We have decided to help some of you out in explaining what an Integrated Digital Marketing Agency actually is and what are the main benefits of working with a reputable one.

Firstly we define an integrated digital marketing company as one that can expertly join all the dots in digital marketing and advertising for a specific business case or requirement.

Now this could mean that a client just wants a website, email marketing, design, video, SEO or paid advertising etc, but an integrated agency needs to be able to offer allied services that will maximise the benefits returned for their initial investment.

We do not mean a hard sell, the client may just need a website full stop, but an integrated agency needs to have the ability to link other areas to one main service provision if needed or required now or at a later stage.

So we would except an integrated digital marketing and advertising agency to be able to advise on strategy, web technology, paid advertising options (including SEO), sophisticated email marketing and also analytics, reporting and the integration of other cool technology such as marketing automation, CRM systems and call tracking.

There maybe areas that specialist providers will be needed for a roll out phase but a quality integrated agency will not be phased by being able to integrate all these areas into a coherent ongoing strategy and help with the build.

Positives of using an integrated digital marketing agency:

Getting a team of experts on an as-needed basis, no hiring, firing, sick leave etc.

Ensuring that all projects are in harmony and that the team can deliver a certain quality level, that you can see exists prior to working.

Experience with projects that require serious management and integrations.

Huge communication benefits and vision.

With the right team you get forward thinking and growing expertise that you can tap into and will likely come forward to suggest areas that other fragmented agencies may feel reluctant to do, therefore pushing yoru forward with digital marketing and not simply delivering base level services.

With many suppliers involved the likelihood of them wanting to ‘pop their head above the parapet’ to help you with new ideas is hugely reduced as it means so much hassle with meetings, clashes of personality and business aims and generally one huge headache, you get under served by using many suppliers pretty much always and will likely tear your hair out learning this.

Negatives to using an integrated digital marketing agency:

We hear and can think of only a few potential negatives to having a close partner relationship with an outsourced provider of professional services, but looked at closely they are outweighed in droves by the benefits of integration.

1) If the agency keeps things hidden and you are unaware of what is being done and spent. (i.e not professional)

If this occurs then you have unfortunately worked with an untrustworthy company which there are many circulating in all walks of life, diligence prior to starting a working relationship should help mitigate this massively if not totally.

Only the kind of agency that usually does not last long is up to these tricks, any agency worth their salt will be managed by reputable people (so check Anthony Munns them out etc) and be upfront and clear with all the best intentions and a clear roadmap and set of deliverables that you know what you are paying for.

It is your choice to agree or not on any project and work and this leaves very little room for explanation or corruption if all has been set out and agreed.

There could be a level of being complacent with an agency, and that is an issue that you as the employer could and should raise regularly if you are seeking to push things forward.

Summary of benefits of an integrated approach to your digital marketing needs:

You will get more positive energy and willingness from an integrated agency than a number of disparate providers who will have to work with each other and you, and therefore likely factor and price a huge factor of hassle into any quotes in order to ensure that the unknown relationship will be beneficial for all.

All in all we feel that most business serious about digital marketing need to work with an expert integrated digital marketing agency.

It just makes so much more sense.

The post Why is an Integrated Digital Marketing Agency usually better than using individual suppliers? first appeared on CY Digital Marketing Agency | Cyprus Web Design | SEO and PPC Agency.

We all know that SEO is an ever changing art and science combined with a bit of luck and a lot of perseverance.

This is why a quality SEO company like CY Digital keep up to speed with what is new and what needs to be considered in order to fulfil client requirements.

So what ever happened to the old Page Rank signal that you could use to see how authoritative your site was?

I have seen as well as many others that the page rank algorithm has all but stalled for 2 years or more.

The fact that no site seems to have gone up or down shows that as a signal it is less useful than we tend to believe.

A better way to test your domain authority might be to use the Mozilla SEO tool and see how you fair.

In rough terms this is how the score will equate to the old page rank score.

Moz Domain Authority: 15-20 (Small power, ≈ PR1 or PR2)
Moz Domain Authority: DA 20-30 (Medium power, ≈ PR2 or PR3)
Moz Domain Authority: DA 30+ (Large power, ≈ PR3 or PR4+)

With that said, is page rank useless?

