a blog by Chris Brogan listing some metrics.  Some good, concrete answers, but I think Mr. Heisenberg would still be skeptical.

Measuring Social Media Marketing

including:

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* That’s not a cross-lingual pun, (roi meaning king in French) just a coincidence, but now doubly true, I realize.

As a burgeoning social media executive who comes from the international sales and marketing world (via licensing, brand and account management), I found this blog from Business Week exceedingly interesting. I twitter, I blog, I use Facebook to promote a photographer, a band and a South African safari camp and run a very successful industry group on LinkedIn.

I look for the “buzz-” the hits, the new members, the retweets, but often wonder how much of that is still just a simple click of a button. Is it the social media equivalent of reading the book jacket of reading a summary of the Odyssey in high school and then recommending it to others? Or is it actual viral promotion. Or: does it matter?

In my experience, and way of working, return on investment is what matters. Having been a licensing manager at an educational not-for-profit, with a zero dollar (0.00 USD or ZAR, EGP, CNY, RUB, BDT, etc.) marketing budget, I learned at an early stage in my career that return does not always mean revenue. Raising awareness, creating goodwill, gaining mind-share, PR, gaining outreach and ancillary educational partners, raising the perceived value of a brand’s equity, etc. could all be as valuable, or more valuable than immediate monetary return. But the question there, which resounds here, is what is that return? And how do you measure it? What are the statistics? Maybe even: does it matter what the metrics are?

I would argue that the last question is the 64 million dollar one. How do you know if what you’re doing is worth your investment (time, money, man-hours, tools) when you don’t have a simple, clear way of quantifying results? You may be gaining revenue, word of mouth, elevated goodwill or endless array of positive outcomes for your brand or product, but not be able to tell because it gets mixed in with the measurements from the more traditional methods. True action to outcome metrics really exist- how does one know that part of the spike in earnings during a tv ad push is actually incidental and comes from earlier word-of-mouth or viral efforts that are just now manifesting themselves in purchases?

Science (say chemistry, biology, mathematics) talks about direct, indirect, causal, related and coincidental relationships. The first three are generally the easiest to prove, but then, with science, it’s actually usually disproving that makes the advances. The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle rules: the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. It goes on to state (paraphrasing, of course): one can never discover the empirical truth without setting up false or contrived boundaries to measure a thing. Like focus groups, or revenue return during an ad spend (the ad spend period being the contrived boundary- there’s no way to know that it’s advertising that’s the end-all, be-all cause of anything).

Apologies, the nerd in me took the wheel for a bit, but the point is this: true ROI can only be known, or more accurately, felt over time. In current global business, that’s the one commodity that almost no one is willing to spend. Metrics for social media effectiveness as regards business will be developed, refined, thrown out and the process started all over again as technology and consumer habits evolve (or change).

In the meantime, this week’s article by Steven Baker in Business Week raises some very interesting questions, but does not overtly mention the most important: What is ROI (in any given instance) and how does one measure that?

Beware Social Media Snake Oil

Hordes of marketing “experts” are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools

By Stephen Baker

For business, the rising popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media Web sites presents a tantalizing opportunity. As millions of people flock to these online services to chat, flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in to billions of digital conversations. They can pitch a product, listen to customer feedback, or ask for ideas. If they work it right, customers might even produce companies’ advertising for them and trade the ads with friends for free. Starbucks (SBUX), Dell (DELL), and Ford Motor (F) have all testified to the magic social media can create.

But the same tools carry risks. Employees encouraged to tap social networking sites can fritter away hours, or worse. They can spill company secrets or harm corporate relationships by denigrating partners. What’s more, with one misstep, one clumsy entrée, companies can quickly find themselves victims of the forces they were trying to master. Thousands of bloggers attacked Motrin last year because of an advertisement from the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) brand they found demeaning to mothers.

Over the past five years, an entire industry of consultants has arisen to help companies navigate the world of social networks, blogs, and wikis. The self-proclaimed experts range from legions of wannabes, many of them refugees from the real estate bust, to industry superstars such as Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They produce best-selling books and dole out advice or lead workshops at companies for thousands of dollars a day. The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.

The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents. “It’s a bit of a Wild West scenario,” blogs David Armano, a consultant with the Dachis Group of Austin, Tex. Without naming names, he compares some consultants to “snake oil salesmen.”

Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes. Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel: Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos. Yet these strictures don’t always make business sense. Adam Kmiec, director of interactive marketing at Marc USA in Pittsburgh, tells of a company he met with that got much of its revenue from the Defense Dept. and had allocated $4 million for social media. “What do you hope to get?” he asked them. Ultimately, the client decided the privacy-obsessed Pentagon may not be thrilled with a supplier publicizing itself through Twitter.

FURY VS. BUZZ

Scrutiny of the hype merchants is picking up. Rob Spencer, senior research fellow for idea management at drug giant Pfizer (PFE), mingles frequently with social media vendors and consultants as he looks for ways to amplify the company’s brainpower. He urges caution. “You have to tread your way carefully and have your B.S. sensors up,” he says. “I call them innovation hippies. ‘Here’s my book for free. Won’t you hire me for $500 to run some workshops?’”

Social media consultants’ own promotions can collide, on occasion, with those of their customers. Take the case of James Andrews, who was working early this year at the PR firm Ketchum (OMC). As a consultant, he helped companies such as Newell Rubbermaid (NWL), Monster Worldwide (MWW), and FedEx (FDX) work out their strategies for blogs and the microblogging service Twitter. On landing in Memphis for FedEx meetings, he says he had an ugly run-in with a racist at the airport and twittered that he would “die if he had to live” in the city. The tweet produced an outpouring of blogged fury from FedEx employees and a fast apology from an embarrassed Ketchum. But for Andrews, the tweet generated buzz and may even have boosted his brand. “It helps me today,” he says. “I use it as a case study. It creates authenticity.” In June, Andrews left Ketchum to launch a boutique consultancy, Everywhere. He helps Macy’s (M), CNN (TWX), and Jane Fonda promote their brands and monitor their audiences on Facebook, blogs, and Twitter.

Skeptics can draw from plenty of examples of social media experiments run amok. Consider Saatchi & Saatchi’s ill-fated promotion for the Toyota (TM) Matrix. Targeting young men, a demographic known to resist traditional advertising, Saatchi’s social media team last year created a campaign based on the pranks of the popular MTV (VIA.B) show Punk’d. According to the plan, a prospective buyer of a Matrix would single out a friend to be the target of a prank. The promise: a bit of fear, a lot of laughs, and perhaps a groundswell of free marketing across Facebook, MySpace (NWS), and Twitter.

Amber Duick, one of the targets in the short-lived campaign, says she received a series of e-mails from a fictitious British soccer hooligan named Sebastian Bowler. He said he was coming to visit her and bringing along his pit bull. He had a MySpace page where he bragged about “drinking alcohol to excess” and participating in riots. One e-mail Duick received was a fake bill for damage to a hotel room wrecked by Bowler. He had left her e-mail address, the message explained, as his contact info. Duick filed a $10 million lawsuit in October and says that to protect herself from the oncoming Bowler, she slept with a machete by her bed. “She was terrified,” says her lawyer, Nicholas Tepper.

In a statement, Saatchi and Toyota wrote that they would “vigorously defend against the claim,” which is “entirely without merit.” They said the plaintiff had granted “her permission to receive campaign e-mails and other communications from Toyota.”

CAN CHAGRIN BE GOOD?

James Cooper, Saatchi’s digital creative director, says social media, by their nature, are unpredictable, which makes them an easy target for critics. “Anyone who says ‘This is going to work’ is either lying or deranged,” he says. He compares the risk model with venture capital, where one bet out of 10 might pay off richly, while the others struggle or even bomb. And he stresses the difficulty of measuring results. “If something’s got 20 million hits on YouTube, that’s a good thing,” he says. “But what if half the comments are negative? I don’t think anyone’s got a long-term case study yet.”

Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.

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A really interesting post from Wired’s Epicenter and blogger Peter Kirwin about the problem everyone “wants to have:” a wildly successful marketing campaign that has taken on a life of its own.  Do you trade dollars for eyeballs- and is that just a short-term question?

Suppose they gave a marketing campaign, and everybody came?

Back in September, Hasbro launched Monopoly City Streets, a massive multiplayer online game that transforms Google Maps into a globalized version of the well-known board game. In the run-up to Christmas, the online game was supposed to promote a boxed version of the game that Hasbro sells for $40 list.

Three months on, however, Hasbro’s MMOG – constructed by ad agency Tribal DDB working alongside engineers from Google Maps – achieved something unexpected. It became vastly more popular than anyone expected. Monopoly City Streets now ranks as the world’s 12th-largest example of the genre, according to Matt Ross of Tribal DDB, attracting 15 billion page views a month.

