Last year Adobe entered the Analytics market by buying Omniture for 1.8 Billion. While other paid providers have suffered at the hands of the free Google Analytics product, Omniture has dominated the top end of the paid Analytics market.

If you put Google Analytics head to head with Omniture’s SiteCatalyst Analytics solution, Omniture comes out the winner based on the number of available tools, modules and reports available.

However reporting is not analysis. While Google Analytics lacks some of SiteCatalyst’s bells and whistles – it is a free product with free updates. This is allowing companies to spend their license fee savings on investing in analysis and insights.

As Analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik, says in his book Web Analytics 2.0, “you need an analyst, that is, a person with a planet-sized brain. Invest multiple times more in her or him, or
more of them, if you truly want to take action on your data. Otherwise, you are simply data-rich and information poor.”

In 2009, the proportion of spending on internal staff increased from 36% to 42% of total web
analytics spend while spending on technology decreased from 45% to 38%. In these tougher times expect this trend to continue.

The good news is that Google and Adobe have the funds to drive innovation – making it easier to gain actionable tasks from their respective Web Analytics systems.

What are your experiences of Google Analytics, Omniture or other Web Analytics products?

Please share your comments below.

The tool works by taking your historical conversion tracking data and automatically adjusting your max cost per click (CPC) bids based on how likely it is that your ad will convert. So theoretically you should get more conversions while maintaining or reducing your cost per acquisition (CPA). Plus you’ll spend less time managing your max CPC bids.

For example…

Joe Bloggs sells pet supplies, and has enabled Enhanced CPC for a campaign that contains the keywords ‘dog collars’, ‘leather studded dog collars’, and ‘pink diamante dog collars’, all with a max CPC bid of £0.50.

When someone searches on ‘pink diamante dog collars’, AdWords recognizes that the keyword has converted well in the past and so increases the max CPC bid to £0.55 for that auction. If historical data shows that a conversion is very likely, Enhanced CPC could bid up to 30% more than the max CPC. So the most Joe Bloggs would be charged for a click is £0.65.

Conversely, if a user searches on a term that has not converted in the past, the AdWords system will lower the max CPC, although Google hasn’t specified how low they will go with the bids.

So the idea is that AdWords ultimately helps Joe Bloggs increase sales and conversions, whilst maintaining or lowering his average cost per conversion.

So What?

It all sounds good but will this tool really make that much of a difference? What’s the difference between this and Conversion Optimiser, which also promises to boost your ROI with an easy-to-use bidding tool?

Will you get more conversion from your AdWords spend? Maybe, although the danger is that you end up spending more. If you are getting more conversions at the same CPA then surely you’re going to have to increase your spend to make the most of it. And surely you reach a point where you can’t spend anymore so you’re getting the same number of conversions at the same CPA, therefore there’s no growth in your campaigns.

And what happens when there’s another ash cloud or the stock market dips, meaning your conversion rates drop? Will Google start lowering bids on keywords that are experiencing a blip? Could they reduce bids to the point where traffic fades to almost nothing?

Don’t lose control

By using Enhanced CPC you relinquish control of your campaign bid management. Google doesn’t offer notifications to let you know when the system begins to modify bids, and you can’t see a breakdown of modified bids within the AdWords interface.

Depending on how big your campaigns are, shouldn’t you be doing this stuff as a matter of course anyway – manually, or using your bid management tool? If you’re running your own relatively small campaigns, you should be reviewing your max CPC bids regularly as part of your optimisation process. Weekly is probably frequent enough to adjust your max CPC bids.

By reviewing your own bids and changing them manually, you retain the control and can make decisions based on the performance data that is important to you. You might want to increase bids only on keywords in a particular campaign or ad group. You might decide to increase your CPA on a campaign, and reduce spend to maintain conversions in another. This tool won’t be able to make those clever decisions for you.

We do use bid management tools to increase our clients’ campaign ROI, but we always retain a level of human interaction with the tool so that we’re making absolutely the right decision for our client. As a smaller business, handing total control to Google Enhanced CPC could cost you more than you bargained for. Test with care…

If you’ve tried Enhanced CPC, we’d love to know how you’re getting on. Leave your comments…

Here, we’ve put together the top 5 things we love about AdWords Editor…

1. You can copy and paste details between ad groups, campaigns and even accounts
How handy is that? The Google interface is pretty user-friendly, but I for one find it really annoying that I can’t quickly and easily cut and paste to multiple ad groups or campaigns.

