We are happy to announce that First Insurance has joined Gravytrain this December.

First Insurance not only offers a wide range of great value motor, home and commercial insurance products to their customers, but also offer amazing discounts off car insurance for students -the better their grades, the better discounts they’ll receive!

We will be running their social media campaign to spread the word about First Insurance and the incredible discounts they offer to students with good grades. The campaign aims to bring a huge boost their presence online, and drive their core audience to their new website.

We are always ecstatic about having new clients joining us at Gravytrain. If you want to find out more about any of our SEO, PPC, Social Media packages or Web Design and Development services, please contact our Business Development Executive, Alex Moran, on 0203 582 6870.

Last week, Gravytrain’s CEO, Kevin Taylor, was asked to voice his opinion on the current state of TV and Online ads by POST Magazine and POST Online. In an article that focused heavily on the importance of ads for insurance companies, Taylor was quick to not discard TV ads, despite the strong growth of online marketing, ads and sales.

Taylor also outlined the importance for online insurance companies to have a strong natural search plan and not just rely on PPC when it comes to appearing in Google. Looking specifically at Go Compare, Taylor points out that although they have a strong TV and PPC presence, they are “no longer in the top 10 for car insurance” meaning “they will be reliant on increased brand searches and pay-per-click for the term ‘car insurance’ which will be costly.”

Read the rest of Kevin Taylor’s thoughts on the subject and the whole of the article at POST Online.

“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.

Make Mine Instant!

So Google announced yesterday the launch of a service they are dubbing “search faster than the speed of type”! Calling itself Google Instant, it has had Twitter and the blogosphere flooded with people from the search industry fretting about how this innovation could affect their campaigns.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Google Instant automatically populates the results page (known in the industry as SERPs) whilst you type. No longer do you have to press the Enter key on your keyboard, or the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button to see the results of what you’re searching for. Google themselves estimate that Instant will save users anything up to 5 seconds per search. This may not sound like a lot, but these seconds all add up when you consider how many searches we conduct through the search engine each day.

But let’s face it; Google has done this for several reasons. Firstly, it’s innovative, and part of Google’s brand is based on their innovative and intuitive products. Automatic search suggestion as you type has long been with the three main search engines, but none of them have hitherto showed a full search result based on the first letter typed into the search box!

Secondly, it’s a time saving tool which will lure users back to the Google home page. Google search has been increasingly appearing on different corners of the web for a while (perhaps more prominently, in the right hand corner of our web browsers), and these handy shortcuts have steered people away from using the Google homepage as their search starting point.

This tool is highly dynamic and potentially game changing for those who work in search or even advertise on Google. It means that some Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts may only appear for a split second on the results page, as Google changes the visible results according to what the user is typing. This could affect PPC and SEO campaigns in three main ways. Firstly, it could mean lower Click Through Rates (CTR) on Google Adwords. For SEO, It could also mean increase the importance to rank high on short tail organic keywords. Finally, it could also further decline the importance of misspellings as Instant automatically corrects

At present, Instant is only available to users logged into a Google Account, who are located in certain countries, and who are searching from the Google home page. And because of its current level of restricted access it is hard to see Instant changing anything from an SEO and PPC perspective in the immediate future. But as with all things that Google does, the proof is in the pudding. Time will tell as to how this ground breaking change to Google’s core product will affect those who advertise with it, and wish to rank high in its search results.

Right, lets get to it!

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