Christmas is coming: Black Friday arrives on November 25th

By Matthew Kinlin

This year, we will see Black Friday arrive on 25^th November and with it comes a wave of excited shoppers looking to grab a great bargain.

Black Friday is the annual date that marks the start of the Christmas shopping season. On this day, a huge amount of retailers will offer promotional sales and bargains to kick off the Christmas season.

The following week will see the start of the Christmas shopping period with shoppers flocking out to find the best presents for Christmas. The start of the week has been named ‘Mad Monday’ to announce the arrival of the crazy shopping season.

This means that shoppers will be able to find some great sales to start the season. They can pick up specific items for reduced prices and track down some bargains.

This will help to kick-start the shopping season. Buyers want to get in there early and find what they want whilst stock lasts. Reduced prices will encourage buyers to start looking early for Christmas.

Black Friday is the official launch for retailers. It marks the moment they will officially start pushing Christmas products. Offering reduced rates will get people in the shops and on their websites looking for what they want.

Large online retailers, like Amazon, are offering a ‘Black Friday Deals Week’. This will feature hundred of deals and millions of pounds of savings for online shoppers.

With the official launch of the Christmas season, online shopping will become a much busier place and just like in shopping centres, the internet should be well prepared for this huge influx of custom.

Smaller search platforms attract traffic too

By Jackie Yeadon
 
Search engines going after some of Google’s share were successful in May, according to figures from Experian Hitwise.

Its recent Search Engine and Social Analysis showed that Google and Yahoo! both lost market share in terms of searches in May 2011, while Bing, Ask and others made “significant gains”.

‘Silver pound’ could be spent on social networks

By Jackie Yeadon
 
Paid search advertising managers will be taking note: the silver pound is strong; meaning businesses who want to expose their products to older generations should be looking to use channels currently considered to be solely for the younger generations.

According to figures published by MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, around a fifth of grandparents over 60 have an active social networking account.

Edits, cloning keywords and split-tests in AdWords

By Andrew Burnett

Every search professional interested in Google scrutinises the small things. It has become apparent over the years that Google tests potential changes and new services on select groups without drawing much attention to it; the ensuing “what’s going on here?” on forums and in chat rooms blows the whistle. Sometimes the new feature or whatever-it-is stays, sometimes it simply vanishes.

Over the past couple of weeks Adrac Ltd has noticed a tweak to Google AdWords. A small number of our older accounts have not had a feature added, but curtailed. Our AdWords managers have asked on Google help forums if anyone else has noticed this and what they think is happening: there have been no responses, meaning that either nobody else is having this issue or nobody know what is going on.

It’s all to do with keyword matching. If you’re a PPC/CPC manager you’ll understand totally; if you have no idea, I’ll put the following in simple terms for you.

Get your own Google-powered e-commerce website

By Jackie Yeadon

Huge volumes of data pose problems that can only be solved by a powerful navigation (or search) tool. On the world wide web, big data is managed by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and so on; on a micro level, searches within a large e-commerce website can be a real headache – for businesses and customers.

How do you pay for paid advertising?

By Jackie Yeadon

The traditional way to employ an online marketing agency to manage paid advertising (PPC) is to allocate a monthly budget for your campaigns and pay a percentage fee on top for the work it actually does. This tends to be around 15% but it can vary between agencies and reputations. Other activities, like content optimisation, link building and so on, are extra. There is usually a minimum-term contract, which can also vary between three and 12 months.

This is the model that Adrac Ltd was built on in the early days of paid advertising and online marketing. When it was acquired by Reach Global Ltd in 2003, this changed with incoming operations director Israr Sarwar.

AdWords preview, digested for SMEs

We have seen Google testing it for a while, but now the AdWords Preview is official. Below is a list of the good and bad aspects of the new feature, as seen through the eyes of internet users and SMEs who include paid search advertising in their marketing mix.

The good news for internet searchers
•    See what a page looks like before clicking – is it attractive, is it relevant?
•    Could save time it takes to reload the Serp (search engine results page),  as previews are displayed on-page.