With AdWords Editor, you can copy or cut and paste keywords and ads, and move entire ad groups or campaigns. You can even copy and paste to another account. This is a brilliant timesaver if you need to make changes to multiple campaigns, or want to duplicate ads and just tweak them.

You can also drag and drop keywords, ad groups, or ads into different parts of the account. This works like copy and paste, but be careful – it will delete each keyword from its original destination.

2. You can make bulk changes
Another favourite feature of mine. How many times have you wanted to add quite a few negative keywords to all campaigns? Or update your bids without having to review every single keyword in the AdWords interface?

Once you’ve downloaded your campaigns, you can add or edit multiple items at once, including keywords, ads, bids, and URLs.

For example, you may have noticed a spelling mistake in your ads (yes, I’ve been there!). Select the ads, and simply change them in the ‘edit selected text ads’ box. Another example might be that you want to amend all your max cpc bids. Again, select the keywords you want to change, select ‘advanced bid changes’ and raise your bids.

You can also add/update multiple keywords and negative keywords – so much easier than doing it through the AdWords interface.

3. You can find and replace, and append to your ads and keywords
The find and replace function is invaluable and we use it a lot. Often we’re running campaigns with special offers in them. Say for example, you’re offering a 50% discount. The offer ends and you’ve got 500 ads to amend. By using ‘replace text in selected items’ option under the Edit tab, you can find all instances of 50% and change them back to your standard 20% off.

It also has an extra, often unknown function – you can “duplicate matching items and replace text in duplicates”. This is a nice little timesaver when it comes to creating new ad variations or keywords with a slight variation. It’s also useful when it comes to A/B landing page testing as it also works on destination URLs. You can simply choose your ads and use this function to duplicate them and change the destination URL in one easy step.

The ‘Append Text’ function allows you to add text either before or after the existing text. This could be used to create expansions of a keyword list. For example, you could add ‘buy’ in front of a list of products, and then cut and paste them into their own ad group.

4. You can group keywords using the keyword grouper
I know I sometimes struggle to group my keywords into logical ad groups, but it is one of the easiest ways to boost CTR and profitability. Doing this manually is painstaking work, especially if you’ve got thousands of keywords.

Within AdWords Editor there is something called the Keyword Grouper. The Keyword Grouper organizes your keywords into ad groups based on common themes.

You might have already set your campaign up and you have one ad group with hundreds of keywords in it. So the goal is to group your keywords into smaller, more tightly themed ad groups.

In AdWords Editor, go to ‘Tools’, then ‘Keyword Grouper’. Once you click ‘generate common terms’, AdWords Editor does its thing and splits your keywords into smaller ad groups. Make sure you select ‘Yes, copy text ads into each new ad group’ and you’re done.

5. Ad scheduling
The other thing we love about AdWords Editor is that you can copy and paste the ad scheduling between campaigns. In the AdWords online interface it takes a lot of time to go through every campaign and set the days and times you want your ads to run.

I recently did some work for a mortgage client, and ended up splitting the account into 35 campaigns. I wanted them all to run at the same time, on the same days. Manually, that would’ve been a nightmare. But with AdWords Editor, it was a piece of cake.

So there you have it – some of things we love about AdWords Editor. And apart from anything else, it’s free. Download it here http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/ – it’s a must!

From the very beginning, Google has continued to build new capabilities that allow advertisers to reach their goals more easily within this network. For example, last year they introduced frequency capping to enable advertisers to manage how often their campaign reaches the right users, and in order to allow brand advertisers to be more selective about where ads appear, a new feature was launched this year to filter out “below the fold” inventory. When applying this filter, advertisers have the ability to show ads only in places that appear on the user’s screen when the page loads, without requiring them to scroll down.

Remarketing is also a powerful feature that has allowed advertisers to reach people that have previously visited their website but didn’t convert. After driving traffic to their site with search ads, they can then remarket to those users who reach their site by showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the GDN.

Another interesting feature of GDN is the Campaign Insights tool. This gives reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness or active user interest in a product or service. The tool is still only available for US and UK advertisers, but results so far prove that this is another brilliant Google idea.

Hair Club, specialists in hair loss treatments, hadn’t been able to hit an acceptable CPA for display advertising in any vendor and were reluctant to try. When they finally did so on the Google Display Network, the Campaign Insights feature drove a 40% uplift in search traffic.

