UK online advertising hits £5bn

UK internet advertising spend is set to hit £5bn in 2012 according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, with Facebook on track for an estimated 60% revenue surge to £288m. Companies spent £4.78bn on all forms of internet advertising in the UK in 2011, with 14.4% year-on-year growth the biggest surge since 2007.

The UK needs to see growth of just over 4% in 2012 – which is definitely set to hit it’s target – for the market to be worth £5bn annually. A big part of the growth in2011 was due to massive boom in advertising on mobile devices and tablets, rising by157% (£203m) last year.

Search advertising (dominated by Google) accounts for 58% of total UK digital ad spend, grew 17.5% in 2011 to £2.77bn.

Display advertising grew by 13.4% to £1.13bn in 2011.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the surge in display advertising is Facebook, which figures from Enders Analysis estimates doubled revenues in 2011 to £180m.

A big part of this growth has come from the British public’s love of web search and the cost-effective nature of search advertising.

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An affiliate introduction to the European Cookie Law

The 26^th of May… put a reminder in your calendar now, because the world of affiliates will get extremely interesting from that date onwards.

Why? Well the good folks at the EU have decided to implement a new law governing the use of cookies and the 26^th of May is when it comes into force.

You eat cookies right? Well no, cookies are the mysterious tech magic that allows the whole affiliate industry to function. ‘A cookie is used for an origin website to send state information to a user’s browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site’ (thanks Wikipedia! My donation’s in the post…) Cookies are responsible for tracking sales on almost every affiliate network, so any change to them, is a change in the very fabric of the industry. The cookie tracks the user’s behaviour on a site (sales, basket quantities, page bounce rates, etc.) and feeds the information back to us industry types for any number of reasons, most of which are sales related.

Why does ‘the man’ care about internet cookies? Well, it’s not just the big guys in Europe. Online privacy is one of those perennial topics that won’t be going away any time soon. Remember that old paranoid saying about Facebook, ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’? People are becoming more and more concerned about how their online behaviour is tracked, recorded, exploited and manipulated. Unfortunately for affiliates, cookies that track sales also fall into this category. The new revised ePrivacy law is hoping to protect ordinary decent internet enthusiasts further, from malicious and creepy tech nerds who might be using those tracking cookies for any number of dubious activities.

But seriously, what does that have to do with me? Well, that all depends… Unfortunately, those same well meaning European guys, while trying to protect people, have made things extremely awkward for normal businesses to conduct their online affairs. If you are a publisher, a merchant, a network, or anything in between, then it won’t do you any harm to know about this stuff. What it ultimately boils down to, is that if you rely on this information, then in future people must agree to share it.

So what should I do? Read? Pray? Sacrifice a small goat?!! Nope… nothing that dramatic. Thankfully the IAB have prepared some sound advice which you can find here. It includes tips on conducting a cookie audit and guidelines to improve transparency. Do yourself a favour and figure out how this will apply to you.

What’s everyone else doing? That… is a very good question. There has been surprisingly little written about this so far. A4U had a useful post here a while ago, but very few official bodies are commenting on it yet or issuing official guidelines. I suspect that many are unsure how to proceed and are waiting for further clarification. As this is a new Law, giving poor advice can sometimes be worse than doing nothing, which is why everything will be infinitely more interesting once this new law will have to be enforced. For an idea of how important it is, even analytics will be affected…

Don’t worry though, we’ll keep you updated with any new developments as and when they happen…

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BBC Social Media strategy leaked

The BBC’s social media strategy for English Regions has been leaked online.

This document gives a sneak peak as to how Britain’s biggest media organisation manages its social media channels, which provides a useful guide for both marketers and brands.

Aside from the usual house-keeping tips, there are some insightful nuggets that we have highlighted below following a quick read:

• Admin access for BBC Facebook and Twitter accounts should be held by at least two members of the team so there is no risk of a single person leaving the BBC with access rights which cannot then be revoked.
• All Facebook updates must be written “natively” for Facebook (i.e. not pulled in automatically from RSS or Twitter).
• It is a good idea to set “Profanity blocklist” to “High” on all Facebook pages (this setting can be found under Edit Page / Manage Permissions)
• All updates must be produced by hand for Twitter (i.e. no cross-posting from Facebook) apart from accounts tweeting online News stories automatically, which should be clearly labelled as such.
• If you wouldn’t say it in a two-way, don’t say it on Facebook or Twitter

Clearly there are other social media services on the market, and there will be many more in the future. Some have been around for a while but are still niche (e.g. Audioboo); others are relatively new and  unproven (e.g. Google+); others are not traditional social networks but rather new social storytelling  tools (e.g. Storify).

