OMGPM News Feed

Online Advertising Under ASA Jurisdiction

31/01/2011 00:00:00

From the 1st March 2011 the ASA will expand its remit and cover marketing on websites. The new regulations could signal big changes and rewrites for some websites. All content, not just on their own website but Twitter and Facebook will have to adhere to the rules set out in the code.

The ASA has launched a media ad campaign to ensure that consumer and website owners are aware of the changes. ASA commented that this new change “calls on companies to ensure marketing communicaiton on their websites is legal, decent, honest and truthful”.

The question remains as to how the ASA will enforce website owners to comply with the new rules.

Display URL Changes In Google

31/01/2011 00:00:00

Google announced recently that display URLS can no longer use capitalisation in the root domain. For example www.AmazingShoes.co.uk will now have to be www.amazingshoes.co.uk. This change has come about after a period of testing and research by Google resulting in the recommendation that this change will lead to “better results”.

This has left many of us confused, as through testing we have found that using initial caps on words gets a better CTR than all lower case, is easier to read and grabs attention. Google advises in the Adwords help section that it is best practise to use both upper and lower case in URLS as it drives a better CTR, adding further confusion to the benefits of this change.

New 2011 Affiliate Marketing Council Chair

31/01/2011 00:00:00

Helen Southgate who works for Sky has been elected Chair as the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council Chair. Helen was competing with Sanjit Atwal from Tradedoubler and Ewan Darby from Neo@Ogilvy for the role. Helen Southgate commented;

“I am delighted to have been voted in as the new Chairperson of the IAB Affiliate Marketing Council and would like to thank everyone for their support. Both Sanjit and Ewan delivered excellent presentations so I’d like to thank them for being great candidates and making this year a really exciting election, the high calibre of the candidates this year shows the importance of the council and the commitment that people want to make to ensure it succeeds.”

“I’m looking forward to an exciting and challenging year in the role. I think there will be some exciting new developments to the industry as it widens its scope and we start to understand and promote what affiliate marketing is all about. I’m also aware of some challenges we will face but am confident that as an industry and council we will be at the table for all major decisions and announcements.”

PPC – Misspelling Crackdown to Pose Problems for Affiliates

10/12/2010 00:00:00

Google appears to be cracking down on PPC affiliates who attempt to use misspelt ad copy in their Google ads in order to match keywords that they are bidding on. One of the main purposes of this is to enable an affiliate to purposely input misspellings into their ad copy headline to match the keyword they are targeting.

The result of this is that the ad copy headline is bolded at the head of the search engine results, which can often lead to a more profitable click through rate.

Nevertheless, it has recently been revealed that Google is working to crack down on PPC affiliates who have toyed with this technique. Google has quoted from its help centre the regulations and after a number of years of letting PPC affiliates off the hook, it seems evident that they are enforcing ‘guilty’ parties to the letter of the law.

The fundamentals of Google’s ad creative guidelines show exceptions for commonly misspelled words or spelling variations that the majority of users would “recognise and understand”. Therefore it is somewhat puzzling as to why Google has now decided to put its foot down so firmly.

Black Hat SEO Techniques Can Potentially Poison the Internet

19/11/2010 00:00:00

An increasing number of ‘cyber criminals’ are seeking to use ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques in order to trick web users into visiting Malware-ridden websites and sites which attack and store personal data of each individual visitor.

SEO forms an integral part of online performance marketing, with the higher position a URL can maintain in a search engine the more likely it is that a web user will click on the site.

As a result, black hat criminals are seeking to jump on the SEO bandwagon for their own illegal benefits. Fraudsters dupe web visitors into signing up for software, or products that eventually compromise a user’s PC with potentially damaging coding.

In fact a study into the threat of malware this year revealed that by June 2010, 22.4 percent of the top 100 Google searches returned URL’s that were poisoned with links to malware – almost 10 percent higher than the previous year.

Even in the last 24 hours black hat SEO criminals have hijacked the news that Prince Williams is engaged to marry longtime girlfriend, Kate Middleton. Terms related to “prince william engagement”, “kate middleton price william”, and “royal wedding prince william” were showing signs of compromise in terms of malicious Firefox updates, videos, and rogue anti-virus applications.

Consumer Credit Directive Conference

12/11/2010 00:00:00

Wednesday 10th November saw the Consumer Credit Directive Conference in Canary Warf. Organised in partnership between OMG, Freedom marketing, Olgivy and American Express, the conference was designed to drive debate on the implications of the new Consumer Credit Directive legislation. The event was well supported with representatives from product providers, publishers and agencies and across multiple disciplines including Marketing, Legal and compliance. In particular we were joined by Amex, Barclaycard, Capital One, Egg, Moneyfacts, Moneysupermarket, RBS, Santander,. Uswitch and Virgin Money. With an introduction from Chris Malin from the Auriemma Group and workshops from Freedom Marketing’s Michael Jacklin and OMG’s Nic Redfern the conference created some useful debates with many questions on how the directive will be implemented at the start of 2011. Some questions have been raised with the OFT which we will of course share as soon as we have this view.

