Heledd Jones

About Heledd Jones

Google’s Enhanced Campaigns: what we’ve learned from migration

With less than a month to go before the Enhanced Campaigns (EC) migration deadline, we’re starting to hear more and more about the impact of the biggest change to AdWords in years.

Both Adobe and iProspect have reported in the last few weeks that they’ve seen CPC (Cost per Click) increases of 6% and 9% respectively and yet a lot of companies still seem to be in the dark on the impact this will have on their bottom line and whether they can do anything to soften the blow.

Here at Confused.com, we have a number of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) accounts split between being managed in-house and via agencies and bid management tools.

We haven’t migrated everything yet, but here are some things we’ve learnt across the way…. 

A rose by any other name: What I’ve learnt about SEO so far this year

I’ve had a busy few months on the SEO side of my job. I was fortunate enough to attend Blueglass’ SEObarcamp (a networking event for in-house SEO managers) and the three day SES conference.

I’ve also been conducting an agency review at the same time, thus picking up some interesting thoughts and tips, and meeting some great folk along the way.

Here’s a short round-up of things I’ve learnt along the way….

Build relationships, not links, for SEO in 2013

Having worked in Search marketing for around 7 years now, 2012 felt like the year of ‘blogger outreach’ to me and there were some great examples of how to do it and which brands were doing it well

Here at Confused.com we learnt in 2012 (as did many other brands I’m sure) that outreach is about building relationships not links and with that in mind we hosted a small event in December from which I thought I’d share some of our findings:

How healthy is your PPC account?

Whether you’ve been managing your PPC account for a while, just taken over a new account or even want to audit how your PPC agency is doing, it can be overwhelming to work out how well an account is performing.

Here at Confused.com we manage several different PPC accounts, and have compiled a list of reports you could run every month (just using AdWords) to check how ‘healthy’ your accounts are.

(I must thank 2 agencies we work with: NetBooster and Essence Digital for inspiring some of these for us!).

Top 10 takeaways from SES London 2012

Last week saw the annual SES (Search Engine Strategies) conference in 2012 where all the big names in search gave their view on the year ahead.

The overarching hot topics were probably Google + and SoLoMo (Social, Local, Mobile).

There are some good round-ups to be found online (e.g. Andrew Girdwood’s blog and Kevin Gibbon’s blog) so for now, here’s my (and my colleague Richard Lewis’) top 10 take-aways for you to think about.

(Apologies in advance if I haven’t given the right people the right credit, feel free to comment if I missed you off the list.)

Another search marketer’s wishlist for 2012

It’s a new year, it’s another new list of search marketing predictions… but what do search marketers really want? What would liven up the year ahead?

Nine is my lucky number so here’s my top nine, to be taken with a pinch of salt and a reminder to be careful what you wish for….

Top 10 tips for testing PPC ads

Testing different adverts in your Google Adwords account is easy to implement and can be a real quick-win within your PPC strategy.

Testing can help you to drive better-converting traffic to the site, improving your Google Quality Score (QS) thus reducing your CPC’s and all the while making the auction tougher for your competitors.

Here are my top 10 tips for testing PPC ads…