Seven inadequately trained cyclists are riding from Brighton to Paris (one of whom is me), setting off on the night of Friday 27 September and arriving there, unaided and without proper mapping equipment, 125 miles and not more than 24 hours later. Oh, and we’ll all be riding single-speed or fixed-wheel bikes. That means no freewheeling (for the fixies) and approximately 108,614 pedal strokes each.

To be honest, we’re stupid enough to do this anyway, but we thought it would be a good opportunity to raise some money for charity. So we’re doing it for the kids. Please give generously to support Unicef. We’re paying for the trip ourselves, so all of your money will go directly to this important charity.

If you’re feeling generous you can sponsor my slightly crazy attempt here.

Tags: News // 1 Comment »

In case you haven’t read it yet, Google is now unleashing some new improvements to its Quality Score. News from Google about changes to their algorithms or the way they rank and charge PPC ads usually creates a tidal wave of blog posts, comments and outbursts from the community that uses AdWords on a daily basis. I therefore thought I’d analyse this new development and share thoughts & case studies with our readers.

Google announced:

“Since 2005, we’ve improved Quality Score in many ways, such as the inclusion of landing page quality and landing page load time as factors. Along the way, we’ve also received much helpful feedback from both users and advertisers.
Today, we’d like to let you know of further improvements we’ll introduce in the coming weeks — based, in part, on this feedback. First we’ll outline the key points, and then dive into the details:

Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query

Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’

‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account”

The idea behind having the quality score calculated for every single search is that it will make Google’s PPC results more relevant and time sensitive. For example, if you competitor writes a compelling ad which most of the traffic for a given keyword, your CTR will reduce, and Google will see you as less relevant in the next keyword auction.

I wanted to check that my long tail keywords were still being displayed, and this is what I discovered:

[Read more →]

Tags: Pay Per Click, Search Marketing // 2 Comments »

I don’t like getting the tube in London, being a born and bred Brightonian I find it confusing. The one upside however is tube advertising is in my opinion some of the most innovative in the world. This Orange ad caught my attention this week for its attempted use of offline/ search marketing integration.

photo credit: markhillary

Anyway, waiting at embankment I came across the latest Orange brand campaign 30 foot wide in front of me. I’d seen the TV ad and already though this was a pretty stupid campaign. The premise is Orange are somehow sponsoring a chap called Mark Beaumont who is apparently cycling around the world. (It actually turns out he’s lied- he’s cycling around different parts of the world in 7 stages and I presume getting planes between continents, also he’s taken over 6 months to do it so I presume he’s stopped for food and sleep which for me defeats the point entirely!!!)

[Read more →]

Tags: General Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Marketing // 1 Comment »

The social media bookmarklet has become a de-facto element in most new website designs. And while I love social media and think it can have some huge benefits for websites; I think including social bookmarklets like AddThis to a new web build by default is at best laziness and at worse symptomatic of a complete misunderstanding of how social media works.

From Flickr

So after I went off on a bit of rant about them in the office I thought I needed an experiment to prove my point. [Read more →]

Tags: Social Media // 12 Comments »

Optimising Pay Per Click accounts for KPIs can be a challenging task. Whether it be increasing traffic for the same budget, increasing the amount of leads generated by a campaign, or simply reducing the cost per lead of a given campaign, keyword and ad optimisation is a very important part of any SEM campaign that you should be undertaking on a (very) regular basis.

Now that’s a big mistake! (via flickr)

In order to “help advertisers present the most relevant ads to searchers”, Google has a wide range of reports and metrics that are the basis of any optimisation work. However, tired eyes and keyword blindness can lead you to include keywords in your PPC campaign that you never would have used had you had a double caramel latte from Toast by the Coast. [Read more →]

Tags: Pay Per Click // Add Comment »

There’s been hundreds if not thousands of articles written about link bait. I’d hazard a guess that there’s probably even more articles about how to write the bait than there is paid up pieces of link bait for clients.

credit: .martin
But with this post I’m going two try and write about something slightly different. With
link bait the content is hugely important. There are some great articles out there about how to write titles, about making your content scan-able even which images to use.

But before you get on flickr looking for creative commons images you need to come up with an idea. That’s the difficult bit, and that’s where I hope to help with some advice on how you can increase your chances of inspiration and when it does come along how you can make more of it. [Read more →]

Tags: Search Marketing // 5 Comments »

At the moment doom and gloom seems to surround the economy, whether or not search marketing budgets are going to fall remains to be seen though.
photo credit: Reenie-Just Reenie

We’ve had a few clients get more pragmatic with their spend; but generally it doesn’t seem as bad as everyone feared. Though that could easily change.

But with every negative situation there comes opportunities. And in the search sphere there are few you’d be mad not to take advantage of. [Read more →]

Tags: Search Marketing // 1 Comment »

As a few of you may have noticed ourselves and Patrick Altoft have been having a few experiments with the Google Olympic Doodle.

Well after our PPC experiment with a 1000 impressions in a minute I thought if we’d do a quick experiment to see if we could replicate Patrick’s success in the Google Blog search results for the huge traffic term of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

I’ll keep you updated on this post’s progress…

Tags: Search Marketing // 1 Comment »