Archive for January, 2008

A leading web marketing body has enacted a change of personnel and hopes to accompany it with a bold new strategy.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Affiliate Council has voted Ben Wood, managing partner of media agency Vizeum, as chair for the year ahead, with the new appointment likely to spearhead a new strategy for the IAB.

Under Mr Wood’s stewardship, the group now hopes to follow up its recent Affiliate Marketing Handbook and establish best practice guidelines and standards for the discipline in the UK, a move particularly relevant at a time when many large companies are embracing affiliate marketing and link building.

Mr Wood said: "I hope my appointment is symptomatic of a move for affiliate marketing from being a niche online play for companies to being a much more established channel, sitting at a higher level.

"If you look at the economy at the moment, all marketing that focuses on ROI as a primary objective is going to rise up the agenda in 2008. As a result of that, affiliate marketing has a massive opportunity to become a dominant channel."

Wood’s firm Vizeum, has this week been appointed by rail booking firm The Trainline to provide re-branding services.

Top UK contributors to video streaming site YouTube are now set to cash in on the advertising gains that the site yields from popular clips.

British film fiends sending their clips in to the site will now be rewarded in the same way as their US counterparts, as YouTube looks to share the revenue generated from new ads included alongside videos.

The bottom 20 per cent of the video screen will now be dedicated to ads for the first ten seconds of all clips, with film creators now set for a slice of the advertising earnings that are measured on a pay per click (ppc) basis.

Amateur film-makers could find that YouTube’s new generosity becomes particularly generous, given that the creators of the most popular clips could earn up to GBP1,500 a month.

The Google-owned site failed to specify the precise criteria for film-makers to cash in on ppc ad revenue, but indicated that the scheme will only be eligible to frequent contributors of regularly watched clips.

Monthly visitor numbers to the site are already estimated to have hit around 130 million, making the scheme a potentially lucrative one for budding film-makers and pranksters.

The key to web marketing is relevance to the customer, a factor giving small firms the opportunity to excel and offer a more personalised approach, according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).

Highlighting the best approaches to direct marketing and other channels, the group claimed that failed marketing campaigns were doubly wasteful if a firm was unable to identify which customers were not responding.

David Thorp, director of research and information at CIM, said that for direct marketing it was key to refine a campaign, with affiliate marketing and other web approaches also depending on the relevance of content.

He explained: "Market segmentation is a key fundamental. Knowing who your audience is, as a small company, that is a really big benefit. You really do have to know who they are.

"If you are a specialised company then technology can really help you to identify your people. That’s the big advantage that a smaller enterprise has."

Knowing who a marketing campaign is aimed at can often help make the most of keyword research and web analytics, ensuring that efforts are channelled toward targeting the right market.

MySpace has won the right to take control of domain name, myspace.co.uk, despite only coming into existence years after the moniker was founded.

The address was initially registered by Total Web Solutions (TWS) of Stockport in 1997, but regulators ruled that the page was now being ‘parked’ and decided to award it to the social network.

TWS was said to have originally used the address to offer mini websites to subscribers and email services, but had recently ‘parked’ it and was benefiting from the popularity of the social network and web-users seeking to locate it.

UK domain registry Nominet ruled that the site was now being used for pay per click gains, with keyword-related adverts placed on the page that related to MySpace and other social media sites.

The address has been passed to the social network, by virtue of regulators agreeing that TWS had adapted the original purpose of the page and was unfairly benefiting from its unintended association with MySpace.

TWS complained: "The fact that the adverts shown in 2004 did not include adverts associated with the Complainant proves that the Complainant was not well known and was not known to the Respondent when it started using the site for sponsored pay per click links."

Web marketing experts have claimed that it is pointless to barrage unknown web-users with direct marketing emails.

E-consultancy explained that company brands could be severely damaged by accusations of ’spamming’ individuals, making it necessary to retain a high focus when conducting direct marketing campaigns.

New electronic communications regulations require individuals to opt in before they receive marketing emails, unless interest has already been shown in products and services linked to the marketing campaign.

