Practical tips to refine your PPC targeting
Recent changes to Google’s AdWords tool allow PPC marketers to set up paid search campaigns without populating long lists of plurals, abbreviations, acronyms, misspellings and stems.
In my last post, I mentioned the need to review keyword match types regularly to ensure your paid search campaigns remain profitable. The recent AdWords changes make regular reviewing even more important; especially for small and medium enterprises.
Here, ClickThrough Marketing’s Paid Search Manager, Saiqa Bi, looks at the implications of the changes, and the potential pros and cons for internet marketing.
A brief recap on Adwords functionality
Before we delve any deeper into what the recent to AdWords functionality mean for you, it’s probably worth a quick recap of what does what in AdWords:
Phrase match keyword targeting allows advertisers to target an ad to any search query that contains…
3 top tips to encourage sharing and 7 bad habits to avoid
Social media enthusiasts tend to look at press releases, and public relations in general, with a jaundiced eye. As a heavy social media user since 2005, I must admit I have read thousands of press releases I wouldn’t dream of sharing with my social communities.
Nevertheless, I am an optimist! I believe the PR industry can adapt and publish press releases that are highly shareable on social platforms.
Three good reasons press releases should be socially shareable
Should press release writers care about social media sharing? I can think of three extremely important reasons:
Social media exposes a firm to new groups of prospects and referrers.
Social shares from influential social media participants increase a firm’s credibility.
Social sharing may have a rippling effect that improves brand awareness.
Unfortunately, many…
A tutorial and examples of adding captions and subtitles to videos
In the past, there were four main things that needed your attention in order to optimise your online videos for search engines; video title, description, category and tags. These things still apply but now there is another really useful tool. Closed captioning means that the content of your video is available in written word format which is something that search engines can read and identify.
What is closed captioning?
Closed captioning is the process of displaying text on a screen (e.g. on a TV programme or online video) to provide additional information to what is already being presented.
The reason it is termed ‘closed’ captioning is that only viewers who choose to activate them will see them. ‘Open’ captions are visible to all viewers.
Some people use the terms ‘captions’ and ‘subtitles’ interchangeably. However, captions are slightly different as they aim to describe what…
Improving EdgeRank factors for a Facebook company page updates
Last week we looked at how Facebook's EdgeRank alogrithm works for marketing. This week we look more specifically at how to improve a page's Edgerank. So, let's get straight into it... I'll review the three factors of Facebook update affinity, weight and decay that I introduced previously.
Improving Affinity
As I explained in my previous post, affinity refers to how interested a friend is in a brand’s page or how much of an online friend you are. Facebook gathers this data based on the clicks you have made in the past to that page /friend’s feed plus the number of likes, shares and comments you have made.
Affinity can drop off relatively quickly so the challenge is to continually be building affinity with your fans. Think about posts more like a dripping tap than a single big splash.
"If you haven’t had the dripping tap…
Analysing link effectiveness using web analytics tools
This is part 2 of a post advising on how to identify quality domains for SEO Link-building. In Part 1, I introduced an approach for identifying domains using specific link analysis tools. In part 2, I'll look specifically at using Google Analytics. Since it’s also important to turn your eye inwards and use your web analytics data to identify which domains are providing valuable links.
If you aren’t already, consider start using campaign tracking codes to ensure that you are measuring the impact of each link and not just reliant on domain level information. If you rely on the referral data, you can only see landing page level detail, not individual links.
Use a taxonomy for your campaign tracking (and make sure everyone in the team knows about it) so you get consistent data. For example, consider the following:
utm_medium = seo
utm_source= links
utm_campaign = domain name
utm_content =…
Ideas to improve the effectiveness of your AdWords creative
In a traditional advertising sense, your AdWords text is your creative, your broadcast to the world aimed at helping (or is that interrupting) people on their journey as they use Google.
As you'll know, copy in AdWords is so important since it affects several factors that all relate to your return in investment. If you make your ads relevant to the audience searching, it will:
Boost clickthrough rate giving more visits to your site and better quality score
Reduce cost-per-click through the way quality score works
Reduce bounce rate and increase conversion through relevance to the landing page
It's a delicate balance since you want to maximise quality score and minimise cost-per-click through maximising clickthrough rate, but at the same time you don't want to pay for irrelevant clickers. So, to an extent your ad should attract and repel (those not likely to purchase) at the…
…and, is it relevant anyway?
We've all heard this term, integrated marketing communications or IMC (yes it has an acronym!). Yet is it relevant I wonder, shouldn't marketing be integrated by definition? Integrated states the obvious!
Marketing of old was relatively simple, from a marketer's perspective advertising was straightforward, retail wasn't complicated and the Internet didn’t exist. Integrating marketing communications was relatively easy to achieve. Today there are many more disciplines and channels than consumer attention can cope with, and we obsess over them.
From a consumer perspective, there's much more information to take in now than say pre 1995. There's more TV programming, radio choice, print options, and outdoor potential, not mentioning online and mobile platforms, of course! In turn, advertisers are quick to hit people with more marketing messages because of that choice, new communication channels are quickly exploited and as a…
An explanation of why Edgerank matters to Facebook marketing - Part 1
So you’ve got a great piece of content all ready to go on your Facebook page. You post and wait expecting the likes and shares to come rushing in. You’ve got several thousand fans but you appear to have generated online tumbleweed moment. Why?
Well, research from allfacebook.com and Edgerank Checker shows that, on average, 83% of your fans may not even be seeing your posts. Facebook suggest as few as 16% of fans are actually reached. That might explain the tumbleweed feel you can get on Facebook.
Data from Pagelever at Inside Facebook suggests the situation is even worse, and the larger the number of fans, the less likelihood of the post being seen.
Whatever the actually figure, getting your…
Boost SEO x53 - and other great reasons to use animation in your marketing
There are all sorts of names for it – explainer videos, corporate video, marketing videos, animated web videos…. cartoons for your company - I prefer to call them animated videos! But, whatever you call them, their popularity in digital marketing strategy is growing.
Once animation was limited to those with massive six figure production budgets, but current technology means you no longer need a big studio or access to television broadcast channels to create and distribute animation.
In theory, anyone can have one written, designed, storyboarded and produced tailored to your marketing needs.
Four major reasons to use animation in your marketing
Increased conversion rates – 64%- 85% of people are more likely to purchase after watching a product video. And, on average, people will stay 2 minutes longer on…
Using SEO analysis tools to identify linking opportunities
In the latest article in this series on how to use analytics techniques for better SEO we look at the importance of targeting relevant domains for your link building.
I'll start by introducing what you should look for in quality link sources and then in Part 1 of this two part article, I'll cover how to select domains to target through link-building tools. In Part 2 I'll drill down to cover how to analyse existing links using web analytics tools.
Not all links are born equal
You'll know this! The impact of a link rests on several factors, not least the reputation of the website it resides on. Search engines place a great deal of importance on quality, relevance and trust. This is a deliberately simplified explanation, but the three signals combined make a heady cocktail of link love. My advice is that if you focus on these…
