One of the challenges of advertising on Google over the last 10 years, especially in competitive markets, is the fact that in many markets the number of search phrases used by potential customers are quite limited. This is due in part to Google's auto-suggestion tool introduced in 2004 and set as a default search option for all users in 2008.

The side effect of this tool is a lack of diversity of search phrases - the so called "the long tail of search". In the past when Google's search box was free format the long tail was... longer!

In many markets this has caused two things:
1. Almost every business HAS to target the same set of basic search phrases irrespective of the searchers intent.
2. Click prices for these phrases have increased as more an more advertisers bid for the same words.

What a company is willing to pay for a phrase depends primarily on how how well that company can convert it into a piece of profitable business. Those companies that can satisfy a searcher and make a few quid will pay more and get higher conversion rates.  Moreover, if the conditions are right Google will also reward such companies with lower costs per click, even if their competitors are paying more to be in a lower position.

Lead generation businesses have been quick to take advantage of this problem as Google (quite naturally) put these companies at the top of the results table as they are more likely to generate a sale and therefore are more willing to pay a higher cost per click.

Confused? A basic example of the problem might help to understand what is going on. Let's say I am trying to sell car insurance. I'm an insurer who specialises in Mercedes classic car insurance to older men and I have the best rates in the country for that profile.  I'm bidding on the phrase "mercedes classic car insurance" and I'm doing OK on that phrase because I convert it well. However, my market is much much bigger than the people typing in that phrase. Sadly most people simply type in "classic car insurance" or indeed "car insurance", so they never find me. Why? because the top results for those phrases are usually dominated by aggregators such as "Confused.com", "Compare the market" etc etc. So as a company I am now forced to pay to be on those sites rather than try to compete against them because they can afford to pay more per click for those phrases and I can never get my Ad to show.

It gets worse too. Because although I do well with my "mercedes classic car insurance" phrase, because it contains the phrase "car insurance" I'm also outbid on that phrase too, further reducing my exposure to that market. The aggregator always wins because of Google's business model.

I am oversimplifying here and of course Google try always to put up the most relevant ad, but the fact is that aggregators and lead generation businesses are becoming more and more dominant and it's spreading down to smaller markets too with the rise of businesses like Bark.com.

Good SEO is not just about getting your web site into the top search page results – though obviously that is the aim for most businesses looking for SEO services.

In the  distant past it used to be easy to get to the top of the search results pages, even in competitive markets. Those “quick win” days are over though it is still possible to make dramatic changes with simple changes to older web sites that have been poorly optimised.

The technical ins and outs of SEO are now well practiced by most businesses. These include “on the page” optimisations (changes to your web site content) and “off the page” optimisations (changes to the way you promote your web site on other web sites and social media etc). We are well versed in all SEO activities.

Technical prowess aside, SEO in 2019 is really more about a holistic approach to improving the experience of your potential customers when they visit your site. In short, making sure that you are maximising the potential of your web sites content to draw in new visitors and turn them into clients and customers.

In essence, Google wants to fulfil its users search goals.  So if your site fulfils a particular goal well (according to Google’s measures), over time Google will reward you with better placement in the search results. It’s as “simple” as that. Matching your web site’s content to the goals of Google’s searchers is part of the art of good SEO.

SEO is an ongoing process based on simple tried and tested methodologies. If you want to get set up for success with a new web site or need help to improve your current site’s potential get in touch for a free phone consultation of your objectives.

YouTube place great emphasis on “subscribers” and “watch time”.

Subscribers are people that sign up to your channel to allow them to see when you publish new videos. They are a bit like followers in Facebook. It’s not enough just to get people watching videos that you publish. Without gaining subscribers who are engaged with your video content on an ongoing basis your youTube channel will wither.

To gain subscribers, viewers of your videos need to have a reason to subscribe to your  channel.  Usually that reason is the promise of more content so you need to make a commitment to expand the channel content over the long term. For example, most successful channels publish video content weekly to get their subscribers returning again and again to watch the new videos.

The objective of every video you publish should be to get viewers to subscribe to the channel and/or watch another video on your channel.  This can be achieved by including a channel promotion segment at the end. What youTube call “end screens”. End screens run for up to 20 seconds at the end of the video and can include promotions for other videos on the channel. e.g. Next video in the series, or intro videos about the series and/or extro “sum up” videos for the series.

