Category: News (page 33 of 1505)

July 1, 2011

Measuring & Monetizing The Instant Gratification Of Mobile Search

No matter where you are in your mobile marketing efforts – whether you are an advertiser still developing a mobile strategy or a growing mobile ad network selling to national advertisers – you should know how to effectively measure mobile and your measurement efforts should include call tracking and attribution metrics.

Mobile attribution is key to helping validate the channel and monetizing the high quality leads it delivers.

Mobile Searchers Need It Today

Consider the mobile searcher profile. Leads that come from a mobile search program are not only more likely to buy, but will often times convert to a customer within hours.

According to Google’s stats, shared at a recent Mobile Marketing Association forum and reported on SEL by Greg Sterl in g earlier this month:

58% of mobile users are on the mobile web at least once a day
90% of mobile users search/lookup local information
87% of local mobile searchers take action from their search

Mobile search is locally focused and all about instant gratification as searchers are typically looking for something that they need the same day.

Consider your own habits: on a weekend day trip, you might make plans on the way there, searching for a place to stop for lunch and calling about a kids menu and reservations, calling about the hours of a special exhibit for a local museum or calling a couple hotels to find out about availability when you decide to stay the night.

Calls Are Top Mobile Performance Metric

Smartphones are transforming the search landscape, and calls are the de facto performance metric as the device’s primary use is for voice service. Our internal data reveals that more than half of all calls driven by local search ads are made from mobile phones – this is nearly double the number from a year ago.

Consumers calling from their mobile phones stay on the phone with businesses longer (more than three minutes per call) and longer call durations indicate a greater propensity to buy/convert. While mobile calls may be longer because there is less robust information available on mobile websites and apps, mobile consumers are closer to the point of purchase.

Mobile Leads Command Higher Monetization Value

The recent BIA/Kelsey’s mobile outlook forecasts that mobile ad spending will grow to $2.8 billion in 2015 with locally-targeted ads comprising 70 percent of that value. As the mobile growth rate is skyrocketing, I expect the 2015 figure will explode.

Mobile leads are truly ready to buy, so mobile ad networks and other mobile ad providers can command a higher price for mobile calls in a pay for performance-based model. And, while clicks are still a standard mobile metric, measuring calls reveals greater consumer insights and is a way to truly evaluate the monetization potential of newer mobile properties—including appropriate verticals, pricing of calls, and optimization opportunities.

The lead quality from mobile callers is so strong that mobile ad providers can price calls (in a pay for performance model) at almost twice the amount of SEM-driven calls. While the price differential in most cases is warranted, mobile programs priced too high could discourage advertisers. So it is crucial to evaluate caller data and compare with other media to help appropriately price calls.

Mobile Requires Unique Approach

Like any media, mobile has its own unique profile. So best practices from online search or other channels shouldn’t be transferred without testing first.

As an example, mobile searchers are more likely to have a location qualifier so the keywords used to search should be different as well. Knowing how mobile callers arrived at an advertiser, listing or phone number and optimizing for more of those callers is key.

Without a doubt, mobile monetization depends on appropriate attribution. This includes tracking calls and providing drill down analysis of call response data – from total call volumes to caller demographics to call durations.

Whether you are an advertiser or advertising provider, if you don’t have a mobile program, you are leaving money on the table. Harness the power of instant gratification by measuring and monetizing your mobile efforts.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

June 30, 2011

OWL survives in a challenged magazine world

Do you know the scientific term for the sound of your stomach growling? Not to worry if you don’t – there are more than 75,000 preteens in Canada who can educate you.

They can also tell you the rough number of hairs on your head, describe the migratory patterns of the wildebeest, and give you advice on making an animal-shaped cake.

It’s all information that can be found in the most recent issue of OWL, which this month celebrates 35 years of giving children aged 9 to 13 a wealth of fun facts to one-up their parents.

The magazine’s publisher is also celebrating its basic survival. After more than three decades in business, Owlkids – which publishes the iconic Canadian children’s magazine OWL, as well as ChickaDEE and Chirp for younger readers – is staying alive at a time when the magazine industry is as challenged as ever. Circulation and advertising revenues for Canadian consumer magazines fell more than 15 per cent between 2007 and 2010. And while the publishing industry is showing signs that it is healing, circulation numbers are not expected to return to 2007 levels any time soon.

