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ivantage's service overview

Natural Search (SEO)

Having a site optimised to rank near the top of Search Engine results should be the goal of all web site publishers. Despite giving good returns, results take time to appear, so some agencies are tempted to use unsound methods. ivantage employs only safe and ethical techniques which are incorporated into a powerful and consistent methodology called HESEO.

Learn more about ivantage's Natural Search and HESEO

Paid search advertising (PPC or PfP)

The industry accepts that paid search (such as AdWords, Overture, adCenter) can deliver increased visitor traffic in a short time. For this reason, we recommend its use at the start of campaigns before Natural Search starts to work. However, the quality of the traffic as measured by its conversion to sales must be carefully and continually checked. ivantage combines diligent and imaginative keyword research with the the feedback of targeted analytics to deliver impressive RoI.

Learn more about ivantage's paid search services

Web analytics

Web analytics are used to track visitors’ behaviour and progress through a web site. They show exactly where visitors leave and join the paths designed for them to follow. The use of analytics is essential to make sure the visitor traffic produced by natural and paid search campaigns is being converted to the transactions which produce the required RoI. Analytics software is available from many sources but, for the combination of value and capability which suits our customers, ivantage recommends Google Analytics.

Learn more about web analytics and ivantage's analytics' services

Analytics In a Box – the secure and scalable Web analytics appliance

Managed e-commerce

The experience of several years delivering natural and paid search campaigns has shown that, time and again, one of the main obstacles to success is the inability of a web site publisher to persuade the site's development team (who may well be part of another company) to implement, in anything like a timely fashion, the changes we have specified. For this reason, we now offer a managed e-commerce service which enables us to both design for good search results and implement them quickly. We prefer to charge for this service on the basis of the increased revenues resulting from the optimisation because this makes it effectively self-financing.

Learn more about ivantage's Managed e-Commerce solution

Training

Although we provide a fully managed service for many of our clients, others prefer one which gets them started – after which we hand over the subsequent work to the client's own people. We originally developed our training services to satisfy this need and now provide them as a stand-alone service to meet a growing demand. Topics cover all our specialisations and are delivered as scheduled, public courses, on-site standard courses and on-site tailored courses.

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Consultancy services

As ivantage has grown, many of the services which we originally delivered as consultancy projects have evolved into packaged services as described elsewhere in this site. However, every client's need is unique so we frequently deliver work in the form of consultancy services, either in combination with one or more packaged services or alone.

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Why a complete service is vital

Experience relates that it is not difficult to find an agency capable of managing PPC campaigns. They come in all sizes – from one-man-bands to multi-million turnover businesses.

The big surprise is that, although most talk the talk about delivering RoI (return on investment), very few make the effort to report actual RoI figures regularly and accurately. You will probably be given the crude values available from the paid-search service which costs you so much money every month – but detailed and segmented reports are simply absent.

The answer is to use web analytics linked tightly with your paid search advertising. By this means, you can receive RoI reports to the finest granularity and very quickly discover which campaigns, ads, wording and targets are making money and how much.

The prime reason why Google allow Google Analytics to be used free of charge is to give AdWords users the means to make the very best of their paid-search advertising expenditure.

At ivantage, we are very ambitious for our clients. We want them to benefit from the very best RoI and strongly recommend the use of web analytics to closely support paid search.

The question we cannot answer is why most other agencies seem content to spend their clients’ money but not properly report the results. Perhaps that tells its own story about how much they really support their clients’ ambitions.