SEARCH CLINIC

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is often quick, lazy and expensive. This video shows you Google’s quality score requirements, explaining you how to maximise your online marketing budget and the importance of long term profits.

This is the sixth part of 11 videos on how to promote your website using the most cost effective elements of the marketing mix.

This video series was made from the lecture Simon Dye Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s made at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals including Members of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Chartered Managers and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and how to use the most cost effective tools for your online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

BP is accused of trying to manipulate the search results on search engines like Google and Yahoo, as it attempts to salvage its battered image following the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.BP is purchasing Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine keyword terms such as “oil spill”, “Deepwater Horizon” and “Gulf of Mexico”, so that when a searcher types these kewywords into search engines, the results prominently feature a “sponsored link” to BP’s official page on its response to the oil spill.

Critics have described BP’s move as unethical. Maureen Mackey, a writer on the Fiscal Times, an online news site, said: “What it effectively does is that it bumps down other legitimate news and opinion pieces that are addressing the spill… and BP are paying big money for that.”

The criticism comes as President Obama expressed unease at the amount of money the company was spending to counter the negative attention the company has received following the oil spill.

BP has confirmed that its digital teams based in Houston and London, together with the company’s marketing executives, are currently engaged in buying search terms.

The company sought to downplay the strategy, saying that it was aimed at helping those most affected by the spill, by providing accurate information on the correct forms to fill in and key people to contact.

Groups can bid pennies or thousands of pounds for a PPC search term, but the highest bid does not necessarily win. Google demands that adverts are “relevant” for Google’s “Quality Score”, that the link is proven useful as many people have clicked on it.

BP have not revealed how much buying search terms such as “oil slick” has cost the firm. Companies are charged “per click”, meaning the more people click on the adverts, the more it will cost the firm.

Other analysts say that the move is a legitimate tactic that has been used successfully by other organisations in crises.

As the importance of the internet has grown, companies have increasingly tried to control their public image through buying advertising on search engines.

Political parties across the world, include the Conservative Party during this years general election, have bought key search terms to ensure their messages are at the top of search engine results.

Search Clinic on YouTube talks about the most cost effective way of online marketing

Simon Dye, Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic gave a lecture to businesses, professionals and students at the University of Gloucestershire for the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and plan the most cost effective tools for online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

This is the first of 11 videos on how to promote your website using the most cost effective elements of the marketing mix.

He compared search engine optimisation, pay per click, affiliate marketing, PR, outdoor, direct mail, magazines, newspapers, radio and television elements of the marketing mix.

Dr Search also looks at the search engines and changes that have effected their success on the past decade.

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on Dr Search’s Search Clinic YouTube channel.

Yell’s long running chief executive and finance director both announced their departure after it reported a 26 per cent fall in annual underlying earnings.

Yell, the publisher of Yellow Pages, has been battling fierce competition from advertising on websites such as Google and eBay as well as the effects of the recession. It bought a directories group in Spain just before that country’s economy collapsed. Late last year it raised £559 million in a share issue to bring down some of its debt.

Dr Search has been helping a number of clients who were Yell and Yellow Pages advertisers improve thier marketing investments by switching their budgets into search engine optimisation.

The results can be remarkable.

Andy Turvey stopped his four figure yellow pages budget and let me optimise his main website instead.

The result? “I’m now getting all of my new business from my website now being found at the top of the search engines ahead of millions of my competitors”.

Do you fancy some of that for your business? If so, please just contact the Search Clinic.

Yell’s annual results showed that the company made a profit of £46.8 million against losses last year of £1.03 billion. Sales dropped by 11.5 per cent to £2.1 billion, though, which left left underlying earnings down 26 per cent at £620 million.

The company predicted that revenues would fall by a further 11 per cent in the three months to the end of June and then would continue to drop at about 15 per cent until the end of September.

Net debt had been cut from £4.2 billion at the end of March last year to £3.1 billion to the end of March this year.

An increase in online advertising helped profits at Yahoo almost treble in the three months to the end of March.

Net profit rose to £200m from £79m in the same period a year ago.

The company’s takings were helped by its search and advertising partnership with Microsoft and sake of the Zimbra email service.

But after subtracting commissions paid to its advertising partners, Yahoo’s revenue slipped slightly to £750 million.

This was below analyst’s estimates – pushing Yahoo shares about 3% lower in after hours trading.

The firm’s chief financial officer, Tim Morse, said that its search advertising business “just didn’t seem to grow at the pace they had previously”.

However its display advertising business was strong, growing 20% year on year.

“High quality advertisers are coming back,” Mr Morse said. “We are still in the very early innings of this turnaround.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s plans to buy Yahoo’s internet search and search advertising businesses were been cleared by both European and US regulators.

The European Commission ruled that the deal “would not significantly impede effective competition”.

Under the deal, Yahoo’s website uses a Microsoft’s Bing search engine, and the two firms share the revenues.

Google has reported double digit gains in first quarter profit and sales, indicating that it is an early beneficiary of the rebound in online advertising.

The company posted net profits of £1.31 billion, or £4.04 a share, an improvement of 38 per cent on the same period last year. The performance exceeded analysts’ expectations.

The company, which controls around two thirds of the US search engine market, said that revenue in the first quarter totalled £4.51 billion, up 23 per cent from last year.

Net revenue, which excludes sums paid to partners, stood at $5.06 billion, up 2.2 per cent from the seasonally strong fourth quarter and above analysts’ average estimates of $4.95 billion.