Compared to its peers in the magazine business, Owlkids is also operating with one hand tied behind its back. While consumer magazines in Canada lean on advertising sales for the majority of their revenues, Owlkids depends almost entirely on money from its readers. No more than two or three pages in each Chirp and ChickaDEE are devoted to ads, and no more than five ad pages run in OWL (which has more pages over all). “It’s a challenge,” Owlkids group publisher Jennifer Canham says of the subscriber-driven business. “We’re facing a challenge of pricing in a fair way so people can pay for our magazines and we can cover our costs. … We have to run a much tighter business than the adult magazines.”

Describing her profit margins, Ms. Canham holds her thumb and forefinger a centimetre apart, squinting at the sliver of air in between. But even though it has sometimes been slow, growth has continued. The first issue of OWL had 7,000 subscribers; it now reaches more than 10 times as many. OWL, which originally stood for “Outdoors and Wildlife,” has broadened its focus from a nature magazine to more general interest – a move that editor-in-chief Craig Battle partly credits for their continuing success with kids. “We’re staying true to the vision, but broadening it to speak to everyone, with news stuff that has a kid focus, for example,” he says.

Most of the staff who work at OWL read it when they were kids, says Annabel Slaight, who co-founded the magazine with Mary Anne Brinckman in 1976 when a year’s subscription cost $6. “They have a deep understanding of the legacy.”

Ms. Slaight watched the magazines she created taken to the brink in 1997, when their parent company went into receivership.

Their white knight came in the form of a group of monks. Bayard Canada, an affiliate of the Bayard Presse publisher in France, is owned by a Catholic religious community in Quebec City called les Pères Augustins de l’Assomption. While some religious communities make cheese or beer, the Assumptionists focus on publishing. They assured Ms. Slaight that the magazines’ content would remain non-religious – a condition of sale that was written into the contract.

These days, prayer books pay the bills. Bayard also owns a profitable publisher of religious books, with offices down the hall from Owlkids. Its financial stability gave Owlkids a chance to recover, working on its magazines and the children’s books that it also publishes. Five years ago, they stopped losing money.

Ms. Slaight, who turned 70 last fall, has watched the magazines continue their legacy. She was honoured June 13 by the Association of Canadian Publishers as a pioneer in the industry.

But it is still a daily fight to stay viable. Owlkids does not do automatic renewals, so it has to convince subscribers to keep coming back every year. And while the lack of advertising has hurt profits, ad sales are still restricted. Ms. Canham has turned down lucrative offers for candy and fast food ads, which she could have taken because unlike in broadcasting, which has a strict code of standards, there are no restrictions in Canada on advertising to kids in print. “I stand by this, even though our margins don’t look too rosy,” she says.

One blessing is that Owlkids does not have much competition: Other kids magazines in Canada are more niche-focused, while its titles are general interest. Peter Piper Publishing in Victoria publishes science magazines Yes Mag and Know Mag, and the charity Canada’s National History Society publishes Kayak, a history magazine (it also publishes Canada’s History, formerly The Beaver, a history magazine for adults). On the wall of her office, Ms. Canham has an original painting of chickadees and a Screech Owl by Robert Bateman. The Canadian artist donated the work in the early nineties so that the Owl Charitable Trust could sell a limited number of signed prints for fundraising. When budgets are stretched, she says she occasionally looks at the painting, wondering if Mr. Bateman would give permission for her to sell it to give them some room to breathe. She hasn’t made the call yet.

“It serves as a nice reminder of all the efforts over the years to keep OWL going,” she says.

Oh, and that rumbling sound in your stomach? It’s called “borborygmi.” Just ask a nine-year-old.

______

BIRDS OF A FEATHER:

The Owlkids family of magazines

Chirp

Est. 1997

Ages: 3 to 6

Circulation: 72,935

ChickaDEE

Est. 1979

Ages: 6 to 9

Circulation: 93,913

OWL

Est. 1976

Ages: 9 to 13

Circulation: 76,815

June 30, 2011

Website monetization large scale and small

Google passed a milestone of sorts during May 2011. The company became the first web presence to garner one billion unique visitors in one monthâ€™s time. This number includes every visitor to every website owned by Google such as Youtube and Gmail. Microsoft websites are close behind with 900 million stop bys and young upstart Facebook had 714 million friends come to call.

