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Monday, May 14th, 2012
Paid search advertising can be a bit of a minefield – tactics which work on one PPC campaign aren’t always transferrable to another.
Managing profitable pay per click services involves a lot of foresight, analysis, and just a touch of guess-work. This experimentalism is absolutely imperative to ensure your paid ads are displaying to the right people at the right times, and getting the right results. Without experimenting, most PPC strategies will fail. Or, at least, fail to meet their potential.
Google’s always been acutely aware that the more tools it can give to search marketers, the more people are likely to spend on search marketing.
If you can analyse properly – to see where money is best spent and best avoided – you can afford to invest more in paid ads as you know you’re more likely to get the conversions you want.
As such, Google’s AdWords tool has, for some time, given search advertisers ways to project and forecast how a PPC ad may work at both the keyword and ad group level. Now Google’s improved its projection tools, allowing advertisers to forecast simulations at campaign level, too.
The change is designed to give advertisers a way to create reports on potential future campaigns even without the requisite level of data to do so at keyword or ad group level.
The tool allows advertisers to swap variables to check effects – such as lowering all bids by a certain percentage.
The system feeds back on how an advertiser can then use the data on a real campaign – with projections on potential necessary campaign budget and a downloadable summary. An AdWords Editor file is also available showing simulated bid amounts and applicable groups.
The changes have already gone live – check the Opportunities section of AdWords.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: ad group, advertising, adwords, campaign, display, Google, Keywords, Paid Ads, Pay Per Click (PPC), PPC, projection, search marketing, SEM, SEO, simulation, tools
Posted in Pay Per Click Marketing
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Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
None of us can possibly keep up to date with the ever-growing number of social media contacts we need to engage with, without using tools to automate some of the processes and managing our time carefully.
One of those tools which has become increasingly useful for those with busy schedules is Buffer – the application which allows you to pre-schedule Tweets to be sent to your Twitter account automatically at times set by you.
So, for instance, if you have blog posts and articles which you would like to bring to people’s attention, but you know you will be in meetings all day for the next two days, you can schedule these tweets (with links to your own website, of course) to go out whilst you are otherwise committed.
For a busy team in a large marcomms department, this can make it really easy to see who else is planning to send out what and when, rather than inundating your followers with a deluge of tweets from different authors who just happened not to know what everyone else was about to do.
Now, Buffer has added the scheduling of Facebook posts to the app, which can only be a good thing for companies looking to intersperse real-world communications with news and PR on Facebook. It is vital not to use any of your social media real estate simply as a one-way mechanism, and alternating broadcast announcements with some one to one human communication with those who post on your wall, page or group is of paramount importance if you want people to return.
After all, social media is not just about how many Likes or Followers you have. It is also about the dialogue that you engage in with those who have taken the time to seek you out and indicate their interest.
Buffer offers a number of plug-ins and apps for multiple devices and browsers, so being able to automate tweets from your iPhone or Android for your business. Or for remote workers to tweet from the road or out of office so that others can see what may be scheduled over the next few days and build additional campaigns or marketing around that.
The Facebook addition allows you to tweet to both Facebook and twitter at once, or just one of the networks (as do applications such as Foursquare) which will reduce your workload and ensure that you reach the different audiences who will be following through the social media of their choice.
A word of warning: if you already have Tweets being posted to Facebook automatically via another mechanism (or vice versa), be very careful not to create a loop. This can mean that you post something to Twitter, which automatically gets posted to FB, and is then automatically posted back to Twitter etc etc until you feel as though you are standing in a room full of mirrors! Keep a record of the tools you trial for which automation tasks as they may conflict if you accidentally set up an infinite loop. And it could have been months since you experimented with a new tool and remembering which it was, passwords, and so on, may come too late if you have a group of followers who find themselves inundated with email notifications from you before you have resolved the issue.
Not that I speak from experience. Oh no. 
Give Buffer a try. It’s free and definitely worth using if your time is limited, if you need to manage a large team, and if you want to schedule in advance any communications when you know you will be otherwise engaged.
http://www.bufferapp.com
Tags: application, automation, buffer, facebook, marcomms, Social Media, tools, twitter
Posted in Uncategorised
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Thursday, September 22nd, 2011
As we said in Part 1 a while ago, businesses were not at that time permitted on Google + but that was no reason not to start thinking about how you will use it once the business applications open up.
