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 // Add 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 // Add 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 »

At Ai Digital we’ve been relaunching our usability and conversion marketing services and I’ve been thinking a lot about how usability best practice and SEO go hand in hand. For me generally the 2 go together like peas and carrots, they’re both based on the guiding principle of making a better site.

photo credit: tashmahal

However at times what’s best for the user doesn’t always seem to be what’s best for the search engine and vice versa so compromises have to be made. I’ve gone over here some of the most common flash points between usability and SEO best practice I see.

[Read more →]

Tags: Search Marketing // 15 Comments »

The Olympics are currently captivating us all. The Opening Ceremony was an amazing display of lights and colors, and medals have already started being distributed to the Olympians. However, the Olympics are so captivating, that many (every) search marketer has missed out on an Olympic opportunity to generate fast and targeted traffic to their site.For about 4 days now, Google.co.uk has been adorned by lovely Google Doodles about the Beijing 2008 Olympics - these logos change everyday according to the daily discipline:

If you click through this Doodle, you will be taken to a page which is simply a SERP for “Beijing 2008 Olympic Games“. This page displays various news results, and the latest news on Olympic events. It also display links to blogs, photos… But no PPC ads! [Read more →]

Tags: Pay Per Click, Search Marketing // 11 Comments »

I have plenty of time for good old fashioned link building, I bang the drum quite heavily for link bait and other types of social media marketing; but for a lot of clients they are never quite going to compete with the success rate of a well thought-out link building campaign.

There are two time consuming elements to link building; deciding which sites to look at for potential links and contacting them.

The first can be alleviated through tools. In fact Simon one of our internal team is beavering away at what could quite possibly become one of the best white hat link building tools at the moment.

photo credit: Sune Frack

You can save time on the second by implicitly knowing whether a website is worth contacting. A lot of that becomes gut feel after a while but if you’re introducing a trainee or client on a course to link building what should you tell them to look for.

That’s where this short list of eight metrics comes in handy. Some can be assessed numerically which certainly helps beginners understand what a good link is and what isn’t. Over time they’ll develop that link builders’ sixth sense but in the mean time gives them a great yard stick to measure with. [Read more →]

Tags: Search Marketing // 1 Comment »

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is marketed as the best possible way of measuring your return on investment , you cannot question this. Where else can you see exactly where people have come from how much they paid to get there and what they done (bought something , contacted you etc). They key to establishing your ROI is with reporting.
The Google Adwords reporting tool is a huge asset to PPC management and is not bettered by any other PPC advertising programme (in my opinion). However I’ve noticed that when taking data from a scheduled report whether it be daily weekly or monthly that the date that is generated is not always factual.

[Read more →]

Tags: Pay Per Click // 3 Comments »