“We track ROI from our campaigns very closely. With Google and Campaign Insights, display became measurable and allowed us to prove an acceptable CPA. We could clearly see the search traffic and view-through conversions that display generates, and we gained actionable insights on how to optimise future campaigns” says Luke Hubbard, Vice President from Hair Club.

Google Display Network Facts

The potential for using the Google Display Network to further brand awareness is already a fact. Jordan, a division of Nike, executed an innovative campaign on the Google Display Network targeting a niche basketball audience, resulting in 188M impressions and 296K clicks over 6 weeks.

Lipton was also very successful with its YouTube and Google Display Network combined strategy. The “Free Your Y” integrated campaign resulted in an increase of awareness, higher levels of intention to purchase for Lipton products, strong brand perceptions that Lipton White Tea is a healthy beverage and, on top of that, the sales uplift was in excess of 26%.

But is this network really effective when it comes to increasing sales?

American Laser Centers, an aesthetic services provider, used the Google Display Network to start a chain reaction of leads and conversions. With GDN text and image ads they increased conversion by 365% while cutting impressions in half.

“The Google Display Network has helped us get more bang for our dollar. We’ve been able to grow scale and maintain our goal costs, putting us in a strong position”, says Erik Maks, advertising director at American Laser Centers.

Don’t underestimate the Google Display Network!

Internet marketing practices are still growing each year. Experts predict that internet marketing activities in the US will have doubled from $13 billion dollars spent in 2009 to $26 billion by the year 2014.

Take Hawaiian Airlines for example. Today, Google Display Network represents more than 15% of their total paid advertising. “Display ads are now part of our core advertising initiatives”, says Reid Ichiki, senior manager of Internet Marketing at Hawaiian Airlines. When recalling the ambitious strategy they started in the summer of 2008, he confirms: “that summer was a challenging time, record-high fuel prices impacted the economy, changing the vacation mindset. We were trying to do more with less while keeping ROI as high as possible. But even in that tough climate, based on the Display Network results, we never considered pulling back our online advertising.”

What are your experiences of Google Display Network?

Please leave your comments,

We’ve pulled together five of our favourite recent Google Apps updates, that could save you time and improve your productivity.

1.) Rich Text Signatures

Do you always sign your email in the same way, or include company contact details?

Auto-signatures have been possible for some time in Gmail, but if you wanted your signature to stand out or include images this was not possible. Although there were some ways around this, it’s only since in July of this year that Google has introduced rich text functionality, allowing you to personalise your signature by using different fonts, colours, alignments and images.

You can create a rich text signature by selecting Settings in the top right navigation, and then scrolling down to Signature under the General tab.

2.) Drag and Drop Attachments

In my last post, “5 Great Ways to Improve Your Gmail Experience“, I mentioned that it was possible to drag attachments onto the browser to attach them, rather than clicking on the Attach icon. Now, Google has made it just as easy to download attachments. Simply click and drag the icon of the attachment you have received and drop it in the required location to download it there!

3.) Updatable Dictionary

Don’t you just hate it when names and acronyms that you use regularly constantly appear with a squiggly red line underneath?

Now, you can add your own words to the Google Docs dictionary and avoid this irritation. Simply right click the word that is marked as incorrect and select Add to dictionary.

4.) Document Translation

Do you have a document in a language you can’t read, or need to create a document in another language?

Now, Google Docs can translate to and from 53 different languages. To do this, open the document you wish to translate and select Tools > Translate document. Now you can select the language that you would like to translate into. Once a language is selected you will be provided with a copy of your document, in the required language, in a separate browser tab.

5.) Dual Google Mail Login

Do you have multiple Gmail accounts for different purposes that you wish to access simulatiously in the same browser? Previously, this was only possible by using separate browser windows. However, this is now possible by going to google.com/accounts. First login to your Primary account and enable Multiple sign-in. Once you have logged into the first account, you can log into a further two accounts. They can all be accessed simultaneously in the same window by clicking the email drop down menu in the top right of the window.

The media are quick to highlight stories of lost data or identity theft, but, while we should be concerned with the protection of our data, there is another truth: many online marketers are drowning in data.

The advantage of online marketing ease of measurement: email marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimisation, Display, Affiliates and A/B testing can all be measured. In doing so, they generate huge amounts of data.

Web Analytics was originally presented as a way of solving this data deluge. Web Analytics is simply the measurement, collection and reporting of online traffic for purposes of understanding and optimising website usage.

The problem is that, as vendors of Web Analytics products have added more options to track more data sources, it has become harder to manage and interpret the data.

