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  1. Innovative Advertising Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Fred Roed February 17, 2009 1 comment

    I thought this was very interesting – At World Wide Creative, we struggle with “banner blindness” on the media placement campaigns that we run. The answer is really to think creatively about the delivery, and so I read Dave Duarte’s blog with a smile on my dial. This is exactly the kind of thing we’re looking at for our client’s campaigns – it’s a useful way of aggregating content on the ad to make the ad more compelling, less intrusive and more authentic. Read Further

  2. The dangers of over-reliance on PPC Posted in Digital Strategy, Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk August 12, 2007 1 comment

    The dangers of over-reliance on PPC

    Pay per click is fantastic for so many companies but as I say to clients, never rely solely on that as a way of generating business. This became evident yesterday with a client who now has a big issue to address, having ignored that advice … Read Further

  3. Complain and ye shall receive Posted in Digital Strategy, Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk May 16, 2007

    Amazing! After years of fighting with Google, I’ve finally got something good to say about them. I like to think it’s their customer focus but in reality it was probably their realisation that I manage over 1M of budgets for clients and the clients were getting mighty peed off with the way Google are dictating. Read Further

  4. What’s so great about Pay-Per-Click? Posted in Digital Strategy, Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk March 25, 2007 3 comments

    Spirit_of_staircase

    Since the topic is about Pay-Per-Click, I thought I would share this story with you.

    The other day, I was trying to educate a client
    about some of the amazing ways that technology could assist the
    marketing effort of her burgeoning company.

    The question was posed:
    Whats the most important reason why we should spend our money on
    Pay-Per-Click?

    What a question. Not that easy to answer especially when in a crunch meeting just before budget time.

    I stumbled through a response, but in
    the car on the way back to the studio I thought of what I should have
    said instead. The French call this L’esprit descalier which means the Spirit
    of the Staircase. Its all the things you think of saying once you’ve already walked
    out the door after an argument.

    In this case, the answer should have been: Accountable Advertising.

    The client in
    question had just spent a monster whack of money to put an advert in a
    trade magazine. It was done as a knee-jerk response to a lag in
    sales, and they felt a quick print-ad campaign was the best way to give their marketing
    effort an adrenaline shot. The problem was: no feedback. After the ad
    went in, they did get a blip in customer queries but they had no idea
    where the customers were coming from. This would not have been the case in Pay-Per-Click. With all the tools at our disposal, we can study the behaviour of our customers and react accordingly. No wonder advertising agencies are so worried about their future.

    Quite simply, Pay-Per-Clicks power is in solving retailer John Wanamakers
    timeless problem: I know I am wasting half my advertising budget. I
    just dont know which half.

    - Fred

  5. Setting up Your Pay Per Click Campaign Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk March 22, 2007 1 comment

    Some of you may be wondering what ever happened to that wonderful website the Heavy Chef Team were promoting with the help of Andy Harris at Custwin. You know the one with the replica art work. Well due to busy schedules its taken a bit of a back seat lately, but with his usual work hard (play hard) attitude Andy has kicked the ball back into play with a great walk through of how he set up the campaign. This is a great guide for anyone in the process or thinking about setting up a campaign.

    Read Further

  6. Pay for your Ads – only if they generate leads Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk March 21, 2007

    This really is note worthy news for web marketers and companies out there and it might change the whole face of advertising online (but we said that about Adsense too).

    A lot of the blogs have been commenting on Googles new venture over the last couple of days, but I thought Search Engine Land (who google have used to launch the product) sum it up best:

    “Google announced a limited U.S. only beta for a new service they are calling Pay Per Action
    ads. Google Pay Per Action will allow advertisers to create ads that
    cost only when a desired action is triggered. The advertiser sets the
    price per action; for example, an advertiser can decide to pay $5 per
    lead acquisition, as opposed to paying per click or per impression.”

    It raises a couple of questions:

    1) When will it hit South Africa? I’m keen to try it!

    2) Will the affiliate networks support the tracking it would require?

    3) What will happen if you place an ad in your web page/blog and then the advertiser pulls the ad?

    It will be interesting to how far this goes, but I have a sneaky feeling that this one could be huge for advertising companies the world over.

  7. Another use for Pay Per Click. Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk March 15, 2007 3 comments

    We are currently going through the keyword analysis stages of the search engine optimisation process for one of our clients. For me its the most important part of the SEO process. Choose the right keywords/phrases and the rewards are fantastic, choose the wrong ones and you’ll be scratching around at 3am in the morning trying to build more and more links from social media networks in order to save your reputation with the client.

    The nice thing about this client is they have a very niche product and that means we are more likely to find less competitive keywords. However with very niche keywords the problem often arises that you can’t get any data on who (if anyone) is searching for those keywords. If no one is searching for those phrases, is their any point in optimising a page on your site for that keyword?

    Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are fantastic tools for checking the viability of certain keywords (and we use them every day) but sometimes for very niche words the data just doesn’t exist.

    At this point Pay Per Click takes on another use. Run a small campaign for those keywords you can’t get any data on, making sure you put enough in your budget to ensure your ad will be seen. This will allow you to get a pretty good idea about the search habits for that keyword. What’s even better about this tactic is you can get data for a specific location, which is something you can’t get with the keyword databases such as wordtracker (although they do now offer data purely for the UK). Working on optimisation projects in South Africa for the first time, this becomes an invaluable tool when our clients target market is local.

