Digital Marketing

The UK Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is to guestimate the advertising revenues of Facebook for its next online adspend figures.

The trade body and its research partner on the study, PricewaterhouseCoopers, are working with digital media agencies including Isobar and Group M to model the social network’s ad revenues so it can present as accurate a picture as possible of digital ad spend in the first half of 2010, due in October.

Facebook is known to account for a large portion of display spending in the UK (and elsewhere) but it is not currently one of the more than 300 media owners that supply its revenues to the IAB to compile the study.

The IAB is keen to beef up the amount of display spend represented in the figures since it is paid search that continues to account for both the bulk of total spend and growth in the sector. Display advertising is seen as the area ripest for new growth as long as advertisers can be persuaded to use it as something other than a direct-response mechanism.

Speaking at a recent Guardian digital event for client advertisers, IAB head of research Tim Elkington said it lamented the degree to which display was not given due credit for its role in delivering online sales higher up in users’ routes to purchase.

The role of display for traditional brand awareness and perception has long been a key issue for the IAB to tackle since the format has become commoditised thanks to comparison with more successful channels for direct, sales-focused advertising, primarily paid search.

A recent study by the IAB examined the campaigns of three airlines to discover that display ads do increase the likelihood of conversion through ‘last-click’ routes like paid and natural search.

Elkington said discussions with Facebook about contributing formally to the study were ongoing and positive and agreed that modelling its revenues might help persuade the company to participate.

He added there had been discussion with the media agencies helping in the task about whether Facebook ads actually constituted search advertising since they are targeted against keywords in users’ profiles. However, it is most likely they will be treated as display due to the format of the ads.

Connectedness.  That is the first thing I learnt when I joined iCrossing earlier last week.  Connectedness is the central philosophy for working life here, or as someone framed it – “the way we see the world”.

I like it. It’s a neat proposition that suitably fits the challenges and opportunities that brands are faced with today.  With a digital space that has become less a place where we dip in and out of to achieve isolated tasks, and more a place we exist in day to day.  In true planner style I have a diagram for this:

The surprise here for me is that search, something iCrossing has carved a strong reputation in, is just a component of this.  Connectedness is so much more and as a newbie here I am impressed (and pleased) to see a company striving to help their clients make sense of what this means and how it works.

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The phrase “brand as publisher” seems to be as commonly used in digital marketing circles as “what’s the ROI of social?” at the moment (which is great news if you’re an online content specialist like me!) Even hardened SEO-focused, direct marketing types are eyeing up the “softer” side of online content and wondering whether they shouldn’t be getting a piece of the publisher action – if only as a means of creating “link bait” and pleasing Google’s algorithm. It means that Content Strategy becomes even more relevant and essential for our clients. We can take a close look at what is working for other publishers, and take a long hard look at their own content, assessing what is going to work for them. And what isn’t.

If your brand is serious about becoming a publisher – whether on your own site or elsewhere on the web, you can learn a huge amount from the people who are creating and delivering the best content and services on the web.

I’ve asked the members of the Content team here at iCrossing to describe their favourite websites – and explain why it works for them on a personal level. It’s a good way to share our ideas on how to match content delivery to user need and business objectives, which is what content strategy boils down to. So here, then, is the iCrossing Content Team’s Top Websites List. If you’re thinking of getting going with a content strategy in the second half of this year or planning for 2011, it’s a good place to start if you want to understand best practice.

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Your analytics data is nearly as important as the financial accounts of your business when it comes to making a decision about your website. Your analytics data helps you understand how effective your site’s marketing, design and content is. And just as you wouldn’t hire more staff without being sure you have the budget for it, you shouldn’t redesign your website without understanding what your customers do when they are on it.

Below are seven ways Google Analytics can be used to help make the right decisions during a redesign.

1. What browsers and windows sizes should we support?

When designing your site you want to ensure that the majority of your customers can view your website and convert without browser versions or sizes preventing this.

