One of the areas that can be ignored with detrimental effects is that of the competitive landscape. Your rivals will often shape your chances of success and it is vital to understand your competitor’s product offering and pay per click management style. You can glean much information by analysing competitor ads and looking at how they set up their landing pages. It will also help you to understand more about your own product offering.

Here are some steps to take when analysing the competitive environment:

Using a search identify who your top rivals are. Look at the ads used and the landing pages. Identify at least five contenders in your field and research them thoroughly. If your market is very competitive with lot of competitors this will be extremely important to you campaign success.

Look at how they differentiate themselves and glean as much information as you can on each company.

Looking at your competition’s products, compare your own product’s features and benefits. This will come in handy when you start writing ad text.

At www.clickconsult.com we offer outstanding pay per click management to our clients and can support your website marketing efforts.

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You can raise the validity of a PPC test and there are many changes that can be made based on the data returned from campaign tests but there will always be those occasions when tweaks made on the basis of statistics returned reap completely unanticipated performance results. These ‘WHAT?!’ moments when a campaign either soars or crash dives following amendments made on the basis of concentrated analysis may have been caused by outside factors. The question is can they be controlled? This is a question that cannot be answered definitively but by understanding what those factors are we can respond quickly and effectively when things don’t go to plan. We can even avoid those nasty surprises.

There are general things you can do to improve validity such as ensuring you test for up to 1,000 impressions before making changes. However the best way of ensuring statistical validity is to use an analysis tool. For the human eye and brain it can be a tall order to look at results and estimate whether the performance has been affected so use the wide range of tool available.

At www.clickconsult.com we offer expert pay per click management including campaign testing and analysis.

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A quarter of all of the UK’s advertising spend is now spent online, and beat the rest of the advertising market into submission, thanks mainly to the recession and its after-effects. The largest growth was reserved for social networks, which rose by an amazing 200 per cent over the year.

And it’s no wonder – Facebook, for instance, has over 500million people logging on daily to check their account, and advertisers want to attract some of these people with targeted campaigns that increase traffic and conversions. Whether it’s through social media or PPC management, a lot of marketers are turning their attention online when it comes to investing in promoting their brand.

Online video advertising and mobile advertising also grew – video advertising nearly doubled in 2010, with many predicting it’s due for an explosion over the coming years. If there’s one aspect that advertisers really take comfort from when they adopt an online marketing campaign, it’s that they know the areas they’re targeting. There is a lot of free software on the internet at the disposal of marketers to help them discover where their traffic is coming from and what areas of their campaign can be improved upon.

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When assessing competitors start by running a couple of searches. Whose results are returned on your key search terms? Who is returned for more than one of those terms? When averaging the positions out how do they compare to you? Also do these competitors bid on their own brands and products? If so, is there an opportunity to attract some of your competitor’s audience away? This latter question can be tricky to answer and there are ways of doing this:

NEVER:

Use dynamic keyword insertion to include the whole of the competitor keyword list. This will cause some angry responses and won’t create good relations with Google.

Make wild claims that can’t be justified. If you are putting in claims citing that you are better than a competitor then you’ll have to be able to back it up.

ALWAYS:

Differentiate. This is a fundamental principle in all marketing but is extremely pertinent to competitor keyword bidding. You can develop an attractive message this way without having to use your competitor’s name.

Display lower prices. You can always undercut as long as the price on the ad is repeated on the landing page.

Using competitor keywords can create a new stream of traffic but it needs to be done well. At Click Consult we offer expert advice on all areas of PPC including keyword bidding.

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However if you want to push conversion rates higher than the 4 per cent pay per click industry average you need to look further than that.

Messages are made up of more than just words. This is true of more than just website marketing. When talking to someone you make various verbal and non verbal cues which when taken as a whole provide you with the complete message. Verbal cues can include inflection, tone, speed and laughter for example. Non verbal cues cover body language, facial expressions and gestures. Although the non verbal cues are not on show from searchers when looking at a PPC ad you can identify certain factors by looking at those ads they do choose to click on.

You need to be able to match the mood and tone of visitors and reflect this in the graphics, copy and images used. You can achieve this when you project how your message would be conveyed in everyday conversation. What can you glean about your visitors which offers deeper insights than the superficial face value? If the tone of your ad conveys an urgency or excitement reflecting the attitude of your target audience then you can match the images, copy and colours used to keep the tone going from ad to landing page.

At Click Consult we offer a range of pay per click management services to our clients.

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Website marketing for online retail doesn’t have to be that difficult, and you can talk to us about this at Click Consult. Here are three tips to make it a little easier.

1. Make it easy. There is sufficient competition online at the moment for internet users to simply desert you if things get too tough on your site. When you combine the availability of online shopping with the opportunities to shop offline as well, you will see that this is true for pretty much every form of online retail. Make sure your shopping portal is flawless if you don’t want to lose sales, and using shopping feeds can be a good way to bump up your traffic.

2. Make it safe. Trustworthiness is another essential for online retail, and this is one area in which your search engine optimization and web development company can really help. Having a professional looking website which adheres to all of the latest security protocols will go a long way to convincing customers that your site can be trusted to process their order safely and securely.

