No silver bullet in PPC

Posted in PPC, Search Engines, Uncategorized on November 25th, 2010 by Matthew

“So what’s the secret with PPC?”

The question is usually something along those lines. I feel a bit like scrooge cancelling christmas writing this post (especially if you’ve found this post searching for the PPC silver bullet) because, quite frankly , there simply isn’t any silver bullet with PPC.

This is not to say that paid search can’t be complex (it often is) , or that there aren’t really any ways to make a difference to a campaign – just that there’s no 1 overpowering method to suddenly reduce your CPA or increase your clicks. You’ll need to do better than that.

There’s now more settings and options with adwords than there have been. Whether you want to add videos , text links or phone numbers to your ads, you can now do it. There’s new keyword match types, mobile device targetting, new ad formats and the ability to ‘remarket’ to people who’ve previously visited your website.

These changes , combined with future improvments, make PPC one of the most exciting areas of digital marketing to be involved in – it means that , increasingly , every paid search account is different not only just in the keywords and campaigns , but in a whole range of ways.It also means that we need to take even more time to understand not just all of the options available to us, but how we can apply these to the client account in question.

The impact on PPC is subtle, yet important. Any marketeers approaching PPC with a fixed methodology are likely to find their work increasingly ineffective. To give an example, I’ve seen checklists and process plans for PPC management – while best practises can be beneficial, a checklist applied to every client is a classic way to get things the wrong way round.

As with traditional marketing, the best way to approach a PPC is to start with the objectives of the business in question – for us, it means understanding our client. It may sound banal to point out that understanding a client means understanding how best to make the campaign work, but it’s nevertheless the case. The most important part of the planning phase for a new PPC client is in being able to map activities according to the level of impact they will have on the client – how much difference optimising them will actually make. When you’ve done this, you know what you need to spend time on, and what you really need to get right.

For cleints, rotating ad-copy can make all the difference , while for others it’s all about conversion rate optimisation. If rotating ads frequently doesn’t make the difference, don’t feel compelled to do it every week. Equally, If reducing the dropout of a form doubles your return on the entire campaign, do feel compelled to spend every last hour trying to achieve it.

If anything, the ‘silver bullet’ of PPC could be as simple as understanding the impact of your work, before you start.

When Display advertising can go horribly, horribly wrong!

Posted in Uncategorized on October 6th, 2010 by Angelina

All forms of online advertising are booming at present. Bucking the recession soaked tears that the rest of the ad industry have shed for the demise of TV, Radio and newspaper advertising in recent years. A report out yesterday details how UK online ad spends rises by 10% to nearly £2billion during the first half of 2010.

But not all that money can be spent wisely. When it comes to display advertising, some of the money can be spent on visual adverts which can, by accident, by shown in some embarrassing and poor PR resulting instances. Here’s why: using the Google Display network and its Keyword focused technology, it is possible for an advert for running shoes for example, to appear in a news article or advertorial for running shoes. That’s not a problem I hear you cry! Well as this article from website Econsultancy points out, it can result in some hilariously bad PR if the campaign is not monitored carefully.

This is why it is important to choose the right agency for your Display advertising. Incidents liked the ones mentioned are avoidable with the right campaign optimisation. The decision to choose the right agency has to be based on trust, and knowledge. Do you trust the agency to have the right knowledge to push your adverts in the right direction? If you answered no, then it may be time to re think your Display strategy.

How to Disappear Completely

Posted in Uncategorized on September 16th, 2010 by Angelina

Has the thought ever crossed your mind? Have you ever sat there and looked at the outstanding ‘pokes’, ‘tweets’ and Linked In updates; only to sigh at the length of time it will take you go through all of them? So, have you ever (whisper it) considered web 2.0 suicide?

It might be something that at some point many of us Facebook, Twitter et al. addicts have thought about. However the admin time to commit virtual suicide may have put some people off. Now there is a website that offers to do just that for you, and claims to give you your real life back in the process. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine will take your login details for your social network accounts, and will systematically un-friend your friends, un-tweet your tweets, and un-link with your Linked In colleagues. It claims that it can do all this in just under an hour, whereas to do this all manually will cost you around 10 hours! That’s a lot of social networking time.

Compare that with the statistic out last year that users spend 17% of their online time on social networks (mainly Facebook and Twitter), and it may end up making economic sense to cease mixing on the social web.

There are other benefits to stopping operating on these sites. As technology journalists Leo Laporte and Jason Calacanis both decided publicly to commit Facebook suicide earlier this year in protests to the sites use of its user’s privacy rights and personal information. Their protest was symbolic of their support for more open platform social networks such as Diaspora. However, other Facebook users may not wish to make such a grandiose gesture, and may simply feel that the site is beginning to take up too much of their spare time.

