PPC | Internet Marketing Blog

Four often overlooked factors in PPC advertising

Yorkshire in March 2013 When planning and optimising PPC advertising, it's important to look at how external factors can effect its success.

In this post I'll look at some oft-overlooked factors which can affect the success of your PPC campaigns.

by Pete Whitmarsh 18 April 2013 11:17am 1 comment

Is Google right to group desktop and tablet together in Enhanced Campaigns?

A few months ago Google announced a huge change to the way that marketers managed paid search with the launch of Enhanced Campaigns.

One of the biggest changes this involved was the move to group tablet and desktop bids together, so marketers are forced to make one bid for both devices.

In the past we’ve highlighted numerous studies which show that businesses shouldn’t lump tablets and smartphones under one ‘mobile’ umbrella, but now Google has decided to do the opposite by claiming that tablets are essentially the same as desktops.

We recently canvassed opinion among PPC experts about Enhanced Campaigns with the general view being that despite Google’s claim that it's trying to simplify the way AdWords works, it’s actually a ploy to force marketers to increase their mobile spend.

by David Moth 10 April 2013 10:32am 7 comments

Start Me Up! A profile of Clickit Digital

Clickit Digital recently launched out of New York's "Start Up Alley" to help clients target their perfect customers everywhere across online leads, search, display, social media and video.

With such a lofty premise/propostion, we were excited to get an inside scoop from the founders.

by Ryan Sommer 02 April 2013 15:42pm 0 comments

Five examples of local PPC best practice

Local search is becoming increasingly important as consumers look to find information about the products and services near to them.

For example, 81% of UK smartphone internet users have looked for local information with their devices, and these people are just as likely to purchase in your store as online.

There’s an extremely valuable amount of traffic available for local queries, so if you are a local business it becomes extremely important to deliver your messaging to these searchers.

Google has focused heavily on improving its local search results experience, and queries that trigger a local results page have increased in number, so that the location no longer needs to be part of the search query.

Google integrates data from Google+ to its map listings, so the easiest way to make sure your business is appearing on a map search is to ensure your Google+ business page is set up and using the correct address.

Here are five examples of PPC ads using location to enhance listings and (hopefully) increase CTR...

by Graham Charlton 26 March 2013 11:36am 6 comments

What are the pros and cons of Enhanced Campaigns so far?

It has been a few months since Google introduced its Enhanced Campaigns, which gave marketers a new way of managing their paid search campaigns.

The focus of the change is to enable advertisers to target people at the right time, in the right place, with the right advert and call-to-action. Effectively, the structuring of Adwords campaigns is becoming device independent, removing the ability to have specific mobile, tablet or desktop targeted campaigns.

Up to now PPC managers have had the choice of whether or not they want to switch over to the new system, although the change will become compulsory in a few months.

To find out how the Enhanced Campaigns are impacting the process of managing paid search, I asked four PPC experts to give us some insight into what they’d noticed so far...

by David Moth 25 March 2013 11:54am 2 comments

Five important PPC trends

The PPC (pay per click) landscape is continually changing as Google introduces new features, and advertisers become more savvy with regards to the customer information that they're tracking, and more accomplished at processing and extracting insights from that wealth of data.

Here are five key areas that I am predicting will have an increasing amount of impact on our PPC activities in the year ahead.

by Pete Whitmarsh 21 March 2013 13:30pm 1 comment

Three best practice tips for integrating paid search with offline campaigns

Paid search is 'always-on' and a numbers game that needs to be aligned with your offline marketing strategy to reap maximum rewards.

In our recent Paid Search Best Practice Guide, which includes over 300+ pages of tips and best practice, we outline how these ads can support cross-channel marketing campaigns.

Read on for three tips from contributor Chris Camacho, Head of Paid Search at Starcom MediaVest Group.

by Ryan Sommer 20 March 2013 13:32pm 0 comments

Is eBay wrong about the value of paid search?

This week, eBay released a study into the effectiveness of paid search ads which concludes that, for the auction giant at least, 'the efficacy of SEM is limited at best'.

It's an interesting study, and well worth a read, but the report's conclusion applicable to brands in general, is it just less effective for eBay, or is there something wrong with the brand's PPC strategies?

I asked a number of experts about the report, and whether they agree with its conclusions....

by Graham Charlton 15 March 2013 10:45am 16 comments

How to let the weather control your AdWords campaign

Google AdWords managers can now make use of a unique platform that will control when your adverts are displayed depending on the weather.

WeatherFIT is a cloud-based piece of software that delivers AdWords adverts based on real-time localised climatic conditions.

The PPC tool retrofits to existing AdWords accounts and uses real-time data from the Met Office to control which adverts are shown based on the weather.

Adverts will only show if they meet the weather criteria you set.

by Simon Hawtin 04 March 2013 10:41am 4 comments

40% of consumers are unaware that Google Adwords are adverts

Research carried out by Bunnyfoot suggests that many people are unaware of the difference between paid and organic search listings, with 40% of web users unaware they were adverts.

While conducting a research project for an insurance sector client, Bunnyfoot discovered that 81% of users clicked on Google Adwords listings as opposed to natural search results.

Further investigation of this surprising bias revealed that 41 out of the 100 individuals tested did not know that Adwords were paid-for adverts, believing them instead to be the most authoritative links.

by Graham Charlton 28 February 2013 11:19am 6 comments