Presenting his agency’s campaign at last week’s Creativity and Technology conference in London, Ross announced: “We’re trying to invent things that are useful to people. We never know if our stuff is going to work.”

“Now Hasbro don’t know what to do with it,” Ross said. “They have a kind of new product on their hands.”

Unexpected popularity has had unintended consequences for Hasbro. If it scraps the game next month, as planned, it risks alienating 1.5 million registered users. If it allows it to continue, it will need to find a way of monetizing all of those eyeballs that may cannibalize buyers of the game they want to sell who are happy enough with the online version it was supposed to promote.

Oh yeah — Ross also noted that his agency’s wildly successful campaign was achieved with “precisely zero media spend.”

Interesting things happen when advertising slips the moorings that have traditionally bound it to Big Media. In particular, Hasbro’s dilemma underlines the fact that the message-carrying capacity of traditional media has always been constrained. As a result, media owners have always carried promotional messages to audiences on a time-limited basis.

The cost of traditional media doesn’t decline appreciably during a campaign. Accordingly, the cost of reaching new consumers increases exponentially as a campaign proceeds. The risk of over-exposure increases, too.

Hence the advertising industry’s traditional ability to take pride in brilliantly crafted, but transient, promotional efforts.

So what happens when scarcity-based constraints disappear? What happens when advertisers and their agencies produce their own campaigns and distribute them on the web?

Attitudes change. As permanence becomes a possibility, pride in transience starts to look questionable. The ad campaign that Hasbro thought it was buying from Tribal DDB may yet turn into an enduring product. In a similar vein, Anders Gustafsson of Crispin Porter Bogusky Europe told last week’s conference: “The stuff we’re doing should last for years, not months.”

Several years after adland produced its first throwaway virals, this suggests that something much larger than frustration with search engines lurks on the horizon for Big Media.

For a century or more, the advertising industry and Big Media have operated on the basis of mutual dependence. Big Media offered unusually broad reach and attracted big budget creatives as a result. In adland, watching your creatives play out across major media was always a mark of high seriousness.

Now this historic pact is coming under pressure. In places, it has started to unravel. The crude appeal of banners and buttons remains important, but long ago ceased to be at the center of the digital action. For marketers who need to engage massive audiences, the web offers a genuine alternative to press and TV, one that allows advertisers to create their own content.

With no small sense of irony, last week’s conference of digital creatives took place at the galleries constructed by Charles Saatchi out of the elegant hulk of the Duke Of York’s barracks in Chelsea.

Yet the Big Media outlets that carried Saatchi’s inspired advertising copy three decades ago merited barely a mention. Among other things, delegates were asked to consider what might start to happen when we, our devices and the built environment become seamlessly networked.

Adam Greenfield, head of design direction at Nokia, describes one possible outcome:  an urban landscape filled with “dynamic advertising that covers every surface and knows everything about us”. He talks of a “shroud of awareness” surrounding shoppers and pedestrians with “dynamic advertising” constructed on the basis of “sensor readings that record place, time and event”.

The future of outdoor advertising has rarely looked so full of potential. The future of Big Media has rarely looked so marginal.

Kevin Slavin, another speaker at last week’s conference, lectures alongside Greenfield at New York University. He is also the co-founder of Area/Code, a New York-based hotshop that develops games on behalf of agencies and advertisers.

According to Slavin, “the idea of being able to see the value of everything all at once” is “grinding down” the price that retailers in particular can charge their customers. “Meaning,” he claims, is shifting from physical products to the “informatic layer” embodied in devices and networks.

This isn’t a particularly controversial notion. What is controversial is the conclusion drawn by Slavin: “If you’re in the consumer packaging and branding business, you’re fucked.”

Perhaps. But ubiquitous computing also represents a further threat to the historic pact between adland and Big Media. In the not-too-distant future, the cereal packets that contain my daughter’s Coco Pops may carry a cheap screen, wirelessly connected to the web, that plays cartoons across the breakfast table. As a result, BSkyB, the BBC and ITV will lose access to eyeballs.

Disintermediation of this kind is already a reality in some shopping malls, where retailers have started sending promotions to handsets carried by approaching shoppers. According to one analyst firm, 35 start-ups and established companies across Europe are developing technology for use in such digital proximity campaigns.

