A lot of clients have been asking recently how they can take advantage of Facebook’s Pay Per Click services so I thought I’d explain the key differences between setting up a PPC advertising campaign in Google and in Facebook. The first step in Facebook is to come up with a creative for your ad and decide on which landing page on a client’s site you’re going to send it to, so far so Google. However, although the first line of your advert is 25 characters long (as in Google) the description is a whopping great 135 characters long, almost double the length of Google. This means you can say all the things you wanted to say in Google (but couldn’t!) about your product or service. Due to the way you choose your keywords in Facebook, which I’ll come to in a minute, you don’t need to stuff your advert repeatedly with your keywords and can instead concentrate on writing something which makes sense and will encourage the viewer to click. You also can add a small photo with your advert. This is optional but I would recommend it as Facebook is a much more visual experience than a traditional search engine. The next step is targeting your advert to the audience, of which choosing keywords is only one part. Facebook doesn’t have a keyword tool like Google to show how many searches a keyword receives a month. Instead you type in the keywords you require and Facebook will recommend keywords that are available. You can only choose keywords that Facebook members use in their profiles, which means that the selection is rather limited. For example I recently set up a facebook campaign for trekking holidays to Everest, for which I anticipated Google would find 50 or more keywords that I could advertise on. However in facebook I only managed 14 keywords, including Nepal Everest base camp trek (good), hiking mountains (okay) and adventure (a bit too generic). On the flip side, demographic targeting on Facebook is much more advanced than in Google allowing you to target users not only by location and language but also by age, gender, education, workplace, relationship status and relationship interests. So if you know who your ideal customer is, you can choose to show your ad only to those viewers who are likely to be interested in your product. Something interesting to watch out for is the counter that Facebook gives you to show how many of its members you are targeting with your ad. This number rises and falls as you select and remove different demographics. As with Google the final stage is to set your campaign’s daily budget and choose whether you want to pay per impressions or the more traditional Pay Per Click. I’d recommend sticking with the traditional Pay Per Click advertising model, as Facebook is renowned for having high impressions and low clicks. Check through your campaign, turn it on and hey presto, your ad can be seen by 1,000’s of relevant potential clients (hopefully)…Good luck.

A Pay Per Click campaign is about more than just advertising. It can be a rapid method of finding out which keywords will bring the best traffic to your site in the long term. 

While Search Engine Optimisation promises to deliver good volumes of traffic to your site, the problem is that it takes a long time to get good natural rankings, and it does not make sense to carry out long term SEO campaigns for keywords and phrases that might bring in lots of traffic but not the type of traffic that converts into business. 

There are a few good keyword research tools on the market but even the best of them can only tell us the search volumes for phrases and how competitive each one is in search engine results.  What they cannot do is tell us which phrases will deliver traffic that will convert into actions such as sales, online enquiries, newsletter signups etc. 

This is where a trial PPC campaign can be really useful.  We’ve found PPC can be an excellent way to test the water with our clients’ real and potential customers, and it can give us helpful indications in a fraction of the time that SEO takes to deliver results. As long as we can implement good tracking for your site’s traffic, a trial run of PPC can be a good exercise for determining not only the volume that comes from each keyword, but also which keywords convert into sales or enquiries.

Once we have run a PPC campaign for just a few months (usually 3) we are usually in a position to determine a good mix of the best converting phrases and, armed with this list, we can begin the hard work of long term Search Engine Optimisation for those phrases.  

Over the last few months I’ve been asked the same question many times, each time I start designing a new website: “Should we design it for 800 x 600 resolution or we can go for 1024 x 768 ?”

Until last year I would always suggest, “Let’s do it on 800 x 600 because half of the users still have this resolution on their computers.” But fortunately the internet has changed a lot since then, and the monitors are bigger, so the computers come with 1024 resolution as default. GREAT.

As we are an online marketing agency specialising in the travel industry, we love to make our clients’ sites sparkle and stand out from the others. Designing for bigger resolutions means bigger pictures, bigger fonts, more information, more space, and more freshness and organization on the page.

1024×768 screen resolution is used by 36% of internet users worldwide, and in fact 57% use even higher screen resolutions. The 800×600 is used by only 4% of the users.