The Consumer Credit Directive was enacted into UK Law in March 2009 and compliance becomes obligatory after 31 January 2010. The new legislation has implications on the advertising of consumer credit products, in particular on the precise nature of the information presented to a consumer and the disclosure of the role of intermediaries the process. There is significant debate on the resulting impact on comparison tables, banner ads and PPC activity.

We will keep our partners informed as further information becomes available.

Google Steps Up Instant With Page Previews

11/11/2010 00:00:00

Google has announced instant previews in their search results pages, building on the new real-time results.

Through their official blog Google stated that "instant previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right pages as quickly and easy as flipping through a magazine."

The feature is planned to be rolled out in more than 40 lauguages over the next few days.

10 Steps to a successful affiliate programme

11/11/2010 00:00:00

Affiliate marketing is not rocket science but the perfect affiliate programme is harder to achieve than some people think. We have prepared a few tips to help make your affiliate programme become more effective; delivering more growth, whilst protecting your brand and managing cost.

Give affiliates the tools to sell your brand and promote you above competitors – provide the right creative, the best commissions, engaging and relevant content, and competitive customer offers.
Feed back to affiliates – tell them how they’re delivering for you so they can refine their targeting and reach more valuable customers for you.
Listen to your network – they’ll offer you advice you on how to grow your campaign.
Listen to your affiliates – they’ll give you invaluable insight on how to generate more sales.
Research your market – know what your competitors are doing. What commercials and consumer offers are they running?
Pay affiliates quickly – they’ll be more inclined to promote your brand if they’re guaranteed fast payment.
Get creative – increase sales with tactical promotions, bespoke commissions and seasonal offers.
Integrate your affiliate marketing with your overall marketing activity – this will boost brand awareness and make your campaigns more attractive for affiliates.
Look at your customer journey – are there any leakage points which could lead to a potential drop off from affiliate leads?
Keep communicating – provide regular communications and materials for your programme to keep you at the forefront of affiliate minds.

8 Steps to a successful referral solution

11/11/2010 00:00:00

Brand advocacy is seen as the holy grail of any CRM department. But how do you leverage this power? The good news is that a digital Word of Mouth strategy provides an ideal solution.

As a technology provider in the performance marketing sector, we are often asked by clients to outline what provides the basis for a successful entrance into the referral marketing arena. For those intrigued to find out more in not so many words, here’s our 8-point plan to making this happen:

Keep it simple – ask all but the essential questions – at least for the first phase
Spread the word – ensure your programme receives adequate exposure by maximising the number of trigger points
Keep your message consistent - knowledge of your referral programme takes time to spread
Vary your offer – try changing the reward for making a referral to establish the optimal cost-effective proposition
Embed your digital WOM solution into your other ‘social’ activity – a powerful message for your facebook page or tweet call to action
Brand or performance – think of the solution as a half-way house between the two and manage your marketing budgets accordingly
Analyse your results – referrals with no purchase still have significant value
In-house or outsource – don’t trip over the complexities of coordinating technical requirements, reward partners and managing campaigns without seriously considering outsourcing

If you are keen to get started and want to talk through your plans or any of the points raised above, please call me on the number detailed below.

Mark Solway
+44 (0) 1603 697721

Multiple sites are not always the best bet

02/11/2010 00:00:00

From time to time we encounter potential clients that want to try to trick Google (and the other search engines) into listing their products several times on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) by creating a web of similar domains which all use the same content and just have a slightly different design (colour scheme) and a different Top Level Domain (TLD).

To set the record straight, Google and the other search engines have become (for a while now) very wise to this trick, and as such have developed the ranking algorithms to detect similar content and then flag the site as a poor quality domain. This means that all of the time and expense that is put into these copy sites is wasted as they will not perform as the owner hopes they will.

Our advice to clients is to spend the time and resource that you would use on setting up and managing these copy domains and instead use it on developing one main site with unique and sticky content features (from a user’s point of view). This will not only engage with users on a better level it will also encourage other website to link to the main domain which in turn will help to increase the level of quality external links which point to your domain. This increase in links will do more over a longer period of time than the creation of additional copy domains.

To find out more information on SEO for your website, please contact a member of the OMG Search Team for a free chat about your site and the techniques you implement.