Search Engine Marketing Blog

At Impact Media, we’re a Google Qualified company and everyone in the team who work on client accounts are Qualified Individuals.

So what? How could that make a difference to your AdWords campaign and, perhaps more importantly, your company profits?

Well, we’re independent of Google and work solely for our clients. Equally, our clients are never tied in to a long term contract so if we don’t add value, they are free to walk away.

Our process is very simple. Once we receive your induction form and have a thorough understanding of your priorities, we review your site and, if applicable, existing campaigns. We then perform comprehensive keyword research to identify both new opportunities and also irrelevant phrases to ensure your online marketing budget isn’t blown on wasted clicks.

We then set about constructing a highly effective campaign with multiple Ad Groups. We make sure that each Ad Group is tightly themed and targeted towards the most appropriate area of your site.

If conversion tracking isn’t in place, we will work with you to implement this so that you’ll be able to see which keywords are delivering sales.

Month by month, we will perform reviews of your site, running reports, performing new research and optimising adverts.

Our entire focus is all about driving your conversions up without simply resorting to throwing more money at waste of time clicks. Refinement is the key!

Hopefully, this has given you an insight into why we believe using a UK Google AdWords Professional could be one of the best investments you could make for your business. If you’d like to know more, request our free Pay per Click report.

Of course, there’s no absolute answer to this question as many search marketing agencies will charge for their PPC services at different rates.

With Impact Media, we work with our clients typically by charging an initial fee to set up their Google AdWords PPC campaign or to optimise an existing campaign. This varies based upon complexity and/or number of products or services but is flexible enough to accommodate most budgets.

We then work on a monthly retainer basis, the purpose of which is to allow us sufficient time to further optimise the account, develop additional Ad Groups and provide comprehensive reporting. Given that we see what we do as a partnership with our clients, no one is tied into any long term contracts and we only want our clients to stay with us if they feel we are adding value.

Some agencies will also charge a monthly service fee as a percentage of the spend they are managing through the pay per click search engine(s) and you should check the details if that is the case as this could develop into a hefty additional charge.

When shopping around for a company to use for PPC management, make sure you have a good chat with them to understand their approach and also ask for testimonials or case studies. If you find a good one, stick with them! Once you do this, the question will change to “How Much is PPC Management Gaining Me?”

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Impact Media provide AdWords management tailored to fit your needs.

Google are well known for their technical innovations and when it comes to pay per click (PPC), their AdWords advertising system is the clear market leader.

However, they’re not perfect and recently seemed to have dropped the ball when it comes to using Broad Match. This is the most common type of matching used when you create an AdWords campaign with the others being Phrase Match and Exact Match.

In very simple terms, Broad Match previously meant that if you entered a keyphrase, e.g. England Football Team, those three words could appear in any order and still display your advert. For example, someone entering the search term, “What kind of football team is England?” could have displayed your ad.

In short, Broad Match has always given most exposures but not always relevant. To combat this, we add a large dose of Negative Keywords.

Now though, Google are developing their algorithms to enable synonym replacement on words. Carrying this example on, it may be that the system thinks ‘English‘ is a good swap for ‘England‘ and ‘teams‘ for ‘team‘ so someone searching for “English football teams” could display your ad. Not too bad? What about “England Rugby Team“?

Although this is a very frivolous example, last week we saw in our own campaign that we had paid for the click “John Lewis Website“. This had come from the broad term Website Marketing Company. Go figure!

The point here is that we’re seeing a lot of totally unrelated searches coming through and if you’re running your own AdWords campaign and have it full of broad terms, you may want to start running regular Search Query reports and scanning a critical eye over the search queries column. Go on, run one today… you may be in for a bit of a surprise!

At Impact Media we pride ourselves in helping our clients increase the return on their Internet marketing investment.

Of course there are many ways we accomplish this but even if you have no plans to out-source your pay per click management to a professional agency, there are still plenty of things that you could (should) be doing in order to help yourself and reduce the wasted clicks, aka cost, going though your AdWords account.

One of the most powerful, yet under-utilised, techniques to use is that of negative keywords. A negative keyword, what on earth is that? Well, simply put it’s a word or phrase that when used will prevent your advert from showing if used in conjunction with another word or phrase that appears in your campaign.

