As part of a good paid search marketing strategy you should always be monitoring and refining the performance of you ad copy. Google Adwords now ensure that only the best advertisers appear at the top of the search engine listings by enforcing a minimum quality threshold advertisers have to meet to appear in the top on the left hand side of the search engine results.

A recent addition has seen the first description line being moved up next to the title to further enhance the listing. As you’ll see from the screen shot below it’s obvious that whilst your competitors have not caught on your ad will stand out and gain more clicks.

The only way that this can happen is if the first description line is punctuated correctly. Google Adwords editorial guidelines do not you require to punctuate the end of the first sentence although they do encourage it. You might find that you want to write one long sentence over the two description lines. This is perfectly acceptable but you can clearly see that there is a benefit to doing this.

Here’s an example of the ad without a full stop and with a full stop:

Without a Full Stop

With a Full Stop

It does make me smile a little inside when I see BIG companies doing their own thing badly.

Take this example of Google Adwords coming up against the search term “web design brighton“. Some of you might argue out there that this is OK. It’s a related service and they are trying to increase brand awareness. I don’t disagree, they do after all have bottomless pockets of budget to splash out on such frivolous broad matched terms.

I do take issue with the point that they really don’t need to be advertising against such an irrelevant term. Mainly because it drives up cost for small business owners on terms which are already heavily competitive and thus expensive. It’s be interesting to get their feedback on this as to whether they’re not using their negative keyword effectively or if this is part of their strategy. Hopefully it is not the latter.

That said Google Adwords in littered with big companies with campaigns so badly targeted that if they were in a darts match I would not be placing money on them to win! Which is why it’s even more important for smaller advertisers to spend their digital marketing budgets more wisely and make sure they are well targeted.

A weird thing happened to me today that gave me a bit of a shock. I referred to paid search marketing as “traditional”! When we think of traditional forms of advertising in today’s market we think of things like television and printing advertising. I know that they say things evolve much faster in the 21^st century but I thought it would be a long time before I started calling pay per click marketing traditional!

It came to me when I was writing some content for www.thedigitalconsultant.co.uk on social media marketing. I recall first writing about social media optimisation, as it was referred to back in 2005, during an update for my search engine optimisation training course. We now know it better as social media marketing, a more generic term to reaching your target audience through social media networks. Whilst the battle continues online about how brands can master and measure the ROI from social media by accumulating likes, fans and followers there is more direct and quicker approach to reaching your audience though social media advertising.

Social media advertising as a term has started to trend recently despite being able to advertise on social media networks like Facebook for around two years. Social networks have been figuring ways to monetise their traffic; the simplest way has been to sell advertising space. Facebook has been doing it for a while but it’s only recent developments to their interface which has mean it’s been easier for advertisers to control their ad spends and pull decent data to monitor performance. Whilst they are light years behind traditional paid search systems such as Google Adwords or Microsoft Adcenter they are way ahead of other social media networks such as Linkedin and Twitter which are just opening up their offerings.

Social media advertising offers more targeting options which is particular useful for small and medium sized businesses that might have a smaller marketing budget. Facebook now gives advertisers the ability to drill down to very specific demographics meaning campaigns can be targeted specifically, increasing the chance of conversion.

We’ll be talking lots more about social media marketing on our blog and how you as a business can take their first steps into this new and exciting form of advertising. If you’d like to know more about how The Digital Consultant can help you, please get in touch.

Google “Instant Search” – How will it affect my business?

Google recently launched its latest update to its main product, search. Touted by Google as a revolution it has seen luke warm responses from some industry analysis.

Google Instant Search throws you straight into the search results the moment you start typing and updates the search results as you type. Rather than go into detail, watch this short video which shows you how it works.

[flowplayer src='http://www.thedigitalconsultant.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/Google-Instant-Desktop.m4v' width=600 height=338]

After watching it, I thought…OK, it’s quick and cool but right now  it a new product that’s not going to knock the search engine industry sideways. The idea of Instant Search is to help you search faster and make it easier to find what you want; to predict what you are searching for and put it in front of you. Google uses personalisation (your previous searches) and data on the most popular searches to do this. As the technology gets more sophisticated the accuracy will improve.

You must be signed into your Google Account for this to work and users using iGoogle currently will not have access to this feature. You also have to be operating the latest browser version to get it work which leaves question, how many people will actually be using Google Instant?

The industry has gone wild is speculation, some even reporting that Search Engine Optimisation is dead! Let’s not get carried away, I mean you only have to look at the example of the Google Wave launch to see the possibility of a hype/nose dive of interest from a product release by Google.

How will it affect my business?

SEO real-estate has been reduced. The Google Suggest box now appears under the search box listing other potential search phrases. This may push the focus onto the paid listings, particularly for comparison or price driven searches. This is also going to mean that being number one for a search phrase in both paid and natural search is ever more important.

Action: Keep a focus on the search volumes for your shorter, more generic search terms. This could have a positive impact on your quality score as this may increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) but may also increase your daily spend. Test out increased positions on your top volume search phrases in paid and push hard in your natural search.

Reduce the reliance on long-tail keywords. There has already been a slow shift away from long-tail search phrases with the introduction of Google Suggest. Users are become lazier when it comes to searching and Google Instant is only going to make it easier for people to search by using the predetermined phrases presented to them. You’ll notice that you can easily flick through the suggested search terms using your up and down arrow keys making it much easier for users to try out a wide range of searches in seconds.

Action: Make sure you are listed highly for all variations of the relevant suggestions. Start typing your top keywords in and flicking through the relevant search phrases to make sure you are listed. If not, then add these keywords in as, at a minimum, exact search phrases.  It’s very likely that you will be listed for these as they will be your generic terms that you should be bidding against but it’s always worth checking.

Google Instant Impact

So Google Instant hasn’t changed the face of search yet. It’s not a revolution, but it is evolution. Lucky for you, you’re reading this article and are aware on Google Instant! That means you can start to monitor its impact and make changes accordingly. It’s an exciting change and one that will most definitely change the way we search, just not quite yet.

We’ve already started looking at our client’s reports, looking at the user experience whilst searching for generic phrases and making changes accordingly. Make sure you speak to your online marketing agency to do the same!

Please share with us your thoughts and experiences with Google Instant. Do you like it? Does it irritate and distract you? Have you seen any impact on your search engine marketing campaigns?

A recent study from the IPA has found that the Cost Per Click (CPC) of paid search for brand terms on Google has risen from 6p to 29p from period January 2008 to March 2009. Click Through Rates (CTRs) for the same period have shown a decline from an average of 40% to 20%.

This raises serious questions around the effectiveness of paid search and whether it has become a commodity. There were a number of changes last year that impacted this, in particular the introduction of brand bidding in May 2008. This was a highly contentious issue which worried a lot of brands. We can now see the impact this has had; opening up the market has driven prices up. Brands are now having to defend their territory much more aggressively.

With more brands focussing their budgets into natural search services this year, it is evident that paid search might be seen to be less efficient. There may be a number of reasons for shifting budget to natural search, but our stance has always been to ensure you develop a solid “search” strategy, which means building natural and paid search campaigns together. This, of course, is best done in one agency as their teams can work closely side by side.

Our advice here would be not to panic. Things to remember are:

• Ensure that you are protecting your brand online. Check you have coverage from both natural and paid search for your key brand terms to reduce competitor voice.
• Chances are that for most companies, bidding on your brand terms is an inefficient strategy. This should be a last resort for a big brand with a lot of budget to burn, as they should be focussing on keywords which provide a better return on investment (ROI).
• Monitor the performance of your brand terms closely. Check your own trends for the year and see if this is really the case.

Written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

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