"We had to make those travelling to Iceland aware of us, instantly. And with Nordic eMarketing, this is exactly what happened," said Hallfreður Emilsson, Co-owner and Marketing Manager at Glacier Car Rental.

Through Google Adwords, Glacier was able to penetrate the online marketing space within several hours, "Google boosted orders through our website by over 90%, and there is still visible growth," commented Hallferður.

"We are really happy with the results of this campaign," explained Haukur Jarl Kristjánsson, Project Manager and PPC Specialist at Nordic eMarketing. "Especially because this is a small, local car rental agency with very personal services, and does not have the power of the big brands behind it."

Click on the following link to see this PPC  case study on successfull PPC campaigns and to view other successful PPC campaigns with Google AdWords click here

Twitter users are twitting on news, education, political campaigns and simple daily things one wants to share with others. Twitter usage is on the rise with around 74.000.000 users in January 2010 worldwide; a sharp 8% rise from December 2009.

Thomas Bindl, SES Advisory Board & Founder & CEO, Refined Labs GmbH
Constance "Connie" Stack, VP, Sales & Marketing, WordStream
Paulo Maranhao, Search Media Strategist, Microsoft

The session was firmly moderated by Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & Principal, Page Zero Media.

for more information on SES London goto their page

Next stop Search Engine Strategies New York

Air France Google Trends

One of the most dynamic ways of communicating to the masses ASAP is through Google PPC, a great sample of that is the crash of the Air France Airbus plane flying from Brazil to France. The plane goes down after 300 KM and news start to spread.

As a part of an PR crisis strategy Air France should have gone out and paid for customized message for their brand search, dealing with questions like; Is it safe to fly with Air France' and/or How can I find information about the crash?

Using the same method, Airbus could have dealt with people frighten to fly with Airbus planes, answering questions like is flying with Airbus planes save?

As one of those that fly frequantly but are not comfortable flying I was one of the first looking for anwers like the above and I do belive that I was not the only person. Check Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends?q=air+france&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0 to back my case.

The problem was that relaying this information to our client was tough, first they did not understand the competitive nature of the words / Phrases they where after and secondly there was even less understanding that to run and maintain campaigns like this takes management and refining. They thing that we needed to relay to our client was that even though in the “brick to mortar” world this seamed rather straight forward it was not online and what they felt where their competitors did not echo online. Little like Blue Lagoon the spa here in Iceland.

Their main competition in branded search in a movie shot in the 80’s staring Brook Shields. In this case we ended up stopping the campaign because the 3k just did not cut it and that spend was by far not cutting it, having the impact needed. The moral of this post? It’s Important not just to open a PPC campaign, you need to make sure that you are managing clients expectations and be sure that he or she understands what to expect.

There is a great article on this at Dixons Jones Receptional News Site.

You can also read about the Paid Search Study at the Visual Revenue site.

Exchanged a bottle of local vodka/schnapps with Matt Van Wagner who brought me a bottle of a very fine Vodka and instead a bottle of 8 year old Brennivin (Black Death). The highlight for me how ever was that my wife saw me speak for the first time.

Digital Marketing is the top level name/explanation of all including search, mobile, email and other related marketing efforts. Internet marketing falls under digital and under internet there is search, banners and email and under search there is organic and PPC.

So while search marketing is digital marketing and banner marketing is digital marketing then banner marketing is not search marketing, or??? You can now buy banners through Google PPC so banner marketing is also search because it's also PPC and you can buy banners through PPC.

Ok, but if I ad eMarketing to the mix? Is that the same as digital marketing? I give up!! Does anyone know this in as simple terms as possible? What is what and the relation between each? I know the people at The Institute of Direct Marketing know, maybe I should drop them a line?

P.s. Wikipedia says this "Digital Marketing is the practice of promoting products and services using digital distribution channels to reach consumers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost-effective manner.", but what do they know?

1. Keep daily budget as high as you can
The daily budget determines how often the ad is shown for the keywords. Set the budget high enough so that ads don’t turn off during the day.

The Google PPC algorithm:
What really determines your ad visability at Google looks a little like this “[ MAX BID * KEYWORD CTR * (AD GROUP CTR or AD COPY AVERAGE CTRS or something to this effect) * POSSIBLE A CAMPAIGN WIDE CTR * POSSIBLY SOME CAMPAIGN OR ACCOUNT AGE FACTOR * (A LOCALIZATION FACTOR APPLIED DEPENDING ON WHERE THE SEARCH ORIGINATED)] = RANK SCORE”
Source: http://www.positionconcepts.com/

You can read more about Google new PPC algorithm here: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061110-085425

2. Improve the ad’s position
Trying to simplify Google AdWords algorithm this is the deal; The ad’s position can be improved by increasing cost-per-click (CPC), refining the text or having a high click-through rate (CTR).

3. Refine keywords to target specific audience
a. Choose specific keywords for the product or service - General keywords generate the most impressions but often result in the fewest number of clicks. Eg. companies that sell football equipment, should not choose the keyword ‘football’, because the ads could appear to people searching for subjects unrelated to the product, such as football matches. Instead, choose more specific keywords like; ‘football gear’, ‘football boots’ and ‘football clothing’.
b. Use keyword variations – People use different spellings of keywords so include spelling variations, plurals and common misspellings in your list of keyword.
c. Change keyword matching options to widen/narrow focus - Specify which type of keyword matching option you want to make the ads appear.

The options are:
Broad Match: just enter the keywords, such as ‘football boots’ (Google uses Tennis balls in their sample, or was it tennis shoes?)
The ad will appear whenever users search for ‘football’ and ‘boots’, in any order, and even if the query includes other terms, such as ‘football clothing and boots’.
For Google, broad matching also utilises expanded matching in which it analyses the keyword list, ad text and daily Google search queries, then shows the ads for other relevant terms and variations (such as ‘football shoes’) even if these were not included in the original keyword list. (Expanded matches can be stopped by adding them as negative keywords or by changing broad match keywords to exact or phrase matches.)
Phrase Match: include quotation marks around the keywords, eg. “football boots”
The ad shows when users search for ‘football boots’, in this order. The ad would appear for ‘Reebok football boots’ but not for ‘boots for football.’
Exact match: include brackets around the keywords, eg. [football boots]
The ad appears when users search for ‘football boots’, in this order and without any other terms in the query. The ad wouldn’t show for ‘Reebok football boots’ or ‘football clothing and boots’.
Negative keywords: include a hyphen before the keywords, eg. ‘-blue’
If the keywords are ‘football boots’ and your negative keyword is ‘–blue’, the ad will not show under the search ‘blue football boots’

4. Target audiences geographically
Languages, countries or regions can all be targeted separately.

5. Improve ad text
• Make sure to include targeted keywords. Do some research, refine, research, refine and so on….
• Be very clear in your messages.
• Focus on what makes the product or service unique.
• End with a call-to-action.

6. The ad links
• Use links to send people to the relevant and useful landing page and don’t be afraid to do some A/B testing. Use third party analytics to messure your conversion rate and ROI, I reccomend IndexTools.
• Monitor the conversions; track how many ad clicks convert to purchases, sign-ups, page views, leads etc…

The most important part is always to remember that a well managed PPC campaing is a full time jop and for it to work well you need to compine competitive analysins, indepth keyword resarch, refining and professional web analytics. I do not reccomend using Google to monitor Google and you can’t monitor MSN and Yahoo with GA.