Online marketing news and resources.

The problem is we can all get complacent or rely on habit when we should be looking with a keen eye! Taking care of adwords campaigns can become routine as the same product keywords are shuffled around!

If your PPC campaigns have been a little lacklustre recently, time to boost your online brand identity! Get tweaking on any tired online marketing habits and fire up your SEO keywords for warming user’s clicking forefingers! Drive your traffic back up the Google rankings again!

Retail and eCommerce sites are always most in need of keeping their sponsored ads flying high on Google Page One to propel high volume click rates.

So if your sales conversions are no longer at the ‘tipping’ point, then here’s a few ‘tips’ to help get traffic moving:

More Keywords … not having the kind of marketing budget to launch a full-scale pay per click campaign, does not mean making the obvious mistake of restricting your bids to just one or two PPC keywords only! The narrowing down of your selection to a couple of phrases will stop you achieving anywhere near the maximum click-throughs needed.

Selecting only the most popular keywords, means facing fierce competition and it is unlikely your site will gain the required traffic levels.

The answer is to try and find a good mix of popular and long-tail keywords – which are especially good for targeted niche product or service word search- and bid on as many as possible.

Relevant Keywords … if you are bidding on keywords just because you think they’re most representative of your site content, but none of your site’s pages actually contain those keywords, then your PPC quality score will plummet!

Your click-throughs will only make the bounce rate increase because you’ve lured a visitor into coming to your site but not given them the information they were expecting.

You must ensure the landing page includes the same keywords you are bidding on as well as using compelling written copy to maintain interest to stay.

Landing on the Right Page … it is crucial that you always direct click-throughs to the exact page! What you must not do is simply use the URL of your website’s home page because it does not have the right keywords or the relevant content.

The greatest amount of lost sales in a PPC campaign is due to the landing page not being relevant to the keywords or not including an easy-to-navigate CTA (Call To Action).

Develop an unique landing page, or an entire micro site that is directly related to your optimised keywords.

Geo-Targeting … there is no point in paying for clicks originating in locations your company does not serve! Specify the details in your Google Adwords campaign to include only certain cities or countries in order to more effectively target your market and potential customer base.

Focus your pay per click ad campaigns specifically on internet users within your reach by limiting sales to specific locations and in specific currencies.

Repeat Test Drives … a campaign first based on original selected keywords with one or two ads and a landing page, and has not been constantly kept up to date by being tested and amended, needs to be urgently addressed! You must develop several ads and landing pages and then test to determine the most effective sales driver.

Remember - don’t just examine the click-through rate, look at your landing page conversion as well.
All hits and no sales means drastic action needed on your overall website design and content …

Anything you need to find out, do and see – on demand, on the move, on your mobile, NOW! As smartphone apps take targeted search to a new level of bringing the dream ever closer, 2010 looks like the year when your business may need to step up a gear and get your website accessibility ready for hyper drive site search!

If it’s true that the future is literally in your hands, then the mobile smartphone is set to become the doorway to the human/web interface! If your company specialises in online retail and eCommerce, and your marketing strategies integrate social media networking, then you may already be seeing the growing demand for mobile access to your website, and products and services to be made available to people who are on the move.

The landscape is changing and online marketing is spreading out across all platforms and channels. If the age of the deskbound PC is being increasingly challenged by the portable access devices of iPhone and very soon the iPad, then it may be time to seriously think beyond the planned website refresh, and consider reshaping your site design to include mobile usability.

Here’s a few pointers you might want to ask about with your web design and developer team: (more…)

Businesses have become used to seeing their websites receive thousands of hits per day but are becoming concerned to increase conversions by knowing how and where they are losing customers. The answer is to get yourself a sales funnel!

This is the next natural step on from driving online marketing traffic to your site …

A sales funnel describes each step of the way taken from the moment a visitor arrives until they fulfil the purpose of your website, whether it is to sign up to opt in newsletter subscriptions, fill out enquiry forms, click on to latest offers or make a purchase.

