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The Basics

The basic principle behind Adwords is quite simple. Lets say you are selling Barney Oven Gloves on your E-commerce site. You setup a campaign within Adwords to target the keywords “Barney Oven Glove” Now whenever someone searches for those keywords via Google your Text advertisement will appear on the screen with the associated search results as a sponsored link.

Different keywords however are more popular than others, therefore you need to bid high enough to meet the reserve in order to be placed on the page. If you want to be given the priority position on the page you need to bid higher then all your competitors.

Each time a user clicks on your ad they are taken to your predesignated landing page and you are charged the rate you bid for the click through rate.

Now not every user that clicks on your ad is going to result in a sale or whats called a conversion. The percentage of people who actually are converted to a sale balanced against how many users actually clicked on the ad is called the Conversion Rate. Your Goal is to get your conversion rate as high as possible but typically it can be as low as 1% so for every 100 people that click on your ad 1 person decides to buy.

So if your Oven Gloves sell for 10 dollars and it takes on average 100 clicks throughs to secure a sale and the rate you are paying for each click is .05 then you are making a 5 dollar profit on the campaign per sale. as .05×100 = 5

Now if you could increase your conversion rate to 1 in 50 then you would make a profit of 7.50 you get the picture.

Basic Secret to Success

You have only a few characters per ad to make an impact so every word counts and more than you think. You need to start thinking completely from the customers point of view. Google loves relevant content  so you need to make your ad as relevant as you can to the search terms they relate to. Make your search terms as focused as possible don’t try and cover the whole kitchen ware market, you will end up with loads of impressions and no click through or worse click through that cost you money where the user has no real intention of purchasing.

In Adwords you can rotate different ad copy to test which works best. A simple change in wording can result in 20% increase in sales without costing you a penny more in advertising. That’s how important getting the right copy can be.

It’s simple to get started open an account at http://www.google.com/adwords and start experimenting. You can set limits on your daily budgets so you don’t have to worry about making a big loss while you experiment.

If you would like us to set Adwords up for you and run a calibrated campaign specific to your needs don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

Just finished reading a great article from smashingmagazine.com called the Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging. The author highlights some straightforward truths about corporate blogging and the misconceptions we sometimes have about our Blog and how to use it. Definetely worth a read and a bookmark.

There is wealth of information on site promotion these days and sometimes it can be hard to know where to start if you’re new to marketing yourself online.

Over the last few years we have helped a lot of our clients drive significant traffic to their sites, here are just a few tips to get started.

1. First of all in order to optimize your marketing and see what’s working and what not you some kind of traffic analytics software for your site. I recommend Google Analytics . It’s free comprehensive and very easy to use and setup. Analytics will track all the users that arrive at your site; where they came from, what link brought them to your site, how long they spent there, and where they left. This is the truly amazing part of the Web Marketing no other form of marketing will give you such a quantitve review of your visitors and their activity. The downside is it can become quite addictive and if you’re not careful you will be checking your stats every other minute you have.
2. Make sure you have a strong domain name and stick to it. Your domain name is a big part of your brand and all your hard work and marketing goes to build the equity of that brand and domain name. If your site is hosted via someone else make sure you have full rights to it and steer clear of free hosting such as www.yourdomainname.tripod.com. If you want advice on picking the best domain name this article is a great start.
3. Take advantage of Pay Per Click Advertising like Google adwords. Depending on your niche the cost of advertising can be quite cheap and can be targeted to specific countries and sites.
4. Good design is important. If you have an ungly website, redesign. Don’t launch something you are not happy with. Your visitors take under 4 seconds to sum up your site and make a decision about whether they want to move on or not, first impressions last. Keep the site look consistent through out.
5. Keywords are the significant words that a user types into google or any other search engine when they are looking for something i.e. Dublin Hotels. Research the important keywords that are related to your site and brand and keep them in a handy glossary. Keep this glossary in mind when you are writing content for your siteand make sure to include these keywords. Do it naturally however as some search engines will penalise you for overuse of keywords which will result in a negative ranking rather than improving it.
6. Setup your site with Google Webmaster Tools . These tools let google know how your site is setup and where the content is via a sitemap this makes sure it can be indexed easily and is faster to find.
7. Make sure your Web Designer or Developer is using good web standards to build the site, this helps make the site accessible to the widest audience possible.
8. Make sure to add a signature with your site address on all your emails and ensure to include the address on all print materials.
9. Content is king, think seriously about blogging about your business area. Fresh content keeps visitors coming back for more and you can establish yourself as an industry expert.
10. Contribute to social networks like Facebook, Flickr, Myspace and Twitter e.t.c but remember don’t shamelessly promote yourself this can have a negative effect.

