“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”
In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.
With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.
Even though it is early days for Tim Norton’s PlanHQ, his team are making quite a bit of traction with their web based business plan software. Below is an iJump interview (thanks Simon!) with Tim in regards to his approach to marketing of PlanHQ using the blogging world as their main driver of referral traffic to their site. I highly recommend to OnlineMarketer.co.nz subscribers that this interview is well worth the watch. The main points of the interview are:
PlanHQ participate in the blogger community to drive traffic to their site.
They focus on bloggers who will influence main media
The data that is generated within their website and software application by its users helps with decision making on future product developments
Tim uses PlanHQ himself for their business
Finding existing communities to participate online is easier than starting your own community
The first phase of marketing PlanHQ was to get people talking about the product which is a “pull” marketing strategy. Tim will now go into “push” mode.
Tim typically blogs every 2 days.
The main benefits of blogging for PlanHQ are: increasing traffic to the site, high quality engagement with their target market, the ability to test ideas and get immediate feedback and to gain trust.
Tim Norton is speaking at the Interactive Marketing Summit next Monday, 26th May. Netconcepts will also be at the conference. It will be a great day mixing with some of the leaders in the online space in New Zealand.
Debbie Mayo-Smith wrote an article today in the NZ Herald’s Business Herald paper titled “When Google seeks, make sure your website is what it discovers”. Unfortunately I can’t link to it right now because NZ Herald has not made this particular story available online.
Debbie makes good points that the typical brief when designing a website is “make my site look good” and that making a website search engine friendly is often not even considered throughout that process. It’s a shame because many businesses are investing a lot of money into their websites to find out that it is filled with good looking pictures and design, but it can not be accessed by search engines like Google.
Dave Cooper from Netconcepts was referred to by Debbie as being “brilliant” when he offered the following advice when building and marketing a website on the Internet…
Incoming links are the most important element
Use Words, not graphics
Make each page unique in keywords
The page title is the most important part of the page
Use heading attributes - search engines place importance on these
Give your homepage the most attention as it is the most important
Use keyword rich site maps
Do not use complex URL structures that include parameters like &, % and ?
These tips are only the basics of natural search marketing. As your website technology requirements become more complex and competitive within your online market, more advanced strategies are required to gain the visibility in search engines that generate bottom line results.
In the last of our SMX Sydney series we caught up with Danny Sullivan who shares some tips to get rankings in blended search along with keeping a balanced life in this crazy “always on” digital world.
Jacqui Jones: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX Sydney and today were speaking with Danny Sullivan and so, welcome to Australia and welcome to this side of the world.
Danny Sullivan: It’s good to be here. I’m squinting and crying because it’s so bright today.
Jacqui Jones: It is extremely bright. Well, thank you for your session today on blended search, it was very interesting. We have some questions that we’d like to ask you from the team back in the US. One of which is about images and so when you actually do a site query command in image search, will that actually bring up all the images that are typically indexed by Google?
Danny Sullivan: I honestly don’t remember, I’d have to go back and sit at the computer and take a look at it. Are you saying that if I do a site colon and that domain command and I’m in image search, does that narrow it down?
Jacqui Jones: Yes.
Danny Sullivan: I wanna say that it does, but sometimes the site command can be funky when you try to use it on some of the vertical searches, so I’d have to take a look and see.
Jacqui Jones: Can we then assume that if that is the case, does that mean that only those images would be displayed in blended search results?
Danny Sullivan: Yeah, I mean if those images aren’t in Google image search, there not going to be showing up in blended search results, so that certainly is a good way of to find out what’s likely to make it.
Jacqui Jones: Absolutely and so, images from Flickr and other image type sites would actually display in blended search results as well, won’t they?
Danny Sullivan: That’s right. I believe that Google can crawl Flickr and pick up the material that’s over there. I don’t think that they’ve blocked it, although you don’t tend to see a lot of Flickr showing up on Google, and then of course at Yahoo it is the opposite. They favour the Flickr photos. They’ve been pulling in the Flickr thing, so certainly if you’re trying to deal with blended search at Yahoo, you wanna have a Flickr account.
Jacqui Jones: One of the observations I’ve made is that the content or the text on the page actually puts the image into context and that actually affects the ranking of that image, do you think that’s the case at all?
