The RAR 2013 Awards Results – Nominated for 7 Awards…
April 22, 2013 • Article by Dan Fallon
Last Autumn we decided to enter the RAR (Registered Agency Register) Awards. This went against the last 7 years of Search Star thinking that Awards were a swizz – a way for magazine publishers to reward their largest advertisers & make an additional revenue stream (overpriced dinner tickets & large category entry fees). We chose... Read more →
Getting Stars Lifts CTR 17%
April 2, 2013 • Article by Dan Fallon
For the last 18 months Google has been putting Seller Rating Extensions (gold stars) next to the adtext of advertisers who have been positively reviewed within media that Google can read. For an example see Search Star’s own PPC ads below…we practice what we preach & in the adtext below we are showing 46 positive... Read more →Google and Money: A Short Story
March 26, 2013 • Article by Dan Fallon
My slides from last Thursday’s Bristol & Bath Marketing Network talk at the Bath Hilton are below. Many thanks to all those who came along and for getting involved in the post-talk discussion. Any questions then please get in touch! Google & Money – Search Star from Dan FallonLegal PPC – How To Use It Effectively
January 14, 2013 • Article by Dan Fallon
In Nov 2012 we did a series of Legal Masterclasses on “Top Tips for Legal PPC”. In the audience was the lovely Delia Venables, editor of the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. She asked us to turn our Powerpoint into Word and write a short piece on how Legal Firms should run their PPC. Three thousand... Read more →University of Phoenix is Google’s Largest Advertiser
November 6, 2012 • Article by Dan Fallon
I’ve just been looking through SpyFu’s analysis of who Google’s top advertisers are globally and then within the UK. Google doesn’t publish any data and so all stats have to be calculated by 3rd parties based off either search results scraping or through ISP & panel data . There are also massive guesstimates for CPCs... Read more →LinkedIn: Making First Contact
October 11, 2012 • Article by Dan Fallon
In B2B sales LinkedIn is an essential tool for finding contacts in target businesses. What many of us neglect though is the paid advertising offering from LinkedIn. It has targeting that allows you define users by a mass of parameters including location, industry, company size and most importantly job title. You can show ads to... Read more →Guide To Campaign Tracking
May 14, 2012 • Article by Dan Fallon
For all our clients tracking is a constant issue…how sophisticated should they get with tracking and what solution is right. Fortunately an extremely experienced direct marketer (Martin Wright) has written a rather useful guide to getting the right campaign tracking solution. He covers the pros & cons of source codes, Unique Telephone Numbers (UTNs), Unique... Read more →Yahoo Search Marketing Is No More
April 26, 2012 • Article by Dan Fallon
For the last few months we have been moving all our client Yahoo accounts into Microsoft Adcenter as Yahoo & Microsoft completed their “Search Alliance”. We’ve just received a flurry of emails from Yahoo & Microsoft (separately) saying that the transition is complete in the UK, France & Ireland & that that all search advertising... Read more →Search Star is 0.2% of Google UK Revenues
April 13, 2012 • Article by Dan Fallon
I just saw the announcement that Google Q1 2012 UK revenues were $1.19bn. Google isn’t great at telling us how we are doing so I thought I’d spend a few minutes over a sandwich working out Search Star’s share of their UK market. $1.16bn converts on today’s exchange rate at £746m. For Q1 2012 0.2%... Read more →PPC + Organic = Incremental Traffic or Cannibalisation?
March 29, 2012 • Article by Dan Fallon
In 2011, Google released a Search Ads Pause research study which showed that 89% of the clicks from search ads are incremental, i.e., 89% of the visits to the advertiser’s site from ad-clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when the search ads are paused. In a follow published last week, Google has addressed two... Read more →