Social Media blog

As with most things in online marketing the key to success comes from attention to detail, relevance, analysis and ROI interpretation in a blend of site analytics and PPC tracking.

This is all complex stuff but it has a direct impact on revenue. To do it in-house is fine as long as you have 30-40k for a great PPC manager. If not, you can get away with 15% commission on your total spend with set targets and a growth in your business with an agency that has the expertise of setting up and running a healthy PPC return for your business. Read more

It is a little comical that MSN adCenter fails to rank in position number 1 for the term MSN adCenter.
Maybe it goes to show… Read more

It is indeed a very time-consuming process to open up a master account in Google. What is more frustrating is the need to create additional Google accounts and then some more.
I ran out of emails doing that. Should it not be a little easier for agencies to create something like that, even if they are not running on massive budgets.

The (late) email reply I got from Google was firstly explaining a massive demand and delays in getting back to you. Surely if the product (and AdWords is a world class product, not so a service) is so popular and therefore increases revenue why not put a little more money into the interface and the staff around it?
You might want to keep things scalable in an internet business. Google is just that, no longer.

Customer services please!

Pay per click seems to have significantly changed in the last couple of weeks. If you perform a search for “service” + “location” e.g. “car hire London” and then after a couple of different combinations go back to a generic search such as “service” e.g. “van hire” you will see that the location entered before sticks with you. Works better with specific locations (rather than generic London) so you can have fun drilling down.

Of course this means that Google has made major advancements in the way it is targeting ads to consumers, by second guessing Read more

If you are using site-targeted campaigns with AdWords it’s very easy to root out invalid traffic depending on your goals. If for example you need many pageviews, have a look at your AdWords analysis in Google Analytics or any other analytics software you are using and check how many pageviews an advertiser is bringing on average. If your target is 3 PVs per user and a site is only generating 1.2 PVs then you know that the traffic you get is not really qualified.
Read more

We normally don’t review products here but here is a post about KeyTrail. If you are a small or medium size business or a search marketing specialist with limited resources then you need to have a look into this. It gives you control over PPC spend, however small or big and helps you understand the activity top-level as well as down to details such as individual keyword performance across time.
It is a very interesting product for tracking pay per click activity and it does what it says on the tin. Great to see a site that does not over-claim what the product can offer. Read more

The Google AdSense network is not the best place ever. There are thousands of very strange looking sites with questionable traffic. Google’s answer to this self inflicted mess is the site-targeted campaign option in Google AdWords.

You can select from a list of better quality and traffic websites and see the pageviews and conversions increasing.

The Cost Per Click is not too bad either.