Danny Sullivan: I believe that’s what certainly Google has said, that the content of the page can be associated with it. Usually it’s the words that are very near the image, definitely the Alt text. They’re very explicit about the Alt text being important as well.
Jacqui Jones: Ok, great. So were seeing a lot more other types of web assets and media appearing in blended search results such as video, so how would you go about getting your video to rank in Google, is it a matter of just pointing links at that video on YouTube or on Google video?
Danny Sullivan: Well, in the terms of blended search, they’re hitting both YouTube and the stuff that’s on Google video. As I was talking about, some people feel like they’re favouring that content. Since a lot of these places allow you to take the video content anyway, I would just go and put it out on as many places as possible. If you can have it on YouTube and you can have it on MySpace video, why not put it in both places, you can always choose to promote just one of those, if you want to go with it from there.
Jacqui Jones: If everyone is doing that, if a whole range of businesses in a particular industry are all putting video onto YouTube, Google video and other video sites, how do you actually make your video more important in search results, more relevant to that search query? Is it dependant on the ratings or the number of views of that video in YouTube or is it simply having some links with good anchor text in it, linking back to that video?
Danny Sullivan: I honestly don’t know what Google has said in terms of when they hit blended search, how they’re making that determination. I don’t think that they’re using things like the YouTube ratings. And the reason I’m fairly certain they’re not doing that is because they couldn’t use those YouTube ratings and then fairly weight all the other video content that’s out there as well. I would tend to think it’s going to be much more a combination of looking at the meta data from the video they have that’s been reported as well as looking at the anchor text they’re pointing over.
Jacqui Jones: We know that local search and maps is huge on the internet, and it’s made a huge impact on what people are seeing in search results and where they’re going to. Once maps and local search starts to become more popular and more business are being listed in local search how do you actually make it to the top 10 listings that are displayed there? Again, is it based on reviews or links going back?
Danny Sullivan: There’s a tonne of factors that come in. The proximity to say the city centre if you’ve done a generic city search, it’s coming up within that, certainly the words that are in the listings, the title of the business name can have an impact and it can bring you up there as well. In some cases, like I think with Yahoo that they did say that ratings could have an influence as well. I can’t recall if Google said the ratings have been. I mean local search tends to be a very, very complicated creature in terms of all the factor s that flow into it.
Jacqui Jones: The next question is on a personal note. I don’t know if you’ve heard that on blogs recently or on the news, that some bloggers they have had heart attacks or a couple of A list bloggers have had heart attacks and it’s because they haven’t had a balanced life. And I know for you, you’re busy traveling the world and blogging and you’re online all the time. How do you actually keep balance in your life?
Danny Sullivan: I saw that story in the New York Times and thought it was a lot of bull really. I mean we had one tech writer that actually died of a heart attack. Om Malik who runs GigaOM did have a heart attack. I don’t know that’s a wave of bloggers suddenly having… Om fortunately didn’t die and he’s well, but you know I think lots of people have unhealthy lifestyles. I don’t know that just because you’re a blogger that tends to do it. For me personally, I did notice about two years ago that you know, I spent a lot of time sitting in front of the computer, doing a lot snacking, not getting a lot of exercise, I suppose blogging, it’s just anyone using a computer a lot.
I just really started thinking more about what I was eating, trying to eat less and do a lot more exercise. It was around the time there was a lot of people talking about doing this blogger diet, so I got inspired by it. I remember Chris Pirillo had lost a lot of weight, and (Jeremy Wodney?) had done that, so it was kind of nice peer pressure to think, well I wanna go out and see if I can do something better. I guess my life does probably, you know health wise has improved a bit. I’m sure I’m not the healthiest person out there though.
Jacqui Jones: So, what does a blogger diet consist of?
Danny Sullivan: Well, I mean in my case, it wasn’t that I was eating the wrong things. I was just eating a lot. I mean I was doing a lot of snacking. I would get up and I would take a break and I’d have you know, just some candy or something like that and eat too much and I wasn’t getting a lot of exercise. I think on the traveling it’s harder, cause you’re traveling and you’re going through an airport and it’s very easy to say I’m gonna get a candy bar here and I’m gonna grab a thing there. You go into a reception here and there’s a lot of food that’s out and you go oh I’ll have this muffin and pick up something like that, so for me that’s just more a lot of saying no.