The solution is build to Web Analytics Dashboard that only focuses on the data that is of the most interest.

These are the top five rules that I use when creating Web Analytics Dashboards:

1. Keep It Simple & Include Insights
Keep your Web Analytics Dashboards to just one page: doing so will keep it focused and make it easier to understand the data. As well as including the summarised data, have space for some insights and recommendations. Having a section for these allows the senior executives reading the Dashboard to focus on making decisions, rather than just interpreting the data.

2. Include Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
What do you need to track? Is it time on site or the recording of a sale or sign-up? First work out your KPIs, then set up Goals to measure them, and then include these in your Dashboard.

3. Use Filtered Data
Filters allow you to exclude certain traffic from your Web Analytics. This could be your internal traffic or traffic from your web development company or PR company, allowing you to be sure that you are only looking at data from genuine visitors.

4. Segmentation
Web Analytics allow you to not just filter your data but also segment it. For instance, you may only want to look at search web traffic or even just Paid Search traffic. Segmentation will give greater clarity to your data and make it easier for you to see if your KPIs are being met.

5. Make Your Dashboard Visual
A picture says a thousand words: using graphs, pie charts and bar charts will not only make your Dashboard look more appealing but will also help make it easier to understand.

What do you all think? Have you tried to create your own Web Analytics Dashboard? What was the impact of it? Do you have any tips you want to share?

Please share your comments below.

See Also:
3 Tips For Leveraging Your Google Analytics Data

However, most companies find themselves at one or other of the extremes of data analysis: either they swamp themselves in swathes of incomprehensible numbers, or they barely look at the top-line visitor stats.

There is a happy medium to be found for every company. With some forethought and work, you can make Analytics an asset to your business that builds customer intelligence and revenue and even makes your colleagues love you!

1. Set up and monitor Goals.
A Goal in Google Analytics is used to monitor an action that happens on the site. This can be anything from a purchase to a download, the completion of a form, to the length of time that the visitor spends on the site.

When setting up Goals, it is a good idea to go through your business aims and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and look at the most efficient ways of reporting on them. If you are reporting in a heavily sales-oriented organisation, for instance, it is a good idea to look at goals that relate to completed purchases and time spent on shopping cart pages.

2. Track your marketing campaigns
Imagine that your marketing department has come up with a crazy new scheme to drive traffic via Twitter, Facebook or whatever the next social media phenomenon is: that campaign needs to be tracked!

Using Campaign Tracking in Google Analytics, you can monitor traffic, revenue and other KPIs by tagging your links. This is especially useful for services that use URL shorteners, which usually skew referral URL data.

Getting your colleagues in the habit of tagging campaigns that go out on the web can be a drawn-out process, but it will pay dividends in the end. Your Financial Director will love you for the ROI data you present on that Twitter campaign!

3. Use Advanced Segments
Your site traffic is not one big group of like-minded people who all turn up for the same reason. Likewise you shouldn’t be treating your analytics stats as one almighty block of figures.

Using Advanced Segments will give you greater insights into the behaviour of different types of visitors, such as new and returning visitors or those from different sources, such as organic and paid search. You can even create your own Segments, tailored to your categories of visitor.

Segments will tell you a different story about each of your visitor types and allow you to make informed decisions on how to interact with them.

Like most site analytics packages, Google Analytics collects a huge amount of data, but there is no need to try to tackle it all at once. The three techniques we have gone through here will get you well started towards using Analytics in an intelligent way that relates to your company’s goals, targets and KPIs, without getting bogged down in a mire of data.

See Also:
5 Rules for the Perfect Web Analytics Dashboard

Despite the opportunity to expand into international online markets, Marketing Directors tend to feel more comfortable focusing on their own countries online, perhaps through lack of knowledge or awareness of how easy and cheap it can be to test potential foreign markets online.  Even targeting minorities in your own country could increase your website’s performance and sales: in the United States, there are over 43 million Hispanics/Latinos with a purchasing power of more than $800 billion a year, and almost 16 million of them are on the Internet.  It’s because of impressive numbers like these that companies like Best Buy have started to launch Hispanic American sites.

Many companies are now creating country-specific websites in an effort to capture international markets, often by simply translating their existing sites. Unfortunately, this isn’t good enough in most cases: carefully crafted sales copy, marketing messages, communication and calls to action all suffer through literal translations.  Literal translations will leave your company’s site looking unprofessional, lowering customer trust and goodwill towards your brand.

