PPC | Internet Marketing Blog

Seven ways to avoid marketing meltdown

Whatever the size of your business, there are several pitfalls we all face when putting together a marketing strategy and sticking to it.

These include daily tasks, too much research to do, the temptation to head to the pub. All of these things regularly pop up and threaten to knock us off course. Here's seven simple steps that will help keep your marketing on track...

by Matt Owen 12 July 2010 11:17am 4 comments

Search market report reveals increase in PPC and SEO spending

UK firms have been increasing their investment in paid search and SEO over the last 12 months, though lack of internal resources is the biggest problem affecting the success of search marketing.

These are some of the findings of the Econsultancy Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2010, sponsored by Guava, which is based on a survey of more than 500 client-side digital marketers and agencies.

by Graham Charlton 07 June 2010 09:51am 4 comments

Optimising PPC for long-tail keywords

A common problem for running search campaigns in niche industries is the typical low volumes of data to optimise against.

However, it's not just restricted to areas such as B2B, but also applies to long-tail campaigns where some keywords might only get triggered a few times a day.

by Magnus Nilsson 20 May 2010 11:14am 1 comment

Landing pages: ten top tips

If you want to do online marketing well, you need to get the basics right, and few things are more important than writing effective landing pages.

by Kevin Gibbons 10 May 2010 12:53pm 10 comments

UK political parties’ PPC election strategy just doesn’t exist

With the election in full flow two members of my team at Net Media Planet, John Hillman and Matthew Ncube, decided to monitor the main political parties’ PPC activity.

Here’s their take on where the three parties have all been going wrong.

by Sri Sharma 27 April 2010 09:48am 3 comments

Q&A: Chicago Steak's Matt Crowley on maximizing search keywords

Chicago Steak Company had a problem that many online retailers share. The steak and seafood seller offers high quality products at impressive price points. But if you haven't noticed, a lot of companies sell steak online. Looking to drive traffic toits web site, increase visitors and reduce the cost of customer acquisition, Chicago Steak found its single Google AdWords campaign lacking.

The brand needed help both identifying and managing larger amounts of keywords. Finally last year, it started working with a third party to help make its search strategy more granular. The result? Lower costs per acquisition, boosted traffic to the company website and increased conversions. I spoke with Matt Crowley, the company's vice president, to find out how they did it.

by Meghan Keane 16 April 2010 15:45pm 1 comment

Avinash Kaushik: When you're buying keywords, don't forget the long tail

Attendees at marketing conferences are often looking for concrete advice, and this morning at Search Engine Strategies New York, they got some.

Google's analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik had some clear tips for PPC purchases: go after the long tail.

by Meghan Keane 24 March 2010 16:34pm 4 comments

PPC health-check through long-tail analysis

We have all heard about the long-tail of search marketing. And odds are that even if you have not intentionally implemented such a strategy, you are to some extent utilising broad or phrase match keywords, thus capturing a long tail of varyingly relevant searches.

Long-tail keywords are phrases that are not often searched for individually, but in aggregate can create a sizeable opportunity. And with increased user sophistication and complexity of queries, the opportunity grows larger.

by Magnus Nilsson 08 March 2010 08:52am 7 comments

How to control SEO spending post-recession

Remember back when the credit crunch was new? Every other blog post, including a fair few of mine, urged firms not to lose faith in online marketing, not to hack at their search engine marketing (SEM) budgets or lay off members of their online PR team.

I still think it’s important to hold marketing nerve. If you are to grow your business then a successful marketing strategy is essential and budget cuts are not going to help.

However, as the country shudders its way out of a historic recession, achieving an estimated 0.1% of growth in the last three months of 2009, it’s time to face facts. Your money need to work harder.

by Kevin Gibbons 09 February 2010 11:45am 10 comments

Q&A: Nick Carter of ValuePetSupplies.com on infinite email ROI

nick carter, ValuePetSupplies.com What's "infinite email ROI"? Nick Carter, marketing and sales manager for ValuePetSupplies.com says it's making tens of thousands of dollars in revenue from a email campaign that cost him nothing. Literally nothing.

So we caught up with Nick to learn how he's regularly squeezing up to 7,000 ROI from his email campaigns, and made them 451 percent more efficient than paid search marketing. He told us, and also shared some pretty provocative thoughts on how coop ad dollars could be better used if re-allocated to online marketers and the vendors that serve them.

by Rebecca Lieb 13 January 2010 22:46pm 1 comment