Website Marketing Directory — Search Engine Optimisation — Melbourne, Sydney, Australia

Emma Weekley (c) 2007
Published Monday 24th September, 2007

On August 9, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report for the quarter ended June 2007 on behalf of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia (IAB).

Total market expenditure in the internet advertising industry has seen a relatively consistent yearly rise in total expenditure since 2003, the first year of record keeping of online advertising expenditures.

As the figure below illustrates, annual expenditure has increased by more than $1b in the last five years.

A summary of findings are outlined briefly below:

Published Monday 24th September, 2007

The first major update to Google's Website Optimizer has been released.

This update, named A/B split experiments, enables faster optimization of your website and vastly improved conversion rates.

Firstly, for those of you unfamiliar to Google's Website Optimizer, it is a tool that can assist you in enhancing the effectiveness of your website in order to get a return on your investment.

The new addition of the A/B experiments application enables you to test the performance of entirely different versions of a page. That is, you can change the content, look, feel or general layout of a page while comparing it to your original test page.

Published Monday 24th September, 2007

The physiological term "singularity" refers to the the centre of a black hole, the point at which the laws of physics no longer makes sense.

This notion of singularity in terms of technological progression was discussed at a recent conference in San Francisco whereby hundreds of Silicon Valley techies and scientists from abroad gathered to discuss the ethical considerations associated smarter-than-human technologies.

Ron Erdos

Imagine telling your Yellow Pages account manager that you are happy to pay for your ad, but only when people ring up!

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is an entirely new way of thinking about advertising. For the first time in history, you can pay for advertising only when you know people are interacting with it.

Here are some tips to help you deliver the maximum revenue from your PPC campaigns. (You will save hundreds if not thousands from these tips).

Tip #1: Don’t dump all your keywords under one ad.
In offline media, it is common practice to see one ad offering many products. Department store brochures in your mailbox are the classic example.

It is a different story altogether online. People are after cricket bats, not sporting equipment. They are searching for 42” plasma TVs, not consumer electronics. It’s important that you have ads that refer to specific products, not just ads which refer to the product category as a whole. Often these search terms will even have brand names attached (such as a search for “Brand X, Model Y plasma TV”).

If you can show people that you have exactly what they are looking for (e.g. “Brand X, Model Y Plasma TVs”), you are much more likely to get clicks on your ad. For those who were unaware, more clicks on your ad results in cheaper clicks for you. This is because ads which are clicked on often are deemed highly relevant, and therefore seen to provide a better search experience for the user. Think of it as a “discount for providing relevant ads”.