Online ad spend grows by 50% on last year
The Advertising Association has released a report indicating that online spend has risen by 50% (to over £2bn) and now constitutes 10.6% of the entire market.
Press spend is down 2.7% to 43.7% (£8.4bn) and TV is down 4.7% to 24.1% (£4.6bn). Steve Ballmer’s prophecy that all media dollars would wind up online is on-track. Older media must respond by changing their pricing model - I would definitely buy a TV ad where I paid not for airtime, but for leads …
Life enriching?
Jersey’s £240k logo is pictured below:
Short of blogging ideas
Try Google news alerts. Signup at Google Alerts. Google will send you news information on any keywords you desire, and then you can spice up your blog with absolutely current information.
Google Website Optimizer
Google Adwords turn traffic on for your site as easily as turning a tap, but as many Adwords users will testify, traffic does not always equal sales conversions.
There’s three many areas to consider when identifying a poor conversion rate. Firstly, the adword copy itself needs to be compelling enough to attract buyers, and yet specific enough to deter timewasters. Secondly, the keywords should be specific enough to ensure you’re targeting the right audience. And finally, your landing page should give an attractive value proposition.
By running pilot studies, you can usually work out the first two parts (but keyword selection will need ongoing experimentation to ensure you get the highest CTR (clickthrough-rate) and lowest CPC (cost per click)). The third part, landing page effectiveness, requires extensive experimentation. You need to look at copy, images, price points, alternative conversion markers to sales (e.g. sign-up for free online course).
Google is highly motivated to help you in these areas. If you don’t get a good ROI on your Adword spend, then the $1.6bn per year cash river will start to dry up. So, to make things really easy, Google’s launched the Web site optimizer. This free online tool lets you run experiments on your site, and uses stats from Adwords to determine exactly which parts of your pages are performing. Of course, you could get us to run it for you …
[Quick WR SEO plug: Jersey web design]
The great leveller
Amazon’s web strategy has never stayed dormant. To become the world’s leading bookseller Jeff Bezos and his crew invested every penny they raised in producing a world class distribution and fulfilment system. To drive these systems, and the webstore, they designed a distributed hardware solution (just like Google).
Last year, Amazon, made the strategic decision to share its resources (for a modest payment), and the world now has Amazon Web Services. Essentially, this gives the ordinary business access to a massive scaleable architecture from the getgo.
Ultimately, Amazon’s motivation is to ensure developers use Amazon’s infrastructure, and by extension code applications for Amazon’s webstore and marketplace. Developers are just another distribution channel.
Despite such massive architecture, Amazon recognised that you still need humans to perform intelligent tasks. In a slightly sinister turn, Bezos asks why not use the Web to create marketplaces of willing human beings who will perform the tasks that computers cannot?
In response Amazon has created Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online service involving human workers, Bezos describes the phenomenon as “artificial artificial intelligence.”
Workers from all over the globe (think poor countries), signup to work on the Turk, performing mundane tasks like matching images with products, in return for micropayments ($0.002 per task, etc).
The evils of capitalism? I don’t think so; just a very smart way of distributing wealth, and giving a pay rate in hard dollars worth much more than local earnings. I’m already thinking of some Turk applications, like writing emails to politicians … please post any Turk ideas on the blog ….