October 6th, 2006
Chemistry’s Shamrock Development (watch on YouTube) is an excellent example of viral advertising. As marketing departments demand increased return on their spend, and in a culture where ‘interruptive advertising’ (ads that interrupt you - TV, radio, pop-ups, etc) is getting more and more stick, an ad that people want to see is gold dust. A classy use of Web 2.0 technology. If you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen it yet, check this article on the Sunday Business Post website. If you thought it was a bit incredible, check out what the PD’s are ‘planning’ for Dublin.
Posted in Miscellaneous, Marketing | 2 Comments »
September 15th, 2006
“Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.” (David Ogilvy)
Search engine marketing (SEM) is usually measured along direct-response lines - conversions, purchases, signups, outcomes, page views, and so on. But a new school of thought is emerging - that branding and SEM are not mutually exclusive.
Branding work is cool. Its intangible makes it difficult to measure campaign success, it requires deep strategic thinking, budgets tend to be larger, and there’s no responsibility to directly drive sales. People involved in branding rarely consider SEM as an option.
Maybe they should:
- 41% of users gain awareness from online search results (DoubleClick, 2005)
- 27% of respondents are more likely to name a brand if it’s in the top spot on Google (IAB, 2006)
- Top listings have a significant upward lift on branding metrics, particularly with unaided awareness (IAB/Nielsen NetRatings, 2006)
- 60% of 3,000 respondents’ brand opinions were changed or enhanced as a result of searching (Dieringer Resource Group, 2005)
Proof that effective SEM builds brand. For those of you who still judge your campaigns by return on investment (ROI) metrics, it may be time to judge campaign effectiveness by different metrics.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Marketing | 2 Comments »
September 1st, 2006
The recent leak of AOL’s search data onto the Web (more info here, here and here) has prompted questions on the security of searching the Internet. Basically, AOL this month released a file containing 20 million searches by over 650,000 AOL Search users over a 3-month period. This data was intended for research purposes, but a New York Times article uncovered one of the searches. Many users were performing “ego searches” - searching for their own name - that made it easy to identify them. Heads rolled at AOL as users went into uproar mode over privacy concerns, and the data was quickly deleted. But not, of course, before lots of other sites downloaded the data and mirrored it all over the Web. There are some really interesting findings.
Almost half of all searches are in vain - 47% of searches result in no clicks on any results. This supports evidence that users tend to refine their searches by adding more keywords or by putting a country or area name at the end of the search. Thus, “digital camera” morphs into “4 megapixel digital camera dublin ireland”.
Unsurprisingly, when a user does click on a search result, he/she is 90% likely to click on a first-page result, and the top five results get three-quarters of all clicks:
- 42% of clicks are on the #1 result
- 12% of clicks are on the #2 result
- 8% of clicks are on the #3 result
- 6% of clicks are on the #4 result
- 5% of clicks are on the #5 result
If anything, this shows just how important the number 1 spot is for your keyphrases. The drop-off from 42% to 12% for second place is huge. Number 1 is still the holy grail for search engine marketers
Posted in Search Engine Marketing | 9 Comments »
August 29th, 2006
I use Firefox, it’s a much better Web browser than Internet Explorer. It’s got great pop-up blocking tools, it very rarely crashes, and its tabbed browsing makes visiting different websites so easy. Plus, of course, its free, which is the reason that 13% of users (and growing) use Firefox. In Europe, 20% of us use it. In Germany, 39% of internet users browse the Web with Firefox. But, according to the BBC, one in ten UK websites don’t work properly with Firefox. Make sure that your site works well with Firefox - it’s going to get a lot more popular in the coming years.
Posted in Design & Usability, Miscellaneous | 6 Comments »
August 18th, 2006
What’s the most popular search term of all, I hear you ask? Is it “free stuff”, “ringtones”, “hotels”, “jobs”, or “jokes”? Surprisingly, none of these keywords appear in the top 50 searched-for terms on the Internet.
No, people instead prefer to search for things you’d thing they’d found already. Nielsen/NetRatings (PDF file) released a study of the most popular searches in November 2005, and came up with some interesting results.
“ebay” received just under 14 million searches, closely followed by “google”, with just over 13 million. “yahoo” clocked 8 million searches, and “yahoo.com” was searched for 6.5 million times. Other entries included “ask jeeves” (3.4 million), “msn” (3.2 million), and “ebay.com” (3.1 million searches).
Hold on. Why would anyone search for “ebay.com”? Just put a “www.” before that and you’re there! And why search for “google”, “yahoo” or “msn”? Don’t they know how to use this Internet?
No, there’s something afoot here. People can’t really be searching for the ebay website. Something else is going on.
People are using search engines in new ways – to get quickly to the websites they want. Think about it. If your homepage is Google or Yahoo, typing in “rte” should bring up www.rte.ie ad the first result. You click on it. It brings you to the RTE site without you having to go to the trouble of entering “www.” and “.ie”. Simple!