As web developers who work hard to get a hundred thousand visitors to a site in any given month, we are astounded by these figures. That whole snowball rolling down a mountain thing really works! But something to be discussed about all of this is how the sites manage to make a dollar or a pound from all of this traffic and does supersite monetization have any relatable bearing to us mere web mortals?

I believe it does. Let us examine the way these sites make money. Google is in the advertising business, the ad game, “The Hidden Persuaders.” They are incredibly adept at targeting product buyers and pitching their clients goods. Indeed the entire text ad business, using calls to action, smacks of infomercial appeal.
Facebook is basically in the billboard business. Pay them enough money and they will plaster your burgers, insurance or political agenda all over the right hand sidebar. The ads are not very compelling but you do get those page views.

Finally we have Microsoft. Microsoft does sell a few ads on Bing, plus here and there, but they make their money selling Windows and Windows gear. Need a nice $800.00 compiler? Come to Billâ€™s new and used software. Most people have no idea how many applications and web development programs Microsoft offers. Letâ€™s just say they donâ€™t need Java.

So how does all this relate to us web peons? We monetize in exactly the same ways as these masters of the web universe do. We are either running our affiliate billboards, directly selling in house products, or running pay per click ads in hopes of piling up pennies. There arenâ€™t really too many options for website monetization. Now if someone were to come up with a new oneâ€¦

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June 29, 2011

Hey Marcell, Watch This

Throughout the past couple of weeks I had two older people each ask me if I had seen the “Hey Marcel, Watch This” television commercial. The reason for the question is neither person knew what product was being advertised. If you’re ATT that’s not good. The spots are actually for ATT’s U-verse product, and this may be a case of the commercial being so catchy that people get caught up in the content and never pay attention to the message.

Personally, I DVR everything I watch, even live news and sporting events, so that I never have to watch a commercial. Advertisers know an increasing number of TV viewers are doing as I am, so they are working hard to develop commercials people will find so entertaining they’ll quit fast forwarding through them.

I found this number hard to believe, but according to TV ratings company Nielsen, the average American watches 151 hours of television per month. That’s a lot of television! However, it gets worse. Television programs in the U.S. include about 18 minutes of commercials per hour. A little quick math reveals during that 151 hours of TV, you’ll see just over 45 hours of commercials!

Just for fun, multiply that 45 hours spent watching commercials by the hourly wage you earn at work. Depending on your salary you could be looking at several hundred to over $2,000 per month. That makes the monthly cost of a DVR or a few commercial-free premium pay television channels seem mighty cheap by comparison.

Here’s another way to look at this. Throughout the course of the life of someone who lives to be 75 years old, using the above averages, that person would spend 40,500 hours watching commercials. Compare that to a typical 8-hour workday and you’ve just spent 5,062 days being commercialized. Now using a 5-day workweek, you would have just used the equivalent of more than 19 work years viewing TV commercials. Amazing!

I hate to use the word greed, but it does seem to apply here. Back in the 1960s, the average hour of television only included 9 minutes of ads, or half of current standards. During that time television was successful and highly profitable. Throughout the following decades networks kept incrementally pushing the amount of commercial time per hour a little higher every few years. So far the public hasn’t “cried uncle” and I don’t expect the network brass to stop “commercial creep” until we do.

Television is not alone, the same scenario holds true for radio. One popular radio talk show I’ve listened to for many years has now crammed so many commercials in, that when you take out news, traffic, weather and advertisements you’re only left with 16 minutes of programming during a half hour. There’s one commercial break during this show that features 5 straight minutes of ads. I used to keep talk radio on for 5 or 6 hours a day while in my office or while driving, but I’ve almost kicked the habit due to commercial overload.

Of course, music stations are just as commercialized. The few dollars a month I spend on commercial-free SiriusXM satellite radio is well worth it. Plus, I have a much wider variety of music available to select from. More than 22 million Americans now subscribe to SiriusXM and millions more listen to Pandora over the Internet, which also offers a low-cost commercial-free subscription plan in addition to its free plan that only includes about 1 minute of ads per half-hour.

Other media are also playing the cram-in-as-much-advertising-as-we-can game. In some newspapers, you have to hunt for the articles, which helps partially explain why circulation numbers are dropping precipitously across the nation. Of course, in recent years large numbers of us started using the Internet as a source of free news, but even this too is going downhill. A few newspaper related websites like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have started putting some of their content behind paywalls, requiring a monthly subscription to view articles. Other newspapers are watching to see if it works before they too jump on the bandwagon.

