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Europe’s online ad industry predicted to overtake US

By Andrew Redfern @ 5th November 2010 10:25 am online advertising

European online ad spend has shown double digit growth according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau report.

Spain’s ad spend increased by 20% followed by Poland with 18%, Italy 15%, Hungary 11%, UK, France and Bulgaria 10%, Romania 8%.

It is predicted if European ad spend continues to increase at the same rate, its online ad industry market value could overtake the US by summer 2011.

New companies are planning online ad campaigns every day for the first time. Greater reach, return on investment and customer interaction has motivated this move.

According to the CEO of the IAB, Alain Heureux, the growth is partly due to the fact that companies that are already advertising online are allocating a greater portion of their budget to the medium.

Performance based techniques are being used for branding and more targeted marketing to give better results, also cross media campaigns making use of various media including TV, Radio and Outdoor.

Hit Search Director Andrew Redfern commented “Double digit growth in advertising spend in not a surprise in the UK digital space, as it is a more mature market compared to Poland, Spain and Italy.

Given the return on investment nature of the digital area these figures underpin the huge part the digital industry is having in the UK economy.”

Adapted from Business and Leadership’s article “Double-digit growth for online ad spend”

PPC Tips for the Run up to Christmas

By Andrew Redfern @ 1st November 2010 4:44 pm online advertising

While the basics of paid search behaviour and choice of keywords do not change throughout the run up to Christmas, the market conditions, however, vary by the way people buy, the way you sell and the way you compete.

Searches are more gift giving inclined, with increasing urgency as shipping deadlines get closer. As it is traditionally a heavily promotional time focusing on specific key dates – black Friday, cyber Monday and the increasing importance of shipping deadlines, sales and inventory levels vary significantly. As demand rises, competition heats up by existing competitors becoming more aggressive in their online marketing strategies and new competitors entering the market.

The chart below shows the volatile trends of the peak Christmas season last year (click on the graph for an enlarged version).

Peak Holiday PPC Seasons

The text ad is the first opportunity to answer to the searcher’s question, it must appeal to their gift giving intent, your promotions and distinguish itself from new and more agressive competition.

Alex Cohen, accomplished online marketer, blogger and presenter gives 3 tips to help increase click through rates and answer the most profitable holiday questions.

1. Segregate your brand keywords

Brand Keywords are unique, containing your brand name, they have high click through rates and low cost per click with high return on investment. Brand plus keywords contain your brand name and a category generic term. As there will be many brand plus terms, it is important to focus on the most profitable first for the Christmas period then to work through the rest in due time. The goal being to only attract brand plus queries, the last step to add your own brand terms as negative to any non brand campaigns

2. Manage your ads with ad parameters

The use of numbers in adverts, e.g. cost, inventory or discounts will help the ad to stand out against competitors, requiring a specific landing page which delivers the promise. You can add parameters to control changing figures for inventory stock or prices. The AdWords API blog has some good examples.

3. Query Mine for Winners

During the period leading up to Christmas, it is important to dig deeper into your search queries. People will search in new and different ways, especially as Google’s new ad format and Google instant have just launched and this is the first Christmas period that they will be used. It is important to focus on the highest volume/ cost terms and words that are converting profitably. These will separate out into unique ad groups with specific ad groups that address their intent.

Andy Donaldson (Hit Search Director) comments – ‘A Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign can either make or break a business over this critical period for online retail. Adopting a Christmas PPC strategy focused on a scalable return on investment should be the least your agency is focused on over the next few weeks…’

To ensure success in the run up to Christmas, paid adverts are critical. The best text ads are crafted by focusing on the specific Christmas intent in each search query. Use brand terms to break out your ad groups. Get specific in text ads with numerical parameters and mine search queries to fine tune even more directly.

