Dynamic Search Ads benefits

• Fill gaps in your keyword coverage
• Allow Google to crawl website content and match landing pages to relevant search queries
• Improve users’ experience
• Improve CTR through generating suitable ad headline
• Allow specific webpage bids optimisation
• Advertise extensively different website sections

How DSA Works

DSA allows Google to scan your web content and deliver quality traffic beyond the targeted keywords. Every time a relevant search occurs, DSA generates an ad template along with a dynamic headline based on this query, leading customers to the most relevant landing page. This provides you with a better coverage across a range of terms that your PPC account might previously have fallen to capture.

High quality traffic

DSA gives you a unique way of targeting new customers. On The Beach, a leading online holiday retailer, increased their bookings by 14% and reduced cost per click by 16%, simply from using this tool along with regular keyword reports.

By using negative targeting the Dynamic Search Ads exclude any unwanted sections of the site, yet never trump any existing keyword-targeted ads. On the Beach’s PPC Manager Danny Catapano said of DSA, “It certainly helped to save time researching and expanding keywords compared to previous methods.”

Success with DSA

DSA is a complimentary tool to assist your AdWords campaigns, delivering more clicks and conversions with less effort and cost. For more information and tailored DSA strategy, contact Soap Media at 0161 638 0981.

The post Dynamic Search Ads: Increase keyword coverage and traffic relevance appeared first on Soap Media.

As stated in one parliamentary briefing paper on the proposed Jackson Reforms: “Lawyers have not always been effective in marketing their services and some clients have been left unserved.” Despite calls from many politicians to delay the introduction of these measures, it seems inevitable now that they will go ahead on the 1st April, for better or for worse. Amidst the raft of legislation, regulation and rule changes surrounding the funding and conducting of litigations, it is perhaps the banning of referral fees that has left personal injury claims companies and no win, no fee solicitors scratching their collective heads most vigorously. So how can these organisations plug the hole in their business without committing a regulatory offence? And where do they turn for lead generation if not to their traditional partners?

For firms trying to access these“unserved clients there are a host of offline and online marketing options open: including print, TV and radio advertising, direct mail, telephone, video marketing and social media. There are benefits to be had in utilising both traditional and new marketing channels, but head and shoulders above the others in terms of lead generation is the Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. As any online marketer will tell you, PPC is effective because it is targeted, cost effective, fast, flexible, and immediate. And just as importantly for many conscientious firms, it is more quantifiable and transparent than any other channel – so businesses can see it in black and white when their conversion rates head through the roof.

As the personal injury claims sector clamours for the best way of making up for lost referrals and recommendations, PPC will be a key factor for solicitors and accident management companies in staying ahead of the curve.

Of course, the temptation with online marketing is always to test the water without bringing in the relevant expertise. After all, it could be relatively cheap to set a small budget aside and choose a few pertinent keywords, sign up with Google Adwords and see how successful they are. Yes?

NO.

Trying to dabble in Pay Per Click in an industry this competitive will do three things:

1.  You will burn money like no tomorrow… as click costs can go up to £50 per click in this sector you need a highly experienced PPC management team, competitor intelligence and a very extensive ‘long tail’ keyword list.

2. Lead to more potential clients bouncing away from your site through badly integrated campaigns. Sending the wrong customers to the wrong landing pages has a negative effect on online credibility not only with those web users but with search engines, too. In short: you’ll be penalised for it with a poor quality score.

3. Waste time and money on generating dead leads that will never produce a return on investment.

On the surface, PPC may look easy but it is a delicate, constantly changing and nuanced beast. You wouldn’t rewire your entire house without having the relevant expertise for fear of electrocution; and in the same vein, making just a few shocking mistakes with a PPC campaign can leave a well-intentioned marketing strategy badly burnt. The rewards of a successful PPC campaign are high, as we have already mentioned, but to spark that success it is imperative to bring in the right expertise – and that’s where finding the right digital partner comes in.