    - Perky

  8. Setting up the Pay Per Click Campaign Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk January 7, 2007

    Two months after starting the "Pay per click for web profitablity" category on the blog we finally get around to actually doing the pay per click campaign:-)

    The site (www.artrevision.com for those that have forgotten) sells hand painted replicas of famous works of art. You choose the artist and their work and the highly talented Yolande will paint the replica to order.

    For the first step of the campaign I took a very similar approach to the way I would go about an SEO campaign: Research the keywords. In fact Nicola (my lovely wife) was at a loose end this afternoon so I asked her to do it.

    When we had all the data my first instinct was to look at it from an SEO point of view. Where were the gaps we could exploit and what were the popular or niche words that people searched, yet had little competition online.

    But with PPC it is slightly different. Yes you need to know what people are searching for and what the competition is like, but the added factor of "cost per click" is vital. At this point I thought it best to send the results through to Andy (from UK PPC firm Custwin – www.custwin.co.uk) and see where he takes it. So now I’m ready to sit and learn whilst I watch a master at work. (No pressure there Andy :-)

    Initially we’ve set a small budget of 100 (R1400) for the month and will focus on maybe one particular artist. The low budget is always an approach we recommend with most of our web marketing. Start small and build up – watch what works and what doesn’t. That way you can adjust anything from the site to the text to the images to the ads, etc, etc – until a good return on investment is reached, then you can invest more knowing the return will be worthwhile. Remember: pay per click is about creating profitable websites, not going bust quickly.

  9. Mike to get the ball rolling Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk January 4, 2007 1 comment

    Mike and I are back to work again this week. Its Friday and Im knackered already. I had big plans to do a massive blast at the ArtRevision.com site Pay-per-click campaign, but after a week of normal work / slog and a bunch of eager emails from my venerable business partner, Im calling it a day. In fact, Im calling it 10 days.

    10 days is the amount of time I have decided to spend in the little seaside village of Hermanus, around 1 hr outside of Cape Town. While I’m away, Mike and Andy are going to get the ball rolling, and since were really serious about making ArtRevision.com a success, well post regular updates on the progress of online sales.

    The good news is: it can only get better. We have officially got a standing start. Not one painting has been sold from the site since it was made live 2 months ago.

    Hey, Amazon started with only one book sold. From humble beginnings…

    - Fred

  10. Response from Pay-Per-Click guy Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk October 30, 2006 4 comments

    This is Andy’s response to my letter:

    Hi,

    Yes, that’s fine. I need to look at the Art Revision website asap – that’ll give me what I need to recommend back to you putting my comments into the blog.  What I’m highly likely to say, in a more flowery way, is the following:

    • Decide in which markets the Adwords campaign will be visible (UK, SA, Worldwide etc.) and ensure that currencies allow for that on the site (or there is easy access to a currency converter externally)
    • Think of as many different variations of art/pictures/paintings etc. as possible and list them all (I’ll expand on this as part of the input to the blog once I can see the Art Revision site)
    • Use Excel to add those different variations to the different artists/painting names
    • Create several Ad Groups – one for each type of artist (I’ll have to expand on this quite a bit)
    • Set a budget for clicks Monitor campaign after the first few days to see where the clicks have come.Compare to enquiries. 
    • Do webstats analysis if necessary.

    We could, however get you to set up a test group, focusing on just one artist first and then build the campaign up after the first week or so.

    It could end up as quite a big blog though because there’s several processes to go through in setting up PPC properly – will that be ok?

    - Andy

    Andy, we realised around 3 weeks ago this is going to be a juicy project, so bring on those processes. I’m enjoying the learning experience.

    We are aiming to get the site done this week, so as soon as it’s live, I’ll point you to the domain.

    Cheers,
    - Fred

  11. Letter to a Pay-Per-Click guy Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk October 30, 2006

    Hi Andy,

    We are about to make live the Art Revision website for the Heavy Chef project at www.artrevision.com.

    Mike said it would be a good idea that I should speak to you before I go ahead with the Google advertising.

    What do you reckon the steps I should take from now?

    My thinking is this:

    • Come up with a list of key-words that potential clients would search for to find the site
    • List the goals for the site
    • Set up a Google Adwords account
    • Set the daily budget
    • Review whether the goals are being achieved

    What do you reckon?

    - Fred

  12. PPC vs. SEO Posted in Online Advertising, Search Engine Optimisation, Concocted by Mike Perk October 13, 2006 2 comments

    Its already been coming up in discussions this month as to whether PPC is more important and more profitable for your website than SEO. I’ve always said its a balance between the two. But I found this really good video on youtube which talks about both.

  13. Can Pay Per Click make your website profitable? Posted in Online Advertising, Concocted by Mike Perk October 4, 2006

    Pay Per Click is seen by many in very different ways. Some see it as an easy way to get quick traffic to a site and to start making their website profitable from the word go. Others see it as an expense that doesn’t guarantee them business. Some see it as part of a necessary online strategy. And some see as an unwanted evil forced upon them by the search engines because profitability via optimisation of sites takes so long or belongs only to the few who master the art.

    Whatever your feelings about Pay Per Click is is having a huge impact worldwide on advertising budgets of companies both small and large. It is also getting a variety of results. This month The Heavy Chef project focuses on Pay Per Click and asks is it a good way of making your website profitable and if so what should we being doing to ensure it gets a return on investment?

    Fred, who hasn’t been directly involved in any pay per click campaigns we run, will be setting up a campaign for a new business and providing us with an outlook from someone trying it for the first time. I’ll be adding my tuppence (for what its worth) and we’ll also be asking Andy from Custwin in the UK, who specialise in using pay per click campaigns to build profitable businesses online, to provide us with some useful hints and tips.

    - Mike