PPC advertising is probably the largest breakthrough in marketing!  We have put together our Top 5 Tips so you can get the best out of PPC. Limit your adgroup size to 10 keywords max. Use Adwords rules to prevent overspend. Test, test, test... Continually split test adverts. Match budget to seasonality. Pause keywords that don't deliver leads or revenue.

The key to every successful business lies within great marketing. Even if you sell a wonderful product, or offer a top notch service, you won't succeed if no one knows about it.  Traditionally, businesses have been constrained to traditional forms of marketing. They include advertisements published in the newspapers, TV adverts, or even the distribution of flyers. They are traditionally more expensive, putting them out of reach for most small businesses, especially if they are just starting out. That's where hiring an online marketing agency comes into play. Content marketing is a much cheaper than conventional forms of advertising. For example, blogging on a particular subject topic can make you an established expert in your field, boosting your credibility among potential customers. This will help you to build your brand name, and is critical for your long term success. If you choose to go with paid forms of advertising, you can easily track your Return on Investment (ROI) on your advertising campaigns with established services such as Google Adwords. This will allow you to generate quality leads at a much cheaper rate. Hiring a digital marketing agency does not necessarily mean that you have to choose one form of advertising over another. In truth, you should combine both of them to give you the best results.  Let's say you own a dental clinic. You can advertise your services in your local newspaper to draw in customers, and give out flyers to attract customers within the area.  At the same time, you should establish a presence on the web, creating your own website so that potential customers can learn more about your clinic at the convenience of their own homes. You can hire an online marketing agency to help promote your clinic through social media. For example, they can create and run a Facebook page for you so that your patients can keep in touch with you. You can even offer your patients special discounts or deals to reward them for their loyalty.  You can also establish yourself as the expert in a particular treatment to by writing guests posts on blogs in that field or by starting you own website to teach people about a certain topic.  The possibilities are truly endless.  So, don't be drawn into the debate about whether online marketing or traditional forms of marketing are better. You should instead leverage on both to help take your business to the next level.  

If you are looking to take your business to the next level, than you should consider hiring a digital marketing agency. If your brick and mortar business does not have an online presence, than you risk being left behind by your competitors. An online marketing agency will ensure that you remain relevant to your consumers. This is especially important if you hope to cater to young consumers. What You Should Look For: When you hire someone to establish your presence online, you need to find a company that is familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google has more than a billion unique visitors using it each month, far more than other search engines such as Microsoft's Bing or Yahoo. A seo agency will help make the necessary on site and off site optimizations to ensure that you rank highly on Google for your desired search terms. Before you contact an agency, you should have a good idea of the services you need. The most common services that most business owners need are: Design of Website On Site & Off Site Optimization Content Creation Monthly Maintenance Search Engine Ranking These are all common services that a well established SEO Agency should provide.  When contacting them, you also need to set an appropriate budget that you are willing to spend. Most agencies charge an upfront cost to create your website and rank it on Google, and a monthly fee to maintain it.  You should also ask your agency whether they provide support for PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing. Ranking your website on the different search engines can take time. Paid advertising represents a quick, cost effective way to drive targeted leads to your business. The great thing is that advertising online is much cheaper than conventional forms of advertising. Besides that, the leads that you generate are much more targeted as they are already searching for your services. Final Thoughts: Maintaining an online presence is essential if you want to your business to succeed. It can mean the difference between success and failure. Make sure that you budget the right amount of money to hiring a good digital marketing agency. It will definitely help your business in the long run.

We are proud to announce the launch of a brand new brand and eCommerce website for Gardening Specialists, YouGarden. The branding project has been a key piece of work for EAOM, with YouGarden utilising a strong multi channel marketing campaign from launch, allowing our work to be seen UK wide throughout the National Press, Web and Television. To supplement the branding work, EAOM have also developed a new eCommerce website for YouGarden, which incorporates a significant amount of digital media to help the sales proposition. The website has been developed to supplement the online ads that are running through the National Media with the overall objective of gaining high conversion rates on consolidated offers. So far, the website has been a roaring success. The traffic drive has been helped by online marketing campaigns run by EAOM, including PPC and SEO, whilst direct traffic generated from a significant off the page campaign has also aided the traffic through the website. EAOM’s parent company, Exact Abacus, has also developed the main back office software which is responsible for the stock control, order processing, distribution, purchasing and accounting functions of the business. YouGarden are also operating a weekly slot on the TV network Bid.TV. In the coming months, YouGarden will be launching a number of white label versions of the YouGarden website in the coming months which will be utilising the 3ex.net platform, with the creative managed by EAOM.

