…My favourite football team made me realise this last Saturday. They were 2 – 0 up, which is widely considered to be a comfortable lead, but went on to throw the advantage away and lose 3 – 2. They had established a healthy lead but went on to lose. How? By not doing the basics correctly. Sound familiar?
The exact same situation can occur in a PPC account that you are managing; you can have a great CPA, CTR and be ahead of the competition. This is when it is imperative to ensure that basic checks and optimisations are occurring within your account, so that you consolidate your position at the top. Don’t get pegged back or overtaken like my football team, maintain your advantage. The points raised in this article should help you avoid basic errors hindering the performance of PPC accounts as well as help my team to win a match this season. [click to read full post…]
The many fresh faces that you will see around most digital agencies are a testament to just how new the online sector actually is. With 8 out of 10 staff under 35 at my agency MEC, people haven’t had a chance to grow old in the industry yet.
Despite its youth, the speed with which digital marketing is growing is incredible. The internet which once stalled at a single desktop PC per home has expanded out to laptops, tablets, smartphones and beyond. With a whole new wealth of devices on which people are able to access the internet, the scope for digital advertising has grown exponentially.
In a report by the IAB on digital investment in the UK in 2011 they report a market worth of £4,784m a year (14% YoY growth). With digital advertising making up a third of all advertising, it has been a huge area for growth over the last decade.
Interestingly, Paid Search makes up 58% of total digital investment. This is a huge step up from the next biggest spender – Display – at 24%. The fact that PPC makes up such a large percentage of digital spend shows how advertisers have identified it as a vital part of online marketing.
With the growth of ecommerce, search engines are an integral part in allowing consumers to find the websites which sell the things they are looking for. Alongside the advent of search engines comes the unique ability to advertise to a consumer at a time when they have actively expressed interest in a particular product or service.
Coupled with the flexibility of real time advertising, the ability to track purchases and the ease of measurability of revenue these all further emphasise the appeal and importance of Paid Search, which as the marketing spend figures show, is becoming increasing important to advertisers.
If you haven’t noticed it yet, take a look at Google’s updated Keyword Tool and traffic estimator. These tools help to determine how a particular group of keywords may perform by providing estimates of impressions, cost and competition among other predictions. Essentially they provide search marketers with a starting point to evaluate potential keywords and to judge what amount of budget and bid level will be appropriate to achieve good results for a particular campaign. [click to read full post…]
Almost everyone has probably heard of Google’s Project Re:Brief by now and seen how they tried to re- imagine America’s most iconic and famous advertising campaigns for the web.
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Someone at work sent around an email yesterday with a link to the Google ad preferences page which proved to be an interesting read. It’s a page which allows you to see what sort of person Google thinks you are when they are serving ads to you and lets you correct them (if they are wrong) so that you can receive more relevant ads.
I found out that Google thinks that I am an 18-24 male who is interested in music. Although I wasn’t sure whether I was amused or offended by the fact that Google thinks I’m a man, it got me thinking about how accurately Google can define you by what you search for. [click to read full post…]
