If you’ve been involved in Google Advertising for any length of time, you may well be thinking that it’s starting to become somewhat more competitive. And you’d be right. According to Merkle’s Digital Marketing Report, the cost of a Google Ad is around 12 - 14 per cent higher today than it was a couple of years ago. This is largely being driven by more marketers spending more money on ads, with spending up 24 per cent...
Keyword research is a bit like cardio. We all know we should be doing it, and occasionally we have a flurry of activity and do a bit. But, for most of us at least, we simply don’t do enough. For online advertising, keyword research is the cornerstone to your success. Whether it’s display advertising, search marketing or PPC campaigns, without robust keyword research, your already doomed to fail. Getting started with keyword research is easy, and usually takes...
Your landing page can be the hero of your marketing campaign. Regardless of the channel or content you are working with, a solid, high performing landing page will get your campaign goals nailed down perfectly. As they play such an important role in the marketing mix, having effective landing pages becomes vitally important to your campaigns. Minor landing page improvements which increase conversions by just a fraction of a percent can positively affect your bottom line, so...
What visuals accompanied your latest big campaign? Were there beautiful people doing beautiful things with your beautiful products? Probably. Were those people around the 18 – 30 age group? Almost certainly. And did anyone have a visible disability? Probably not. Marketers are coming under fire as the spotlight has turned on the lack of diversity and inclusion in the industry. With these issues a ‘trend’ for 2018, it’s only natural that the wider community demands we become...
Paid search is one of the most powerful marketing tools available to businesses today, if not the most powerful. In terms of digital ad spend, it accounts for almost half of every penny spent by marketers around the world. Google reports that a good campaign can generate a ROI of £2 for every £1 spent, which makes it a pretty attractive way to advertise. But let’s not be naive about this now. Google doesn’t exist to help...
Google have made AdWords a highly simplified piece of software that lets you get started in minutes. Click a few buttons, hand over your credit card details and off you go! However, it is exactly this simplicity that could end up costing you dearly. Here, we’ll take a look at whether AdWords really is the simple solution everyone should be using, and how it can go horribly wrong when you don’t know what you’re doing. Does AdWords...
If you’ve never used Google AdWords before, you’re already missing out on something amazing. Because of AdWords’ natural ability to drive highly targeted, low cost leads to your website, it’s one of today’s most powerful marketing tools out there. But, before you head off to the AdWords interface and start loading up your campaign, know this: You could lose a lot of money very quickly if you don’t take the time to plan. Misplaced keywords, misunderstood filters,...
Running an AdWords campaign might seem, at first glance, like a pretty simple process. Choose keywords, add funding and off you go; full steam ahead! But in reality, if you want to run an effective campaign (and who doesn’t) things need to be watched a little more closely. If you’re new to AdWords and rush into your campaign without a clear management plan, you could end up spending an inordinate amount of time and money for very...
No doubt you’ll already have heard about the latest, and some would say biggest, scandal to hit social media company Facebook. In an exposé made by the Guardian newspaper it was revealed that the data of around 85 million of its users was acquired unethically by analytics company Cambridge Analytica. Worse than that, it would seem that the company then used this data to skew the opinions of voters in the run up to the US Presidential...
Knowing your return on investment (ROI) is crucial if you’re going to spend your marketing budget wisely. Although ROI is well known to be a key performance indicator (for everything, not just online marketing), 76 per cent of marketers are still either not measuring the ROI of their AdWords campaigns, or are not doing it properly. The result? Thousands of chief executives who still don’t know whether all the money they are pouring into AdWords really...