The second installment in a three part series from EAOM's Head of Search, John Trimble, which explores the creation of effective pay per click adverts. [More]

Google has recently been accused of over promoting is own service and all too often this comes inform of an image advert for their prime revenue driver Google AdWords. Whatever you think of Google ethics the bottom line of advertising on this scale is that even more businesses will start using their Advert platform and as such there will be more competition for first page positions resulting in means higher CPC (Cost Per Click) bids. So with Google Adwords CPC’s increasing across the board, great ad copy has become more important than ever. Because of this I’ll be exploring the basics of writing a great pay-per-click (PPC) advert in a three part blog post series. In this the first part I’ll provide advice on how to research your advert correctly, I will then cover the fundamentals of writing an effective advert in part 2, concluding with split testing in part 3. Easy Advert Research Advert position and quality are playing are increasing important part in generating a suitable ROI but all too often many advertisers get this aspect of their PPC campaigns wrong and miss out on the all-important click. For many PPC marketing managers’ great ad copywriting is key, the beginnings any successful advert starts with the correct research. We’ve broken down this research process into 3 easy to follow steps: Keyword research:Great ad copy focuses on the most significant keywords in your AdGroup, These keywords will be the main drivers of revenue or conversions, failing that you can use clicks as a metric to define which keywords are important. Competition & Market Research (Who, What and Where):Having a deep understanding of your competition and market is a crucial part of the ad copy writing process as it allows you to create adverts that stand out and target your audience effectively. When analysing your market and competitors you should contemplate the subsequent factors: Who is your audience?Are you targeting expensive luxury products with a long buying cycle or are you targeting the quick sale with low-value, high volume products? Take ‘Office Furniture’, your target audience could be highly price focused SME owners, in this instance you want to focus on call to action and price-focused ad text. Conversely if you marketing luxury products like ‘Design Watches’ a single sentence over both advert description lines may convey your advertising message more effectively. What do competitors' ads look like? What USP (Unique Selling Point) are other advertisers focusing on? Are they focusing on benefits like free delivery or low prices and discounts/sales. Should you be offering the similar USP as other companies it may not be worth mentioning them if all your competitors are doing the same thing. Making your advert standout is key to generating a good click-through rate. When looking at the search result for "office desk" it can be noted that many advertisers are focusing on discounts or just ‘Low Prices’ and none are pushing prices in their adverts. In this example, mentioning the price of your lower-priced office desk item in your ad text may bring better click-through rates than your competitors' by ads helping your advert stand out. Where does your product sit in the market? Is it the cheapest in its market or is it a luxury item? Is it a similar product or service to that of your competitors? Understanding these factors are vital when deciding on whether you can use your product's price as its USP. If your service or product is more expensive when compared to those of competing advertisers then you should not include a price as your USP. Pricing may be a motivating factor, but if your price is not the lowest and your markdown or sale does not provide the greatest financial value to buyer, then opting to promote your other USP’s may result in a better click through rate.

The 2012 Olympic Games are now fast approaching, having originally felt like an eternity away back on 6th July 2005. Many companies will be looking to capitalise on the world looking in on England, and will be hoping to piggy back on the Olympics for their own awareness and profits. However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) bring with them one of the most strict and heavily enforced set of trademark restrictions, sponsorship and marketing rule sets in the world. [More]

With the major global markets all suffering in recent weeks and with many economic and business commentators predicting that the UK and other leading countries are facing the prospect of a ‘double-dip’ recession, the inevitable scrutiny of business expenditure and cost cutting measures has begun. Therefore marketing budgets are under much more scrutiny via both the online and offline channels. [More]

For many PPC marketing managers the merging of Yahoo! and Bing’s natural and paid search results is a blessing in more than one way [More]