As some of you may know, since Monday 05.05.08 Google has started to allow advertisers to bid on other company’s brand names. Previously banned in the UK (but allowed in the USA), competitors are now allowed to show one of their adverts when some searches for another company’s brand name.

We have already started to see other web hosts biddng on our brand names, and through out other industries these adverts are starting to crop up. Check out lastminute.com, moneysupermarket.com, and iPod.

Important
In order to clarify our position regarding affiliates, I would like to emphasise that affiliates who have joined our programs through 123-reg itself, Commission Junction or TradeDoubler are prohibited by the terms and conditions from bidding on our brand names (123-reg, WebFusion, Donhost & SupaNames).

Any affiliate found to be bidding on our brand name or using our brand name to advertise on another company’s brand name will be removed from the program and no commission paid for any sales made from those adverts. This may seem a little strong but it is vital we maintain control of our brand and where we are seen to be advertising, as well as our relationship with fellow web hosting companies.

Share This

Comments

With 25 characters in the title and 35 characters per line in the body, getting across your marketing message in a search engine pay per click advert is a challenge, especially if you take in to account you will be competing with 10 organic results and 9 other paid results for the searcher’s attention.

Below is a dummy advert for an online sports store bidding on the keyword “trainers”

Trainers sale ends soon
Trainers up to 40% off top brands
Hurry ends soon. Free delivery
www.super-sport-shop.com/trainers

1. Use of the keyword in the advert
When a keyword appears in a PPC advert it is highlighted bold which makes your advert stand out and confirms to the searcher your advert is relevant to their search.

2. The keyword at the start of the title and body
When you look at a search engine results page you don’t read each entry and then make a considered decision. Rather you skim the page looking for visual cues as to which result answers your query best. Research is showing that if they don’t get a cue within the first few characters they will look elsewhere.

3. Stand out from the crowd
What are you marketing that makes people want it? Here we have a sale, so we lead with the biggest percentage discount we have. If you have a low cost product lead with the price, if you have a new product; emphasise that and so on.
Read the rest of this entry »

Share This

Comments

Note: This post is all about pay per click advertising on search engines. If you are very new to this subject, you will find our beginners’ guides a great place to start before reading this post:

Part 1 - Concept of search engine pay per click (PPC) advertising
Part 2 - Research and choose your keywords in detail
Part 3 - Write your PPC adverts
Part 4 - Analyse PPC performance
Part 5 - How to increase your PPC ad’s conversion

This post is going to do exactly what it says on the tin; comment on the relationship between your pay per click (PPC) ad positions and your advert’s click through rate (CTR)

Your ad CTR is calculated by dividing the number of times your ad is clicked on by the number of times it is displayed as part of a search result. It’s then multiplied by 100 to give your CTR as a percentage.

CTR% = (number of clicks / number of impressions) x 100

The question is, what is the point of having an ad placed in position 4 that costs 30p per click, when you could be in position 6 for 22p per click, saving you 27% per click? After all, positions 4 and 6 are virtually next to each other, so aren’t people bound to see the ad at position 6 if they can see the ad at position 4, and be just as likely to click on it?

Well no, unfortunately, that is not the case.

I want to share some of our own data with you to highlight how closely the two are tied, and how moving just one ad position (up or down) can have noticeable effects on your traffic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Share This

Comments

The end of 2007 is just round the corner now, so we’re entering the time of the year that’s crammed with reviews of the last twelve months.

One of the more interesting is Google’s annual Zeitgeist: a look at notable search terms from last year.

It’s rather US-focused but still worth a look. In Google’s own words, it’s “a look back at the breaking news, the big events and the must-have gadgets that captivated us this year”.

Unsurprisingly, ‘iphone’ was the fastest-rising search term both worldwide and in the US, reflecting the remarkable buzz around Apple’s mobile phone.

Rumours of their deaths spawned spikes in Google News searches for several notable names, including Michael Jackson, Criss Angel and Fidel Castro.

Transformers was the most searched for movie, Heroes the top TV show and Rihanna’s Umbrella had people scrambling to search for the lyrics - presumably to work out what on earth the song is all about.

And we’re still preoccupied by the big questions: ‘who is god’, ‘what is love’ and, er, ‘how to kiss’ came out top in the ‘who is…’, ‘what is…’ and ‘how to…’ categories.

You can see Google’s full 2007 Zeitgeist here.

If you’d rather see some UK-specific details, there are lists of the top gaining queries - for the most recent month and previous months (in the archives).

Finally, if you haven’t seen it, Google Trends is also a good way of wasting time online doing valuable research. You can compare the search volumes for different terms over time, and even see how news events influenced the number of searches.

