Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’

Get Ready For the Bounce Back After Catastrophic December Retail Figures

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

2011 Profit GrowthStatistics recently announced across the national press have shown just how disastrous both the coldest December in 100 years and the lingering atmosphere of the economic downturn has been for the UK retail sector.

In a depressing report the Office for National Statistics explains how retail sales volumes have overall dropped by 0.8% from November and how the regular December spike in spending basically didn’t happen this year. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to have been a rush by consumers to try and beat the VAT rise which many retailers had hoped would have filled a significant shortfall.

All sectors have been affected too including fuel, clothing, household goods and food so no matter what business you are in; the chances are you have not had a happy December. However, what traditionally happens after a big fall, is a big (or at least a significant) rise in sales, just because people tend to need stuff and will feel more inclined to spend their money when conditions change and retailers lower their prices to entice them back.

So what can you do to make the most of this situation?

Assuming you have a website already (if you don’t, stop reading now and go get one) there are a number of things you can do which will help you capture disaffected customers looking to spend without spending too much. Ensuring that your website has secure payment gateways provided by a respected payment service provider is also critical.

Improve PPC Budget

Pay per click (PPC) is a great way to target highly motivated customers in a place where you can appeal to their desires directly. Basically, paying for a link to appear at the top of search engine results pages for keyphrases which people will be typing in if they want your product cheaply will give you a greater chance of pulling in traffic than by many other means. By increasing your budget in this area you can make sure you are at the top. All you need to do is write an advert that appeals to tired consumers looking to start spending again and keep tweaking it until you get results.

Social Media

Social media is the modern day word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is an important way of getting your products out to the right people. By developing a social media marketing portfolio, including Twitter, Facebook etc, and by offering incentives, you can open up a large network of potential customers in a short space of time. Timing your incentive offers just right will help you to ride the wave of consumers flocking back to their traditional spending levels.

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How Can Google Help You Advertise Your Business Online?

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Google AdvertisingGoogle is one of the biggest companies in the world and has a near monopoly over the billions of searches made through search engines every day. This gives them rather a lot of power over the internet. Luckily for us, Google is quite nice and has the philosophy “Don’t Be Evil” which means that they have your best interests at heart.

Search Results

Google is a search engine first and foremost: the most popular one in the world. Or rather more accurately, Google is a database or index which they have built up by constantly combing the web for changes to current sites and entirely new sites which it then uses its search engine to trawl through in order to quickly pick out the best results based on your search query. By meeting a long list of criteria for a relevant and authoritative website you can get your website to the top of Google search results, which is a very good way to advertise yourself especially if you can do this for a keyphrase which people use often.

AdWords

Alternatively they have provided AdWords which is an advertising service which allows people and businesses to get their adverts in front of millions of pairs of eyes every day for specific search terms without having to go down the organic search engine optimisation (SEO) route. After you have signed up and decided on your budget and your key phrases, you just have to write a catchy advert and outbid your competition for a place at the top of the page.

Google Places

If your business has a shop or an office or a hub location or in fact, even just a vague geographical area you can advertise yourself using Google Places. This service highlights you on a map in Google search results and gives searchers a link to your location and your website. This can be a very quick and effective way to catch some customer’s attention.

Display Advertising

Recently Google have been in New York to discuss display advertising with the Mad Men of Madison Avenue. At Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual MIXX conference, Google presented their pitch about display advertising explaining that it is the future of dynamic online advertising. Especially as new HTML 5 technology will make getting video to every web surfer a slick and easy process allowing display advertising to be more exciting.

So next time you look at your advertising budget and think what you’re going to use it for…save a thought for Google. With the right understanding of Google’s platform you can turn traffic into profit and make your payment service provider really earn their keep. Just ensure that your money transfer services can handle it.

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Analysing your Google AdWords Campaign

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

In this series of posts we have looked at a number of the different facets involved in setting up and maintaining your Google AdWords campaign. From keywords to the actual ad text we have explored tips and information detailing what they are and how they work. In this blog post we will look at the other end of the process: Just how do you evaluate the progress of your campaign?

Once you have set up your Google AdWords campaign and spent all the necessary time looking at the products on your site that you wish to promote. Then found key phrases that will perform and are relevant to your needs. And finally taken care to write ad text, and have actually had the campaign running for a period of time. You will soon be looking for some indication of whether your campaign is working effectively. After all, if you can optimise your campaign then you can, not only spend your advertising budget in a more effective way, but you can actually make more sales.

One of the initial components to look at is Impressions. This represents the actual number of times that your ad has been shown. If you find that your ads do not have many Impressions, then this could be for a number of reasons – the keywords that trigger your ads may not be popular, meaning your ads are only being shown to a very small number of people.

Clicks are hopefully the results of Impressions, these represent people seeing your advert and deciding to click on it.

Click through rate, or CTR, is a combination of the two previous factors. CTR is the number of Clicks compared to the number of Impressions represented as a percentage. The higher the CTR the better your ad is performing.

Conversions represent the final goal of most sites: a sale. Although high numbers of Clicks and good CTR’s are desirable, they must all make way for the ultimately essential Conversions.

It may seem like most of the work on your AdWords campaign is over when you have all your keywords and ads in place. But the most effective way to run pay-per-click advertising is by constant revision based on previous results. By analysing statistics such as these you can evaluate how your Google AdWords campaign is performing.

Martin Able is an online advertising authority working with payment gateways and money transfer services for ecommerce stores.

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Mobile Ways to Advertise Online

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Online advertising is big business: Fact. Google would certainly agree with that, as it’s always been a staple of their business model. In fact advertising is for Google a multi-billion dollar industry. So why is online advertising so successful? Well, unlike traditional advertising like billboards, TV adverts, etc, advertising online is far more direct and infinitely more focused. However with modern changes in how people get online the game is certainly going to change.

If you advertise through Google AdWords for instance you’ll find that your adverts are targeted, making them more effective as you’re putting them in front of the right people. Ads such as these can be configured to fit your demographic; popping up at the right times, and in the right searches. As opposed to traditional blanket advertising, people are actively searching out your kind of service. That’s the beauty of search based advertising. Of course with people getting online through mobile devices you might have to re-think your advertising strategy.

Fortunately there are services becoming available which can help you on your way. Google for instance, has invested hundreds of millions into getting its mobile advertising setup off and running. As an expansion on Google AdWords, Google Mobile helps you to get your adverts in front of mobile users, by providing information to help you tailor your ads for mobiles. Mobile ads are more restricted in the number of characters available for things like the title, and as such copywriters have to be on the ball. There are similar services available from Microsoft and Yahoo, but these are hampered by the fact that there are far less popular browsers available to them than Google, which in turn constitutes a less rewarding platform for businesses to broadcast themselves.

Of course the move into other areas for advertisers doesn’t stop there. Due to roll out in the next few months the iAd platform from Apple is set to be a very different animal. Running on the iPhone, iPod and iPad it’s clearly gearing into a very different section of the market. Advertisers will apparently be charged a minimum of one million dollars when the platform rolls out. Running ads through apps on each device will clearly boost the number of free apps available, as developers take advantage of the new revenue stream available.

Whichever way advertisers go it’s apparent that the online advertising game is changing. The only thing that’s for certain is that it will continue to grow as online advertising takes over.

Martin Able is experienced in web advertising and providing online businesses with money transfer services and security for online credit card processing which has allowed him to see the benefits of effective ads.

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