Jacqui Jones: Very good. One last question. What do you think are the main challenges for search in Australia and New Zealand?
Danny Sullivan: You know it’s difficult to say, cause I’m not down here. I’ve really been talking with a lot of people already. The top of my head, I would say one of the biggest challenges is, you’re not getting as much support as of some of the new things that are coming out. There’s Local (search) that’s out there, that felt like from talking to some people that they didn’t have as much support. They did have a local business though, they were pleased about that. There’s no product search for Australia and they’ve had product search at Google for like 5 years now. So where, you know the heck is it?
It’s not like the people in the room that we were talking with didn’t have products to sell. There’s just no ability to put it out there. This is my 3rd trip to Australia and talking with people, unfortunately you seem to get use to being forgotten sometimes. You know, “we’ll get to you when we get to you”.
At least on the last trip I came out, it was still a case you couldn’t even buy the paid links, you know, so I guess there’s advancement there. They want to take your money now. You couldn’t even give your money away to them at the time.
Jacqui Jones: I think your observations are right, that sometimes we do feel a bit forgotten, but things are catching up and there’s a lot more happening down this side of the world, which is fantastic. Thank you for your time today and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Sydney.
Danny Sullivan: Definitely looking forward to it, you’re welcome.
In our second video from our series of SMX Sydney interviews, we speak with Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz on seo tools, link building and social networking.
Jacqui: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX Sydney and we have Rand Fishkin right here from SEOmoz.
Rand: Hi, How are you Jacqui?
Jacqui: Welcome to Australia.
Rand: Thank you.
Jacqui: It’s a bit bright isn’t it? It’s very sunny.
Rand: I think this is just about the best weather I’ve had at a conference. Maybe one of the best cities too, it’s incredible here.
Jacqui: That’s a lovely thing to say. As I just mentioned, one of our analysts in our US office, she wanted to ask a question about the sluggish-nish of your web site, so what is the case?
Rand: There are a few issues with SEOmoz. One is it was not built to handle the traffic that it gets right now. It was architected for maybe a max of 10,000 visits a day and it gets close to 15-20,000 on a lot of days. The other thing is the tools slow it down heavily. So as the tools have gotten more popular, that’s a tonne of database requests and it’s a tonne of pulling data from other places. One of the biggest problems was, I think a couple of weeks ago was running super slow, and were going what the heck’s going on, and we found this spammer in Singapore had like signed up for a tonne of accounts and was running like 50 tools at a time, so we’re constantly monitoring for that kind of thing. So, November we’re going to co-locate hosting in New York and Seattle. Were gonna have a new version of the site which runs a lot faster. Hopefully it will get better.
Jacqui: Ok, so in the meantime, you know, do we just have to persevere?
Rand: Yeah, I would say visit it during, no you shouldn’t have to do anything. It’s ridiculous to ask people to not like, come and visit. I mean were doing the best we can and I do apologise for the sluggish-nish. I promise it’s totally worth it dude, just you know, come on over.
Jacqui: Another question I have is how did you come up with the name SEOmoz? What does moz actually mean?
Rand: So, we stole it from the Mozilla foundation, and Chef Moz and DMOZ and all of those sites. So, they had this philosophy that we just loved, which was of openness and of sharing a lot of robust, free content. And we’ve always subscribed to that moto. So even though we have paid stuff, kind of behind the pro membership, there is thousands and thousands of pieces of great free content on SEOmoz. There’s a lot of stuff that users contribute themselves through YOUmoz, through the market place. All that kinda thing so, yeah, we took it from the kind of ethos of openness.
Jacqui: You’ve got a range of professional analytic tools available on SEOmoz. Can you tell us a little bit about what they are?
