Our account director, Ian Howie, recency gave an interview to Google on the benefits 1upSearch have seen using Google Website Optimizer.

Howie states “Our speciality is return-on-investment.” But while businesses are keen to optimise both their paid and unpaid search, Howie discovered websites are often a blind spot. He believes many web professionals need to fundamentally change their attitude to their websites, in the UK especially. When 1upSearch started to include website optimisation as a service, a common roadblock was that business owners and webmasters viewed the website as ‘complete’. It was not an element of PPC or SEO that is refined and improved over time. It is the shop. You do not rebuild the shop. Howie says “People are still thinking of websites in terms of ‘build it and they will come’. And really in a lot of cases the attitude needs to be ‘build it and we’ll get it wrong but we’ll work out what we got right’ …sometimes it is like telling people the earth is round when they’ve been told the earth is flat”.

As an agency 1upSearch has fully integrated Google Website Optimiser into its marketing services. It has run experiments on websites of different shapes and sizes; from incremental text and image changes to complete website restructures. Website Optimiser has consistently provided the insight to make websites better. Worldfirst is the UK’s fastest growing foreign exchange broker and one of the clients that benefitted from website optimisation. Howie elaborates “These guys were selling a service in an extremely competitive market and in 2008 the currency rates were going all over the place. And we were still able to increase conversions. Website Optimiser has been a big part of that… it shows that just because your market is changing, if you test, you can still reap the benefits. But if you leave stuff static, you are going down with the market.” 1upSearch experimented with the text of the home page, changed the links and added a block of benefits to the page. The result was a 20% improvement in conversions.

The consistent success of Google Website Optimiser in creating conversion-driven websites prompted 1upSearch to adapt its business offering. Howie says “Our pitch to every customer now involves, what we call TOP: Traffic Optimisation Process. It tries to encompass a PPC campaign, an SEO campaign and the conversion products together with Google Analytics.” TOP is a move away from the more general online marketing consultancy of a few years ago. 1upSearch believes it is an offering more suited to the modern online business. Howie says “You may have a lot of traffic. Great. But let’s make more use of the traffic you’ve got. Or you may be a customer who doesn’t have the right traffic. If so we’ll make sure you have optimised traffic, optimised landing pages, optimised conversions.” He is unambiguous about the benefits of Website Optimiser “The thing we like about it most is that it does the job. It is very clear what it does and it is given away for free. It is very powerful for a free product. You don’t get half a product. You get the full product.”

Read the Full Case Study on Google.com

Due to the success of our last workshops we’ve scheduled another, in June.

Includes all you’d expect from a 1upSearch Workshop including expert advice on your business, 1 to 1 consultancy and class room training - all in 1 day!

Find out more and book your place.

Back by popular demand!

What? Exclusive 1-day Profitable PPC Campaigns workshop

Who? Hosted by 1upSearch’s Ian Howie and Alex Cooper

When? Wednesday 26th May, 09.30 - 17.30

Where? One Alfred Place, London, WC12

Someone, somewhere is searching for your products and services at this very second. Google AdWords allows you to reach those people at that crucial moment – people who are already interested in, and are looking for, what you have to offer.

This 1-day workshop is for website owner and marketers who want to learn how to create and run effective AdWords campaigns. Whether you’re new to Pay Per Click or are struggling to make your existing campaigns successful, by the end of Profitable PPC Campaigns you’ll be able to create fantastic new profitable campaigns that will help you achieve your business goals more quickly.

And since this workshop is taught by AdWords experts with unrivaled industry knowledge, you’ll also be privy to insider tips and trade secrets that will give you the edge.

IN JUST ONE DAY YOU’LL LEARN…

1 - The benefits of Pay Per Click marketing


2 - The core principles of PPC Marketing


3 - The importance of keyword research and selection


4 - The journey from click to landing page to conversion


5 - How to build your PPC campaign


6 - How to structure your keyword research into Ad Groups


7 - How to structure campaigns, ad groups and keywords


8 - How to use keywords to create killer ad copy


9 - How to use analytics to make changes



WORK ONE-ON-ONE WITH PPC EXPERTS

This is a rare opportunity to create an actual AdWords campaign under the close supervision of seasoned AdWords pros, Ian Howie and Alex Cooper. You’ll get practical advice with real-world examples and a review of your own campaigns. Plus all of your questions will be answered and the myths uncovered as we tell you what it really takes to make money with PPC.