And the rise of the Google Toolbar means that you can perform a search with one click, regardless of what corner of the Internet you’re exploring.
Also, the rise (and fall and stabilisation at a mediocre takeup level) of WAP and the emergence of i-mode (which really is excellent for checking the latest scores, getting the news, booking a flight and all that) have changed the way we search. A default option on i-mode is to “Search Google”. Entering a www.domain.com address on a mobile phone is much harder than just searching “domain” on Google.
So what does this mean? Has the address bar met its end? Does anyone go to the bother of typing in the full domain name anymore? Well, I use the address bar to find sites I know, but this latest research highlights how crucial search engines have become to the online experience.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Analytics | 10 Comments »
August 11th, 2006
“And who raves these days? Who raves at a party,
‘You should have seen our tax return – it was brilliant!’”
Harry Beckwith, What Clients Love
Harry Beckwith, in his excellent book What Clients Love, makes the point that word-of-mouth advertising is dead. He cites three reasons for this:
1. Mobility: we all move around so much now that there is little sense of community.
2. Complexity: increased specialisation by business means that you don’t know whether or not a recommendation will be relevant.
3. Conversation: nobody raves about companies these days. Who ever goes to a dinner party and sing the praises of their accountant?
And to an extent this is true. The above three factors have had an adverse effect on “You should give such-and-such a call”.
What’s filling the vacuum? Beckwith suggests that good old-fashioned public relations and advertising are the means by which smart companies get their word out. But do people really trust advertisements and publicity junkets in the same way they’d trust a recommendation from a friend?
No, Harry, it’s the Internet that has replaced old-skool word of mouth. In the absence of real community and face-to-face conversation, people are turning to the Web for suggestions and recommendations.
Witness Amazon, a smart company if ever there was one. By giving visitors the opportunity to write reviews about the products on offer, Amazon has created a true community that many people use when making a purchase decision. On the Amazon page for my favourite album, Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones, you’ll see the following:
Scrolling further down the page, you’ll see a list of reviews. There are a lot of people like me who take notice of strong reviews, and Amazon lets people rate the actual reviews written by other users.
There are lots of other examples of online word-of-mouth. The Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 Films is used by millions of people who want to ‘culture’ themselves in cinema. TripAdvisor lets users rate hotels from one to five, and is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. The popularity of MetaCritic.com just keeps growing. And if you go onto Boards.ie, people from all over Ireland are looking for recommendations for books, dentists, MP3 players, software, and so on. On an industry-specific level, Irish forums such as the one on WeddingsOnline.ie can get over 300 posts a day and many times that viewing the debate.
Positive word of mouth online is great for two reasons. One, you don’t need to be friends with the people recommending a product or service.
Negative word-of-mouth online is just as prevalent. The age-old bank debate on Boards.ie is viewed by lots of Irish Internet users.
But if word of mouth has moved online, how do we harness it? Seth Godin, in his Unleashing the Ideavirus, opines that your business needs to be remarkable if you are to get positive word-of-mouth online. Pity that. Surely there’s an easier way? Well, we’ll get to that part. But, of course, if your business isn’t remarkable, outstanding, world-class, then everyone in your company needs to back up a bit and start at the beginning.
Of course, you can cheat. Before we start, there are good reasons for not cheating. For a start, it’s morally reprehensible. For another thing, it cheapens the value that online word of mouth provides to millions of users. That said, there are ways to cheat, obviously. A new book can be promoted on Amazon by registering multiple accounts and giving lots of 5 star ratings. You can respond to questions asked on forums and tout your business there. Or you can go on TripAdvisor and say lovely things about your hotel. But of course that’s cheating, and it’s wrong.
The most effective way to guarantee positive word of mouth online is to be outstanding; to have a world-class product or an unbeatable service. Whether it’s a book, a piece of software, a hotel room, a package holiday, a mortgage or whatever, consistently good service will work online as well as it used to do offline.
Posted in Marketing | 8 Comments »
June 29th, 2006
Since pay per click passed the tipping point, many Irish companies these days are sitting up, taking notice and ploughing their advertising budgets into it.
And why not?? It’s a really cost-effective way of bringing targeted visitors to your website. And you don’t have to fiddle around with optimising your site to rank high on Google. No more messing with meta tags, page titles, link popularity, and suchlike. Just set up your campaign and site back.
This is an attitude that is all too prevalent, and there are a few reasons for it. For one, pay per click is a form of advertising, so it sits easier with agencies to sell it. And, as stated, pay per click is so much easier than search engine optimisation.
It’s great to have your name up there on the results page, but there is no substitute for high search engine rankings. The number one listing above will be seen by roughly 100% of people searching. The ad on the right-hand side, on the other hand, will be seen by about 50% of people.
The Eyetools diagram above is taken from a piece of software that tracks users eye movements on a Google results page. Red areas correspond to parts of the page that are viewed by almost everyone. Orange and yellow areas are popular parts of the page, and the blue areas are viewed less by users.
