Ann's presentation is part of today's 'SMX Advanced Track' and will cover Product Ad Extensions and Listings in Google's AdWords, and take delegates through how these can be set up in Google AdWords by linking it with a Google Merchant Centre account. The presentation will also cover how to optimise product listing ads to maximize clicks and conversions.

For those not  attending the SMX event, you can see Ann's presentation here:

If you need help or advice about Pay Per Click, or any other aspect of online marketing, please feel free to contact us and take advantage of our free audit and consultation process.

This new presentation brings in even more hints and tips to make the most of your online marketing efforts in the ever-changing digital landscape, from the 'quick wins' of Email Marketing and Local Listings in search engines to integrated approaches to SEO, PPC and Social Media. As well as focusing on tactics to improve traffic, Ann's presentation also deals with how to  improve conversion rates.

Today's event is at Phoenix Square Film and Digital Media Centre in Leicester's Cultural Quarter - full registration details can be found here: CIM Presentation: How To Drive More Traffic To Your Website.

For those who can't make it, here's Ann's presentation:

If you would like our help with any aspect of online marketing, feel free to get in touch for a consultation and a free audit.

It's an exciting time for all involved with Anicca Solutions, and is a measure of just how much we have grown in the past few years - in terms of both numbers of staff and lovely clients

We're still ironing out a few technicalities (little things like furniture and internet connection!) but we are all now settled and fit to receive guests at our new online marketing headquarters. Here's a few pictures of the new office (it will look a bit more homely soon!):

Our lovely new reception and welcoming area:

And here's the SEO and a bit of the PPC team hard at work:

We'll update you with how the new office decoration goes and let you know when it's all finished!

So, as the role of social media develops as a sales channel, marketers and web analysts need true outcome-oriented reports, and this is now what Google Analytics is providing. If you have Google "+1" and Facebook "Like" buttons on your website, it is increasingly important to know which buttons are being clicked most frequently. For example, you will need to know which of the blogs and articles posted in your social spaces are most commonly "liked" or shared, and from which social network they are being shared from. 

The new set of Social reports within Google Analytics aim to bridge the gap between social media and the business metrics already provided. The reports aim to deliver 3 things:

• Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions

• Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs

Getting social media activities right is time consuming.  Being able to measure the impact through Goals and Ecommerce results can help to quantify the time spent nurturing these often lucrative traffic sources. There are 4 new reports to look out for: Social Value Overview, Social Sources, Social Plugins, and Conversion Reports in the Traffic Sources section of your account.

What will the new social reports provide?

The reports allow you to analyse all of this information together and see a more complete picture of your overall social impact as well as see at a glance how much conversion value is generated from your social channels.

If you want any help or advice regarding social media, Google Analytics or online marketing in general, feel free to get in touch with us. See our Contact Us page for full contact details.

The presentation covers the whole range of online marketing methods and tactics - from SEO best practices in the post-Panda environment to how to best leverage the ever-growing arsenal of paid search tools. Ahead of the presentation this afternoon, you can see a selection of the slides below:

Ann is a regular speaker at CIM events and has been teaching various aspects of digital marketing for nearly 10 years. She is a Chartered Marketer and a Google AdWords Certified Practitioner. Her passion is search marketing, especially Pay Per Click and her seminars and workshops are full of practical tips and real life case studies.

Today's presentation takes place at Staffordshire University at 14:00. For more information on this, and all upcoming CIM events, visit their website: http://www.cim.co.uk/

Looking forward to talking on "driving more traffic to your website" #CIM workshop in Stoke on Trent today cim.co.uk/Events/EventDe…

— Ann Stanley (@AnnStanley) April 26, 2012

Despite the backdrop of a receding economy, UK advertising has increased 14.4%, reaching a new high of £4,784 million in 2011 up from £687 million last year, not too shabby for a depressed economy.

The top 5 categories for online marketing, counting for 63% of the market, are:

Finance (15%)
Consumer (15%)
Retail (12%)
Entertainment & the Media (12%)
Technology (9%)

Display grows 13.4% to top £1bn for first time

The driving force of display is banners and other embedded media, which continue to push display forward. Growth of this format was fuelled by larger, richer and more interactive ads that increased display spend by 13.4% to a high of £1,128 million (up from £945 million last year) and a 24% share of online ad spend.