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Adapted from Alex Cohen’s “3 holiday PPC Tips for Black Friday (and beyond)” http://searchenginewatch.com/3641490

Hit Search calls for help for digital push for SME’s

By Andrew Redfern @ 28th October 2010 12:43 pm online advertising

According to the ‘Connected Kingdom’ report commissioned by Google, the UK internet is now worth more than £100 billion. A significant finding of the report was that the internet in the UK is growing at a rate of 10% every year, in 2008 it made up 7.2% of the UK economy and is predicted to generate up to 10% of the UK’s economy by 2015.

“As the report highlights the UK is the leading nation for e-commerce and the Internet is one of the key drivers for steady growth in the economy in 2010.” said Andy Redfern, Director of Hit Search Limited, online marketing specialists.

The UK has the largest per capita online market and the second largest e-commerce market in the world according to the report. Redfern add “At a time when the government is spending vast amount of time on austerity measures – a greater focus on getting the majority of SME’s digitally enabled from a sales point of view would no doubt help increase the country’s GDP.”

The report also found that the growing online industry accounts for approximately 250,000 UK jobs and will play a vital part for the UKs economic recovery during the next few years. Within the UK, the online industry is already larger than the construction, transport and utility sectors. Redfern commented “I am proud that our industry directly employees over 250,000 staff and growth of SME’s that use internet marketing outstrips those offline by a ratio of four to one. “

Redfern concludes “The Digital Inclusion task force focus was on the general public, this report highlights that greater investment is needed to push our business community online.”

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Social media and online video boost UK online ad spend

By Andrew Redfern @ 27th October 2010 11:31 am online advertising

A report into the 2010 H1 Ad Spend by the Interactive Advertising Bureau UK shows an increase of 10% to almost £2bn in online advertising spending between January and June 2010 despite of the UK recession. One of the main drivers for the growth was online video advertising spending, which has increased fivefold in the last two years from £3.9m in the first half of 2008 to £20.7m in the first half of 2010.

Hit Search Director Andy Donaldson comments ‘We have actually noticed that as times got harder for clients of ours over the past few years, return on investment came to the fore front of marketing discussions and these discussions eventually ended up with online marketing at the centre of recent strategies. With the tracking tools available today, ROI is a key measurement for clients and one that strongly guides marketing spend.’

The report by IAB in partnership with PricewaterhouseCooper attributed the growth to an 8.9% increase in investment in search advertising and a 6.3% growth in display advertising.

The entertainment and media industry was the biggest spender on social media advertising followed by finance then FMCG brands with increased interest and investment by running major new media campaigns.

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Paid advertising on social media becoming more popular

By Andrew Redfern @ 14th August 2009 12:50 pm online advertising

It has been highlighted recently how more and more big name brands are turning to social media outlets for their advertising. A report in today’s Financial Times reports that Facebook is now attracting input from global giants such as Starbucks and Coca-Cola.

Facebook is an interesting case study because it allows companies to establish a presense on their site for free using it’s Pages funtction. This is complemented by a paid advertising system that displays targetted ads on the right hand side of the screen. As Facebook’s chief operating officer points out “If you look at people’s profile pages, you’ll see a lot of commercial activity even without advertising.”and this makes it an excellent medium for building up a promotional presence.

The advantage inherent with social media sites like this is that the very nature of the sites makes it extremely easy to target ads at specific users. The advertising systems can cross-match the data contained in user profiles with the parameters selected by advertisers in order to get their ads showing to a very specific target audience.

The problem social media advertising has is a question of user motivation. If someone is search on Google they are actively looking for something, generally users are not looking for products and services whilst on sites like Facebook. Therefore the types of promotion highlighted needs to change, the focus should generally be on informational content and event announcements. This is key to running a successfull social media advertising campaign with a tangible return on investment. It is essential to be providing something that will be of interest to a user rather than trying to meet a pre-existing demand as with systems like Google adWords.

Also it is fair to say that currently the model for dedicated social media advertising is very much B to C, there is little evidence to suggest the benefits of a B to B campaign using Facebook. LinkedIn, which has a much more corporate model, is served by the Google Placement Network.

