The shift from static to mobile Internet gathers momentum as Eric Schmidt that Google are a ‘mobile first’ company.
No longer satisfied with conquering the static Internet, Google have now announced their intention to do the same with the mobile form. During a keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress, Google’s Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt, announced that their programmers would be “doing work on mobile first”. With the technology, expertise and brand power at their disposal, now is the time to really start taking mobile search advertising seriously.
It’s not only Google moving over to the mobile internet, it is the consumers themselves – in their millions. New devices are flooding the market and providers are increasingly integrating online minutes within their tariffs and contracts. The lines of accessibility, affordability and interest are drawing steadily closer. Mobile search advertising is also a growing market and one that could become hugely lucrative to those who master it first.
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It’s official, online advertising has overtaken television in terms of financial investment. It has been announced that Internet ads now account for 23.5% of the UK’s entire advertising spend, leapfrogging TV which slips to 21.9%.
Whilst advertising revenue in general has seen a marked drop in the past year or so, up to 16.6% it has been suggested, the Internet has remained steadfast, even making small gains. This year in fact online advertising spend has grown to £1.75bn, which represents a 4.6% upward shift in the first six months. So what does this all mean? Is the Internet now the best place to advertise?
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What is a Landing Page?
In simple terms a landing page is simply the page on a website that a paid advert or SERPs links to. The key to any landing page is to be instantly eye-catching so as to get the attention of your visitors as well as to be relevant to their initial search.
Landing pages can hold the key to a PPC campaign’s success or failure. It won’t matter how good the wording of your ad is or how regularly people click on it; if the landing page bears no resemblance to what you’ve advertised, people will soon leave.
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What is a Click through Rate (CTR) and why is it Important?
In any PPC campaign there is something called a Click through Rate, often abbreviated to CTR. Essentially, this is the percentage of people who have seen your advertisement and have then chosen to click on it.
To take it back slightly, every time your advert is shown on SERP (search engine results page) it generates an impression. If a lot of people see your advert, thus creating a high number of impressions, but choose not to click on it, you may find that your campaign is adversely affected. More on this in a moment.
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Whenever you create a new PPC advertisement there’s a temptation to see how it appears on the search engines. This temptation can grow further if it fails to deliver the expected traffic rates or has an unusually high bounce, thus indicating a potential issue.
The only issue with looking for your advert through the search engine itself is that it can create unnecessary impressions and lower the Click through Rate (CTR), which may in turn adversely affect the campaign. So how can you preview your ads without upsetting the statistics and potentially costing yourself more money? Well, Microsoft Bing have come up with a simple solution.
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Why is my PPC Campaign not Converting?
There can be any number of answers for why a PPC campaign, which gains regular clicks, doesn’t convert into sales. However, first and foremost you need to check the landing page.
A landing page is where a visitor is directed to after clicking on one of your ads. If somebody follows a paid advertisement more often than not they are looking for a specific product or service. Therefore, if the page that they ultimately arrive at has no relevance to their initial search, they’re unlikely to stay and search through the remainder of your site.
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The Background
Bing is the newly refurbished Microsoft search engine, formerly known as MSN Live and MSN Search. Microsoft launched Bing on 1st June 2009, with a clean and uncluttered layout and a daily image that is rotated daily to provide searchers with a fresh and attractive search experience.
Pay Per Click Advertising
It’s not surprising that since the launch of Bing, more and more advertisers are looking to promote their business on this new and emerging branded search engine. Bing Pay Per Click advertising is run in much the same way as it was previously on MSN Live and Search, via the Microsoft adCenter programme.
The Microsoft adCenter platform has currently remained exactly the same; the only major difference in fact is the search engine that your ads will appear on. You will still see your ads appearing at the top or right hand side of the results page in the same format as before.
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Could online advertising really be more effective than televised campaigns? Well, according to comScore’s latest research, it is, well at least for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) at any rate.
The study found that the Internet was capable of boosting retail sales by as much as 9% where campaigns were able to reach at least 40% of their market audience. That might sound a little tenuous, but by the same measure, targeted television advertising was only able to generate 8%; showing that whilst costs may be different, the outcome certainly isn’t.
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Click fraud is one of the unfortunate bi-products of online paid search. It occurs when an individual or automated program deliberately clicks on certain advertisements, thus triggering an automatic charge, despite having no interest in the actual content.
News that it has dropped to 12.7% for the second quarter of 2009 should come as a reassurance to all online advertisers. Google and the other major search engines have been making huge strides in reducing the possibility of this kind of fraud occurring. In fact, these latest figures show a significant drop since the same quarter last year where the figure stood at 16.2%.
