According to Stuff New Zealand facebook are currently testing ways of allowing users to pay to promote posts, or as the test states, ‘highlight’ posts made on their walls. Currently the amount facebook are charging is $2 however they have been looking at a variation of price points, including free. The interesting part of this is that you now no longer would need a Fan Page to advertise content you have created within facebook and essentially this is a way facebook are looking at recovering from their recent diminishing advertising revenues (see the Q1 2012 figures from the S1 proposal). There is no news on who the ‘advertiser’/user would be able to reach with their post however I would say that this would be within their immediate friend network or possibly friends of friends as well.

My biggest concern is that this feature would turn facebook into a quagmire of low quality advertising and would start to deter advertisers’ from facebook’s current, full blown advertising options as advertising blindness, by users, would increase across the platform. Having said that I am yet to see what the ads look like or where they appear so fingers crossed they would be completely distinguishable from adverts bought through facebook marketplace or facebook premium.

Ben Wood, MD, iProspect

We now take for granted that search is the most important web utility. For consumers, search engines continue to act as a gateway to the web, a start point to all web journeys. For advertisers, they represent an unmatched opportunity to place a brand or offer into the line of sight of a consumer when they are most actively engaged. And for the technology and publishing players developing search engine technologies and algorithms, they are both revenue and data goldmines.

We also know that in search, relevancy is king. Mathematical improvements and tweaks continue to improve engine algorithms (and make them ever harder for agencies to second guess) and results have become ever more universal with the introduction of video- and image-based results.

But in the battle for relevancy, there is a new frontier: social media.

It stands to reason that the social graph should help to refine our search engine experience, making results ever more personal and relevant. Of course we are more likely to like products that our friends like, buy and engage with, so “social integration” is the new battle ground as engines seek to continue to drive relevance.

To this end, in a smart symbiotic partnership, Facebook and Bing have been working together for some time now, pooling their resources in search and social media to build the foundations of a (potentially) world-beating social search product. It’s a real win/win, with Bing getting the social shot in the arm it needs and Facebook helping to defend its dominance of the social sphere.

Not to be outmanoeuvred, across the road in Mountain View, Google has built its own social platform, Google+ with a similar long-term search and social media integration model in mind. I’m sure many people have seen the initial impact on results.

Now Bing has extended its efforts by “making social recommendations a part of search”, essentially incorporating Facebook’s Like feature directly into its search results. This movement towards further integration between Facebook and Bing moves the game on again, and is great news for marketers in the digital space – if we recognise how to act on it.

I would propose two simple strategies:

1. Take Bing seriously Search is bigger than Google, and in the US, the combined Bing reach across MSN and Yahoo is creeping towards 30% of the total query market. While the balance is weighed more heavily towards Google in Europe, effective social integration could be the game changer.

Facebook certainly has the data volume to make social search relevant and universal through Bing in a way that might be out of reach for Google until we see more volume in its own social environments.
2. Get “social by design” If you don’t have an effective strategy to properly engage with users in social environments, then in turn you will not be building the social signals that the engines are looking to incorporate and build upon.

One thing is clear: the future of search is most definitely social and the incredible shift in relevance – and usefulness – we will see when this fully develops shouldn’t be underestimated. And where there is relevance consumers will follow, and where there are consumers, brands will follow. For Bing, on the back of the Yahoo distribution deal, this partnership could just be the game changer.

The IPA has granted five Fellowships and one Honorary Fellowship to industry practitioners, in recognition of their exceptional and prolonged contribution to the IPA, and Mark Fagan is one of the lucky Fellows!

Mark Fagan, Head of Search and Performance Media, iProspect
Mark was a founding member of the IPA Search Group and became its Chairman in 2009. In this capacity he oversaw the launch of the IPA Search Certificate, the UK’s first professional Search Engine Marketing (SEM) qualification by search agencies for search agencies. He has been instrumental in the Certificate becoming an integral element of professional development within the search agency community, becoming a badge of professionalism for both individuals and their agencies.

As well as providing exceptional support to the IPA’s new business activities as Group Chairman, Mark also oversaw the introduction of an events programme that both promotes SEM to the broader advertising community and provides a forum for search professionals to meet, learn and network. Having completed his tenure as Chairman, Mark remains an active member of the IPA’s search community and recently committed iProspect as a founding agency partner for the Search Programme of the IPA Ad School.

Congratulations Mark!

The full article can be read here.

