A recent report by Deloitte's predicts that UK online spending will rise by 10% this Christmas compared with last year. 

The results of their recent survey shows that people who shop online are planning to spend more this year compared with traditional shoppers.  It also shows that there has been an increase in the numbers of people who shop online. Deloitte's said that consumers who do most of their shopping online are expecting to spend an average of £773 this Christmas, compared with £655 for the total population.

They also point out that the number of retailers offering ecommerce sites has increased to 81 percent from 71 percent last year and 51 percent in 2006.

It will be interesting to see how these UK predictions pan out. 

US analysts, comScore, released actual performance results from the Thanksgiving shopping weekend in the USA which were fairly flat:

For the holiday season-to-date, $10.41 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent decline versus the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1 percent. For the combination of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, online sales were up 2 percent relative to last year.

Overall, it clearly appears that online sales are growing despite the current economic conditions - the actual level of growth will be interesting to see when the full set of seasonal results are assessed in late January.

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

Recently Google has released a beta of it's search based keyword tool. It is intended for PPC usage, but there is some SEO value to be gained in terms of keyword research and selection.

It compares your website (and any current PPC campaigns) with historic search queries, and identifies extra keywords that might be useful.

Here's a snapshot of some results:

Joe Bursell
Campaign Delivery Manager

A year ago I blogged about latent semantic indexing, but didn't offer any SEO tools to test if your content could be seen as contextually relevant, or if your keywords are seen by the engines as closely related to other, perhaps equally useful keywords.

After doing some nosing around I found Princeton University's lexical database that offers suggestions for related words. It works, but isn't good with phrases, or colloquial terms.

Then I remembered that Google is pretty good at giving related word examples, not directly though. By using the tilde ~ synonym finder operator in a search you'll get shown related results, and more importantly the SERPs will show you whether you are pursuing the right keyword if it has multiple meanings.

So, if you're struggling to cover as many bases as possible in your initial keyword research a simple ~ can go a long way. For instance, if you've got a website that sells road traffic monitoring equipment, and you've got robust version for a building site you'd probably want to know if "site traffic" is going to be of much use to you. By searching with ~site traffic, Google shows what it reckons:

Here we can see that although the AA and Highways Agency get a look-in the majority of results relate to website traffic, so it wouldn't be a good option.

Joe Bursell
Campaign Delivery Manager

If you are expecting some downtime on your website - perhaps you might be moving web servers or need to perform some server maintenance? If this is going to happen, and you know about it in advance, then there are some steps that you can take to prevent your site being re-indexed by the Search Engines at just the wrong time and protect all those SEO results you have been working to maintain and improve by getting the website to report a 503 header status.

First off, I’ll give a bit more info about why we want to do this. A “normal” web page returns what’s called a 200 header status. This tells search engines and browsers that this page is a normal webpage and is “ok”.

A web page that has been permanently removed reports a header status of 404. This is why it’s important to have a functioning error 404 page, because when it is done badly, an error page can return a 200 status and tell search engines that an error page is actually ok, when in fact it isn’t.

However, if possible, we don’t want your site when it’s down to return a 404 status, because if a search engine crawls the website at this time, it may think its permanently removed.

Other status codes that you may well have heard about refer to redirects. There are 2 common header status’s for redirects – 301 and 302. A 301 redirect tells search engines that a page has PERMANENTLY moved, and a 302 redirect tells a search engine that a page has TEMPORARILY moved.

Another status code that many web searchers occasionally come across is a 500 code. This is a server error, when the website is unavailable at the time of visiting.

Without taking any action to put this in place, its normal that by default the status code returned during the site downtime will either be 404 or 500. These are common error messages when this occurs, but there is potential, if the search engines crawl the site at this time, that they may well think the site has gone, which could potentially have a devastating effect on your search engine rankings.

If it's possible to do so, the best method to prevent any problems is to get the site to return a 503 status – this tells them that the site is temporarily unavailable – and lets Googlebot know to check back later. This guidance comes from the Google Webmaster Blog from a couple of years ago, but is still relevant now. Its also possible to tell the search engines when to expect content back on the site using a “retry-after” command.

Pete Handley
Campaign Delivery Manager

The IDC have just released the results of a study on social networking services (SNS) such as FaceBook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.

Their research shows that SNS sites have great market penetration with more than half of US consumers (with Internet access) using such sites regularly.  They also believe that this will grow over the coming years.

So good news for SNS sites, but not great news for advertisers.