Whatever the reason for wanting to commit virtual suicide maybe, it is handy to know that there is a website that can do all this necessary admin for you. Want to commit Facebook suicide? There’s a web app for that!

ad:tech – t’s and c’s

Posted in Uncategorized on September 7th, 2010 by Matthew

1) Entrants must be aged 18 or over. 2) This competition is not open to Gravytrain employees (or members of their immediate families). 3) No purchase necessary. 4) Only one entry per person. 5) The winner will be the entrant who completes the fastest lap time. In the event of a tie the winner will be drawn ‘from the hat’. 6) The competition will close at 5pm on Wednesday 22^nd September. 7) The winner will be notified via email. Our decision is be final, and no correspondence will be entered into. 9) The winner will be announced via our company blog: www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog after the closing date. 10) By entering the competition the winner agrees to participate in such promotional activity and material as Gravytrain may require. 11) The prize will not be transferable to another person. 12) No part of a prize is exchangeable for cash or any other prize. 13) In the event that the advertised prize is not available, we reserve the right to offer an alternative prize of equal or greater value. 14) This competition is being run by Gravytrain Ltd, 8 The Mews, 53 High Street, Hampton Hill, Middlsex, TW12 1ND. 15) Gravytrain reserves the right to amend these rules at any time.

Is that Website Selling Links? Here’s a Few Ways to Tell..

Posted in Search Engines, SEO, Uncategorized on May 21st, 2010 by Matthew

When we’re evaluating potential link partners for our clients, one of the key things we look at is whether they are in the business of selling links. The last thing we want to do is expend our resources targeting websites that might pass little or no value, because they are obviously selling links without using nofollow. The chances are, if you are confidently able to determine that a given website is selling links just by looking at it, the search engines will also be able tell and thereby nullify any value passed.

Bear in mind that Google doesn’t need to be too concerned about making mistakes when doing such a classification – as long as they penalise link sellers (by stopping them from passing value) they don’t risk excluding sites unfairly.

make sure your links don't look like this

Here’s just a few of the many signals we look at to determine if a site is selling links:

Look out for Blocks of Links

Some websites are less savvy about Google’s terms than others. Whilst it may be against Google T&C’s to sell links (unless using nofollow) many webmasters are unaware of this and don’t go to a great deal of effort to disguise the fact that they are selling links. They will therefore mark up the section ‘Sponsored Links’ or something equally blatant. This is extremely easy for either a manual reviewer or an algorithm to spot. If you are familiar with HTML, you can also check the source of any link blocks to look for clues in the markup if you see something like ‘div id=’ads”, then you have another clue

Another obvious signal is where you find a block of links, often in a dubious place on the website (e.g the footer), that all link to a set of seemingly unconnected but commercial websites. A key thing to differentiate here is a ‘Blogroll’ from a block of ad-links – a Blogroll will usually link out to useful resources which tend to be a mix of other blogs, commercial and non commercial links – a block of ads will link purely to commercial websites.

Check the Anchor Text

Another obvious signal is in the anchor text of links – i.e. the text you see on the screen for the link. If all the links say things like ‘Credit Cards’, ‘Car Insurance’ etc, then there’s a str0ng possibility somebody paid for the website to link with favourable text – this is especially likely to be the case if:

a) the site being linked to isn’t called ‘Credit Cards’ (i.e. doesn’t have the url www.creditcards.com)

b) the site being linked is obviously targeting ‘Credit Cards’ as a keyword

Who are they linking to?

Possibly my favourite test of all when looking at a website’s outbound links is to see exactly who they are linking to. Generally, you can identify the major link buyers in any industry – the types that have chunky five figure link building budgets that buy rich links from anywhere and everywhere. If the website you are looking at links out to these (especially with rich anchor text in a sidebar) then it’s almost certain they are in the business of selling links – Google knows who the major offenders of link buying are, and therefore by association has a good idea of who the sellers are too – don’t get yourself involved with this crowd because you’ll probably be wasting your time/money… or worse, you may see a your site penalised.

Who owns the website?

Although this might lead to an occasional false negative, the owner of the website can give you a good clue as to their intentions. There are two interesting things to look out for here:

1) Is the website owned by a publishing company? If so, you can almost certainly buy a link. Generally speaking links tends to be nofollowed and go through some sort of tracking url. However, some publishing companies have wised up to the potential income from followed links…

2) Is there a disconnect between the websites owner details and their audience? For example is the website targeting a UK audience but owned by an individual outside the UK who also owns 572 other domains. Why should this concern you? Because there are literally thousands if not millions of websites created every day, purely to sell links to other countries. Although there will sometimes be a perfectly legitimate reason why the domain owner is overseas, it’s just another indicator that the website was created with the intention of selling links which can be balanced against other signs and signals.

Use your common sense!

It might be difficult to see every link on a page, but given you can pretty much ignore internal links for this purpose, scan your mouse over all the main link blocks and pay attention to the external links – a simple sense check can often tell you whether or not the link deserves to be there. Put yourself in the users shoes – if there’s no logical reason you’d want to click on the outbound links, then chances are, the site’s selling links.

Image credit Tim Parkinson

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