It’s always interesting to see which keywords have the highest average cost per click in Adwords. There are lots of lists for the USA, but Hallam Internet compiled data for the UK: And the 4 biggest categories on their list? Gambling Legal Services Insurance Debt With “online live roulette” being the Read more…
On Friday (19th July 2013), Finance ministers from 20 of the world’s largest economies have endorsed the first internationally co-ordinated attempt to roll back decades of ballooning tax avoidance by many of the biggest multinational corporations in the world. (From the Guardian) Obviously, there are certain companies in the crosshairs: Amazon, Vodaphone, Read more…
If you have high organic rankings, should you run ppc ads for the same keywords? Google (should you choose to believe them) have the answer: http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/new-research-shows-that-88-of-ad-clicks.html They did a study and “learned that 88% of site visitors driven by mobile search ads would not otherwise click on the business’s organic Read more…
RKG have published their 2nd quarter 2013 PPC marketing trends report. Two things stand out to me: (1) Adwords cost per click is up 10% year-on-year. (2) 33% of Adwords clicks now come from Product Listing Ads. (If you sell products, you’ve got to take advantage of these). You can Read more…
I hate using Bingads. The Bing interface could be described as ‘dog do on a stick’… but at least they’re trying to get better. The fact that some PPC people now like Bing ads more than Adwords, e.g. http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-enhanced-campaigns-hello-bing-ads-164401 just tells you how much Google’s attitude stinks these days. The Read more…
Have you ever improved your Adwords quality score only to see your ad positions drop, your cost per click increase, and your ctr to go down? It’s one of those strange phenomena – like lowering your bids and seeing your average cost per conversion increase – that we Adwords managers have Read more…
I confess, I’ve long been sceptical of the “make your website/buy button x colour and people will trust/like you” approach to design. This scepticism has been fuelled by 2 things: (1) Split-tests I’ve run across many sites where we compared one colour to another – and found no “one-size-fits-all results. Read more…
Squeezing out extra sign ups from our web forms can make a huge difference to your business. Fortunately, Contentverve has written a great article – including the results of many split-tests they ran – about how to maximise signups from web forms. Some of the results are surprising – and Read more…
Marketing tends to conform to the principle that there’s “no free lunch”. The things that get results tend to cost you – either they cost money, or they require hard-won (or expensively hired) expertise. Marketing Sherpa recently conducted a survey to find out which marketing methods people use, how effective Read more…
Wordstream made an interesting blog post called, “How Product Listing Ads Are Stealing Your Conversions”. http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/06/05/product-listing-ads-stealing-conversions It’s an interesting view on how PL ads change the appearance of the page, how different elements appeal to different searchers – and what that means for both PPC advertisers and for organic listings. Read more…
