Do you run an ecommerce PPC campaign?  If you do, there are twenty-three negative keywords that you should add to your account right now. They could save you money. The List The list of keywords is a list of common UK ecommerce sites, like ebay and Amazon, as well as common price comparison and review sites. amazon [...]

Shawn Livengood over at PPCWithoutPity recently wrote a great blog post called The #1 Reason PPC accounts Fail.  It’s scarily accurate, and certainly worth a read.  Livengood argues that PPC accounts fail for a simple reason: the products they’re advertising are bad.  (His language is a bit more blunt.) I certainly can’t argue with that. [...]

At Maple Forest, we have a healthy mix of two kinds of clients, e-commerce clients and what we call “service providers”. E-commerce clients tend to have highly complex campaigns, but tracking is comparatively easy.  After all, it’s simple to measure a sale and register a conversion from PPC campaigns with any number of analytics and [...]

What’s your target cost per acquisition? That’s a question that a surprising number of people who sell online don’t know the answer to.  At its most blunt, a cost per acquisition is just the cost of your online advertising budget, divided by your number of sales.  (Whether or not that number turns a profit for [...]

So, what the heck is Social Media anyways?  Why is it important for a business?  We’ve been doing a lot of consulting work with our clients lately on how they can turn the big scary concept of “Social Media” into actionable metrics and tasks. We define Social Media as anywhere online that people have conversations [...]

In a competitive market place it is important to protect the identity of your business. An effective online brand protection strategy secures the value in your brand. This value consists of the inherent visual or aural impact of the brand as well as the customer recognition and goodwill that attaches to the brand as you [...]

Google is in the midst of launching a new social layer on top of its search results called +1 – broadly similar in practice to Facebook’s “Like” button.  (Though, Google seems to be taking great pains to avoid calling their new feature “Like”.) Google’s own introduction to the +1 feature is available as a video: [...]

When running a local London campaign, it makes sense to think like a Londoner.  Londoners often describe locations and navigate by postcode.  When using Google to search for a nearby takeway, a Londoner is just as likely to type in “Indian takeway in SW6″ as they are “Indian takeaway in Fulham.” When testing for a [...]

Over drinks a few days ago, one of my friends asked me what the number one tool or application was that we use for PPC Management at Maple Forest. We played a bit of cat and mouse for the answer.  The conversation went something like this. Is it some kind of bid management software? We [...]

We get this question all the time – and the answer is simple: SEO shouldn’t cost you a thing. That doesn’t mean that running a Search Engine Optimisation campaign doesn’t take time, effort and money.  It absolutely does. But, it does mean that if your SEO agency or campaign is working properly, it should yield [...]