eMarketing Trends|Verbal Acrobatics & Graphic Gymnastics

Congratulations to two of our team members, Kerry-Leigh Stevens and Mangosuthu Malinga, who succesfully passed the Google Adwords Professionals (GAP) exam.

As specialists in online strategy and e-marketing, Virtuosa recognises the need to provide credibility and we are proud to say that Virtuosa is now an Accredited Adwords Company – this means that we are officially qualified by Google to advertise online.

What this means for Virtuosa clients:

• Clients are assured of receiving expert PPC services from qualified Google Adwords Professionals;
• With more than one Adwords Professional in the Virtuosa team, clients are guaranteed of even better creative ideas for online business strategy;
• Virtuosa receives insights into future Google developments which allow us to understand and timeously implement trends effectively;
• Virtuosa will have access to Google beta testing of new tools to understand and participate in the development;
• Virtuosa has direct communications with the Google International team as well as exclusive previews of new product launches;
• Virtuosa has access to Google Market Intelligence on best practice within various industries that we operate within

Find out more about Virtuosa’s Paid Search Marketing services.

The topic says it all… the upcoming Journal of Marketing’s Breakfast Debate moderated by Jeremy Maggs is sure to be an interesting event. The panel that will participate consists of a variety of well known and exciting individuals in the online marketing arena: Read the rest of this entry »

Virtuosa is currently looking for an Online Marketing Manager to join our amazing team to help drive business and revenue strategy for our clients.

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We are looking for a PPC Specialist/Search Marketer to join our team permanently in Fourways Johannesburg.

The primary focus of this position is to set up, implement, maintain, analyse and report on Pay Per Click services.

Duties, requirements and further details can be found here, PPC Specialist/Search Marketer.

This is an update on the latest trends in Global Search. eMarketer’s latest report named Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics says that in the realm of search marketing budgets, SEO budgets will increase in the next five years, while paid search budgets will decline relative to the overall marketing budgets for companies.

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I just wrote about Personalized Search and specifically SearchWiki a few days ago and alas, Google surprises us with another twist to the tale. They are testing SearchWiki on Google Adwords, allowing searchers who are logged in to remove (delete) Paid Ads from the SERP’s.

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In the latest press release distributed on BizCommunity, longtail eMarketing eluded to the fact that as a result of website owners wanting faster results and quicker return on their investments, they are looking at PPC and Banner Advertising rather than SEO when they want to market their website on the Web. Let’s look at some excerpts from the article with extra commentary on these.

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Even though we live in a fast paced and virtual world we are still very limited in our way of thinking in order to retrieve and obtain information. I just had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Stafford Masie from Google South Africa at the Lowe Bull Group office in Johannesburg. I was not the only one, but all of us were equally blown away by what Google actually has to offers its users, Advertisers and individuals in the Media world.

I have to mention that longtail previously invited Stafford to speak on Google’s involvement in South Africa at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange which I was not able to attend, so the following are my impressions taken from his latest presentation. This is in the particular order of randomness.

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In a recent blog How the Internet is affecting (y)our world?, I made mention of how the “Interent has shaken up the US Elections”. Another article on this topic caught my eye this morning which made for further interesting reading.

The article, written by Greg Jarboe, asks the question whether the more seasoned Hillary Clinton was out-Googled by the more search savvy Barack Obama for the 2008 US Presidential Campaign.

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Google has officially announced that the load time of your PPC Ad landing page affects keywords’ Quality Scores.

As of 18 June, Google is incorporating the page load time factor into your keywords’ Quality Scores.

“Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.”

Google is doing this for two reasons:

1. First, they want consumers to have the best experience when clicking on a Ad (they don’t want consumers to wait a long time for landing pages to load) and;
2. Second, they want to help you improve your conversion rate (slow loading pages are more likely to abandoned and will hurt your conversion rate)

The inclusion of the load time factor by Google will most certainly help you improve conversion rates on your active Ads, but more important, it provides you with the opportunity to offer consumers the best possible experience when interacting with your brand or product.

How do you improve your page load time?
Google Adwords is able to re-evaluate your page load time on a regular basis and should you make significant improvements to your landing page’s load time, you should see a better Quality Score and lower minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids.

To find out more, go to the AdWords Help Center to learn more about load time and landing page quality.