This won’t result in the death of retail advertising in the weekend editions of national newspapers any time soon. But there’s more to come. The next steps involve the gradual splicing together of three separate disciplines: mobile advertising technology, real-time search and the long-established science of retail footfall analysis.

Coincidentally, Twitter this week released its long-awaited geolocation API into the wild. In this context, one statistic is worth noting: according to the digital ad agency Razorfish, 44 per cent of US consumers who follow a specific brand on Twitter say they do so in order to gain access to special offers.

Campaigns that cut out Big Media with a mix of gaming, location awareness and social networking aren’t yet an established fixture in adland. But we might not have to wait too long. The iPhone’s crystalline screen was made for opportunities like these.

The fallout could make Rupert Murdoch’s dispute with Google look like the proverbial storm in a teacup.

Among the digital creatives who gathered together last week, a few are already looking toward the future. “Now that we’ve been invited to the party and have money, influence and power,” said Ian Tait of Poke London, “I worry we are like a bunch of kids with the keys to the sweet shop.”

Judging by the heady optimism on display at CaT last week, Tait’s concerns aren’t yet widely shared by his peers. But they will be – and soon enough. As Google knows all too well, disruptive power brings serious responsibilities in its wake.

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In our previous article about SEO for On Page, we talked about the importances of having a title that matches the content of your page. What I want to cover is be sure to title your page for your prospect, not for Search Engines.  Take the following examples for “job search” and “search engine”.

-CareerBuilder.com Jobs – The Largest Job Search, Employment …

In the world of emails, there are 2 critical stats – Open rates and click through rates. These are probably the most important factors to your e-marketing campaign.

In a previous post, I told you how to optimize your open rates. In this post, I will tell you how to optimize your click-through rates. Read on!

The first thing is the layout of the email. You’ve got over half of the readers to open your email, now what? You need to have a nicely laid out body, not too many images, not too much text. Just the right balance.

There are many ways to improve your click-through rates (CTR). The first one I’m going to tell you about is a simple one; be friendly. As I have said in countless previous posts, you need to be friendly with your readers. People are a lot more likely to click the links you want them to if you are being more personal than business-orientated.

Try playing with different call to actions; the A B test. Split the email you are going to send to your list into 2, so you have 2 emails exactly the same. Now you alter the call to actions in one email, and leave the other how it was. Then send each email to half of your list, and monitor the results.

Personally, I believe that a basic link, as in blue underlined text, has the best click-through rate. If you use a picture as a link, make sure you explicitly tell your readers that said picture is a link.

At the end of your email, in the signature box, add all the links you want the reader to click, eg. LinkedIn, Facebook, Website or your Twitter. These will not be clicked as much as links in the body of your email, but will still receive a fair few clicks.

The last thing I am going to say to you today is try these methods, personalise them to work for you, and then monitor them. There are many other ways to improve both Open Rates and CTR, and I will be writing more posts outlining these, so keep checking for updates!

Now that online users are clicking on display ads less and less, should we lower our expectations of online advertising and place less value on the click-through? According to a 2009 study by Starcom USA, the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009. To make matters worse, only 8% of the Internet user base account for 85% of all clicks. So while the other 92% of users may see your ad, most aren’t clicking through to your website or landing page. Yikes.

Certainly there is value in potential customers seeing your ad. Even if a person doesn’t click, the ad has the ability to raise awareness and keep your brand top of mind. And perhaps, this is the value we should measure for display ads, rather than sheer click-throughs. An increase in online and offline sales, a rise in searches for your company, more favorable dialogue about your services and other marketing goals can all be attributed to campaign exposure. Tracking becomes essential, but also can be a bit murky as, ideally, your display ads are being integrated into an overall marketing effort that reaches your customers through a variety of mediums for the greatest frequency and impact. 

I work with a national home builder who does an excellent job of tracking leads. But the leads are only as good as the sourcing data. As buyers come in to the sales center, they are asked how they heard about that particular community. While my client relies on a broad mix of online and print advertising, direct mail, community outreach and events, it is their outdoor advertising that consistently ranks highest among traffic drivers. Why? I doubt it’s because their billboards are the most effective medium. It’s more likely that this is the last place the customer received the message. Like a display ad, a billboard is a highly visible marker that may not necessarily help the buyer form an opinion about the product, but it can lead them through the door into the sales center. However, you can’t discount all of the marketing efforts that led them to take notice of the billboard to begin with, giving them a favorable impression of the builder, information about the homes and timely reminders about the value and reasons to purchase until they were ready to buy. The marketing mix is essential. Online ads have a place in this mix too, but perhaps it’s not just to generate click-throughs.