3. Make it about sales. Another mistake that online retailers can make when first approaching online marketing is to get caught up on the idea of more traffic automatically making it a success. As any online store operator knows, traffic is useless unless it converts into sales. Conversion rate optimisation is something that you can look at along with the SEO and PPC management which brings them to the site in the first place, ensuring that your customers have the simplest and most positive on-site user experience possible.

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In favour of advertising

Many SEO professionals are in favour of combining SEO with another, more traditional and direct, form of marketing. This is because adding search advertising or similar tactics to your main plan can help give your SEO an initial boost. Appearing in more than one area of the search engine results pages is also an advantage.

There is a down side to this, of course. Most companies can’t afford two forms of marketing campaigns. When faced with a choice between search marketing and SEO, many opt for the short-term gains of ads. This can be a long-term mistake, as the traffic lasts only as long as the campaign.

In favour of not advertising

Subtlety is the name of the game with internet marketing. Although a good online plan usually includes some of the more traditional marketing methods, such as search advertising or ads on web pages, this isn’t always going to fit into the budget. If you want marketing methods that are both effective and cost-effective, the smaller, subtler moves are going to be your best bet. A lot of these moves are the ones that you’re already making as part of your SEO.

Small and subtle moves can help your general internet plan along as well as your search engine optimisation plan. Things like article marketing, guest blogging and reviews are all great methods of developing grass-roots support.

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Bing has seen steady progress since its launch and is starting to make a serious name for itself in the world of search. That perception is backed up by statistics provided by StatCounter, which says that it has leapfrogged Yahoo in the search stakes to second place.

It may not seem too significant in the grand scheme of things, as despite the change in position Bing still only has 4.37 per cent of the global search market. Yahoo’s share has fallen to 3.93 per cent – Google, meanwhile, control an astonishing 89.94 per cent of the search market, showing that it’ll be a long time before anyone can take them on properly.

Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter chief executive, said: “It is significant that Bing overtook Yahoo! globally for the first time on a monthly basis but it remains a tough battle to claw back Google’s market share. Although Google dipped below the 90 per cent mark in February worldwide for the first time since August 2009, it shows little sign of losing its global dominance any time soon.”

But, however slight Bing’s growth may have been, it still shows that there are viable search alternatives out there and people are starting to explore them properly. Though Google will argue their drop to 89 per cent is small, it’ll be interesting to revisit these statistics in the future and to gauge whether the trend has continued or not.

It’s important when search marketing not to optimise for only one engine, and to always put the user first at all times. Whether it’s through your web design, PPC management or more, constructing a great user experience will see your traffic and ROI improve over time.

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Bing and Yahoo have likely been waiting to see the legal precedents that are being set before changing the way they conduct their PPC management. Part of the new Microsoft policy, effective as of March 3, says:

‘Microsoft prohibits infringement of trademarks and other intellectual property by advertisers. Advertisers are responsible for ensuring that their ads do not violate the trademark or other intellectual property rights of others.’

Which puts any issues squarely on those who want to bid for trademarked keywords as part of their campaign, as underlined by:

‘Please note that Microsoft is not a mediator. As such, Microsoft encourages trademark owners to engage directly with advertisers who they believe are misusing their trademarks.’

A change from how they’ve previously operated, as Bing and Yahoo have usually been quite strict about how they handle trademarked terms in their PPC ads. Have they been waiting to see how Google fared from a legal point of view before making policy amendments? The change opens up a new window of opportunity to those who want to broaden their pay per click campaign across search engines other than Google, and pull in a lot more revenue for their targeted terms.

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But Google has noticed a quite obvious correlation. When temperatures were at their lowest during November 2010, Google noticed a massive increase in people doing their Christmas shopping online. Now, though we say it’s an obvious correlation, what we mean is that if people can’t venture outside to do their shopping then they’ll obviously choose the next best method – shopping online.

But Google are looking into the science behind it. Google’s advertising revenue accounts for a whopping 97 per cent of its total funds. They noticed a large jump of people making use of their AdWords platform at the same time that temperatures dropped and the number of in-store customers fell.

So Google are looking to maximise this as much as possible, using weather trends to help increase revenue. Not just for themselves, but for retailers up and down the country, according to Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist: “We saw a dramatic increase in the number of clicks during the two week period [from 20 November], then we see them falling, and then we see another big increase during the second period of bad weather. When we get a streak of dreary weather the ad clicks go through the ceiling. It used to be that bad weather was an unmitigated disaster for retailers, but now they have a way to hedge themselves with an online and offline presence that allows them to benefit whether rain or shine.”

The potential for AdWords to develop is certainly there, according to Varian, which should hearten all those looking to improve their PPC campaign: “An advertiser could set an ad campaign that says if the weather is cold and rainy for four days in a row, increase my budget for [ads for] get-away vacations by 10%.”

It’ll be interesting to see how AdWords develops, and if Google can relay PPC management campaigns around the weather in the future.

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