For example, let’s say you sell blue widgets and you’re using a combination of match types to get the maximum exposure for this product. However, your keyword research has thrown up that there is a lot of searches for ‘used blue widgets‘. In this example, you would add the word ‘used‘ as a negative.

Although important with both broad and phrase matches, with Google’s synonym replacement on broad matches, it is imperative that anybody running an AdWords campaign has performed thorough keyword research to identify as many negatives as possible. Failure to do so will mean a poorly performing campaign costing far more than it need.

Online Advertising will grow by 85% between 2006 and 2009 according to figures from ZenithOptimedia.

It is becoming clear that businesses in the UK are recognising the benefits associated with marketing their websites on the internet. This is not limited to big businesses either even smaller businesses are getting on board.

Linus Gregoriadis of e-consultancy told DirectTrafficMedia that local search is becoming ever more popular with small and medium-sized businesses and providing them with new and expansive opportunities to advertise their products.

According to a recent survey commissioned by Internet Advertising Bureau UK, the amount of money invested in online advertising has risen to £1.33 billion for the first six months of this year compared to £917.2 million for the same period in 2006.

The survey goes on to suggest that this figure could reach £2.75 billion by the end of 2007.

Such has been the growth in UK Internet advertising that it now accounts for almost 15% of all UK advertising.

57.1% of the total spent to date has been invested in paid search, or Pay per Click (PPC). With £762.3 million spent, this is a 44% increase compared to 2006.

If you manage your own Google AdWords campaign you probably already appreciate the value to your business of using Pay per Click (PPC) advertising to promote your site online.

What may be less clear however, is why you should consider using an AdWords professional to optimise and manage your campaign. Although Google have created a fantastic way to quickly start advertising online, it’s simplicity is actually one of the biggest dangers! It is so easy to set-up an account, create a campaign, shove in a few random words and phrases, add your advert and away you go…

Days, or weeks, later you review your budget and find that your money has been spent but you’ve not had the level of sales or enquiries that you’d hoped for. It’s all in the detail!

At Impact Media, we’ve helped many of our clients save money, increase conversions or both.

There are countless ways a professional can help you squeeze more out of your PPC campaign:

• Perform split testing to optimise ad copy
• Carry out extensive keyword research to identify overlooked opportunities
• Make use of negative keywords to prevent your ads being shown for undesirable searches
• Optimise landing pages to improve conversions
• and more besides…

As an AdWords Qualified Company, we’re proud of the fact that our clients only stay with us because they want to, not because they have to, i.e. we do not tie anyone into a long term contract. If engaged to work on optimising an AdWords account, we treat it as if it’s our own. We’re not concerned with simply spending more of your budget by employing reckless bidding strategies. Our aim is to ensure that your return on investment improves so that you can focus on running your business.

If you’re a UK company that appreciates the benefits of getting more targeted visitors to your site by using paid search, why not get in touch with us to see if we can help? Better still, request a free Pay per Click assessment and we’ll get one of our AdWords Professionals right on it!

Getting Noticed on Google in Easy Steps By Ben Norman, UK Search Engine Optimisation Specialist

What do you do when you have a website but nobody can find it in the world’s most popular search engine, Google? You need to optimise it!

Leading UK search engine optimisation consultant and managing director of Impact Media, Ben Norman will show you how to optimise your website to appear higher in Google in his new book “Getting Noticed on Google in Easy Steps”.

Ben said “I was approached in 2006 by Computer Step and asked to write a book detailing how to market a website to Google. Regardless of your current skill set you will be able to follow the do-it-yourself processes and find the answers you need easily. You will also be able to implement changes to increase your websites relevance to Google and ultimately increase your online visibility.”

“Getting Noticed on Google” is part of the world famous “in easy steps” range of books from Computer Step. Computer Step is the leading UK computer book publisher and has been supplying affordable computer books to people worldwide since 1991.

The book covers all bases when it comes to getting Google to notice your website. Through-out its full colour illustrated pages you will be guided through the entire process of optimising your website from keyword, website and competition analysis to website optimisation and reporting. You will learn how to:

* Find profitable keywords
* Optimise your own website
* Build inward links to your website
* Find out who your online competition is and what they are doing
* Use and find free search engine optimisation tools

If you are looking to get your website found on Google then this book is a must to enable you to effectively optimise your website.

We have finally made the time to join the world of blogging and over the following months we will be fully populating it.

So keep checking back for the latest goings on at Impact Media HQ!