Tweet this

GroupM Search and comScore just released the results of a study examining the relationship between social media exposure and search behavior.

Consumers were divided into 3 segments. Segment 1 was only exposed to a brand’s paid search. Segment 2 was exposed to social media, relevant to a brand’s category and segment 3 was influenced by social media that was specific to a brand.

Search behavior was broken into segments, based on the stage of the purchase funnel queries are made. Upper-funnel terms are usually more generic and express awareness and consideration, whereas lower-funnel terms express action and loyalty.

The findings were that consumers who searched AND engaged with social media were far more likely to search for lower-funnel terms. This was particularly the case when they belonged to group 2 and used social media exposed to a brand. In fact, these consumers were 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand’s products than consumers from group 1 that were only exposed to paid search.

Even though marketers have suspected this trend, the study supports and validates those assumptions for the first time. An estimated 50% increase in click-through rates occurred when consumers had been exposed to brand influenced social media as well as paid search. While generic keywords at the top of the funnel are popular, consumers use social media to change their mind on the products and services they would consider buying further down the decision process.

For brands this is a great opportunity to influence consumer discussions about their products and services using social media, although the challenge will be understanding how to allocate budgets between social media and paid search.

Read the comScore press release.

What is the value of Twitter?

This is a questions that many people are wondering; including Twitter themselves.  A study just released by technology and media research firm Interpret just shed some light on the value of Twitter.

Their study provided these insights:

• 24% of Twitter users reviewed or rated products online (compared to 12% of non Twitterers)
• 20% of Twitter users viewed company profiles (11% of non Twitterers)
• 20% of Twitter users click on ads or sponsored links (compared to 9%)
• Almost 20% of their tweets included a brand

If I am a brand manager, this information is very interesting.  By now, most companies are in the social media game, and most have started their Twitter presence.  This gives incentive to move Twitter efforts along more quickly.

These results could be because of the nature of Twitter and its users.  Most non Twitter users say, “why do I care what you’re doing?”  I respond to that with two points:

• Twitter isn’t about telling the world about yourself, it’s about sharing information, news and ideas.  It’s a medium to teach and learn – not say “I’m sitting on the couch”
• and.. yes you do care about “what I am doing”.  If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be on Facebook 4 hours a day

People use Twitter to learn and explore, which explains why people are more likely to interact with companies online.  This “open mindedness” and thirst for learning makes Twitter users very active and lucrative customers.  As long as you fill their need for information and “push” them content, chances are they will play around with it.

Something that TV advertising can’t say today.

So Twitter users, do you interact with brands online?

Follow Todd on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/toddliss

Note: The original Paid Content Article can be found here

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-study-twitterers-more-receptive-to-ads-than-other-social-net-users/

If you have set up a brand page on Facebook to attract fans, when do you typically post status updates? If you’re posting quickly at the end of the week on Friday, or from the comforts of home on Saturday (because you “forgot” to post this week), you’re wasting your time. According to an emarketer.com article, statistics from social media services vendor Virtue show that Tuesday is the best day to update your Facebook page. With an average click-through rate of nearly 10 percent on Tuesdays (followed by a close-second-Wednesday), your chances of having your fans click-through to pages and information are much greater than on any other day of the week. It makes sense. Monday is typically the day people go through their email from the weekend, organize themselves for the week, create their to-do lists and prepare to stay on task for the week. Tuesday and Wednesday are the days when you’re in the thick of it, strategizing and implementing new ideas – or looking for them. So you’re going to log on to your Facebook account more toward the middle of the week to “check in” and see what’s happening. By Friday, you’re winding down your work week or scrambling to meet last minute deadlines (which leaves you no time for FB browsing). Build a plan around your social media strategies. Save 10 minutes in your schedule on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to pop in an informational and benefits-driven post on your Facebook brand page. Then track the results and see how you do. Who wants to work on the weekend anyway?

* not really

from Chickita/ CrunchBase

New research performed by online search advertising company Chitika suggests mobile users are far less likely to click on ads than non-mobile Internet users. In fact, they’re about half as likely, the study shows based on a sample of 92 million impressions.

Could that be true? Wasn’t it the other way around?