Any use of these services around our output must:

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Facebook Timeline increases engagement

This Friday Facebook Pages switch to Timeline and if you are wondering if Facebook Timeline will be worth the effort, here’s some encouraging news: A researcher reports that brands are getting as much as 46% more engagement after activating Timeline.

Simply Measured, drew its results from a small sample of 15 Facebook brand pages. Doing so may have created a false sense of lift, especially since the greatest beneficiaries, Livestrong and Toyota, who saw their engagement rates increase from somewhere between 161% and 156%, respectively.

It’s not all good news though, data gathered by Simply Measured reveals that responses to status updates actually fell with Timeline, but engagement with videos and photos were up a composite 65%. Schoenfeld’s theory is that the larger images on Timeline are leading to more engagement with visual material.

This makes it worth  post more videos and photos. “We’re wondering if this is because of Pinterest,” he says.

To talk about social media drop me a line at ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk

Follow us on Twitter @tugagency

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Easter, SEO and traffic peaks

If your sales are affected by specific time period during the year, you are affected by what marketers call ‘seasonality’. One of the main events that helps to increase profits is Easter – a time when even my expenses increase:

-          travelling home

-           buying easter eggs for my little cousins

-          reserving a good bottle of wine for me and my family.

If your company sells anything Easter related, it would be great if you could open a page dedicated to Easter and start capitalizing on the related keywords.

Graph that represents the searche volume for the keyword "Easter"

The three main countries in terms of Easter related searches are United States, followed by United Kingdom and then Australia. Most of the search terms are connected to the year, such as “Easter 2011” and “Easter 2012” followed closely by “Easter egg” and “Easter eggs”.

Graph that represents the search volume for the keyword "Easter Egg"

If your business is related to travel and entertainment you can benefit from targeted traffic related to keywords such as “Easter holiday + location” or “Easter Weekend + location”.

Having a look at London related keywords you can see how the top search is “Easter in London”, followed by “Easter holiday London” and “Easter Sunday London”. According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool the first and third terms are low for competition. In particular the keyword “Easter in London” had 74,000 searches during March 2011.

Graph that represents the search volume for the keyword "Easter in London"

Whenever you are located in a smaller city, the peak of traffic due to seasonality can positively affect you. In March 2011, 1,300 Google visitors have searched for “Easter in Brighton” compared to 8,100 that have performed the same search in April.

How to benefit from seasonality seems pretty straight forward in terms of strategy but it takes time in terms of execution. Here’s the two actions to start getting visitors from Easter related keywords:

1)      Open a new Easter page targeting the Easter keywords related to your business.

2)      Begin link building for these keywords.

If you would like to know more about SEO and how to capitalise on half terms, Olympic Games and the Queen’s Birthday, drop us a tweet @tugagency

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Don’t give your Facebook password to employers

Well that seems pretty obvious doesn’t it? Supposedly in North America though, candidates are starting to be asked – so that prospective employers can check any closed groups they might be involved in. Well that’s just crazy. I ask everyone I interview if they are on Facebook but never their password! Usually candidates don’t realise that I want them to say they are on it multiple times a day – they are worried that will show them to be slackers – whereas I see it as proof that they are comfortable and savvy online. I hired one guy who used the Irish spelling of his name on Facebook for the express purpose of avoiding snooping employers like me… ha! I found him anyway…. but never hacked his account! geez…

Facebook has come out saying that this activity is illegal – totally agree

Here’s the story on Facebook passwords

Find out more about Tug’s Social Media Marketing services

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Pin it to Win it….How Brands can use Pinterest

So the new kid on the block (Pinterest) is still here and going strong and so now attention turns to how Brands can start using it.

As Pinterest’s traffic rose 52 % between January and February, from 11.7 million unique visitors in January to 17.8 million in February we definietly need to start thinking more about how our clients can work it in to their social media strategy if applicable.

Here are 3 ways ways to start enaging via Pinterest as a Brand:

1. Show case your products:  Create mood boards for your products.  If you are a clothing company it could be boards relating to colours, seasons, designers or trends.
2. Competitions:  Land’s End recently ran a competition asking people to create boards using their website and then send them in.  You could run a competition asking customers to pin an image of them using your product
3.  Coverage:  Brands could use Pinterest to cover an event like the Vitality Show and create boards  of favourite clips/trends/stands etc from the show

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5 affiliate topics you should know something about in 2012

This is my quick guide to sounding like a well rounded and informed member of the affiliate industry in 2012. For those with only a passing interest in affiliates, think of it as a cheat sheet to the topics everyone will be talking about this year.