19th September NEWSFLASH – Google+ is now wide open to everyone!!
Google+ is likely to advance quickly once the basics are resolved and Google announced today that they had passed 100 major changes to G+ which had been requested or were on the G+ team wishlist. Having a user base of at least 10 million within only a few weeks, even as a closed beta, the feedback came thick and fast for the development team. In addition, even a quick look at the different applications and services that Google can add on and integrate within G+ puts it considerably ahead of the vast majority of the competition, and that work has been ongoing throughout the summer.
Just a quick look at this page of Google Products, let alone the many Google Labs gives you an idea of how broad the Google church now is and where G+ might be going.
So, the integration of multiple different products inside Google +, or easily accessible from within G+, does indicate that for some G+ could be the portal from which all things happen. However, for others, change is to be avoided at all costs, and if there is a tool which works for you then it is unlikely that you will change it in a hurry.
What this means for businesses is that Google+ may well become yet another place in which you need to seek out your target audience, but not everyone will be using it, so you will still need to target your audience using the applications which they prefer. This could be Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn etc.
It is also possible though that just as Tweetdeck has become the most popular Twitter app, third party developers will help to integrate existing tools with G+. Facebook has made this very difficult except with Connect, because the whole arena is closed off and everyone wanting to develop for Facebook must do so inside Facebook. Google is unlikely to make the same mistake, and the API for G+ is now available which means that many of the integration tools which were available previously will likely be superseded by apps developed within the API.
Will G+ take off as a replacement for Facebook for businesses? Right now, as Facebook also announce many changes, the likelihood is that as a business you will need to market to more than just one social network. But G+ now offers functionality for your business, rather than just as a marketing tool, that you would do well to look at. Shortly, we will be blogging about Hangouts and the changes announced this week that could save a fortune in producing content, collaboration, and exciting ways to engage with your customers.
Tags: API, business, g+, Google, google plus, tools
Posted in Blog, Google, Small Business Resources, Social Media
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Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Tools
The first tools you should use are those which are available on Twitter to personalise or brand your Twitter profile – logo, bio, website link, background etc. When people look at your profile and timeline, they should be able to learn all about your brand, business, products, USP etc from that profile.
There are people who will argue that personalising your profile is pointless when so many use the tools we recommend below – Tweetdeck etc, which generally do not show the actual Twitter profile design, but it is an undeniable fact that there are now many people sharing visually attractive profiles, as well as others making money from creating them.
If you are team posting from within your company, you should brand each Twitter user in a similar fashion to give a corporate look/feel to the accounts.
The next most important is a tool which allows you to keep track of all that is going on in your own Twitterverse – the website is too clunky to do this easily. You need to be able to easily follow:
- specific events (usually denominated by a hashtag)
- individual accounts (e.g. your competitors or loyal customers)
- conversations so that you can see how a conversation developed (this is particularly useful for helpdesks where different team members can see what has gone on previously)
Also, most tools offer stats, trends and search facilities, as well as lists so that you can keep track of what is working as well as what isn’t, what is trending, and group users into different departments or lists. You can check Twitter trends by region too, as well as trends in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow on Twitter itself, so if your audience is local, you can keep an eye on what is trending right now near you.
Essential for all of this are either Tweetdeck (acquired by Twitter this week), Hootsuite or Seesmic.
These tools help you to both aggregate the tweets from those you follow, your followers, hashtags, search terms etc, and separate them out into columns to make life much easier.
Try all three to find which one best suits your modus operandi – there are plenty of how tos, videos, FAQs and tutorials across the Net to make the most of their features. It may take an hour or two to investigate but will pay enormous dividends if you have the right tool for the job. All also offer mobile solutions which will give you more chance to follow and post to Twitter on the move.
Automate your tweets
You will send tweets for one of two reasons: a) to communicate/respond or b) to promote. The vast majority of companies are using Twitter only for the latter, which can be fully automated from your blog, website, RSS feed, or for tweets written ahead of schedule e.g for upcoming press releases.
There are so many tools to do this job that you just need to assess what you are attempting to conjoin with Twitter eg wordpress blog, Facebook or Linkedin status update, RSS feed, press releases etc and choose the right tool(s) for the task. These requirements will be unique to each company and based on the existing resources that you have for marketing both on and offline.