Some people from other agencies still think that 800 x 600 is the right resolution to go for. It’s definitely a matter of who is going to be navigating on your site. It could be that your target market is somewhere in the world where they don’t have high spec computers or big screens, and still use a dial up connection. In that case, yes, go for 800 x 600, but they are the minority of users (8%).

I think that when it comes to 1024px resolution, we can enhance the user experience on the website, adding more to the page where we couldn’t before, because we didn’t have enough space.

Conclusion 1024 px resolution has changed the way of design for the better, as we now can use the “extra” space to do “extra” things for our clients and their customers.

GO BIGGER !

Fresh content as part of an SEO strategy is enormously important to boost websites’ ranking in Google. The fact is, Google spiders favour sites with fresher, more relevant content, and reward them with higher positions in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). To put it simply, Google spiders visit the sites they like more frequently, so adding fresh content regularly will make them habitual visitors.

And when a site increases its position on SERPs, an increase in its traffic is sure to follow. So the theory is simple, but of the utmost importance. Web content writing should be one of the core elements of any SEO strategy, and it is imperative that sites have fresh, frequently updated copy.

We’ve found blogs to be a great way to keep sites’ content up-to-date. If they’re created as a subdomain of the site, Google will associate the fresh content of the blog with the main site, and reward the site with higher search engine rankings accordingly.

To get the most out of the content on your blog, be sure to apply the usual SEO strategy to your posts. Make sure your posts are key-phrase relevant in their content, title tags and meta tags, and submit posts regularly. They can be a great way to build up a library of keyword enriched, relevant content, and Google will be able to see that the site’s copy is fresh, based on the frequency of the blog posts.

In time, your blog itself will begin ranking for the key phrases relevant to your company, and you will essentially be getting double exposure – your brand will appear in the SERPs for both your blog and your main website.

We’ve found blogs to be immensely successful tools for our clients’ SEO strategies, as they’re such an effective and easy way to create new, relevant content. Google acknowledges this new content, and awards the sites better positions the SERPs, resulting in an increase in traffic and ultimately in higher conversion rates.

Last week Travolution, in conjunction with Travel Weekly Magazine, created a list of who they believed were the top ten power players that the travel industry should be watching in 2009. At LeadGenerators, we were delighted to spot Matt Brittin, the UK director of Google at the top of the list—it seems companies in the travel industry are finally taking notice of the power a good SEO campaign can have on their activity.

We’ve listed their top five, with our own comments on what we think about their choices:

Matt Brittin – It seems that the travel industry is finally realising the power that Google can have on their company. Travolution quote that when ‘Google sneezes everyone catches a cold’, and as Matt Brittin has the power to change the dimensions of their online marketing and SEO campaigns with the click of his mouse, it’s of no wonder that he’s one watch in 2009.

David Cameron – With the Labour government in disarray a general election is becoming more and more likely and if David Cameron becomes the next prime minister then he would be responsible for making many travel related decisions. According to them, Conservatives have very different views on travel policies from those in place, and David Cameron’s possible election could have many strong implications for the industry.

Marc Charron – Marc Charron is the managing director of Trip Advisor whose plan to bring about a meta search engine by the end of 2009 definitely makes him one to watch in the travel industry, but also with regard to SEO. The search engine is already estimated to be way beyond what is offered on other travel websites and will contain an in-built price estimator. One thing is certain; Matt Charron has certainly been very busy for the first half of 2009 with recent business-to-business deals with both EasyJet and VisitBritain.

Stephanie Draper – Sustainable travel may be big news this decade, but Stephanie has been helping businesses clean up their carbon footprints for the past 12 years. Many large travel organisations are now turning to Stephanie for advice on how to sell tourism which is sustainable for the future and she offers advice from carbon offsetting to longer holidays in order to make plane travel worthwhile. Longer holidays? We say that she’s definitely one to watch in 2009.

Tony Fernandes – Tony is the Chief Executive of Air Asia, the new low cost airline which aims to make long-haul travel more affordable. With flights to Kuala Lumpur starting at £129 and then follow on flights to places like Langkawi and Bangkok starting at just £29 it’s no wonder that his business has become an instant success. Tony also has backing from Sir Branson himself.

