AdWords for Mobile provides mobile access to your account, key alerts and statistics as well as a facility to make quick changes to your AdWords settings even while on the move.

You have to customize your experience for your mobile device. To do this you should first log in from your desktop computer and choose the parts of your account that you want to monitor closely. You are able to set up custom alerts for key account events such as when your campaing reaches a certain threshold of your daily budget or to monitor when traffic drops significantly.  You can also set “saved filters” to flag your most important keywords and campaigns.

The interface was designed to access the essentials in your account by viewing and making basic edits to campaigns and keywords. If you need access any other areas of your account then you can switch to the desktop version of AdWords through a link at the bottom of the screen.

AdWords for Mobile is now the default mobile interface for a small percentage of English language advertisers, and Google will be enabling the feature for additional advertisers and languages in the coming weeks.

To try out AdWords for Mobile immediately, simply direct your Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre to http://adwords.google.com/dashboard/Dashboard

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 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.

For many, that is where it ends. Well, make no mistake, any kind of online initiative involving the three just mentioned is invaluable, but most miss the value of ongoing marketing initiatives. Fingers may be pointed to shortened purse strings, marketing budgets being slashed or even the state of the current economy due to the “recession”, but I think there may be more to it than that.

I think it has more to do with a complete understanding of the channel or rather, a lack thereof……

To illustrate my point, let’s look at a perfect case study.

Somewhere late in 2006 a television commercial was aired about a housewife baking with Stork products while talking about blogging. You’d probably say, “So, what’s the problem?”

Well, if you were promoting your products and you’re talking about blogging, shouldn’t you support the message of the TV Ad by actually having a product blog? Needless to say, there was no blog for Stork products or even a company blog. This left many consumers confused and the opportunity for Unilever to capatilize on this campaign was lost. There was no correction or even a follow up after this.

One year later longtail got involved and discussions began to create a social networking site for the Stork Brand, called foodcrEATions. This was a much talked about topic once it went live in June of 2008 (see Stork Comes Round, Foodcreations, Social networking for chefs? and SA’s First Foodie Social Networking Site by Stork) and apart from just the social aspect other marketing initiatives like PPC, SEO, SMM and WebPR were implemented to strengthen the Brand online.

Great success was achieved in just two months and the site recorded 12000 visitors and 135000 pageviews with each visitor remaining on the site for an average of 7.5 minutes viewing 11 pages. A total of 1300+ active registered users were captured.

5 months later after continued SEO, WebPR, PPC, Social Media Marketing, associated online campaigns and a foodcrEATions newsletter, the site hit just over 20000 visits and a database of over 4000 users.

What happened after that was tragic and resulted in a decrease in all areas of visibility. After November all ongoing eMarketing initiatives were halted and already 4 months later the result of that can be seen.

Site visits have plummeted by 50% to only 10 000 in the last month with very little activity on the site in terms of new content being created.

To longtail, watching your “creation” die a slow death has been frustrating and a feeling of helplessness was amplified by a lack of interaction on the site.

Public interest of another kind has also been stirring with some Internet Marketing specialists using foodcrEATions as a case study to illustrate my point that ongoing initiatives are a crucial part of your marketing strategy. Doing things on a once-off basis is wonderful, but forgetting to continue is a critical error.

In the online digital world we call the internet, change is a reality. It is constantly happening and your perfect number one ranked listing in Natural Search Results quickly falls off page one or your outdated site is quickly shunted and replaced with a more up to date source of inspiration.

Nowadays one cannot afford to not continue tweaking your site, test whether it works, create new content or promote your product offering in a new way or format. You cannot afford to stop communicating with consumers out there who is looking for you, wanting exactly what you are offering.

To regain trust and interest is harder than the original acquisition and this is the sad fact that so many marketers forget, so please keep even the basics going and don’t lose complete credibility with your loyal users!

In case you missed what SearchWiki is, it lets you customize your Google Web Search results. In other words, you can delete search results you do not like, promote the ones you do like to the top of the listing and even comment on them. (Read my full blog post on “The change in Search and Organic Search Rankings“.)

Like I said above, with this test of SearchWiki on Paid Ads, you are simply allowed to remove ads. You cannot promote or comment on Ads as with the organic results and you can only do this if you are logged in with your Google Account details.

Is there cause for panic?
All of a sudden the Search World has been thrown upside down (yet again) and many have been asking questions about how this will affect Quality Scores, how much abuse this might generate, will it affect ad variations for that domain for “the same search in the future” and also questions about how much users will really engage with this.

I don’t believe there is any cause for panic. The Pay Per Click (PPC) model has for a long time been “the” mainstream source of revenue for Google and personally and I do not believe that Google will willingly hijack the success of one of their most profitable tools.

Second to that I believe that Google are very aware of how it might affect Advertiser confidence as a whole. Advertisers pay a lot of money to Google to advertise their products and many do have confidence in the PPC model. Google has worked hard to establish trust in their product but a permanent feature like SearchWiki on Paid Ads may damage or dent that confidence.

Finally, I believe that Google is simply testing to see how 1. The Search Marketing World reacts (I have no proof) and 2. how the general Google user responds to changes in SERP’s. I am still of the belief that Google is continueing in their ideal to deliver the most relevant results to the end-user.

Oh, before I forget, some say that this is only being tested in the US, but I am seeing the little “X” next to Paid Search Ads via multiple accounts from my location here in South Africa. Guess Google is testing global market reaction?

How long will the test last and what will Google learn from it? I don’t know, we’ll just have to wait to find out!

When website owners consider ways to market their sites on the Web, the most common Search Marketing methods they choose are often Banner- or Pay-Per-Click Advertising. These methods allow advertisers to calculate the Return on Investment within a number of days after going live with their campaign. In addition to this, live tracking tools allow site owners to monitor Site Visitors, Cost per Conversion and Click-through Rates to their site with a click of a button.

