Instagram & Facebook – Why?


A few hours ago I read that Facebook had acquired Instagram for $1bn… aptly enough, this news came to me via my Facebook feed. There’s also an official release here from Mark Zuckerberg My first thought once I checked the legitimacy Read more

Return On Influence: The New ROI


There is not a single activity in business which is exempted from a query regarding return on investment.  Focused strategic planning and expenditure to optimise your e-commerce mix is known to be an investment worth making for product and Read more

••

Pay Per Click

Should your company SEO and PPC campaigns be run by the same team?

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Mike in Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Tools | 2 Comments

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Whether you have experience first-hand or outsource you organic and paid search, you know that both play a large role in the success of your site. If potential customers can’t find you, then how are you ever going to get their business? A highly ranked website can get thousands or millions of website visitors per month, depending on the keywords. This is a good thing because the traffic is free. Of course, depending on how your campaign is run, this traffic may not be completely targeted to your product or service. When a website cannot rank well for keywords in its niche, it then becomes necessary to essentially “buy” traffic, PPC or Pay Per Click advertising. If you do this correctly, the money you spend to get visitors to your site will pay for itself – this is the goal of course, it may sound simple but as anyone who has tried it can attest, it’s not so cut and dry. Despite their differences, PPC and SEO are almost one and the same thing. They both aim at helping a page rank high and earn revenue from increased inflow traffic. Though one can outsource the SEO and do PPC in house or vice versa, it may be best to have the two managed by the same team of professionals. To see how these can be beneficial to the company, let’s see how the two campaigns complement one another. More exposure SEO and PPC may be different in operation but their results are the same-…


SEO and PPC Combined to Become More Powerful

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Mike in Digital Marketing, Featured, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimisation | Leave a comment

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: The majority of agencies and in-house marketing departments target either PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to market an internet presence, whether it is an application built inside a social media network or a good old fashioned website. But have you ever considered using both together to form a bigger and better campaign? After all the end goal is increasing search traffic and understanding your customers. First things first, SEO (natural search) and PPC (paid search) are incredibly opposite marketing tools and are used to target different audiences. When combined they can form an amazingly powerful form of marketing – SEM (Search Engine Marketing.) With competition within the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) increasing every day it is vital for the most successful SEM campaigns to incorporate elements of both in order to make sure that you are not missing out on any potential clicks to your business, brand or products. Once a new website is launched and entered in to the big World Wide Web aka Google, The next stage is ensuring people can find it. Anyone who has worked in or on SEO knows that solid natural listings take time, so using both PPC and SEO is essential at getting you in front of customers. On-going Research and Development One of the biggest mistakes I have seen whilst working within digital marketing is that once a good job on SEO has been completed and the site is appearing on the first page for the most effective keywords, the budget used marketing…


Online advertising: search vs. social (Google vs. Facebook)

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Fayaaz in Pay Per Click | Leave a comment

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: We are all familiar with Google Adwords, it has been around for a long time and we all know how it works and maybe that is its biggest problem. With so many Google users becoming accustomed to seeing paid advertising on the side of their search results are these ads becoming less effective? Meanwhile, Facebook advertising is becoming more popular. Could Facebook advertising become a more viable option than Google Adwords? We decided to look at the pros and cons of each and try and find out. Intent – With Google Adwords you are able to know what the customer is looking for now allowing your ad to fulfil their immediate needs. Whereas on Facebook a customer may see an ad that is interesting and relevant to them but not at that particular moment in time. Interest– Although Facebook do not know what people are looking for now they do know what they like. Facebook ads are targeted using interests (“likes”) that allow you to pursue relevant potential clients as well as avoid competitors. For example, your competitors could conduct searches using different keywords to find out where you appear in the search rankings. Any clicks from these competitors will obviously be useless to your business.  Interest targeted ads enable you to reach an audience that might be interested in you, but would not normally search for you. Demographics – Both platforms allow geographic targeting so that you can pick which locations your ads will be shown in. However, Facebook ads are also…


