Firetop

It’s easy to get carried away with all the social networking hype; one has only to spend a few minutes eavesdropping on the train to hear how successfully young people have latched onto the current tools for keeping in touch with their peers (think Bebo, MySpace and Facebook) as well as the proliferation of Instant Messaging. It’s fairly evident that as this young tech-savvy audience moves into the world of commerce, the networking tools they’ve grown to love will be put to new uses; job searching, candidate location, news & information gathering, even supplier research and contract negotiation will be second nature in the modern virtual world. This in addition to their existing love of all things Web 2.0 for the entertainment aspect of their lives - which already carries so much weight in setting modern music and film trends. (more…)

As we moved into 2007, Forrester Research identified that 81% of broadband users now have pop-up blocking software installed. According to the National Statistics Office, UK broadband users account for more than 73% of the UK’s Internet audience. With such information available it’s fairly safe to assume that next to nobody will see a pop-up campaign on screen. The continual demise of the traditional pop-up advert has surely reached its climax; pop-ups are beyond terminally ill, they’ve flatlined and there’ll be no resuscitation. (more…)

Some of my more regular readers will recall that in early November I looked into the popularity of ‘Celebrity Sex Tape’ downloads. This followed a Channel Four documentary detailing the history of the top 10 celebrity sex video downloads – a documentary which I felt compelled to correct on its statistical inaccuracies (I reordered the popularity chart based upon actual search volumes not just search results). As it turns out, that blog entry is now one of my most popular; bombarded with searches for ‘celebrity sex tapes’. However, we all know what these visitors are really searching for… and it’s not the correct video download chart. (more…)

On Thursday evening I was privileged to attend the first AdMonsters event of 2007, this time a cocktail & dinner evening at Axis / One Aldwych. One Aldwych is a hotel not too far from Temple tube station, ‘Axis’ is one of their restaurants (a rather nice one). This online advertising operations event was, as usual, pretty popular - a few familiar faces from agencies and publishers were present to discuss the daily grind facing us all in delivering online advertising efficiently and effectively. (more…)

This morning I visited the Grange Fitzrovia Hotel in London to attend a Forrester Research presentation. There the folks at Forrester went through the results of their second 2006 UK Internet user study. Forrester run such surveys every 6 months, collecting user data from over 130,000 UK consumer profiles visiting the UK’s most popular websites. Typically this data is collected through invitation to an online survey, as a visitor surfs a website. Participants are questioned over their basic demographic information such as age, sex and income - data which is then reviewed against their own described online behaviour to identify trends. For me the results were fascinating, giving a great insight into the real UK usage levels of blogs, social media, mobile phones and media sites. (more…)

One or two sites I’ve worked on of late have had problems with the relevance of Google Adsense adverts appearing on their website. Typically the problems have involved adverts being relevant to the website’s name (or domain), but not what the website is actually about. For example, this website ‘Firetop’ on initial installation of Adsense saw a huge amount of advertising for ‘fireplaces’ - relevant to the content? Nope! Whilst rooting around in the Adsense help pages I came across a couple of useful comment tags which enable a webmaster to emphasis key areas of content for the Google Adsense spiders to prioritise, with inverse tags to highlight areas to ignore. Within 48 hours these fixed 99% of the problem and increased relevance accordingly. (more…)

Eye tracking research studies are available from relatively few web technology companies. EyeTracking Inc are one such US based company, their eye tracking service enables customers to determine where an audience are most frequently looking, and within the context of a website - on screen as they browse page content. Data is obtained by fitting willing volunteers with head gear which, in my opinion, resembles some kind of medieval torture device, or the kid at school who got bullied for having a full head brace! In reality it has to be a bit cumbersome because it contains a series of cameras which track the movements of a user’s eyes as they read web pages. The tracking provides a ‘heat map’ of hot and cold areas of a web page with hot (red) being most read. For companies employing eye tracking researchers the resulting data is massively helpful in planning site layout. (more…)

Mozilla Firefox is clearly the largest rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser; my own recent analysis put its use at 22% of the 3.5 million audience I sampled (up 2% on January 06). However, whilst popular with web users the browser is not making the life of online advertisers (or ad operations staff) any easier. Firefox is Adobe Flash enabled, but only enabled for standard in-page units such as a 728×90 leaderboard or 160×600 skyscraper. Anything that I class ‘enhanced’ rich media’ such as an ‘expand on mouse-over’ format will malfunction. (more…)

On Thursday I attended the second AdMonsters Operations Leadership Forum at Café Royal on Regent Street. Admonsters brings together the publishers and agencies involved in online advertising production & operations.  Discussion and debate focuses on the issues affecting the global industry and ad trafficking processes. Attendees included members from the IAB and ABC Electronic, publishers like FT.com, CondeNast, Sky TV, MySpace and Yahoo!, agencies like Mindshare and Zed Media plus vendors / sponsors Doubleclick and Mediaplex. The biggest issues discussed at this event included streaming video standards and website auditing and demographic analysis. (more…)

This afternoon I had an online demonstration of Nielsen’s AdRelevance tool, an online reporting interface which enables the subscriber to see which advertisers are running banners across the major media websites. AdRelevance reports show where banners are running, flight durations and stores examples of the creative. From an online ad sales perspective this is wonderful stuff. Auto-triggered email alerts can dispatch emails displaying the latest campaign details from competing websites, enabling a sales person to contact the relevant marketing manager about running a similar campaign on their own network. However, one thing was pretty clear - AdRelevance is generating false clicks on banners when it retrieves creative and URL information, not good news for advertisers. (more…)