I honestly think that this is not an entirely new trend but certainly one that has gained much momentum and will continue to gain even more. We find that people are finely tuned-in to see a ROI in much quicker time and with the help of various free online tools available to the Internet-savvy site owner, control is now in their hands. The sliding scale has tipped over from marketing companies telling/advising clients what to do to clients telling the marketing company exactly what they want (even adding instructions on how it must be done).

It is true that in a world where everything has become “instant”, there is a new reality that people do not have the patience to wait for results anymore. We have become used to and are expecting to see immediate results. This expectancy has shifted over to Online Advertising. Website owners not only want instant visitors by using the quickest methods possible, but they want to see results and conversions and they want to also track the effectiveness of their campaigns, all at the same time.

Like I mentioned, the weight has shifted, thus, from a Search Marketing perspective, digital companies now not only have to deal with a fast paced industry where the metrics are constantly changing, but they also have to meet the higher customer demand. Clients are expecting better results, higher relevancy, bigger profitability margins and increased performance, which I believe is something Search Marketing companies have adjusted to sufficiently to deliver quality results, not only to meet the needs of result driven clients, but to even exceed client expectation.

The key here is that Digital Companies should not fall back on trying to advise the clients on what to do, but to embrace the fact that clients mostly know what they want and to simply then provide a strategy that supports and improves the client objectives. Any company should be able to adjust if they are open-minded to change.

For this very reason, they seldom look at long-term solutions and never think of the value that copywrited content or optimized website pages offer them for the long term. Search Engine Optimisation is probably one of the least thought-of methods to use for online marketing.

However, it is a very effective, proven way of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Much more patience is required when doing SEO, but it will deliver the desired results.

As mentioned above, SEO is not only a proven Marketing method, but a very effective method to improve volume and quality of traffic to any website. Apart from patience and the understanding of SEO implementation, regular testing and tweaking is required which is why it takes much longer than 24 hours to see your efforts pay off. The end result is just as rewarding as that of seeing conversions come through from PPC or Banner referrals. The trick is knowing that it is not only about getting more quality visitors to the site, but understanding how to convert these visitors into customers.

Search Engine Optimisation works when applied correctly and the key is that it needs to be applied in a transparent way with no shortcuts taken. More importantly Search Engine Optimisation can work quickly, effectively and drive massive amounts of traffic to the desired site.

There is always a right way and a wrong way to do things. Perhaps it is just the way I am, but transparency and honesty is the core of everything I do and this must be the foundation from which I function. So, from my dealings with clients, colleagues, site visitors and even search engines, this is the metric that stays constant for me. That is why (again, for me) SEO should be applied in the correct manner and be done without trying to take shortcuts. Knowing the risks of taking shortcuts and knowing what the right and wrong things are and how to implement or when not to implement them, is important.

In conclusion, it is perhaps not a question of whether you are considering Search Engine Optimization as a marketing tool. All Search Marketing companies will tell you that it is worth doing it. It isn’t even a question of whether you are doing PPC or Banner advertising because these are equally important and effective.

Perhaps it is more a question of how you implement any of the above, how you engage with your client and what the message is that you want to give people about you and about your site.

Perhaps we should start there and then decide which method is best to market ourselves or our business.

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.

I personally don’t follow too much of US Politics, Presidential Election Campaigns and their respective efforts to lead their respective parties, but what I did find interesting was that there has been a significant change in marketing efforts toward the Internet with a new focus to online digital solutions.

Clearly, advisors to the Barack Obama 2008 campaign knew how much influence voters (as Internet consumers and end-users) could have on the outcome of the elections, so what did they do?, they took advantage of “Voter-generated content” (end user-generated content) such as shared Videos on YouTube and blogs to secure Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential nomination.

Not only that, they also used Pay-Per-Click Advertising on Google to achieve this. This was confirmed by senior editor of ClickZ, Kate Kaye, saying that Clinton spent far less online than Obama in an interview by BNN (Business Network News). She explained that the Barack Obama 2008 campaign used pay-per-click advertising on Google for different purposes than the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

So there you go, not only does it prove that online Marketing works when used effectively but it also indicates that there is much more confidence in people’s opinions and interactions online than ever before. We need to take notice of online conversations and opinions and not only monitor it but use it to our advantage. This is what the US government started doing, shouldn’t we?

Here is the video of the BNN interview with Kate Kaye.

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.

Now called the Site and Category Exclusion tool, and it allows you to exclude certain categories of webpages from your content network campaigns in addition to excluding individual sites.

This change should make it easier for advertisers to keep their ads out of sites where conversions remain low. You don’t have to repeatedly exclude sites from the same category any longer.

Head on over to the Inside AdWords blog, for the latest on Category exclusion.

To keep it short, here is the basic gist of the session:

Why advertise online? (UK stats)
60% of UK households have internet
10% growth in Internet households in last 3 years

• users spend +- 2 hours to shop online

• changing face of advertising: from outdoor > press > radio > tv > online display > seach ads > blogs
• from generic push to personalised pull
• 25 million Google search customers
• Google advertising network is the biggest advertising network in the UK – 1 million daily ad exposures
• you have full control over your ads
• you can target geographic locations
• relevant ads gain higher rankings
• key principle
  quality score = relevance
  higher ranked ads get more clicks
  Ranking = Max CPC x Quality score
• Good quality score leads to a low Minimum CPC
• the stronger the quality score, the more clicks for less
• when clicks count as most relevant, quality score goes up – the more relevant the ads, the more users will click and continue to click
• include strong call to action – book now fro instance.