The BBC has been following the owners of ten small firms throughout the year. From November to December, three of them gained confidence in their businesses. Two lost confidence and five felt about the same. So nine out of the ten owners rate their confidence at least a seven out of ten.
That’s great given the circumstances. They represent a range of business sectors and different regions in the UK. One is a hotelier on the Isle Of Wight.
Even what’s troubling the business owners is encouraging. Four of them were issues relating to banks, which is what so many people are trying to fix right now. One’s worried about finding qualified employees, which implies that his company will expand. Do you have similar issues to any of the business owners? How confident are you feeling? Let us know. Read more here
General
Business, Tourism
Keyword Quality Score (QS) can make a huge difference to your conversion rate, cost and number of impressions. Google will give you a QS every time someone searches for your keywords. Google AdWords rates QS 0 – 10 where 0 – 4 is ‘Poor’; 5 – 7 is ‘OK’; and 8 – 10 is ‘Great’.
If you have a poor QS there are a few things you can do to quickly increase it.
You can work on your landing page (the page that your Ad links to) making sure that it includes your keywords in the title, meta tags, content and alt tags. Also make sure that your page doesn’t take too long to load which can have a negative impact on your QS.
A key element contributing to a good QS is the Click Through Rate (CTR) on the particular keyword. The CTR is the number of clicks per impression, i.e. the percentage of times a user clicks on your ad. If you get a large percentage of people clicking on your ad, Google assumes that your keywords must be highly relevant and will require a lower keyword bid price for the same position, and so save you money.
Another way of improving your QS is including the keywords in an Ad. I was achieving quality score 2 which was having a negative impact on the number of impressions that I was receiving and the cost per click. I reviewed the Ad and found that I didn’t have the particular keywords included in the Ad! I added the keyword into the headline and repeated it on the 3rd line of the ad. The Quality Score jumped up to 4 over the next 20 minutes! I increased my impressions by a whole 50% and my cost per click dropped down from £0.70 to £0.66 for the same position!
A note of caution, if you are making any similar changes keep an eye on the keyword position as it can improve very quickly and you might end up right at the top of the page which can cost you a lot more money especially if the keyword is expensive.
Submitted by Olga
Google AdWords
adwords, Google, quality score
U.K. advertisers substantially reduced their budgets in the final three months of 2008 according to the IPA’s Q4 Bellwether report, published today. 49 percent said they had cut spending.
Online experienced less of a reduction than any other medium, with further growth in overall market share, which the IPA now estimates at 10 percent. Hardest hit in the fourth quarter were budgets for “main media advertising,” which includes TV, radio and press.
Read more http://www.clickz.com/3632345
General, eCommerce
advertising, adwords, Great Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, Webviz
As mentioned in previous posts, there’s a great opportunity to promote your business using AdWords abroad, but, if your foreign language skills are like mine and limited to ordering coffee and beer then you’ll be pleased to know that Google can help.
Google has a free translation service at http://translate.google.com/?hl=en give it a try!
We use it for finding foreign key phrases to bid on too, it’s become an invaluable tool
Google doesn’t stop there either, remember, if someone from Germany (for example) does a search for your business, Google will offer an option in the results to translate your page into German, give it a try with your own company name, just go to http://www.google.de, do a search for your company and then click on “Google-Suche”, once you see the results, click on “Diese Seite übersetzen” to see the German version of your site!
A final note, Google can’t read any text in images so that bit won’t get translated!
Genießen Sie Ihr neues Spielzeug von Google!
Google
advertising, adwords, foreign, Google, overseas, Tourism
Many people don’t know that you can use Google AdWords to advertise your business on websites too
Rather than having people search for you, you can publish your Ads on other people’s websites, such as information sites, blogs and the likes, Google call this “The Content Network” and they deliver these Ads using something called AdSense, you may even be doing it already and not even know!
In September 2008 this got even more exciting (in a sad online marketing kind of way) as Google introduced it’s AdBuilder service in AdWords allowing you to make your own image based and animated Ads
Here’s an example of a site displaying these type of Ads (you can see that these are text Ads in this example at the top right)
Content Network / Adsense Example
You can also make a bit of money yourself by publishing AdSense on your website too
Google AdWords
adsense, advertising, adwords, Google, Tourism
