Headline figures are as follows:
Online Advertising Spend in the first half of 2008 – £1.68 Billion
Online Sales in the first half of 2007 – £1.33 Billion

UK Online Advertising

That’s an increase in online advertising spend of 21% for the first half of the year, when compared to H1 2007. Despite a slow down in the rate of growth (growth of 41.3% was reported for H1 2007 when compared to H1 2006) the market share of online advertising is growing. Online Advertising now accounts for 18.7% of the total advertising spend of £8.98 Billion. Up from a market share of 14.7% in the first half of 2007.

The interesting fact is that the overall advertising is down by 0.7% year on year for the first half of 2008 with TV, press, outdoor and radio all experiencing falls. Thus online is the clearly in favour with UK marketeers and is rapidly closing the gap on press (with a marketshare of 19.3%) and TV (with a market share of 21.7%).

Source of data IAB UK

“Anyone can do PPC, it’s easy, all you do is bid up and bid down” – a common misconception! Having seen how some agencies run PPC accounts it’s no wonder that this idea has been allowed to move around marketing circles. At Equator we do things differently so that our primary aim is to work with the client’s site to help drive the best ROI possible.

There are lots of important factors when running a PPC account and these are a few steps that we at Equator like to follow:

·         Every client is different so we research your website, your company and your marketplace before deciding on how to structure your account. By doing this we ensure that we start from the best possible position for creating value and ensuring future growth.

·         Keywords – the seeds of a PPC campaign. We don’t just add every keyword associated with your products, we research and ensure that you get the best quality traffic. The process doesn’t just stop here, we constantly monitor the account so that we work the best performing words, ditch the worst and block out any bad searches you are showing up for.

·         Our ads are written to best reflect the keywords – Google rewards this with cheaper clicks! We also use this area to best describe your products and offers (a lot of information to fit into 25 characters of title and 35 characters of body!) By doing these things we help to get the best quality traffic and reduce wasted clicks

·         We don’t use automated bidding tools and ad generators. Although many areas of your site may be similar we find it’s best to do things manually to avoid sloppy ad text and linking to the wrong areas of sites. We’ve all seen those ads for EBay saying things like “Buy Cheap Coffins”, it’s funny but we don’t want that for our clients as it wastes money.

·         Unlike some agencies we use Google, Yahoo and MSN so that you brand is protected on all the search engines you are connected to everyone who is searching for your products. Sometimes Yahoo and MSN are cheaper and sometimes they convert a lot better than Google – why miss out???

Having said all this, we’re only human but fortunately at Equator we have experts from SEO, Affiliate Marketing and web design. This ensures that we are up to date with all the latest online trends and whenever some new technology or technique is discovered we can apply it to our clients!

There you have it, we have the techniques, we have the knowledge and we have the fresh thinking needed to run you PPC account. Now it’s time to get back to work…..bid up!!

Andrew Marshall is a PPC Coordinator with Equator Ltd.  Our team of experts help companies accelerate revenues and achieve maximum ROI.  For more info, visit www.eqtr.com, email hello@eqtr.com or call 0141 229 1800

A survey had been carried out by CCBfast.map.   It has come up with some interesting results regarding sales and marketing professionals.   Who is painting this picture of us not being sexy?  I demand to know.

mad.co.uk has a few of the results