For example, Socialoomph (previously known as TweetLater) offers you a wide variety of tools to automate many of the tasks that you may find you need to carry out to harness the power of Twitter for your business. This not only includes automated tweets, but autofollow, welcome messages, stats, linking multiple social accounts and blogs, monitoring follows/unfollows and so on.
Personalised Engagement
The area that you cannot automate at all, if you value your reputation, is the personal side of Twitter – responding to a technical support tweet, answering questions, expressing opinions, conversing etc.
This is the most important part of a social media strategy, so you need to assess the human resource needs for this. You can start small and bring in further resources as you find you need them, and as they begin to generate results.
If you don’t engage on Twitter, or use Twitter to promote a route for human engagement eg a forum on your site, blog comments, a phone line or online chat, webinar or real world seminar etc, then you are not being social, you are broadcasting.
Decide what tone or personality your company wishes to adopt on Twitter – this is really important and needs to be upheld reasonably consistently. Customers want to feel that companies are far more approachable than in the past, especially large corporates, and it is easy to develop a personable, friendly style, even in a technical help centre format. Instead of Business to Business, or Business to Consumer, think Person to Person.
Then, decide who is going to be responsible for monitoring and maintaining your tweetstream, Build in redundancy so that you have at least two people responsible, even if not both full-time, and each knows what the other one has done, conversations that have been held and so on.
Tomorrow, we will continue to look at how to use these tools and strategies and your Twitter account to maximise your business strengths and create social signals to help improve your search engine optimisation and internet marketing.
Tags: hootsuite, seesmic, tools, trends, TweetDeck, twitter
Posted in Blog, Small Business Resources, Social Media, Uncategorised
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Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
We’ve looked at why you need a co-ordinated marketing strategy, we’ve got you using Twitter (if you weren’t already), and now we are going to look at the next step, which is getting on and doing it.
Step 2 – JFDI!
Once you understand the basics, you need to understand how you can harness Twitter for your success.
1) Find loyal followers – these are the people who will evangelise your messages, promote you, buy from you, talk to you, and support you. Without loyal followers, Twitter is simply a time sink that becomes useful for research but little else.
2) Think out of the box to customise Twitter to your own ends
3) Don’t get stuck with one strategy. Be flexible, agile and ready to change. Be reactive as well as proactive.
4) Work with other people to cross promote and retweet.
Let’s take each point in turn.
1) Find loyal followers.
When Twitter first became popular, there were many tweets along the lines of “How to find 1 Million new followers in a month” as many people perceived fame and fortune in numbers. However, we all know it is quality not quantity which matters.
There is also a limit to the number of people who you can follow EFFECTIVELY. If you wish to build relationships with those you need to, you must communicate with them where possible on a 1 to 1 basis, rather than 1 to many.
The purpose of Twitter, for many people who are likely to be those who buy from you, talk about you in a positive light etc, is to communicate. Therefore, it is simply not sufficient to follow everyone you possibly can. You need to a) be choosy b) notice people – an auto welcome tweet when they follow you may seem easy but it’s not good form – be personal and personable and c) nurture your followers by getting to know them.
2) Think Out of the Box
Everyone can click “Follow” (as was discovered by the poor chap who unknowingly tweeted Osama Bin Laden’s death). You need to make your followers glad they are following you, because you are different. And be aware of the pains of 15 mins of fame – you should aim for long term strategies, not just quick wins. (Although we will be posting about getting this balance right next week).
Large corporates need to get personal, small companies need to think bigger, bloggers need to share other blogs as much as promote their own, sales and marketing teams need to get under the skin of their customers to see what makes them tick.
Standard rules may or may not apply on Twitter and in online marketing, but the truth is that you need to stand out from the crowd.
Very standard out of the box thinking would include: Offer prizes to the person who RTs you most in a month, but only offer it on your website, so that serial RTers don’t just win by reading Twitter but by knowing your site. Run Treasure Hunts, photo competitions, Twitter focus groups. Offer extraordinary or out of the ordinary special offers. Create really useful lists for your followers based on their feedback. Add that little extra to their day that helps them to use Twitter more effectively. Find the product(s) they are looking for – even if not yours. Answer questions, offer advice, be helpful.
(For more advice, speak to an online agency who specialise in social media marketing and watch for our Guerrilla Twitter Tips – coming soon).
3) It’s not set in stone.
