What is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising? - It’s a way of paying to get to the top of Search Engine listings. (When we talk about Search Engines, Google is by far and away the most popular so we concentrate on that.) Whilst they’re placed adverts, they’re designed to look similar than natural search engine results, and despite what you may think many, many people do click on these ads. It’s massive, Google makes $20 billion a year profit from this but this comes from people running poorly managed campaigns. We’re confident you’ll get back more than what you put in to this area of marketing, if it’s run well.

It’s uniquely tangible - The fantastic and unique thing about PPC is it’s instantly measurable and changable, more than any other form of advertising. You can tweak and improve every day if you want to, and in no other form of advertising can you specifically and exactly target people that are search for the service you provide. Compare to advertising in a publication, instead of hoping someone reading the publication is looking for ‘web design and marketing gloucester‘, we can have our advert pop up when some searches specifically for ‘web design and marketing gloucester‘.

Selecting your keywords - Keywords are the trigger for your advert to appear on a persons computer, for example as shown in italics above. This is example is a ‘long tail keyword’, it basically presents better value and targeting to your campaign. Each keyword trigger costs a different amount, depending on the competition and number of searches for this keyword. For example ‘web design and marketing‘, without the geographical element will cost lots more because you’re competing on a national level. We maybe talking about 4p per click compared to a few pounds per click. We advise our clients to focus right in on ‘narrower’ (or longer tail) keywords to ensure the very best value. We can provide a report on words related to and around your business which shows the cost of various keywords and phrases.

Google v Content network ads - You may have seen on some websites, there are ‘adverts by google’. You can choose whether you want to appear on relevant, partner websites – or purely on Google. This may be relevant and useful to your business or not. Content network is a little more like traditional marketing, as you’re trying to ‘distract’ people rather than helping solve a persons search query. The key is to separate out. If in doubt, we’d advise to disable the Content Network.

Click Thru Rate (CTR) and quality score - Where and how often your ad appears is largely based on the budget you set for your adverts. If I set a £50 a month limit to my click thru costs, I will get approximately double the appearances of a competitor with a £25 monthly budget. However, it’s not quite as simple as that. Depending on your CTR, Google awards you a Quality Score, it uses as a measure the % of people seeing your ad and clicking on it. Changing, testing and reviewing your CTRs to increase them is a crucial part of making this marketing strategy work the hardest for your business. Being clever means you should be able to increase the CTR and reduce your costs.

Relevancy and landing pages - Google is clever. It also ranks your advert by checking your landing page and website for relevancy and uses this to score your advert. This is also reflective of a customers experience. Clearly, if someone clicks on our advert using the ‘web design and marketing‘ example, they want to be spoken to about that when they click through to your website. Various ads landing on the most appropriate pages is key, not only to improving your PPC campaign, but in converting visitors into customers.

Maximise, convert your website visitors - A PPC campaign is a very effective tool in getting more traffic to your website. The crucial element is then to make a sale from this visit. This requires fine tuning of your website, it’s headline, copy and the offer. We can help you independently look at your website and review it’s offer to make the most of your visitor a buyer.

See for yourself

We can set up, run and manage a Pay Per Click campaign for you. We can use our expertise to maximise these campaigns really benefit your business to save you time and hassle, for a small monthly fee. Compared to traditional advertising, we really do genuinely believe PPC provides a great value form of marketing and advertising.  We provide a monthly report so you can see exactly how your ad is performing and we’ll constantly suggest improvements.

The first thing to do is to ask us to produce a Keyword Analysis report for your business. We’ll provide this free and without obligation to continue – what have you got to lose? It’s a really useful way to get an idea of what people are searching for around your business and the services you provide, if nothing else.

We hope you’ll soon get used to it and know once you do you’ll see the benefits. Please shout if any usability issues and we’ll help you out.

There is a help facility (a ‘?’ in the top right once logged in) which gives a few more details.

Good luck getting used to your new and improved webmail facility!

Thomas Legal Group outside their Churchdown office

We’re pleased to announce the ongoing success of a highly recommended local solicitor customer of ours, with this Press Release;

A young, modern and expanding locally based solicitors firm – which has successfully extended its operations into London – is now returning to its roots with the opening of a fourth office  in Churchdown.

With offices already in Cheltenham, central London and Eastern Avenue, Gloucester, Thomas Legal Group has made a name for itself offering a range of specialist conveyancing, wills and probate services to clients throughout the south west of England. Since expanding into London, leading solicitors from the firm are regularly featured in national newspapers, such as The Sunday Times, providing weekly ‘Ask the Experts’ legal advice columns for its readers.

Simon Thomas, Managing Partner, explains: “I was brought up in Churchdown so I’m extremely pleased that the ongoing success of the firm allows us to return to my roots and provide modern and effective services from a new office in Churchdown. It’s our plain English, transparent and personal approach to the way we work that has proven so popular with our clients. Since opening our London office over a year ago, the business has gone from strength-to-strength enabling us to grow our team and the locations from which we operate.”

The opening of the Churchdown office will also enable Simon and his three fellow Partners – including local girl and now Partner, Victoria Hudson – to grow their teams with the appointment of senior Wills and Probate Solicitor Lorna Henderson, to oversee the new Churchdown branch. As a specialist in working with deceased’s estates, Lorna will be working alongside well-known solicitor, Alan Thompson, who recently joined the firm as a Consultant.

The ongoing expansion of the Cheltenham office has also seen experienced senior paralegal Pat Milton join the Group. As Thomas explains: “Securing the highly respected Pat Milton in addition to Alan Thompson and Lorna Henderson has been a real coup for the firm, enabling us to provide highly experienced and focused advice to our clients.”