It seems that everyone is having a stab at top travel trends. Following on from a previous post of mine, I thought I would post what PhoCusWright considers the most important consumer travel trends shaping today’s marketplace (keep in mind that these are the the USA market). I received this in an email and I could not find a webpage to link to so I have just copied from the email. Recessionary markets provide extraordinary opportunities to observe shifts in consumer behaviors and attitudes. PhoCusWright projects that the total U.S. travel market will decline 11% in 2009, returning the industry to pre-2006 levels. Top U.S. Traveler Trends When it comes to online spend, Generation Y has come of age and is overtaking the baby boomers. Twenty-five to 34 year olds are spending the most per household on travel and 18-34 year olds are significantly more likely than older age groups to indicate that they plan to travel more this year. While boomers are commonly described as the wealthiest generation, the 45-64 age group is spending the least per household on travel and is also the most likely to reduce travel spend this year. It is going to get worse before it gets better Consumers who spend more than average on travel are more likely to reduce travel expenditure this year, and those that spend less than average are more likely to actually increase travel expenditure this year. The result of this mixed bag of intentions is that overall expenditure will decline considerably across the board, but budget brands will experience a smaller decline than upscale brands. Online travel agencies will fare better than other channels It may seem surprising given the recent flurry of fee cuts and revenue-eroding promotions from online travel agencies (OTAs) like Expedia and Orbitz, but OTAs will outperform other channels in year over year bookings because of their consumer base. Online travel is mature but not saturated Though the majority of travelers typically book online, there is still plenty of opportunity to grow online transactions. Consumers that spend the most on travel still use a mix of online and offline methods. Travel search engines are (finally) making a mainstream impact Travel search engines like Kayak are not new to the travel industry, but are now becoming a mainstream element in the travel planning process. Over a quarter (28%) of travelers typically turn to them when shopping for travel and new entrants like TripAdvisor will continue to broaden the audience.

A reminder for all of us involved in providing travel marketing solutions online

I found this great list of trends by Ginny McGrath on her Travel2.0 blog. I have taken the liberty of copying and pasting her list here. Thanks Ginny! 1. Flights come first: on average holidaymakers buy flights 44 days before travel, book their hotel 42 days before and their rental car 19 days before, says Frommers. 2. We trust reviews: People are more likely to book a holiday if they can read reviews from other travellers, says Frommers and TripAdvisor (well, they would wouldn’t they). Research shows “consumer opinions posted online” are trusted more than newspapers. 3. Tripadvisor is growing fast: 20 new travel hotel or destination reviews are added to Tripadvisor every minute. 4. Travel companies are getting dull: Lufthansa is boring – and proud of it. They do the basics well says UK and Ireland general manager Marianne Sammann. “Boring is the new cool” hailed travel bloggers at the Travolution Summit (see keep it simple at no. 6). 5. There are empty villas all over Europe: Holiday homes are used by their owners for 30 days a year on average, with two and three-bedroom properties the most popular, says HomeAway. 6. Travel websites are getting simpler – executives from across the airline, hotel and tour operator sectors – companies such as travelsupermarket.com, Holiday-Rentals.co.uk and Lufthansa – agree that flashy tools doesn’t beat a simple design with an efficient search facility. 7. Dot com entrepreneurs DO wear trendy rectangular glasses: see Dopplr chief executive Marko Ahtisaari, PlanetEye.com chief executive Butch Langlois et al. 8. It takes a month to book a holiday: the stats have been banded about before, but it’s fascinating stuff: the average holiday booked online takes 29 days and 12 searches on 22 different travel sites. 9. Price is paramount: travellers search Google for ‘cheap hotels’ most often, then ‘beach hotels’ and ‘luxury hotels’. 10. Travel websites are getting “prettier”: Dopplr says they want “digital delighters”, the equivalent of chocolates on our hotel pillows apparently, Frommers says people want photos of destinations and travelsupermarket.com adds that the pictures can’t be of too many children or people who are too beautiful – that puts people off, they say.