Have a look at this example comparing Led Zeppelin with the Spice Girls to see what I mean.

Share This

Comments

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting to get ranked that high in such a short space of time (123-reg is #1 and WebFusion is #2). It’s worth noting that there aren’t any commercial rivals for this search term so both 123-reg’s and WebFusion’s page rank will have helped a lot. 123-reg has a PR of 7 and webFusion 6, which explains why 123-reg is ranked higher

Although this is a really basic test, hopefully it helps to show the importance of each of these basic and controllable web page elements:

• Title tag
• Page URL
• Body text
• PageRank (Number/ quality of links)
• Anchor text

For search terms related to your site it will be very (very) rare to get such dramtic effects so quickly, especially if you are competing with large sites or for a popular search term(e.g. “Shopping U.K”), but by ensuring you have researched and planned all the elements above, you will see your site ranked a lot higher than if you only spend a couple of minutes on them or ignore them altogether.

To research the most popluar keywords and the variations people use surrounding it, the most commonly used tool is http://inventory.overture.com. If you have a Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search or MSN adCenter account, they also offer keyword list generator tools.

(Why “Monkey shine on tree”? No idea!)

Share This

Comments

Monkey Shine on tree
I want to do a test to show how important different elements of a site are when it comes to getting ranked in Google’s natural listings. To do this, I have written the title above (which makes absolutely no sense) to see how long it takes for this post to be ranked and how high up I can get it.

To start with I have used the keywords as the title tag, the page URL and the page’s headline. To help it along, I am now going to start adding keywords into the paragraph so here comes monkey shine and now here we have on tree and to make it interesting let’s put them all together to make monkey shine on tree.

Another factor is a website’s Google PageRank (PR) which uses the number and quality of links to the site as a method of predicting relevancy, so I am going to put this exact post on to our sister site, the WebFusion blog. WebFusion has a PR of 6 compared to 123-reg’s 7, so in theory 123-reg’s should rank higher. I’m also going use the keywords in anchor text linking to WebFusion, and vice versa. So to read exactly the same post on WebFusion click on this link: monkey shine on tree.

Keyword checklist:

• Title tag
• Page URL
• Body text
• PageRank
• Anchor text

Limitations:
Obviously I can’t build the keywords in to the domain name itself, so I can’t demonstrate the importance of that.

A background to “Monkey shine on tree”
The search query at the time of writing has 96,000 results, with the top 3 being:

#1 A Flickr account picture that uses the term and a woman hanging in a tree, with a keyword in a sentance below the picture
#2 A webpage with the keywords in the domain name and a sub-directory along with use of the keywords a lot in the text
#3 An entry on quizilla.com using the keyword in the URL and another in the body of the text

Let’s see how I get on…

Share This

Comments

In the previous four parts of this guide we’ve introduced the concept of search engine pay per click (PPC) advertising, looked at how to research and choose your keywords in detail, how to write your PPC adverts, and ways to analyse PPC performance. This final part will look at how to increase your PPC ad’s conversion.

Once your campaigns are up and running, generating impressions, clicks and (hopefully) conversions, you can start optimising them. This will help you increase the conversion rates.

Continuously test your adverts

To see how different adverts increase or decrease your metrics, use at least four variations on an advert. Two of these should contain slight changes. Set your adverts to self-optimise. 

For example, if we wanted to advertise to people searching for ‘designer watches’ we could use these ads:

Batch one

Quality Designer Watches
Browse our selection of designer
watches. All with free UK delivery
www.yourwebsite.com

100s Top Brand Watches
Browse our selection of designer
watches. All with free UK delivery
www.yourwebsite.com

Batch two

Quality Designer Watches
Choose from our wide selection of
men and women’s top brand watches
www.yourwebsite.com

100s Top Brand Watches
Choose from our wide selection of
men and women’s top brand watches
www.yourwebsite.com

This way, the search engines will automatically start to present the most effective adverts more regularly, identifying the poor performers for you. Once these become clear, delete them and introduce a new batch to test. Over time, you’ll home in on the most effective text for your ads.

Read the rest of this entry »

Share This

Comments

In the previous 3 parts of this guide we have had an introduction to using search engine pay per click advertising, looked at how to research and choose your keywords in more detail, and how to write your PPC adverts. Now they are up and running, the next step is to analyse their performance.

Once you have set your objectives (i.e. what you want to acieve with your PPC adverts) you can decide how best to measure the success of your Pay Per Click campaign.