Some companies will inevitably consider bringing in an in house team to handle their PPC campaigns, but why add to overheads and spend months establishing an arm of the business when outsourcing allows the management team to focus on the core of their business. Utilising the expertise of a digital agency guarantees a team with a proven track record, offers flexibility to the law firm or claims company and ensures cost effectiveness.

In personal injury lead generation the best partner must be both proactive and reactive: choosing best keywords, integrating strategy seamlessly with websites to avoid sending traffic to useless and irrelevant landing pages. The right digital agency can monitor activity, fine tune techniques and analyse new and emerging options in the market – both in terms of the competition and changes made by search engines. And the very best agencies can integrate Pay Per Click in a way that builds and reinforces brand identity.

The result: a campaign that is “relevant” and an investment that sees a handsome return. And the bigger your budget the more important it is to have that cash converting customers. Have the right team in place, produces a streamlined user experience that doesn’t confuse potential leads and won’t annoy Google.

Personal Injury claims are a fiercely contested battleground, of that there is no doubt. And with more businesses going online to access their clients, PPC is only going to become of even greater importance to businesses. With the Jackson reforms making it likely that the market will become saturated, cost-per-click will increase and the pressure on law firms and claims management companies to make their marketing spend count is likely to become even greater.

If you are not already looking into lead generation, or even if you are and want to improve your use of it, why not contact Soap Media and find out how you could be cleaning up in online personal injury leads. We’ve been Google certified since 2006 which means we know them inside out, and we’ve got a dynamic, growing team of industry experts committed to improving your conversion rates. Our CV reads like a who’s who of leading national clients, and we’ve enjoyed success that’s included getting 500 million impressions per month for a partner. Or how about the organisation whose increase in daily lead volume soared to 700%, whilst cutting their PPC budget by 70%.

Sound like good business? Then contact us today and we’ll help you flush out leads from those hard to reach corners of the digital world before they slip through your hands.

The post Taking The Personal Injury Lead: Using PPC To Protect Your Business appeared first on Soap Media.

Explosive Growth

The explosion of smartphones and tablets is changing the way we live at a dizzying pace.

The amount of data being moved around by mobiles grew 70% last year. Today almost two thirds of phones in Britain are smartphones, and YouGov calculate there will be 10 million tablets by August.

How’s that affecting businesses who live on the web?

The Effect on Browsing

Almost one in four paid search clicks in Britain now comes from handheld devices, the highest proportion in the world, according to research by Marin Software.

Cost per click (CPC) on smartphones is half the desktop rate though, because businesses are looking at the simple figure of conversions from phones at 1.6%. What most businesses are failing to realise is that conversion rate doesn’t tell the whole story. Far from it.

Google reckon more than a third of people who search on a phone go on to buy on a computer later. Others walk in and do business face to face.

That research by Marin also suggests that conversion rates on tablets will actually overtake computers this year, but CPC is still lagging.

There’s an opportunity here for those who know what they’re doing to grab more clicks and conversion at cheap rates.

Keeping Up

Online advertising is changing quickly and most businesses are just not keeping up. Those that do chase the clicks will steal the advantage.

Google say if you’re not at the top of their search results for your keywords you’re just not in the game, because on mobiles we don’t scroll we pick from the top. And people simply don’t stick around on sites which don’t work well on smaller screens.

It’s a reality which hasn’t escaped companies like Soap Media who are advising online businesses on how to adapt, maximise clicks, and make their pages work for mobile.

The future of PPC

As usual Google are ahead of the game, and that should send a message loud and clear.

They’ve just announced changes to AdWords to reflect the future we face. The new “Enhanced Campaigns” also mean we’ll have to rethink the way we run our sponsored click marketing.

Mobile will be included by default, with an option to pay three times as much for a mobile click-through as we do for a desktop one.

Google sense that they and other businesses who don’t target their online advertising at the mobile market as aggressively as they do desktops are ignoring a large and growing pool of possibilities.

Conversion Rate Growth

It’s hard for businesses to keep on top of the twists and turns of consumer behaviour, let alone the complex changes the likes of Google throw up time and time again.

