Companies could lower the cost of their pay per click services by focusing on low-priced keywords that still have high conversion rates, it has been suggested.
Jack Keifer of BabyAge.com told Internet Retailer that his company – which sells baby car seats, nursery furniture, prams, toys and bath accessories – had managed to do just this, cutting pay per click services costs from 75 per cent of overall budgets to 15 per cent.
Marketers at the firm looked at keywords that were not as highly priced as the most popular terms but still managed to offer good conversion rates.
This tactic, coupled with an expanded product line, also helped BabyAge.com to increase sales by about 300 per cent in the final three months of 2008, he said.
Mr Keifer remarked: "It has worked out well. With less dollars spent frivolously, gross sales from search marketing are lower but profits are up."
The company places its pay per click ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Live Search and Pronto.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
This month saw Google and Yahoo! announce their results for the fourth quarter of 2008.
Google posted strong revenues for the period, up 18 per cent on the previous year. However, its net income fell as a result of investment-related costs.
Meanwhile, Yahoo!’s results were not as disappointing as some analysts had expected, with steady sales year-on-year. However, it recorded a net loss for the quarter.
Earlier in the month, Yahoo! revealed that it had appointed former Autodesk boss Carol Bartz to the post of chief executive, succeeding Jerry Yang in the role.
Elsewhere, figures from Click Forensics suggested that click fraud rose to a 12-month high in the fourth quarter, while predictions from various analysts indicated that some are still hopeful over the performance of the internet marketing sector over the course of 2009, despite the deteriorating economy.
According to eMarketer, search marketing growth will still be strong as firms look to more accountable and measurable forms of advertising during the recession.
Imran Khan of JP Morgan also forecast sound growth for the search marketing sector as performance-based advertising becomes more important to businesses.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
A new study has revealed that almost four in ten internet marketing executives do not have programs in place to help them to track or encourage positive word of mouth marketing among their customers.
This is in spite of the fact that 84 per cent of respondents believed positive customer experiences and word of mouth had helped their brands to grow, the report from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council said.
A further 44 per cent of marketers admitted that high-profile negative customer experiences had compromised their brands at some point in the past.
Overall, 14.5 per cent of respondents track word of mouth on the internet while 12 per cent use a word of mouth marketing platform to enhance customer loyalty.
"CMOs must assume ownership for the customer experience and establish enterprise-wide measures and disciplines to ensure continuous improvement," said CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May.
Fewer than half of marketers use analytics to measure the success of their campaigns, according to a recent Alterian study.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
The fourth quarter of 2008 saw click fraud rates in the pay per click sector increase to 17.1 per cent, according to new figures.
This is compared with 16 per cent in the previous three months and 16.6 per cent in the last quarter of 2007, Click Forensics said – a trend that may indicate a need for marketers to make use of the relevant pay per click services to combat click fraud.
Click fraud rates also rose quarter-on-quarter on search engine content networks such as Google AdSense, while a growing proportion of overall click fraud traffic was found to come from botnets.
About 31.4 per cent of traffic emanated from botnets in the fourth quarter, compared with 27.6 per cent in the previous quarter and 22 per cent in the last three months of 2007.
"In addition, we’ve started to see old schemes like click farms re-emerge. Advertisers should pay close attention to these types of threats in their online campaigns throughout the year," warned Tom Cuthbert, president of Click Forensics.
Botnet traffic also increased quarter-on-quarter between July and September, according to Click Forensics.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Yahoo! has surpassed analyst expectations with its results for the fourth quarter of 2008.
The internet services company generated $1.8 billion (£1.26 billion) of revenues during the final three months of last year, down one per cent compared with the equivalent period in 2007.
A net loss of $303 million was recorded for the quarter, while full-year revenues and net income were $7.2 billion and $424 million respectively.
Pay per click services revenues rose by 11 per cent in the fourth quarter, according to chief financial officer at Yahoo! Blake Jorgensen.
The company is "better positioned to weather the economic downturn and emerge stronger when advertiser spending improves" thanks to cost-cutting and investments made in the fourth quarter, said Carol Bartz, chief executive of Yahoo!.
She went on to note in a conference call discussing the figures that she believed Yahoo! would do better as it is now than if it was split up and sold off.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
E-commerce sites are making use of new features and promotions in their internet marketing to enhance conversion rates, it has been suggested.
The 11th annual Mystery Shopping survey by e-tailing group found that a growing number of retailers are looking to encourage more sales by improving website efficiency and running limited-time offers.
Lauren Freedman, president of e-tailing group, told Internet Retailer that merchants were found to be "pulling out all the stops" when it came to new promotions, better site search, improved content and enhanced community features.
About 42 per cent of e-commerce sites now offer limited-time promotions, compared with 18 per cent in 2007.