Video and social media grow 800%

Video ads continue their unbelievable growth and now accounts for 10% of all online display advertising.  Online video expenditure has doubled year on year to £109 million. The medium has increased more than eight times since 2008, when video spend was £12 million.

In 2011 banner ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, increased by 75% to £240 million – an 800% increase since records began in 2008.

Online is still the preferred direct response tool as search soars by 17.5%

Search marketing proved to be a recession-proof staple for direct response advertisers, recording impressive growth of 17.5% to £2,767 million, and a 58% share of online advertising spend in total – so it seems that all of our efforts have actually made a difference to online advertising.

Mobile ad-spend more than doubles

Advertising on mobile devices rose by 157% in 2011, to a new high of £203million, as a result of increased numbers of smartphones in the UK (1/3 of the population now own one), the explosion of touchscreen technology, 3G, and massive tablet sales, sparked a surge in interest from brands.

Did you know…

Online audience grows – on average last year there were 39.7 million people online each month – 375,000 more than the monthly average in 2010

The UK is addicted to social media – social networks account for 27% of all the time spent online in the UK last year.

Mobile and social behaviour - 38% (which is a whopping 19 million) of the UK mobile audience accessed social media via a mobile device in the three months up to January 2012, an increase of 35.6% year on year.

We’re prolific internet users - In 2011 UK internet users visited an average of 2,500 web pages across an average of 80 different web sites every month.

We’re a nation of video devotees - 27.3 million, of the 38.5 million people who went online in the UK on their PC in Feb 2012, viewed streamed content.

If you want to know more about how you can get into paid search ads, SEO or Facebook ads then get in touch with us today.

If you’re lucky enough to be an IAB member, you can view the full report here:

http://www.iabuk.net/research/library/2011-online-adspend-full-year-results

(Research and report conducted and created by PwC)

By Lucie Crouch, follow her on Twitter

The two-day UK conference is taking place in the capital on May 15th - 16th 2012 at Chelsea Football Club, Stamford Bridge, and will be covering advanced search tactics for professional digital marketers.

Anicca Solutions MD, Ann Stanley, will be presenting on day 2 of the conference in the advanced Search track from 3:00pm until 4:15pm. This session will cover how to maximize paid search campaigns with Google.

Ann has established herself as an authority on paid search after presenting at SMX London and SMX Stockholm last year.

Ann will be joined on stage with Jeff Ferguson, Fang Digital Marketing, George Popstefanov, Performance Media Group, and Paul Risebury-Crisp, Efficient Frontier.

If you haven’t yet got your tickets for SMX London if you use our special discount code you can get 15% discount. Simply use the code - ANICCA012 - at the checkout to receive the discount.

Visit the SMX London site to find out more about the other programs taking place throughout the conference.

By James Murphy

Anicca are going to run a competition to see who can write the best PPC ad copy. We’ll give you some useful hints and tips so get the balls rolling and then the balls in your court – the winner will get a £75 VOUCHER for Google AdWords (kerching).

If you are already a PPC pro, you’ve probably already worked out that your ad copy plays a crucial role in the success of your PPC campaign.

Even after having the best keywords and a strong sales copy, your PPC campaign could fail. One of these reasons is bad ad copy.

Sometimes it can be easy to lose sight of ad copy and forget that after all the technical stuff – ad copy is still ad copy, if in doubt keep it plain and simple.
So here are 4 good tips to take into consideration when building your ad copy:

1. Be Specific: Avoid writing generic ad copy and try and be as specific as possible so that you know your ad copy is delivering the right message to your audience. For example, if you are selling sports equipment and you have different types of trainers in your catalogue – e.g. tennis shoes, football boots, running trainers, walking boots etc.; you should find a few sets of keywords for each of the different type of catalogue that you have and then write good, interesting ads for each of those. The best way to do this is to have multiple ad groups for your different sets of keywords so that you can easily write exact ad copy for your different ad groups.