I’d personally think that you should design your website in a size that at least 95% of your visitors can see without having to scroll horizontally. An easy way to check what browser sizes your current visitors are using is to go the Screen resolutions report under Visitors > Browser capabilities > Screen resolutions.

By comparing to site average you can also see if any particular screen resolution(s) has a significantly higher bounce rate

In the graph above you can see that the wider screen resolutions are actually performing much worse – this could be addressed by using a liquid layout or JavaScript to position content.

A quick way to check if your site has browser compatibility is to look at the browser report and compare each type to the site average, for the website below it is clear that there is poor support for safari.

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I am mightily impressed by a recent presentation from Paul Adams, a senior user experience researcher at Google. Entitled ‘The real life social network’, it examines how people connect, relate and communicate with each other, and what this means for experience designers online.

As someone who works agency-side I started thinking specifically about what the implications of Paul’s observations of human social behaviour are for brands, especially those taking part in the social web. Intriguingly, it suggests that social media is a customer retention, not a customer acquisition, game.

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Since Google started including local entries in natural results for location-specific search queries, local search optimisation has been gaining more attention. And with Google allotting more spaces to its Map-packs, pushing the traditional results below the fold, getting listed in the local search space is becoming crucial.

I always thought location was the only factor deciding the ranking of the map listing; the better optimised the map is to the location keyword, the higher are its chances to rank on top. However, according to the latest edition of David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors, there are more points to take into consideration. The most positive ones are summarised below:-

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A recent study in the US found that more than half of social network users are worried about their privacy.

In the main, privacy concerns seem to focus on the complexity of managing your public profile on Facebook and other services. However, with a growing awareness of broader privacy issues by  mainstream web users is beginning to invite more attention to the ways brands respect and support their customers needs in this area.

Even activities as apparently benign as listening to social media conversations about your brand are being questioned by some in the media (see the recent Daily Mail story about web monitoring). Now MPs are portraying companies “trawling Facebook for negative comments” as being “something worthy of the secret police”, understandable in a totalitarian state but unacceptable in ours (perhaps we should ask how many UK Government departments are monitoring social media for mentions of their policy areas).

Whatever our opinions on these stories, its clear that brands need to bear in mind privacy issues in how they develop their online campaigns and especially those where user participation or individuals’ data is involved.

Here are some thoughts to bear in mind:

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Summer is in full swing and down here in Brighton that means weekends on the beach, having a drink in the sun and going to the cinema to watch the big summer movies. Being a data geek ninja I couldn’t help but take a look at where cinema search was most popular and who out of the main players ruled that space. A big thanks to Amo Bassan Head of Design at iCrossing UK for creating these infographics.

(click for a larger image)

Above we looked at how the top six cinema chains rank for search in each location. Read more…

Writing good content for your site is not a new concept. Content is king after all. However with Googles recent shift in gear, (cranking up its indexing to Caffeine level) to cope with the sheer weight of content being produced online, there is an ever more compelling need to be sure the content you produce is quality and visible amongst the endless quagmire of mediocrity and spam.

Caffeine is “a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online”. What does this mean at this stage? Well exactly what it says on the tin: Caffeine is in it’s infancy but has been built with the future of ever increasing content creation in mind.

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As the selection of social media platforms grow, it’s becoming harder and harder to know what’s worth investing time in and where to focus efforts. Platform priorities may change  dependent on the main marketing objectives/motivations of the company.

An interesting study by Burson Marsteller based on some of the world’s larger brands (in this case  Fortune 100 companies) reveals the social media platform selection and useage types that these brands are currently active in. Here’s the key takeaways (via i-Strategy)…

• 79% of the Fortune 100 are present and listening, using at least of one of the main social platforms to communicate with their customers.
• 20% of Companies are using all four of the main social technologies (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Blogs)
• 82% of the Fortune 100 update and engage with customers on their Twitter account
• Fortune 100 Companies on average post 3.6 wall posts to their Facebook page per week
• 50% of the Fortune 100 have a YouTube account and upload 10 videos on average a month

What we don’t get as part of this study though are the marketing objectives for why each of these brands may be using each social media platform.
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