New Ad ranking research shows importance of position

You will know that how high up your ad appears on the Google results pages is absolutely critical in determining how successful your advert will be.  According to AccuraCast's recent analysis of close to two million Google ad clicks, the clickthrough rate for adverts in position one averages at 7.11%, whereas those in position nine averaged only 0.55%. Natural search result clickthrough rates also show this dramatic decline with position This shows just how much influence ranking has on your ads success. The graph above highlights the importance of occupying position one, showing a huge drop in CTR for ads in position two, and a gradual decline in CTR through ad positions. An additional benefit of getting an ad in position one can be seen in the image below. Ads get all sorts of additional bells and…

Engagement tips to drive offline action - a not-for-profit campaign example

At charity @vInspired, digital and social media is key to engaging with our young audience. Retweets, mentions and comments can be an early indicator of success, but they are only transitory metrics and not our end goal.

Source: All images: vInspired

If we're not getting young people to take a real-world action, to volunteer, then we are just measuring digital outcomes - what some call vanity metrics.

Our recent research, 'Online Engagement, Offline Action' explores digital behaviours that can be harnessed to help young people discover the value of volunteering. We identified four digital trends that can help us and other organisations use digital engagement to drive offline actions.

Four digital trends to help digital engagement drive offline actions

1. How can…

The most popular jobs in digital marketing show what employers are looking for

We showed in our recent review that digital marketing is now bigger than Internet marketing based on searches for knowledge and services related to digital marketing. As demand for digital marketing has grown, so has the number of specialist digital jobs needed in companies and agencies. Google Trends shows us that searches for Jobs in Digital Marketing has overtaken Jobs in Internet Marketing and continued to grow through 2013.

What is the talent gap between digital marketing jobs and resources

Earlier in 2013 we created the second infographic in this post showing the most in-demand online marketing jobs based on LinkedIn skills and the popularity of online marketing jobs in the UK. We have now added this related infographic which shows the Talent gap between…

Google Helpouts are the latest in a long line of services from Answers through Knol

From when Google Search launched in 1997, Google has always been trying to find the best answers to its users' queries. Google Helpouts are the latest approach to help answer users queries, but in a quite different way to standard search. Did you know that Google briefly tried a similar approach before? In order to provide a more dedicated response to users' queries, in Aug 2001 Google decided to launch 'Google Questions and Answers'. This service allowed users to send their questions by email and for a flat fee of US $3 Google staffers would reply to those questions. Unfortunately the Google service ran for only 24 hours, after which it was shut down due to excessive demand! This was followed by 'Google Answers' in April 2002. This  was different in the…

How to assess the contribution of different communications touchpoints

In my last post for Smart Insights I published a complete list of today's channels. Thanks to some comments and suggestions , the channel list has reached 106 channels so far. 95 of these are suitable for marketing purposes be they physical, digital or a bit of both. This is the way they break down.

[caption id="attachment_32020" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Venn Diagram of Marketing Channels[/caption]

Naturally there are at least two questions that arise when faced with such channel choice.

Firstly, how do you pick which channel to use? And then secondly, how do you measure the combined performance across channels? The latter question of course relates to the tricky issue of attribution - the apportioning of sales revenue to the channels that lead up…

The tech and tools to keep your Contact Centre at the cutting edge

Cloud Computing and social platforms may be the IT trends dominating the contact centre landscape, but there are a host of other technologies that are helping businesses drive value from their call centres. While Cloud-based infrastructure is the fastest growing area in the call centre industry - doubling in size over the next two years according to DMG and social media is being wrestled from the hands of the marketing department to support customers over new channels, Contact Centre Managers are also at varying stages along the adoption curve of a number of other disruptive technologies.

Technologies for the Contact Centre

MyCustomer.com spoke with some of the leading experts in the contact centre industry to discuss what technologies you would find within leading-edge call centres of today and that could be…

Twitter opens its advertising to small and medium businesses in UK, Ireland and Canada and adds custom timelines worldwide

Importance: [rating=5] Recommended link: Twitter blog With the virtual ink barely dry on the Twitter IPO, Twitter has sought to increase its revenue per user from advertising by offering its Promoted Accounts, Tweets and Trends products to smaller businesses in a limited number of countries outside the US - we will update readers when more countries are added. If you had previously tried to sign up via this form you would have seen a minimum monthly spend of $10,000, but this has now been removed, opening up more competition within the ad auction.

Ten things you need to know about Twitter's new advertising options

So this is big news for many small businesses, particularly those such as B2B companies whose audiences tend to…

A primer on Information Architecture (IA) approaches for cross-channel design

We can no longer think of a computer as something that just sits on our desk at work or at home. There are computers all around us, literally. In fact, in most situations where there are groups of people there are likely to be more computers than people and this is only 2013. Imagine the situation in 2018 and beyond... We are now living with computers in a much more intimate way since the inception of Apple’s first generation smartphone back in 2007. In turn, such close and constant proximity has resulted in many interesting changes. Firstly, how we use computers. Secondly, the information we use them for.   Source:  Amit Burstein / Flickr This article is a primer for people that want to gain an overview of cross-channel design. It will also address…

Persuasion techniques and examples to improve conversion

'You say tomato we say tomayto', 'c0mmunication breakdown', 'do you speaka my language', 'my baby’s gonna write me a letter'........? It’s funny how song lyrics, when paired with a catchy melody are easy to remember, bulging with emotive meaning.

How easy would it be, fellow webmasters, if there was an easier way to mainline understanding between a website and its target customers? Without the need to carefully group masthead, hero banner, top navigation, product description and call to action button?

The truth is web design and written text are like an arranged marriage. They barely know each other, they’ve never met and then suddenly there they are sharing a bed (or a webpage) for the next however many years.

Top tips for persuasive design

Page composition is often decided way before the body copy has been written - or vice versa. This rarely makes for a persuasive experience.…

8 techniques to choose the right marketing agencies to pitch to you

This article supports the Smart Insights agency selection template. The template helps businesses with the next step in the process, which is using a scorecard to help you choose the best agency when several are pitching to you. This workbook details a range of selection criteria which you’ll glean during either desk research, due diligence stage and/or at face to face meetings with an agency (either ‘chemistry’ meetings or pitch presentations). In the first part of this article I suggest how you can pull together a short list of potential agency partners.  In a follow-up article I will look at approaches to running the actual selection or pitch process. I say ‘or’ because you don’t necessarily need to run a full-blown pitch process (which can be very time consuming for both you and the agencies involved) for smaller projects or where an…