SEARCH CLINIC

This video explains how to maximise your Pay Per Click (PPC) ROI with examples of Google’s AdWords PPC matching requirements to target your budget effectively- broad, exact and negative keyword bidding phrases are the key to saving your wallet from taking a battering. I have saved one client 93% of his Adwords budget- and he’s still getting the same amount of traffic. The only loser is Google.

This is the seventh 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.

The Times newspaper has begun charging readers to access its online content by introducing a paywall due to falling advertising income
From now on, access to the Times and Sunday Times website will cost £1 per day, or £2 a week if readers sign up to a subscription.

News International, which owns the papers, announced plans to impose charges earlier this year in response to falling advertising income.

Currently the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal are the only major papers to have similar paywalls.

All other national papers offer free access to their sites, but are likely to watch the launch of the Times paywall closely.

Falling readership numbers and advertising revenues have put significant pressure on newspapers in recent years, and devising the best way to make money from content is seen as a major challenge for the industry.
Continue reading the main story

Other papers including the Guardian have vowed to keep content free, pinning their hopes on a recovery in advertising revenues.

Although the Times risks losing readers as a result of the new charges, News International hopes the charge will be low enough to attract sufficient readers.

Robin Goad from Experian Hitwise, which monitors web traffic, told BBC Radio 5 live’s Wake Up To Money programme that traffic to the Times website had fallen “significantly”.

“Since the registration wall has gone live before the full paywall, we’ve seen about a 60% drop in traffic over the last couple of weeks,” he said.

However, “that is probably a little bit less of a drop than a lot of people expected… so this is quite a positive [figure],” he added.

Under an introductory offer, registered readers will be able to access the site for £1 for the first month.

The site has already been restricted to registered users for the last 30 days.

Given Rupert Murdoch’s determination to charge for his content, Dr Search expects that the new regime will continue until at least September or October.

As more marketing and communications professionals use social media channels for UK brands, new research by McCann Erickson shows that many agencies and consultants are not providing enough guidance to help their clients with social media.Almost half of those surveyed (48%) said they still don’t feel they have adequate knowledge on how best to use social media channels effectively for marketing purposes.

Although this is down by over 16% from 64% last year the figure is still surprisingly high.

Nearly a quarter of respondents (23.4%) admitted that advances in social media are difficult to keep up with and almost the same proportion (22.4%) said they would like to understand social media more but that it is not easy to find genuine ‘experts’ in the field.

Interestingly, in just 12 months since the last survey there has been a marked increase in general social media usage for communications activities.

On average, usage for each of the main social networks (facebook, twitter and LinkedIn) is up by around 22% from last year. Twitter has shown the most increased usage (+28.2% since 2009) with 61% of those surveyed now saying that Twitter is regularly used as a way of distributing news stories.

It seems that IT departments are now more willing to let their marketing teams have access to social networks at work.

Last year’s results showed that 46% of respondents were unable to get access at work and although this figure has come down to 24.3% it still shows that nearly a quarter of UK marketers and communications practitioners are not granted workplace access to social networks, making monitoring and campaign execution impossible.

Social media monitoring for brands is now a key area for marketers who need to demonstrate effectiveness of activity, ROI and target audience usage of social networks. By far the most popular way of brand monitoring online is through Google Alerts with 45.5% using this free tool.

Radian 6 has emerged as the most widely used paid-for tool with 14.3% usage followed by PR Newswire’s monitoring tool Social Media Metrics at 10.4%. 11% of those surveyed said they relied on their retained PR agency to monitor social media brand activity and 37% said they conducted ‘ad hoc’ monitoring in house.

Asked where they think the responsibility for social media communications should reside, 50% said it came under a combination of disciplines; 23% said it was best managed by public relations professionals and 11% said it should sit with digital experts.

Additional results at a glance:
• 59.8% respondents said that social media communications is now part of their day jobs
• 29% think there are now too many social media networks
• 12.1% think social media networks are becoming too commercial
• 16.8% said they are interested in using social media more within their daily role but do not
currently use it

Dr Search reviewed the research from: McCann Erickson Social Media Index 2010

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.

Website analysis can generate improved performance, but your focus should be on measuring and analysing perception against expectation in three key linked areas.