Social Media has definitely become the buzz phrase of the moment. A big, fat part of that social media sphere is blogging. And for those who’ve slept through the last few years, it’s up there with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, SecondLife and a whole lot of other things too contrived to mention. So, if you’re sitting pondering whether Social Media is for you or for the dustbin, let’s take a hot air balloon ride through blog country.
Last month, we told you about the top 10 mistakes you can make in Search Engine Optimisation. Thanks to the power of analytics, we learned that you enjoyed that article lots.
So, to ensure we keep delivering you what you want (and deliver more readers for us); we’re pleased to bring you our Top 10 PPC mistakes. Don’t say we’re not good to you… this is free advice. Your home is not at risk if you do not keep up to date with this knowledge but your paid search profitability may well be…
We’ve tried to keep these points as simple as possible. However, if any of this hurts your head and you’ve got a PPC campaign, why not give us a call? We’ve got an excellent team of Paid Search experts at your disposal that can help with bringing solid ROI to your PPC. PDQ.
At Equator, we’ve been managing Search Engine Optimisation campaigns now for over 10 years.
In that time, we have seen many things change. “Back in the day”, there was no such thing as Google Analytics. Google itself had a rather more simplistic view of sites; people still used FRAMEs in their site and, well the world was a lot simpler – even if to the average person SEO didn’t seem that way. Fast forward to 2009 and everything is a lot more complex, Google has smartened up and everyone knows that SEO is one of the most important channels in the online mix.
In the current economic climate, consumers are so much more price sensitive and in becoming so are increasingly looking for a bargain, and why not if they are there to be had? With this change in consumer buying behaviour cashback sites (which have in fact been around for years) have seen an upsurge in popularity, however we are seeing an increasing number of merchants throughout the affiliate community choosing not to work with them.
So why is this? We are all aware of how cashback sites operate, merchants are promoted by the cashback affiliate in the usual way, but where the affiliate would normally keep the commission paid by the merchant for any completed sales, the affiliate gives some or all of the commission to its members. So far so good, merchants see an increase in sales and consumers effectively receive some money in their pockets.
Roll back to around 2004 and Microsoft ruled the roost on pretty much everything to do with computers. They had the most successful operating system, internet browser, office suite, development suite and so on. Bill Gates, their creator and CEO was the world’s richest man by some margin and every major government body was squeezing them over what seemed to be an unstoppable monopoly. But they needn’t have bothered.
Behavioural targeting (BT) has got a bad rap. Plain and simple, we’ve got this advertising method that can give extraordinary value by targeting people with behaviours that we like and we’re ashamed if we’re using it. To understand why advertisers employing behavioural targeting are being shamed we must address how BT works.
What’s your personality?
As part of this month’s Twitter special we wanted to give you a few tips on how to get the most out of this new medium. At Equator, many of us have become addicted to using Twitter and have been experimenting with it on a personal level as well as a client marketing level. So we felt it was about time we talked about what we’ve learned, especially as we witness a barrage of companies large and small starting to use the now ubiquitous micro-blogging tool.
“Google is your friend” – that’s generally the mantra of the SEO people of the world. After all, if you follow the rules, do good quality, ethical SEO with a focus on relevance on trust, then Google will deliver.
Most of the time.
It’s great being a full service digital agency. For most of our clients, this means we manage many different aspects of their online marketing. Whether it’s their website and their SEO, their email and their affiliates or every single channel, it gives us a rather exclusive insight into how all the channels work together. It also gives us an insight into what to do and what not to do. So, it means when clients ask us interesting or challenging questions, we’ve invariably got the answer somewhere in our repertoire.
In these challenging economic times, we’re all watching the pennies a little bit harder. We’re looking to save where we can and when it comes to investing our marketing budgets, we want to direct it towards the channels that deliver us the most revenue.
Thankfully for us at Equator and all you smart people with good websites, that usually means online getting an increasing piece of the pie. However, just “online” isn’t smart enough for us Equator people. We need to get a little more granular and work out whether it should go to PPC, SEO, Affiliates, eMail, Media or something else. Which channel is delivering the most sales? Where can I get more sales from?