Well yes and no, as having a quality page rank can mean that many still value your site for quality, the truth is though that in SEO terms the signal has for sure become a little more blurred of recent. Will it ever return to be a factor of highest importance, this we are waiting to see.

The likelihood is that more signals from social, mobile, speed and other areas will make up a general non published ranking that will stop people having an ability to play a system and allows the search engines the ability to move and adapt to the changing landscape of browsers, technology and user desire.

The post Why What You Think You Know About SEO Is Probably All Wrong first appeared on CY Digital Marketing Agency | Cyprus Web Design | SEO and PPC Agency.

Here at CY digital we have been delivering and enthusing about content marketing before the term even became part of the digital marketing vocabulary.

In our early days as a leading digital agency back in the UK we were one of the first to be brought into huge PLC’s to consult on huge investments in email marketing which is also known as marketing automation.

A more sophisticated way of staying in contact with new leads and engaging with them in order to educate and hopefully sell your services.

In essence all business need content in order to communicate clearly to people online why they should choose your service or product over another.

Let us take an example of two types of businesses.

One B2B – selling water saving technology to the oil sector.

One B2C – selling building services to trade and private clients.

So what is content marketing? and why is an SEO agency and promotion so vital.

Well firstly let us dissect how people use the internet when thinking of buying or investing in a service or product.

In early stages of buying someone will be pretty top level and start searching for a term and location or a term and another signifies.

e.g: An engineer for oil and gas installations needing to find ways to save money on his plant equipment may type ‘water saving mechanical seals’ in order to find mechanical seals that will fit his budget and specification.

A home-owner who has had water damage may type external rendering company in Yorkshire in order to find a supplier to fix a wall that is leaking.

Now one of the first things any website owner will need is to know what terms people are typing for services or product you need.

This keyword research will inform you on what SEO techniques to use to gain the right traffic, but firstly if you are not found you lose out on these early stage searches.

Another way to gain this traffic would have been paid advertising for Google or Bing or other search engines where your advert will appear when people search for certain terms.

Trust and expertise:

So now we have been found (assuming we have implemented SEO or paid advertising methods), we need to start to educate the client on why they should choose you (or make them laugh for valuable shares).

This is where content marketing cyprus is useful and will help people digest information in a preferred manner.

Examples of content marketing include:

• Whitepapers
• Case studies
• Podcasts
• E-books
• Video
• Infographics

The key is to work out your audience, what they need (a laugh or info about your company or product) and what you are then prepared to provide, your budget and then prepare to promote.

Promotion:

So once you have defined an audience, created some quality content, you then need to think about promotion.

This can be with paid ads (adwords, twitter, linkedin, youtube etc), SEO (ideal if you are already getting results) social media, or email marketing.

Either way you will be seeking to gain trust, followers, shares and a general positive sentiment about you and yoru brand with the content you crate.

This is a nutshell is the pay back for giving something useful or funny.

The question really is what do you want to do to give back in return for a little love and attention?

The post What Is Content Marketing? The Huge Benefits Of Content Marketing first appeared on CY Digital Marketing Agency | Cyprus Web Design | SEO and PPC Agency.

What exactly does PPC, CPA, CPC, CPM, CTR, PPI, VTR, eCPM and CPI mean?

In the world of online digital advertising, there are a wide variety of key terms that you need to fully understand in order to feel comfortable with your options and what a digital advertising and marketing agency like CY Digital actually does to help you gain more traffic and convert this traffic to sales/customers/leads.

Your ad network options

For the most part clients of CY Digital are faced with a number of options for advertising networks, and between them they cover pretty much all the options available for advertising online.

1) The Google ad network via the AdWords interface is a huge area offering many options to clients who want to reach visitors by region, advert style, publication, demographic, time of day, the list goes on. The available space that Google offers is second to none and is the largest network we work with and available to companies to advertise on.

2) The Bing and Yahoo network which is not the most stable or easy to understand of relationships but suffice to say that they are partners in offering advertising space and ad availability on their networks via the Bing ad network which replaced the Microsoft adCenter and the Yahoo ad marketplace.