2. Highlight your Unique Selling Point (USP):  What exactly is it that makes you different from your competitor? What makes your product or service unique? What will a customer get out of your product and not another? If you can answer these questions then you’ll have a USP – if you don’t then get thinking. You need to be in a position to offer a product or service which your competitors can’t. It must be unique and something that your customers can relate to and can benefit from.

So when you write your ad copy include your USP, this will set you aside from competitors, make you stand out and the idea is that it persuades people to buy from you which they’re bound to want to know – provide this information easily without them having to find it out for themselves. But make sure you retain credibility and trust – if you’re going to make a statement back it up or offer a fall-back, for example a money back guarantee.

3. Include keywords: Advertisers will do their best to make their ad copy creative but this rarely does well in terms of click-through-rates.  Creativity is good to an extent but in terms of PPC sometimes it can do you more harm than good. Due to the nature of the paid ad, it’s essential that the ad copy catches a user’s attention right from the word go.

When you’re next writing ad copy make sure you use keywords in both the ad headline and description, this means your ad will be more appealing and relevant, and they’ll also be in bold so will be, ideally improving your CTR and quality score.

4. Include your Call to Action: Often we lose sight of the most important thing, what’s the actual point of your ad? What do you want to gain from it? Include a call to action. Having a good call to action is proven to improve your CTR and your campaigns effectiveness. The searcher needs to know what the deal is when they see the ad – they need to know what they’re going to be doing, if you’re going to take a searcher away from one page and on to another they need to know there’s something in it for them.

Below is an example of a poorly written ad copy (when a user has searched on ‘tennis shoes’):

Below is an example of a well written ad copy (when a user has searched on ‘tennis shoes’):

So here’s where the competition comes in.
We want you guys to come up with some good ad copy, and the one which we think is the best will win a £75 Google AdWords voucher.

The ad copy needs to be based on the following:
Men’s blue shoes from Anicca Shoes 70% off until May 2012 * terms and conditions apply.

• All you have to do is submit your copy in the Facebook comments below and we’ll choose the best.
• You can’t have all your words capitalised, and use no more than one exclamation mark and unless you can prove you’re the ‘best’ don’t use that in your copy. Your URL needs to represent your site (yes you can make this up).
• Your ad copy should have 25 characters on the first line, then 35 on the second third and fourth lines.
• Simply post your entry below in our comment boxes to enter
• You have until Friday 6th of April to get your entries in, and each entry should adhere to industry guidelines!

Go!

1) PPC Account Manager(s) with 1-4 years experience for immediate start – salary £18,000 - £25,000

2) Trainee PPC account executive – graduate intern. starting May or June– salary of £15,000 rising to £19,000 after training

Job descriptions

1) PPC Account Manager(s) with 1-4 years experience – salary £18,000 - £25,000

• Account Manager for candidates with 1-2 year’s experience (salary circa £18,000 - £20,000 depending on experience)
• Senior Account Manager for candidates with 2-4 years experience (salary £20,000 - £24,000 depending on experience)
• AdWords Certified Individual (minimum of 1 advanced module), other AdWords exams and Analytics accreditation is an advantage
• Experience of handling agency accounts or large in-house campaigns
• Multi-platform experience, including Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn ads
• You must have excellent attention to detail and be able to multi-task as you would be expected to manage up to 10 accounts of differing sizes
• You will be expected to live within easy commuting distance of Leicester city centre

We are particularly interested in candidates with additional expertise in any of the following areas:

• Ecommerce marketing experience; as you are likely to be involved with implementation of ChannelAdvisor for multichannel management for ecommerce clients. A practical knowledge of eBay and Amazon would be a great advantage.
• We are also interested in candidates with experience of running multilingual PPC (European or Asian languages)
• Additional experience in digital advertising for example bid management tools, ad serving technology or conversion optimisation

Successful candidates will report to our 'Head of Digital Advertising'. The role in the first 3 months will be to learn our processes, procedures and technology (Acquisio and ChannelAdvisor) and to work on new PPC accounts.

You will be expected to take on supervisory and management responsibility of new executive(s) by the end of your 6 months probationary period (sooner if applicable).