Paid search still remains one of the most targeted and effective ways of reaching out to an audience. Whilst overall advertising numbers have dwindled since the start of the global recession, few would argue that it remains an invaluable resource for smaller companies looking to even the playing field against the larger corporations.
There is still a lot that needs to be done in order to combat click fraud, but this does show that steady progress is being made. With increased safety comes greater efficiency, with improved efficiency comes better profitability; all of which makes PPC one of the best ways to get targeted traffic directly to your site.
Review our services page if you’re interested in Impact Media’s pay per click advertising services, which include professional management and continual analysis of all your campaigns. If you suspect click fraud, there is free and effective solution available.
The bounce rate for any site is essentially the percentage of people who visit and don’t navigate any further than the first page they land on. So the higher your website’s bounce rate, the quicker visitors have been exiting.
There’s no magic answer for resolving a high bounce rate; but to give yourself the best possible opportunity you need to ensure that each page is bursting with useful information and engaging language. First impressions are vital, not just on your homepage but right throughout the site. If you’re going to convince visitors that it’s worth their while using your services, you need to abide by three basic principles:
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For anyone doubting the power of paid search, Hitwise have revealed some interesting statistics regarding traffic generated by PPC advertising and comparison sites within the insurance sector. Despite the slowing down across all sectors, paid search remains an incredibly lucrative source of traffic and revenue. For insurance alone it still accounts for 33% of all traffic from within the UK, well above the average of 8.6%.
The rise in popularity of comparison sites, which all feature round the clock advertising both online and offline, has done little to curtail the value of PPC. In every single division (Health, Home, Motor, Travel and Other) paid search was found to be well ahead of the comparison sites. The lowest figure was found to be Health insurance, which only received 39.8%, whilst the other four sectors were reasonably consistent between 49% and 53.4% of search traffic.
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Whatever way you look at it, this really isn’t a good time for the travel industry. With the credit crunch in full swing, fuel prices back on the rise and a potential global pandemic to contend with, it’s little wonder that their annual PPC ratings are looking a little bedraggled
Whilst many industries have been able to protect themselves against the continuing economic crisis, it seems travel has been one of the major losers in all of this. Their paid search results have fallen right across the board over the last 12 months, as perfectly illustrated in Robin Goad’s Hitwise blog. With fewer people searching and clicking, it is inevitable that sales suffer as a result.
Tough Times for Travel
This helps further highlight just how important the Internet remains in modern marketing strategies. With the results available for all to see, there really is nowhere to hide when it comes to online successes and failures. When the purse strings are being universally tightened, businesses in all sectors have to adapt to succeed. Unfortunately for travel agents, there isn’t a great deal of flexibility in what they are able to offer.
Despite these findings, the Internet still remains the most accessible advertising medium available. Unfortunately with fewer customers around, some industries need to be more innovative how they go about finding their potential clients. Nobody can afford to stand still in this competitive environment. Whether you’re an SEO Company like us or a major multi-national travel operator, getting noticed by your target audience and delivering on service remains paramount to success.
An advertising model where by advertisers pay search engines for traffic normally on a pay per click basis.
In the Search Engine Marketing Buyer’s Guide (2008) recently published by E-consultancy (September 2008), they reported that the market for spend on search engine marketing was estimated to be worth £2.75 billion this year in the UK alone.
As a UK business owner, you may not be interested in that fact but where the numbers start to tell a story is how they’re split between paid search (£2.42 billion) and search engine optimisation (£330 million).
This split is mirrored by data released by SEMPO which has the US advertisers investing just 11% of their Internet marketing spend on search engine optimisation ($1.3 billion).
As a company that helps businesses with both of these core aspects of search engine marketing, we can appreciate why there is such an investment in PPC advertising. However, we find it intriguing that search engine optimisation (SEO) is so far behind in the spend stakes being treated with the same disregard as an Icelandic bank savings account. Perhaps it suffers from the feeling some site owners have that SEO is free? The notion of free listings is valid but for any business to not be making provision for SEO in their online marketing budget is short-sighted, particularly when you review the following:
Google Eye Tracking Heat Map
This eye tracking heat map from Enquiro clearly highlights the fact that most searchers still go top-left when conducting a search. It demonstrates that the sites occupying the top 3 slots of the natural search results will attract 100% visibility and only dropping to 50% at position 6. Compare this to the PPC adverts where the ad at position #1 only achieves 50% visibility. This falls dramatically to 10% by the time you get to the ad in position 5.
Hopefully, you’ll appreciate the value in SEO and understand why free isn’t always best.
We offer a range of search engine optimisation services and would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate how we could help your business improve its online visibility.
Further Reading:
Eyetools Eyetracking Research