Watch time is how long someone watches your video before clicking away to watch something else or leaving youTube. Short watch times are an indicator that your content is not engaging and so youTube like to see people watching to the end of your video or at least most of it.

Once a viewer has decided to watch a video they have found, they must be engaged by it. If they are not engaged then watch time is going to drop off quickly. If enough people don’t watch your video all the way through, youTube are going to see that as an indicator that your videos are not particularly compelling.

There are several techniques that can be employed to encourage viewers to keep watching. These are:

1. Using a short intro sequence which quickly describes the whole content they are about to see.
2. Keeping the video duration sensible as the videos that are too long may not be viewed in their entirety.
3. Making sure the content of the video itself is engaging.

One of the key factors to success of your channel is getting your videos in front of people when they search on youTube. This is a little like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but on youTube not Google.

The main drivers for promotion of videos are the keywords people use in search. Keyword research should be used to “title” and “tag” each video optimally to improve its chances of being found. This is an art and needs to be done with great care and attention to detail.

It may also be appropriate to use advertising on youTube to gain viewers quickly. This promotes your videos to the top of listings for specific searches.

Finally, creating a youTube channel is at its heart about creating a “community” of viewers. This community needs to be supported by you in various ways. e.g. Responding to and moderating comments on all published videos, engaging directly with your viewers to build a lasting relationship with them. Providing the video content your community wants to watch.
​
If you’d like help setting up your business on youTube we can help you to get the basics right, increasing your chances of success. Get in touch today.

In order to measure the performance of your marketing you need data about where your inbound calls are coming from and which ones are generating the sales. If you are running advertising on other web sites (or offline ads e.g. posters & leaflets) a solution is to use a different phone number for each marketing channel.

There are many call counting and routing services around and they are relatively inexpensive. (e.g. http://www.tamartelecommunications.co.uk/) These services provide really great information about how many calls were made for a particular time period, whether those calls are answered and how quickly they were answered, how long calls were and for most callers the number of the caller too. Combining these statistics with knowledge of where you are spending your marketing budget will allow you to focus your budget and energies on the marketing channels that deliver the best performance.

If you are worried about people being put off by non-local numbers (e.g. 0800, 0333 etc) you can easily purchase local numbers for your area.

One of the pitfalls of this approach is that if you use this method over a longer period your customers can get confused about which number they should be calling you on. So for example the number they first called you on (from an ad) might be different to your main switchboard number. Also your statistics can be skewed by calls from existing customers on tracking phone numbers.

The solution is to develop a clear strategy about how many numbers you are going to use and how they will be managed over the longer term. This varies from business to business depending on the number of advertising channels and call volumes in general.

When it comes to tracking the performance of calls from Google Ads things can get trickier due to the technical challenges. Google do provide some solutions to call conversion tracking but knowing which calls converted to a sale is not easily tracked. Any information you can get from call tracking, even simple call counting, can be used to make adjustments to your campaigns.

With mobile phones now being the dominant use of the web, phone call tracking systems are becoming more and more popular as it’s often much easier for customers to call directly from their phone than fill out a form on their phone.

​Do you want help with call tracking and improving the performance of your Google Ads campaigns? Get in touch today.

I believe the motivation for debunking the sales funnel lays in selling more complex marketing services and products that have marginal value add compared to getting the basics right. The old adage of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) applies. As does the adage that to get the last 10% right requires 90% of the effort! Why would you (potentially) nearly double your marketing spend for the benefit of additional 10% of sales? It does not make business sense especially when there may be other ways you can spend that extra budget reaching more customers in other markets.

So what is the sales funnel? In the context of Google Ads, it’s about where prospects are in the buying cycle. If a prospect is close to purchase they may be using different keywords compared to when they are in the research phase. As a business you need to be promoting your business at every stage of the buying cycle. At the early stages promoting informational pages, but critically and most especially promoting your sales pages at the later stages prior to purchase. If your budget is limited and your web site purely sales, then the focus might be wholly on the later stages of the buying cycle. For example: ”What’s are the best football boots for astro turf?” vs “Best price for Nike Hypervenom X Astros”. The former is research, the later has a strong purchase signal.
​
Do you understand your sales funnel and purchase cycle? Have you applied it to you Google Ads campaigns? We can help.

On the face of it tracking leads and sales sounds quite simple, but it can be very challenging to implement in some situations. Generally tracking of sales leads and sales themselves can be done quite effectively with Google Analytics and/or Google Ads conversion tracking particularly if all your sales are generated online. (With recent privacy laws there are even challenges here as some users may refuse to accept cookies removing the ability to track visitors effectively over time.)