It’s increasingly an area for experts to guide us.

Think back to those figures for growth, for page-views and for paid clicks. They are growing quickly, the market is changing fast.

Is your online marketing changing at a pace which will keep up?

The post Mobile Paid Search Growth – Why It Pays To Be Optimised appeared first on Soap Media.

Most fundamental change since the beginning of AdWords

Have you heard what the world’s number one search engine is doing to its pay-per-click marketing tool?
Consistently at the forefront of Internet search-based marketing, Google have announced details of a whole new raft of improvements to their popular AdWords advertising model.

In fact, the new enhancements are the most fundamental changes for advertisers since the AdWords platform was first introduced.
In order to really maximise the marketing power of its search targeting, Enhanced Campaigns (as named by Google) will give us the ability to alter bids according to location, time of day and the type of device on which the search is being carried out.

3 Key Variables – Location/Time/Device

In a single campaign, you’ll be able to alter a wide array of options in order to maximise your click throughs.
But what can you do to really embrace these changes and make them perform to maximum effect for your business.

The answer? Get in touch with a Google Adwords specialist. Assistance with the complexities of AdWords is surprisingly affordable and just like you’d call a plumber to fix your leaky tap or a mechanic to service the company car, it’s proven that taking advantage of the services of expert online professionals to drive custom to your business is the best way forward.

As a long-standing, Google-accredited agency (and one of the UK’s first such agencies might we add) we reckon there’s no-one better to help guide you through the changes and really make them count when it comes to driving traffic to your website and footfall through your door.

Our online experts are fully conversant with all aspects of the new-look AdWords Enhanced Campaigns features, and have years of experience of online and offline marketing in general.

Let Soap Media navigate you through these changes

That’s why it’s worth giving us a call to talk through how your business can implement these exciting and powerful new additions and really boost the performance of your AdWords campaigns going forward.

There’s no need to commit to a long-term contract with us – we’re much more easygoing than that! We’re happy to help for as long as you need us, to get you up-to-speed on the improvements so that your business can enjoy all the benefits.

You can bet your bottom dollar that your competitors will be doing all they can to make Enhanced Campaigns brings custom to their business. Make sure your organisation doesn’t fall behind – get in touch today for a no-obligation chat to see how we can help you drive traffic, drive sales and maximise profit.

The post Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns launches: Don’t get left behind! appeared first on Soap Media.

Debugging WordPress can sometimes prove a little tricky at times and whilst WordPress has a few inbuilt functions like WP_DEBUG that will enable notices and php warnings to be displayed it doesn’t have anything specifically for outputting a snapshot of what is being loaded and not loaded. debugWP on the other hand provides an unobtrusive expandable bar that can you give you a quick eye shot of the key information being used by a particular page or custom post type at the point of execution  - which is ideal for seeing:

• Total queries ran on the page to aid speed optimisation
• Execution time of the main query to help help guage performance
• General object information
• Current Page & Post Type being loaded
• Which page template is being called
• Which scripts and styles are being qued  and which have been loaded
• A summary of  site information
• Bot Status – Really important to prevent/allow Search engine indexing
• Number of posts per page
• Current active theme

You can download the plugin by searching for “debugWP” via the “Add New” option under the Plugins section of your WordPress admin

As always if you have comments or suggestions please feel free to post them in the comments section or via twitter account

The post DebugWP WordPress Debugger For Developers appeared first on Soap Media.

By contrast however, Google AdWords focus on not just the seller profile, but the specific products that customers are interested in. It offers smarter ways for commercial websites to escape the triviality and promote their entire product inventory online with more relevance.

Via linking Google Merchant Centre with your AdWords account, product specific campaigns can be set up to show each individual product  in the portfolio with price, picture and description underneath, increasing the chance to capture the buyer’s attention and most importantly – increase the click through rate (CTR). Using the features described below has generated increased sales performance for discount retailers, high tech and home appliances providers, specific product ranges, to name a few:

1. Google Product Extensions are ad innovations by AdWords, allowing advertisers to enhance their existing text ads with product information, appearing both on PCs and mobile devices. By relating your product portfolio to search queries, Google will list the most relevant products below the ad, with or without image. This is beneficial for general search terms such as ‘red rugs’, showing several items from the same provider with listed prices, allowing customers to choose and click directly.
2. Google Product Listing Ads (PLA) are product-focused ads, allowing advertisers to promote standalone items. Google Product Listings were previously under the Google Affiliate network, where sellers had to pay for using this feature, but now they are available to all merchants. The product listings do not require ad text; Google scans the information in Google Merchant Centre and provides a single product ad to highly relevant searches. Besides Cost-Per-Click, PLAs allow established advertisers to use Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) bidding, where the cost is set based on how much a sale is valued. The results and revenue from such campaigns can be precisely and instantly tracked via Google Analytics so your campaign performance and return on investment is highly visible.

While product extensions allow the addition of extra business information to your advertising, the product listing ads concentrate on the items rather than the merchant. In this way, customers have the chance to choose a product before clicking an ad, saving you the costs from comparison shopping clicks and also improving the click quality. Taking advantage of these Google features will improve the shoppers’ e-commerce experience, as well as the competitive edge of your commercial website. For more information and free advice on how you can boost the effectiveness and impact of your commercial website advertising, please contact:

Call on 0161 638 0981

The post Boost your commercial website advertising appeared first on Soap Media.

Maximise your reach

Once your YouTube adverts are live, you can continue to hone your campaign by remarketing. This allows you to work at efficiently maximising the number of people you reach. Remarketing targets the members of your audience who have come across your advert on YouTube, but did not lead to a click or conversion. Don’t let these hot leads slip away, re-advertise to them using YouTube Friendly Ad Units. These include a video ad or an overlay advert, which sits over a video being played, and a distinctively visible companion display advert in the sidebar next to the video. It is very easy to create an overlay advert by using the Display Ad Builder, then choose to add it to a video as an InStream Video Ad. You then have the option to upload an image to be used as a companion ad next to the playing video. This is a wise idea, because even if the viewer chooses to minimize your overlay ad, the companion ad will still be visible for them to click on. People who choose to click on your adverts will be taken to your website, just like with the video campaigns. Companion ads can also be used with your video campaigns, which, as we discussed in part two, pre-roll a short film before your chosen YouTube video. Viewers may choose to skip your pre-roll film or don’t click on it because they are keen to watch their chosen video. By placing the companion advert next to the video, the viewer is constantly reminded of your brand and has the chance to click later in the video or once it has finished. These companion adverts give the audience a second chance to engage and makes sure they don’t get away.

Tracking the results

Once your pre-roll, overlay and companion adverts are live, you can monitor their success within your AdWords account. Within the Ads tab, you can monitor the clicks and ad performance, just as you do with ordinary text and image Google ad campaigns. You will be able to find out how much of your video people play in quartiles, so you can see how many people are watching for 25, 50, 75 and 100 per cent of the video. If you find that people aren’t watching the first quarter, then you can tailor your pre-roll video to make sure more people carry on watching in future. You can also use conversion tracking to see how many people who click on the advert go on to convert into a sale or perform your required conversion action. As your advertising campaign progresses and you acquire more data, you can continually tailor your adverts accordingly to make sure they are performing more efficiently.

Creating a YouTube ad campaign

Soap Media can help you to create a winning YouTube campaign. Because we have a vast amount of experience in dealing with successful video marketing, we instinctively know what works and can devise a strategy that will target your desired audience. We can also help you to analyse all the data once the campaign is live to optimise your conversion rate and turn those video views into clicks and sales. To find out how we can help your brand to grow, visit www.soapmedia.co.uk or call 01772 978 944 today. Download Part 1 and Part 2 of our 3-part series, for a full explanation of how You Tube video adverts can benefit your business.

The post How to Successfully Advertise on YouTube – Part 3 appeared first on Soap Media.

You Tube Ads

YouTube offers TrueView video ads, which allow you to specifically target audiences of certain videos, channels and genres.

Your video advert will bid for space via an AdWords auction just like with Google’s text and picture ads. If your campaign bids more for the keywords you have selected, then it will appear alongside a relevant video.

With TrueView, you only pay for ads that your potential customers engage with with – this CPC style of advertising saves you wasting money on adverts that are seen by internet users that are not interested in your products in the way that click per thousand impressions-style CPM campaigns can do.

When a viewer sees your video advert, they have the option of skipping it, watching the whole thing or clicking on the ad to be taken to your site. As with text and picture ads, you will be charged for each click, but you will only pay for views of the advert if someone watches it for more than 30 seconds or for the duration of the whole advert if it is shorter than that time.

Because viewers have the option to skip your advert if they wish, that will remove the people who aren’t interested in your company and you won’t have to pay for them seeing the beginning of your advert.

Viewers of TrueView ads have been found to pay a lot more attention than people watching TV ads, with research finding that YouTube audiences have a 31 per cent higher chance of remembering adverts than when watching TV.

Going viral

Many users of social media choose to share video content these days, and if they post a video that features your advert, it will be seen by thousands more viewers as the video goes viral.

YouTube videos can be embedded into Facebook and YouTube, so the user does not even have to leave their chosen network to watch the video, which encourages even more people to press play.

When selecting which videos to target with your campaigns, bear in mind how likely they are to be shared via social media sites. The public don’t just share embarrassing home videos and cute short films of cats skateboarding; they also frequently post their favourite music videos and film trailers too.

Remember SEO best practice

As well as searching for videos on YouTube and stumbling across one on a social networking site, viewers can also find videos when they do a Google search.

Blended Google searches show ordinary web results alongside images and videos, so it’s important that you are bearing SEO in mind when choosing keywords for your videos.

Devising a strategic campaign will help your advert to reach even more people via Google and YouTube’s AdWords offers you insights into how your keywords are performing to help you tailor your campaign as it goes on.

If you missed Part 1 in this series of 3 articles,  download it now and look out for Part 3 which will be released tomorrow, which concludes this series on using YouTube advertising to help your business.

The post How to Successfully Advertise on YouTube – Part 2 appeared first on Soap Media.

At the core of any Magento e-commerce website is a fundamental business objective to generate sales revenue and ultimately profit.

At Soap we are accountable to our clients for our ability to develop solutions that will generate sales and a key part of this knowing the ROI on the marketing channels we use. This process relies upon accurate and detailed reports from which we can make strategic marketing decisions. For this we use a variety of tracking tools some of which are standard Magento features, for example ‘out of the box’ Magento does an excellent job of integrating Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking and a sample of the reporting is shown below:

Why Use the Magento ROI Tracker Extension

However support for additional third party ROI Trackeing tools does not come as standard with Magento and they can be troublesome to integrate. Over the years we have developed a number of  Magento conversion tracking tools that help capture the data for ROI reports and we have compiled some of these for release  in the form of the Magento ROI Tracker Extension. This extension currently supports Bings Ads Conversion tracking on Magento (formerly Microsoft adCenter), Google Adwords tracking, Shopping.com ROI Tracker and Addshoppers

What Magento ROI Tracker Extension Does

The Magento ROI Tracker adds the functionality to trigger the Google Adwords conversion tracking code on the Magento ‘thank you’ page once a customer has placed an order. The extension also adds similar support for the Shopping.com ROI Tracker.

