Firstly, you’ll need to create an account… but I’ve already got one – I hear you cry!

Well, nonetheless I would strongly suggest that you create a separate account for Facebook advertising – just to keep it totally separate from your personal profile. It does look like you can allow other people access to the advertising part of your account, without them seeing your personal profile… But still – I’d consider it ‘best practice’ just to keep them separate – our account manager at Facebook recommended we do it that way too… Better safe than sorry, eh?

So once you’ve created a new account, click on the ‘Advertising’ link at the bottom right of the page. Should you wish to, you might like to checkout Facebook’s Guide to Advertising – probably worth a look; although it’s fairly straight forward.

The first step is to create your advert…

Pop in your destination URL – you’ll then see that there is an option to suggest an ad – click on it if you like; quite handily Facebook will grab a couple of the images from the page – which may be the ones you want to use.

Less handily the auto-generated ad text is pretty rubbish, but you can amend that

Bear in mind that your ad needs to attract attention, so don’t be afraid to get a little creative with your headline and body copy. Also, you can of course upload any image you like… Just make sure you own the rights to it!

Just for fun, I’ve created an ad targeted specifically to Coca Cola employees – (don’t panic all will become clear in a minute).

I’ll now click on continue, to move on to targeting options…

Targeting on Facebook…

Here’s where Facebook is actually pretty awesome.

Remember my Coca Cola ad? Well thanks to the magic of Facebook I can get it to show up only to people who work for Coca Cola.

There are tons of options here – you can target by location, age, gender, sexuality,  relationship status, languages, their likes & interests, plus education & where they work. So, you can be as targeted or generic as you like.

The marketer in me, says ‘be targeted’ – but I guess it really depends on what it is that you’re looking to do. For example – if you were running some adverts for an online job site which covers all sectors and locations – you might just elect to be pretty generic.

As before, when you’re done, click continue…

Campaigns, Pricing & Scheduling

This bit is pretty self-explanatory – just set your pricing, scheduling etc and then hit review advert…

You’ll then get the opportunity to either ‘place order’ (which is an odd turn of phrase, but heigh ho) – or go back and edit your ad.

Then simply lather, rinse and repeat to create as many ads as you like.

The targeting is set at a campaign level – but you can create as many campaigns as you like – just be a bit careful if you are creating multiple ads for campaigns – as if you’re not careful you can find yourself adding the adverts under the wrong campaign.

To be honest the system is pretty slow, clunky and has an irritating tendency to crash. It would be really handy to have an offline Facebook Editor (as with the Google AdWords editor) as I’m pretty sure that this would speed up the process – perhaps something for the future eh, Facebook?

So… hopefully you’ve found this useful – as usual, any feedback, questions or declarations of love via the comments please

Gravytrain will be there on stand 146 and we’ll be hosting our own seminar:

‘Kick-ass Google Analytics to drive ROI’

Google Analytics provides marketers with huge volumes of visitor data, but it can be tough to translate that data into insight, let alone actions to improve ROI. Fear the data no longer, in this seminar we will show you how to create your own kick-ass reports to help you improve your the perforamce of your sites. You will learn how to:
- Segment your visitors to gain insight
- Understand why visitors fail to convert
- Uncover lost opportunities to maximise customer revenue

The session will provide actionable takeaways relevant to a wide variety of industry sectors.

Even better? It’s completely free to attend! To visit the ad:tech expo and access a huge range of seminars completely free, click here to register.

We’d love to see you there! If you are coming along do pop over to the stand and say hello.

Plus – we’ll be running a fantastic competition to win a track day worth £1000 on our stand; the lucky winner and 4 friends will experience the thrill of high speed passenger laps around one of Britain’s premier motor racing circuits.

Even if you can’t make it to ad:tech fear not – we’ll be posting our seminar slides on the blog shortly after the event, because we’re nice like that.

So, by now you’ve got yourself a kick ass copy brief, and you’re much clearer about what it is you need to write, what you need to include etc . Now’s a really good time to plan out your structure. Here goes…

Now pretty much whatever you’re writing in terms of sales copy can be broken down as follows:

The Salutation – Dear / To / Hey etc

The Opener – you need to get to the point really quickly here, or you’re in danger of losing your reader. You need to get their attention and make sure they understand what it is you’re selling, and why they need it. Often I’ll ask a question by way of an opener. NB you may also mention your offer here (but only in brief).