But there are some circumstances that make things even more challenging. For example, what if your Google Ads campaign generates leads not direct sales? Sales are the measure of true performance not leads. You can track the leads easily, but it is much harder to track sales especially for businesses with long sales pipes where sales happen offline. E.g. After face to face meetings that can happen weeks or months later. CRM software can help in these sitautions.

Ideally you also need to tell Google Ads about that follow up sales conversion as that conversion event is the ultimate measure of performance. You can tell Google about your conversions manually.  Manual sales tracking can be a lot of work because even if you can track sales you also need to have a system to attribute those sales to a particular Google Ads campaign via the original leads unique identifier.

In more complex situations it’s historically been a case of balancing the effort (and cost) required to track leads and sales against the value of that information and the effect on the performance of the Google Ads campaign. If everything is working ok in your business and sales are being generated from the leads, why bother to track sales? It’s happy days! Also it’s a question of balancing priorities and historically implementing complex tracking systems is just too much like hard work.

However, as Google moves further towards AI based automated optimisation of Google Ads, conversion event information could become more critical to the long term success of your business and campaigns. In the future, Google Ads AI will only work effectively if your conversion tracking tracks every lead. If your competitors are tracking all their conversions and you are not, Google may see your business performance as poorer and may start to throttle your campaigns relative to the competition.

This raises a deeper and more ethical question. Do you want Google to know that much about your business performance? We suspect that the privacy concerns of individual people will be overshadowed in the future by business privacy concerns. As a business owner do you really want to reveal how well (or not) your business is performing, to Google?
​
Do you want help with tracking conversions and improving the performance of your Google Ads campaigns? Get in touch today.

Many Google Ads campaigns trundle along spending their budget each month and deliver broadly the same number of conversions month to month. But a deeper longer term analysis often reveals that the bulk of the business done is focused on a relatively small subset of keywords within each of the campaigns. This is classic 80:20 rule. In other words, most of the “work” of the campaign is being done by just 20% of the keywords and Ads being used.

So what about the other 80%? Usually we have found that spending money on them is a complete waste of money! Not only that but in cases where budget is limited they can also get in the way of the better performing keywords “stealing” budget from them and reducing the overall exposure of the Ads on the better keywords.

What that means in practice is that potentially you could be getting up to 5x the level of business you are currently getting for the same spend or simply just spending up to 5x less on your Google Ads marketing!

Talk to us today and get a Google Ads review.

Over the years, the Google Ads system (formerly Google Adwords) has evolved dramatically into a highly sophisticated marketing engine that can drive your business forwards. However, like an engine it can also overheat, misfire or fail if not properly maintained. The level of complexity and sophistication also leaves plenty of scope for errors to creep in and if you are new to Google Ads the whole system can be quite overwhelmingly complicated.

Google have attempted to overcome this complexity by continuously refining and improving the Google Ads platform interface. This activity does however mean that it can be quite challenging when things change and you have to adapt to the new way of doing the same things.

Google have also employed an army of Google Ads account managers who can advise and recommend changes to your campaigns which in theory should improve performance but can sometimes be counterproductive. Our experience of account account managers is that their emphasis is on expanding your reach, getting you to spend more while trying to keep the level of business coming in (via conversion tracking) on an upward trend. The problem is that many account managers are quite inexperienced. They do generally understand the Google Ads platform well, but they can miss the bigger picture of how your business is using the platform and what your business priorities and constraints are. In short, they generally don’t know enough about your business to make decisions about your Google Ads settings.

There is almost always scope to optimise your Google Ads account to suit your business marketing needs better as often the priorities from Google’s perspective are different to yours.

So the question is, are you asking Google for the right things? To properly answer that question we need a deep understanding of your business first. Talk to us today.

In the past when Auto Suggest was not provided people typed in all manner of search phrases when they were looking for products or services. Canny advertisers were able to target some of the more niche phrases that were more likely to convert searches into customers. This was called the “long tail” of search and it proved very lucrative for some businesses, particularly those businesses selling niche products and services. That method of finding customers has been curtailed (pun intended) as the frequency of long tail searches has reduced.

