1 What is PPC?

“Pay Per Click” or PPC advertising has taken the internet by storm over recent years. In an ever competitive marketplace, advertisers, comfortable with ‘traditional’ advertising options, have begun to embrace the development of all media advertising, allocating substantial budgets to the development and monitoring of effective and PPC campaigns.

The basic premise is as follows:

When a potential visitor searches and chooses to click on your PPC advert, they get directed to your web site, and you are charged the amount you bid. So, if you bid £0.15 per click on ‘widgets’, and that’s the highest bid, you’ll probably (note probably) show up first in line. If 100 people click on your PPC listing, then the search engine or PPC service will charge you £15.00.

The search engines use complicated and ever changing algorithms to allow them distribute your budget through the day. This ensures that campaigns with limited budgets can get exposure throughout the day, but will also mean that your website link may only appear for a percentage of the searches undertaken that suit you keywords.

The key to ensuring good results is good management and a clearly defined outcome.

2 The Plus Points

One of the clear advantages of the PPC advertising over more traditional methods is the ability to track and effectively gauge results of the budget spent on your campaign.

Legendary American retail pioneer, John Wanamaker, is famously quoted as saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In truth, even this statement is far from the truth with a generally acknowledged norm of 1-4% of generic advertising ‘working’.

A well managed, tailored and monitored PPC campaign can remove much of the hit and miss of traditional advertising, providing accurate, clear results and allowing the campaign to be fluid moving and adjusting to the visitor reaction and campaign requirements on an ongoing basis.

Instant Results
Pay-per-click advertising has a quick set-up and money spent will immediately translate into clicks through to your site. This means that PPC advertising delivers immediate results, unlike Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns. While an SEO campaign will ultimately produce more website visitors of a higher quality and lower unit cost, it could be months or years before you see the full benefit. If you need to generate online revenue immediately and have a business model which can support cost-effective PPC advertising, then a PPC campaign should form a key component of your Internet Marketing strategy.

Pay only for performance
PPC advertising costs relate to the number of visitors your site receives, not the number of times that your ad is shown. This ‘pay-per-performance’ model also allows advertisements to be delivered only in certain geographical locations and only on sites with related content. This results in targeted, high-quality traffic to your site, leading to a high conversion of browsers into buyers. PPC is therefore an effective way of selling goods and services. If you’re aiming to build brand awareness or launch a new product, pay-per-impression advertising may be more appropriate.

Total control over your campaign and your costs
PPC providers allow you to set upper limits on your cost-per-click and total daily spend, meaning you only spend as much as you want. This ability to set and adhere to strict campaign budgets, combined with PPC’s instant results, means that you can monitor the results of your campaign in real time. Poorly performing ads can be easily identified and revised, and your budget can be adjusted in light of the results achieved. This complete control over your advertising campaign allows you to respond to problems and optimise performance regularly. In contrast, the amount of time it takes for SEO campaigns to achieve results means that you will have spent the majority of your budget before there is any indication of whether the optimisation has been successful.

3 The Downside

Potential Spiralling Costs
One of the biggest problems with PPC advertising is that cost can spiral out of control. It can be easy to get caught up in a bidding war over a particular keyphrase and end up spending far more than your potential return, this can also tip the balance in the favour of competitors with large budgets or ‘money to burn’.

Bid Inflation
Bid inflation consistently raises the per-click cost for highly-searched phrases. This inflation is caused by ‘bidding war’ bidding and by the search engines themselves, who impose quality restrictions on many keywords. These quality restrictions increase the cost per click even if no one else is bidding.

Traffic Quality
Poor quality traffic can suck the life (and the budget) out of your campaign. Most pay per click services distribute a segment of their results to several search engines and other sites via their search partners and content networks. While you certainly want your listing displayed on Google and/or Yahoo, you may not want your listings showing up and generating clicks from some of the deeper, darker corners of the Internet. The resulting traffic may look good in statistics reports, but you have to separate out partner network campaigns and carefully manage them if you’re going to see a return.

Lack of Scalability
Finally, pay per click advertising does not scale. If you get more traffic, you pay more money in nearly direct proportion to that traffic – your cost per click stays constant, and your overall cost increases.

4 Who are the Key Suppliers?

Google Adwords
Not only does Google receive more than 80% of searches conducted, they also have the largest inventory of display advertising today. This can be seen as positive as they will certainly return clicks to your site, however, competition for effective can drive costs up and reduce the effectiveness of your budget. If you are getting started in paid search you begin your advertising with Google Adwords.

Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! is known as the 2nd biggest player in the paid search market. Yahoo! Provides a solid platform and decent exposure to the remainder of searching web user, additionally, providing a conversion and performance tracker not unlike that of Google’s.

