A briefing on Product Listing Ads and Google Shopping changes  

From today, February 13, Google will phase out free listings in UK Shopping searches. As Google Shopping changes, marketers will need to budget for clicks they previously got for free and get to grips with the Merchant Center, product feeds and product listing ads. “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change.” – Charles Darwin Change is coming. After ten years of sending free consumer traffic to online businesses, Google Shopping is ending its charity. From February 13, free listings will begin to disappear from Google Shopping. In their place, we’ll soon see more and more of the Product Listing Ads: big, shiny, image-led adverts which contain all the info a shopper needs to make a purchase there and then. This is…

An experiment to assess what drives organic Reach on Facebook? Likes, Comments or Shares?

I wrote recently about some comparisons I had drawn between different types of post on Facebook with a view to drawing conclusions about the most effective content types on Facebook. Continuing on a similar theme I've been experimenting this week with two similar posts. One resulted in lots of Shares and Likes but only 1 Comment vs another with lots of Comments (and half the number of Likes and Shares). Here are the post, they were both classified by Facebook identically (both were Photos - recently downgraded by Facebook in its new variant of the Edgerank algorithm) and both were posted at a similar time of day. The image on the right (with the highest Reach) was posted first. If anything its high success would have driven a higher organic audience for the subsequent post (on the left)…

Using eyetracking to assess the 3Ws of your landing pages

Imagine that you are at a reception in a massive hotel ballroom, and Barack Obama is the guest of honor. You desperately want to speak with him about a brilliant idea, but know that you will only have a few seconds to catch his attention before he is whisked away by his security detail. So, what do you do? Flash your accreditations and references? Dress up in a clown costume and perform your rendition of the robot? Launch into a slam-poetry version of your master’s thesis? These tactics to get attention may seem improbable, but they are precisely the kinds of mistakes in building a landing page that we see at Eyequant all the time. Landing pages are designed to give the user a branded and actionable gateway into an online offer. Without stretching our poetic muscles too far, a…

Buyometrics’ success formula for 7% click rates on daily emails

Email campaigns with unique open rates of 30% and unique click rates of 7% beat email marketing benchmarks and represent great performance that any campaign manager would be happy with. Now try doing that for a daily email across your entire customer database... That’s harder, but it’s a reality for the Buyometric Daily Deal campaigns. Buyometric are letting me lift the lid on their success formula. The corner-stone is using highly dynamic and automated deal content targeting driven from a predictive algorithm which factors in several signals about what will most likely appeal to subscribers. It starts with collecting user preference information after signup. Providing preference information is optional after the signup, yet Buyometric get a massive 78% of new signups to complete this optional step. Its all down to the incredibly smooth user experience, I’ve previously posted about how this works…

Personalisation 101 - how to increase customer engagement and conversion rates by "Sense and Respond" to Digital Body Language

In this post I hope to give a practical guide to website personalisation, to show you how to improve customer engagement and increase your conversion rates. Apart from the well-known Amazon example, many other types of business are now seeing the benefits of personalisation.

easyJet increased their conversion rate enormously through personalisation. During the easyJet January sale 2012, they delivered a personalised home page to each of their 2.5 million customers and converted five sales per second. (They used the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform).

John Lewis said that their personalised site was a key factor in increasing Christmas sales by 27.9%. Personalisation is important to business and customer alike and no doubt you have already seen it feature high up in the…

12 practical tips for customer preference centres

Preferences centres have never really caught on have they? Many of the big retailers like this one from Amazon or Tesco have had them for years, but they're still not used so widely.

Here's a great example of a B2B preference centre:

I remember, as far back as 2003 I defined these ‘E permission marketing principles’ to prompt email marketers to think how to improve relevance and targeting of emails - the main purpose of communications preference centres. The key advice remains valid I think: 1. ‘Offer selective opt-in to communications’ Offer choice in communications preferences to the customer to ensure more relevant communications. Some customers may not want a weekly e-newsletter, rather they may only want…

7 steps to getting an edge through marketing

We asked ourselves this question of our own business this week - how will our own agency, First 10, grow commercial success in digital marketing as well as deliver that as a service to our clients? How will we walk the talk, too. We wrote down the key seven factors to help us avoid those false gods of advertising (in any shape) and dedicated sales people who so often plague our industry. We came up with a list in order of importance - and we liked it - so I thought I'd share it with you since I think it applies to marketing across different types of businesses… Improve the product (or service) - having worked in senior positions both client and agency side I cannot stress how this is the most important way to improve commercial success. Marketing is baked in. Sounds obvious, right.…

A briefing on the new Adwords Enhanced Campaigns

Value/Importance to AdWords advertisers: [rating=4] - But only if you have high levels of mobile traffic and/or physical store locations. Recommended link: AdWords Enhanced Campaigns announcement - 06/02/2013

Our commentary on AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

Google’s mantra has always been Relevance, Relevance, Relevance! They’re now really putting it into practice for mobile marketing with this exciting new feature which means that soon you will be able to more easily target mobile users with ads based on their location, device and time of day. These options were already available to advertisers, but it will become much easier to implement and measure mobile-specific ads. However, I understand that tablets can't be easily targeted any longer. Google says this is due to a blurring of different tablet devices and desktops. Nevertheless, savvy advertisers were using this as a way to reach a perceived more valuable audience. The key features of…

Responding to the four biggest legal risks of social media to business

With legal cases involving social media are on the rise, businesses need to manage the potential risks. To help review the challenges and solutions to managing the risks of social media, we have recently published our benchmark study on social media and the law. We hope marketers can use the data to evaluate their knowledge and establish the risks they may need to manage. We’ve summarised the risks of social media in this infographic showing the four main risks as we see them against the awareness of the law. We see three main takeaways from the research: Many marketers know the risks, but don’t have company buy-in. Over 50% of companies don’t consider social media legal risks to be an issue or a priority. This was unexpected when respondents made it…

How do you bridge the gap between email's value and the failure to recognise this value?

As a marketer, what do you associate with email marketing? The traditional media impression is one of an ageing Labrador: reliable, steady, still capable of doing a good job, but not really where the action is these days. And then there's the go-getting reality. Here are some key numbers that popped out of the UK DMA's recent National Email Client Report, which surveyed 250 brand marketers on how they feel about email marketing and its role, how they use it and what results they're getting… Is email still relevant in a multichannel, mobile and social world?

89% said email marketing is "important" or "very important" to their organisation.

It’s just about those traditional generic promotions and newsletters, though?

One-size-fits-all…