Many marketers are using or have tried Google AdWords, the auction style advertising platform that allows you to advertise on Google sponsored search and content networks, commonly known as pay per click (PPC). This guide shares my experience of actively using Adwords as a small business owner who manages their own campaigns. I'll run through the steps to review Adwords to improve traffic quantity and quality to give more conversions. In the second part I'll go into more detail on the optimisation. I have been using AdWords for a while and overtime I have gone through many phases of continuous tweaking and re-structuring to improve conversions and I am always looking at ways to make it a cost effective marketing tool.  Whether you are starting new or have been using it for a while, it is important to understand some key areas within your account to improve the…
In the days of Heraclitus, mobile messages involved horses. But his wise words about the constancy of change apply so well to mobile email. Mobile long meant a senior executive armed with a BlackBerry that turned HTML email into something suited to a modern art exhibition. Email designers scratched their heads and hoped the problem would go away. Email marketers took solace in the fact that most audiences were BlackBerry-free. Then along came the iPhone and mobile email has never been the same. Keeping your head in the sand is no longer an option: mobile email is one of the four trends driving email marketing change. This post explores the challenges and solutions for the forward-thinking marketer. (more…)…

An introduction to on-page optimisation for SEO

Many of the posts or articles on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that you find on the web today will talk about emerging trends or the latest tools to manage this or analyze that, it can become too easy to lose sight of the core building blocks that help shape a successful online business. Working closely with Dr. Dave Chaffey, we have created the first of many 'back to basics' guides that we hope will help companies who lack outside or internal expertise review their own digital marketing effectiveness - a DIY approach. You can download the on-page SEO template at the end of this post. We hope that anyone who writes or reviews copy who isn't an SEO expert will find the guidelines and examples useful.

What is on-page optimisation?

On-page optimization is an essential tool in your natural search-marketing toolbox. Each page of your…

Using The Social Media Balance Sheet"„¢ tool to measure social media presence - for sector and competitor research

Social Media Metrics have to date mainly focused on the view of their effectiveness from inside the company. At Evonomie we"€™ve been looking for a while for an external qualitative method to measure companies"€™ online activities as part of a strategic review. Internal or in-company quantitative methods are in abundance and focus on activity, surveys and return on investment (ROI). These are certainly valid metrics and there is a comprehensive list in Jim Sterne"€™s book Social Media Metrics. The real question when conducting research is how can you capture the metrics if you"€™re outside the company? You don"€™t have access to their analytics so need to make a judgement on what"€™s important and whether the information is available.

Benefits of benchmarking competitor use of social media

Reasons we want to measure the social…
One of our aims at Smart Insights is to make marketers aware of the many software tools that can be used to take advantage of the unique communications benefits of digital media. Ultimately, these software tools should help customers too. Website personalization or behavioural targeting tools are an interesting class of tools since they can benefit both companies and customers, yet there are privacy concerns about how the data is collected is used. This category of website personalization and behavioural targeting tools is also interesting since everyone still quotes the Amazon personalized recommendation "collaborative filtering" technique - read paper describing the algorithm. Most are still wowed by the accuracy of the technique (apart from when buying gifts for others...), but it doesn't seem to give rise to too many privacy complaints.

Magiq dynamic website personalization software

When I bumped into Malcolm Duckett at the last Econsultancy Masterclass presenting Magiq I was…
Technologies get attention, yet they"€™re fleeting suggests Steve Rubel in this presentation for Edelmen PR. I couldn"€™t agree more - remember MySpace, bought by Murdoch 5 years ago for £330m. And, only yesterday Google Wave went belly-up. Rubel notes that trends develop more slowly and are timeless, and for this reason it"€™s the trends that we need to take note of. So many "€˜new trends"€™ have been there all along, after all what"€™s really so new about social media - aside from the changing technology? Our desire to connect and share isn't new, and forums were one of the first web services online. Was that early social media or "€˜word of mouth"€™, both? So what trends are new according to Rubel... Six Digital Trends To Watch by Steve Rubel and David Armano…
Q. Who would you say the market leaders are from an e-commerce perspective?  i.e what companies are you aware of that provide a complete outsourced online shop(s) through to order handling and fulfillment on a multi-country basis? A. I think there are a limited number of Ecommerce solution providers that can deliver this. There are more that work on in individual countries or markets, but fewer which can offer the international fulfillment. For me, these are best known suppliers which I believe have the scale to help you I would recommend taking a look at : 1. GSI Commerce international Ecommerce solutions 2. Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS) 3. Venda Ecommerce Fulfillment To review others I suggest you download the Gartner Ecommerce Leaders Magic Quadrant: