paid search

Five interview questions to ask search marketing candidates

Recruiting the right talent for your team is tricky no matter what industry you’re in, but people working in search marketing face some very particular challenges.

There aren’t a lot of experienced and talented people to go around. Equally, experience doesn’t always correlate with talent.

There are a lot of excellent search marketers with only a few years experience and others who’ve done the years but don’t have the skills. 

Lots of people are responding to this by taking on trainees, this can work a treat but does eat into one of your most precious resources – your senior team’s time.

So if you decided to recruit someone with more experience what do you ask them?

Enhanced Campaigns a year on: how have marketers adapted?

In early 2013 Google overhauled the way PPC worked with the announcement of Enhanced Campaigns.

The new system enabled (or forced) marketers to manage their mobile and desktop PPC bids within the same campaign.

While the stated aim was to simplify how PPC campaigns were run and reflect the way consumers shift between devices, some marketers felt that it was a ploy to drive up Google’s mobile ad revenues.

In May 2013 I asked several PPC experts for their initial opinions, with the consensus being that Enhanced Campaigns had made their jobs easier by streamlining the bid process. 

Does PPC have any effect on SEO? The expert view

I’ve recently been making a point of plunging myself deeper and deeper into the murky depths of SEO. 

It’s a fascinating place that can be filled with deeply satisfying victories, bafflingly contradictory advice, black and white hat gunslingers and requires dogged determination, nerves of steel and a strong sense of routine discipline.

While writing various beginner’s guides to SEO and paid search over the last year, I realised that I still had many more questions to ask, in particular how these two disciplines relate to each other.

And what’s the best way to seek enlightenment? Ask a bunch of experts that know way more than you, and pass off their advice as your own!

What is off-page SEO and how can you use it?

Before we begin to understand what ‘off-page SEO’ means and the various methods that relate to it, let’s have a quick recap at what ‘on-page SEO’ means.

On-page SEO (or on-site SEO) refers to all the elements on your web page that you can control in order to make it visible to search engines. 

For instance: internal linking, using a clear navigation with a naturally flowing hierarchy, search engine friendly URLs that have relevancy to the content, fast loading pages, submitting regularly updated XML sitemaps or remembering to tag your images and videos properly. 

On-page SEO can be considered a technical job, although there’s nothing particularly complicated to learn if you want to carry out the basic techniques of good SEO. It’s about adopting a routine or having a checklist in place that ensures you remember the tasks that benefit your page’s visibility.

Off-page SEO requires a different discipline or skillset from the above, but the desired outcome remains the same.

Does eBay really hate paid search?

Is eBay’s latest report on paid search really a blow to search engine marketing? Or are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Following the release of the final results of an ongoing study, there have been headlines proclaiming that “eBay warns that search ads have ‘no measurable benefit’”.

So, either eBay is making an outrageous claim that paid search ads don’t work. Or, the headlines are slightly misleading.

Having now read the paper by eBay, it would appear that both may be true.

How many web users are unaware of Google’s PPC ads?

Did Google make £3.768bn from users who had no idea they were being advertised to?

Here’s a study of 2,000 people where we try to find the answer to that question & more.

You may remember two studies which found that 40% of people did not understand that Google ads were ads in 2013, and that 36% still don’t understand this in 2014.

These were researcher-led user tests, of around 100 people each, led by Bunnyfoot.

During the tests, at the end of a scenario based around a Google search, users were asked the question “Recall any ads?”.

Mobile accounted for 28% of US PPC impressions in Q1 2014: report

It’s no great secret that mobile search is becoming increasingly popular and that it will soon become more common than desktop search.

However new data from The Search Agency suggests that there’s some way to go before mobile devices challenge desktop’s dominance of paid search.

Its new Q1 2014 report shows that smartphones accounted for 16.9% of ad impressions, compared to 11.1% on tablet and 72% on desktop.

While proportionately these are large year-on-year increases of 35% on smartphone and 21% on tablet, it should be noted that desktop ads still account for 72% of search impressions.

Paid search CTR on mobile increased by 78% in 2013: stats

In the UK, the share of clicks coming through mobile search ads almost doubled in 2013, from 24% in January to 43% in December.

According to the latest research from Marin Software, mobile devices will account for 50% of all paid-search clicks globally by December 2015. 

The UK is ahead of the rest of Europe, where mobile and tablets only accounted for 20% of paid search clicks in 2013.

That being said, advertisers in Europe increased their investment in mobile paid search by 109% in 2013, while UK advertisers increased their mobile paid search spend from 22% to 35%.

Google click-to-call used by more than 40% of mobile searchers

Google and Ipsos have published new research intended to detail the use of click-to-call in mobile search.

The results show that almost half of those surveyed (42%) had used click-to-call in search, with the need to talk to a real person stated as the main motivation. Other motivations included ‘wanting answers more quickly’ and ‘needing more information than a website could provide’.

Of smartphone users, a massive 94% have needed to call a business directly when searching for information, whether click-to-call is available or not.

Google has a unique perspective on much of the mobile customer journey with search, Maps, Chrome, Places, click-to-call, Wallet, to name a few. 

Google ads drive 40m calls a month and with in-search features growing more on desktop and smartphone, customers are using them more and more. The research showed 47% were aware of additional information displayed in search results.

Here are some more findings from the research and an additional click-to-call case study from sk:n clinics.

For further information on this topic, check out our blog posts looking at five good and five bad examples of click-to-call mobile CTAs, or 12 useful tips for optimising mobile landing pages.

Consumer electronics SEO: Amazon comes top for organic and paid visibility

Consumer electronics shoppers usually spend a lot of time researching products before they eventually make a decision, which typically involves looking at upwards of 14 sources of information.

This includes searching for advice from consumer publications such as Which, comparison sites and customer reviews.

Organic and paid search is therefore an extremely important tactic for gaining brand exposure during the purchase journey.

There is a mix of competition within this sector as manufacturers, specialist suppliers, ecommerce brands and multichannel retailers attempt to improve market share.

A new report examining which brands achieve the highest visibility for consumer electronics has found that Amazon.co.uk comes top for both organic and paid search, which probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

Three important considerations for mobile PPC success

As has been the case for the past while, the start of a new year brings a whole host of predictions, rich with content about the importance of mobile (thankfully, this year we avoided the dreaded ‘year of mobile’ proclamations).  

For PPC campaigns this year, one of the key challenges will be ensuring that the opportunity for increased sales via mobile traffic is efficiently and profitably taken.

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