Rand: Sure, so I mean there’s a tonne of them, but one of the ones, how about I’ll tell you about one of the new ones, one of the ones that’s coming out, that no one has seen yet! So, in, what’s it gonna be, it’s June 3rd I think it launches, and it’s, I don’t know, we haven’t come up with a name yet, maybe like the video watchers can help us, you can help us come up with a name for it. Internally we call it the Trifector tool. So, it is page strength, which has been probably our most popular tool right, which gets a bunch of factors about your web site from the search engines, from Yahoo, from Google, from Alexa, all these places and then comes up with kinda score of how important we think you are. And, we took that one step further and said you know, page analysis is fine, but for a lot of time we need to analyse a whole domain, and other times we wanna… there’s blogs right and we specifically want to break out blogs, so we have page strength, blog strength and domain strength, thus we call it Trifector right, and so that is launching June 3rd. We have a tonne of tools in there, but I think this one is going to be huge, it’s gonna be very, very popular.
Jacqui: We’re looking forward to seeing that being launched. A question from one of our analysts Tim in our US office… he wants to know, can you actually add more than one site to the pro analytics tool.
Rand: You can’t right now, but you’ll be able to add five sites in total, so your site like plus four top competitors starting May, I think its like, May 20th, May 25th, something like that. We launched it in a preview Beta mode, knowing that’s what folks would want. We all ready have internally, some stuff where you can see like four sites at a different time. You can see oh well, Search Engine Land is going up and SEOmoz is going down, and oh we have to catch up to that Danny bastard, you know, yeah.
Jacqui: So what do you think what are some of the greatest challenges in search for Australia and New Zealand and I appreciate you have only been here for 5 minutes, but what are your observations so far?
Rand: I have a really good friend who’s based here in Australia and he spent a week with us at SEOmoz. Lucas Ng from Fairfax digital and I think he’s just brilliant, absolutely brilliant about SEO stuff and he commented that Australia and New Zealand are always about a year behind the US in terms of technology. Everything from Ajax, to social media marketing, to Twitter, you know, to Digg, or whatever it is, their always kind of a little bit behind, and so I think it can be tough to come to some of these presentations and to hear these tactics described and then say to yourself, ok we’re not quite there yet, but this does gives us an opportunity to be on the cutting edge.
Obviously some of the other things are it’s really tough to network from Australia, in person networking is extremely hard because it’s so far to fly to you know, London, or to Los Angeles, or San Francisco or New York, I mean these are just far, far away destinations, and so I think that there’s a lot of opportunity therefore in the power of social networking. I mean I had, you know, I had never met, Colina Jordan until I came here, but she was a huge name for me and the same is true with Barry Smyth and you know a lot of the other folks who are here. I knew them through the social profiles and media that they contributed to and participated online, so I think that recognising that challenge and also that opportunity.
Jacqui: Great, so for those particular people, they would want to have an international profile to network with people like yourselves and others in the industry in the States. So for businesses in Australia and New Zealand where they primarily want Australian and New Zealand business and traffic, if they were to participate in social media sites in the US, does that really provide a lot of benefit to them?
Rand: So, probably not quite as great as the other side, however that being said, if you participate in those sites, you can probably earn links that none of your competition will have and you can earn this branding outside of what your competitors can get. And that will help you right, so all of those links will help you to rank well for queries even here in Australia. You’ll earn that trust and the authoritative domain status and all these kind of things and then when your competitors are you know, struggling, they might say, oh man how did they get those links, how can I get those links and that’s a pretty powerful thing.
Jacqui: If you are generating global links, does that really benefit your site? I mean surely regional links will be better than a global link?
Rand: Not necessarily, not entirely. There’s something to this idea that authoritative domains gather links from all different countries, all different languages and recognising that is going to be really important. SEOmoz is a good example. Once we started getting links from Germany, from the UK, from Canada, from Australia, from Singapore, from China, and we look at all these different markets and said oh my gosh like this is really establishing us as an authority on the web on this subject and it means that our rankings are going to increase in the US as well as overseas. Let’s say you want to say target Singapore, getting links in Singapore is absolutely very important, but if you’re working here in Australia and you’ve got an Australian domain and you have lots of Australian links already and now you’re trying to expand your link profile, going international can be a great, great help.
Jacqui: We’ve been speaking with a range of PR consultants recently, and they’re just starting to learn about social media and PR online which is great and one of the question they ask is well, how do you actually value a link because they’re so use to when they get a mention in a newspaper article, they can put a dollar value on that, so how do you actually value a link? Is that possible?