In order to improve conversions, all you have to do is focus on each stage at a time and take the necessary action to prevent clicking away and increase the number of users who follow-through to the next step. Even a modest improvement in the number of users held at each step is going to lead to a huge increase in conversions. (more…)

Are you scoring an own goal? Did you think that by just having a website and driving traffic to get those daily hits that your business is doing online marketing? The net result will be no silverware !

We all should know by now that the proud boast of how many hits a site has received, is now a dead giveaway for showing how behind you are in understanding where the game is now at!

Sure, it was only few years ago when the buzz was all about concentrating on the visitor numbers you could attract by investing in Pay Per Click or Search Engine Optimisation.

These methods are still key and – alongside vital keyword phrase link building by blog/ article writing and social media messaging – are essential tools to delivering traffic to your site.

But the focus has shifted! (more…)

Making money from Social Media ? The jury’s still out in many businesses as they still fail to ask the right questions and look away whilst others jump on board without a strategy or goal defined. Both need to take closer look!

The great social media debate continues! Some embrace whilst others grimace!

Recent studies found that :

• 53% are unsure about their return on Twitter
• 50% are unable to assess the value of LinkedIn or blogs

It is understandable that the apparent lack of a ROI measure may not be attractive to some business owners, not keen to experiment in the current economic climate and sticking to known and proven marketing strategies until their key questions are answered.

Thus, the need to account for any spend and resource allocation means the bottom line is that they want measurable results from social media! However, it‟s not as simple as counting subscribers, followers, fans, conversation volume, reach, or traffic. (more…)

Around five per cent of web users now have screen resolutions of 800 x 600 whilst most use 1024 x 768 or larger. You should check to see what screen resolutions are most used by your visitors, as the many differences could badly affect the way your site is seen!

The wide ranging options that now exist for ‘going online’, whether via a standard desktop PC, laptop, netbook, smartphone, or ebook has now increased website accessibility challenges demanded of site owners and their website design developers, alike.

With the recent launch, for example, of Google Chrome, IE8, AppleMac OS X Leopard, not to mention the coming of iPad, GoogleWave, GoogleBuzz to add to the mobile platforms, the time maybe now to examine your site stats and analytics. Undertaking a website refresh and looking at any access updating required is vital to staying aware of your site visitor behaviours. (more…)

The phenomenal growth of real time search has just made it easier and simpler for customers to find out what’s happening with your company and at your website – right now! Every day search enables even more of your target market to discover products and services, so staying visible and current across browser platforms is vital to brand identity!

Social networking and bookmarking sites are taking over business, social and personal! The instant you type your message, it’s shared almost as soon as you thought of it!

This means Realtime search provides the opportunity to able to look at material literally just published – in real time! It’s also important to remember that search engines strive to have the most up-to-date relevant content on the web, indexed and ready for display to word searchers. (more…)

Ability to access websites quickly and easily from laptop and netbook to smartphone and ebook via any number of new apps or social networks has become critical! Keeping up is important to business survival online but a reminder of website basics is essential to visitor experience and conversion.

Maintaining visibility, and attracting and retaining visitor traffic to deliver desired results is a key function of integrated website design and online marketing. The development of social media networks is driving the interactive communication channels that a website must now offer to create customer communities and precisely targeted, bespoke service supply.

Issues of wide reaching website accessibility can be critical in the current economic climate, where the competition for every enquiry, word search and site visitor in a given niche market, is keenly fought for.
Even though a reminder of the basic essentials may seem a retrograde step, in fact, it can prove valuable for tiny but important improvements that make all the difference : (more…)

It’s getting complicated, isn’t it? With online users now using any number of different communication channels, just where do you target your marketing campaigns?

SME business owners in particular, are trying hard to know how best to get their company message out to their target audience. So many different means are now available that knowing the right ones for creating the right marketing strategies can be confusing.

The problem is that potential customers are not using just one medium to the exclusion of all others. Nor are they using many channels for the same purpose. Instead, each alternative method is selected for a particular purpose or plays a different role for the user. (more…)