Top Ten Tips When Using Pay Per Click

Posted on February 25, 2010 by Ian Fergusson in Pay Per Click | Leave a comment

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Pay per Click (PPC) is a form of online advertising which directs traffic to the advertiser’s website once a user clicks on an advert. The advertiser pays each time his/her advert is clicked hence the name pay per click. However when starting out a pay per click campaign what are the key things to remember and look out for? 1 ) Pick a trusted easy to use platform. The industry favourites are Google adwords and Yahoo search marketing. Most advertisers use Google, this is because more users search on Google in comparison to other search engines. 2 ) Select a budget. Decide on an overall maximum daily budget, this will determine how many clicks you can afford, the more money the more clicks. Secondly decide on how much you want to bid for each click (Cost per Click). The average bid for a click is between 80p and £1.20. Remember that you can always increase you budget once you know what keywords are working for you. There is no need to go in guns blazing. 3 ) Select Key words that are relevant to the website you are trying to promote.  These are the words which users will search for. Think of what users will type into Google to find your products, make sure your key words match the description of what you are offering. If your advert is displayed for keywords that have no relevance to your website, you will be wasting money on clicks which will not convert to sales. 4 )…


New Google Adwords Exam

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Mike in Business Development, Pay Per Click | 1 Comment

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Towards the end of last year Google updated the exam that was required in order to earn Advertisers Professional status. Previously the exam pass rate was 75% and the questions were based upon your knowledge of the Google Adwords system. This has now changed and you need 85% to pass and the questions are a lot trickier and force you to think about the online advertising concept. This is an interesting move from Google and they are definitely raising the entrance criteria to become an Advertising Professional. No longer is it possible to just take the exam and open up the next day as a PPC Consultant; with this exam you really have to know what you’re doing and actually study. This is a good thing, the previous exam needed to be updated as PPC advertising has evolved and changed over time. There are different concepts to consider, different ways of making your budget work and understanding a return on investment model. There are not a lot of accreditations in the Internet Marketing world and I know a lot of customers think this area is full of dark arts and black magic, which is why Google’s accreditation programmes are a good thing. I’m not saying that you absolutely have to be accredited to know what you’re doing; it’s just another way to help your customer make an informed balanced decision. Anyway, we needed to tidy up our own accreditations and get everything ready for our new website launch later this month, so we recently…


How Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing works

Posted on December 27, 2009 by Mike in Pay Per Click | 2 Comments

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Before we go into the way Pay Per Click (PPC) works in the web advertisement world, let us understand what PPC is. PPC is a model which is used for Internet marketing. It is a web advertising tool in which the payment is made to the host by the advertisers when their advertisement on the web receives a click. In the other case, the advertiser has to pay a fee to the search engine and other Internet publishers when his advertisement receives one or more clicks which bring traffic to his website. This advertisement model is called Cost Per Click (CPC). As far as the search engines are concerned, keyword phrases become very important for advertisers to bid on, and these keyword phrases are more connected with the market that the PPC advertisers are targeting, which bring the visitors to the page displaying the advertisement. PPC is a model which is called an affiliate model. This differs from the usual model of advertisements, where the intention of the advertisement is to drive traffic to the concerned website. PPC is an advertisement model which is placed on websites of several hosts, and this provides purchase opportunities for the surfers where-ever they may be surfing. PPC offers financial incentives to the advertiser’s affiliate partners in form of a percentage of the revenue earned. PPC is an accepted and popular model in affiliate programs. There are other programs other than PPC, and these include, banner exchange, revenue sharing programs, and others. Surfers use keyword phrases in…


DIY Pest Control: Increasing website traffic and product sales with Google Adwords

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Mike in Business Development, Customers, Pay Per Click, Web News | Leave a comment

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: DIY Pest Control has been actively involved in urban and rural pest control since qualifying through the British Pest Control Association in 1991. In 2009 diy-pest-control.co.uk was launched, its aim is to provide the best advice and latest technology to help you to control pests in your home or office. DIY Pest Control have noticed an increase in natural and organic pest control solutions, and alongside traditional pest control products wanted to support the new site launch by targeting traffic via Google Adwords. Google Adwords is Google’s flagship advertising product; it offers pay per click (PPC) advertising and site-targeting advertising for customers. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger and present their adverts and specify the maximum amount that they are prepared on a cost per click basis. PPC is certainly the best way to make an impact and to be visible on the search engines, especially if your organic listings are not quite there yet. We advise clients with new sites to carry out some form of PPC activity while their organic listings mature. The objective of DIY Pest Controls campaign was to raise awareness, increase traffic and increase sales. It was also a great opportunity to learn and analyse the traffic trends and customer behaviour, as unfortunately this information was not available due to the website only just recently launching. Initially, Generate UK worked with DIY Pest Control to establish the target keywords; these would be the keywords/phrases that would be bid for in order to attract targeted traffic. Once the keywords had…


Pay Per Click helps deliver fast results, but it’s not for the faint hearted!

