Christmas is just around the corner, and that means that the Shopping frenzy is well underway. It is this time of year that holds the most promise for all online stores, provided they are quick enough to sharpen their online campaigns to grab the attention of those eager buyers out there. So here are the few tips that can help strengthen your PPC techniques to get those high ROIs this Christmas.

The festive period means shops are selling Christmas trees, stockings, advent calendars and singing Christmas collectibles; all of which signals that the countdown to Christmas has begun.

So what should you be doing now in preparation for a lucrative Christmas?

Here are a few things you can do during this festive season:

The first step is to look at your account’s history:

Analyse your accounts past metrics such as cost per click, impressions and conversion rate in order to plan your strategy effectively. One metric that is pretty useful is the average position of the text ads and the related performance, so you will know more or less how to position your “special ads” to achieve the best results.

Choose relevant keywords and match types:

Ensure that you add festive keywords to your keyword list such as “Christmas gifts, Christmas hampers, Wine for Christmas” etc. Be sure to also include variations and misspellings as well, in this case it would be prudent to include search terms such as “Xmas gifts, Holiday activities, Xmas table decor” etc. You could even further improve relevancy, if for example you sold Christmas trees online, you could include keywords that include a clear call to action, such as “Buy Christmas Trees”. This type of keyword is great for your ROI. Another key point is to be aware of match types, if you are operating on a large advertising spend, a campaign incorporating all match types would be feasible, however if you have a smaller budget, you can try limiting the campaigns to exact and phrase match keywords.

Inject some glitter to your ad text:

This is the time of year where the competition is quite stiff, so in order to grab the user’s attention, you need to have ad text that really jumps off the page. Include call to actions, free offers and special discount prices in the ad text and more importantly include the “Christmas” terms as well.

Landing pages and website:

It’s important to keep the Christmas feel and theme on your landing pages and website, Christmas is a significant time for many people and these little touches can make a big difference in persuading users who have clicked through to convert by making a purchase.

Happy Marketing This Christmas Season!

People ask me a lot what is the best to do: PPC or SEO. Now with a limited budget I would say start of with a PPC campaign because you will start to see results immediately. With SEO it tends to take a bit longer. If you can afford to do both PPC and SEO at the same time I would say go for it, as you will just gain more out of both campaigns. A lot of people really don’t like clicking on paid ads so if you can be on the top spot organically that will also help you a lot. If you can rank high for your relevant phrases organically the nice thing is even if your PPC budget runs out you will still be visible on search engines.

One advantage of PPC is that it is a lot more flexible than SEO, you can cover a lot more keywords than with a SEO campaign, so while you optimize your SEO campaign to rank high for your beter performing keywords you can also target a whole range of other keywords to drive people to your site.

I want to show a comparative report on how these can work together and especially how you can  even double your visits if you do SEO together with your PPC campaign.

For one of our clients we started doing SEO more than 2 years ago, you can really see a difference in the traffic they get. The graph below shows visits from the first of January 2009 to the 30^th of September 2010. The orange line  represents Paid traffic and one thing you can clearly see from it is that they haven’t increased their Adwords budget, it stayed the  same. If you look at the green line which represents organic traffic you will see that it gradually got more, up to a point 7 months ago where it started outperforming the PPC traffic.

The quality of the visits don’t differ a lot however, the bounce rate, average time spent and page views are a bit beter on SEO traffic than the PPC. The blue line indicates the total visits to the website, so you can imagine what the difference would have been if the client only focused on PPC or SEO. By doing both PPC and SEO you can maximize your reach to clients looking for your services.

By looking at these statistics you can clearly see how SEO traffic grows over time and how it can work together with PPC to give you a great Search Marketing campaign. So if you are just doing just PPC or SEO at the moment, you have now seen what your traffic can look like when you combine it.

OK, so you’ve just registered your domain for your new company and got your logo designed together with your website, it’s up and running and live. The next thing you do is Google yourself to see if you can find yourself and you find: Nothing!

The thing with brand new domains is that it takes some time for Google to know it’s there. You will eventually feature organically for your brand name or domain name, but not immediately. One thing that you can do to ensure immediate results is to run a branded PPC campaign where you only show an ad on the search engine result pages when someone type in your company name or misspellings thereof.

This will ensure that you will be seen when someone is looking for your company. The clicks for these branded terms will also be fairly cheap as there will be little or no competition. Google Adwords has got a setting called site links that is only enabled when you have a campaign that has a very good quality score and feature mostly in the first position. Now with a branded PPC campaign it is very easy to achieve this. The site links will display up to 4 of your products or services with direct links to their pages on your website, this will give the user a greater experience as they can see what your main products or services  are from your ad and  go directly to that page.

I have found that a lot of people have the Google page as their browser homepage and whenever they open it up they type whatever website address they want to go to directly in the search box. The problem with this is that they might be potential customers and if they don’t find you in that search result, they will think that your website doesn’t exist or that it is broken (believe me I had people phoning me tell me that their website is not working because they can’t find it on Google).

So if you just launched a new website get a branded PPC campaign going to make people aware of your brand. Even if your website has been indexed and appears in the first position keep your PPC campaign active and up there and make use of site links to direct people to your most popular products or services.

Today it is extremely important to have an online presence and without any marketing, your website would not get the right traffic for the products or services you provide. A lot of small companies start by doing some type of internet marketing themselves to drive traffic to their websites in the form of PPC, some SEO or via social media. Soon they will find out that this is a full time job and to do it properly they will need professional help.

This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.

Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.

People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.

If you have a business today, it is very important to have a website where people can view your services and products and also find out a bit more about your company but that website means nothing if people can’t find your it or if they don’t know what your URL is.

That is why effective online marketing is vitally important. It is essential to have a strong online presence and not be just another needle in the proverbial haystack.

The two main ways to create an online presence is through Pay Per Click advertising and through Search Engine Optimisation. Both of these methods work very well but each one has it’s advantages and disadvantages.

SEO

SEO is where the website is optimized to perform beter for certain keywords on the Search Engine Result Pages. It involves fixing the code of the website and optimising the content for the desired keywords. With SEO your goals are more long term, as it takes time for your pages and changes to your pages to be indexed by the search engines as well as getting a good rank for your keywords.

PPC

Pay Per Click is a type of advertising that is used on websites and search engines. You set up an ad that will display when certain criteria is met and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It works on a bidding system, you compete against other advertisers for the top spot. The placement of your ad all depends on what you are willing to spend per click as well as the relevance of your ad and content to the specific keyword you are bidding on. PPC is a lot more flexible than SEO because you can start and modify campaigns in a couple of minutes. You can see results instantly, so it is good to get a PPC campaign going while you are busy optimizing your site to perform beter organically.

The rest of the week these services will be discussed in more detail, so do come back to find out more.