Hope some of these help. If you have any you would like to contribute I’d love to hear about them.

I’ve recently come across a new hosting provider called Site5. I’m quite slow to change providers as it’s very time consuming to migrate sites between servers and there is a steep learning curve associated with learning a new Hosting platform. Site5 however were offering unlimited bandwidth and storage so I started using them as a backup server.

Having been a customer of theirs for several months now I have to admit I’m really happy with the level of service and add ons provided with the accounts. So next week I’m going to be migrating all of my sites over. This is a heads up and preemptive apology for any temporary down time that might occur over the next few days.

If you have not already seen the news this morning, all the major stations are carrying a story about a massive security flaw that effects the Microsoft Internet Explorer Browser.

For some time now Hackers have been exploiting a workaround in the applications security to steal and misuse sensitive password and user information.

Microsoft at this time says it is working on a solution but has not offered a deadline for its release. In the mean time I would urge anyone out there using Internet Explorer ( versions affected 5.5 - 8 ) to switch to one of the many other browsers available. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari or Opera.

I recently switched to a Mac for development and design purposes and this news only cements my decision more I’m happy to be clear of Microsoft. Does this mean as web designers we can stop supporting IE6 yet?

The Lisbon Treaty site I designed and developed for RTE, http://www.rte.ie/lisbon Has just been nominated for a Golden Spider Award in two categories. Best E-Government Website and Best Digital Media Website.

Nice One! Hope you will join me in crossing your fingers. The awards night is on the 18th of November.

I’ve recently been introduced to a very clever suite of applications called Portable Apps.

It’s basically a mini operating system that you can run on an Ipod, USB key or any external drive (I’m running my version on a 2 Gig USB key).

If you’re like me you probably get frustrated at the fact that every internet cafe or computer you use does not have the comfort and familiarity of your own settings and shortcuts.

Portable Apps allows you to run applications such as Firefox (with all your personal passwords, settings and plug ins) Mozilla Thunderbird for email and a host of other convenient little applications.

I’m currently experimenting with a setup I hope to use for web development on the fly:

• Firefox plugin - FireFTP
• Firefox plugin - Web Developer Toolbar
• Firefox plugin - Colorzilla
• Firefox plugin - Firebug
• Notepad + + for Code editing
• Gimp for image editing

I’m also running the XAMPP apache server setup on the usb key with several of the current sites I’m working on, So I can save and upload local copies as I go.

If anyone else out there is experimenting with a similar setup I’d love to hear your thoughts.

With the launch of OpenSocial the flood gates have opened for the mass development of mini platform applications for popular social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Orkut to name a few.

These mini applications which are available for installation through a users profile page, offer a unique marketing opportunity and a channel in which to engage and target a precise market.

Companies can have a viral application developed to indirectly promote themselves through a clever user experience, or sponsor a previously developed application which is related to their demographic.

However it’s important to stress that for an application to be successful you must adhere to the moral and ethical rules of the network. These are not imposed by the network administrators but by the users themselves.

Early applications provided a negative user experience and proved to be just crude advertising vehicles. This kind of behavior not only resulted in the user deleting the application but also damaged many brand reputations.

It pays to concentrate on a concept that is not shamelessly aimed toward brand promotion but provides a valuable user experience and has viral potential.

Of course this is easier said then done. Many developers are turning to an Alexa style stats site called Adonomics which is dedicated to the Facebook platform. Adonomics provides a stock-market-style analysis of popular applications and gives deep analysis of the most popular trends.

While the true potential of Facebook marketing is yet to be seen, great opportunity exists to develop some truly immersive and creative brand experiences through these platforms.

Domain Tools and articles about domains. Another classic round-up from Smashing Magazine this one is old but is a great resource to be bookmarked. If you’re researching the best domain name for your company it’s a “don’t miss”

The nice guys over at the Interactive Advertising Bureau have published a great bite sized report on Digital Video Advertising (you can download it here). The report gives a general overview of video advertising metrics and delivery methods. Well worth a read.

If you’re in a hurry, jump to page 7 for a breakdown of delivery methods and page 10 for a concise business overview.