In broad terms, the number of searchers has gone up dramatically over the years but the number of unique phrases (in particular markets) has reduced due to the introduction of the auto-suggest feature. This means there are the same number (or even more) Google Ads advertisers chasing a smaller variety of shorter search phrases. The result is that bid prices have risen dramatically over the years, swelling Google’s coffers but increasing advertising costs.

With the rise in popularity of voice activated devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home however we should (in theory) see a resurgence of the long-tail keywords. After all telling a device what you are looking for is much easier than typing it into a search box and could result in a lot more variety of searches on Google. That said, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that these devices will suggest alternatives. E.g. Me:“OK Google, find me local Greek restaurant that serves stifado.” Google Home: “Would you like to search for Greek restaurants in your area?” Me: “Yes”. There’s a lot at stake here and business need to wake up to making their web sites a little richer (content wise) to get the benefit of this change.

Talk to us to prepare for voice activated search.

Facebooks advertising platform offers great targeting opportunities too, so if you are mainly selling to “women of a certain age” (for example) you can just show your Ads to those local women. It may not be huge volumes (and therefore modest costs) but the quality of the targeting makes it more likely to convert those people to customers.

Social media advertising is however a little bit of an art and requires a certain amount of seduction when it comes to finding new customers and getting them to follow or like your business. It’s not usually about the direct sales pitch - though it can be. In some ways it’s more of a PR exercise.

People searching for products or services to buy on Google are usually doing so with intent to purchase. Whereas those on Facebook are usually just catching up with what their friends are doing, hanging out in Facebook Groups engaging with people interested in a particular subject or hobby, or reading news and other items shared by their friends. In short, they are not usually in a “buying” mode.

Even so, as a local business, if you can make local people aware of your existence and your business’s “personality” that might just tip the balance the next time they are in the market to buy your kind of products or services locally. For example, they may have passed by your hairdressers shop a hundred times, but if they have seen your quirky posts on Facebook they might just pop in next time they pass by when they need a haircut.
​
If you are a local business trying to reach local customers we can help set up and run your Facebook page and Facebook advertising. Get in touch.

In this scenario you can find you are in a seemingly impossible situation trying to sell products or services into markets that are dominated by “non-competing” products and services.

If your products or services are of a lower value this can be very frustrating as you’ll be unable to reach your market cost effectively using Google Ads as other advertisers will be willing to pay more for exposure to those keywords.

If your products and services are more expensive or too niche you may find that your Ads are not clicked on enough and this can lead to your Ads being suspended or deemed not relevant to the keyword even though from you and your customers point of view they are completely relevant.

There are potential solutions to this conundrum but getting the balance between your needs to advertise and Google’s needs for Ad revenue from other non-competing advertisers can be particularly challenging especially if you are targeting a very niche clientele.

We look at such cases very carefully to determine the viability of advertising for these types of businesses. To be fair on Google, they are getting better and better at understanding the context of a specific users search by looking at the individual searchers “search context”. E.g. History of past searches and interests etc. Google are also beginning to offer theme based targeting via audiences so that the context of a search can also be factored in to which Ads should be shown.
​
This is a complex and nuanced area which we can help you to explore. Contact us today to discuss your particular Google Ads challenges.

What few advertisers are aware of is how quality scores can affect what you pay for your clicks. A low quality score can increase your cost per click (CPC) when compared to a competitor whose quality score is higher. This can lead to the counter-intuitive situation were competitors whose Ad shows above yours are paying less for their clicks that you do! It’s important therefore to ensure that your quality scores are at least 5 or more for your chosen keywords. Ideally your quality scores should be higher than 5 as this will reduce your costs and give you scope to expand your campaigns in other ways with the savings made.

Improving your quality score can be challenging as it’s based on a number of factors, some of which you may not be able to improve directly. It is also likely that you will have to invest quite heavily in rebuilding your Google Ad campaigns structure to ensure you are presenting the most relevant Ad and web site landing page for a given keyword. You will almost certainly have to invest in creating new content (new pages on your web site) to ensure that visitors have the best experience for their chosen keyword. All of this extra work and investment can pay dividends over the longer term as you will get savings from your overall spend and find that your Ads reach a wider audience.

Ultimately, it’s all about pleasing Google’s users experience, something Google are passionate about.

Would you like to reduce your monthly Google Ads spend and improve performance? Get in touch today.

​This fictitious scenario is an example of how businesses can easily miss a market and spend money on Google Ads in the wrong place but there are much subtler ways of making similar mistakes and wasting your marketing budget promoting Ads to the wrong people in the wrong locations.

