This is a guest post by Sri Sharma, managing director at Net Media Planet.
2012 was a fast paced year in the world of digital marketing and advertising. 2013 will be no less quick! Here are 5 predictions on the big things brands will be devoting their time and budget to, and how brands can act to stay ahead of the game in 2013. (more…)
This is a guest post by Sri Sharma, managing director at Net Media Planet.
There are so many online publishers competing for every sale this festive period it has never been more important to stand apart from your rivals. There is still time to maximise performance of your e-commerce site this Christmas by improving your Paid Search marketing.
Here are some top tips for your ecommerce site to help you make it a bumper 2012 Christmas! (more…)
This is a guest post by IrishWonder, who has been practicing SEO since 2000, is an independent SEO consultant at irishwonder.com and a CMO for ContentMango.com.
Search engine optimisation, albeit often rumoured to be dead or about to die, is getting more and more popular as a career path. It’s hardly taught anywhere formally, one of the reasons being its ever-changing nature (by the time you get a University course prepared and approved it’s already largely outdated). The bars to entry into the industry are ridiculously low – or insanely high, depending on how you look at it. There is no formal certification but there are plenty sources of information and too many of them are either outdated or complete garbage. There is no lack of SEO conferences and workshops – but many of them are quite expensive, speakers sometimes pitch their services rather than provide useful information, and travel costs do add up as well. So how do you learn SEO without making costly mistakes and spending a fortune?
Believe it or not, there are ways to do it completely free or almost free. The ways listed below range from easily doable by anyone to ones requiring certain skills/knowledge, but it all depends on your character and how willing you are to learn. Majority of these ways also require serious social skills – so while our industry is known for stories about making millions from home in your pyjamas never having to meet other people, you probably cannot afford not having social skills at all. (more…)
This the season for search marketers in retail to not sleep, as click volumes begin to rapidly increase and fluctuate throughout the busy festive online shopping season. To ease some of this stress, we at Marin Software have been analysing data from the 2011 festive season to help search marketers prepare campaigns for key dates and fluctuations.
We’ve been looking at spend, CTR, CPC, impression, revenue and mobile click share trends across Q4 2011 to identify key dates for your 2012 Christmas calendar. Off the back of this I wanted to provide nine practical and actionable tips to prepare campaigns for the festive season. So, here goes: (more…)
This is a guest post by Jeffrey Bleijendaal, Manager Search Engines and Display Marketing Ematters.
Keeping Google AdWords ROI positive is extremely important to Google, because having happy advertisers means more ad spend and thus revenue for Google. There are a number of features advertisers can use to keep their budget under control. You can think of ad scheduling, regional targeting and keyword match types. In this article we’ll have a closer look at this last feature; keyword match types.
The keyword match types offer advertisers the possibility to create huge, broad campaigns which drive a lot of impressions and clicks. On the other hand it also makes it possible to keep it small and narrow to only drive impressions and clicks for the most relevant searches. How broad or narrow the campaign eventually will be depends entirely on how the keyword match types are being used. This article will give you a close insight on how to build the desired campaign using these match types. (more…)
This is a guest post by Toby Osbourn, senior web developer at Belfast-based creative agency Pierce Communications.
Last week I had the honour of attending the second day of the Dublin Web Summit held at the RDS in Dublin, Ireland. Considering that the Web Summit is really in its infancy being that this is only the third year the event has been running it is already a huge deal – touting 200+ speakers and 3000+ attendees over the two days.
The second day appealed to be because of the developer track they had running, being a code monkey I’m naturally drawn to talks by other coders, and who wouldn’t want the opportunity to hear greats such as Monty Widenius (of MySQL fame), Ilya Segalovich (co-founder of Yandex) and whilst not a developer (but I can’t hold that against him) your very own Bas Van Den Beld. (more…)
New job. New conference adventures. More search education. More Avios BA points.
This was the first time I had gone to a non UK / US search conference and overall my three days in Stockholm was highly enjoyable.
A good mixture of European based search practioneers attended the fifth edition of SMX Stockholm with around 100 folks in all at the Munchen Brewery.
In terms of my main highlights from the two days of talks, I particularly enjoyed the insight from Jon Quinton from SEO Gadget. His talk focused on Linkbuilding Do’s and Don’ts.
As ever the questions about Penguin update quickly rose as Jon asked the audience “Has anyone had a site hit by Penguin? ….(silence)…ok I’ll rephrase that – anyone know a friend who has had a site hit by Penguin? 
This is a guest post by Pavitra Kumar, senior marketing manager at digital marketing software company, Kenshoo.
In a world full of bad economic news, our latest research shows that search marketers have many reasons to be positive: global paid search budgets have been rising with a growth rate of 24 per cent year-on-year (YoY).
These are numbers coming from the Global Search Advertising Trends Report which was released by Kenshoo last week. Below you will find a summary by Kenshoo’s Pavitra Kumar. The report also highlights a number of interesting take aways that search marketers need to think about – such as the strong performance of Product Listing Ads (PLAs) over text-based ads; mobile versus tablet and even the Yahoo! Bing Network against Google.
Data for the report was aggregated from Kenshoo’s clients who have been actively advertising over the last 18 months across Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu and Yahoo! Japan. This rolling quarterly data set covered several billion dollars in global paid search ad spend. (more…)
This is a guest post by Aleh Barysevich, Marketing Director at Link-Assistant.Com.
Press release distribution is something each site owner has at times considered for promotion. Some of us want more search traffic as a result of press release distribution; others seek media outreach. Some opt for free distribution, others use paid services. Few are aware that services vary depending on how they’re used and make their choice accordingly.
But at the end of the day, the question is: how do I evaluate if a press release really did the job?
Apparently, the outcome should depend on the goals, so let’s start with a list of goals site owners usually set for press releases. (more…)
This is a guestpost by Alan Coleman, CEO of WolfgangDigital.com.
Remarketing, probably the greatest innovation in digital marketing since search marketing itself.
As digital marketers we love remarketing, we love remarketing for it’s ridiculously good display CTRs and we love remarketing for it’s “brand-term like” conversion rates. However as internet users we are probably not as enamoured right now.
We’ve all been haunted by unwanted remarketing ads.
We’ve been stalked from website to website by stale, irritating ads polluting our internet experience. Perhaps even dreaded watching videos on YouTube or logging into Gmail because we know we are going to see that same overexposed remarketing ad again! (more…)
A few months ago the International SEO School launched. And the school (on which I myself am also a trainer) decided it wanted to give some extra attention to talents so it gave away two scholarships. We received a lot of applications and in the end there were two winners who both attended the first series of the SEO School in Barcelona.
The two winners were asked to share their experiences of their week in Barcelona. And both of them did. Below you can find the experiences of Michael Rurup Andersen and Gary Wells. They share what they have learned and why it benefitted them. Enjoy! (more…)
This is a guest post by Cedric Chambaz, EMEA Marketing Lead of Microsoft Advertising.
For several years now, an increasing number of small businesses have reaped the rewards of investing in search marketing as a way of reaching their target audience and delivering to them exactly what they seek. The obvious benefits – better targeting, clearer return on investment (ROI), cost efficiencies and others – are clear to many business owners, and as search continues to grow in popularity, the results only become more compelling.
However, while the benefits mentioned above are soon felt by those embarking on their first search campaigns, if you look past them there are also some more hidden rewards which SMBs might not at first connect with search marketing. Search is much more than just a lead generator; it can be turned into an incredibly powerful business intelligence tool, extending into parts of the business such as PR, product development, sales, merchandising and broader business strategy. All it takes is for marketers to think a little bit outside the (search) box… (more…)
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