2) Trainee PPC account executive – graduate intern – salary of £15,000 rising to £19,000 after training

• We are looking for candidate(s) to train as a PPC marketing executive through our Graduate Placement Scheme
• You must be about to graduate or recently completed your degrees (2010 - 2012);  – previous candidates are welcome to reapply
• It is likely that you will have studied Marketing, Business Studies, accounting, Maths or another “quantitative subject”.
• You must be highly numerate and an advanced user of Excel.
• You need very good attention to detail and an ability to multi-task.
• Preference will be giving to graduates from Leicester, De Montfort and Loughborough University; or from graduates wanting to return home to live in Leicester.

The Executive will be provided with full training on all aspects of PPC marketing, with support from our existing team. You will be expected to take exams in Google AdWords and Analytics and therefore you will need to study in your own time.

There is a defined career structure and we are looking to train and groom you to become an account manager within 12 months.  Therefore you must have excellent verbal and written communication skills and be hungry to work in a rapidly growing agency.

Apply in the first instance by sending your CV to ann@anicca-solutions.com or call 07930 384443 (office hours).

Posted by Ann Stanley

Channel Advisor is a system which basically runs multichannel ecommerce platforms for you, and helps you to tailor your product so that anyone anywhere can find it, and you.

This week we’ve asked our ecommerce guru Darren Wynn what he believes the benefits of using Channel Advisor for are. Basically we’ve asked him why Channel Advisor  is so helpful to businesses in helping them manage their online merchant centres such as Google Shopping, Amazon.co.uk and eBay.

So below we’ve got a list of the top 5 benefits of using Channel Advisor, a mixture of tools and things that Channel Advisor does to make your multichannel ecommerce operations a bit easier…

1. The ‘Re-Pricer’

Basically this tool enables users to set parameters around what they want their product price to be, the software looks at competitors and will work within the set parameters (for example maximum and minimum price), and will automatically set itself at the most competitive price. It automatically checks this a few times a day, so you’re always in the best possible position across a huge network of competitors, for example if you list 2000 products on Amazon.co.uk using Channel Advisor, they can all be competitively priced, yet work to within the parameters YOU have set.

2. Simultaneous Platform Monitoring

This simply enables users to monitor and analyse data from their platforms on a day-to-day basis. For example a user could see screen shots within a pie chart of sales from eBay and / or Amazon, effectively giving the manager the ability to view and manage information from one screen.

3. Account Management is Simple

Products and figures are easily managed from one screen, and if need be can be blocked from running on eBay or on Amazon.co.uk this can be done with a simple click of a button. This means that users can not only manage data easily, but can also easily manage financial issues through the platform.

4. You Can See Where Any Errors Are In One Place

If an error or issue occurs which needs fast and effective attention you don’t have to come in and out of different screens and platforms, this can all be managed in one place, through the main dashboard.

5. You Can Integrate This With PPC Campaigns

keywords can be built into PPC ads in using experience of what does and doesn’t convert through Channel Advisor, if those products run out of stock, then your ads will then stop running – this is a far more dynamic way to run your paid ads on the web.

One down side of the product is that users should have enough products to warrant having a management system like this –Darren said:

“Basically it’s not too effective if you have fewer products- if you have 2000 products you will have to look at software to implement it all for you, running it manually would just not be an option.

“Obviously using a service like Anicca Solutnion’s, you have a manager there doing it for you, we work on a one-to-one basis, and we’re the ones making sure it is ticking over, and it can be a challenge.

"But a system like this won’t come cheaply – being one disadvantage of the system.

“We know it’s more expensive than competitors, but the support available is much better and the quality you get is higher.

“You need to look at whether it is viable for your company to spend money using this system – the average user should be bringing in between roughly £30,000 to £60,000 a month minimum revenue, any less may need to look at whether it is actually worth the expense.”
If you’re interested in Channel Advisor, if you’d like to know more about it, or if you think you or your company could benefit from our services and support, then get in touch with us now.

Follow Darren on Twitter.

By Lucie Crouch

Follow Lucie on Twitter .