In highly competitive markets where you are limited by your budget, you can also find your Ads are sidelined in favour of your competitors if you do not target your advertising effectively. That can leave you with the “crumbs off the table” missing out on some of the best potential customers for your business. It’s all down to how Google’s bid management system works to ensure the best results for its users and advertisers. There is nothing malicious in this (though it may feel like it), it’s simply the way the system works to optimise Ad revenue for Google and create the best experience for its users.

An example may help illustrate the kinds of problems some of our clients have had when they come to us with tales of poor conversion rates and lacklustre sales from Google Ads.

Imagine you are selling a service in a competitive market. You are competitive on price, product quality and your web site experience so all things being equal you should stand as good a chance of selling as your competitor does on Google Ads. You have a reasonable budget to spend and try to get as many clicks as you can for your money. But you don’t see your own Ads very much on Google and sales are poor. You are GEO targeting the areas you serve across the south of England (for example). It should all be working well, but it isn’t. What’s wrong?!

This is a scenario we are all too familiar with when prospects come to us for help with their Google Ads. The root causes can be very different from customer to customer but the experience is the same – it feels like you are wasting money on Google Ads. And in short, invariably businesses in this situation ARE wasting money. Possible causes include:

• Poor Geo targeting.
• Poor Ad text quality.
• Poor click through rates strangling your Ad exposure.
• Poor keyword choices.
• Poor campaign structures.
• Poor Ad to keyword relevancy.
• Poor quality scores.
• Poor (inadequate) bids.

​If you are experiencing poor performance of your Google Ad campaign get in touch with us for a discussion about how we can help improve your campaign performance.

You’ve probably seen plenty of Ads where people are trying to sell things at a significantly higher price than someone else. This is sometimes a sign of lazy marketing but can be due to differences in the product itself that are not obviously clear.

Trying to sell the same product at too high a price is a waste of time and a waste of your marketing budget. Despite this, some clients can delude themselves into thinking that they can still make money by selling their products at a higher price than the competition. (Often driven by the fact that they cannot actually sell it any cheaper due to their margins.) In these cases they carry on marketing in the vain hope that things will change without making changes to their offer that could change the dynamics of the sale. For example, by including a simple value added service with the product that might encourage customers to buy at the higher price.

There is no easy answer to the scenario where the price differential is just too great though sometimes a tighter marketing campaign can improve sales in particular circumstances. E.g. where location, speed of delivery or multi-buy discounts are a factor.

Where clients have a wide range of products in a fluctuating market, it can be very difficult to keep track of competitors prices. Reviewing your pricing on a regular basis and pausing your advertising where it is ineffective is one solution but that takes significant attention to detail and so is time consuming.  Some products price changes can also be easily missed. A technical solution to this problem is to semi-automate or fully-automate the detection of price fluctuations and adjust your advertising accordingly.

It’s a similar situation when you are selling a service rather than a product. If you’ve seen your market decline over the years it may just be the hard reality that your service is now over priced in the marketplace. If you are lucky the problem may simply be that you are not conveying the true benefits of your service and distinguishing it from the competitions offer which may have hidden limitations.
In short, don’t be tempted to race to the bottom on price until you are 100% clear that your product or service represents good value for good reason.

Need some help resetting your marketing objectives for your product or service? Talk to us today.

Google is moving more and more towards AI based automation of bid prices and you cannot beat a computer in that game. Furthermore, many of the levers of control in Google Ads are being removed by Google and this trend is likely to continue. So what’s the answer? How do you compete in a constantly shifting digital marketplace where the tools you have used in the past are being taken away? The answer is simply that you cannot beat Google at that game anymore and the real game has moved to a different playing field. Luckily it’s one you have complete control of - the overall performance of your business to satisfy the demands of Google’s users.

Are you putting your energy and money in the wrong places? Talk to us for some independent, informed advice and allow us to take a look at your marketing in the context of your marketing objectives.

Google Ads Costs Per Click (CPCs) vary considerably and are driven in part by the level of competition in your target market. In competitive markets you can find your CPCs rising to uneconomic levels if you set your max bid prices too high. If you set your max bids too low in competitive markets you can find your exposure to audiences limited, sometimes to the point where your Ads are rarely shown or only shown to markets where your maximum bid applies.