Users of SNS sites seem to be resistant to advertising on these sites - or certainly not in a "buying frame of mind" when using them.  It seems that only 57% of users of social network sites have clicked on an ad in the last year compared with 79% of all web users.

In terms of these click converting into sales, apparently only 11% of SNS users will actually place an order versus 23% for the rest of the internet.

So the click through rates and conversions are very low compared to other online resources.  This is largely down to buying intent - when someone is reconnecting with friends onfacebook, they are not receptive to sales messages and so will largely ignore them. 

Having said that, the sheer volume of traffic taking place on these major SNS sites can still compensate for the lower average conversion rates for the right types of products or services.  You just need to ensure that your messaging is adjusted to take into why and how people are using these sites.

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

Welcome back Pay Per Clickers!

Following on from part 3 of my Glossary, This weeks term I have hand picked for all you keen Pay Per Click guys out there is one that has a real sense of importance within a PPC campaign. Many prospective clients and newbies turning to PPC for the first time want to know what the figures are behind this term as it relies heavily on the amount spent on a campaign.


Today's term for you all is CPA - Cost Per Acquisition. This term is also know to many as the cost per conversion.

With Pay Per Click Marketing being a very direct and instant form of advertising your products or services to the general web search world, a fast and frenzied approach to a new account can be taken. Keywords can be expensive and positions hard to get for the money. Many of you may think just spend and spend more again. However this is not always the case and big budgets are not always available........

So a real concentration on making your budget work to its full potential is needed for times like this. You need to have and idea of your return on investment or a have a target in mind of what you are prepared to pay to get your potential clients to complete your call to action. Whether this be to fill in a form, buy a product or even call you ( the latter being the hardest to work out unless you know that the call came from your campaign).

With all of these factors taken into mind you can work out for yourself a realistic CPA target for your campaign and set goals to achieve this target. As an example if you are paying £1 per click and it takes you 100 clicks for a person to buy a product or service then your CPA is £100.

Total Cost spent / Total Conversions = CPA

Most PPC Marketing companies will base a campaigns performance on the CPA and hitting targets set buy both clients and agencies combined. Obviously you need to be realistic here and take in other factors such as industry standard conversion rates online, the cost per click and the target audience. If you are merely data capturing with a free product download for instance your conversion rate will be a lot higher than someone who is selling flat screen TVs and who is playing in a much more competitive market.

If your product or service( using the above example) earns you £80 profit after all of your overheads are taken out of the equation a CPA of £100 is no good and alarm bells should ring and you need to be working on your campaign. This could be tweaking Keywords, Ads or Landing pages and sometimes even rebuilding entire Pay Per Click Campaigns to get your CPA within a sensible amount. If you can drop your CPC to £0.50 the whole scenario will change..... Now if you are paying £0.50 per click and it takes you 100 clicks for a person to buy a product or service then your CPA reduces now to £50. This in turn means at profit per unit of £80 you will be earning £30 per conversion. This also works with increasing conversions. So if you simple cant get the Cost Per Click down then concentrate your efforts on converting the clicks you are getting. With clicks at £1 if you can get 2 conversions in 100 then the same CPA of £50 can be achieved. Food for thought and even more areas to work on improving.

Happy tweaking for now and tune in again for part 5....................

David Thomas
PPC Campaign Delivery Manager

This is part 3 of my occasional series on “Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign”. The first part was about the long tail and the second was using search engine traffic levels. This third instalment uses one of the many other metrics available to website owners: conversion.

We post about conversion quite often on this blog, because it is an important element of your website. We’ve given lots of tips on how to improve your site conversions. However, it can have some drawbacks to using it as an SEO metric.

There can be issues with using different measurement of conversion e.g. Adwords and Analytics track conversions differently - this means that in Analytics a sale or lead could be marked as an SEO conversion but in Adwords, the PPC ad would get the credit.

Conversions are much more subject to on-page issues – no two websites ever convert the same. Additionally, making changes on a site can make big differences which are not related to SEO. Changing onsite forms can be a great way of increasing the number of signups. I recently had a customer who implemented a page redesign to make his form more prominent, and literally doubled his number of conversions overnight.

Likewise, there are some on-site issues that are outside the control of the SEO company, which is why you find very few SEO companies that will agree to a profit related payment scheme. Some basic examples of this are sites where the products are too expensive, so although people might find your site in their research process, they will choose to buy elsewhere. Another one is having a ranking for a very broad keyword, and although visitors come to your site, they don’t find the product they are looking for.