Leading digital marketing agency iProspect is predicting victory for Boris Johnson based on a digital and social analysis around the candidates’ campaigns for the 2008 mayoral election and today. The study reveals that in the 2008 election, a 60% share of Googlesearches for Boris Johnson led to a victory with the Conservative candidatebeating Ken Livingstone 53.2% to 46.8%.  iProspect has compared the historical data of online behaviour over the last month to find that Boris Johnson is receiving nearly five times more searches than his opponent. (11,629 searches compared with 2,337 for the week commencing April 22^nd).

Boris Johnson is also leading in the social space, driving at least 7% more positive sentiment across the socialnetworks than Ken Livingstone, both historically and over the last month. The results show that he is reaching and interacting with more people via social channels, for example owning over double the amount of interaction than KenLivingstone on YouTube and 15% more on Twitter, suggesting that his opponent is missing a trick in engaging with voters online.

Neilson Hall, Head of SEO, iProspect said: ‘Search has been overlooked as a key indicator of success in the run up to the election. What is clear is that in the digital ecosystem, electoral candidates are effectively brands – and as with any brand, online reputation is a prevailing indicator of success. Theresults provide a clear indication that Boris Johnson’s campaign is directly affecting online behaviour.’

See the full article in the Telegraph here. 

One key titbit to emerge from Facebook’s revised IPO filing (released Monday), highlighted the fact that the operating income made by the social giant during the first quarter of 2012 ($381 million) has decreased 53% in comparison to Q1 2011 ($731 million). Could this decline be due to their aggressive expansion?

Facebook has already hinted at counteracting these declining margins. Currently they receive a 30% share from app developers when users make transactions via Facebook “credits”.  At present, this online currency is only available to use on games such as Farmville. Given the large influx of apps being created for use on Facebook, there could well be scope to expand credits beyond gaming. If this does go ahead, Facebook have suggested that may have to re-think this percentage fee.

Facebook employs a share based compensation incentive with all staff and as Global growth continues so does the headcount; meaning more and more people are entitled to a slice of the pie. Not to mention the infrastructure costs incurred while setting up camp in new markets.

What’s more, Facebook are quite keen to tap into developing markets , like Brazil and India, where the average revenue per user will be less than in the UK and Western Europe. However, since these developing markets are highly populated with large volumes engaged Facebook users, having a strong presence here makes sense in theory. To take Brazil as an example, Facebook membership has increased 180% over the past year (now 45 million). If a similarly impressive trend continues, this seems likes a very scalable investment. It might give today’s investors pause for thought, but it  should pay dividends in the long run.

Google Adwords For Video rolls out of beta with improved targeting on YouTube.

Brand Republic have reported today that  Google aims to bring the detailed analytical power of PPC advertising to video content using the same bidding model. This will offer a great opportunity for our clients to engage with consumers and allow for more relevant video advertising.

Brands will be able to treat video ads as just another campaign that they’re running with Google making it more affordable and measurable whilst also allowing them to target the right audience demographic through targeting options, with a selection of new engaging ad formats.

Over the past few months iProspect have been testing a combination of formats for our clients in retail and the beverage markets. Overall, we’ve found it to be a rich and engaging way to connect with the right audience. In particular, one ad format named ‘in-stream’ has proven that you can reach a wide or selective audience whilst giving the viewer the choice to engage with your ad. What we love is the fact that the advertiser is only charged when a viewer has chosen to watch the ad, not when an impressions is served.

We believe that Google Adwords For Video gives the advertiser the best of video and online advertising. Giving advertisers the brand engagement and reach of YouTube combined with the analytical power of online marketing, through conversion tracking, insights and optimisation means this could be a real game changer!

In a quiet period after F8 last year, Facebook mentioned that the majority of its formidable software engineers will be working on mobile (tablets included), and for good reason: smartphone ownership is already at about 50% in developed nations, and growing phone ownership in MENA/BRIC is skipping out the PC middleman entirely. In Kenya, for instance, over a third of the population use mobile banking.

In other words, the world is going mobile, and Facebook needs to keep up. In this context, it becomes clear that the Instagram buy is a move to make sure the world’s biggest social network stays relevant on the screens of iPhones everywhere.

But why photos? Well, here at iProspect we know that photos make up some of the most engaging content on the web. People love photography, all sorts of photography – baby photos, travel photos, beautiful landscapes and candid snaps of friends. Photos garner magnitudes more comments, shares and likes. We’ve witnessed the rise of Pinterest, and it’s no coincidence that Facebook’s new Timeline format is so much more visual.

