Every £1 said to generate £11 returns for online performance marketers
At the recent IAB Affiliate Marketing Council, the IAB released the findings of an AMC and PWC ‘Online Performance Marketing’ (OPM) Study. The study was commissioned to outline the growth and size of the affiliate marketing industry (lead generation is included in the Online Performance Marketing umbrella).
The main headline was the scale of the market, it generated £9bn of transactions in 2012 in the UK. Of the £9bn, £8bn was accounted for by Affiliate Marketing. Advertisers in the arena spent £814m on OPM in the same period. This accounts for £1 spent for every £11 made.
The study found that there were between 3,000-4,000 advertisers working with 10,000 publisher websites. This resulted in 100 million transactions and 70 million leads generated. What is also promising for the…
The Shape Of Things To Come? How social media should influence our campaign creativity
Noticed anything different about snowmen this winter? Of course, the Christmas episode of Dr Who might have prompted a few of us to revise the long-held perception of them as representations of jolly, portly folk prone to roaming the skies while singing.
But what about in real life? Have you noticed that the traditional and rather simple model – two balls of snow (one big, one small) a couple of twigs for arms, a carrot for a nose and lumps of coal for eyes – is changing?
Across the world, a fall of snow now seems to be more a blank canvas; a chance to go out and create something inventive, different, eye-catching. And it would seem we have social media to thank for that.
Thanks to our smartphones, it’s not just our neighbours…
A briefing on Product Listing Ads and Google Shopping changes
From today, February 13, Google will phase out free listings in UK Shopping searches. As Google Shopping changes, marketers will need to budget for clicks they previously got for free and get to grips with the Merchant Center, product feeds and product listing ads.
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change.” – Charles Darwin
Change is coming. After ten years of sending free consumer traffic to online businesses, Google Shopping is ending its charity. From February 13, free listings will begin to disappear from Google Shopping.
In their place, we’ll soon see more and more of the Product Listing Ads: big, shiny, image-led adverts which contain all the info a shopper needs to make a purchase there and then. This is…
An experiment to assess what drives organic Reach on Facebook? Likes, Comments or Shares?
I wrote recently about some comparisons I had drawn between different types of post on Facebook with a view to drawing conclusions about the most effective content types on Facebook.
Continuing on a similar theme I've been experimenting this week with two similar posts. One resulted in lots of Shares and Likes but only 1 Comment vs another with lots of Comments (and half the number of Likes and Shares).
Here are the post, they were both classified by Facebook identically (both were Photos - recently downgraded by Facebook in its new variant of the Edgerank algorithm) and both were posted at a similar time of day. The image on the right (with the highest Reach) was posted first. If anything its high success would have driven a higher organic audience for the subsequent post (on the left)…
A briefing on the new Adwords Enhanced Campaigns
Value/Importance to AdWords advertisers: [rating=4] - But only if you have high levels of mobile traffic and/or physical store locations.
Recommended link: AdWords Enhanced Campaigns announcement - 06/02/2013
Our commentary on AdWords Enhanced Campaigns
Google’s mantra has always been Relevance, Relevance, Relevance! They’re now really putting it into practice for mobile marketing with this exciting new feature which means that soon you will be able to more easily target mobile users with ads based on their location, device and time of day. These options were already available to advertisers, but it will become much easier to implement and measure mobile-specific ads. However, I understand that tablets can't be easily targeted any longer. Google says this is due to a blurring of different tablet devices and desktops. Nevertheless, savvy advertisers were using this as a way to reach a perceived more valuable audience.
The key features of…
Examples showing how SEO recommendations should be briefed for implementation
SEO recommendations are often highly technical and specific in nature. One common mistake businesses make when implementing changes recommended by their SEO Agency is to not clearly communicate why the changes are needed in the first place.
Recommendations often pass through two or more people before they get implemented – from the SEO Expert, to a Marketing Exec (non-techy), to their internal/external Developer for example. On some occasions, this means the reasoning behind the recommendation is lost along the way and it can have a devastating effect on your SEO.
This article gives insight into a few examples of things that could go wrong if SEO recommendations are misinterpreted during the implementation process...
Canonical tag misrepresentation
As an SEO, recommending the addition of canonicals is a matter of best practice. It can address known duplicate content issues, as well as guarding against…
Reviewing your Adwords campaigns to make them more effective
Paid search marketing using AdWords for cost per click (CPC) advertising can be a very effective way to bring targeted customers to your website. By targeting specific keywords, you can capture customers that are in a more advanced stage of the buying cycle and have a need that your product or service can fill.
Without proper management, AdWords can get very expensive and, over time, lose its effect. That’s why you need to do periodic audits of your AdWords program.
Performing a AdWords audit serves a few functions, but the main goal is to maximize the impact of your campaigns and, ultimately, your costs per conversion and return on investment (ROI). A mismanaged campaign can cost you more money than you need to spend and can also result in missed business opportunities. Below are some…
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…
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…
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…