There are also the other elements of post-click marketing, which are particularly pertinent to ecommerce websites, such as availability/stock levels, delivery times, return policies and delivery costs, many of which are checked by a potential purchaser in their selection of which vendor to use. Trust elements also come into play, whether it is the use of HackerSafe logos, customer testimonials or previous vendor experience. The customer journey through a purchase decision has a myriad of different on-site elements.

On the other hand, real hard sales or leads is a firm number to attribute to a marketing outlay in order to generate an ROI figure, and can’t be ignored as a success metric.

If you don’t already track conversions, then you should figure out a way to do so. It could be as simple as adding a form to your site, or a custom email address or telephone number to track offline conversions. Trial print out and bring in vouchers if you have bricks and mortar stores. Always ask your customers where they heard about you from – the answers are a vital feedback into all your marketing processes.

Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager

We've just released the first in a collection of landing page templates that you can use in your own PPC campaigns.  These templates are professionally designed around certain core themes - the first one being released today is designed to support your Christmas "special offers".


Each set of templates will include:

• main offer page - simply add your copy and your logo
• working enquiry form - with php script to handle emailing
• thank you page - update with logo, copy and conversion tracking

We've found that pages on most company's primary web sites do not make great PPC landing pages.  There are many reasons for this, but they include:

• web pages do not sell - they tend to be more informational and lack the necessary call to action to complete a transaction
• they are not simple or clear enough to allow the searcher to make a buying decision quickly
• they have too many exit links which cause the visitor to get distracted
• they are not linked to the ad text in the PPC campaign
  

We hope that these PPC landing page templates will provide many smaller companies with a quick "leg up" when trying to get their PPC performing more effectively (post click).

To download this Christmas landing page template, simply visit our templates page - and register for our bi-weekly newsletter.

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

Google's personalised searching changes have taken a new twist with the release of Search Wiki, as is being widely reported at the moment including on Google's own blog.

Rather than Google deciding how to personalise results for you, when signed in, you can now remove and move around the placements of the search engine results - and then next time you search for the same phrase, the order that you gave results will be remembered and served back to you.

Google are stressing that this data isn't going to be used to determine standard placements - they say "The changes you make only affect your own searches" - but it will be interesting to see if they use this data in the future to help
quality assure the results that they serve for particular keyword searches.

When you look at a SERP when signed in, there are a number of new elements that you wouldnt have seen until now:

I've marked the new buttons with numbers, and these perform the following functions

1. You can use this button to move the position of the current listing

2. You can use this to remove this listing from the results page that you see

3. In this area you can make notes about the page/SERP

Now whenever I search for "search engine optimisation", Vertical Leap are going to appear in position 1 for this phrase! If only the real SEO of the site was this simple!

 

Pete Handley
Campaign Delivery Manager

Recently I posted a blog on the new Google Quality Score feature in Adwords. This new system did away with the old style, where by agencies and users had to pretty much guess what state their adwords campaigns were in and what the quality was by using logic and testing within the campaigns, retrieving data and acting upon it. Google promised a new easy to use Quality Score algorithm........

As I predicted and mentioned in my last post the new system was riddled with teething problems and needed time to bed in properly. This had stirred up the PPC Companies and posts of errors and problems came flooding in. 

Hooray the uneasy storm has now past and the calm of a Quality new era begins.....

The new algorithms that have been put into place mean that advertisers will now be given opportunity to move up position rankings in the sponsored links without paying above the odds for the privilege. Google will determine the relevancy and quality of ads an decide where best to place them. Previously impressions and CTR's played the majority part in deciding an ads Quality Score, this however meant that the usual top spot ads received the greatest number of clicks and therefore much higher Quality Scores. Leaving other advertisers bidding for the remaining slots. This function seems to be one step closer to their goal of only showing the most targeted of ads on 1 page.

This has also led to a change in the way Google choose ads for the coloured sponsored search bar at the top of the page. Before now the ads sitting at the top of the page were the only ones who could be moved up into this much sort after position providing they meet the quality benchmarks of relevancy etc. Now the new system can see those ads in lower positions leapfrog these big guns for having better Q'S. Google are rewarding competently built and targeted campaigns over and above the big money bidders. Is the playing field finally leveling as previously shouted about??


What to do?

Well the answer is the same as before keep ads relevant. Make sure that keywords are separated into the most granular of ad groups possible, and keep everything as tight as you can. This may mean test and test again to reach your optimum goal but in the end its your pocket that will benefit from the hard work. Many PPC Companies who are happy to sit back on old campaigns will feel the hit harder and see positions dropped only to be replaced by someone only spending £10 per day. So use your history reports to help and start to climb up that sponsored ladder to success.