How to Install  the Magento ROI Tracker Extension

To install the Magento ROI Tracker tool simple copy the key from the ROI Tracker page on Magento Connect and install via Magento Connect Manager located under the system menu in your Magento admin

How to configure the Magento ROI Tracker Extension

Shopping.com ROI Tracker

• Enable: This disables/enable the Shopping.com conversion tracking code from appearing on the post order/thank you page
• Account Number: This is your shopping.com account number

Google adWords Tracking Code

• Enable: This disables/enable the Adwords conversion tracking code from appearing on the post order/thank you page
• Conversion ID: This is your unqiue Adwords account ID
• Language: The site language on which the Adwords code is placed on
• Label: This is the conversion name specified in your Adwords account that you defined
• Colour: This is the colour of Adwords notification box displayed to the customer

Microsoft adCentre Tracking (Bing Ads)

• Enable: This disables/enable the Adwords conversion tracking code from appearing on the post order/thank you page
• Domain ID: This is your unqiue Bing Ads account ID

AddShoppers Tracking Code

• Enable: This disables/enable the Adwords conversion tracking code from appearing on the post order/thank you page
• Account Number: Your AddShoppers account number

How to setup AddShoppers ROI Tracking code for Magento Video

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

How to setup Shopping.com ROI Tracking in Magento Video

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

How to Track Google Adwords in Magento Video

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

How to track Bing Ads (Microsoft AdCentre) In Magento Video

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Talk to Us

Going forward we are looking to include the option to specify a Google Adwords Remarketing code in the Magento add-on however if you have any other suggestions or improvements we would love to hear from you in the comments below. Alternatively if you have a specific Magento Development Project you would like us to look then please feel free to get in touch

The post Magento ROI Tracking Extension appeared first on Soap Media.

Online audiences have grown by 174 per cent in the U.K. with 34 million people now watching online videos every month, and over 800 million unique users visiting YouTube worldwide each month. It is clear that this is a trend that is only going to continue to grow.

The Impact of YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and the fourth largest internet site. It is also the UK’s most popular place for watching online videos. On average, UK consumers watch 18 hours of online video each month and 5.3 of those hours are spent viewing YouTube – that’s more than double BBC IPlayer, ITV Player and 4OD put together.

When you consider that the average Channel 4 viewer watches little more than 5 hours each month and that nearly as many people watch YouTube every month as E4, More4, Dave and ITV3, then you realise that YouTube is becoming a worthy competitor for mainstream television.

What That Means for Advertisers

The number of people watching YouTube and the amount of time they spend viewing the channel demonstrates there is a huge untapped audience waiting to view your marketing campaigns.

Some people dismiss YouTube as something that children with no money watch, but they are wrong. More than 88 per cent of YouTube’s viewers are over 18, with 33 per cent being aged 28-34 and 55 per cent of their audience being 35 and over.

Add in the fact that 58 per cent of YouTube’s unique users are ABC1 and it is clear to see that the people using the site have a lot of expendable income that they could be spending on your products.

Another myth about YouTube is that it is just full of miscellaneous home-made videos, but again that is a misconception. YouTube actually offers a wide number of TV shows, music videos, specialist channels, magazine shows and popular content that is produced by the site’s approved partners.

There is also the more well-known user-generated content, but advertising is never displayed against this type of uncleared content.

This means that you can choose a suitable place for your advert. For example, a food company that would choose to advertise alongside Jamie Oliver’s shows on TV can pick from the most popular food shows on YouTube, while a perfume brand can opt for fashion magazine Grazia’s online videos instead of placing an advert in the middle of a popular show for woman.

ABC audits of YouTube are carried out so you can choose the channels that suit your campaign in the same way that you do when buying space in magazines, newspapers and on TV. YouTube also offers the added benefit of knowing who is watching what because 40 per cent of their users are always logged in when they watch – whether they are viewing at home online or away from the house on their iPads and phones.

You can also tailor your advertising strategy to suit your needs. YouTube allows you to target the demographic, category or specific shows. You can also choose to target all partner content, all premium partner content or go for a custom bundle.

With so many options available, you can always make sure that your marketing will be viewed by your target audience.

Marketing via online videos works in exactly the same way as the TV and print platforms that you are used to, but it opens up a whole new market for you.

We will explain further how marketing via YouTube can benefit your business in part two and part three of our report, so tune in next week.

Note:

• Source for 800 million unique users visiting YouTube worldwide each month http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics
• Any other figures not from the supplied documents are from http://www.barb.co.uk/

The post How To Successfully Advertise on YouTube – Part 1 appeared first on Soap Media.