BOOK NOW - only 8 places available!



It’s first-come, first-served - a place in the 1-day Profitable PPC Campaigns workshop costs just £397 inc. VAT - a small price to pay considering the rewards you’ll reap once you put what you’ve learned into practice.



You can book your place using the form below or by calling the 1upSearch Training Hotline on 0845 094 1019

Recently we’ve started using online software technologies to help us serve our clients better, communicate between our consultants and manage products. We’ve been amazed at how truly fantastic some of this new “cloud software” is becoming.

Hosting your software online makes perfect sense. The internet is now fast enough to deliver great software and with Mobile Phones finally becoming really useful web enabled devices (iPhone, G1 etc) having all your tools at your fingertips, and not on your desktop, is essential.

Here’s some of the software we’ve been using. I suggest you try some of them….

..your desktop will never be the same.

Basecamp - Project management

Highrise - Contact Relationship Management (CRM)

Freshbooks - Online Invoicing plus much more.

Enjoy your new tools.

-Alex

We released some info to the world yesterday on our recent achievement…

—-

London based search specialist 1upSearch has today become one of the first ever UK companies to become a Google Website Optimizer (GWO) Authorised Consultant, making it one of an elite group of Website Optimizer specialists.

1upSearch has recognised the growing importance of landing page optimisation and can now offer clients GWO expertise as part of its trademarked
Traffic Optimisation Process (TOP) programme. TOP combines Pay Per Click, natural search and GWO to deliver increased sales and conversion rates, whilst maximising Return on Investment (ROI).

This achievement puts 1upSearch ahead of its competitors – they are confident that using GWO will enable them to convert keywords that other search agencies can’t.

As a Website Optimizer Authorised Consultant (WOAC), 1upSearch can give clients the confidence to test, help them identify what to test and then improve elements of their landing pages to give them the competitive edge. In the current economic climate, 1upSearch has seen clients want better results with less spend. As GWO experts, 1upSearch can help its clients achieve that with painfree and cost-effective testing.

“Today, focusing on ROI and optimising customer conversions are more important than ever before. Our network of highly skilled Website Optimizer Authorised Consultants provide the services necessary for online businesses to gain website usability insight which they can then take action upon. We are delighted to add yet another highly experienced Google Website Optimizer expert to our consultancy network and look forward to strengthening our partnership with 1upSearch” says Alan Wrafter, Program Manager at Google.

1upSearch will continue to work closely with Google, ensuring the most up-to-date training and support, the benefits of which will extend to its customers.

Alex Cooper, founder of 1upSearch says “The Google Website Optimiser accreditation acknowledges our focus on conversions rather than just clicks. A website or landing page without conversion is a bit like eating junk food – it’s expensive and isn’t very good for you but it’s hard to stop. GWO helps clients get their web spend leaner and meaner – which means a healthier ROI.”

1upSearch client Wendy Casterton, Marketing Director at WorldFirst comments “1upSearch’s approach is to use Website Optimizer as a marketing tool – their technical and marketing understanding has helped us gain both a commercial edge on our rivals and a better understanding of our customers.”

Ken McGaffin, Marketing Director for Wordtracker adds “1upSearch’s Web Site Optimizer work has not only helped test web pages, images and copy, but also helped us make sense of the data from a commercial point of view.”

Find out more at www.1upsearch.co.uk/gwo

Wordtracker recently came out with a very interesting new tool, which instead of showing you keyword related searches, will come up with what questions searchers have typed directly into their partner search engines, and their frequency in the last 140 days.

For example, when I typed in the keyword “rowing,” questions returned include:

What muscles does rowing work?

What is the best rowing machine?

I’m sure we can see that this has the potential to be a very powerful tool indeed for sites who can find much asked questions related to their industry. Coupled with a well optimized landing page, answering a potential customer’s specific question could go a long way to gaining them as a customer. This could perhaps be especially powerful for information-based products.

However, when I entered the phrase “phone numbers” (I’m working on a UK-based phone number merchant site at the moment), some very different results appeared:

Wow! Not only did I find nothing useful for selling phone numbers, I also found out two disturbing things: People really want to find out celebrities’ phone numbers, and they also seem to think that they will actually be freely available online! I’m not sure which is more worrying. (Well, probably the stalking thing now that I think about it).