Photos are more socially important than ever when everybody has an internet-connected camera in their pocket. Yet Facebook’s phone app wasn’t really the best platform for taking mobile photos on. It wasn’t even necessarily the best platform for sharing them on, and that’s a big problem when you’re a social network.

Facebook knew this. Instagram is an undiluted, single-purpose app that does its job extremely well, and it was eating Facebook’s lunch. Post-acquisition, Zuckerberg’s public note shows that Facebook will be keeping the two products separate so that Instagram can do its thing without getting lost in the noise. Instead, the big blue will be carefully baking in Instagram to its platform, which should provide the best of both worlds – not to mention a boost in traffic.

In term of what users will actually see, a little bit of Instagram functionality might find its way into Facebook, and vice versa. And that’ll be nice for creative campaigns and further viral uplift. But the real significance is that Facebook should now be feeling much more comfortable about its mobile strength. As the world prepares to leave the desktop behind, its biggest social network is prepared.

Written by Ben Wood and Philip Dyte

With rumours circulating of Facebooks move towards the development and implementation of its own search strategy to rival that of Google, Mark Oldfield, account director for SEO at Aegis owned online agency iProspect discusses the possibilities and the implications it could have for search rivals.

http://www.thedrum.co.uk/opinion/2012/04/05/potential-facebook-search

However, at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference on March 10, 2012, Matt Cutts – the head of the webspam team at Google – announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty, which will target websites that overly optimise for the search engine. This is the latest penalty-related algorithm designed to not only improve Google’s search relevancy for users, but also encourage websites to provide high quality content and an enjoyable user experience. By penalising websites that are excessively optimised and feature mediocre content, Google is essentially giving less optimised sites with excellent content an opportunity to improve their rankings. Although the concept of penalising sites for building unnatural links is nothing new, it has certainly been a catalyst for making webmasters more aware about the various pitfalls of ‘cheating the algorithm’.

So what will the impact be and how will this effect the results that we see?

Understanding your link profile

The key to building a natural link profile is not to think about links, it’s to think about the user. What content do they want to see, is it sharable, will people want to bookmark it? All these questions are the ones truly world class SEO’s should be asking. If you don’t take these factors into consideration, you could be building an unnatural, unsustainable profile. So what factors contribute to an unnatural links profile?

An over optimised anchor text link profile – It is difficult not to agree that sites with a very large portion of links containing an exact match anchor text will suggest some level of manipulation. When you come across sites that actually have more keyword anchor texts than brand anchor texts that is even more concerning. Wouldn’t it be “natural” for people to call you by your first name rather than referring to what you do? It surely will be the same for people to refer to your products and services.

An uneven distribution in the level of authority of links – Looking at the page authority of links pointing to your site, skewed values can indicate a concentration of links with similar values that could imply an artificial acquisition process. This equally relates to having too many links with very high value or with low value. When we think of a natural link profile, in fact, the main reference should really be to the probabilistic and statistical definition of a normal distribution. It is not unnatural for sites to have very high or very low value links; it is just more common for this to occur with a certain distribution.
Of course, this will be relative to your niche, your brand, your online activity and many other factors, but essentially, it is about the pattern under which people will react to all of these factors by linking to your site.

A “spiked” link acquisition over time – That is generally known in SEO terms as “link velocity”. When looking at the amount of links created over time, signs that can suggest an unnatural profile can also be recognizable. Again, it is not that much about the unevenness of number of links crawled over time, rather about the regularity of trends.

Facts or events related to your site that happen in a particular moment and generate a concentration of links at that point in time are going to happen, and ultimately any online marketing activity is likely to bring that beneficial boost in link popularity. On the other hand, new links created with a very regular and predictable frequency do not reflect that natural buzz around your site.

Amending the damage is certainly the first thing to do. However, the real question is what to do next? Little is done if this is not put into the bigger picture and long term strategy of your site online promotion. The latest algorithm updates and actions from Google are clear and here to stay: the focus is on quality. For Google to serve the best possible search results to users, good sites need to be recognised as such.

Creating “engaging content” is one of those words that make SEO the continuous re-invention of ideas and approaches which this field is about: one objective, many ways to achieve that. What content you generate, how content is presented, to whom or through who content is created and shared? These are all questions a solid link building strategy should respond to through the knowledge of effective communication and atypical formats (e.g. infographics), diversified angles in treating subjects with a clear target audience and the amplifier power of social networks.