Rand: Not, not right now, not, at least not from the prospective of this helped me this much to get the rankings that I want. I think you can do it arbitrarily and you can do it a little bit, you can kinda say, hey we through out this piece of content, it got this many links, it’s earned us this much traffic and referrers to that page sent us this many conversions. You might be able to puzzle out something, but chances are it’s gonna be a low ball. I think that low ball number is probably an ok thing to use, but yeah it’s a very, very tough thing to do because you don’t know whether that link is going to be, oh hey that increased my trust rank, that increased my page rank this much. I think that eventually there will be tools that will help us to analyse those.
Jacqui: Great, well that’s all the questions I have for today, so thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your time in Australia and also New Zealand when you go there next week, so thank you.
At SMX in Sydney I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing a range of professionals in the search marketing space. Over the next few days we will be delivering some of the video interviews that we conducted. The first in the series is with Monte Huebsch from AussieWeb where we discuss the state of local search in Australia and New Zealand.
Jacqui: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX in fabulous Sydney. Right now we’re speaking with Monte Heubsch from AussieWeb. How are you?
Monte: I’m great Jacqui, thanks for talking with me.
Jacqui: So you’re originally from Brisbane aren’t you and you’ve flown down to Sydney for the SMX conference?
Monte: Yes, we came down. This is the largest international conference of its type in the southern hemisphere with 200 plus people, people from New Zealand like yourself. I’ve got a yank accent, but, yes, I’m from Brisbane.
Jacqui: Is it possible that you can tell us a little bit about AussieWeb and what you do?
Monte: AussieWeb is a local search and business directory with 1.2 million Australian businesses in it. It’s the 5th largest directory in Australia. People who are larger than us are who you’d expect like Google, Yellow Pages and TrueLocal which provide the data for both Google and Yahoo!.
Jacqui: What is the status of local search in Australia and New Zealand if you know that?
Monte: Local search is in its infancy and is just beginning to grow. All the searches that were done historically in the past, and even Google recognises this because we partner with Google, you’ve used Google and found what you wanted and you have bookmarked all those sites and so you do less searches unless you have a new problem. Now people are using the Internet to find local businesses.
They are doing research on the Internet and finding a local company and not completing the transaction online, but they are buying local. In fact 62% of online purchases are influenced by online research.
Case in point, if you search for an Apple computer, an iPod or an iTouch you might find the Apple website, however you might not want to buy online and wait 3 days for it to be delivered. You want to find the local outlet, find out whether they have the stock of the phone or iTouch you want and then go buy it. Actually, local search is a percentage of general searches growing at a faster rate now.
Jacqui: Sorry, did you just mention before that you supply some of the data to Google and Yahoo!? Is that correct?
Monte: No, TrueLocal is the provider of the data. It is owned by Rupert Murdoch and they provide in Australia the data to Yahoo! and Google business directories. Google actually takes their data from multiple sources so they will have restaurant reviews from a restaurant review site. We provide Google with an xml feed if they think that data is useful so they use our data as well.
Jacqui: Do you think that over time that by Google’s local search and maps technology becoming more popular will possibly make local directories such as AussieWeb and local search redundant at all?
Monte: Good question Jacqui, it’s a valid one. Of all the major directories in Australia of which there are about 8, there are only two that are considered Web 2.0 and what I really mean is that they are free which are Google and ourselves. All the rest of the directories have premium listings and charge anything from $800 to $8,000 to participate. TrueLocal is a good case in point. They are an $800 a year product and if you list in TrueLocal, you automatically show up in Google and Yahoo!, as well as TrueLocal.com.au. That’s a paid environment and there is a big difference between paid and free. I don’t think we’ll go out of business just yet.
Jacqui: What do you think are some of the greatest challenges for businesses in Australia and New Zealand in regards to search?
Monte: The challenge in either country is the same and that is that there are so many new businesses starting every year and there are also so many businesses that exist and then go out of business. The number is around 40%. So keeping your directory base current and accurate is the biggest challenge and the way we get around that we have a button on AussieWeb’s site that says “report this listing as wrong”.
If someone goes and says “hey that business is longer down the street or they have closed or changed their name”, we’re actually using our users like a wiki to provide information to keep our directories fresh and current. That is our greatest challenge.
Jacqui: What are your top tips or what do you see happening in the future or what would like to see happen in local search?