Seeing this, I thought it might be interesting to compare questions on some prominent world figures, namely George Bush, his replacement Barack Obama, and our own Gordon Brown.

The results for Bush looked like this (note questions 7 and 12):

It seems a fair amount of people were also concerned about Obama’s height, and aside from small questions about morality and constitutional violation, his top 20 results were very similar:

More worryingly if we scroll further down on Obama’s results we see:

Now to look at the results for Gordon Brown:

Oh dear. In fairness the results only return questions asked in the US versions of Wordtracker’s partner search engines, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of interest in our own Prime Minister (correct at time of going to press), but there are some worrying elements there.

Perhaps the questions on Obama’s assassination are not such a big surprise, but I’m wondering why people want to know when this will happen, and how they think the internet will know? Last time I checked, oracle.com was still just a business software company, not an actual oracle.

What also intrigues me is the obsession with the height of US presidents. Is this a deciding factor in supporting one candidate or another? Perhaps when finding the wikianswers pages for Obama and Bush, a hundred or so Americans decided that they did indeed need a much taller man as president, then went ahead and ticked a box for Obama. Seems as good a reason as any to cast your vote, eh?

More likely looking at some of the other questions, certain people were after height figures so that they could more accurately calculate trajectories from the windows of tall buildings. Forward planning sure makes those assassination attempts go so much smoother.

So there you have it. Wordtracker has a great new tool which can make you money, and the internet is used for stalking celebs and planning assassinations. Here ends today’s lesson. Oh, and has anybody got Kelly Brook’s phone number?

Michael Theodoulou

Follow Michael on Twitter

Adwords Beta testers have recently received the following email from their Adwords account managers inviting them to test a new feature: “Automatic Matching.”

“I’m excited to tell you that you have been selected to participate in a beta for our new Automatic Matching feature which will be starting on February 28th.

Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign’s reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists. By analyzing the structure and content of your website and AdWords campaigns, we deliver more impressions and clicks while maintaining your current CTRs and CPCs.

For example, If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as: “shoes” “adidas” “athletic”, etc., and less obvious ones such as “slippers” that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion on your site.

Be assured that automatic matching will try to never exceed your budget. If you’re already meeting your daily budgets, automatic matching will have a minimal effect on your account.”

We would counsel avoiding this feature like the plague if and when it does get a general release. Even standard Broad Match terms should be tightly monitored and treated with caution to make sure they don’t overly drain your daily budget. This tool will actually attempt to spend your whole budget every day, expanding to less and less relevant keywords. There goes your carefully crafted relevant landing page, followed by your campaign ROI out the window!

Currently the feature is an extremely limited beta, so whether or not this feature gets implemented remains to be seen. We would counsel The Big G to make the feature an opt-in one rather than a default when you open an account.

Education of new Adwords users should also be a high priority, as it could quickly lead to another generation of casualties with very empty bank accounts.

Michael Theodoulou

Follow Michael on Twitter

October 17th saw a quiet but significant change in Google’s UK Adwords policy. Their global ban on the advertising gambling products was relaxed, by allowing gambling ads to be displayed to searchers in England, Scotland and Wales.

It looks like the ads have been classified “non-family safe,” and searchers will only be able to see them when they disable the Safesearch option. It seems that geographic filtering is quite strict and probably done by IP.

Even so, sources estimate that Google’s annual revenue increase from this move could be worth as much as £100 million.

For gaming affiliates, this isn’t the great news it first seems to be, as looking deeper into the terms and conditions, Google will only let you advertise if you have a valid gaming license:

“At this time, Google AdWords only allows online gambling advertisements targeted to Great Britain (England, Scotland, or Wales) where the advertiser has a valid licence for the remote advertised gambling activities in the UK, Malta, Isle of Man, Alderney, Gibraltar, or Tasmania. If you are licensed outside these jurisdictions but within the European Economic Area (EEA), we will need to consider your application further.”

It also looks like there are a few hoops to jump through if you want to start advertising your gambling sites, as Google wants you to create a new Adwords account specifically for the gambling ads, and then go through an application process to get the account cleared for use in this area.

Overall this is pretty good news for the major UK gaming companies such as Ladbrokes.com as well as for Google’s accountants, but also for smaller players in the UK gaming sphere, as there will always be opportunities to beat the bigger boys with PPC if their consultants know their stuff!