So social media advertising with it’s targetting advantages is opening up a new avenue for companies wanting to advertise however it is not as simple as just picking your audience and running your ads. A report in today’s Telegraph highlights research that shows that despite it’s growing popularity social networking adverts fail to engage with over 90% of users.

The article quotes Liane Dietrich, managing director of affiliate network company LinkShare

“Less than 10 per cent of our respondents are interacting with adverts across social networking sites. This just proves that there is still long way to go until people using networks, such as Facebook, are converted to online shoppers through targeted advertising. We don’t think brands should walk away but rather need to evolve what message their adverts are conveying. Online users are information shoppers – they are looking for buyer reviews – so adverts need relay more information to cater for this need.”

This shows how picking the right message and displaying it in the right way is vital to the success of a social media advertising campaign. They do however offer unparalled accuracy in reaching the exact audience advertising are hoping ot engage with and so, if the underlying message is engaging enough, offer outstanding value for money.

Leapfish Search Aggregation, Whats So Special?

By Andrew Redfern @ 28th July 2009 4:35 pm online advertising

“Don’t Worry You’re Not Cheating On Google!”

A fun and smart look unfortunatley can’t hide what can be a slow clunky service. A quick search for “Gatwick Airport” should have resulted in a welath of top story results relating the airplane emergency landing, in relaity a slow wait for some pretty low-value results. Leapfish uses Google, Yahoo and even Bing to generate it’s search results.

Whilst I liked the fun vibe: “Don’t Worry Your Not Cheating On Google” displayed in the search bar, I cant conclude with the view that it dipslays the very best of video, blog and search. It simply doesn’t. I am a little unconvinced as to the viabillity of this niche altogether. I-google has wormed its way quite cleverly into our homepages and for a rival to pull me away I want something I cant get easily through Google

The business model replicates AdWords, Bing Adceneter and Yahoo’s Marketing Solutions offering paid search advertising amd keyword sponsoring. New updates will come in August 2008, and will focus on web2.0.

Why do they think we’ll switch?:

“Google has built a reputation of commanding precision access to a tops down organization of websites, which is extremely valuable. But is that everything everyone cares about in the world of web 2.0? The user interactivity demonstrated by the recent events in Iran and with the late Michael Jackson, the tremendous number of new portals including Wolfram Alpha, and the continued loss of accessibility due to the growing information overload is evidence that we need a more sophisticated gateway and interface to the web. We believe a growing number of searches will be answered more completely with LeapFish.”

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Make Money on The Internet – Google & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

By Andrew Redfern @ 10th July 2009 10:37 am online advertising

It is something that all budding entrepreneurs look to do, make money on the internet. With some websites on the internet making £0000s each day, it is no wonder they chase the dream of making money on the internet. The thing is though, it isn’t easy to make money online, some people are under the impression that should they have a website with some good products on, they will immediately start making money.

This is not the case, as many websites actually fail because they go in unaware of how to actually market a website. Internet marketing is the concept of using a number of tools to help increase a websites visibility across the web, the main aspect of this is search engine optimisation or SEO. If you have a website currently being built or are thinking about making an online venture, then you should explore all avenues of how you plan to make this a success.

I mentioned earlier search engine optimisation (SEO) is the main factor in for internet marketing, well I feel I should explain what SEO actually is. It is the process of work completed on your website that will help interest the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Hopefully this interest will increase the number of times these search engines visit your site, which hopefully also increases overall position in the search engines. The difficulty and amount of work needed does depend on the competitiveness of each phrase which is picked out by analysing your products or services to find out what people actually search for online.

The process of search engine optimisation is something that you should never embark on, on your own. The reason being, if you don’t fully understand all aspects then it is quite easy to get your site banned from these search engines and you will no longer be able to live the dream of making money the easy way. This is best left to professionals who have a proven track record of providing results in seo and internet marketing.

Would you like to know about making money on the internet? If so, contact Hit Search on 0845 643 9289

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