Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

Traffic Online Marketing are a Leeds based online marketing agency. We are a specialised team who focus purely on online marketing. Our approach is to focus on our strengths and ensure that we deliver online marketing campaigns that meet your business goals and objectives. From experience, we know that digital marketing requires in-depth technical and marketing knowledge rather than general knowledge. That is why more leading brands are trusting Traffic Online Marketing to grow their online presence.

We are located in the centre of Leeds close to the railway station and main motorways enabling us to service our clients nationwide.

We are currently looking for an energetic and self-motivated account manager to join us. As Account Manager, you will join a successful team of highly skilled individuals who are dedicated to the care and development of a number of client accounts.

Based in Leeds, you will be responsible for project managing digital and search-specific marketing campaigns.

Key Experience Required:

* Proven Track Record of managing, creating and developing SEO and PPC Marketing Campaigns
* Ability to Build Effective and Long-Standing Relationships with clients and partners alike
* Expertise in setting up an managing social media, comparison shopping and affiliate campaigns
* An Understanding of Web Development and Design

This is a key role within the company and will require you to liaise with internal departments and clients effectively. Helping to shape and manage budgets, time-scales and campaign strategy, you will have a sound knowledge of all things search and digital.

Package:

Starting basic salary: £20,000 upward depending on experience
Holidays: 25 per year pro rata (excluding bank holidays, with at least 3 days to be taken at Xmas)
Full time 9 - 5:30 working hours, Mon - Fri

For more information on the company, visit www.traffic-om.co.uk

Interested applicants should send a CV and covering letter to steve@traffic-om.co.uk

** Strictly No Agencies - any agencies who contact us regarding this role will be invoiced for our time **

We were asked to look into some variations to a client’s PPC campaign this week. After logging in to the campaign and seeing what options we had, I was impressed to notice that Google Adwords allowed me to restrict ads to be shown within a specific town or city within the UK. You could even set a radius of a certain amount of miles for your ads to be shown in, which is really helpful for advertisers who want to attract local business only.

I began to think about exactly how this could be enforced though.  It has to be through IP address I thought, so looking through Google’s help section I found the following explanantion:

When possible, we determine the user’s physical region based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) address. This applies to regionally- or custom-targeted ads and to any ads that are displayed on Google.co.uk.

Regional and custom-targeted ads: If someone searches for plumbers from a New York area IP address, we may display ads targeted to New York, even though New York was not in the search query.

Ads that show on Google.com: Unlike country-specific Google domains (such as Google.fr), we consider a user’s IP address for ads that show on Google.com. For example, if a user with an Australian IP address visits Google.com, we will display ads targeted to Australia, even though the user is not accessing Google.com.au.

All very clever. For a full explanation of how Adwords knows where to show keyword-targeted ads, see here.

I’ll take a wild guess that a lot of people don’t know about this! It’s a great way to stop unwanted clicks from areas you don’t / can’t serve, and it could drastically reduce your PPC spend, and increase your campaign effectivenesss.

All our clients on PPC are UK wide so no real savings for them, but it’s useful to know that it can be restricted so ad revenue wastage doesn’t occur as often.

A study this week highlighted how major US companies are failing to take advantage of organic search. It’s well documented that blue chip business invest heavily in paid search, but the figures this study unearths are more than enough to raise an eyebrow. A staggering $51 million is spent by Fortune 500 companies on paid search per day, on around 85,000 keywords.

Looking at how these businesses perform on organic search should make fairly depressing reading for marketing directors of these businesses. Just over 10% showed a strong visibility in organic search results, with this defined as having presence in the top 100 total organic search terms and a rank in the top 30 results.

Just imagine what these business could achieve through online marketing if 10% of their yearly paid search budget was apportioned to natural search! The old chesnut of “no one searches for our brand online” (a phrase I have heard far too many times from major UK businesses through the years) no longer applies. By actively investing in paid search, these businesses are stating their intent to attract more visitors to their website. There are contrasting opinions about how many search engine users click on paid results compared to organic results, but we have always worked on a 80:20 split in favour of organic. Does this not make this look even more appealing for these businesses?

We can only assume that this type of assessment holds true of equivalent UK businesses. If this is the case then such companies should take heed of this report. The right SEO strategy can work wonders for any business - and we have the results to prove it! Not only have we increased traffic to our clients websites via SEO, but we have also managed to reduce paid search spend, whilst increasing conversions from the same campaign! This has to be the target for any business serious about gaining an ROI via search marketing.

When I set up any PPC campaign I always put in a tracking URL so I can track the user once they have landed on the site.  This URL may look like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=adwords&utm_campaign=xxx_campaign&utm_term=blah_blah

When I read the article on Google Analytics Blog I was stunned that they recommended putting 301 redirects on these urls:

‘If this link is popular enough, then search engines will begin to index this URL. It may supplant the same version of this page without tracking parameters in the search results. Clicks on this new organic result will increment the visits number for Google(cpc) when it should really be attributed to Google(organic).’

I was always aware that the spider that indexes PPC landing pages shared data with organic search results (why duplicate processing power?). However the implication of this is that the data from PPC has a great impact on your SEO results, especially is the content on your website is inaccessible to the search engines (either flash or search queries).

I had heard that running a PPC campaign is a sure way to boost your SEO rankings……but this is proof from Google that actually is the case. Especially if the PPC landing pages are more popular than your main pages.

So what action do you need to take?

• Download a report from Google with your destination URLS, key phrases and clicks
• On the terms which have a high number of clicks you need to implement a 301 from the tracking URL to the main URL
• That way if the natural listings pick up your tracking URLS, then the traffic is being directed through the main site and any PR associated with this is transferred across too.