Firstly, it’s important to establish what you can afford to pay for clicks and the only way to do that is to measure the effectiveness of your spends in each campaign. Knowing what you can afford to pay to remain profitable is however only part of the puzzle. In addition, it may be that your calculation of what you can afford is not taking into account the longer term business from newly acquired customers. In which case you may be under valuing the clicks you are seeking and being priced out of your market. Further, it may be that your competitors have deeper pockets and are paying more than they can afford, in which case you have to be very careful not to get into a bidding war!

Balancing these competing factors and getting your max bid price right is an art, particularly as it’s a fluid marketplace. You can end up chasing your tail and get into an endless game of cat and mouse with your competitors all fighting over the same clicks wasting a lot of time and energy that could be better spent on managing your real business.

The solution is to be sure of your facts and “stick to your guns”. To set bid prices within some sensible bounds to ensure that you remain profitable even in fluctuating external market conditions.

Secondly it’s important to be aware of how Google calculates your CPC. We say “your CPC” because each advertiser pays an individual price for clicks and it’s not about who pays the most comes at the top. It is quite possible and (more often than not) quite likely that businesses occupying the top slots in Google pay LESS than those in lower positions. This may seem counter-intuative but Google (in a sense) rewards those advertisers who run great campaigns that satisfy their users searches.

What qualifies as a great campaign has multiple factors and many of these factors determine your CPC. High “quality scores” for your campaigns keywords can give you significant “discounts” on your CPCs. Sometimes as much as 40%. So if you are running a large campaign working on improving your quality scores can significantly reduce your overall marketing spend.

So could your Google Ads max bids too high or too low? Do you know? You should as it’s a key metric to the success of your business. And when you do know you can then work on finding the “sweet spot”.

Contact us to discuss your Google Ads campaign.

The last thing Google want to do is show search results that are not relevant to their customers needs, and that includes the Ads they serve as well as the organic results. You may think your Ads are completely relevant but usually there is a good reason why your Ads are not being shown. You need to discover why and fix it.

Of course it may simply be that you are not paying Google enough to meet their minimum bid requirements, but it’s more likely to be about how well your Ads perform in the market against the competition.  If your competitors Ads are more compelling than yours to Google’s users, then after a short while your Ads will stop being shown.

It’s important to note that it’s not just about your Ad’s themselves, it’s also about relevancy to the keywords you are targeting and how well you satisfy the users desires after they click on your Ad. In short, you have to get every step of the process right to ensure that your Ads perform to the best of their ability. Sounds like a lot of effort? Yep, it is! Embrace that and optimise your whole marketing process. We can help.

Request an analysis of you Google Ads account today.

We’ve worked with clients whose Google Ads account metrics looked great: Low costs per click (CPC), high click through rates (CTR) and plenty of leads. However they were just not achieving either the volume or quality of business that they should be achieving.

The metrics don’t lie, but they can distort or hide the truth. Do you recall the Smirnoff Vodka TV Ad in the 1990s which distorted reality? (You can view it here.)  In the same way that the bottle distorts our protagonists perception of reality, so can the Google Ads data distort our perception of the market. The metrics we look at via the Google Ads system are distorted by the settings for Ads, keywords, target locations etc.

In summary, it can be very easy to miss a bigger view of the market when looking through the “lens” of Google Ads. Are you missing the bigger picture? Request an analysis of your Google Ads account today.

Long gone are the days when you could buy clicks for 5p or 10p. Google introduced minimum bids years ago and minimum bid prices have risen dramatically in some highly competitive markets. For example, in insurance markets you can expect to pay £30 or more per click for the top slots, a ludicrous amount of money. Or is it?

There’s no doubt about it, Google Ads Pay-Per-Click is cheap as chips.
There has never been an easier or cheaper time to reach your target markets. What can be done today with search marketing would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Niche businesses in particular had to rely on blanket marketing campaigns to find their markets, it was an expensive exercise if done at all.  In that respect, finding and targeting your market with Google Ads is cheap.

So what is the truth? Is Google Ads the cheapest and most successful marketing tool ever made or is it expensive and a potentially crippling cost to your business? The short answer is that it can either depending on how well you are using the Google Ads platform.

It’s very easy to get things very wrong in Google Ads and to pay more than you should to reach your target market. This can cost your business dearly and in some extreme cases can end your business. It’s more challenging to get things right but it is very possible to make a success of Google Ads and use it as a driver for the growth of your business at modest or very reasonable cost.

