From the monthly archives:

August 2008

What is PPC ?

by Billy on August 28, 2008 · 0 comments

in Online Marketing

Pay per click or PPC is an advertising model used across the internet on search engines, advertising networks and content websites. The advertiser only pays when a user has clicked on their advert which leads a user to their website.

Example: A user types into their desired search engine lets say Google, the search query ‘golf clubs’ a list of search results will be generated, with a list of sponsored results along side that will be advertising highly targeted adverts to the users term ‘golf clubs’. The user then clicks on the most relevant advert to them leading to a quality website where they can purchase or find information on golf clubs. The advertiser pays for the click of the user and many more like it. A percentage of those clicks will eventually turn into sales and so and so forth.

There are two main categories of ppc advertising, keyword match and content match. Keyword match is based on the search results from a search engine created by a user entering a search query like the previous example, ‘golf clubs’.

Content placements matches the advertisers advert with relevance to the content of a website that a user is looking at.

Tagged as: ppc

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AdWords Quality Score

by JC on August 21, 2008 · 1 comment

in Online Marketing

In July 2005, the Google’s AdWords team introduced minimum bids for keywords based on a Quality Score. This system was introduced to manage low-quality websites using Google’s all important revenue generating AdWords product. AdWords has always been a victim of its own success, because it sells the highest quality traffic – in the highest volumes – it has always been attractive to genuine, quality websites and websites at the lower-end of the market, also known as spam.

Under considerable pressure to clean-up its search results and improve the quality of ads for its users the AdWords team chose to use a purely financial measure. The Quality Score system was introduced so that lower quality websites (spam) would have to pay more than higher quality websites. This was smart, because it allowed Google to get the best of boths worlds. On the one hand they improved ad quality, and on the other they maintained a lucrative source of revenue (just at a higher price than before).

4 years later, the overall effect is that the cost of advertising on Google has increased significantly for both spammers and quality website owners and there are still many keywords crowded with spammy advertisements.  Today Google has announced a futher update to the Quality Score system, and the AdWords team continue to try and manage the tricky balancing between quality and spam. Web spam is like junk-mail; you can never stop it completely.

Tagged as: adwords, quality score

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WordPress themes

by JC on August 21, 2008 · 0 comments

in Form & Function

If you need a WordPress theme built, you should speak to these guys: http://outlawdesignblog.com/

They have built a few for us and the cost and quality has been very good.

Tagged as: wordpress, wordpress themes

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iPhone increases its market share of online usage

by JC on August 19, 2008 · 0 comments

in Media

Just been reading again about iPhone gains in online usage.

According to HitsLink, the people who track web usage statistics, iPhone users account for about a third of one percent of web browsers on the Internet, the largest of any mobile platform.

iPhone ranks fourth overall in terms of operating system market share, behind Windows, Mac, and Linux. On August 16, the stats peaked at 0.45 percent. That’s a two-fold increase since the iPhone 3G was released July 9. (Source: TUAW.com

A lot of this must be because the iPhone’s web browser is so easy to use, making websites accessible that could never work on other smart phones. Now with the speed increases of the latest model this trend is set to continue for some time…

Tagged as: iphone

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AdWords seminars

by JC on August 19, 2008 · 1 comment

in Online Marketing

We use Google’s AdWords for about 70% of our client work; it really is a fantastic product. If you want to start learning it yourself you should consider registering for one of their seminars here.

Tagged as: adwords

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A List Apart survey 2008

by JC on August 1, 2008 · 0 comments

in Media

Possibly the most important invention of the past century, the web is undeniably one of the most robust engines of knowledge transfer, political and social change, artistic endeavor, and economic growth the world has seen.

Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every citizen to be heard.

Source: A List Apart

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Want to measure all of this?

by JC on August 1, 2008

in Online Marketing

We measure everything we do; we keep very fine notes on every cent we spend of your advertising budget. We prepare reports for you that tell you exactly what you have got for your money. How much traffic, sign-ups, registered users, whatever; remember you set the goals! If you use us you will gain more insight into how much these goals are worth to you, and you will be able to compare our reports to your other marketing efforts.

One the main tools we use to manage all this stuff is Unica’s NetInsight. NetInsight is a powerful log-file-based web analytics tool. It can be tailored to manage all kinds of conversion events and is highly configurable.

The market leading analytics tool is Google Analytics, NetInsight beats the Google product in two very important ways: firstly, it uses log-files which means you don’t have to install additional code on your pages which in Google’s case often slow down the load time; secondly, NetInsight frees you to track any type of web traffic whereas Google Analytics is much more restrictive.

Tagged as: analytics, netinsight

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Want more sign-ups, sales & leads?

by JC on August 1, 2008

in Online Marketing

At Sky Rocket Inc., we don’t simply want to increase overall visits to your website, we are much more interested in increasing online events that are important to your business. These events might be leads, sign-ups, registered users, sales, downloads, whatever! In short, we can tailor traffic to suit your business goals.

Why it’s important to focus on specific goals?

The internet is a busy place, and people are surfing around for all sorts of reasons. It’s actually very easy to buy traffic into a website and increase the overall visits as there are many cheap sources of traffic. But unless you are paying close attention to what that traffic is doing, then you have no real clue about how valuable these potential customers are to your business.

Choosing your goals

To control this process you need to decide on the goals at the outset. For most website owners this is very easy, as websites can be split into two broad categories:

Online Sales

Sites that sell a product or service online; where the financial transaction is completed on the website itself.

Offline Sales

Sites that sell a product or services offline; where the financial transaction is completed over the phone, at the store, in fact anywhere that doesn’t involve the website.

If your site does online sales, then your goals will be focused on increasing the amount of sales for all or certain products in your inventory; whereas, if your site does offline sales, your goals will be focused on obtaining information about the customer and their interests to aid the offline sales when it happens.

Want to measure all of this?

Tagged as: goals, leads, sales, sign-ups

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Want more website traffic?

by JC on August 1, 2008

in Online Marketing

We can get more traffic to your website quickly, effectively and on budget.

Quickly

We buy traffic from Google, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook and some smaller search engines and advertising networks. We choose traffic that is either keyword-driven or where we have tight demographic control, this ensures that the traffic is targetted. We buy traffic from leading internet brands, so we can send high volumes of quality customers to your website very quickly.

Effectively

Google keyword search

Keyword-driven means the user has initiated a search by typing a keyword into a search engine. This is very effective; because we know what the user is searching for we can place advertisements that exactly match their desire.

For example: if the users types “luxury holidays” into Google, we can place an ad that advertises a website for luxury holidays and if a user types “nike shoes”, we can place an ad that advertises a store selling Nike shoes.

As you can see, there is a high relevancy between what the user typed and the ad they are served. This relevancy factor is key to the whole experience. The higher the relevancy the more likely the user will click the ad and buy the product. This is why keyword driven traffic generally converts into sales at a much higher rate than ANY other form of advertising.

On Budget

Online advertising is not expensive, the cost is a fraction of print, radio and television. We run campaigns for our clients where daily budgets range from the thousands per day down to a few bucks. All are effective at bringing in customers at a price that suits our clients.

Want more sign-ups, sales & leads?.

Tagged as: traffic

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