The bad news for internet searchers
•    It’s an extra stage and more time.
•    Is the preview large enough to isolate the detail you need to assess it?
•    May miss out on good content if the previewed website doesn’t look attractive, even if it’s relevant.

The good news for SME paid advertisers
•    You don’t pay for a preview click, only a click through.
•    Your quality traffic and conversions could increase.
•    It does not affect your quality score.

The bad news for SME paid advertisers
•    Preview is free but not optional.
•    If your landing page doesn’t look good on the preview, your quality traffic and conversions could decrease.
•    It might not last if it affects click throughs massively from Google’s point of view.

It will be interesting to see how this takes off or flops in the next few months – that is, if users appreciate the offering, ignore it or purposefully avoid it.

Adrac Ltd: the common sense approach to SEO and search

Internet intelligence agency Experian Hitwise issued a warning to businesses and SEO agencies that build their websites according to Google’s rules.

Commenting on its own latest research, it suggested its “latest insight … underlines why it is important for brands to ensure they do not solely optimise content around Google at the expense of other search engines”.

The findings of show that while Google maintains its lion’s share of the search market, Bing is getting a more substantial nibble: last month, Google lost 0.66% of its market share but Microsoft’s increased by 0.28%.

These might look like minute figures but transfer this trend onto a global template and they are significant; and the underlying message, according to Experian Hitwise, is that people like search engines for different reasons, and not every peg will fit into every hole.

“Bing, Yahoo! and Ask each appeal to particular audiences and often send more of their traffic to key transactional industries such as retail, travel and finance,” the report stated.

While we don’t believe Google is about to lose popularity with users and advertisers, it is important to remember the other search engines too, for these reasons – they represent niche markets and specific types of user that can be targeted.

As Google underlines, one should not optimise a website with a search engine in mind, but the end user. Leave the search engines to fight over who has what share: a good SEO agency will take a balanced approach to your internet marketing so you can kick back and enjoy the benefits.

IAB: Mobile advertising ‘comes of age’

One detail from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC’s most recent bi-annual ad spend study revealed that mobile is an immensely popular, growing channel for marketing.

The study recorded a “staggering” 116% year on year growth (like by like basis) in 2010 – 32% more than it was in 2009.

Advertisers spent £83m on mobile advertising, with overall spend championed by the entertainment and media sector. Other sectors, including finance, telecoms and consumer goods advertising, showed “encouraging growth” in their budgets.

IAB chief executive Guy Phillipson indicated that mobile advertising is a valid channel which has been accepted into the mainstream and offers marketers more choice.

“The power of online to build brands is clearly reflected in the spectacular growth of display, thanks to the popularity of social media and video formats.

“And with mobile advertising finally coming of age, marketers are enjoying an incredible array of digital opportunities.”

Anna Bartz, strategy manager at PwC, said: “All formats – display, search and classifieds – contributed, although display showed the strongest recovery. This was driven by video, social media and mobile, channels which build a strong foundation for 2011.”

The study, released at the end of March 2011, caused a stir because UK advertising spend had burst through the £4bn mark for the first time.

Learning from the big 100: the IAB and online advertising spend

This week the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has published positive figures showing that 25% -which has a worth of just over £4bn – of British advertising budgets are spent online.

According to the IAB’s most recent adspend report, this is growth of 12.8%: not bad for a country in recession!

There’s an awful lot of bad business news presently but what the IAB’s report highlights is how commerce is utilising all the skills at its disposal, not only to survive, but to thrive. The IAB notes, using Nielsen’s figures, the top 100 companies in the UK are spending more on marketing.

Smaller British companies sit up and pay attention: if the big 100 are doing this, what is stopping you?

Regular readers of the Adrac blog will know that one of the golden rules is never to shrink your adverting/marketing budget in a recession.

Two common opinions

“Yes but you’re an internet marketing agency, you’re bound to say that!”
“Yes but I’m an SME!”

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