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The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has announced it is extending its powers to cover all online marketing and advertising from March 1st 2011. Under the new regulations, the UK’s independent watchdog, committed to maintaining high standards in advertising for the benefit of consumers, advertisers and society at large, will have the power to remove advertisements and statements from Facebook, Twitter and pay per click (PPC) ads on all search engines. Paul Byrne, Senior Account Manager – PPC, at independent search and social marketing agency Greenlight, looks at what this means for online advertisers.
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Poole Literary Festival in partnership with the Media School at Bournemouth University has established a prize for new media writing. Closing Date 15 September 2010. By Gary Dalkin.
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Great business value can come from harvesting and leveraging the best of knowledge that is created on communities and social networks, i.e. “social knowledge”, for customer service offered through your own contact centres and self-service systems. By Andrew Mennie.
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As we head into 2010 the big question is what will the year ahead deliver for search marketing. In its ‘Year in Review Briefing’, Greenlight, the UK’s leading independent search marketing agency, provides a summary of developments in natural and paid search.
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Global search queries have increased year-on-year since the creation of the web. Between July 2008 and July 2009 the number of searched increased from 80.56 billion to 113.69 billion (comScore Worldwide Search Market Overview July 2009 vs. July 2008). For the vast majority of us the first thing we see each morning is Google, Bing or Yahoo. Google’s instantly recognisable screen is synonymous with the internet and has long reigned as the dominant search tool for businesses and consumers alike. Google searches for last year alone accounted for 67% of the global market- a staggering 76.68 billion individual requests. In this article, Paul Dawson, Experience Director and Head of Interactive Media at EMC Consulting, analyses the future of searching on the Internet.
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Online advertising is continuing to defy the downward trend of traditional advertising budgets. Research from Nielsen Online shows that the number of UK online display ad campaigns grew 11 percent in the second quarter of 2009 compared to the same period the previous year. On a global level, in July, Zenith Optimedia predicted that global online advertising spend will rise by 10.1 percent this year. In this article, Joëlle Frijters, Improve Digital, explains the concept of 'ad network optimisation'. more
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The Online Information Conference 2009, to be held next week, brings together a range of seminars of key interest to any company or professional concerned with information management. A core topic of the event is the semantic web, which brings new forms of organising content. The semantic web revolution is becoming a reality and solutions are imminent that will permit people to organise content in much more sophisticated fashion.
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Dr Gregory Grefenstette, from Exalead explains in this article how the semantic web is changing our way of managing information within organisations. He explains the main advantages and challenges of the solution, and clarifies the concept of real time Internet from the perspective of the semantic web. more
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Money Saving Pay-per-Click Tips
If you’re feeling the pinch and considering cutting back on your pay per click budget, it is possible to shave inches off your current wasted spend without sacrificing your search engine presence completely. Rebecca Appleton of Top Position explains how to make your existing budget a trimmer, leaner prospect with these money saving tips…
It seems that newspaper headline and TV news bulletins are filled with cries of a credit crunch. Traditionally, advertising budgets are one of the first things to be cut at the time of an economic slowdown, making justifying a high search marketing spend extremely difficult.
If you’re feeling the pinch and considering cutting back on your pay per click budget, it is possible to shave inches off your current wasted spend without sacrificing your search engine presence completely. Make your existing budget a trimmer, leaner prospect with these money saving tips…
1. Content Network
Contextual advertising is a powerful tool but should be afforded its own campaign and assigned CPC bids to really make the most of search network placement. Google AdWords pay per click accounts have content advertising set to default in the initial account creation process so go back and untick the box to claw back some wasted budget. Content ads have their own targeting tools and bids are more flexible, giving higher costs and poor conversion rates when search ads are shown as standard.
2. Too Many Keywords
If you’ve fallen into the trap of including as may key terms as possible within your ad group, it should come as no surprise that you’re spending lots of your budget on pay per click adverts with few concrete conversions. Being ruthless and deleting or moving irrelevant terms into their own ad group will result in a more targeted campaign.
Web browsers searching for your product or service will try to reach a supplier in the most direct way possible. That means no long winded or vague search terms. Removing keywords that fall into that category will ensure your PPC cash is used up by surfers who are actually interested in the product you have to sell.
3. Landing Pages
Even if you have trimmed your keywords down, the right person landing on the wrong page can also prove costly. New advertisers and those running a non-optimised pay per click campaign fall into the trap of sending all adverts through to the home page. If your site is complicated, is difficult to navigate, offers to many options or has sub pages that must be navigated through to find specific products, the person clicking on your advert will lose patience and take their e-business elsewhere.
The key to converting on the initial interest shown by the person clicking on your advert is to send them through to the most relevant page for that product. If you sell electrical appliances and are advertising flat screen TVs, point that advert to the page containing info and purchase options for flat screen TVs.
The easiest way to let pay per click spend run away with you and fail to deliver the expected results is to leave it to run by itself. There are always improvements you can make and small savings to be made if you have the time to invest.
Author Bio
Rebecca Appleton is the operations director at pay per click and search engine optimisation consultancy, Top Position.
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