New Ad ranking research shows importance of position

You will know that how high up your ad appears on the Google results pages is absolutely critical in determining how successful your advert will be.  According to AccuraCast's recent analysis of close to two million Google ad clicks, the clickthrough rate for adverts in position one averages at 7.11%, whereas those in position nine averaged only 0.55%. Natural search result clickthrough rates also show this dramatic decline with position This shows just how much influence ranking has on your ads success. The graph above highlights the importance of occupying position one, showing a huge drop in CTR for ads in position two, and a gradual decline in CTR through ad positions. An additional benefit of getting an ad in position one can be seen in the image below. Ads get all sorts of additional bells and…

Twitter opens its advertising to small and medium businesses in UK, Ireland and Canada and adds custom timelines worldwide

Importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: Twitter blog With the virtual ink barely dry on the Twitter IPO, Twitter has sought to increase its revenue per user from advertising by offering its Promoted Accounts, Tweets and Trends products to smaller businesses in a limited number of countries outside the US - we will update readers when more countries are added. If you had previously tried to sign up via this form you would have seen a minimum monthly spend of $10,000, but this has now been removed, opening up more competition within the ad auction.

Ten things you need to know about Twitter's new advertising options

So this is big news for many small businesses, particularly those such as B2B companies whose audiences tend to…

5 key questions to help develop your Twitter strategy

Following the initial public offering for Twitter valuing the company at $140 billion, we now find ourselves wondering  how the social network will become profitable, and how it can help our businesses to profit.

The truth is, despite now having over 280 million monthly users, Twitter is not profitable - yet.

But there is opportunity for your business... The ability to share updates, disseminate content to prospects, customers, influencers or even just people who are interested in your brand, presents you with the perfect tool for real-time brand awareness.

Of course we know there are also many other advantages of Twitter including service, lead generation and relationship building, with many great examples of brands using Twitter for customer care.

So in fact the questions you should be asking are not only how…

Tips for integrating video as part of content marketing

"The next big thing in content marketing is video,"

...so said, nearly everyone in 2013.

Rather than attempt to convince you of this as a consumer of brands or a business, in this article I'd like to show and advise as to how as part of integrated content strategy, video content can work hard for you and deliver results.

The growing popularity of online video

Online video is big business and it's visibility and the demand for it is statistically astounding. The Content Marketing Institute report the following stats to help paint a picture:

On-line video has increased eightfold in five years.In 2016 the gigabyte equivalent of all the movies ever made in the history of film will move across networks every 3 minutes.It will take 6million years to watch all the video that will uploaded in one month, in 2016.Video will be 55% of all internet…

We find that keyword match types are an important aspect of Adwords that there is often confusion about. It is so fundamental that all Adwords customers understand this that I thought I would try and summarise it more clearly than Google do! We also cover the topic in more depth in the Smart Insights 7 Steps guide to improving AdWords ROI that I recently updated.

I will cover these two areas of good practice in this post:

Keyword match typesNegative keyword match types

It is worth doing this because; although negative keywords and standard keywords share the same basic match types (broad, phrase and exact) these terms actually have different meanings and functions with the two types of keywords.

1. Keyword Match Types

Exact Match

The users search term must exactly match a keyword in your account in…

How brands can use Instagram to connect with customers

Following the news that Instagram is set to bring ads to the service, MyCustomer.com asked a number of experts how this will help brands connect with customers. When Instagram was bought by social media giant Facebook back in March, speculations quickly began about the likelihood that Instagram would follow Facebook’s lead and begin monetising the site. And it wasn’t long before this was confirmed. Last week, Instagram COO Emily White, who joined the company from Facebook, told the Wall Street Journal that the photo-sharing network would start rolling out advertising within the next year. 'We want to make money in the long term, but we don't have any short-term pressure,' she said, adding that the challenge for Instagram would be to integrate marketing without jeopardising the network’s ‘cool factor’. The details on…

A case study of boosting offline email signups 3.3x with SMS

Increasing the number of customer touch points used to ask for an email address is a good start to accelerating email list growth. However, the way in which the email address is requested makes a big difference to how fast your list grows. Its not just the copy and incentive, as are commonly considered, but the process too and for offline data collection the response channel. In this case providing customers the ability to subscribe by sending their email address using SMS delivered 3.3x more email addresses than simply advertising a web signup link. Remarkable given that the vast majority of brands simply give a URL in offline advertising, posters and other media. Zettasphere worked with Deal Monster to put to the test the signup method. Deal Monster are part of the Johnson press group, so it made sense for Deal Monster…

A step-by-step tutorial to managing Link detoxing

Link detoxing is extremely important for many reasons, including keeping your site active and penalty free. One bad link is a problem, but many bad links are a huge setback and should not be taken lightly. When you do a link detox you can either use a program or go through all of your links manually to check for any bad links. After finding bad links the next step is to get rid of them and delete them off of your profile. Questions that are often asked about this process include how do I spot bad links, should I use a program or do it manually, if I use a program which one, and how do you get penalties removed after the bad links are gone? You can find all of the answers to these questions and more below, as well as some basic information about…

The advantages of claiming your online identity for SEO and brand authority

As search continues to advance, the concept of authorship and identity will grow in importance. Many opinion leaders believe that over time, websites will begin to be ranked based not just on the keywords they contain and the inbound links they attract but also the people and authors behind the content being produced. Earlier this year, Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt stated: 'Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification'. At the time, some commentators suggested that this statement was proof of ‘AuthorRank’, a situation where Google will give certain pieces of content a rankings boost based on the author of that content. However, whilst there’s no definitive evidence to suggest that AuthorRank is in effect now, authorship mark-up is in place…

Examples of the many ways email marketing influences sale in addition to clickthrough

Email Marketing is already highly valued by a diverse range of B2B and B2C companies because of the excellent ROI it provides.

eCommerce brands are the biggest users of email, in no small part because the tracking makes the business case for email crystal clear.

Social media too puts huge value on the power of email. Facebook is joint third biggest sender of email worldwide. Whilst ExactTarget is the biggest ESP by sent volume, Facebook sends more email than all their clients put together (source Senderbase top senders)

Even so, could it be that email is undervalued, even by many big brands?

More often than not the value of email is determined by conversion resulting from an email click.

How about when there is no click on an email? Does it mean the email had no value?

It would be strange to consider…