Bing
Microsoft’s search engine currently ranks 3rd in paid search exposure. A large paid search inventory is not why you want to advertise on Bing. Instead, Bing is developing a name for giving the best cost per lead / goal on average than any other search engine. Additionally, 2011 saw Bing take over the number 2 spot in actual search queries from Yahoo!
Other offerings include Facebook, Ask etc…

5 Example Campaign

Scottish Holiday Park Company
In 2009, Intimation undertook the promotion of the new holiday park development of luxury lodges on the banks of a loch with a price range from £175k

Over the following 12 months, the client agreed to budget £500.00 per month to the Google keyword campaign to promote the sale of the initial stage development of 12 lodge holiday homes and also to promote the lodges as a holiday location as part of the service provided to “buy to let” investors.

The decision was made to allocate 33% to the letting side of the business and the remaining budget to sales element of the campaign. Over the twelve month period, the campaign achieved the following results:

• Advert Page Impressions: 605,568
• Clicks Achieved: 8,009
• Conversion Ratio: 1.32%
• Average Page Position: 5.7 (Page 1)

Using the Google Analytics, it was possible to track active enquiry form submission and allocate at least three lodge sales and numerous booking enquiries directly to the PPC campaign. During the period Intimation undertook reviews of the campaign results, paused the campaign as required and made keyword adjustments to make the campaign as effective as possible.

For further information or to begin your PPC campaign please contact us on 01620 829145.

After a discussion with Durham Wildlife Trusts Headquarters about the amount of waste cardboard they had lying around the offices the guys at Intimations Gateshead studio had a gust of festive spirit sweep over them! Blessed with a great window space and being inspired by the local Fenwick’s Christmas display they decided to take up the challenge of creating a Green (Enviro friendly) Festive window display all of their very own!

Using only cardboard donated from our ever encouraging clients (and of course a couple of reliant Sharpie pens!) the project began!

After a lot of cutting, sketching and hanging the display was finally ready to show off to the North East public. Complete with the Moon, Stars, Santa Claus and much more to feast your festive eyes on it is now a Christmas creative treat not to be missed!

As a nod to Intimations clients such as Durham Wildlife Trust, Quorum Business Park, Kinesio, Belhaven to name just a few, which have been a pleasure to work with for another year there are “QR Code presents” scattered throughout the window linking to some little online treats.

So thanks to everyone that donated their junk in the good name of recycling!

We hope you enjoy the display and be sure to keep an eye out for new appearances in the arches over the next few weeks!

Merry Christmas and happy New year from everyone at Intimation Creative.

The world over, social media is being utilised by the business world as an effective marketing tool for connecting with their customers. Social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have rapidly grown in popularity creating online communities made up of people with shared interests. The trend has been supported by development in smart phones and mobile enabled websites.

From a commercial stand point companies are embracing social media, with many operating online marketing strategies. Although most agree that businesses should utilise social media for marketing purposes, there is little agreement on what this should involve and how it can be made to work successfully, illustrated by a selection of industry quotes…

• “We look at social media as a conversation with the customers, and therefore it needs editorial control to ensure you get the balance right” – Dominic Burch, head of corporate communications, Asda
• “Social media is a living, breathing marketing tool that forms a vital part of a healthy integrated marketing strategy” – spokesperson for Beam Global Spirits & Wine
• “Facebook is central to our social media strategy” – Robin Auld, marketing director of Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland
• “We use Facebook, You Tube and Twitter channels to broadcast our corporate news on top of our traditional methods” – spokesperson for SABMiller
• “Social media has become necessary for advertisers to engage their users” – spokesperson for a leading internet company
• “Using social media is a key way of engaging with target consumers, especially in the younger age groups” – spokesperson for PepsiCo UK & Ireland

Many of the strategies undertaken to date have placed a strong emphasis on connecting with customers, such as through posting updates regarding corporate activities, sharing information and resources and product marketing via competitions. Advertising via social media (e.g. via apps or photos) is also increasing.

Some of the social media pioneers within the food and drinks industry have included PepsiCo, McDonalds, and Starbucks, which encourages consumers to submit new product or marketing ideas.

The major social networking websites

Facebook

With around 650m active users, Facebook is the world’s largest social networking site. It enjoys market leadership in many leading countries, although access is blocked in China. The popularity of Facebook has grown rapidly. In December 2010, it attracted 153.9m unique users, up by 38% from December 2009. The total number of pages viewed rose by over 70% to over 76.8m, while the site’s average number of daily visitors experienced a similar rise. Furthermore, 30% of all internet sessions in the US are now thought to include a visit to the Facebook site. The US accounted for 65% of Facebook’s advertising revenue in 2010, although this figure is forecast to drop to 60% in 2011 as international growth continues. During the first quarter of 2011, Facebook accounted for 31% of all adverts served to US internet users, up from 23% for the corresponding period in 2010. Smaller companies account for around 60% of advertising revenue at present, with the remainder coming from major multinationals such as Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble.