 

David Thomas
PPC Campaign Delivery Manager

It's the first time I noticed it, although it's probably been there forever- the humble watermark that sits in the search box on the Google Analytics Support page:



It indicates the language that you are likely to be searching with, using the "custom search".

What's odd is that when I've logged out of Analytics the search box contains a Cyrillic alphabet watermark:


Before I log in it displays a UK one:

What's odder is that the URL of the Cyrillic one is:
http://www.google.com/coop/intl/uk/images/google_custom_search_watermark.gif
and the UK one's is:
http://www.google.com/coop/intl/en/images/google_custom_search_watermark.gif
...the only difference is the country identifier being replaced with a language identifier (uk or en).

I'd love to know to how or why this happens. Of more interest to me is whether it is a reflection of, or a hint at, how truly difficult it is to serve country-specific content.

Joe Bursell
Campaign Delivery Manager

As an SEO company, Vertical Leap spends a lot of its time explaining the processes we use and monitoring the effects that our efforts have on the traffic and rankings for our websites.

We also monitor the blogs and websites for information of interest to us. We read a lot of information on a daily basis, some of which we agree with and some of which we don’t. We filter the information in the blogosphere past our own experiences and evaluate it. With a hundred or so clients we have a lot of data to check other people’s hunches about the way that search results are changing.

So it was with great interest that yesterday, I read two items of interest. One was a summary of Bruce Clay’s PubCon presentation, and the other was Google’s Release of their SEO Starter Guide.

The focus of Bruce Clay’s presentation was the evolution of SEO in 2009 (including forecasting the death of rankings again). Predicting the future is always difficult and he’s made a reasonable extrapolation of what could happen.

Google’s foray into the future of SEO is interesting too. Whilst there has always been a tacit acknowledgement of SEO, their published information was a little thin on the ground e.g. this page which mainly seems to warn people against SEO companies :-) I’m not counting Matt Cutt’s blog here, because it is technically independent.

What this meant was that people were aware of search engine optimisation, but then turned to other sources to get the ‘how to’ information. This has caused a few problems along the way because of the fluid nature of the internet – what worked for SEO in 2003 might not be appropriate (even dangerous) today.

So it was with great interest that I read through the document that Google has provided. From a SEO professional’s point of view, it may be a little superficial in places (yes, we all know that title tags are important, but the order of words matters too), but for many webmasters even this level of information could be a revelation.

So we have two very contrasting views on SEO – one is the high level professional view all about the changing landscape and how we will all be changing the way we work in the future. The other is Google’s back to basics viewpoint which I think illustrates that they still think that the majority of sites have a long way to go to be truly “search engine friendly”.

Dealing with lots of sites on a daily basis, when reading these I can appreciate both are valid interpretations of what SEO is, but the underlying message of the two is quite different. This demonstrates that SEO doesn’t quite mean the same thing to everyone.

Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

eBay sellers who want to draw more attention to their listings can advertise on eBay through a new program called eBay AdCommerce. AdCommerce is a new powerful advertising option which will show sellers ads near the bottom of search results pages to targeted buyers that are interested in your product line.

Sellers decide how much they are willing to pay each time a buyer clicks their ad after running a search for certain keywords. The ad includes a title, short description, and an optional image, which appears at the bottom of search results pages.

AdCommerce will have no up-front fee and no minimum payment or deposit. Sellers pay only when a buyer clicks your ad and goes to your listing or eBay Store

James Daniels
PPC Campaign Delivery Manager

Google is set to trial their own Adwords system on Youtube in an attempt to make money from their very popular video site. The new arrangement will see advertisers bid to have their videos displayed in a new “sponsored videos” section of the site when Youtube visitors search for particular keywords.

As with the current Adwords system where advertisers pay per click, advertisers on the Youtube version would have to pay per video click.

The attempt to use the AdWords approach could solve two problems that have done much to hold back advertising on YouTube. One has been a fear among advertisers that many of the site’s user-generated videos are not suitable places for them to display their advertising campaigns.

Sounds like this could be a worthwhile addition to the already successful Adwords system. Oh and not forgetting more profit for Google. Credit crunch is obviously not affecting them!!

James Daniels
PPC Campaign Delivery Manager

There have been many surveys on the topic, but it seems that around 87% of consumers research products online before buying them in person or in a store.  This phenomenon has been named "ROBO" - research online, buy offline.  People will use a search engine for product reviews, price comparisons, etc and then look for the best local source to actually make the purchase.