Monte: We just did a seminar session with all the search players, competitors and friends alike, all got together and spoke about that. Google is a good case in point, where they have just added video, where you can link video to your local search listing and I think you’re going to find rich content coming along.
The ability for a small company who may not even have a website, having a directory listing that includes pictures, a map to get there, directions, a video, it literally becomes their web presence. And having that in multiple locations is valuable and the cost of being on virtually every directory in Australia of consequence, except maybe Yellow, is a few thousand dollars and that is probably better money spent than building a website which small businesses are time poor and do not have the ability to maintain and operate.
Jacqui: Absolutely. They are all the questions that I have for you today. Thank you for speaking with us at Netconcepts and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.
Monte: We hope to catch up with you in New Zealand.
At the last Google Geek Night I interviewed Jeremy Wood from Google about Google Gadgets and Gadget Ads. He provides some helpful hints and tips for marketers and developers on how to get the most out of Gadgets.
Jacqui: What are Google Gadgets and how do they differ from Google Gadget Ads?
Jeremy: We have two products which can be confusing. One is Gadgets and the other is Gadget Ads. Starting with the base program and model is Gadgets themselves. Typically Gadgets are most familiar to people who use iGoogle. When you go to the iGoogle homepage, all those gadgets, also known as widgets, which can be anything from weather to horoscopes to crossword puzzles to much more complex. They are really like little applications or mini websites.
Jacqui: Why do you think marketers should care about Google Gadgets or Gadget Ads?
Jeremy: So, for the Gadgets themselves is huge exposure. It is basically a way on a free platform for marketers to get additional exposure either driving traffic through to their website or branding or just getting interaction or value with their clients. Or even just to have a bit of fun without it costing anything except for some development time.
The Gadget Ads themselves could take advantage of our broader content network. You can place those ads in much more specific highly targeted pages so you know that the viewers who are seeing those gadgets are indeed your target audience. It is the ability to take a mini version of your website or a component of it to get in front of your end customer.
Jacqui: You’ve just spoken about how Gadget Ads can be placed onto the content network and that is a paid placement. What are some other ways for marketers to get more exposure for their Gadgets?
Jeremy:We encourage people developing gadget ads to place an “add to iGoogle” little button on their gadget ad itself. Although it is serving on the content network and they are paying for that, they can also let users take it off the content network and put it onto their iGoogle page leveraging that platform to get that additional viewership. People are also free to take that to put it onto their Facebook page, MySpace or even their own webpage or blog. It repurposes itself over and over so there is no end to where you can put it as it is just a simple snippet of code.
Jacqui: That sounds good that you can get so many uses from such a small application. Many of Netconcepts clients really care about conversion and driving traffic to their website. Do you think that Gadget Ads are a type of banner ad which is possibly not so great for driving traffic or do you think it is useful for that purpose?
Jeremy: Actually I think one of the powers of Gadget Ads is that because it is essentially a website in a website, you are free to develop it in anyway that you want. Based on your objectives such as driving traffic, then you are free to build a gadget ad to drive traffic right through to your website. We had a few people in the beta testing phase that did exactly that. They had one or two layers of interactivity before it drove people straight to the site. They had phenomenal click through rates and at the end of the day it was driving that drive click through rate versus just pure branding where they are just engaging users. It is wide open to what you want to do with it.
Jacqui: What we have seen so far with Gadget Ads that they are mostly flash banner ads. Do you see advertisers creating more mash-ups or reservation forms or other types of applications as such?
Jeremy: The great thing is that you are limited by programming or restrictions because it is open source. So it is native for people to take advantage of flash, it is familiar to people. We are trying to get people to be more creative and think outside the box. They are slowly starting to do that such as integrating different languages and things like that. We are going to see cooler and cooler stuff from the developers putting these things together.
Jacqui: What are some tips or hints how marketers could increase click rates from their Gadget Ads?
Jeremy: One of the learnings we are getting from the early testers and even people adopting it right now is execution. We are not seeing people fail because of distribution or anything else rather than the creative execution. We want to encourage people to spend the time in the development phase, take their objectives and build out exactly what they really want to do and they will see great results at the end of it. It is like any traditional website. Keep it fresh, keep it unique, make the navigation easy and make the path obvious.
