Archive for November, 2008
The Impact of the Recession on Online Advertising
Posted by admin in Banner Advertising, Search Engine Marketing on November 17th, 2008
After weeks upon weeks of having constant news of the global financial crisis and the recessions impact on various industries, we set out to examine the impact on online advertising.
It is no secret that the financial sector, automotive, and airline industries have been hit hard by the recession. These three industries have been serious online advertisers for years and competing heavily amongst each other. They also represent a large chunk of the total spend on online advertising. Just surf the web for 5 minutes and you’re sure to see a credit card banner, car banner, or a travel (holiday) banner somewhere. But will this still be the case?
The answer I believe, is No. These industries are desperately trying to rally around cutting jobs and reducing their expenses to just stay afloat. Some of these “Expenses” are budgets that were set aside for their advertising campaigns. There is no way that a company that is in the process of cutting 10,000 jobs will pay premium prices to actively participate in display advertising on major websites. They simply can’t afford it.
My theory is that display advertising on major websites and newspapers will decrease significantly. Large Publishers will be hit hard. But advertising is still the backbone of generating sales for most companies, so online advertising will still be a priority for them. But to what extent?
These online advertisers will focus more on search engine marketing and getting strong conversions. They will spend their budgets competing on their keywords on Google searches for instance, and making a strong impression on people specifically searching for their products. The key word is Targeted marketing. Their online advertising campaigns will ALL come down to positive ROI’s.
To sum it up basically, Display Advertising and premium website buys will decrease while search engine marketing and other forms of highly targeted online advertising will continue to be strong.
The days of spending $50,000 to simply show a Auto Banner on MSN.com with the purpose of only generating strong brand awareness and not a positive ROI are over….for now.
Increasing your CTR on Adwords
Posted by admin in Search Engine Marketing on November 10th, 2008
One question I see a lot on SEO forums and blogs is, “How can I increase my click through ratio on Adwords?” What’s alarming to me (and great for Google) is that the most common answer I see on these forums is, “increase your bids.” Not to say that increasing you bids and raising the placement of your ads won’t improve your click through rate, it just happens to increase your costs per click, which we all know can greatly affect the ROI of the campaign.
So let’s re-examine the question. What we need to ask is, “How can we increase our CTR while maintaining the same cost per click or even lowering the cost?” I know you’re thinking that you can’t increase results and lower cost with a pay per click campaign. This is supposedly the unattainable Holy Grail of search engine marketing. Well, we’ve found it, and we’re even going to share.
Our approach to increasing CTR’s is Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing different ad copy with Google can be labor intensive to get up and running. And without a PhD in statistics, you won’t be able to make sense of the numbers without some sort of automation. That’s what we offer. Our web based proprietary software syncs with your Adwords account and allows you to test 50 variations of your text ad for every keyword in your campaign. Our system will identify the top performing variations and provide you with easy to understand reporting, allowing you to adjust and refine your marketing efforts.
You’re probably thinking, “That’s great, but I don’t see how this will actually lower my cost per click.” You’ve got to remember that Google rewards ads that perform better. By simply increasing your CTR Google will actually lower your average cost per click, saving you money and increasing your ROI.
For more information about our multivariate testing for Adwords click here, and if you’d like to speak with a representative please contact us today!