I would like to introduce a new variation on this concept - "ROTOBO" - or research online, TOUCH offline, buy online.

Some products can be purchased at some discount online, but many people are hesitant to purchase without first seeing and "touching" the product "in person".  Products that fall into this category are flat screen televisions, white goods, etc.

For example, let's say I was looking for a new LCD television. 

I would first research the authority sites and check product reviews, user comments, etc.  From this, perhaps I would select a television such as the "Sony KDL32W400".  (Research Online - RO)

This is a television that is sold at stores like John Lewis and Currys - and so I would visit these first to see if I really like it.  (Touch Offline - TO).

But as we are all painfully aware, we're currently in the middle of the "credit crunch" and so I want to save a few pennies.  I therefore consider purchasing this online if I can save money.  So back to Google and perhaps GoogleBase to search for the cheapest supplier from where to purchase it.  (Buy Online - BO).

The lesson here is about awareness.. if you sell products that could fall into the ROTOBO category, are you keeping an eye on your competitive offering?  Can you meet or beat all Internet prices (including shipping)?  Can you offer additional value or premiums for purchasing offline?  

Your online marketing has paid off by bringing the customer into your shop - don't lose them now...

Matt Hopkins
Managing Director

 

So many times I hear prospective customers say they are so confused about whom to choose to provide them with SEO - I have to say I genuinely feel sorry for any company taking on board the hunt for a good and trustworthy SEO company who really does what it claims.

Its quite often I come up against competitors adding things  to ‘pack out' a proposal. Things such as ‘Free Google Analytics' -  which is already free to anyone who signs up for it , ‘Free monthly reports', - generally a print out from Google analytics you could have done yourself ‘, ‘performance related charges' - which just worries me as how can you be in control of your budget when traffic volumes can fluctuate so much?? All of these offerings can sound impressive when listed as part of a companies SEO proposal but what are you really getting?

Generally, in my experience, if anything sounds too good to be true - then it is - especially in this industry. As my colleague mentioned in her blog about SEO for £35 a month how on earth can there be any service for this fee?? Can these companies really provide top notch SEO services which drive well targeted traffic from keywords that actually perform AND be pro-active in their approach to manage campaigns? I think not! The thing is - its not about ‘only wasting a few quid' if the campaign doesn't work - its about all the business you could have missed, loss of rankings through bad SEO practice, starting from scratch again....need I go on! It's when you quantify what you will have lost over time that it is vital to make sure you money is well invested for the future of your business online.

I have questions to ask prospective SEO companies that may help sort out the good from the bad:

What happens if a keyword does not perform?

DO they research new ones, make suggestions and action - and if so - do they charge for it.

You may need more links to really push a keyword? Which in essence means more work for the SEO provider - will they charge you for the extra work? If so how much will this be?

What types of links do they build? Be wary of anyone who buys large amount of links on your behalf.

What happens if you drop positions in the search engines? Will they know your site has dropped? Do they notice the change and are they working on it before you notice and will they make you aware of why this has happened? 

If they claim to monitor, then how do they keep on top of search engine activity to catch these fluctuations and what do they do about it?

Can you get to see the work stream of your SEO expert? Believe me in 6 months from sign up you may wish to know what on earth has been going on as you may have seen no real change in your positions.

What happens if I want to change my website? Or add lots of new products? Find out if there are extra charges if more pages need SEO or you wish to rebrand the site etc.

How vital will the keywords be to my business? If the company is claiming to get you number 1 positions, make sure it is for a relevant keyword - not some bizarre phrase that will mean nothing to searchers.

If you are really at a loss ask the company for some REAL customers contact details so you can call them and ask about the service they have received and the success of the campaign.

Jayne Wiltshire

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

Today I saw a new feature test on Google, which is something I always like to see happening. On some searches that may have local intent, they are asking you to enter your postcode:



And here it is in context:

A few searches turned up a mention of this appearing in the US, back in May this year, and there was some detail of it in a presentation from SEMpdx, but in the UK it is obviously something that has been popping up this month, as this blog last week shows.

So perhaps it has been a successful test and they are expanding the testing to a wider range of countries? With so many searches having local intent and Google's wish to personalise the search experience, this is an interesting development. I wasn’t logged in to a Google Account when I found this search – if you are then Google may have information about your location already e.g. from Google Maps, particularly if you have set a 'home' location in any way, such as iGoogle.

Considering the regional nature of many searches, awareness of local SEO should be growing faster than it is.

Kerry Dye
Campaign Delivery Manager