So try and have creativity and sharability at the heart of the offsite content you are producing, don’t think about the search engines think about the user.

You may often hear your stakeholders questioning the value of bidding on your own brand terms; my favourite quote from them is “why should I pay for consumer laziness?”.  On the other hand, other senior marketers have a different point of view and wonder why we should bid on generics, when terms are too expensive and don’t meet their ROI or CPA targets.

By only looking at an isolated KPI, based on last click performance, those people are missing the opportunity to capitalise on their generic terms.  Here are 5 ways to make sure that you will get the best out of them:

1. Analyse your PPC click paths to conversions
Although only X% of your generic clicks convert, there is probably a substantial portion of the non-converting clicks that are a part of the conversion path. If you track conversions in Google, you may use the conversion tab; select Search Funnels and export all the paths, then filter all your generic clicks and calculate the % of total conversions involving at least one generic click.

Google Adwords Search Funnels: This is a good start to assess your generic assists and first clicks. You can also change dimensions and look at impressions.

2. Run a cross channel attribution analysis
Although a visitor may click on one of your generic ads first, he can convert later through a different channel such as SEO or direct traffic. Adwords will not provide you this insight; therefore you will need to use other tools such as Google Analytics or a tech platform like Marin or Ignition One. All these analytics tools will show you the click paths at a channel level. But please make sure you tag your generic campaigns differently from those of your brand otherwise your tool won’t know the difference between a brand and a generic click.

Marin Visitor tab & Google Multi-Channel Funnels: Whichever tool you use, export all of the conversions paths for a 30 day period in an excel sheet.

3. Test new attribution models
As we saw in points 1 and 2, your generic clicks may contribute to a conversion but however it will not be rewarded with it; therefore its KPI will not reflect its true performance. Nevertheless after finding the real portion of your generic clicks involved in the conversion path, you can start testing new attribution models. Depending on your assumptions and beliefs regarding your customers’ behaviour, you will have the choice between various models, the most common ones being the U- Shape or the Exponential one which can be up weighted at the end or at the beginning of the path as showed in the picture below. Run a test for a month for each model at least, and monitor the CPA or ROI’s change for your generic terms. The best model should be the one which enables you to achieve the highest revenue possible within your overall digital ROI/CPA target.

Exponential Weighting vs. U-Shaped : depending on your time lag and path length, select the number of clicks to be shared in a conversion. And then up weight either the first or the last click.

4. Benchmark your Performance

Stakeholders will challenge you saying that your competitors are doing better and you may hear : “X competitor is in first position for a given generic keyword, whereas we are not even in the top 3 for the same keyword and it is already too expensive for us; how come they can make this keyword profitable?!” Use a competitor intelligence tool to answer this question. Tools like Hitwise, Adthena or Adguru will tell how much share of voice (SOV) you have actually achieved, how much SOV your competitors have, and how much they spend to achieve their SOV. You may realise that you have got the second largest SOV in your market but you are only the 5th highest spender. You can go even further by running some gap analysis at KW level and compare your cpc traffic volume, with any competitor. Besides, having a large SOV will also benefit your brand awareness.

Also, use those tools to review traffic coming from generic organic terms. You may find out that 90% of you generic traffic comes from PPC because you do not rank well in SEO, hence PPC becomes even more essential. Coordinate your effort with the SEO team to reduce bids on their top terms.

Adthena Share of Voice : in that case you can notice that competitor 3 has got more generic SOV with half the cost of its following competitor. Indicating that its generic paid traffic is more cost efficient than some of its direct competitors (number 4).

5. Optimise and Test further
If despite all your findings you are still not convinced by the performance of your generic keywords, it is time to optimise them. Reduce your bids to get more clicks for the same budget. Bear in mind that Generic’s bidding strategy is about converting whereas Brand’s is more about position. However make sure your bids are optimised for the 1st page. Review your ad copies because generic ads need to be tailored to the search query and to stand out more than brand copies. Review your ad scheduling, and if your budget is limited, only bid on generics at key converting times (probably in the evening), pausing them during the rest of the day if you cannot afford it.

My final piece of advice is to extend your cookie window. You may find out that a significant proportion of your customers take more than 30 days to convert (such as in the travel industry). Extending your cookie window will increase the chance for generic clicks to count more often during the click path.

Time lag: use Google Search Funnels to find out how long your paid visitors take to convert.