You may start on Twitter using it as a broadcast mechanism, e.g. promoting your fresh content to your followers, and you may find that this justifies the time spent setting it up. But is it enough? And is it working? (Are you checking your stats to make sure that enough people are coming from Twitter to your site? And are those people higher value than visitors from other sources? Who converts?)
With social media, you can trial multiple strategies in a fairly short time scale, without spending a fortune. If you have a team tweeting, try expanding (or reducing) the team to see if it makes a difference. If you see a trend developing that you can add in to with your product, a white paper, commentary, a blog post, etc, then give it a go. If you have an idea, run it by your followers first. If it works, roll it out!
4) Cross-promote, co-operate
It’s a tough world. Working together with others makes life, and business, a little easier. Find others who tweet similar information to you, agree to RT (retweet) their tweets and you will RT theirs. Create and share Twitter lists.
Think complementary not competitive. Find others who are tweeting about your region and ask them to tweet about you, follow you and RT you. Get on board with others in the same industry and help each other out getting each other’s information to your group of followers. Follow the media who represent your area, industry, community of interest and feed them stories from your world, not just about you.
Use the mention feature as often as possible to promote your most staunch allies. This is simply the addition of a . in front of the @twittername of that business or individual. It will then reach everyone who follows that person and not just your own followers. It is a rarely used, but very useful feature of Twitter for marketers.
So “I love .@clickthroughsem and the latest series of blog posts about Twitter http://bit.ly/kEEFp4 ” could be your next tweet.
Thank you!
Part 4 tomorrow will cover some of the uses of Twitter that far too many business uses seem unaware of.
Tags: business, guerrilla, hootsuite, lists, Marketing strategy, seesmic, success, tools, TweetDeck, twitter, twitter tips
Posted in Blog, Social Media
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Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
Have you ever wondered why it is important to keep your website up to date?
Wonder no more!
Google has just added a new feature to search engine listings – event dates.
Hosting a gig? Running a series of seminars? Then, make sure the event dates are listed on your site.
Not sure how to do it? Then check out the documentation on event listings in rich snippets.
These events will list below your organic search results in hCalendar micro-format standard, just as currently links to specific key pages of your site do.
If you run events, this is a key SEO optimisation tip for you.
Tags: Events, Google, Google search, rich snippets, SEO, tools
Posted in Google, SEO, Tips & Tricks
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Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Making sure your site appears as it should in different browsers is no mean feat for the people who code your website.
It is always wise though to check your site in as many browsers, including mobile browsers, before it goes live.
Here are some tools to do precisely that and show you exactly what your website visitors will be seeing:
browsera
Browsershots
Netrenderer – for all the most recent versions of Internet Explorer (IE)
Browsercam – cross browser compatability on a wide variety of devices.
Tags: browser checker, Browsers, cross browser compatibility, tools
Posted in SEO, Tips & Tricks
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Sunday, September 6th, 2009
For those using Twitter or looking to see what you can do with it, take a look at TwitterEye which is a directory of the ever-increasing number of apps available for Twitter users.
Very useful and shows just what happens when you make your source code / API available to developers to play around with.
Tags: Application programming interface, social marketing, tools, twitter
Posted in Small Business Resources, Social Media
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Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
I was actually looking for a tool that would allow me to easily see who was pulling the RSS feeds from certain sites and came across Copygator instead. Whilst the original search was not for content theft per se, but rather to discover where content is being syndicated, this seemed a useful tool.
Copygator constantly monitors RSS feeds to see if blog posts are reproduced elsewhere, and then lets you know. Over 250 million blog posts have been compared to date.
This led to urlfan.com which lists the most popular websites and finds Web 2.0 properties that have linked to you.
Has anyone used either of these before? Do you have any comments on them, or suggestions for similar tools?
Tags: monitor RSS feed, monitoring links, popular websites, RSS, Syndication and Feeds, tools
Posted in Blog, Link Marketing, SEO, Small Business Resources, Social Media, Tips & Tricks
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Thursday, August 13th, 2009
SEOs around the globe are trying to discover the implications of the ‘under the hood’ changes that come with Google caffeine (which is currently down for a few hours maintenance, it seems).
There are already various tools to compare the old (decaf) version of Google with the new one.
Facesaerch comparison tool
Comparegoogle.com
Google Caffeine Bookmarklet
compare Caffeine
Tags: Caffeine, compare, comparison, Google, Google Caffeine, Search engine optimization, search engines, tools
Posted in Google, Keywords, SEM Industry, SEO
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