Even free-content Internet news sites have grown tired of just having a few ads scattered around the pages. Now we’re faced with ads that cover the screen for a few seconds or slide across the screen when we first land on the site. Many use neat tricks to allow pop-up ads to appear even though you have pop-ups blocked with your security settings. Then there’s the 30-second video ad you have to watch just to get to see a short video news clip. One news website I absolutely loved loaded so many different types of ad attacks on its pages in recent months, that I’ve just given up and no longer use the site.

Another trend is the website that requires you to register and then login each time you visit just to view the free content. The purpose is so they can set cookies on your hard drive and then sell your demographic info. You would be surprised at how much these companies know about you.

Based on your web usage they may have learned you like gardening, romance novels, drink wine and love the beach. Then they sell this info to the companies that place the ads on the sites you visit. Have you ever noticed how sometimes the ads on a site seem targeted at your specific interests? Maybe you visited the Ford Motor Company website browsing for info on a new truck. Suddenly ads for the F-150 start popping up on other sites you visit.

Here’s my free tip of the day. Go to Download.com and grab a free program called CCleaner (yes it has two “C’s”). I placed the icon for it right next to the browser icon on my desktop screen and every time I finish using the Internet I run the program. It takes about 5 seconds for it to clean all the cookies and other tracking items from your computer’s temp folder.

Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I highly value my privacy. My Facebook privacy settings are placed about as high as they can be set, and I don’t “check-in” at places with Facebook or any other service such as Foursquare that broadcast to the world where I am at any given moment. If I have to register and login in order to use a website, I’ll set up an e-mail account with a free service such as Yahoo! or Gmail and choose a user name that in no way identifies who I am. There are also services out there such as Anonymizer that allow you to surf the web without fear of anyone identifying you through your computer’s IP address.

Though I’m a coupon clipper and love to save some big bucks when grocery shopping, I’m not what you would call a fanatic. I’ve seen some of these folks on television and they can be a little spooky. However, when it comes to trying to avoid commercials and advertising, I am becoming a little extreme.

Our modern media delivery systems such as television, radio, newspapers, and now Internet, are largely based upon the concept that in exchange for viewing and listening to some advertising you get the content for free. If you want to swap out 19 work years of your life in exchange for free television, that’s your call. I just feel this model has been pushed beyond what is acceptable, so I am now proudly part of the anti-advertising underground. Maybe I need to start a new advocacy group. Of course we’ll need a website, and that means we’ll need some way of raising revenue to pay for its creation and upkeep. Anyone want to buy some advertising?

Follow me on Twitter @chuckshiflett and also check out my statewide columns at: The Backroom Report.

June 29, 2011

Commerce Supports Privacy Bill, Within Limits

John Eggerton — Multichannel News, 6/28/2011 7:16:00 PM

The Administration backs consumer data privacy legislation that includes a privacy bill of rights and codes of conduct produced in concert with industry and enforceable by the Federal Trade Commission, but it also stresses there are necessary limits to government action.

That is according to the prepared testimony of Cameron Kerry, general counsel of the Commerce Department and a veteran cable attorney, for a June 29 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on privacy and data security.

Kerry advises the committee that while it contemplates consumer data privacy legislation — which includes a bill co-sponsored by his brother, Sen. John Kerry [D-Mass]. — there are key limitations it needs to observe.

They are:

*Legislation should not create “overly burdensome regulatory requirements” for businesses that already adhere to the privacy principles embodied in that legislation;

*Legislation should be technology neutral, both so that firms have compliance flexibility, including to adhere to the principles but use data in ways the bill might not anticipate; and

*Legislation should be a basis for greater cooperation between nations and reduced compliance “burdens” for U.S. companies abroad.

Kerry said there were already signs of potential for better international cooperation. “Last week I was in Budapest to speak with European data privacy commissioners and, while we have much further to go in our discussions with Europe, and much remains uncertain about the final shape of the EU’s revised Data Privacy Directive, we see encouraging signs of potential for interoperability and harmonization from the other side of the Atlantic,” he said. “U.S. enactment of legislation establishing comprehensive commercial data privacy protections will help.”

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