paid search

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What is click fraud and how can you prevent it?

Are you an advertiser running a PPC campaign? Is there something not quite right with your paid search costs? Does your performance data contain unexplained anomalies? 

Have you heard the term ‘click fraud’ bandied around the internet and think that you could be its next victim?

I realise that while writing this introduction I was beginning to sound like a fear-mongering, consumer-based TV show that makes even the most rational people think twice about leaving the house after dark, so I’ll stop here.

Is click fraud something you should be aware of, and if so, to what extent does it affect your PPC campaign?

US mobile paid search spend up 66% year-on-year: stats

Marketers in the US are continuing to invest heavily in mobile paid search across Google and Bing/Yahoo, with the total spend on tablets and smartphones up 65.9% year-on-year to 28.7% of search budgets.

Taken individually, spend on tablets increased 87.6% compared to Q3 2012, while the increase on smartphone was 118.1% in the same period.

The increased investment is unsurprising considering the consumer shift towards mobile search and the recent roll out of Google’s Enhanced Campaigns. 

Data included in our own Mobile Commerce Compendium shows that search is one of the top three most popular smartphone activities behind email and making calls, so it’s inevitable that marketers will begin ramping up their investment in this channel. 

Six ways to optimise your search marketing for Christmas

With Christmas make or break for retailers how can they make the most of their paid search budget in the run up to the big day?

In these ultra-competitive times the peak Christmas period can be make or break for retailers. With up to 40% of sales happening around this time, under performance doesn’t just harm your company,  it could be fatal to your business.

Paid search is a proven way of delivering buyers to your website, but how do you maximise its impact, while minimising costs?

Based on Kour experience there are six steps to optimising your search engine marketing for Christmas success:

Businesses are more likely to outsource display than PPC or social: report

Only a third of businesses (32%) manage their display advertising exclusively in-house, compared to 44% for paid search and 52% for social.

The data comes from a new Econsultancy and Adobe report that focuses on the use of paid-for digital channels, namely paid search, display advertising and social.

For many companies, the buying of these media is been owned and managed by different parts of the business with responsibility for different channels also split across in-house and agency teams.

The report found that display is the most likely to be managed exclusively by an agency with social the least likely to be outsourced.

Only a fifth of companies optimising paid for digital media

With so much attention now being given to ‘owned’ and ‘earned’ media, it’s easy to forget that it is still paid media which command the biggest chunk of marketing budgets and where the stakes are highest.

However, despite the large sums of money being invested, new research by Econsultancy and Adobe shows that few companies are taking an integrated and cross-channel approach to paid-for digital media. 

Travel aggregator sites dominate airline brands in Google results: report

Travel aggregator sites dominate airline brands for both natural and paid Google rankings, according to a new report looking at search visibility.

The analysis by Searchmetrics also found that brands achieving high natural search rankings are taking the opportunity to limit their investment in PPC.

The study is based on analysis of how airline brands performed on Google for the 1,439 most popular search terms relating to flights. It examines results for the US, France and Germany, but for this post I’ll focus on the UK results.

And for more information on this topic, check out the Econsultancy Paid Search Marketing Best Practice Guide or our UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report.

CPCs for Google Shopping ads have increased 53% year-on-year: report

The cost per click (CPC) of Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs) has increased by 53% year-on-year, reaching an all time high in June as the search engine finally completed the transition of shopping results to a commercial model.

Though PLAs are still cheaper than standard text paid search ads, it shows that Google has successfully managed to cause a massive increase in CPCs by changing how the ad formats work.

In fact, PLA CPCs have increased by 34% since January alone and costs are likely to continue rising despite a slight drop off in July, which is likely as a result of seasonality.

Springsteen shows why it’s positive to be negative with your PPC

Can you remember back to those days when you naively viewed the internet as an innocent playground of interesting things, before your outlook was forever sullied by initiation into the digital marketing community?

Before your blinkers were taken off and you realised that 95% of everything on the internet has been specifically put there – after a lot of thought, time and investment, I might add – to make money?

What do search marketers think of Enhanced Campaigns?

Back in February Google announced that it was overhauling the way AdWords worked with the rollout of Enhanced Campaigns.

It’s a catchy name that makes the new system sound like an upgrade on the old model, however there was some disquiet among paid search marketers as Google has essentially removed the ability to run PPC campaigns targeting specific devices.

After an initial grace period Google finally forced everyone to begin using the new system in July, and you can find out more about the switchover in our Enhanced Campaigns migration checklist.

To get further insight about the perceived impact of Enhanced Campaigns, we asked more than 500 search marketers for their opinion of the switchover as part of the new Econsultancy/NetBooster UK Search Engine Benchmark Report 2013.

Google enhanced campaigns: a migration checklist

Google’s automatic migration to enhanced campaigns is swiftly approaching on July 22, 2013. Any existing PPC campaigns will be automatically moved over to the new format. 

If you don’t implement a planned migration there’s a risk you could be wasting budget and not getting the most out of your search advertising.

For those advertisers who remain unsure: the essence of enhanced campaigns is that instead of advertisers having to duplicate their effort by managing multiple campaigns in order to target individual devices (desktops, tablets and smartphones), Google has introduced a streamlined format to manage multi device targeting within a single campaign.

Businesses now spend 24% of total marketing budget on paid search

Paid search now accounts for around a quarter (24%) of the average business’ total marketing budget, according to a new report from Econsultancy and NetBooster.

The UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2013 asked respondents about the division of marketing budgets into the search, social media and display categories. 

Paid search is apportioned the largest average budget by companies (24%), followed by SEO (18%). Social media and display had equal average share of budget (both 11%).

This figure could potentially increase further by 2014, as more than half of respondents (55%) said they expect their PPC budgets to increase over the next 12 months.

Baidu: the opportunity for European businesses

The value of online transactions in China reached $190 billion in 2012 and the country is predicted to overtake the US as the world’s largest ecommerce market at some point this year.

So it’s no surprise that European businesses are eager to try and break into the marketplace.

As with any ecommerce market, search is a vital source of building brand awareness and attracting traffic in China. This means you have to optimise your site for Baidu which has around 83% market share.

Baidu recently signed a deal with CharmClick that gives the company exclusive rights as a resale agent in Europe, which subsequently partnered with Net Media Planet for Baidu ad sales in the UK and Ireland.

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