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Joe in Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimisation | 2 Comments

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: In the last few months we’re seeing more and more of our customers turn to Pay Per Click (PPC) as a cost effective route to market. In these tough economic climates companies want measurable results and through the use of on-page analytics, understanding the conversions rates versus the investment has never been easier to measure. PPC is certainly the best way to make an impact and to be visible on the search engines, especially if your organic listings are not quite there yet. We advise clients with new sites to carry out some form of PPC activity while their organic listings mature. The problem most businesses face when approaching PPC is knowing how much budget to use and what keywords will bring the best returns. Understanding what budget to use really boils down to how much you’re willing to invest and how much you’re prepared to pay for a prospect to click on your advert. As a company we always advise an initial test budget so that we can understand what keywords are providing the best returns. Of course each keywords and phrase costs money, how much money is dependant on how competitive those keywords are. Understanding each keyword’s KEI (keyword Effectiveness Indicator) is really important as this determines the cost versus competiveness.  KEI is a measurement of how many times a keyword is searched for against how many times the keyword appears in other websites.  Ideally you want to seek out the keywords that are obviously relevant to your business, that are…


Internet Marketing New Year New Ideas

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Joe in Business Development, Email Marketing, Events, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click, Web News | Leave a comment

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Wow, what a tough year it was in 2008 and if you believe the papers and all the hype, 2009 is going to be an even harder year! Businesses are going to strive hard to try and increase revenues whilst keeping an exceptionally tight rein on their marketing budgets. So if companies are slashing their marketing budgets where are they going to focus their spend and how can companies be assured that the marketing channel they use will give them the return that they want? In a just-released survey from eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit more than 64% of respondents say the current economy probably won’t affect their overall marketing budgets, but most report plans to increase or maintain their budgets for Email (83.6%), Online Advertising (77.2%), Keyword Search Campaigns (75.5%), Social Media (61.8%), and Video Advertising (38.2%). eMetrics’ analysis states, “34.5% of respondents’ marketing budgets are negatively impacted by the economy but only 10-15% of respondents are cutting budgets on online channels. This would suggest that confidence in online marketing effectiveness continues to grow.” According to the survey web analytics have become increasingly important to senior management. “Web analytics helps us maximize the effectiveness of our shrinking marketing dollars by pointing out our strengths and weaknesses and providing an actionable roadmap to our most impactful ROI channels online. Tough times really do call for tough measures.” You can download the entire survey results from the eMetrics web site. So it appears that digital marketing is the way forward as through the use of analytics it is 100% visible…


The Rough Guide to Successful Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management

Posted on September 12, 2008 by Mike in Pay Per Click | Leave a comment

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Before reading this post, we recommend that you get Generate UK – Digital Marketing Blog delivered directly to your email inbox We try to keep the blog free of obvious advertising and use it more as a source of information for our readers and customers. However in the case of this post, we thought it made sense for us to provide you with more details about our pay per click campaign management solution. We’ve done this because we know there are many companies out there who are considering running a pay per click campaign for the first time. Whilst we would obviously like to have the opportunity to work with them, we would also like to provide them with information that we think would be useful to them, especially if they have never worked in this area before. The guide below is an overview of what we offer, it is also (in our opinion) a guide that companies can use to benchmark against. Dedicated and Professional PPC Campaign Managers The success of a PPC campaign is dependent on being able to analyse data and quickly act upon this information. This is why it is very important to have a dedicated and experienced account manager who works with you to understand your campaign objectives. Your account manager will then work within the campaign team to research and identify the right keywords and phrases to bid on, they will also create the right PPC Ad copy designed to compel people to click. Specialist PPC Software for…


1 2   Next »