Ms Freedman said: "Smart merchants are taking execution to a higher level, elevating the online shopping experience to provide customers with increased efficiency while fostering retention."
The survey also revealed that all of the 100 sites studied offered keyword search, while 85 per cent provided the ability to refine searches beyond keywords.
According to Econsultancy, the growth of online shopping means that a rising number of businesses are looking at implementing e-commerce platforms this year.
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Business-to-consumer search marketing is viewed as one of the best advertising platforms for return on investment (ROI), new statistics have indicated.
MarketingSherpa’s figures for the fourth quarter of 2008 revealed that tactics such as search engine optimisation and pay per click were ranked alongside house email marketing as offering the best ROI.
The survey suggested that search marketing in particular will experience an expansion in budgets this year, in spite of recent predictions forecasting lower growth for the channel in 2009.
"Search may end up faring well through the recession, however, within a larger overall shift from brand tactics toward the more dependable and measurable direct online tactics," MarketingSherpa commented.
Spending on paid search rose by 28 per cent to £981 million in the first half of 2008, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.
Overall online marketing spending increased by 21 per cent to almost £1.7 billion, the figures showed.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
Marketers will increasingly turn to performance-based marketing channels such as pay per click services in 2009, a new survey has indicated.
According to the Vertical Search Report 2009 from Econsultancy and Convera, two-thirds of internet professionals are looking to invest more in marketing tactics based on a cost-per-lead model this year.
Just under 50 per cent said they intended to spend more on cost-per-click advertising, while 29 per cent will increase expenditure on cost-per-mile (CPM)/online display advertising.
"CPM is already suffering as advertisers turn their attention to performance-based formats to ensure that they can get clearly measurable returns," remarked Linus Gregoriadis, research director at Econsultancy.
Marketers are predicting online spending growth of 16 per cent for 2009 and 17 per cent for 2010, according to a survey by the European Interactive Advertising Association carried out last year.
Eight in ten of those polled forecast increases in search marketing spending for both years.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
I always like Seth Godin’s posts and this one is no different.
As a marketer, how often do you take the time to think out of the box and do something slightly different? Not just for your clients but also for your own business?
When marketing a local business eg the Mexican restaurant, then how much does it really cost to send out a $10 voucher? Many people will throw it away, or file it away and forget about it. But even if you get a 3% conversion rate, that is a whole host of new visitors to impress, giving a potential high return on investment for that marketing.
And this highlights to me one of the most important facets of marketing that many websites fail to deliver upon. Yes, you can spend your money on fliers, or PPC, or SEO, and draw visitors to your site, but just as that Mexican restaurant will need to, you must deliver when they walk in the door (enter your website) and throughout the meal (site visit experience).
Take a long hard look at your website today and the goals you are aiming to achieve.
The Mexican restaurant is trying to rebuild its brand and image, establish a new and loyal customer base, serve up great food and good experience to each customer who walks in the door. Not only will it bring in new custom but how they treat each of those visitors brandishing their $10 discount voucher will dictate how many of those goals they achieve, and whether those visitors convert to long term customers who spread the name of the business by word of mouth.
And your website is no different. The marketing does not end with the PPC or SEO or calls to action on your site. The marketing continues through into the back office and your systems, how your receptionist answers the phone or email enquiries, how well your e-commerce system works and how simple it is to use, how quickly you deliver the product, how well your customer services team respond to complaints or difficulties, and so on.
And on top of all that, it is about the flourishes that you add to make everything just that little bit more special and unique for your customers, potential and actual.
The Mexican restaurant might throw in a chilli chocolate freebie with the liqueur coffee at the end of the meal, just as you could add a link to free manuals for your products, examples and case studies of how other customers have used your products and services to reduce their bottom line, make money, save time, etc. It is those additional touches that will make all the difference.
You could package your parcels up with a discount voucher inside for the next purchase or an ‘Introduce a new customer’ offer but those are for your benefit eg in encouraging new sales.
What you need to offer has to be 100% for the benefit of the customer to show them that you care. Like a freebie chilli chocolate scrumptious delight.
Have you enabled the Conversion Optimiser on your Adwords account?
Instead of manually monitoring and adjusting your PPC bids, this tool now does much of that work for you. There are, however, as with all automated tools, certain things which do not work as well as human intuition, but on the whole this tool is likely to reduce your PPC costs and enable you to increase your conversion rates.
You can only apply it to campaigns that have had over 50 conversions in the previous month, so you may need to group together campaigns in order to reach the required conversions.
Interesting article here on SearchEngine Land about how and why it works with different scenarios, plus some results from broad match and exact match experiments.
If you are already using Google Conversion Optimizer, what are your feelings about its effectiveness for your clients or your own PPC campaigns?
