by Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2010 12:07 pm Internet Marketing

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.

Ref: HSLP0101AA206

Online Privacy : This Email is Set to Self Destruct

by Andrew Redfern @ 20th August 2009 5:36 pm Internet Marketing

Many users seem blissfully unaware that each and every time they send an email a copy is not only kept on the sender’s machine, but the recipient and even the ISP’s server. Now depending upon where about in the world you live, a copy of that record may also be request-able under a European Directive.

Imagine if every time you sent a letter, the postman made a copy. Or whenever you, under a European commission directive, to dip into some of that data.

There may however be a solution at hand. Seattle based researchers have a free self-destructing-email program. “Vanish” was created by Roxana Geambasu and Prof Hank Levy at the University of Washington. A delivery date set within the message and expiry date transforms emails to become unreadable when this date has passed. Even to the creator of the message.

The need for the service implies that a user may have some sinister reason for privacy, but do they? Many users will have sent emails which contain private data such as credit card details or names and addresses. These message swill often remain until the user upgrades their computer.

Similar sites have offered email services such as Hushmail which offered an encryption service. In 2007 Hushmail admitted that it wasn’t in fact as secure as it would like to make out as Canadian law enforcement had been forcing the company to decode the messages or face jail.

“Vanish” operates in a more innovative manner, following the encryption process the message becomes useless without the “key”. Vanish splits the key into 10 parts then spreads those across 1.5m computers. Making it impervious to hackers as every second goes by less and less machines hold the key until eventually it can never be decoded. Clever.

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Google, Yahoo, Bing Take The “Blind” Search Engine Challange

by Andrew Redfern @ 10th August 2009 11:15 am Internet Marketing

Each of us have our favourite, we are by and large mostly Google devotees. But are we right to be? are we loyal to the best search engine or do we stick with them out of loyalty. There has been a general view within the industry is that users are not as discerning as they would like to think. Google has become what “Hoover” became to the vacuum industry and this will only serve to reinforce the idea that to search on the we, means: to “Google”.
So with a scientist cap on, the people at fejus.com. have created: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ .
Try now and search for something, it doesn’t matter what it is, you will receive the results from Yahoo, Bing ( soon to be the same) and Google ( fanfare please!). All branding is removed and the results are split into three columns.

I voted twice for the result which I favoured, by searching “HitSearch” I was presented with three different search results. At this point it would be nice to tell you the reader, that Google was hammered by Bing and that all the years we have been hoodwinked.

Well not quite..but almost:

Google: 44%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 23%. When you compare this against the 80% market share of Google and paltry 5% for Bing, Bing may very well be one to look out for in the future!

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Marketing - Your Way To Beat The Credit Crunch With SEO

by Andrew Redfern @ 16th July 2009 5:14 pm Internet Marketing

Do you own a company and are looking to generate more business? Has your business started to see a decline due to the number of people not looking to spend as much as they used to? There are answers for you providing you have a section of your business that trades online. If you don’t have a marketing package or team that is willing to provide you with a comprehensive internet marketing package, then you could very well be losing a fair bit of business.

There is still a large volume of people searching and spending money on the internet every single day, even though the high street shops have seen a decline in sales, certain sectors of the web has seen a dramatic increase in its online sales. How do they achieve this? The majority have a search engine optimisation company that will perform and help them through every single step in internet marketing.

What search engine optimisation is, is a way in which your site is altered and improved in a way in which to increase your rankings in the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. This increase is where you site is then seen by people who search the web. This form of search engine marketing can help dramatically increase your overall traffic each month which in turn helps you increase your sales online. Results are not seen over night however there are other marketing packages such as Google Adwords that can also go alongside SEO to help you get a quick return on investment.

If you’re reading this and believe that your website is suffering and need some advice, then please don’t hold round and wait for someone to contact you. Look at internet marketing companies who have a proven track record in increasing sales and traffic through websites.

Would you like to know about Marketing? If so, contact Hit Search on 0845 643 9289

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Apollo 11 Launched 40 Years Ago Today - But How Would We Market This?

by Andrew Redfern @ 16th July 2009 1:17 pm Internet Marketing

I know back when apollo 11 was launched, that the internet was not even a thought in anyones mind so no one was thinking about how to market the fact that the 1st man on the moon would happen very shortly. The question I asked myself, was how would you go about spreading the word of this in the modern world.

With apollo 11 currently being a trending topic on twitter and an account re-enacting the events in the exact sequence at @ReliveApollo11, I was looking at what type of things people are putting out there when trying to pick up traffic from this topic. The one that struck my attention was a website called http://www.wechoosethemoon.org/ which is going to have a live renactment of the launch and mission itself. This is in flash based format with a live transmission from what I can assume, is the launch day its self. The site currently ranks for the term “apollo 11″ and from the response on twitter, there is quite a response of people enjoying the prospect of viewing this again.

On the marketing of this website itself across the internet, the micro blog site twitter does look like the way in which this site is going to be successful. I would anticipate as the launch comes closer, then the interest in this site and the level of trend on the topic apollo 11 or http://www.wechoosethemoon.org/ its self as a trend, will increase dramatically. If you are after more information about apollo 11 or like the idea of hearing biographies of the astronaughts then you may also want to try the sky at night dvd featuring Sir Patrick Moore, where he explores the past on how we actually landed on the moon.

Would you like to know about Marketing? If so, contact Hit Search on 0845 643 9289

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Twitter & Bing Put Search Engines on a Whole New Level

by Andrew Redfern @ 15th July 2009 4:17 pm Internet Marketing

We all know that microsoft have been trying to muscle Google out for quite some time with virtually no success at all. The new branding of “Bing” has been microsofts latest attempt to unseat Google as the market leader in search engines. It looked promising although did see a small decline recently as the novelty wore off, however they have now combined with the popular micro blogging website called “Twitter” in order to try an revolutionise search.

With twitter itself now taking a market share of searches, it needs to be considered as a tool for marketing websites. Microsoft have been quick to act on this and created a search engine that combines results from both, bing and twitter on the one page for easy access to users. We believe this can really help revolutionise search as twitter does bring you LIVE results. Live search is probably the future of search engines where all results are categorised each second bringing back websites and blog posts created maybe minutes previous.

The website is called www.bingtweets.com for those interested, and if microsoft put into action a correct marketing strategy, then there is no reason that this can’t bring microsoft and bing into a larger share of the search engine market. With celebrities and every day people both using twitter this could very well bring a massive number to a place where you can tweet, search twitter and search the web all in one convenient place.

If you are interested in learning how Internet Marketing can work for your website and want more information then contact Hit Search, Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click experts, on 0845 643 9289.

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