Comscore data highlights consumer mobile behaviour

More than 72 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs via their mobile devices in August, 37% up year-on-year from the same time last year, according to data via comScore.

Here are 5 quick observations we can pull out of their data:

Nearly one-third of all U.S. mobile users are now accessing social media services More than Half of Mobile Social Networkers Access Sites on a Near Daily Basis Facebook Mobile Audience Approaches 60 Million Users 70 Percent of Mobile Social Networkers Posted a Status Update While on Their Mobile Device More than half read a post from an organisation, brand or event while on their mobile device There is no doubt that social networking via mobile devices is on the up-and-up. This is inline of course with sales of such devices, especially smartphones. Comscore also suggest that “This…

New research from Google suggests the investment is worthwhile - they would, wouldn't they?

Value/Importance: [rating=3] Recommended link: Google Research Blog

Our commentary

Whether using Adwords is generates incremental visits when you already rank well in natural search is a perennial question within paid search, but the findings in are still relevant & should be taking seriously enough to run your own tests. The research was aimed at answering one simple question: "Does bidding on keywords you already rank number 1 for in natural search just waste money or does it deliver additional traffic?". This situation is often the case with the brand search terms that are so important because they are the most important search terms for most well-known brands. The answer from the Google Research clearly states that: 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This…

A reminder of the latest changes to Google Analytics for non-specialists

This update page is intended to help anyone who uses Google Analytics, but not day-in day-out! It's also a reminder for me when giving training courses to highlight what's new. I subscribe to the Google Analytics Blog feed to keep up-to-date and other related ones like Webmaster Tools. There are quite a few detailed posts from Google about Analytics that won't make so much difference to most users and are more for interest of GA specialists working on it all the time. So in this summary we alert you to what we see as the major changes that every marketer using Google Analytics to review their digital marketing needs to know about - there's been a lot of them in 2011. Many thanks to the analysts like Dan Barker, Helen Birch and Tim Leighton Boyce who have written tutorials on how…

Over the last few months we’ve seen the new Google Analytics platform (v5) build momentum with a string of new feature releases, and last week it was the turn of real-time reporting to be included as the latest addition to the family. In my previous role with an analytics vendor, I would often have clients come to me with “Real-time data” on their list of requirements but in reality very few were in a position to be able make actionable decisions based on the data that quickly; to a greater extent that is still the case today. As analysts we struggle already to make the best use of the vast quantities of data we already have. Would increasing that with real-time reports across the system only exasperate that? In certain situations real-time data can be a very powerful tool in the analyst’s kitbag. I’ve been testing the real-time reports for a few…

Using the 4Ps of the marketing mix to give context to decision makers

Most web analytics departments in large companies are now using data to report on their online marketing performance. Navigational patterns, conversion funnels, and marketing channels have come to be the focus of most of these reports. But what happens after these analyses are distributed? "Analytics ninjas" may comprehensively understand what is happening with their website, but do other organizational members? Who is viewing these analyses and do they have the propensity to act on the data insights? Producing analytics reports is not a simple process, but involves numerous company resources. From technical departments for the implementation and deployment of web analytics to different levels of marketing management to adapt reports to business objectives, the whole process is undertaken whilst dealing with multiple assets and data sources. Such big investment is always undertaken with the objective of reporting financial growth, but it…

How to apply the marketing mix to develop online marketing strategies

We often hear that the concept of the marketing mix isn’t so useful any longer in this era of customer-first. But I believe it is still highly relevant today as a framework to develop digital marketing strategies. In this post I’ll take a look at situations where I have found it useful to develop and refine customer propositions.

Why the online marketing mix still matters

The marketing mix is a conceptual framework, and as such it is useful since it enables a common language to be used in the planning, execution and measurement of a number of coordinated activities that deliver the desired marketing outcomes. Customer centricity demands that organisations becomes a lot better at collecting and reacting to customer insight and adapt their offering to best suit an ever growing number of narrowing customer segments – ever approaching the ideal of…

Using symbols to engage your email subscribers

Getting the email subject line to standout in the inbox is a continual challenge. Here I'll show you how you can experiment with a technique you don't see discussed much in email marketing. It's about the potential of symbols, such as snowmen and hearts, to achieve this. I say "potential" deliberately - do you think it's a useful technique - would you use it and when? Email clients have been improving their support for world languages and this has meant also support for the many symbols that are defined in the world character set, known as Unicode. I decided to try a few symbols and see just how well email clients did in correctly showing them. The subject line I tested with was this: The webmail clients for Gmail,…

Review your persuasion approaches to increase conversion

Websites that are effective in conversion often share common approaches to persuasion. I'm often on the look out for simple, practical persuasive ideas so I can include them in workshop or conference talks. This post summarises 10 tried and tested approaches I've seen grouped under key areas of persuasion for websites. I hope you find them useful!

Page headlines

1. Ask a question Are you writing statement-based headlines? If so, try turning some of them into questions. Question-based headlines are more attention grabbing. Questions entice us to find out more. In a world where text scanning, rather than reading, is the norm, questions force us to sit up and pay attention:

“Do you want to engage your audience?” rather than “Engage your audience”.

2. Create a problem Once you’ve identified your audience, give them a familiar problem to…

An interview with Katy Andić, European Web Marketing Manager at Misco

Our articles by Emma Durant on the challenges of managing international marketing online have been popular, so when I recently connected with Katy Andić of Misco on LinkedIn, I thought it would make an interesting case study of how these challenges are managed in practice.  Misco provides a range of over 25,000 IT products via online and direct mail channels across Europe. A big thank you to Katy for summarising the approach Misco use to manage international online marketing in an interview with me.

Resources for managing local markets

Q. How many different European sites do you co-ordinate at Misco? What resource do you have available in each country for managing the site content? What are the biggest challenges in managing across all these sites? There are marketing resources in each country UK, DE, NL, FR, ES, IT and SE. In addition, there is…

and six mistakes to avoid disastrous mobile emails

A couple of days ago we summarised the latest Comscore research showing the popularity of email on mobile devices. Given the rise and rise of mobile email, it's important to ask your agency or ESP what they're doing to get the email experience right for subscribers using mobile devices. To help here, earlier in the year we wrote a 5 step guide to designing emails for mobile you may want to check out. I hope this new infographic may also help - it's from Litmus, the email testing service. Step 6 is making sure you test on the main platforms you're targeting.

Print / view large scale infographic.

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