Jacqui: How do advertisers track the performance of those ads? From the guidelines you are not allowed to place any cookies within those ads. How do you do that?
Jeremy: It is one of the unique things that stands out for gadget ads apart from anything else at this stage which is our interaction tracking. We offer up to 30 levels or different types of interaction tracking which feeds right back into your AdWords account. You’re free to bake that into the code yourself whether it is play, fastforward, rewind, mouse on, mouse off, clicking in a certain corner instead of another corner. Right now we have thirty but we’re hoping to expand that over the coming months to a much deeper level. Basically you have that great reporting that is fed right back into your account so you can track very, very well.
Jacqui: In the guidelines they also specify that animation must be kept to a limit of 15 seconds is that for the total ad itself regardless of how many animation screens there are within the gadget ad or can you have a maximum of 15 seconds for each screen?
Jeremy: In theory it is per animation. What we are seeing right now is that people typically are not confusing the user by having too many things going on at the same time. If you take yourself from one part to the next part and there is a flash animation to continue that 15 seconds. It is all about the user experience and you don’t want to overwhelm them with gizmos because you can.
Jacqui: It is about the user experience, so if the user does not flash enabled on their browser what do they see instead?
Jeremy: That’s a great point. Basically they will see a back fill image and we encourage the gadget developers to have that sort of alt source in place so that people can at least see a static frame. We are seeing the rates of flash enabled browsers are phenomenally high so there is extremely a small proportion of users that may not have the full user experience that you are hoping to get out of Gadget Ads.
Jacqui: Do you see at some point launching its own cookie type system to track the user experience at all?
Jeremy: I can’t really comment on that at this stage. This is the very early stages of this. We’re taking on feedback, we’re developing and we’re moving forward with a whole bunch of initiatives in the next little while so it is best to stay tuned at this stage.
Jacqui: For the foreseeable future, what is the future of Gadget Ads over the next 6 to 12 months?
Jeremy: What I would like to see are the developers themselves coming back to us. We want to work with the user community and see what people can do with them. And if there are any restraints working with those people to build that out and make it a function in future version of Gadget Ads. I would like to see people getting out of the mindset that it is just a flash ad and take it to next level and really take advantage of the open source platform to do something that is out of this world. Really from a creative element that is what I am hoping to see over the next 6-12 months. They can do anything they want with it.
Jeremy Wood sent me an email a few days later after the interview. He wanted to add the following to ensure OnlineMarketer.co.nz readers have the right information:
“The question was around what the user might see if they didn’t have flash installed. So the answer is basically the same as what they would see on any site that required flash and the user didn’t have it installed in their browser, and that is the little icon in the middle of movie area asking you to install the Flash plugin. The same issue would be encountered for an AJAX-based gadget where the user has javascript switched off. Gadget Ads are essentially a web page within an iframe. In terms of best practice, it is recommended that you have some sort of placeholder text in case Flash or JS is not rendering.”
We received our first question on OnlineMarketer.co.nz today posed by Mike Kittendaal of Kittendaal Ltd whom I suspect is not a real person and is only an alias.His asked the following:
“Hi there I am looking for some information on InPageAds in New Zealand and was wondering if you can assist. www.inpage.co.nz do not provide statistical data on the penetration of their ads in specific markets, the information they do provide is limited to Asia Pacific as a whole. I was wondering if you have access to any statistical information for NZ?”
Mike, I would like to ask you a question.Are you the owner of www.inpage.co.nz or do you have insider knowledge? When I did a search for InPage I came across a comment that you had posted on Jim Boykin’s blog associating you with this advertising product.
When participating in the blogosphere it is highly important to remain transparent, otherwise you can really shoot yourself in the foot.It’s like John Keys of the National party saying different things to different audiences and not realising that journalists will pick up on the anomalies.I recommend in future for you to simply ask for your product to be reviewed or something to that effect.Honesty goes a long way online.It’s all about making friends, turning those friends into customers then into advocates.
The concept of InPage advertising is an interesting one though.On the surface it looks like a good advertising product as it is akin to television ad breaks throughout tv show content.Even though ad agencies and advertisers may go for it, what’s in it for the website visitor?Most people hate advertising on the Internet unless it is highly relevant to what they are searching for or viewing online.