First, we should note right off the bat that Chitika is an Internet advertising company that’s decidedly not into mobile advertising according to its own website, so that brings along a large truck carrying bags filled with grains of salt. That said, it’s worth taking a look at how they got to the conclusion, so we can reach our own.

Chitika claims to power advertising for over 55,000 sites, serving ads based on 2 billion monthly impressions. Of the 92 million impressions cited in the study, approximately 1.3 million or 1.5% of the lot came from mobile browsing. The ads that were shown on mobile devices were exactly the same as the ones displayed to non-mobile users, rather than comparing standard online advertising with mobile-oriented ads.

Ad click-through of mobile as a whole pulled only 0.48% according to analysis of the sample, with non-mobile holding steady with a 0.83% clickthrough rate. That would mean mobile commanded just over half of the average.

Of the five major smartphone operating systems – Android, iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, Palm OS and BlackBerry OS – Apple’s iPhone ranked worst for ad click-throughs representing a mere 0.30% rate. The “Other” group, comprised mainly of BlackBerry users and a handful of other operating systems (including Symbian, Nokia, and HTC) saw the highest ad click-through rate.

Personally, I’m a bit hesitant to believe the outcome of the study – much like Chitika’s earlier one about Bing ads’ click-through rate being twice as big as Google ads – considering the self-serving aspect and the apparent desire to come to controversial conclusions in order to draw attention.

On the flip side, there hasn’t been that much independent research for mobile ad click-through rates yet, and I’m equally keen not to blatantly believe studies that show mobile advertising commands spectacularly high click-through rates compared to web advertising. In my opinion it’s conceivable that click-through rates would be rather similar and largely dependent on context, type of advertising, how well the message fits the medium etc.

In short: more neutral research wanted.

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CrunchBase Information

Chitika

Website:	chitika.com
Location:	Marlborough, Massachusetts, United States
Founded:	May, 2003

Chitika, Inc. (www.chitika.com) is one of the largest search-targeted advertising networks, serving millions of search driven impressions per month, and growing. For result-driven advertisers and media buyers, Chitika offers a keyword-targeted… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase

There are few things more annoying than internet ads.  Most are ugly and get lost in the clutter. The average American sees about 5000 ads a day according to the 2007 Yankelovich study. That’s a lot of clutter.  Much of the time, ads have become so commonplace, our eyes just graze over them.  That is especially true with internet ads. I rarely notice their placement on the page. 

Pringles has invented an ad that may just provoke people to click it.  In full disclosure, I was directed to this site after hearing about the award winning Cannes ad, but I’d like to think that if I saw it on some random site I might just click it too…..but probably not.  Oh well, you should check it out though. It’s a cute little story and the Pringle guy is actually sort of funny in a random way….he got me to click all the way through the end. 

Click the pringles to be linked away to the ad, if you dare. 

Click-through Rate (CTR) (Ratio de clic through):

Porcentaje resultante de clics sobre las impresiones descargadas de un anuncio. Un click-through es lo que el sitio patrocinador cuenta como resultado de un clic publicitario. En la práctica, los clics y los click-throughs tienden a usarse indistintamente. Sin embargo, un click-through implica que el usuario ha descargado la página.

Click-through (Click-through):

Número de clics constatadamente eficaces, es decir clics que hayan llevado a la descarga completa de la pagina de destino. Acción sobre un hipervínculo dentro de un anuncio o contenido editorial que lleva a otro sitio web o a otra página o marco dentro del sitio web. A veces es utilizado erróneamente en lugar de clic. Los click-throughs publicitarios deben ser medidos y reportados como un redireccionamiento 302 al ad server y debe eliminarse cualquier actividad robótica ó automatizada. El verdadero valor del click-through es que un usuario ha accedido a visitar otra página web del anunciante, donde éste puede comunicarle otros mensajes.

I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that traditional forms of Advertising are shrinking. There are many statistics backing this up. There are many statistics backing this up and in Asia Pacific, Carat, for example have forecast a 5.8% decline in ad spend for this year. Obviously the economy is a factor in this result, but it also signals a change in advertising behaviour as people are paying less attention to traditional forms of advertising. Many people now have products such as MySky and Tivo is almost here. These products make it very simple for people to avoid watching TVC’s because the can fast forward their recorded TV programmes. TVNZ announced that they were laying off 90 people as a consequence of a $25 million reduction in advertising revenue. The same applies with radio where many people are now opting for their iPods to listen to their favourite music instead of tuning in and being forced to listen to radio ads.