Attribution – The great and ugly attribution debate keeps on rolling along, with no end in sight. It can be simplified to a single question, ‘is the last-click model fair?’ For years now, true content affiliates have been complaining that their hard earned sales get poached at the last minute by greedy voucher code super affiliates who dominate the industry. The solution would be to divide the commission between every site that contributes to the sale. Unfortunately, no one has so far proposed a workable solution. Considering recent research from Google shows that on average 20 sites are involved in the booking journey for the travel industry, how could the sale commission ever be divided fairly between all of them?

Mobile – For quite a few years now we’ve been promised the ‘year of mobile’. While there’s no disputing the phenomenal growth in mobile sales and traffic, innovation has been lacking in the affiliate space. With the exception of some very popular cash back apps, affiliates have been slow to really break into mobile with the same impact that has characterised the industry so far. I expect this to continue through 2012, as the retailers themselves need to adopt the latest technology before affiliates can really start to innovate off the back of that.

Social – How can affiliates effectively tap into the billions of social network users who are just sitting there, waiting to be sold something? If only it was that easy. One of the more practical solutions is to turn the users themselves into micro affiliates and pay them a proportion of the commission if a link they share results in a sale. The results from this have been mixed however. One success story is how Skimlinks rinsed it for a while on Pinterest, but it did raise some uneasy feelings and suspicion. It also seemed that even though affiliate income had kept the site alive in its early days, the model was quickly dropped in favour of venture capital once investors became interested. The proof of concept is there, but needs serious refinement. As for Facebook, who knows?

Emerging Technology – I’ve heard people say ‘anyone can become a super affiliate’, but with the constant development of new affiliate technology, it really is possible. One of the most interesting experiments recently is the Zoo project launched by TradeDoubler. This is a start-up incubator that’s purely concentrated on affiliates. Applications were made earlier this year and a team of ‘dragons’ chose the finalists. Great ideas, free office space, support and mentoring from some highly respected and well connected industry leaders and a collaborative community in which to develop? It’s definitely something to keep an eye on…

EU Cookie Directive – If you actually end up having a conversation about this with someone, then you need to hang around with cooler people. So, the EU is giving everyone until the 26^th May 2012 to get their cookies in order. This is part of the e-Privacy Directive and is designed to regulate cookies that collect personal data. As the whole industry is based on cookies, it’s quite a big deal and is discussed in infinitely more detail elsewhere on the internets.

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Google Analytics Update Connects Social Marketing With ROI

Any one involved in social media you will have probably asked the question “What is the ROI on social marketing?” Well that is what Google Analytics are trying to answer with their new features.

As social media continues to become an important part to any integrated marketing campaign, it was inevitable that the Google Analytics team would include a social-focused reports.

Traditional social analytics products tend to be more focused on “listening” clocking mentions, retweets, analyzing sentiment. These are key metrics but what most financial decision makers want to know is, how does this activity effect our bottom line?

Companies using the new social reports can set the goals that they’re interested in, whether it’s making a purchase, registering a user, or just having someone click on their about page. Google will then show you how many visits are coming in from social networks, which ones and how many of those social visits are “converting” to that goal.

This a great news for tracking the often mentioned Tug conversion funnel, being able to track if someone visits your website by following a link from Twitter, then returns in a week to buy something through PPC, Google will track that this. In essence Google can then assign a monetary value to both the “last interaction” and “assisted” conversions. This is a breath of fresh air when in helping brands decide whether the money they are budgeting for social marketing is actually supporting the bottom line.

In addition there is an ‘Activity Stream’ tab that offers conversation monitoring, similar to what you would find on existing tools like radian 6. In short you can track what people are saying about your company on each social network.

Google says it will be rolling this out over the next few weeks. Google Analytics users will find the new features under the Standard Reporting Tab.

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The power of reblogging

The last cover of Wired Magazine was dedicated to David Karp, the creator of Tumblr, a social blogging platform where you can find information on fashion, art, design and beauty.

At Tug we love Tumblr because it allows 2 options:

- Publish written and multimedia content

- Reblog (defined as the republication of a piece of content from another Tumblr blog – you need to click the related button and you will publish the same post in your blog, links included)

It is easy to see how this platform has transformed its users into artists/curators of online boards, that most of the time appear in a stylish layout.

This community has a strong inclination to share content, so you would benefit if the community reuses the same content in different domains, as the links are also transferred during the reblogging.

Recently we have published a blog post on a big industry influencer that has enabled reblogging buttons. This has lead to massive results, namely 14 reblogs from other Tumblr adepts along with 23 likes. Mind you, she does have around 3,000 followers on Twitter!

From the link building viewpoint you can get your links multiplied due to reposts and this will strongly benefit your positions.

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