Through our offer to carry out a free website assessment we review a large number of websites each month, which often have common problems. Here we list our top issues which may affect you, or could be useful to avoid in the future!
New figures published by the IAB in October show further substantial growth in the online advertising market during the first 6 months of 2006. Total spend fell just short of £1 billion during this period, which indicates that money spent on Internet advertising in the UK is set to exceed national press advertising by the end of the year.
As search engine marketing becomes more competitive, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve good results for the most obvious keywords and phrases, however there are some useful tools available to help you research further and build a good list of more specific and relevant terms. Here we review our top 5 ‘free’ tools available to anyone.
As the use of Broadband continues to expand in the UK, the use of the Internet is also developing at a rapid rate, with search traffic, website applications and all forms on online media (such as video) benefiting from this trend. A recent report by internet testing company Epitiro, on the top consumer ISP’s in the UK provided performance data – which was previously unavailable in the public domain – that shows BT Yahoo coming out top in the period April to June 2006.
Overture UK has just announced that they will be following the lead of their US parent and renaming themselves as Yahoo! Search Marketing at the end of February, along with all of the other European Overture sites. This change has been expected for some time and follows the acquisition of Overture in 2003 by Yahoo! who wanted to own part of the pay-per-click advertising market.
This time last year we made 5 predictions for 2005 and so we can now look back on them with a mixture of outcomes, as they were a mixed batch! Some did take place, as predicted, and others were some way off the mark – at least last year – so we review what really happened.
The use of website statistics is extremely valuable and can provide essential data regarding visits to a website and usage, which in turn can help to develop the site’s content and marketing activities. However, the wide range of statistical packages also represent a variety of different methods of recording and analysing online traffic data, plus there can also be discrepancies between this information and statistics provided by online advertising activities, such as pay-per-click advertising or banner adverts.
Latest figures from Hitwise, the online traffic measurement company, report on search engine usage and market share in the UK during September 2005. This continues to show the dominance of the 4 main search properties in this country, and in particular, Google’s overwhelming superiority being maintained. The report also tracks the usage of different vertical search options, such as news, image and local search.
ABC Electronic (ABCe) is an organisation that provides an industry standard measurement in the UK for websites that wish to sell advertising and need independently verified statistics on their visitor numbers and usage data. In such a confusing area where websites tend to quote a wide array of statistics gathered in different ways – including the irrelevant figure of ‘hits’ – the ABCe site can provide some valuable data on the state of the Internet market.