Patrick Pichette, Google’s chief financial officer, said that an improving economy and a return of large advertisers helped the company to a “very positive” start to the year.

Mr Pichette said the company expected to hire aggressively through the year. In the last quarter it had increased its workforce by nearly 800 employees, the biggest growth since the first quarter of 2008.

Despite the results Google shares slid 3.1 per cent to $576.92 in after-hours trading last night, reversing a 1.1 per cent gain notched up earlier in the day and reflecting continuing uncertainty over the company’s acquisition of the mobile-advertising company AdMob, as well as concerns over its censorship dispute with China and its ability to add revenue from new formats or platforms.

The company’s shares have fallen by nearly 5 per cent this year, against a 10 per cent rise in the Nasdaq index.

Mr Pichette said last night that the company was still working on the AdMob deal, despite a review of the acquisition by the Federal Trade Commission.

Twitter has said it will rollout it’s Twitter101 service and allow advertising on its site for the first time.

The social networking site said advertisers would be able to buy “Promoted Tweets” that will appear on Twitter’s search results pages.

It has been reluctant to allow advertising in the past.

However, co-founder Biz Stone said they would not be traditional adverts. They must be Tweets that “resonate with users” and be part of conversations.

Twitter is growing fast. Currently, the world’s Twitter users tweet about 50 million times a day 600 times a second.

Twitter’s management hopes to apply the Google advertising model to its own micro-blogging service.

Companies using the service, however, will be looking closely at the return on investment that the service will generate. Should they pay per tweet read, per click-through, or per sale-after-click?

Commercial tweets to build brands and create buzz are probably the most promising application of Twitter ads. For ad copy writers, it will present a new challenge: how to hook customers with 140 characters or less.

Twitter has already signed up a raft of big name organisations such as Sony Pictures, coffee chain Starbucks and US retailer Best Buy.

It describes the Promoted Tweets as “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organisations want to highlight to a wider group of users”.

Initially, Promoted Tweets would only appear in Twitter search results, the company said, and only one Tweet would show up on each search results page.

It is the first toe in the advertising water for the social networking site, which has yet to make a profit and has only just begun to do deals to raise revenue from the high profile service.

It is an approach that the company described as a “stubborn insistence on a slow and thoughtful approach to monetisation”.

It follows Twitter’s announcement over the weekend that it will buy Atebits, the developer behind iPhone application “Tweetie”, which is one of the main user access points to Twitter.

The acquisition means that Twitter will for the first time be able to control directly the service they deliver to iPhone users, instead of relying on third party application developers to do this for them.

However, analysts say it also means that Twitter is turning the remaining applications developers that it has partnered in the past into direct competitors.

This raises the possibility that if Promoted Tweets prove unpopular with users, rival application developers may offer products that filter them out.

The advertising and Tweetie moves are not the first revenue-raising initiatives by Twitter – in October the company announced tie-ups with Google and Microsoft’s Bing under which the two search engines pay Twitter to include Tweets in their search results.

Twitter’s latest initiative is the first phase of its advertising plans. In future, Promoted Tweets will appear in users’ stream of posts, not just on Twitter search results pages.

Keen not to alienate his members, Biz Stone said that if users did not interact with Promoted Tweets by replying to them, “favoriting” them or retweeting them, they would “disappear”.

Apple is to rival Google in the mobile advertising market with a new iAd advertising platform to be rolled out this summer.

The announcement follows Apple’s purchase in January of mobile advertising network Quattro Wireless for £196m, demonstrating that Mr Jobs is happy to put his money where his mouth is.

Yet the mobile advertising market is currently tiny, so the acquisition price paid for Quattro is small change for a company currently valued at over £145 billion.

However, analysts say that the potential for mobile advertising is huge and it could transform mobile commerce. Investment firm Piper Jaffrey is predicting a total in-application market for advertising of £450m by 2013, of which iAd could capture £250m.

Mr Jobs’s rationale is that mobile advertising can be tailored to the individual users needs and interests, in much the same way that Google has been able to use data from users of its search engine and gmail accounts to target advertising.

Apple could use the mobile phone user’s physical location as a hook for advertisers – for example Mr Jobs cited a Nike advert incorporating a nearest store locator. But information about a user’s interests can also be gleaned from the applications they choose to purchase.

Steve Jobs’s announcement comes at a time when rival Google’s own mobile advertising initiative has become hamstrung by the US anti-trust authorities.

In November, Google outbid Apple to purchase leading mobile advertising company AdMob for £500m.

“Google came in and snatched them because they didn’t want us to have them,” said the Apple head. Admob already operates on Apple’s handsets.

However, Google’s plans immediately ran into trouble as the Federal Trade Commission chose to review the deal. Months later, a decision is still pending.

The iAd initiative also seems designed to provide a fillip to the growth of new applications for Apple’s handsets.

The Apple chief executive said that 60% of the advertising revenues raised will be passed onto the application developers, creating a major new financial incentive for programmers to generate new functionality for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

“The revenue sharing opens the floodgates for a lot more free applications,” says Mr Wood. “This is an extremely astute move by Apple. I would expect both the number and the quality of applications to grow much more rapidly because of this.”

The rivalry between Apple and Google will partly be decided by the direction that mobile phone technology takes in the future.

Apple stakes its future on the continuing development of applications as the main forum for mobile software, whereas Google expects applications to be supplanted by a web browser that gives users access to the entire internet.

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