Marketing Week Profiles:TOUCHSEARCH

●●● Who we are… Touch Search Marketing is a wholly owned subsidiary of Touch Local. The agency team comprises experienced online marketing experts with extensive knowledge of pay per click (PPC) and search-engine optimisation (SEO).We are qualified Google advertising professionals and our expertise will take clients campaigns to the next level in terms of efficiency and performance. We will ensure that clients’ search referrals convert well to achieve the best possible ROI and growth for their organisations.

●●● What we do… Touch Search’s online marketing services ensure that clients’ campaigns are targeted and accountable, building brand presence and generating leads at a competitive ROI. Our experience enables our clients to drive their business with online advertising that increases traffic, leads and sales in a transparent and affordable manner. All our work has a structured approach to analysis, daily monitoring and implementation. The aim is to increase our clients’ conversion rates. Many years of experience working for several companies listed on the FTSE and AIM means our marketing services and management team can deliver the sales needed for our clients’ businesses.

●●● Who we work with… Our clients include Air France, Barbara Kelly, Bathstore, Gowealthy, Justmoney.co.za, Warehouse Express and UK PLC.

●●● Why work with us…? We offer a holistic marketing approach including what happens with PPC and SEO from a local search perspective. We acquire usability statistics from Touch Local, our UK business finder with 2.7 million listed businesses and more than 2.1 million unique users a month. We can uniquely forecast trends and know when and how people are searching online. We create a scalable and profitable route to customer acquisition and business growth.

We offer a personalised service with customised solutions; bespoke reporting for each client’s needs; and 360° online marketing services available from SMEs to multinational companies.

●●● What we did for Australia travelmarket
Global Travel Market specialises in developing bespoke travel search engine solutions in the UK, China and India. The company has applied the travel search engine concept to developing destination specific websites, which add value to the traveller through the richness of content and breadth of their products.

●●● The brief and objective
Global Travel Market were looking to increase the online reach of their Australian travel portal, www.australiatravelmarket.com, and reducing PPC costs whilst increasing conversion. The PPC strategy included in-depth competitive and user behavioural research to increase the campaign keyword spread from several hundred to several thousand keywords. Campaigns and key words were aligned to incorporate an arbitrage model, where we worked to very strict budget rules.

Planning for this meant that keyword precision was carefully considered to include hundreds of highly specific destinations, split for optimisation purposes. The approach was two-tiered, with some tactical keywords generating high return as well as the more specific longer-term keywords to reduce average costs and increase conversion rates.

Further planning was undertaken to extrapolate the most relevant keywords from the PPC campaign to start doing an intensive SEO project around our findings, so as to drive the PPC costs down in the long run. The keywords selected for SEO were designed to target the high cost of generic terms combined with the terms that generated the highest conversions. A full audit of the site was done and a bespoke strategy was developed to make the site rank for the key terms that would be most relevant for reducing costs, increasing revenue, and market share.

●●● Execution
“The PPC campaigns were activated and managed across all major search engines, where tracking and analysis was carried out daily. After optimising the site, we rolled out a bespoke link building program to improve the sites popularity and rankings. Profitable traffic sources were identified, and the site was placed onto various alternative sources at our disposal such as www.touchlocal.com, our parent company’s online directory to generate more targeted traffic, along with other societal marketing mediums.

●●● Results
Dave Simmons, CEO of Global Travel Market says: “Touch Search did a great job for us on our Australian travel market portal. I was really impressed by their intelligent combination of PPC and SEO techniques, and I would highly recommend them to anyone looking for help in either area.”

● 45% more cost effective and reduced average CPC, combined with significantly improved quality of leads.

● 30% of total PPC spend directed away from generic terms that are ranking for SEO.

● 100% increase in organic traffic; bounce rate down by 20%; and time on site increase by 23% over the past 5 months.

● The arbitrage model Touch Search Marketing embarked on for this project has been so successful that it has now been adapted for other clients’ arbitrage campaigns.

Touch Search
89 Albert Embankment
London, SE1 7TP

● Chief executive, Tamer Ozmen
● Head of search, Colin Schabort
● Head of SEO, Simon Cole
● T: 020 7840 4341
● F: 020 7840 4301
● E: colin.schabort@touchsearch.com
● W: www.touchsearch.com