What & Why – explain what it is you’re selling and more importantly – what the benefits of your particular product or service are. Features are nice and all that, but it’s the benefits that sell. Remember we talked about barriers to entry last time. You’ll need to break down these barriers here.

The How – explain here in more detail how your product / service works – here’s where your features come in.

The Offer – explain the details of your offer here. If you still haven’t got an offer, well – what can I say. Offers improve response rate. Are you really sure there’s absolutely nothing you could offer? Free or discounted trial? Free whitepaper? Money off purchases?

Lifesaver – I often like to ask ‘Still not sure?’ at this point. You’re almost at the last chance saloon. Give them a couple more reasons why they really should give you a go – pop in details of awards, testimonials etc

Response Mechanics – Tell them in plain English what they need to do next. Normally giving people a variety of ways to respond will also increase response – e.g. website, email, phone etc

Valediction - Yours sincerely / Kind regards / etc

Your Name

Last Chance Saloon – Use a PS – this is your last chance – so keep it punchy and to the point – e.g. ‘PS Don’t miss out! To trial our service completely free of charge make sure you contact us before 4pm on 31/08/2010!

Formal Signature – name, address, contact details etc

Terms & Conditions / Legal - don’t forget to include the small print

Now comes the scary bit – putting pen to paper (or finger tip to keyboard).

At this point many find themselves staring at a horribly blank screen whilst they try to figure out where on earth to begin. You decide to make yourself a cup of tea, that will help. You type your opener a couple of times, delete it, re-type it, delete it. Then you figure you might need a break, so you have a quick look on Facebook / Twitter (or whatever your own particular brand of poison might be). An hour later you’ve still got nothing written and you’re getting more and more stressed by the second.

What to do? I’ve pulled together some tips below:

Skip the opener.

Yes, that’s right. Skip it. Yes it is really important, but don’t bother with it right now. That opening sentence is a horror, and right now it’s blocking you from getting down to the real work. I almost always write my opening lines last. In fact I often approach writing with something of a scatter gun approach.

Starting to write is often the hardest thing. Once you get into the flow, it gets easier. So just start. Start anywhere – any section you like. That’s the joy of planning your structure – start out by typing out your structural headings – and do the easy bits first. You’ll feel better straight away – look – words are now breaking up that previously impenetrable  sea of white. You are awesome.

Don’t try to simultaneously write & edit.

Just write it. It doesn’t matter if it reads really badly. Just get it all down on paper. Normally I’ll set myself a time limit – e.g. half an hour’s solid writing. Then, and only then I’ll go back over it and edit it.

Don’t write your copy brief, then forget about it.

Once you’ve got a first draft that you’re reasonably happy with, go back and review your copy brief. Check that what you’ve written still fulfills the brief. If it doesn’t, then go back and amend it.

Find yourself a proof reader

So you’ve written and edited your little heart out. It’s now time to hand over your baby to someone else to proof read. They’ll do it much better than you ever could – you’re just too close to it now.

… So – how did I do? Got any tips of your own you’d like to share? That’s what the comments are for my loves

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No Blackhats please, we're British!

For more years than I care to remember; I was a perennial outsider to the SEO industry. Gazing through a frosted window into a sector which was visibly growing and (I have to admit it), exciting! As a former recruiter for the digital sphere, I know all the terminology and some of the tricks, and was very keen to move over into SEO practice.

Now that wish has been granted, I’m moved to reveal just how open and forthcoming the SEO community actually is, and how this can benefit a webmaster/ client.

For starters there is a belief in the rest of the digital industry that geek speak is king. Unless you are familiar with HTML5, JavaScript or even the intricacies of design software such as Photoshop; then you’re lost. In SEO there is real technical jargon you can learn, but much of it is made easier to understand thanks to the burgeoning SEO community and their openness.

A key example of the openness that runs through the veins of the industry is the community in the US called SEOmoz. These guys originally offered SEO consultancy, but have since changed their business model, and now offer a set of tools for the SEO industry. However, what’s really interesting is the community. There’s a wealth of knowledge and ideas shared via both the SEOmoz blog, and the YOUmoz blog.

