netactr

If you are looking for ways to better engage your audience, check out Microsoft’s Left vs Right. This site hosts two fictional characters representing the spectrum of political opinions. Visitors use the chat metaphor to initiate searches on Live Search and watch short skits that are loosely based on submitted queries. Left vs Right builds on the success of Ms. Dewey and Live Search Club.

Snap is an interesting gadget for spicing up your web content and earning ad revenue in the process. After you integrate a 3-line java script into your home page - I just created a title-less text widget on my WordPress blog and copied the code over there - all your links will be “snappable”. Snap will insert an icon right after the link to indicate the availability of a “snapshot”. When a visitor hovers over the link (or clicks on the Snap icon), a popup magically appears showing the snapshot of the target site and an ad.

I like Snap’s business model for they basically share the ad real estate with you. Enter your AdSense pub id (more ad networks to come) and Snap will start serving ads alternating between their own account and yours. Instead of establishing a new business relationship (and sharing your SSN or Employer Id with yet another ad network), you stay with your existing ad provider and just use Snap’s technology to present ads in novel ways.

Summary: It took me the whole of 15 minutes to sign-up for a Snap account, configure my AdSense settings, and set up my blog with the Snap code. Kudos for ease-of-use. The relevance of ads is low though. I don’t believe Snap matches ads to content yet. This is something I’d look forward to in future versions. I would also ask for a more favorable ratio of my ads versus Snap’s – right now it looks like I am getting less than 20% of all Snap popup views.

We’ve all heard it, that terrifying R-word. Recession that is. Besides the monthly pain from looking at one’s brokerage statement, recession also means a changing landscape for marketing professionals. Marketing budgets will be under review, impacting general awareness vehicles such as marketing swag, PR, print and TV ads disproportionally. Anything that can’t be directly associated with sales is threatened. You know how it is … folks will be searching for that elusive half of advertising budgets which is universally acknowledged as being a waste. But you can fight one R-word with another. I mean ROI, Return On Investment.
Marketing managers can reduce their CFOs’ anxiety by shifting budgets from views to clicks. Anything that can be tracked to a prospect or, better, a sale will prosper. Paid Search, Cost-Per-Action-based display ads, referrals from social connections should do well. Technology and marketing vendors can do their part too. Sharing the risk, generating incremental revenue and splitting the proceeds are better than prepaid fixed cost campaigns.

I just stumbled upon Openads.org – a publisher (as in “ad publisher”) solution available both as software and hosted service. If you own a few websites and are considering allocating some of your web real estate to revenue-generating ads, you should definitely check these folks out. I like the fact that Openads aggregates ad inventory from multiple ad networks: adSense, Yahoo, Valueclick, Casale, you name it. For publishers without IT departments Openads just launched a hosted version, and for more technologically-invested sites there is an open source server software, free to run and customize. Feature-wise they seem to be quite complete. I especially like the “direct selection” feature which basically provides an ad query language (may I suggest ‘AQL’, or ‘akl’, as the new name) based on keywords, campaigns, ad sizes etc. Oh, last but not least, they just received another round of financing. Openads is here to stay.  

If you have a few free minutes, check out zaaz.com. Zaaz is an interactive marketing agency and their site concept is truly refreshing as it is built around a combination of search and chat metaphors. First, the Flash-based site recognized my wide aspect ratio display and printed a quirky message. I was hooked. On my typing “SEM” in the search box Zaaz showed the definition of the term. Ok, not very helpful, but acceptable.

I then typed “web site design” and that’s when I had the second WOW. Zaaz showed further query suggestions such as “Tell me more about your Creative Director” and “Who do you design sites for?”.

Relevant? Yes. Mind-boggling. Hell, Yes! You can’t help but appreciate this site’s distinctive personality. Can you imagine your own web presense following the same concept? I definitely can!

The supply side of the Web Analytics Data market is dominated by comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings, compete, and hitwise. The first two (comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings) provide the most accurate and stable data sets and are quoted throughout the industry. Compete and hitwise are good info sources for triangulating or researching trends but sometimes have wide swings month to month. The Big Four charge Big Bucks for their data streams, but you can get free but still useful bits from their PR departments: comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings, and hitwise.

For example, the favorite ad format in the first week of January 2008 was Leaderboard (728×90) at 30% of all unique ads tracked by NNR, followed by Medium Rectangle (300×250) at 22%, and Wide Skyskraper (160×600) at 15% (source NNR).

compete has a Site Analytics tool that works well with larger sites and, most importantly, is free. Compare the Unique Visitors trend from compete with the (paid) data from comScore for my favorite blog techcrunch.com. They are close but I will let the TechCrunch folks choose which numbers they want to believe in.

compete Techcrunch UV Trend

comScore Techcrunch UV Trend

According to comScore, 28.3% of all web site visits in December 2007 were to Search/Navigation sites such as Google Search or Microsoft Live Search. Compare this to 24.3% in January 2007. One of the fundamental activities at work or school is researching for information and people are relying more and more on Internet to accomplish this task. Makes sense. But it’s still amazing.

US search query volume is predicted to grow at 12-13% CAGR rates through 2010, the Worldwide volume - at almost double these rates (23% CAGR). Interestingly, Paid Search revenue is expected to grow faster than volume, driven by increases in RPM (revenue per 1000 queries) due to increases in ad inventory (e.g. better ad coverage). Here’s a compilation of volume growth research from a number of sources.

(click on the thumbnail image)

Assumptions
(1) Morgan: Morgan uses SRPV (Search Related Page Views) for forecasts which is different from Distinct Searches. In 2005 the ratio of search result pages viewed per distinct search query was approximately 1.8. I converted Morgan’s SRPVs into DSs using that ratio.
(2) Piper Jeffrey: U.S. and International search query volume CAGR of 12% and 23% (2006-2011) respectively

Notes

• Morgan: Searches are driven by increased user base, broadband penetration, improvements in relevancy, and search becoming a primary means of accessing information.
• Morgan: US Internet user base grows at 2-5% five-year CAGR for 2005 - 1010, broadband penetration to reach 60-70% during this time.
• Piper Jeffrey: Globally there are more than 550 MM searches performed daily on the Web = 200.750B/Y = 16.729B/M (End of 2006)
• Piper Jeffrey: Internet users in the United States perform about 245 million searches per day = 89.425B/Y = 7.452B/M (End of 2006)
• Piper Jeffrey: In the next five years Europe and Japan will increasingly gain significance for the Internet companies, while China and India may well dominate the markets in the next decade or so.

Here’s a random statistic: Search volume (measured in distinct search queries) on weekends and holidays is about 60% of workday volume (in US, Major Search Engine). This ratio has been pretty constant over a longish period of time.

I just stumbled upon this collection of internet-related research and forecasts by Morgan Stanley, your friendly neighborhood i-banker.  The Internet Advertising Outlook report by Mary Meeker is very good, especially because it spells out various assumptions and drivers like Coverage, Click-Through-Rates etc. Not surprisingly, Paid Search leads the pack at least until 2010. Marketers like performance-based tools. It’s all about improving Marketing ROI, isn’t it?