahoo’s search bar will be powered by Bing, with a sweatner resulting in 110% revenues for Yahoo in the first year. A huge commitment on the part of Microsoft.

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