I’ve been really impressed by the lengths at which different corners of the Search industry go to in order to make their knowledge available to the wider world. There are plenty of other sites full of shared information that an SEO can turn to for advice. The likes of Sphinn, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and State of Search, offer their readers an insightful view of the changing Search landscape.

How can this benefit you, the client? Well, the more open the exchange of information, the easier it is to begin to understand SEO as a process, and indeed how that relates to your particular niche. Plus as your knowledge and understanding grows, it can also help you seperate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to appointing an SEO agency – which can only be a good thing, right?

]]> http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/08/from-the-inside-speaking-out/feed/ 0 http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/07/seo-agencies-and-scalability-why-bigger-often-isnt-better/ http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/07/seo-agencies-and-scalability-why-bigger-often-isnt-better/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:40:15 +0000 Matthew http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/?p=1386 One of the toughest challenges for a digital agency, after building an SEO proposition, is how to scale it. Being a human capital driven service, many good SEO agencies are borne out of a small pool of talent that embrace the medium and have the right skill set to capitalise on it. On the face of it then, it sounds rather straightforward to scale – just get more good people in to service the new clients as they flow in.

Are you trying to get too big?

The reason then, why this often doesn’t work as planned, would also appear to be quite logical – many new recruits to such businesses simply don’t reach the same standard as the founders, perhaps because the best people are already part of a successful company already, or they aren’t able to grasp the knowledge needed. There is some truth in this – SEO, being a relatively new industry, isn’t easy to recruit for – people with many years experience are in short supply while there are few educational alternatives for those without it.

Although good recruitment can help to overcome the problem, it usually needs to be backed up by a pretty good training proposition for new staff. Training SEOs can be harder than it sounds too – good SEO doesn’t just require a large amount of knowledge around a variety of subjects, but it also requires that the knowledge is up to date. As such most agency SEO training is done in-house, further draining away the time the talented staff have to spend on clients.

But recruiting and training staff is only half of the problem, and arguably the most solvable. A bigger problem could be successfully achieving scalability itself. In an effort to achieve scalability, economies of scale must be achieved to compensate for the almost inevitable dilution in talent. The few agencies that have grown beyond a few dozen staff have tried a variety of things to achieve this, from content networks & their own indexes of the web, to heavy automation of regular tasks like reporting. While the effectiveness of these particular strategies can of course vary, they all tend to have the side effect of making life for their new staff easier. And herein lies that deeper problem.

These SEO agencies that were good enough to achieve a good reputation and rapidly grow their client base typically didn’t have these luxuries when they started out – more likely, they probably had to make do with small budgets, a shortage of time, and basic resources. Such constraints, as with many creative industries provide an environment perfect for innovation. With severe constraints, it’s not just desirable to innovate – it’s essential. Without the need to innovate, it’s even more challenging to prevent a great proposition becoming stale and mediocre.

Despite this,  I have no doubt that there are many large and growing SEO agencies that provide excellent service to their clients, but I’m also equally convinced that smaller agencies have an often overlooked advantage over their larger peers – the creativity and innovative capacity of their staff can be a bigger asset than any automated system or content network.

As such I thought I’d share the typical approach which we use when approaching a copywriting project where the end game is to generate a response – e.g.  a sale, an enquiry, an email sign up etc.

Part One – The Copy Brief

Even if you’re not hiring a professional copywriter, taking the time to write a copy brief (even if it is for yourself) will allow you to gain a clear idea of what you’re trying to write, can help with internal buy in and will allow you to approach your writing in a systematic fashion – ultimately, a little spent up front here, can make the whole writing process quicker and easier. Here’s an example of the headings we use for when pulling together a copy brief here:

Company Name

Sector/Nature of the Business

The Job – Set out precisely what it is that you’re attempting to write – e.g. homepage copy for your website, a sales brochure, an email, a letter, a promotional leaflet etc, etc.

Audience – Who is this intended for?  Are there any special considerations in terms of technical knowledge, tone of voice etc?

How will it be consumed? - This is another key consideration – people consume media in different ways – e.g. they’ll typically spend more time reading a letter than a tube advert.