Linus Gregoriadis, head of research at E-consultancy, said: "Some companies buy lists of contacts who have opted in to receive communication from third parties. This is legitimate but marketers typically have better returns when they are emailing people within their own organically grown database."

"Marketers should do their utmost to make sure they only send their customers relevant emails. This process can be aided by customer segmentations whereby people are contacted according to their interests, profile and previous behaviour."

He added that if people continue to receive irrelevant emails they will switch off mentally and eventually report it as spam.

Affiliate marketing could be growing at an even faster rate than first thought, according to Precision Marketing.

The marketing specialist site claimed that close search market analysis revealed that rates of growth in the sector could be considerably above the "conservative" analysis made last week by E-Consultancy.

The figures in question identified growth up to 45 per cent last year, with more than GBP3billion generated in online sales, but Precision Marketing pointed to growth figures of more than 70 per cent at expanding affiliate marketing network Buy.at.

It was claimed that the firm was benefiting from high profile clientele including John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, O2 and Virgin Mobile, as more and more firms used the marketing method to achieve growth at reduced costs.

Other big firms like RBS Insurance, Littlewoods, Eurostar, BT and Lovefilm were also said to be flocking to the benefits of affiliate marketing, making it a highly profitable sector by any estimates.

Buy.at chief executive Kevin Cornils was quoted as saying: "Affiliate has proved itself as a particularly cost-effective way to drive a volume of customer acquisition, resulting in increased investment in the channel."

Search marketing has enjoyed a strong fourth quarter of 2007, according to new search market analysis from RBC Capital Markets and SearchIgnite.

Yearly growth in total search marketing spend was found to be as high as 26.6 per cent, while figures for the quarter also revealed companies in the retail sector the quickest on the uptake, with a 43.9 per cent inter-annual growth rate.

Quarter-over-quarter spending increases for the retail sector were even as high as 72 per cent, suggesting that high street retail’s slowdown this winter had not affected the proceeds of paid search to the same extent.

Jordan Rohan, managing director of RBC Capital Markets, said: "The strength in retail category ad spend evident in the SearchIgnite data suggests that search may not be as tied to economic forces, in the near term, as some people had feared."

Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite, added: "It was a strong quarter for search marketers across the board. While there was particular strength in retail spend, all industry segments that we monitor showed strong year-over-year growth."

Yahoo!’s market share of media spend was seen to have declined over the quarter, while Google gained one per cent and cemented its place at the top of search marketing.

After the success of third-party applications on Facebook, the social network is to allow them to be embedded and used on other websites.

Drawing on its set of API tools, Facebook will extend its applications to other sites, allowing advertisers further means of penetrating the lucrative marketing opportunities of social media.

Last year Facebook opened its site to third-party developers in a bid to boost its revenue, with a new JavaScript client library now promising to allow users to make Facebook API calls from any site and extend marketing campaigns.

Facebook’s Wei Zhu said: "Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML.

"An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own websites."

Providers of third-party applications on the social network have so far reported strong advertising success, thanks to the wide reach of Facebook audiences.

Snap Interactive’s "Are You Interested?" and "Meet New People" Apps reportedly helped the company to secure a 300 per cent revenue increase from the third to the fourth quarter of 2007.

A leading figure in social media has been invited to speak at a major search marketing event in London.

Rachel Hawkes, co-founder and editor of the Social Media Portal (SMP), will appear at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) London 2008, where her knowledge of social networking sites will have a high premium on it.

Ms Hawkes’ SMP is a news and information portal mapping social networking sites and their owners and is a product of London media consultancy, Elemental Communications.

Drawing on her knowledge of social media, Ms Hawkes will address questions on video and podcast search engine optimisation (SEO), at a time when web-surfers are ever-increasing in number.

But in anticipation of her speech, Ms Hawkes, who is also account director at Elemental, claimed that media content was expanding as fast as web-surfers, making it more important than ever to get SEO right.

"With over 65,000 videos uploaded daily to YouTube and almost 80,000 podcasts available in iTunes it is becoming increasingly difficult for brands, agencies and marketers to have their content found and consumed."