3) Social advertising space on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks and websites.

These networks are huge and offer many different types of advertising options from text and images to video and sponsored elements.

Notably Facebook’s own advertising eco-system has grown to offer similar reach to Google Adwords and has really pushed the space in mobile advertising where you can deliver a great range of sophisticated technical options for mobile devices to your targeted demographics on a variety of mobile devices and via a huge array of publishers who are part of the Facebook ad network.

YouTube and Twitter are also offering valuable space with innovative options for their own networks and mediums.

A good PPC agency will be able to really give you sound advice, save you money and make you more sales.

So what are all the internet advertising terms?

We wanted to give you the ultimate low down on the most common terms used in online advertising and explain to you what they mean so you can share the knowledge and keep it safe for future reference.

CPM (Cost Per Mile/Thousand)

A confusing one this as many assume it means cost per million, when in actual fact it means cost per thousand or mile (another term), the amount is based on impressions and the base unit is one thousand.

The impression can be page views or page loads, so if your advert is at the bottom you may not actually have been seen, so is not a 100% sure way of gaining real eyeball impressions, but generally speaking this is not a concern.

How CPM is charged and calculated

Let us say that you are a publisher with a successful blog and you get a lot of traffic in the holiday sector, reviewing cottages to stay in Britain, and you get approached by a business with three cottages in Yorkshire. They want to pay for an advert to be seen by readers of the blog as they know that there is strong chance some will be interested by their cottages in Yorkshire, so they negotiate a deal costing €10 CPM, this means that if the cottage business pays them €50 they will get 50,000 page views shown with their advert (at an agreed areas on the site in this case).

Using CPM and a network like AdWords to manage your assets means you get more choice of publishers, more control over how and when the advert is seen and you choose your bid amount to be high in order to get the top spots available on websites that are related to your chosen demographic or niche, but you have no full control like approaching a publisher personally would offer.

Often AdWords (Google) and similar networks like Bing and Yahoo are the best route to deliver an effective, far reaching CPM campaign.

An example CPM calculation:

• CPM units = (Impressions/1000)
• Total price = CPM unit(s)* CPM rate (€)

For example, if an advertiser wants to display 200,000 impressions at €10 CPM (cost per thousand) rate, then the total price for the CPM advertising for the CPM advertiser will be:

• CPM units = 200,000/1,000 = 200 units
• Therefore, total price = 200*10 = €2,000

What is CPM useful for

CPM is a useful term to keep track of for costing and if you are looking to deliver effective and affordable brand awareness, the impressions made mean that you have potentially been seen by many visitors, though this is not always the case. It is definitely a useful metric to utilise for getting your name and brand in as many eyeballs as possible.

Though the effectiveness of this will depend on your copy text, designs, and what you are looking to pay (placing on pages).

If you are going for an approach to an individual publisher you may be able to choose your position and negotiate a deal.

PPC (Pay Per Click)

Pay Per Click (PPC) and Cost Per Click (CPC) are one and the same in all honesty, the point is you are paying for a click on an advert, and the publisher gets paid for the click, simple.

Often a publisher will utilise a CPC (cost per click) advertising revenue model and get paid for adverts that generate clicks on their website, only getting paid per click, this can be set up via any of the main networks and more.

An advertiser will use a PPC (pay per click) based advertising model and pay an agreed amount per click for adverts on the publisher sites or in adverts on search results for instance, in Google.

So they work as the same but are termed differently for publisher and advertiser to be more relevant to what the click actually means and who gets paid or pays.

Tip

Don’t forget that paying for clicks can also mean that you are getting impressions that cost you nothing especially with display (graphical) advertising.

CPC (Cost Per Click)

As a publisher the CPC (cost per click) is the amount of revenue that you earn each time a visitor clicks an ad displayed on your blog, website, or article. The advertiser determines how much the CPC for any ad will be.

CPC advertisements are not all the same in terms of cost and reach and some will cost more than others. Much of this will depend on the keywords you choose and and how much other advertisers are willing to bid on ads.