My gut feeling is that InPage may not work for all media websites.A publisher has to consider what affect an advertising product may have on its audience.Will the ads be shown in between every single page?Or are the ads simply displayed once or twice throughout the user session?A product like InPage must be used sparingly otherwise you will experience “ad burnout” rather quickly and people will not visit the site again.
Will the ads be contextual?The more relevant the advertising is, the more likely it will be perceived as content rather than an ad.You will need some pretty smart technology to do this. Perhaps you could partner with DoubleClick rather than reinventing the wheel?
In regards to the penetration of InPage type advertising I am not really sure.I have not seen this type of online advertising in New Zealand at all to date.Mike, or who ever you are, I’d be interested in knowing how advertisers and publishers are responding to InPage if you are keen to share this.
Netconcepts has heard from MSN Live that they are currently going through a backlink update.If you are wondering why the number of incoming links to your website reported by MSN has either dropped or increased hugely, this is due to the update.Some of our clients have had a drop of roughly 40% in backlinks reported.However, another client saw an increase of approximately 35%.
MSN Live’s update is split into chunks and they introduce some randomness to thwart spammers.A partial backlink update was occurring over the last day or so.The updating of backlinks precedes the ranking update usually by approximately a week.This means that you will find your website rankings in MSN Live to change shortly.
The MSN Live backlink update will not affect those websites focusing solely on the New Zealand market since Google makes up the dominant share of search.However, if you are targeting international markets, MSN needs to be part of the search mix.
There are so many hopefuls on the Internet. They hear of the get-rich-quick schemes and think that they can do it too. And yes, it is possible to make your millions on the Internet, but you do need a pretty smart plan to get there.
Many of the ideas that are bantered around include starting a blog, a social network or community site. Many still think that if you build it, they will come. If you plan to become an Internet publisher, it is time for a reality check. It’s great having wonderful content on the site and when the community is passionate about the topics within, but at the end of the day, being an online publisher is all about the numbers…. if you want to build a business empire or just make a living from it that is.
Ways of generating revenue from a site are in the forms of banner advertising, pay-per-click advertising, sponsorship, licensing your content to a media marketplace, selling products or services or participating in affiliate marketing programs (where you get a small commission if you recommend a product and people buy it).
Let’s just say that you want to generate $10K per month from advertising on your site. To reach your target revenue, you need to work backwards to understand how many people are actually required to visit your site and the number of pages they need to each view.
Most banner advertising programs are sold at varying CPM rate cards (cost per thousand impressions). Banner advertising is good for brand building, but not necessarily the cheapest way to drive traffic to one’s own site since click rates are quite low. Banner display ads can be bought for as low as US$0.25 CPM, with an average being US$5 CPM in the US market.
In New Zealand, CPM costs vary between NZ$0.50 and NZ$80, but typically only a few sites in this market enjoy the traffic levels that are required to employ a team of people and hopefully generate some profit.
Based on a CPM of $5, to reach $10K per month you would need approximately 200,000 to 400,000 visitors to the site per month, viewing approximately 5-10 pages each, with all inventory sold. By placing more ads on the page, would mean a smaller number of visitors or page views required to reach the target.
For a community site, banner advertising is a good way to monetise this opportunity, because members are less likely to click on ads and therefore a pay-per-click performance ad network may not maximise revenues.
From Netconcepts own media sites, we have generated between US$0.09 to US$0.46 per click. Our average is approx. US$0.20 per click with approx. 1-2% click rate. This is dependent on the type of advertiser that is on the site. Some industries like insurance are likely to pay higher per click costs, but click rates may be much lower due to the type of product being advertised.
Participating in a pay-per-click performance ad network is beneficial when visitors are searching for something. For example, they land on your site from being found in search engine result pages, and then they see an ad that meets their needs, so they click and leave again. A site that is built to reach a searcher’s needs inevitably gain higher click rates on their ads if they are highly targeted. For every click, you make some coinage.
These are just a couple of ways of generating revenue from website adverting, plus there are numerous others that can be explored.
With any type of business you are juggling several balls at the same time and you must not drop one. For publishers, activities such as content creation, community building, marketing of the site (including natural search marketing, paid search, link building, online pr and more) plus the monetisation all must be managed simultaneously in order to reach your targets. Without this, a website is merely just a hobby.
