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Why your Business can benefit from a Professional Digital Marketing Agency

By Andrew Redfern @ 18th November 2010 12:11 pm Paid Search

To understand the benefits of using a professional Digital Marketing Agency you must first look at the nature of how business works online. If you are looking to sell products or market your company online you essentially have three separate avenues which you can explore, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay per Click (PPC) and Affiliate Marketing.

Each of these is a specialist area which will take months, if not years, of dedicated training and research for an individual to become skilled enough to market a business online and each of them individually is potentially a new revenue stream, especially for a company that has never focused on their online business before.

For medium sized businesses this can be very problematic as usually they will look to employ someone in-house to handle the online side of their business. Who do they employ, an SEO specialist, someone with a background in PPC management or an Affiliate marketing specialist? If they are looking for someone with a strong background in all three then they should expect to be paying a very large salary indeed.

If as a business you employ a person with an individual speciality then this is potentially a serious strategic error. Is your SEO specialist able to maximise the revenue from a PPC campaign? If not you may be paying more for every click than if you had a dedicated PPC specialist onboard.

Is your PPC specialist able to effectively optimise your site so you maximize your organic search rankings? Remember 1^st page organic searches account for an estimated 75% of clicks as opposed to 25% for the sponsored listings. How much business could you potentially miss out on?

Are you even the right person to decide which avenue would be the most effective way to market your company online?

The growth of specialist Digital Marketing Agencies is because many companies, from the smallest start-ups to the largest corporations in the country, can see that these strategic decisions and the effective implementation of online campaigns is crucial to future business growth.

Employing an agency that has in-house SEO, PPC and Affiliate specialists means that you don’t miss out on maximising the potential for your company online and most importantly you have an online campaign that is based on sound strategic decisions.

PPC Tips for the Run up to Christmas

By Andrew Redfern @ 1st November 2010 4:44 pm Paid Search

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

Social media and online video boost UK online ad spend

By Andrew Redfern @ 27th October 2010 11:31 am Paid Search

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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Digg Offers New PPC & Advertising Model

By Andrew Redfern @ 12th August 2009 9:56 am Paid Search

On the 3rd of June Digg announced that in a couple of months, they will start a pilot advertising platform. This platform allowed users to bury or digg adverts that they found useful. The more an advert was buried, the more advertisers paid therefore if your advert was dug more, then the less you would pay.

When the announcement was made, I was imagining it would be around October/November time before we would see it, just in time for Christmas. However, it looks that Digg have rolled it out a lot sooner than people had imagined. Ads have now started to appear within the “river” and I imagine there will be an awful lot of clicks on adverts that appear on the home page or on the other high volume pages.

As a company, we believe this is a pioneering move by the social bookmarking site, as advertisers now have the opportunity to get really good feedback from actually internet users. Traditionally the only feedback we got was the number of clicks your advert achieved, but now we can see if someone likes what your advertising then they will digg it. As digg is a massive volume website, then you can use this information to see exactly how users interpret your ads, this information is then useful to use across any other adverts you use across the internet.

There currently doesn’t look to be a big relevancy insertion around, however I imagine this will come in the future. This does however, mean that are effectively bidding against digg users instead of other advertisers in order to have your content advertised cheaper.

If you are having trouble with your PPC campaign or would like some extra PPC resource then call Hit Search on 0845 643 9289. Remember, its a big world out there, make sure you become visible.

Google Adwords, Bing & Yahoo Paid Search

By Andrew Redfern @ 8th July 2009 4:36 pm Paid Search

Although most companies look for search engine optimisation as a means of generating business. There is also the option to use paid search. This is ideal for companies who look for a quick return on investment with the option to target their audience down to the smallest detail.

Yes we know Google are probably the market leaders when it comes to natural searches, this is probably also the case with paid searches. We have the option of picking keywords and finding out the average cost per click for certain positions. We also get details on how many clicks you would expect on each day. Although this is an average, its a great tool to guage how much budget you would need for an effective paid search campaign.

Although you have all the tools in place to be able to run a campaign, there are 100′s of little extras built into Google, yahoo and bing paid search campaigns. These are little bits to help you get the best out of your campaign. Rather than try to figure all these out on your own, there are companies that are qualified in managing these adwords accounts. These companies can generally help you run your campaign in the best way possible aswell as cutting out words that don’t convert.

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

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