In a recent report published by The Kelsey Group it has been predicted that interactive advertising in the United Kingdom will grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 23.4%. In figures this means that the current spend of £2.7 billion is set to increase to around £5 billion by 2012. In recent years the industry has seen some fantastic growth figures since 2003 where the market spend was £407.8 million, in some years the growth in expenditure on the previous year has hit over 60%. At this rate the advertising spent online will be comparable to that spent on television within 10 years, with the current market share of expenditure on internet advertising being 15% and TV at 22%.
With this in mind what does it mean for businesses, for some it definitely means more expenditure. However you can also see that it will more than likely lead to an increase in competition as more people find that they will benefit from a solid online advertising campaign.
With search engine optimisation (SEO) starting to become an integral part of a company’s advertising spend as well as a solid pay-per-click (PPC) campaign a company will need to figure out what they require from their budgets. Choosing the right SEO company will be an important part of this as you may want a more personal, responsive approach to your campaign and one that is as free of jargon as possible.
The online marketing world need not be a confusing environment to enter and should be embraced to ensure that you receive the maximum exposure for your budget. With a carefullly researched online marketing campaign and the right SEO company on board you should see a significant return on investment and be able to take advantage of the current boom in the market. You should of course be wary of companies offering instant results and guaranteed positions as the search term algorithms are continually being refined to aid a searcher to find what they are looking for, this is where an online marketer will be able to provide you with the correct information and advice. Although this can take time to see results a good SEO company will be able to start you in more informed and prepared position.
Information sourced from The Kelsey Group and The Internet Advertising Bureau
It has been a very busy week in the field of online advertising, with the ongoing attempts from Microsoft to purchase Yahoo and Yahoo’s subsequent rejection of the offer, you would have thought that both parties would have been pre-occupied with their current wranglings. Yet, both Yahoo and Microsoft have made annoucements this week relating to pay-per-click advertising.
Microsoft unveiled plans to beta test (from the 1st of March) a new way of measuring online advertising effectiveness. Instead of the traditional “last ad-clicked” approach of todays current search advertising platforms, they are looking into what they are terming “engagement mapping”. This will provide an overview of which adverts a person has seen over a specific length of time and the influence that it has had in a person’s decision to purchase a product. How Microsoft intend to do this is vague at the moment but hopefully we will be able to see results of this beta fairly soon after the start and should be able to gain an idea of how Microsoft are logging this.
Yahoo on the other hand are set to remove the $0.10 price fix on the current minimum bid on their search advertising. Now this could be a big bonus for some search engine optimisations (SEO) companies and their pay per click (PPC) campaigns but could also lead to bidding wars driving up prices on particularly competitive keywords and phrases. If you have chosen your keywords carefully then you could find that you have hit upon a potential goldmine as your return on investment increases as your costs decrease.
As with all new implementations it will take time to see tangible results for both of these ideas, but they certainly should be followed closely for the near future.
Google are currently accepting sign-ups for the new demographic targetting feature of their Adwords facility. This will enable you to focus your campaigns more tightly on your selected audience and can provide more of an insight into your ads performance for those groups.