How ‘warm’ are your consumers likely to be? – For example, if someone’s already a customer, they’ll probably be ‘warmer’ to you, than a prospect who you are contacting for the very first time. Think about how this might impact how you construct your copy.

Key Objectives - What do you want people to do? Buy, sign up, enquire?

What are you selling - The products/services you want to sell.

Response Mechanics - How do you want people to respond? Call, email, complete a form?

Why should they respond? - This is key. What is your unique selling proposition? Why should your customers choose you over the competition? What are the benefits to them?

Barriers to entry - Think now about why people might not want to respond/buy/enquire? Note down all of the objections you can think of – you’ll need to tackle these later!

Offers - Detail any special offers which you’re running which you want to promote. Not running any offers? Well you might consider running something – typically it will uplift your response rate.

Tone of voice - This will largely be dictated by your audience, how warm they are and how your copy will be consumed – but it’s worth thinking about nonetheless.

Other mandatories for inclusion - What else must be included – e.g. testimonials, logos, details of awards/qualifications/affiliations/accreditations, telephone numbers, addresses, legal statements, terms and conditions etc.

Whilst this might seem like a pretty labour intensive process, you should now find that you have a much clearer idea of what you need to write, and the key things which you need to tackle. In part two I’ll talk you through how to structure your copy, plus offer some tips on how to make your sales copy more compelling, and ultimately, drive a better response.

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Job Title: PPC Exec (with Ninja-like skillz)

Based: Our offices in Hampton Hill, TW12 1ND

Reporting to: SEM Team Manager

Duties & Responsibilities

1. Management of our client’s PPC campaigns.
2. Identify and analyse key metrics and assess the performance of campaigns, providing clients with written monthly reports
3. Day to day client liaison via phone / email / face to face
4. Keep up with industry news and developments
5. Represent the company at industry events / conferences
6. Create new business pitch documentation and attend pitches
7. Contribute to the company blog

Person Specification

Personality

A self-starter you will be driven, positive and focused on delivering high quality results for our clients.

Skills / Experience:

Essential:

1. A minimum of one year hands-on PPC experience gained either client or agency-side
2. Google adwords qualified
3. Excellent written and verbal communication skills
4. Strong analytical skills
5. A genuine passion for the web, online marketing and social media

Desirable:

1. University graduate
2. Be active within the online marketing community

Working Hours

Monday – Friday 9am – 5.30pm.

Salary

To £26k per annum depending on experience

Benefits

Private health care and subsidised gym membership & regular company evenings out

How to apply:

Applicants are invited to send their CV and covering letter via email directly to:

Hannah Smith – SEM Team Manager

hannah@gravytrain.co.uk

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Despite this, there are still many who will treat or describe SEO as a purely on-page technical exercise. Essentially they’re saying that high amounts of traffic can be recieved simply by tweaking various tags and attributes and strategically using keywords on one’s website. Whilst this can certainly help, and, in the case of some very niche keywords, raise rankings, this is sort of activity will not enable a website to compete on phrases where large amounts of traffic are available.

This situation partly explains why it’s possibly to get 10 radically different solutions for an SEO strategy with equally radical price differentials – many of the very cheap solutions are only optimising the on-page technical factors, which, according to industry experts are only around 15% of the algoirthm.

The explanation for this is very simple – there’s simply too much competition on the web. To demonstrate my point I’ll show you exactly how much competition there is for a big phrase. Here is a search on Google for the phrase “Car Insurance” :

Yes, that’s right – 35 million web pages seemingly competing on that result . Ok, so you’re probably thinking that most of those pages aren’t relevant at all, and this is where the clever SEO comes in. Not so.

If we use Google commands to search for the same phrase with that phrase in both the title and page URL (a very strong indicator that the web page is actively optimising for that phrase) we see that there are still a staggering 439,000 web pages in Google’s index. It doesn’t matter how advanced your software is, or how technically adept somebody may be, there’s simply no way you can do anything on-page that puts you head and shoulders over half a million results, because there isn’t a logical way for Google to determine which is the most relevant.

It would be rather like trying to pick 10 people to hire from 439,000 applicants based purely on the contents of their CV – they can *say* whatever they want on their CV – but it ain’t necessarily so – you’d definitely want to meet them, collect references and so on before hiring, right?

