The growth of Liberty Marketing over the past few months has been so dramatic that we have brought in another new member of staff. The latest recruit is Nathan Jeans, whose primary responsibilities will be SEO copywriting, article creation and press release distribution.

With a business and marketing degree and a postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism to his name, Nathan promises to have an interesting mixture of skills that will really benefit Liberty and its clients. Having worked most recently as a freelance writer, Nathan has produced articles for The Guardian and The National Geographic, as well as countless articles for numerous sport magazines, where football, cricket and darts were particularly well received. When not working, Nathan particularly enjoys partaking in the afore mentioned sports, with the exception of cricket, where apparently his technique lets him down!

Managing director, Gareth Morgan commented, “We are delighted to have Nathan onboard. I have worked with dozens of external copywriters over the past few years, but it’s great to actually have someone in-house who can get to know the ins and outs of the company and our clients, and produce copy that represents the ethos and professionalism we have here at Liberty. I have had a good look at his past work and am very impressed by its creative and personable nature. I really do see a lot of good things ahead for the future.”

A client of ours just received an email with the subject "Google AdWords: Ads stopped running", which looked like it was a warning from Google:

In case the picture is hard to see, the message within the email is:

Hello,

Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.

Some of the ads have stopped running today (Monday, 12 April 2010).

If you want to get your ad back up and running you need to optimize the campaign to improve the CTR. The link below has some helpful tips, but, in a nutshell, you need to look at your keywords and your ad text. Make sure your keywords are jighly relevant and then make sure that each keyword in the ad group makes sense in terms of the ad text associated with this ad group (usually this means you need to create more ad groups with a smaller number of keywords). Having a tight connection between keywords and ad text helps improve CTR, which should fix your problem. 

Click here to get your ads back up.

Please note: if you do not verify the status of your account and notify us if your ads do not appear online, we cannot help you.

The spelling errors and grammatical issues didn’t really convince us that this was Google and after a few seconds of investigation we were right. When the mouse hovered over the link it tried sending us to adwords.google-rs.com.

Whilst phishing emails like this one certainly aren’t new, they aren’t that common in the Pay Per Click world and this is one to watch out for. This particular client had their account temporarily suspended by Google last week due to “potential unauthorised access to this account”! A coincidence?

2009 was a landmark year for online marketing. The first six months of the year saw online ad spend overtake television to become the UK’s largest advertising sector for the first time. It was predicted that this trend would continue into 2010.

A recent report from the Internet Advertising Bureau, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Advertising Research Centre, has found that online ad spend in 2009 went on to surpass predictions, reaching £3.5 billion (a total increase in spend of 4.2% over the year). Online advertising has continued strengthening its position as the largest advertising sector into 2010 and has proven itself not to be just a blip, caused by recession-hit companies looking for cheaper ways to advertise, as was suggested by some academics in 2009.

The report shows that spend on paid search (Pay Per Click advertising) rose by 9.5% to £2.15bn in 2009. One of the consequences of this increase is that businesses using Google AdWords and MSN Adcenter to market a business are now competing against more bidders for advert positions and clicks.

One of the most surprising results from the report was the 140% increase in video advertising. This is partly due to companies using the internet to distribute their television adverts and also due to many hoping that a video released on the internet may go “viral”.

The increase in online advertising is thought to be due to the changing habits of UK citizens. The Internet is increasingly becoming a vital part of 21st century life and people are spending more time surfing. The changes in consumer habits towards mainstream Internet use has resulted in innovative marketing from companies that have had to re-think the way they advertise. As the results of the study show, many companies are completely restructuring their advertising strategies to include far more online advertising and turning their backs on the increasingly expensive, hard to track, traditional means of promotion.