What is PPC and CPC for

Put simply PPC and CPC are great ways to get traffic to your website for an ad clicked on a publishers website or in search results and as an advertiser/company/brand you pay for a click to your website or link of your choice, this will ideally be an optimised landing page or have a clear call to action so you can get a quality conversion rate.

CTR (Click Through Rate)

This is a vital metric that will help you keep costs down and gain the best traffic to yoru website.

Your CTR will be altered depending on your choice of advert text, imagery and general appeal, it will also be affected by other details like who you target, when and where so is a very complex statistic when looked into deeply.

Your CTR (click through rate) will be a sign of the success of your online advertising program or campaign as it will show you how many clicks you are obtaining for impression served.

This means that you calculate your CTR by adding the number of clicks you have on an advert and dividing this by the page impressions, page views or queries that have been received/provided.

CTR (click through rate) Calculation

• CTR (%) from your page = Number of clicks/Number of impressions, page views or queries (%)

For example, if an image ad was served to a website 200 times and 10 people clicked on it, then the CTR would be 5 percent:

• CTR (%) = (10/200)*100 = 5%

Therefore, in essence, CTR is the average percentage of clicks you receive for each ad impression.

Why is CTR Important?

Knowing your CTR helps you adjust your campaign and work out solutions to gain more traffic, it can also mean that your ad is served more times and costs less depending on your niche and ad network used, so it is vital to understand the relationships between advert, clicks and conversion to work out if your CTR is gaining you the right traffic and if so how you can gain more and convert more of your impressions to clicks and ultimately conversions.

When looking at CTR it is key to know that various niches have varying average CTR’s and a CTR for an email campaign to a subscriber list that people have signed up to will generally be a lot higher than an advert placed on a search engine result page (SERP) and subjected to many other options for relevant content or a published website where people are browsing and reading related or non content.

eCPM (Effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

if you are an advertiser you can use eCPM to work out how much it will cost to have an ad placed on a particular website, this can be helpful if you have a limited budget but really like one publisher and want to be seen on their website with your advert.

Different pages/sites will have different eCPM figures also as some may be much more popular than others, so this will change how much a publisher charges (depending on perceived value and traffic to that page/website).

• eCPM = (Total earnings (€)/Impressions)*1000

For example, if your website received 500 page impressions and you earned $4 from these page impressions, then eCPM would be the following:

• eCPM = (€4/500)*1000 = €8
• This equals your RPM (Revenue Per Thousand)
• RPM is used to calculate revenue earned per thousand impressions from a website, blog or any written work published online.
• RPM = (Estimated earnings/Number of page views)*100

Impression

An impression is referred to the per page view or per page load obtained from a web page.

CPI (Cost Per Impression)

A CPI or cost per impression is a price paid for an impression paid to a website owner (publisher) or a network offering placement in search results or on websites.

For example, to work out the CPI of a website page that gets 1000 impressions 500 impressions (page views) at an agreed purchase price of €10 CPM rate, then the CPI from the article will be the following:

• Cost Per Impression Rate (€) = CPM rate (€)/1000
• If an advertiser offers €10 CPM rate then your earnings from per impression will be = €10
• CPM/1000 impressions = €0.01
• Now, 500 impressions will earn you 500*0.01 (€) = €5

The CPI will vary hugely from industry to industry and using a network to buy space from will mean that you can learn more about your CPI form inside the dashboard, perhaps setting up limits to what you pay per 1000 impressions (CPM).

PPI (Pay Per Impression)

Similar to CPC and PPC, Pay Per Impression (PPI) and Cost Per Impression (CPI) are used to mean the same thing by different people.

But like CPC and PPC it usually is refereed to in terms of the publisher who sell a cost per impression (CPI) and advertisers who pay per impression (PPI).

CPA/CPL/CPS (Cost Per Action/Acquisition/Lead/Sale)

CPA/CPL is also referred to as CPL (Cost Per Lead) and CPS (Cost Per Sale).

Using a CPA model is a very specific online advertising option that will help you work out what it is costing you to gain a metric you decide is worthwhile to be benchmarked, and from this point you can try to optimise, reduce the cost and/or gain more of the particular desired action(s) with the knowledge of what it is currently costing.

