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Why your Business can benefit from a Professional Digital Marketing Agency

By Andrew Redfern @ 18th November 2010 12:11 pm pay per click

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.

Optimise My Website – But Why?

By Andrew Redfern @ 5th November 2010 5:43 pm pay per click

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving the visibility of your website to Search Engines so you can achieve the highest possible position within the natural search listings on the Search Engines.

Search Engine Optimisation is essentially the process of understanding how Search Engines calculate their search results and applying that understanding to enable your site to appear as high in their results as possible.

The higher your rankings are the more visitors you will have; the more visitors you have the more conversions you will get.

Another way to optimise your website is through PPC (Pay Per Click). This involves positioning your business in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a selection of terms that your potential customers use, to search for the products and services you offer.

For a company with online presence, the visibility of their website to potential clients is just as important as, for example, retail customers being able to find the physical location of a high street store or to find the number of a call centre. If people are not able to locate it, traffic volumes will slowdown and drastically fall, potential clients might never find you at all.

Advertising your web address on printed media/ radio or TV is not enough, you cannot be certain that all potential clients will pick up or hear the advert. However, if a potential client types a few words into a search engine, they can be directed to your website. To ensure they are taken to your website above your competitors, your website needs to be optimised correctly to be in the highest rankings of the search.

How optimising your website will help your business:

It will lower advertising costs.
It is cost effective in increasing sales leads.
A properly optimised website will rank high and therefore will put you ahead of your competitors, many of which will not have optimised their website.
Your reach will be extended globally through international search engines and target specific geographic regions with different campaigns.
It will bring high quality potential clients to your website.
A fully optimised website will enable you to build an online reputation and to build your brand online communicating your marketing message to your target audience.

PPC Tips for the Run up to Christmas

By Andrew Redfern @ 1st November 2010 4:44 pm pay per click

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

16% Rise in Online Christmas Shopping

By Andrew Redfern @ 19th October 2010 11:22 am pay per click

It has been predicted that in the run up to Christmas 2010, online sales will be up by 16% to £6.4bn on the same period of 2009. This will bring the total online sales for the year 2010 to £57.8bn compared to £49.8bn in 2009, supporting the trend towards the increase in online shopping which will certainly create a challenge to the dominance of the high street.

The prediction follows reports in June 2010 that online shopping had increased by 22% over the past year compared to 2008/2009. In September, online shopping sales had increased by 24% year on year as consumers started their Christmas and winter clothes shopping early. Chris Webster, head of retail consulting and technology at Capgemini noted an interesting observation that consumers are starting to spread the cost of Christmas over several pay checks and we may start to see an early peak in Christmas shopping spends.

Director of Hit Search Andy Donaldson commented on the topic “ We have a variety of huge retail brands and despite the economic downturn over the past 2 – 3 years they have prospered right throughout the year. Proof that by getting the online marketing mix right, can not only buck seasonal trends, but also stabilise businesses above and beyond their bricks and mortar sales – especially during this key period for retail.”

Hit Search provides a range of search engine optimisation and pay per click solutions helping you to increase your online presence for a share in this growing trend. Call 0845 643 9289 to hear about what we can do for you.

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Paid advertising on social media becoming more popular

By Andrew Redfern @ 14th August 2009 12:50 pm pay per click

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.

Digg Offers New PPC & Advertising Model

By Andrew Redfern @ 12th August 2009 9:56 am pay per click

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 pay per click

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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