Twitter

Launched in July 2006, Twitter was developed by members of the US-based podcasting company Odeo. Twitter was spun off to form its own company in 2007. It is now used by people in almost every country worldwide, and a stock market listing for the company is expected to occur within the next few years.As of May 2011, it is estimated that more than 155m tweets are sent every day, up from around 50m at the start of 2010. Twitter now has more than 200m registered users, with 460,000 new users signing up per day. Businesses are increasingly using Twitter for reasons such as gathering real-time market intelligence and building closer relationships with their customers.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn was founded in 2003, primarily as a way of connecting business people worldwide. The site now boasts more than one billion members spread across 200 countries worldwide, while over 2m companies currently have LinkedIn pages. LinkedIn has been expanding recently, with revenue for 2010 reaching US$243m, twice as high as in 2009. According to LinkedIn, a new member joins its site every second. More than half of its members are located outside the US. In 2008, LinkedIn launched a self-service pay-per-click text advertising service called LinkedIn Direct Ads. This was upgraded in 2011 and the service now targets adverts according to job title, company name or LinkedIn Group. The upgrade aims to provide advertisers with improved access to a high-quality and increasingly relevant audience of professionals, therefore leading to a greater return on investment. Although LinkedIn Ads (as the service is now called) is available internationally, it is only in English and with US dollars at present.

YouTube/Google

Based in California, YouTube was formed by three former employees of PayPal in 2005. The site now serves around 3bn videos per day, up from 100m in 2006. Since 2006, YouTube has been a subsidiary of Google Inc., which acquired the business in a deal worth $1.65bn. As far as future strategy is concerned, Google is thought to be working on a major overhaul of YouTube at the time of writing. YouTube is increasingly seeking to compete against broadcast and cable television, given the emergence of TVs enabling people to watch online video in their living rooms. In June 2011, Google launched a new social networking site called Google+. It claimed the site would “bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software”.

MySpace

MySpace which was launched in 2004, was acquired by News Corp. for $580m in 2005. In 2008, it was usurped by Facebook as the world’s leading social network provider. In June 2011, News Corp. sold MySpace to a digital media company called Specific Media for a reported $35m. Musician Justin Timberlake will take a stake in the business.

Flickr

Flickr is one of the world’s leading online photo-sharing websites that is widely used by bloggers to host images embedded into blogs and other forms of social media. Developed and launched by Ludicorp of Vancouver, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! during March 2005, in a $35m deal.

Renren

Another company that can be expected to assume increasing importance in the future is Renren, which was set up as a Chinese equivalent of Facebook. It is the most popular social network amongst the country’s students and urban-based youths. Renren has approximately 117m registered users, although its number of active monthly users falls to somewhere between 20 and 30m.

Renren made its trading debut on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2011. Its initial public offering (IPO) represented the largest by a Chinese technology company to date, with the value of the company’s shares rising by 29% on its trading debut. In total, the IPO raised $855m, with over 53m US-listed shares having been sold. As a result, Renren’s post-IPO value was put at $7.5bn.

You may have seen these 2-dimensional images used in TV programs, poster advertising, on your airline boarding pass, or even on your favourite bottle of wine.

QR codes (short for Quick-Response) are a fairly new concept but they are increasingly becoming a useful marketing tool and 2011 has seen an explosion in their use.

QR codes allow you to be immediately linked to digital content on the web that gives you additional information about a particular promotion, product or brand. This information is provided when scanning the code with your smart phone.

With the increasing use of smart-phones now dominating the market QR codes are convenient and can be read by millions of consumers without the need for a special scanner. Information is delivered to the consumer instantly about the promotion allowing data to be collected about the consumer who scanned the QR code. Once a QR code has been scanned it can give your consumer details about your business (allowing users to search for nearby locations), or it may give you a coupon which you can use in a local outlet.

The QR code itself should be enough to intrigue your consumer though it’s often a good idea to include a short message about the benefits of scanning the QR code, something along the lines of… ‘Scan this code for more details’ or something specific to your brand. Advertising coupons, special offers, free downloads or product demos can create that added interest to sway your consumer to scan your QR code and benefit from the promotion.

If any of the details of the promotion change there is no need to reprint the QR code, a quick revision to the destination link and you have a new campaign!

Want to know more about QR codes and how best to use them in your marketing campaigns? Give us a call…

Intimation Creative is pleased to have been appointed by “The Malt Kiln” Haddington, to undertake a review and refresh of their current brand and to adivse in the development of an e-marketing strategy to help promote their new ecommerce website.

The Malt Kiln, is a well established outlet in the centre of Haddington, known for their fantastic range of exclusive, unusual and quality gift and household items.