People use many choices for metrics in this area such as a sign up to a newsletter (CPA), an actual sale (CPS) or similar and the terms used will primarily depend on what the action is primarily.

VTR (View Through Rate)

VTR or (view through rate) is a way of measuring the actual number of post-impression views or responses or ‘view-throughs’ from and sort of display media impressions viewed during and following an online advertising campaign.

Instead of simple CTR the VTR is a useful tool as post-exposure behaviour can be expressed in site visits, on-site events, conversions occurring at one or more websites or potentially off-line.

This data is often missed form simple CTR’s but with unscrupulous ad networks the cookie method of data collection can be manipulated so is not always a good way to measure the success of an advert.

Conclusion

All in all there are many more terms that we use in online digital advertising, and it takes many years to make sense of what you need for report generation and strategy formulation. Learning the basics and speaking with a reputable provider will help you gain most from online digital advertising.

Digital Marketing Newsletter

The post What does PPC, CPA, CPC, CPM, CTR, PPI, VTR, eCPM and CPI actually mean? first appeared on CY Digital Marketing Agency | Cyprus Web Design | SEO and PPC Agency.

Why Outsourcing SEO services is done at your peril

For those new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and wondering which provider to choose, a word of warning.

Going cheap on your SEO could be one of the most costly mistakes ever.

An article in Entrepreneur highlights some of the many pitfalls of choosing a low cost (supposedly quality) SEO company form regions such as India.

So why this bashing of the outsourcing SEO work force?

Put simply, SEO is not just a science, it is also an art form, you need solid processes in place to ensure that what you are doing is up to date, legal, allowed and useful to the general optimization desires of the client, and you need an SEO company who takes time to help you develop content that is high quality while doing all the on page and off page SEO that they can to make sure your site is truly optimized correctly.

There are a huge amount of SEO ranking factors to take into consideration, granted ticking all boxes is not 100% vital but you need to get the basics and then more right to truly succeed.

Too many low cost (low quality) outsourcing SEO companies offer the world to start with and do very little to add value to the overall SEO of your website. They will typically offer a low barrier to entry and bamboozle you with science in the hop that you stay quiet when in reality they may be harming your site with the work they are doing.

Major SEO issues

One major SEO issue is language

Google actually grades content on a website for the level of language skill of the person which has written the content, and we all know that content is king. The problem is that badly written content pits the native reader off and also Google wonders who has written it is it is of low quality.

Another issue that arises when using low quality SEO companies is that they use borderline spammy techniques, this is not altogether wrong (depending), let’s not forget that SEO is par art right, the issue is if areas are relied on heavily and an update occurs you can see all that hard work wiped away unless more robust tactics are implemented and added

Poor quality links

With the quality of links back to your website playing an ever increasing importance factor it is vital that you do not let old fashioned tactics play any part in your future SEO drive, and using cheap companies often means they lack the sophistication needed to generate quality content to gain links in a more natural way and will lean towards buying or using link farm type linking arrangements.

Understanding your business needs

Many SEO firms will claim results for long tail keywords, these are usually around 4+ words that are very specific and often show buyer intent (very useful to be found for is you have a relevant product or service) but there is usually much less in terms of competition and therefore a bit easier to gain result for. In a worse case scenario you are paying for ‘results’ but gaining very little in terms of actual useful traffic.

Lack of conversion knowledge

The other major issue is like way too many SEO’s the focus on telling the client all about traffic, which is nigh on useless unless you can convert that traffic into a paying customer and this takes usability studies, conversion knowledge and high quality copy text, images and communication.

Summary

if you are serious about SEO, you need to accept that it is a time and money investment and you need a partner that works with you, not bamboozles you with promises and lingo you do not understand.

If you smell a rat, then you are probably going down a dark tunnel with a light at the end that can quickly go out and leave you very, very lost in the large open space that is the world wide web, don’t let your website and business suffer by going cheap and outsourcing your SEO to abroad.

Speak to expert providers locally so you can discuss your requirements face to face and work out your options properly.

Digital Marketing Newsletter

The post Why Outsourced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Could Cost You In The End first appeared on CY Digital Marketing Agency | Cyprus Web Design | SEO and PPC Agency.