The importance of quality score in paid search

Paid search, or pay per click (PPC), often used in conjunction with SEO, remains an essential marketing element for many businesses, most notably those that want an online presence.

But we are still seeing businesses not effectively implementing PPC campaigns successfully. One of the biggest areas that businesses are failing to address is a low AdWords quality score. In short, if you’re trying to master PPC, you need to understand quality score.

According to Google,...

22 August 2017 | Paid Search

Using curated marketplaces to ensure brand safety in digital ad buys

When Forrest Gump’s mother famously told him that “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get,” she just as easily could have been talking about digital ad placements purchased programmatically.

Unfortunately, real-time bidding (RTB) is a real problem for advertisers, as the recent boycott of the Google Display Network and YouTube by a slew of frustrated big brands has proven.

8 August 2017 | Advertising Technology

How Bing embraced search intelligence

Technology has immersed itself into all aspects of our lives meaning our digital footprint paints a more detailed picture than ever before.

Brands today have a wealth of different ways they can engage using this understanding but the key to unlocking future realms of engagement boils down to translating the intelligence into meaningful actions, using this to create new world touch points driven by technology.

Marketers continue to lead companies through this digital...

10 July 2017 | Advertising Technology

Retailers spend p8.9 million on iPhone related search terms

The term ‘iPhone 7’ is the top consumer product keyword in the UK, according to analysis by AdGooroo.

The company, which measures paid search activity across over 2.5 billion search results pages, found that British retailers spent £5.6 million on that particular term between June 2016 and May 2017.

This is £3.6 million more than the next highest keyword ‘pandora’ (a popular jewellery brand).

Five iPhone related keywords featured in...

5 July 2017 | Paid Search

Free suite of tools aims to improve transparency of paid search

A new range of free auditing software has been released by biddible with the aim of increasing transparency of paid search performance.

The tools will also allow companies to efficiently report on the effectiveness of AdWords spend in under 60 seconds.

we believe it may disrupt some major players in our market

The release marks the first time a free suite of tools has been aimed at helping companies accurately judge the efficiency of Google’s main source of online...

3 July 2017 | Advertising Technology

Strong and Stable vs. The Many: UK election PPC strategies analysed

When Theresa May called for a snap general election to be held on Thursday 8th June 2017, the major UK political parties were left with little time to prepare and implement their campaign strategies.

Whilst each party presented very different manifestos to how they would govern the UK, one thing the two major political parties, Labour and The Conservatives did agree on was to invest in search marketing, competing to get their adverts positioned at the top of search engine results...

16 June 2017 | Paid Search

Digital spend highest in seven years, argues IAB

(c)iStock.com/Ydefinitel

Digital ad spend grew at the fastest rate for seven years with UK digital ad spend up 16.4% to more than £8.6 billion, according to the latest Internet Advertising Bureau UK Digital Adspend report, conducted by PwC.

The rise is the highest since a 17.1% rise in 2008 and follows a 12% increase in the number of internet-enabled devices in each household. The report claims this now stands to 8.3 per household with connected TVs seeing the biggest...

27 April 2016 | Advertising

New report shows huge increase in social advertising spend

(c)iStock.com/FeelPic

Social advertising spend is growing rapidly, according to a new report which shows that marketers spent 86% more year on year in the first quarter of 2016. The growth was driven particularly by a 122% rise in mobile ad spend.

An increase in spend on Instagram ads and Facebook Dynamic Product Ads also helped to drive the increase – a trend that goes against the normal seasonal ad buying patterns.

The figures, compiled by Kenshoo, showed that in...

25 April 2016 | Advertising

Half of US small businesses failing to use SEO, survey finds

(c)iStock.com/MartinPrescott

It’s one of the most fundamental eCommerce marketing tools in the book and yet a new report finds that half of small businesses’ websites in the US do not engage in SEO, reducing their chances of being found by potential customers. The survey also showed that of those small businesses surveyed only just over half (54%) had a website in the first place.

The report, from a small business digital marketing survey by Clutch, shows that cost...

17 March 2016 | Commerce

Early studies show increase in AdWords CTR after Google drops right-side ads

(c)iStock.com/serg3d

The change may be relatively new, but research suggests that the CTR of Google Adwords has improved as a result of a repositioning of ads on the platform.

Since mid February Google stopped showing ads on the right hand side of desktop search results, moving instead to showing a fourth ad above the organic search results and up to three ads at the bottom of the page below the organic results.

Analysis from a two-week study of the impact of the change,...

15 March 2016 | Advertising