Posts Tagged ‘Search Marketing’
Search Advertising Increases in uncertain times
The Global economy is in a down-turn. Mega-corporations are crashing. Currencies are slumping, and everywhere you turn, there is doom-and-gloom.
Despite this decline in global economies, it seems that online advertising is increasing, in the face of potential failure.
The Australian Internet Advertising Bureau suggests that 212 million dollars have been spent on online advertising in Australia alone during the first quarter of this financial year, growing 33% from the previous year.
This is an indicator of companies desire to attract new customers as revenues erode, and consumer confidence and spending falls.
It is also a testament to the faith that many companies now have in Search Marketing as a viable mechanism to attract customers, in uncertain times when accounting for every dollar is important, and measuring your success or failure is critical.
Search Advertising offers companies that peace of mind.
It is also important to remember that whilst Pay-Per-Click advertising can deliver a measurable and almost immediate return on investment, your dollars can often be squandered on higher numbers of clicks as customers are more price sensitive, and the fierce competition who are advertising in your space and increasing the cost of your bids to increase your customers.
Search King recommends to consider a two-pronged approach to search marketing, and that is to run PPC campaigns in the short-term, and a search engine optimisation project in the longer term, which should help attract customers, whilst lowering your spend in the months and years to come.
This article is brought to you by Search King.
StumbleUpon
Recently, we were reviewing the website usage logs of a newly registered website, and had found that within 4 days, there had been an amazing 700 unique visitors and over 2000 hits to the site.
This is a phenomenal number of hits for such a new website with little to no exposure, and so we began to investigate just where this traffic was coming from.
Our analysis found that most of the traffic was being referred from a website called StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a community-driven website that rates other webpages.
The concept is that you can use stumbleupon to find random internet pages and rate them. It compares your past ratings to that of “like minded people” who have similar usage trends to yourself to present you a page that you are likely to be interested in.
It also allows you to add and rate random pages which you quite literally stumble upon into the “stumbleupon” directory to be presented to “other like minded users”.
This has a few advantages over search results presented by SERPS, as each site is quality-rated by real humans, rather than being presented with a search result displayed by a search engine whose results may be manipulated.
This is an interesting website, and it demonstrates the power of social networking and other community driven websites that are capable of generating traffic, and also highlights that boosting traffic through search engine advertising and search engine optimisation needn’t be your exclusive focus for your online marketing strategy.
Check out stumbleupon.com or add the toolbar to your browser (support for firefox and internet explorer).
Google Trends
A new tool recently launched by Google, which is very useful for Search Engine Optimisation and Advertising is a tool called Search Trends:
This tool allows you to view historical search data related to key word searches performed by internet users dating back to 2004
Search Analysis - Google Trends
Google previously had a site similar to this which displayed only select popular search terms on an annual basis, and this report is referred to as the Google zeitgeist
This new Google Trends tool was released by Google last month and contains much more information, that has presumably been gathering data since 2004, launched now to to provide historical data.
This is a fantastic tool for SEO, as it allows you to perform search engine analysis to see what your target audience is searching for, and gage the popularity of certain key words, phrases or search terms which is indicated by the number of times the phrase has been searched for.
It’s great for narrowing down region-specific search results, by Country and can even State and Territory based results in some cases.
This is the tool that search engines optimisaton specialists have been waiting for. Book mark the site today.
Yahoo offer Free Online Advertising
Yahoo have been offering a limited run of free advertising accounts for it’s search marketing network.
The offer is worth $199 and if you’re curious about trying out PPC, or even if you are putting your PPC via Google, and always wondered what Yahoo’s search network was like, now is the perfect opportunity to give it a go Free * (check the Yahoo website for conditions).
This offer has been on rotation on foxtel of an evening over the past few months, and despite supposedly ending a few weeks ago according to TV, is still available as of August 28th 2008.
The deal:
- Go to http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com.au/tv to redeem
- You cannot redeem if you are already a member of Yahoo search marketing
- Signup, and enter the promo code supplied, and you get $199.00 for free
- Follow the setup proposal assistant
The catch:
You need to pay a $99 upfront fee, so the old saying rings true:”There is no such thing as a free lunch”. Even so, this is an offer worth checking out if you’re wanting to look into setting up a Pay Per Click Campaign with Yahoo.
Presumably this is to weed out tyre kickers and the like