If you are struggling to justify your Google Ads expenditure let us take a look and see if we can improve the performance. It’s not just about how you are using the Google Ads system, it’s also about what your web site is like and how well it converts those “expensive” clicks.

Request an analysis of you Google Ads account and marketing today.

Week 1 Phone Consultation – Free
(Up to 2 hours but usually shorter)
- Getting to know each other a little bit.
- Discussion about budget, timeframe and quality expectations.
- Email summary of call with loose outline proposal if appropriate.
- Explore dates and locations for face to face meeting.
Understanding your objectives and discovering if there enough synergy between us for a long term win-win partnership.

Week 2 Face to Face Meeting & Written Proposal - £150
(Meeting up to 3 hours with follow-up work of up to 10 hours.)
- Initial face to face meeting.
- Deeper understanding of your objectives, expectations and aspirations for the web site.
- Understanding your marketplace / industry sector and customers including keyword research.
- Competitors and their web sites.
- Written proposal with optional elements.
This helps us to understand the marketing space and your place in it.  Are your expectations realistic? We do some research then reflect on it over the week to reach conclusions which we present to you in the form of a report and proposal.

Week 3 (8 to 16 hours+) Defining your Brand £400 - £800+
- Positioning the new business within the marketplace.
- Your business brand values and raison d’etre.
- Your business’ Unique Selling Points (USPs).
- Developing "Strapline" which encapsulates your message.
- Design exploration – fonts, colours, style.
- All ideas encapsulated in a branding document.
Working with you to develop your brand and branding though Q&As in a second face to face meeting. Deliverable : Branding document.

Week 4 (8-16 hours+) Logo Development £400 - £800+
- Review of research, preferences, likes/dislikes
- Various mockups - 3 variations
- Selection and working up at various resolutions and potentially aspect ratios
This is a particular "how long is a piece of string" task. If you have a clear or fixed idea on logo already then that can speed things up. It's important not to get too obsessed with this task. Logo can be evolved over time. Best to keep it simple at start.

Week 5 (4-8 hours) Domain Name Sourcing £200 - £400+
Domain name choice and selection (if required)
- Research, Shortlist and selection.
- Purchase (Third party costs £12-£30 for first year if name available.)
Ideally your chosen name would be available in .com and .co.uk.

Weeks 5-9+ (24 – 64 hours or more) Web Site Build £1200 - £3200+
- Content development and/or collation.
- Hosting with Weebly or other service.  (Third Party cost from £120 per annum)
- Theme choice and page template creation.
- Page creation. Information architecture. Home, Contact, About, Services, Case Studies etc.
- Legal T&Cs, Privacy Policy – standard ones or bespoke via your solicitor.
- SEO of all pages.
- Google Analytics set up.
- Google My Business and Bing Business set up.
It's hard to put a fixed time frame and cost on this task. Our experience is that it will take longer than you think to develop the site content. It's important to get the content right and it usually takes several iterations.

How much of the content creation and page build we do vs how much you do greatly affects costs. It could end up being quite simple and you may end up doing a lot of the time consuming content creation work yourself and that will keep our costs to just the technical and design aspects of the web site build. Or you may require us to be more hands on with the content creation.

There are many additional services including:

Social Media Marketing
We can assist with setting up and running a Facebook page for your business.

Paid Advertising
We can help you set up for success in Google Adwords.

Ongoing Reporting
We can monitor and report on your web site’s performance.

Web Site Evolution
We can evolve your web site by creating and adding new content and making changes to existing content to enhance the web site’s performance.

Interested? Get in touch for an initial free telephone conversation to discuss your requirements or arrange to meet us for a fixed consultation fee of £100 for 2 hours - excluding reasonable transport costs.

​So, “How much does a car cost?”

There are many different makes and models of cars. Cars have to be serviced and maintained and over time most cars depreciate in value. Further it’s no good having a car if you are not prepared to put some fuel in it, tax it and insure yourself to drive it. All of these elements factor into the cost of car ownership.
So what does it cost to buy and run a car? It varies of course, depending on the quality of the car, how often it breaks down, how much it costs to insure and how thirsty it is in fuel.

The cost actually depends more on your motivation for car ownership – what is its purpose? Is it just about getting from A to B efficiently, the thrill and fun of driving or is it more about status and positioning yourself a successful person? Or maybe you’re an enthusiast or collector and it’s just about the love of ownership? Or maybe it’s a mix of all of those things.