You can visit their website at www.thomaslegalgroup.co.uk

We had a prize draw on our stand to win an hour of our design time, to which we had a great response. We are extremely pleased to announce our two winners.

• Holly Mills – Holly Mills Photography
• John Foster – Salescore Ltd

Congratulations to you both! Thanks to everyone who took part.

Its great to see so many creative businesses offering high quality products and services in our county, and credit must go to the GMG who work hard to provide support to local creative businesses.

Thank you to everyone who entered our design time competition – we’re making the draw on Monday and will announce the lucky winners on our website then. Watch this space!

Web designers have had issues with supporting various browsers, and in fact multiple versions of browsers, for many years now. When I refer to multiple versions, I am of course referring to Internet Explorer (IE). However there seems to be a light at the tunnel…

IE has its own unique way of rendering web pages, differing from that of Safari, Firefox et al. My experience has generally been that it prefers to interpret ‘padding’ in a different way to its counterparts, which can have an ‘interesting’ effect on carefully calculated web design layouts.

This has been part of the joy of any web designer, but has not been a show-stopper by any means. Techniques such as Tantek Çelik’s Box Model Hack provided a neat cross-browser ‘hack‘ using CSS to keep all the browsers happy and deliver web pages as the designer intended.

Problems with versions of IE are well documented and beyond the scope of this post. Many web designers have used hacks, such as the Box Model Hack, ‘conditional comments‘ to serve an alternative css style sheet just for specified versions of IE, or utilising php or javascript to serve different pages to the user.

Now lets get to the meat of this post. Do we stop supporting IE6 as both web designers and web users?

The incomplete standards support IE6 provides rapidly made it look inadequate after its launch in comparison to its competition. Developers are spending more and more time ensuring their web projects work in this ancient browser, and things are due to get more involved with the launch of IE8.

IE6 has not presented any major problems for us until recently. This week it came to our attention that users of IE6 were unable to visit the home page of our website, despite the fact that we tested it in all the major browsers as part of our relaunch. The reason: IE6 delivered an ‘Operation Aborted‘ error because it didn’t like the way ‘a javascript inside a <div> element tried to modify the <body> element’. Translated, this was a result of using a standards compliant method of inserting a Flash movie into a web page. Microsoft’s solution to this was to upgrade to IE8. Not quite the solution I had hoped for and pretty typical of Microsoft. What about all of our potential customers that use IE6? How can we realistically tell them to upgrade? The potential for serious loss of traffic and subsequent enquiries through our website could have been devastating. Not satisfied with the option of not supporting IE6, I decided to dig a little deeper…

It made me wonder why people are still using IE6 and what can we really do about it. After all it was launched in August 2001. The web has moved on considerably since then, and techniques and developments in code to enhance user experience rely on browsers that can support them. Some web designers have stopped supporting IE6 completely, creating scripts that deliver the visitor to their site with a message why they should upgrade, or what seems a popular trend (181,238,634 downloads at the time of writing), to install Firefox as their default browser. I came across a couple of posts in my search for a solution. This old post (16.07.08) by Chris Coyier of  CSS Tricks that discussed the very subject, and a more recent post on the website of .net magazine that documents the most recent movements in dropping support completely (for those with enough welly to make a change in behaviour).

It seems as though the big players have decided that the end of IE6 is nigh and are encouraging users to upgrade to IE8, better still Firefox, or Google Chrome (still not available for Mac).

Apple, Facebook, Digg and most recently YouTube have joined the drive to encourage a shift in browser preference, with Google having a vested interest with the launch of Chrome. Social networking websites, which in the past, may have been interpreted as an unproductive distraction to the workforce of larger organisations, are now used by the same firms for marketing purposes, so it would be fool hardy not to upgrade their browser preference.

Facebook serve a much degraded user experience, promoting a browser upgrade, Digg plan to stop support and YouTube (not surprisingly being owned by Google) are soon to stop supporting IE6 and encourage an upgrade (preferably to Google Chrome, if you have a PC of course).

The fact that these big players are warning users of IE6 that they will no longer be supported (or offered a much reduced service) and better still providing links to upgrade, can only do us a favour in reducing the number that use this deprecated browser.

We’ll just have to wait until these decisive moves have a positive effect and the number of users is minimal to drop support for this browser completely, until then, we’ll just have to continue extensive browser testing and creating standards compliant hacks, or worse, reducing the enhanced standards compliant features of our website designs.

Tools

To ensure our websites work in all browsers we:

Undertake extensive cross browser compatibility testing – we prefer IE Net Renderer when testing on a Mac
Download Firefox, Google Chrome or if you must, upgrade to Microsoft IE8 (you could do a lot better!)

This followed it being one of the main ‘latest news’ articles featured in last week’s printweek.com html email update and on their home page. Read their full story here.

If your business has a story, using PR can be a great and cost effective means of telling the public about it.

We’ll be there all day to discuss your marketing needs and answer any questions you may have about the best way to market your business in these tough times.

To find out more contact Holly Thomas at the GMG or visit: http://thegmg.org/diary/2009/9/18/gmg-village-fayre

We look forward to seeing you there!

The organisations aim is to promote and support the design industry in the South West to ensure its continued growth and development in the future.

Their key strategy is:

• Promoting the South West design to new markets
• Demonstrating design’s potential to contribute to quality and innovation in other sectors of the economy
• Targeting key gaps in design companies’ knowledge to improve business skills and development in the sector

For more information visit the websites: http://www.swdf.co.uk and http://gdn.org.uk/

You can view our profile at: http://gdn.org.uk/directory/absolute-creative-marketing