There is the also argument that on-page is fine if you’re not targeting super competitive phrases, but even for some less competitive terms you’ll need to do a lot more than tweak a few elements on-page.

There are many people who prop up the ‘tweak it and they’ll come’ theory – these include designers of wordpress plugins; £199 website optimisation ‘tools’;  lazy SEOs and those who simply don’t know any better. The sad thing is that it not only does it not work, but it could cost the business owner thousands of pounds of lost sales.

So, if you’re in the market for some SEO consultancy make sure you take a long hard look at those proposals. Ideally the activity proposed should comprise of:

1. Technical & on-page
2. Content creation (NB you may be able to save yourself some pennies if you’re willing (and able) to create the content yourself)
3. Link building

Oh, and bear in mind that great old adage – “pay peanuts… get monkeys”.

To be qualified under GAP as a company/agency previously, you had to meet Google’s eligibility criteria, including qualification requirements for at least 2 individuals in a company. This has been changed to require companies to have at least 1 individual to have attained a pass in one of the advanced level qualifications, in addition to the ‘Fundamentals’ exam, which is similar to the previous GAP qualification.

Following the changes introduced, Gravytrain has recently become qualified as a Google Certified Partner by meeting the new requirements under the GCP Programme. You will find our brand-spanking-new certified status logo below and on our website homepage.

Gravytrain remains committed to providing clients with superior online marketing services and continues to keep up to date with developments in the market to deliver effective results.

The pay per click model came about in the late 1990s and differed from previous methods of advertising which were based on CPM (cost per thousand impressions) rather than cost per click. GoTo.com (later Overture, now part of Yahoo) were the first search engine to offer PPC in 1998.  Google were a little late to the party, adopting the PPC model in 2002.

Back in the bad old days it was literally an auction with the advertiser who was willing to pay the most per click securing the top position.

However, it quickly became obvious that this wasn’t the best model – a pretty irrelevant ad which gets only 1% of the clicks @ £10 per click generates less revenue than a relevant one which gets 10% of the clicks @ £2 per click.

As such in the mid-noughties Google introduced quality score – an algorithm which essentially ensured that most relevant ads (i.e. the ads which generated the most revenue) would get pushed to the top of the results. Yahoo and MSN later followed suit with algorithms of their own.

This changed the face of PPC – as instead of fighting an auction war, PPC-ers had to get a little bit cuter and make sure their ads were as relevant and attractive to users as possible in order to secure a decent position on the page and (potentially at least) reduce the cost they pay per click.

Quality Score Explained

Quality score is calculated every time your keyword matches a search query – that is, every time your keyword has the potential to trigger an ad.

So, how is it calculated?

Quality score on the search network is calculated based on the following metrics:

1. Historic click through rate of the keyword, ad and display URL
2. Relevancy of the keyword and ad to the term which is being searcher for
3. Relevancy of the keyword to the ad copy
4. Relevancy of the keyword to the landing page
5. Landing page quality
6. Historic account click through rate

You can read more here.

For obvious reasons Google don’t reveal quite how these factors are weighted, however it’s easy enough to guess

It’s pretty much all about click through rate.

This a nice metric as high click through rate indicates that users think that your ads are relevant/offer an attractive proposition AND of course clicks = money for Google.

Should you *always* worry about Quality Score?

Frankly, no. Whilst having a high quality scores is good from a cost per click point view (as you’re likely to be paying less per click) – you shouldn’t necessarily let it bother you overly. Obviously Google want you to play by their rules and create relevant ads that people want to click on so they can continue to rake it in; however – on some occasions you might want to bid on certain keywords, but limit the number clicks you get.

For many clients we use ad text to pre-screen clicks. For example, we may bid on a term like ‘taxi insurance’; but because our client only wants to insure taxi drivers over a certain age we might elect to run an ad like this:

Low Cost Taxi Insurance

Over 25? Compare Leading Taxi

Insurers & Find the Cheapest Quote!

TaxiInsuranceExperts.co.uk

Now here, we’re actively trying to limit the number of clicks which we’ll get – which of course may impact our quality score – however it’s far more important for us to deliver the right sort of leads to our client. So it’s not necessarily something you ought to be tyrannised by

Questions, comments, etc? Hit up the comments my dears.

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