Pod1 Blog

Planning on starting a Paid Search Campaign? Make sure you bring your ‘A’ game.

If you ask a lot of companies, especially smaller start-ups, if they have tried paid search you will often hear tales of budgets getting spent before they realised what was going on. While I’ll leave the advanced PPC tactics to our advertising team, setting out in (and making a return from) PPC is going to require some basic strategy.

The reason a lot of companies that ‘dip their toe’ in PPC don’t succeed is because PPC is extremely competitive. Google have done a good job at selling their product and, like any auction, the more bidders there are the more competitive it is. There are still opportunities in PPC but in order to get a positive ROI you going to have to take on competitors in every way you can.

I’m assuming some basic knowledge of what paid search is but these are the factors that influence achieving your target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and therefore ROI.

Those factors in red are the ones you can directly influence.

Bid – this is pretty straight forward but rather than being your starting point, it should almost be your end point. By getting the other 3 variables as competitive as you can, and having a target CPA (or ROI) you can start to work out what your bid needs to be.

Quality Score – not sure what this is? Head over to this video to understand how Google ranks bids.  The influences of quality score are listed here, and you will immediately see that new starters have a disadvantage (having no account history.)

Bid and Quality score will not only affect how much you pay but also the number of impressions you receive and position of your ad (which will influence CTR.)

CTR – click through rate. Improving this is all about getting the copy right. Copy should be tested, and testing again. I guarantee that what you think your best copy won’t be the best. Also think about geo-location based screening and time restricting so your ads are being shown to the people most like to click on them (in the right country and at the right time.)

Conversion – once visitors get to your landing page you’ve got to make it as easy as possible for them to buy. This may mean a different landing page for PPC traffic to what other traffic sees without any of the bells and whistles. If a browser has clicked on an ad for a specific product they are probably best off without being distracted to your facebook page. Again, it comes down to testing, Google Optimiser is a great place to start. Common sense such as only advertising products that are in stock should also prevail.

Getting these strategic basics in place from the start will give you a good chance for getting a good return from paid search.

ITV Live is an exclusive live online service for football fans providing video replays, real-time stats and live chat during the football World Cup in South Africa.

Capitalising on the open platform access afforded by social media applications, ITV Live will seek to connect with the likes of Twitter and Facebook inviting as much interaction as possible.

In keeping with the sharing theme, the network has worked with producers and talent – such as ITV’s World Cup team led by presenter Adrian Chiles, who will refer to ITV Live comment and chat during match presentations – to develop content to support programmes.

Coverage starts at 1.30pm on Friday 11th June so there’s no excuse to miss any of the action.

Let us know what you think of it and if there are better services out there?

With the World Cup now less than 2 weeks away it is no surprise that the volume of searches on associated terms has started to increase rapidly. To help visualize the search traffic around the event Hitwise has compiled the graph below which shows how the level of interest has been growing.

1. world cup 2010 (4.98% of all UK Internet searches containing the phrase ‘world cup’)
2. world cup (3.70%)
3. world cup 2010 dates (3.28%)
4. england world cup fixtures (1.77%)
5. world cup fixtures (1.64%)
6. fifa world cup 2010 (1.36%)
7. world cup groups (1.10%)
8. world cup 2010 wall chart (1.10%)
9. fifa world cup (0.74%)
10. world cup fantasy football (0.73%)

Read the full article on the Hitwise Blog

Twitter has signed up a number of well known brands, including Starbucks, Sony Pictures, Red Bull, TV channel Bravo, Virgin America and Best Buy to trial the launch their new paid advertising service.

Twitter users will now see sponsored tweets at the top of relevant Twitter search pages. The ads will be a tweet from the brand clearly labeled “Promoted” to distinguish the paid-for tweets from the normal ones (as above).

This is just phase 1 of the roll out and at some point adverts will also begin appearing on the site’s home page tailored to the user’s interests, determined by the messages they publish and receive.

Eventually the ads will also appear in tweets that are accessed through other applications as this currently makes up anything between 60% and 80% of traffic.

It is still early days but comes as no surprise that Twitter has at last launched its revenue model.

EasyJet wants to be the first airline to enable users to plan and book flights entirely on Facebook.

They currently have the holiday planner pictured above which allows groups of 3 or more people to co-ordinate flights together (no doubt invaluable for stag and hen nights), but users still need to currently go to the website to complete their booking. The new app will allow users to to complete the whole process without leaving Facebook.

This is a trend Facebook has been actively looking to promote over the last few months starting with PayPal integration back in February and is likely to just be the beginning of a fully transactional Facebook.

…With a beta launch to all English language searchers.

Google Social Search is a standard search results page add-on that displays socially relevant content from people in your online social circle, as determined by your Google Profile.

One recent addition includes Google Images, now when you use social search you might see relevant pictures from the people in your social circle. These are photos that members of your social circle have published publicly on the web through photo-sharing sites like Picasa and Flickr.

Looking at the screenshot above, you can see two links for “My social circle” and “My social content.” These links take you to a new interface where you can see the connections and content behind your social results.

- Clicking on “My social circle” shows your extended network of online contacts and how you’re connected.

- Clicking on “My social content” lists your public pages that might appear in other people’s social results.

This handy table from last weeks NY Times lets you see where the big 4 tech companies are concentrating their efforts. Click on the table for the full article

Google has launched a new feature for its Android phone that searches using the camera instead of keywords to identify landmarks, works of art and products.

See it in action below…

Google’s Universal search results now include streams for live tweets, Yahoo Answers & news articles. On top of this they have also announced partnerships with Facebook and MySpace to pull in any real time data that is publicly available. One other useful feature is ‘Hot Topics’ which has been added to Google trends and feeds through the latest results in real time.

This has some pretty major implications for search results and SEO. Take a search for Pod1 for example the results now look like this… Continue Reading

Here is what I have been asked to present in front of some number of knowledge-hungry students of the ‘Social Issues in Computing’ at University of London.