Having an online presence has unintentionally introduced many products and services into the global market before they had been prepared internationalization.  There are a large number of non-English speakers who will purchase goods from English-language sites despite the language barrier.  If you analyse your site traffic and find that you have a large volume of international traffic, you may want to create one or more country sub-sites, tailored to that traffic, to increase website sales or conversions.

It is important to remember that there is a difference between translation and localization: a good localization service will convert your existing content and communication tools into a message and tone of voice appropriate to the target region, while maintaining the integrity of your brand. The challenge is often cultural rather than linguistic, and translating brands and slogans around the world is a difficult task, with which even multinational giants like Pepsi, Genral Motors and Kentucky Fried Chicken have had issues.

Pepsi’s slogan “Pepsi Brings you Back to Life,” literally translated into Chinese, became “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave,” whilst KFC’s slogan “finger lickin’ good” became “eat your fingers off.” General Motors had a perplexing problem when they introduced the Chevy Nova in South America: despite their best efforts, they weren’t selling many cars until they realized that, in Spanish, “nova” means “it won’t go”. Sales improved dramatically after the car was renamed the “Caribe.”

Your individual country sites should not just be translated and then left to gather dust. Language is only one barrier in cross cultural communication, and calls to actions and sales copy will also need to tailored to your target audience. Even in English, messages can be “lost in translation” when they cross the Atlantic, especially when dealing with humour, style, design, fashion and music: the difference between radio advertisments in the US And the UK is dramatic, even when they are for the same product, because of the need to pitch for different markets.

Your website’s performance and conversion rate are affected by its communication, sales incentive, design and layout. Different cultures have different associations with dates, colours and images. For example, it would be unwise to begin a large sale in the US on September the 11th, purple is associated with mourning in Latin America, and some site layouts may pose difficulties in countries that do not use Roman alphabet.

Bricks-and-mortar food chains, such as McDonalds, have found that changes to their menus are a great way to “golocalize” their brand without losing their identity.  McDonalds changes its menus in different regions in order to appeal to the local culture: in a McDonald’s in Belgium or Holland, you’ll be given the option of fritesaus over mayonnaise, in Canada you can enjoy a locally-inspired Poutine instead of your fries, and in India you can get one of these fantastic looking McAlooTikka burgers!

If you have country sites, they may be lacking in “glocalization.” Your websites are far more likely to succeed in an international market when the communication, products and services are adapted to the local culture of their target areas. Glocalization can be easily achieved by engaging with your audience on a local level. Employing local agencies will help you pitch to your target audience more effectively, and they will be able to point out any potential pitfalls in your campaign communication.

Online communication allows you to reach a larger audience and to behave as a local brand for them: it’s important to speaking to them locally as well!

See Also:
5 Rules for the Perfect Web Analytics Dashboard

But how many bus companies, ferry operators or hotel chains have mobile search campaigns running? Not many!

Of course, mobile search marketing isn’t just reserved for natural disasters and strikes. For years, marketers have been saying that “this is the year for mobile,” but it hasn’t quite come true until now.

Why you need to take mobile search seriously:
· Over the next four years, it is expected that searches made on Google from mobile devices will overtake searches from desktop computers.
· easyJet and BA, to name but two, run highly successful mobile campaigns that are driving real sales.
· All new Google product developments are now built with mobile use in
 mind. The focus is on high-end devices like the iPhone, Android and Palm Pre, which have full HTML browsers, rather than Blackberries, which use the lower-functioned WAP.

Developing your mobile search strategy
Building your mobile search campaign is easier than you think, and can be done from within your existing Google AdWords account. These are the key things to do if you want your campaign to be a success:

1. Be found: Just like your existing search campaigns, mobile search uses keywords to answer the user’s query, driving them to a landing page.

With mobile search, you also have the option of including a phone number in your ad so that, with a single click, users can call your business from their mobiles. Tests of the “Click to Call” numbers in ads have shown increases of between 5 and 30% in Click Through Rates (CTR).

2. Be targeted and precise: When setting up your mobile campaign, you can target users based on the device or mobile operator. For example, if you have a mobile site and want to target business travel users, you could choose to target Blackberries on Vodafone, which supplies many corporate mobile devices.

Google mobile search also allows you to target specific locations that can be pinpointed with frightening accuracy: to within 2 metres if the device has GPS! This means that you can target or tailor your message, showing your customer relevant information based on their location. You can then give them your address and phone number, so they can take immediate action.