In my opinion, this doesn’t mean that people want to avoid advertising, specials and promotions altogether. They want them to be more relevant. ZenithOptimedia have forecast far greater drops in Ad expenditure, 11% drop in magazines, 10% in radio, 5.5 in TV, but around a 10% increase in Internet Advertising. So traditional forms of advertising decline, but Internet advertising is on the rise.

Why would that be? People are using the Internet far more these days, which takes them away from traditional media, but the key element to me is relevance. In the World Wide Web, it is far easier to ensure that advertising is relevant to the search or type of site that people are visiting. It also offers a great opportunity for call to action with Click Through, which is of course where Google makes the bulk of its income.

The ability to have people opt in to various services that are relevant to their interests and needs, their current time and place means that the offers will be welcomed and will have a far greater sales conversion rate than with traditional means of advertising and promotion. This is where the opportunity arises with Location Based Services (LBS) and Proximity Based Marketing.

The issue isn’t that people hate ads, specials, good deals and information. The relevance needs to be around space and time. I would welcome a Speight’s Mates Happy Hour electronic coupon, when I am walking past a bar, with a 2 for 1 offer on a Friday evening after work. But I probably wouldn’t even see a printed coupon in a magazine.

I’m sure tourists would take advantage of a special offer to a half price jet boat ride when they are on holiday in Queenstown, when they are within a kilometre of the boat on a sunny morning, than if they read an ad in the plane on their way to New Zealand. The tour operator gets a full boat and all the passengers have more fun. It’s timely, its based on their immediate location and its relevant to their current situation.

Many people think that the technology isn’t ready, but according to a story in ITWire, compound growth of GPS in mobile phones is over 49% and one of the major drivers in the proliferation of SmartPhones. According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, despite the economy, the penetration of SmartPhones grew by 33% to February this year. The traditional definition of a SmartPhone comes from Operating Systems such as Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile, but if you look around today, many of the mobile apps in those phones such as Contacts, Diary, Email, Still and Video Camera are now standard in pretty much every phone and with the low cost of GPS, that is now being added at great speed.

With Software Development Kits being made freely available for the popular brands and models of phone, this is a perfect opportunity to become familiar with the web services and API’s available from GeoSmart and outlined in previous blogs. All you need is a good idea and a little market research. Of course GeoSmart can offer you a Developer Agreement which gives you free access to any tools you need during the development process.

You can find more information on the Developer Page at www.geosmart.co.nz or email info@geosmart.co.nz

One of the most exciting marketing activities I look forward to each month is sending out our e-Newsletter. We spend a bit of time discussing and sketching ideas.. Then we throw them away and start stressing over the deadline. But then we get it done.. we write the content for our newsletter.

We try to keep the design pretty simple and consistent from month to month. But this past month, we tried something a little different. See, the email that you receive for the newsletter contains a blurb for each article… Hopefully it catches your attention, and you click the link to read the rest of the article online.

Well, this month we decided to remove the “Read More…” link at the end of each blurb. We thought it “looked better” without it. The day arrived to send the newsletter.  We have separate lists that we send the content out to. So, the first list came up on the queue, and the email was sent out…    We track as much as possible.. the opens, the bouncebacks, the click-throughs… all in real-time.

Well, after a few minutes, I started to panic! People were opening the email, but hardly anyone was clicking through! I waited some more, and still.. not a lot of clicks. Now, the content may not have been compelling, but looking at past months, I knew we had a great group of people that normally take the time to click through.

Then we made a decision… Before we send the newsletter to our other lists, we needed to change the design. Yep, we added back in the “Read more…” links.    We sent it out to the next few batches, and the click-through rate started to climb. (We rejoiced!)

Now, there certainly is an argument that the Read More link may not have been the solution.. maybe it was the timing for the first group, or something else.

But here were the key lessons learned:

• Testing your marketing activities is so important! Even when you’ve only made what seems like a minor change.
• While it may add a few minutes to your day, it does pay off to separate your targets into different lists.
• And of course, it greatly helps when you have technology that allows you to view results in real-time, and make adjustments before a message is pushed to the next list of people.

So, to the people that were on our first batch of this month’s newsletter, please don’t be mad at me. I promise you will get an extra special treat in the next newsletter.

Plus… all of the content behind those blurbs can be found on our website

http://www.interlinkONE.com