Over the past few weeks, we’ve worked on a variety of marketing projects across areas like advertising, email, SEO, and ecommerce. Each one has offered useful insights and small wins that may be relevant to others as well.

Below is a short round-up of what we’ve been working on—along with a few suggestions that might help improve your own marketing setup.

If you haven’t trialled a Performance Max ad campaign yet, we recommend giving it a go. We manage performance on a number of client campaigns, and this month did a side-by-side comparison between pay-per-click promotion and the Performance Max AI-led method. The Performance Max ad, while providing far less data on what is happening, and what you can influence in terms of targeting, provided better results in terms of sales conversions.

And with a lower cost per click too—in one case ten times lower. If you’d like me to take a look at your Ads set-up, get in touch.

We moved several businesses over to the Brevo platform this month, away from MailChimp and Klaviyo, whose pricing continues to rise. In the current economy, any saving directly improves profit margins. They charge based on the number of emails sent, not on the size of your contact list. Brevo also provides a simple app that migrates all your data with just one click.

It’s not suitable for everyone - if you use complex flows, staying put may be best - but for businesses just sending out straightforward newsletters like this one, you’re likely to save money without sacrificing performance.

Another annual overhead is the cost of hosting your website. While pricing tends to be similar across providers, the level of service and performance varies significantly. View article about the key differences - click here.

This month, we moved several businesses from their existing hosting providers - without any disruption to business continuity - while matching their current annual fee. The result: faster server speeds, improved user experience, and direct access to me if any issues arise (which is rare). If you're unsure whether you're getting value for money, let me know. If it’s a straightforward switch, we will offer the first year at half price.

We did an SEO project for a business this month, to increase Google ranking ahead of the Christmas rise in sales. It can take up to six months to make a noticeable difference, so now’s the time to start thinking about the festive period (it felt odd during a heatwave!).

The businesses that really win the ranking contest employ more advanced techniques, based on taking control of how Google interprets your content, and eliminating any ambiguity in how it's indexed. With the advent of AI what used to be a highly technical task is now much simplified. If you’re not using structured data markup (also called schema markup) - and you’re serious about ranking - you’re not optimised.

We recently signed up a number of businesses to the DIY Shopify service. Despite the name, it’s not entirely “do-it-yourself”, with the difficult parts taken care of by us.

The feedback so far has been excellent, with the weekly one-to-one Zoom progress sessions being particularly appreciated. These teach you how your site is built and, more importantly, how to manage it once it’s live. This is a big shift from many people’s past experiences - where a website was built and simply handed over with little explanation. For simple shops with fewer than 50 products, the cost to move to Shopify from WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, and other platforms is £450 + VAT.