3. Be relevant: Just like you would with any search campaign, give the user the most relevant information, and, if you’re driving them to a landing page, make sure it’s what they are looking for.

If the user is looking for ‘flights to Amsterdam’, give them a mobile-friendly page with flight information, special offers and related travel information like hotels or local events.

4. Be easy-to-use: Having a mobile campaign doesn’t necessarily mean building a whole new mobile site, particularly if you are targeting high-end devices like the iPhone that use full HTML browsers. However, you might need to make some changes: check what your site looks like on range of mobile devices, or use a tool such as http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ to check how mobile-friendly your site is.

Remember to include a Click-to-Call phone number in your ads, and test it, to ensure that the user can connect with you directly from your ad.

5. Be ready: Next time there’s a volcanic ash cloud or industrial action, you should be ready to offer people an alternative way to get to their destination, a place to stay, or just some help and advice, all through their mobile phones. Be ready to seize opportunities by building campaigns now and having them ready to go when you need them.

As the mobile internet grows, it will continue to offer new, exciting and innovative search opportunities, as well as being a cost effective way to target users in a time when marketing budgets are under scrutiny.

Want to know more about Google AdWords? – check out Ian’s AdWords Ebook over at Wordtracker.

From betting and beer to travel to TVs, who were the real winners and losers?

In the back of the net
In tribute to John Motson, here are some interesting World Cup search stats:
1. Traffic to news sites on June 11th reached over 12m visitors per minute globally. The day’s traffic busted the previous record of 8.5m visitors per minute, which was set when Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election in 2008.
2. According to AdTech, UK traffic dropped by a whopping 20% during England matches. However, as soon as the matches were over, traffic rose, with AdTech serving 10% more banner ads than normal.
3. There was a 20-fold increase in the number of searches for ‘Vuvuzela’ between the 5th and 19th June.
4. During the week commencing the 14th June, there were five times more searches for ‘Vuvuzela’ than there were for ‘Wayne Rooney’, England’s most searched for player.
5. Twitter set a new tweet record during Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark. When the referee blew the final whistle, Twitter recorded 3,283 tweets per second.

Official Sponsorship vs. ‘Ambush Marketing’
Many brands saw huge spikes in searches and traffic around their terms, without having spent millions on official sponsorship. In fact, the brands that sponsored individual teams benefited the most.

Qantas, official airline for the Australian team, saw searches increase by 155% between the 26th June and 3rd July, whilst Carlsberg, official sponsors of the England team was the third best performing brand for the week ending 12 June.

The real winners were the companies like Bavaria beer who used less conventional methods of marketing their products. Bavaria beer supposedly dressed 36 blondes in bright Orange mini-dresses at the Holland-Denmark game. After the story broke, the Bavaria beer website become the fifth most visited beer website in the UK.

Piggybacking on World Cup keywords
What was perhaps most surprising was the failure of brands to link their activity to key online searches. Take Adidas for example. They produced the controversial new Jabulani World Cup match ball. But they weren’t bidding on the term, and only appeared on page two of the organic search results.

The phrases ‘world cup 2010′ and ‘soccer world cup’ were the most popular searches during the competition. You would be forgiven for thinking that advertisers would be falling over themselves to bid on these keywords to profit from the huge spikes in searches. Not so.

The majority of companies failed to make the most of unique opportunities to link their brands with key world cup search terms

What lessons did we learn?
I’ve put together some thoughts on what could have been done by brands and businesses that wanted to get the maximum exposure during the World Cup:

1. Bidding on all related keywords: bidding on ‘soccer world cup’, ‘world cup 2010’ and ‘world cup 2010 fixtures’ and targeting your ads would have been a strong tactic.

2. Using the Google Display Network: there were millions of people reading World Cup news and stories on the display network. By showing ads on the display network you could have opened your business up to millions of potential new users.

3. Using Mobile Search: 19m people now use mobile internet every month. One of the key ways that people find information on their mobile is through paid search, which is predicted to see 25% year-on-year growth.

4. Monitoring the trends and emerging searches: using all the available keyword tools, including HitWise, Google Ad Planner, Insights For Search and Google Trends, look for keywords that are trending and start bidding on them.

5. Learn these lessons for next time – Wimbledon has been and gone, and yet again, no one took full advantage of the competition and failed to bid on the key search terms, including ‘wimbledon’, ‘longest game wimbledon’ and ‘andy murray’.

Globally trusted brands are failing to make the most of these opportunities. If nothing else, doesn’t this teach us that we can turn any event into an opportunity, no matter what your business?