Posts Tagged ‘Paid Search’
7 Effective Online Marketing Habits That Will Boost Your Business in 2012
“We are all creatures of habit.”
It may be a well-known saying, but do we really understand how true it is? Every part of our lives is influenced by routine, repetition and familiarity in some way, right from choosing what we have for breakfast to making important decisions that will affect our businesses. Of course, some habits are better than others, and forming new habits (or addressing ones we’d rather give up) requires training. It is essential to perform our desired actions, use discipline to repeat them and consistency to keep it up. The more we do this, the more natural it becomes – and a habit is born. Online marketing habits are no different. To make your business presence felt in the digital world, you must be ready and willing to identify positive actions, create a schedule for their execution, dedicate yourself to adhering to the routine and continue to carry it on into the future.
Here’s a guide to the most essential online marketing habits to push yourself into the limelight:
5 Ways to Stop the Waste in Your AdWords Campaigns
Paid search is increasingly becoming the preferred option for businesses that aim to generate sales and leads online. Amazon is currently AdWords’ #1 advertiser with a spend of $51 million in a single quarter! So my guess it that, although you probably don’t have as much as Amazon to spend on your AdWords campaign, you still have a relatively substantial paid search budget you expect a return on your investment from. You also probably want a more stable source of traffic from Google because organic & local search appear to be highly volatile and dependent on Google’s ever changing algorithm and its result pages.
With this in mind, effectively spending and putting every single penny to good use in your AdWords campaign is ever so important! Several businesses choose to manage their Paid Search Campaigns in-house; although this is not usually the best option for medium to large sized organisations. Proactive monitoring of campaigns are absolutely critical elements to successful campaigns. If you insist on managing your business’s AdWords account on your own and do not want to thrown money away, then follow these five tips to help you get the best out of your campaign spend and time (these tips are not only limited to AdWords but also Microsoft AdCenter – which now covers Yahoo and Bing and accounts for 20-30% of search engine traffic). Read More »
AdWords Update: Get 60 Characters in Your Text Ad Headline!
Google AdWords have just introduced a major change to the way ads are display in the top positions on Google search (this applies to only top ranking ads, above the organic results and not on the side).
Description line 1 is now displayed along side the headline text in the headline for top ranking ads. This means a total of 60 characters would now be displayed for the top 3 sponsored results i.e. the allowed 25 characters in ad headlines + 35 characters allowed in description line one.
For your ad headlines to display 60 characters, two criteria must be met: Read More »
How to Use the Thesaurus to Kick Start Your Keyword Research
Thesaurus’ came in very handy when I was essay writing in Uni and are still very relevant to me as a search marketing professional today. The thesaurus is my number 1 keyword research tool and the perfect resource for finding synonyms or related keywords. The beauty of using a thesaurus is that a bulk of keyword research has been done for you by thesaurus publishers. My favourite online thesaurus site is Thesaurus.com. Visual Thesaurus is also a handy tool if you are after a visual representation of keyword relationships (but it requires an annual subscription of about $20). I’d rather keep things simple by sticking with Thesaurus.com. Better still, thesaurus.com used in combination with the AdWords Keyword Tool is a clincher for your keyword research efforts.
How to Use Thesaurus.com and AdWords Keyword Tool
Type in your keyword in Thesaurus.com (in this example I typed in “architect”) – it should generate a list of results
Copy the URL- I copied ”http://thesaurus.com/browse/architect” for this example
Go the AdWords Keyword Tool – then copy and paste the thesaursus URL in the website text field.
AdWords Keyword tool crawls the specific page on thesaurus.com and returns even more keyword results
This not only helps you leverage two very powerful keyword tools at the same time but also ensures that no stones are left unturned over the course of your keyword research.
So UK Internet Advertising Finally Overtakes TV Advertising Spend – Paid Search is the Real Winner
I started today with my usual tech news digs on Twitter and RSS feeds BUT this release from the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and article from the Guardian stood out from my endless stream of tech new articles and blog updates. They are both about Online advertising expenditure finally surpassing TV advertising spend. It was inevitable but I really didn’t expect it to happen so quickly!
The summary of the two articles was that:
- Online advertising expenditure in the first half of 2009 was £1.75 billion
- TV advertising over the same period (H1 2009) was £1.6 billion
It’s not a huge margin but considering that the entire advertising industry contracted by 16.6% in H1 2009 and TV advertising declined by 17% in H1 2009 (year on year); online advertising proved to be a recession buster with 4.6% year-on-year growth in the first half of 2009. Freaking amazing…I’ll say!
Lets dig a little deeper to find out the sectors in online advertising that actually tick:
