My experiences in allocating online ad budgets between PPC, Sponsored Stories, Promoted Posts and Facebook Ads

According to a recent Search Engine Land post, some Google customers are abandoning PPC due in part to rising keyword prices. It's an interesting post, and it claims that the majority of PPC companies are, in fact, SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises - SMBs in the US). The final 2012 financial results reported for Google published on January 22nd 2013 show some evidence for reduced competition in that although paid clicks have increased overall globally, CPC has declined significantly, suggesting reduce competition for bidding or fewer advertisers in some markets: Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, increased approximately 24% over the fourth quarter of 2011 and increased approximately 9% over the third quarter of 2012. Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related…

LinkedIn Answers and Events are no more, giving new impetus to Quora?

Importance: [rating=3] A couple of relatively small changes in LinkedIn to be aware of if you use LinkedIn as a B2B marketer or for professional development. The two closures which were not announced by the blog since not positive news, but hidden away in the Help Centre are: LinkedIn Answers - this closes at the end of January 2013. I personally haven’t used it so much recently and wonder whether the better categorisation, filtering and rating in Quora have been the death-knell. A reminder to take a look again at Quora - which has high levels of activity in some areas, for example SEO. To help Answer Digital Marketing Questions try the Smart Insights Answers forum and Smart Insights LinkedIn Group where we have Q&A across the full range…

Using cross-matching in your AdWords campaigns to improve ROI

I recently had a conversation with a Marketing Manager who was extremely hostile towards employing automated bidding, either within their Adwords account or via a third party tool. “It doesn’t work” they said “we were stuck into a spiral of diminishing results, and when we switched to an Agency that uses only manual bidding, our results improved significantly”. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this type of story! Many people have issues with utilising any sort of automated bid management technology because they’ve been burn't in the past. However, I’ve never encountered a reasonably sized account that a bid management tool couldn’t squeeze a little more profit out of. The thing to remember is that the technology is only as good as the data it uses. In this case, I took a quick a look at the account in question and it was very obvious…

Our experiences with using Social Bakers for social media management

Community management is not an easy job. Anyone responsible for an active Facebook and/or Twitter profile will tell you that. The skill set has evolved quickly and was summed up well in Get Satisfaction’s recent Community Manager infographic. Despite this skill set emerging there are a number of challenges that community managers face. Facebook and Twitter users want near real-time answers to a wide range of questions which can be on any topic from sales enquiries to specific customer support issues.  At TUI, I've believed for a long time that sales questions on Facebook or Twitter should be answered by our sales team, customer complaints should be looked after by our customer services team and so on. [caption id="attachment_20117" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Content feedback within the Social Bakers dashboard[/caption] An increasing challenge…

My goodness, how I love a good argument……..

One of my favourite Monty Python sketches in the distant past was the one about the “Argument Clinic”. It was a great idea…the outlet that allowed disputation a place to play out….for money.

“Excuse me I’ve come in here for an argument.”

An argumentative proposition I heard recently was “no one gives a toss about brands any more”. Well, true or false? Actually, neither … how’s that. It’s clear enough isn’t it? No it’s not. Yes it is. No it isn’t… The fact of the matter is that more rubbish is talked about brands than anything else. Linda Barker (God bless her, calls herself a brand – Linda? You know the Interior Designer and TV Presenter). Jordan née Katie Price probably thinks she’s one too.

This is brand Barker or barking….. …

Learning from the global expansion of ASOS

You will probably have heard of ASOS, they are inspiring example of how to achieve online retail growth. Their most recent figures show the scale they have achieved: "ASOS attracts over 17.5 million unique visitors a month, had 8.0 million registered users and 4.4 million active customers from 160 countries who have shopped in the last 12 months. In addition to the global reach of the core asos.com website, ASOS also has country-specific websites targeting the USA, Australia, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. All products on asos.com can also be bought through the ASOS mobile site, whilst ASOS also offers customers the ability to shop through iPhone and iPad applications".

Source: ASOS annual report

I was fortunate to recently work with them for a year as a placement student and Dave Chaffey,…

New options for reaching your target audience through specialist video network channels

Networks represent a demand from consumers for YouTube to grow from being a collection of random videos to something more organized and therefore accessible and useful to audiences. The better networks such as those I feature in this post show the usefulness of teaming up for greater success. It's an approach that YouTube has identified and will address too in 2013. There is some controversy around the usefulness of YouTube networks for channels who are making good content and generating interest in their videos independently. However, there are definitely ways to utilise your involvement with a network to improve your video output and general marketing.

What is a YouTube network?

Put simply, it is a collection of YouTube channels. How these networks come about varies. Some companies start a network and ask channels if they would like to be a part of…

Use questions and filters when planning for digital - don't just follow 'what's hot'

We're just ending the period of 2013 predictions, something I am fascinated by, find useful, but also dread each year. There are undoubtedly some great posts out there with valuable opinion and insight. Yet it can get a little overwhelming and in most cases leave you feeling a little depressed around all the things that "you should be doing." Maybe that's just me? The thing is, in marketing (as any job role), you can't do everything, so there's no point getting anxious about the million things that you could do, prediction posts heap that pressure on; they're good and bad, in that way. We too ran our first online summit a week ago advising on a number of topic areas and recommended priorities for 2013, (you can see the recordings and slidedecks here if you missed them). It's easy to get…

5 real-world examples showing the value of rich media in Ecommerce

Ecommerce professionals and conversion rate experts have been lauding the benefits of rich media like video and 360 degree views for retailers more and more over the last couple of years.  Yet a huge range of high profile ecommerce businesses are still yet to adopt product video, high resolution imagery or 360’s. A number of the clients I work with have benefitted a lot from adopting rich media and have seen big increases in engagement and conversion. I’ve been talking about how rich media can add value to your proposition and general user experience for ages (such as here on SEJ and here on my personal blog) but I thought it would be useful to feature some quotes from expert retailers who have reaped the benefits. Thanks to…

A briefing on the opportunities and limitations of Graph Search to prepare businesses for Facebook’s new breakthrough social search tool

By Carlton Jefferis You will have been hard-pushed to avoid news this week that Facebook launched Graph Search, a major new feature which Mark Zuckerburg hailed “the third pillar of Facebook” after News Feed and Timeline. This overview introduces the basics of Graph Search and looks at what it could mean to digital marketers and businesses. Over the coming weeks I’ll cover this feature in more detail as further information emerges from Facebook and from those with early access to the US beta release.

What is a Facebook Graph Search?

Graph Search is not a competitor to Google as some of the newspaper headlines may suggest. Instead it's a completely new concept in performing a search on Facebook. It’s not about finding links to…