Generating sales or leads
If your main aim is to generate sales or leads, you should use Conversion Rate, Cost Per Action and Return On Advertising Spend to determine success. Conversion is calculated by taking the number of clicks which turn into sales and representing them as a percentage. For example, three sales after ten clicks would equate to a 30% conversion rate.

Cost Per Action (CPA) is a monetary value, and shows how much you have spent to acquire that sale, lead or download. For example if you have spent £100 and 10 people have downloaded your service, you have a CPA of £10. This will show you how cost-effective your marketing is. For example, if you have a CPA of £10 and your service is only worth £9, you have made a loss of £1 per sale!

Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) is the amount of money you have generated for every pound spent. For example, a spend of £1000 generating £1500 revenue is a return of £1.50. A spend of £1000 generating £500 revenue is a return of £0.50 i.e. a loss of 50p for every £1 spent

Brand awareness
If your target is brand awareness, then you should focus on impressions (the number of times your ad is shown on a screen) and ad clicks. You can look at these two data sets independently or combine them to create your Click Through Rate (CTR). For example, an advert with 100 impressions and 30 clicks has a CTR of 30%.

Using the data
Data for data’s sake is a waste of your time. It may present you with some attractive graphs, but if you are not using that data to make decisions on the adverts and your website, your time is better spent elsewhere. Use your data to answer these questions:
- How do customers get to your site?
- How do they interact with your site?
- What was the result of their visit? I.e. did they buy anything?

A basic account will provide you with a lot of information about your campaigns including the following metrics as standard:
- Average ad positions
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Click through rate % (impressions/ clicks)

However, it will not tell you how many sales were generated or information about return on advertising spend (ROAS). To do this you will need to install post- click tracking on your website.

Post-click data
There a variety of different tracking solutions to choose from, some free and others paid. One of the best free products on the market is Google’s Analytics service. You will get a free Google Analytics tracking account when you open your Adwords account. To access your account, just click on the ‘Analytics’ tab at the top of your account page.

In order to install Google Analytics on your website, just follow the instructions within your account. For the basic information, all you need is to copy and paste the Google Analytics JavaScript code into your site’s HTML.

Applying the code to use sales tracking will require some basic knowledge of HTML. You can also tie in your AdWords account simply with a couple of clicks. If you have the ability to enable e-commerce tracking, you can also tie in your sales and revenue providing you with a detailed break down of where they came from and what they bought/ spent.

Basic measurement terms
Visits
The number of times your site was visited. Someone visiting your site more than once, will have each visit recorded here.

Unique Visitor
The metric which measures a visit to the site only once during a specified time period.

Page views
The number of times a web page was requested.

Pages per visit
This shows, on average, how many pages your site’s visitors looked.

Bounce rate
The percentage of visitors who leave after entering the site on a certain page with out navigating to any other part of the site.

CPA - Cost Per Action
This is the amount of money it has cost you to take the desired action on your site e.g. Buy a product, sign up to a newsletter…

CPC - Cost Per Click
The amount of money you have paid for someone to click on an ad

CPM – Cost per thousand impressions
The advertising model which charges advertisers by the number of times an ad is shown. This is typically broken down to the chargeable amount per thousand impressions. For example, 100,000 impressions at £1000 is a CPM of £100.

CTR - Click-Through Rate
The percentage of people who see an advert and then click on it

Return On Advertising Spend - ROAS
This is the amount of money you have generated for every pound spent.

Go to www.marketingterms.com for a comprehensive collection of marketing terminology and definitions

Share This

Comments

I’ve stumbled across a handy little website analyser called The Reaction Engine, which is worth checking out if you look after a website and are tasked with getting better search engine results.

It’s pretty cool, allowing you to enter the URL and find out how your website performs against key indicators such as download time, Page Rank, meta data etc., providing an overall rating. There’s loads of these sort of things around, but The Reaction Engine packages it all up nice and simply.

Whether your site gets a good or bad rating, there are a bunch of helpful suggestions to give ideas for improvement.

Share This

Comments

We have recently launched a domain name search gadget for your iGoogle home page. To add it to your Google homepage simply click on the link above and scroll down to the 123-reg domain name search widget and click on ‘Add it now’. Now you can search for domain names directly from your personal Google home page. Fantastic!

If you haven’t set up a Google home page yet, it is really easy. Go to www.google.co.uk and click on the iGoogle link in the top right hand corner of your screen. You will be shown a generic example home page along with a link to get started. Once you have created your Google account you can start adding tools and widgets to your Google home page.

All feedback is welcome, so if you use it and have some great ideas on what we can add to it to make it even better leave a comment here or drop me an email at hosting-marketing@pipex.net

Share This

Comments