Michael Theodoulou

Follow Michael on Twitter

Brilliant! We can now monitor Search Network adwords stats separately from Google’s stats. Another way to split up our data and analyse it more effectively to squeeze out a few extra drops of ROI. Surely the next stage will be individual Search Partner targeting, where you’ll be able to target AOL or Ask individually and cut out the lesser search engines that are currently draining the budget without giving (m)any conversions back.

So it’s good news and positive implications but lets zoom out a little bit and look at the bigger picture. Why are Google really letting us do this now when we could have had this feature a long time ago?

What’s Google’s Game?

If we can all see how painfully inferior the Search Network is, we’re going to run away from it – or at least the low ROI parts of it (assuming we get to see individual Search Partner data eventually). Why would Google allow us to see the search network in all its inferiority yet provide no tools to optimise it? Well  - perhaps the tools are on their way but, as of the present day, Search Network Optimisation is in its infancy. I believe that Google wants to clean up the Search Network with a view to increasing the Network’s value in the longterm. ‘Hangers-on’ will surely be exposed if Google takes the next step and allows individual Search Partner tracking and this can only be a good thing – both for the client, the client’s customer and Google. The client will be offered new PPC channels to market and Google will surely lap up a bit of the spare marketing budget that will be lying around once a slimmed down Search Network has been established.

Increased Spotlight, Increased Competition, Better Conversion (We Hope)

It’s easy to be cynical here and claim that Google are doing this purely to get clients to reinvest their money more wisely in its own search engine but it can’t be denied the increased competition between Search Partners as they fight for Search Network traffic can only be a good thing for everyone. With competition comes differentiation – perhaps we are seeing the dawn of the niche search engine becoming a key driver of online ROI?

David Bushell
http://www.twitter.com/DavidBushell

Having read the blogs, text-books and general commentary on PPC marketing, I’ve noticed a gaping, giant, black hole of a gap in modern PPC learning literature. You see, when you read books on how to increase your Google ROI, 9 times out of 10, the examples used are classic E-Commerce or clicks and mortar sites. Lead generation marketing, however, is in my view, a completely separate marketing discipline and should, therefore, be regarded as such in the world of PPC. In some leadgen campaigns, every logical, classical principle can be turned on its head. Why? Because the aim of the game in leadgen is often about quality, not quantity.

The Hidden Cost Of Quality

Leadgen PPC is not just about getting conversions, it’s about getting certain types of conversions, or even a certain mix. It’s a bit like running an E-Commerce campaign with a requirement to maintain a minimum Average Order Value – if every lead you get is going to cost, say, 15 mins sales time, the cost per lead can be significantly higher than the spreadsheets might suggest. With lead generation, the E-Commerce metrics of Google Analytics (RPC, Revenue, ROI) are replaced by sales funnel metrics that are stored in the internal CRM of the sales force, often hidden away from the PPC agency. To make life even more challenging, this CRM is often manually updated and prone to error/abuse caused by the pressure and targets of the sales environment.

So with all these variables lying between the investment into Google and the return from the sales person, how on earth can we go about optimisation this process, let alone measuring it? It is difficult but, given the right approach, very achievable.

‘Anti-Marketing’

Recently, I have been trying to increase the ROI of a client of mine who uses a traditional sales funnel. The PPC funnel basically goes:

£ -> Click -> Conversion -> Qualified lead for sales rep to call -> Meeting -> 2nd Meeting -> Sale

Every stage of this funnel carries a cost, whether it is the cost of the click or the cost of employing a salesperson to call, chase and have meetings with the leads. This cost needs to be calculated or approximated but accuracy here isn’t the be all an end all. But when the PPC consultant comes in and hikes up the CTR (and your costs) and comes back with a pile of leads that you can’t sell to (but spend time and money trying to do so), you’ll be able to say you learnt the leadgen PPC lesson the hard way! This is why I refer to PPC leadgen marketing as anti-marketing. It is often those with the lower CTRs, with thoughtful, screening ads and landing pages that get the best ROI – and the happiest (and smaller) sales forces! And to get there, you’re going to need a personal, consultative approach from your PPC agency. Personal selling requires personal marketing!

David Bushell

http://twitter.com/DavidBushell