Would you consider building your own car? Of course not, it would be a very expensive exercise so we leave it to the car manufacturers who have been building cars for decades. That said, some might consider building a kit car so smaller specialist car makers pop up to service that market.

It’s a similar situation with the web site build industry. In the early days of web site development, much like the early days of motoring, web sites were hand built and very expensive to make compared to today. In the mid-1990s it was not uncommon for a small business to spend £10,000s on building a web site that today could be built for £1000s or even £100s.

Today there are emerging technology companys for web sites much like the early days of car manufacturer. Wordpress, Weebly, Squarespace etc. All of these can supply you with the means to make a web site for a very modest fee. In addition, there are many custom web site manufacturers in the form of agencies and web developers who are each using a mix of tools to build sites. It is likely that over time we will see the market develop much like the car industry and there will ultimately be a relatively small number of web site technology supplier companies augmented by third party customisation companies and niche suppliers. The race is on.

Let’s return to the question, “How much does a web site cost?”.  One answer is Free another £100. Another answer is £100,000 or even £10m+. The better question to ask is: “How much is *my* web site going to cost?”. So what do you want your web site to do? What is its objective? The cost will evolve after a series of questions like:  How much material for the web site do you already have? (Branding, Logos. Photography. Marketing texts.) Have you developed a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve and an awareness of the competition? And do you have a way of measuring the success of your web site? Do you have a domain name? How much of the work are you willing to do yourself?

“But come on, what about ball-park costs for someone else to do the work?” I hear you ask.

As a small business with modest requirements your set-up costs are likely to be in the low £1,000s and your running costs (the fuel and maintenance) could be a similar amount per year (or less). If you are in a competitive sector and reliant on paid advertising such as Google Ads your running costs could be a lot higher. (But the aim is always to get the advertising cost back out of the sales whilst delivering a profit.)

More complex web sites with bespoke requirements are likely to cost more than £10,000 as programmer costs for bespoke functionality can get expensive. Large online retailers invest millions in their web sites so don’t delude yourself that you can take on the Amazon’s of the world at their own game without serious financial backing.

Can you get cheaper web sites? Yes of course, but they are either unlikely to not deliver your objectives or will be reliant on you building them yourself… the hidden cost of that activity can be high if it takes you away from the day to day running of your business.

You can get a simple web site for free with Google’s web site builder here. This may be perfectly adequate for your needs if your needs are very modest and you have the time to build the web site yourself. If you’d like something a little more sophisticated then you can try using one of the many web site builders yourself such as Weebly, Squarespace or Wix. These charge very modest fees from around £8 a month for simple web sites.

So do you want our help to “set up for success” at a fair cost? Get in touch today to discuss your web site’s objectives or view our outline plan for your new web site project here.​

In the UK we also call vacuum cleaners “hoovers” even though Hoover is just one of the many vacuum cleaner brands. It just happened to have a first mooover advantage. (See what I did there?)

But how important is branding for the small business in 2019? One of the best business books about branding I’ve read is by Ted Mathews and is called “Brand : it ain’t the logo”. It’s worth getting a copy if you run a business and going through his steps to determine what your brand actually is in practical definable terms.

Branding covers every aspect of your business’s activities and behaviour. From your logo (no surprise there) to the way you communicate with your customers and handle problems. But it certainly does not start with your logo as you might think I am implying here. It’s starts with you and your staff and the core nature, intent and personality of your business and defines how you want to be perceived in the marketplace.

In short branding is very important as it permeates everything, it’s not just the logo. Rebranding your business is not a task to be taken on likely but if you are serious about your business it’s an exercise well worth doing and can be transformative for you, your staff and your business.
​
Talk to us about branding today.

Including:
​

• Reaching new customers using online advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook
• Engaging prospects and customers with your web site or phone Application (Apps)
• Measuring and reporting on prospects and customers behaviour and actions.
• Communicating with customers and prospects using email, chat and messaging services.
• Storing records of engagement with customers and prospects using customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce and Hubspot.

Traditional offline marketing methods are also heavily reliant on digital technologies today as most printed and TV based marketing materials start their lives on a computer in a design package such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. So in that sense they too are part of the digital marketing process.

Our area of particular expertise is in reaching new propsects and engaging them with your web site and measuring the results. We also have a strong knowledge of email marketing and customer relationship management software though that is not an area we particularly focus on commercially.

If you need help reaching and engaging new customers and measuring results, please get in touch.