Argos. Clearly doing well as the UK’s most popular ‘catalogue showroom retailing’ store in the UK. More than 700 stores, 130m customers and £4.3b in sales in 2008 isn’t bad. They also take 26% of their sales online, aided by an Argos catalogue found in 18m households across the country. Not bad for a chain who relies on a strictly ’self-serve’ philosophy that doubles as a business model… but they could do it so much better. (more…)
Announced yesterday on their official AdWords blogspot that the algorithm used in determining a paid ad’s quality score is changing very soon. TechCrunch covered the same story today.
In a continual push for ‘bettering’ their services (including enhancements made to their content network), Google have said that 3 main components in AdWords are changing, in an effort to provide the advertiser with more complete, real-time information that impacts their quality score, and the ability to make it to the front page easier (at a higher cost, of course). In all cases, changes are clearly ‘win-win’ as advertisers get more flexibility and Google gets more money.
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The IAB says that the average percentage of spend for a Canadian company on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) activities accounts for around 33% of their online marketing budget, while a recent report from Emarketer shows that the USA is around 44% and the UK is well over 55%. I recently spoke with Pro Marketer, Carl Brabander (see BIO below), about why he thinks this is?
Categorized in: Best of, Online Marketing, ideas