Findings such as this are forcing many companies back to the realisation that organic SEO is at least as important as pay per click. Even though it’s more difficult to get right, it needs to be an integral part of the marketing strategy.
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Pay per Click | 5 Comments »
May 20th, 2006
Google have launched a new tool, Google Trends. This cool tool tells you how many searches have been done on Google for the terms you enter. The graph format is very nice, but it would be good to have a value on the Y-axis.
Google Trends is really effective for comparing one search term against another, or to see how interest in a person or subject has changed over time. Some good examples:
- People like dogs more than cats in most English-speaking countries, including Ireland, the UK, the US and Australia.
- Ronaldinho has overtaken David Beckham as most talked-about footballer.
- London and Paris are more popular cities than Madrid, Berlin and Rome.
- Heineken is currently the most popular beer, with Budweiser, Carlsberg and Coors trailing.
An excellent feature of the Google Trends tool is that you can drill down to specific countries - and Ireland’s included in the list. So, we can tell that Irish users of Google search for Dublin a lot more than Cork and Galway. But in a marketing sense, we can get some really good information. Some examples:
- “house” has consistently been searched for more than “property”.
- “bmw” is being searched for more than “toyota” - evidence of our current upwardly-mobile nature.
- “blog” is searched for much more than “rss” or “podcast”, showing it’s being accepted more and more by the mainstream.
- Searches for “bulmers” peak in the summer months, the only time of year they number more than searches for “guinness”.
- Searches for the three main broadsheet newspapers in Ireland makes for interesting viewing.
You could spend hours trying different searches on this, and it’s a really good gauge of search habits that can be drilled down to a country level. For popular topics, Google puts markers next to major news events, which is a really good way of seeing how web users react to news stories.
If you’re in marketing, Google Trends is something you need to add to your bookmarks.
Posted in Analytics, Marketing | 2 Comments »
May 10th, 2006
Online forms that ask users to enter data (such as name, address, credit card number, email address, etc.) are an integral part of most web sites today. If you are selling something online, your online form will guide users through the purchase process, collecting credit card and delivery details. If you are using your web site as a lead-generation tool, your forms will request contact details from interested prospects. If you are trying to build your email newsletter subscription list, an online form is the best means of getting them to sign up.
Yet when we talk of “conversion rates” (the percentage of web site visitors who convert to a customer or sales lead), many companies are disappointed with the business that is being done through the web site. They invest in online marketing, and get a lot of targeted visitors to their web site, only to end up disillusioned when too few of these visitors convert to users. Here are a few tips to ensure that your online forms work well:
- Don’t hide your form. If at all possible, have a prominent link to it on the homepage. Even better, place a “Quick Contact” form on your homepage. This will definitely improve the response rate.
- Display the form prominently on product pages and areas that are only visited by users with a definite interest.
- Tell users the benefits of filling out the form, and if possible incentivise the process by offering a free white paper or a free consultation.
- Forms are often complicated and ask you more than you want to tell. Only ask for the bare details – but of course, get the required information.
- Don’t design your form around your database, design it around your user. For example, don’t use a form field each for First Name and Surname – users find it easier to fill out their name in one field.
- If your form needs to be long, break it up into two or more pages – people don’t like to scroll down to finish a form. Provide users with a progress indicator to show how many more steps are involved.
- Pressing the “Back” button on the form should not erase all of the information that has been filled out on the previous page.
- In a drop-down menu, list more popular selections first. If most of your visitors are from Ireland, offer that as the default selection on forms.
- State clearly what information is optional and what is required.
- Ensure that your offline sales team treat leads from the web site as they would treat a lead that came in through any other channel. Often, the offline team don’t see web-generated leads as solid prospects.
- Let users know what you’ll be doing with their contact details. Provide a privacy policy, and let users know if or when you’ll be contacting them (e.g. within the next 24 hours).
- Provide other contact options for users, such as your telephone number and email address. Some users prefer the less structured approach of an email. Others may prefer to pick up the phone.
- Some users make mistakes when filling out a form. If you have a “Form Error” page, you should use this page to give tips on the more common errors that are made when filling out your form.
- Test different forms and observe the effect on conversion rates. The form that you are using at the moment probably isn’t the optimal one.
Most of the visitors to your web site have at least some intention of doing business with you. Make it easy for them, and they are more likely to convert.
Posted in Design & Usability | No Comments »
April 25th, 2006
Check out the world’s first banner, which appeared on Hotwired.com in 1994. It’s an ad for AT&T, the American version of Eircom (I think), and it’s god-awful.
There’s no rhyme, rhythm or purpose to this banner. For a start, the AT&T logo isn’t mentioned anywhere, there’s way too much colour, and it’s all done on a black background. Also, the prescient “You Will” is quite ironic nowadays, in the sense that nobody clicks on banners.
But back in the day, this would have been clicked on a lot, probably because nobody had seen anything like it. Today of course, we’ve got Flash, video and interactive banner advertising. And banner ads are now seen as an integral branding tool in the marketing mix.
Posted in Online Advertising | 48 Comments »
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