August 2007 Archives

Last week I pushed up a quick Facebook poll asking about how people would plan a trip to somewhere new.

Sadly I kind of mucked up the questions.  What I was trying to find out was how many people would go to Google versus go to either a travel vertical or a site like Flickr or Youtube.  The question was targeted at Facebook members based in London - here's a screengrab of the results:

So what went wrong?

The great thing about Facebook Polls is that you can see the data coming in in pretty much real time.  So after 15 minutes, I could see that the results were going to be massively skewed towards Google.

But that isn't the whole picture - for example, content on TripAdvisor is pretty well indexed on Google, so you might start a search on Google, but finish on tripAdvisor. 

It would have been nice to have been able to ask 'which of the following would you use' and allow for multiple selections, but Facebook won't allow for that. 

On the positive side, because I could see that the real-time poll results weren't giving me what I wanted, I could kill the poll after just 30 responses - costing me a very reasonable $8!

And actually, bearing in mind the pathetically small sample, it does look like a very small minority of people would actually turn to TripAdvisor or YouTube before doing a search - so I think there is the germ of something interesting here. 

Final take-out: if you have a simple question that needs researching, a Facebook poll might have some value - if only to spot problems with your question set!

I was speaking with Nate Elliott from Jupiter Research last week and he choked on his muffin at the idea that clickthrough rate on banners might be a useful guide to levels of overall engagement across a campaign.

I wasn't really arguing that clickthrough rate alone can unlock the secrets of the ancients: but I do think that it might be a useful indicator to how well a campaign is performing (taken alongside other metrics, like the obvious ones of cost per sale).

Funnily enough, where we have run brand research alongside an online campaign, there is often a correlation between campaigns with a high CTR and campaigns which deliver good uplifts in brand metrics.

And the new mantra in PPC search is that it is important to focus on CTR alongside cost per click. CTR is, for search engines like Google, a measurement not of brand impact but of relevance - and campaigns delivering high CTRs are rewarded, via the Quality Score, with a lower cost per click. 

Of course, that isn't a disinterested decision by the search networks.  The calculation they make of (crudely) high rank = CPC x CTR also magically ensures that the listings that appear highest on the page are also those which deliver the most revenue.

No one is talking about a system like this for display advertising, but it would make some sense for publishers.  It would essentially reward banners that are the most interesting to their customers, delivering more relevant content through editorial and advertising.  It would also be a good incentive for clients to keep their banner creative fresh and interesting - which would be good for everyone.

The Guardian today has a long profile of Joanna Shields, formerly MD of strategic partnerships at Google Europe, and now International President at Bebo.

The piece has some interesting background to the commercial arrangements behind Kate Modern.  There are five principle sponsors, each paying £250,000 for six months of coverage within the episodes:

• Procter & Gamble (Gillette, Tampax and Pantene)
• MSN
• Orange Mobile
• Paramount
• Disney / Buena Vista

So what are the advertisers actually buying?

It's early days, but we are promised more than just product placements - the idea is that the brands will be written seamlessly into the plot.  For example, one recent 'webisode' has Kate arranging to meet a friend at an 'Orange Wednesday' evening at the local cinema.

In some cases, the wider community can almost do the advertisers' jobs for them.  I spoke to Mark Charkin, Bebo's Head of Sales in the UK, last week and he told me that a fan had commented on Kate's profile page complimenting her on her hair - the answer came straight back that the secret, naturally enough, was Silvikrin!

The presence of Procter & Gamble is intriguing given the involvement of P&G and Unilever in the early days of television - clearly P&G is taking a punt that interactive drama like this becomes the soap opera of the new century.  

UKnetmonitor has picked up some research we did earlier this year on the UK travel industry.

Their article is titled 'Influence of blogs on consumers' - which is slightly misleading... what we were really looking at was the impact of user review sites like TripAdvisor on purchases of flights and holidays.

This was primary research with consumers and a decent sized sample of 600+ responses.  Headline findings were that although consumers used a wide range of information sources, review sites like TripAdvisor were the single most trusted reference. 

Also interesting that the more frequently people travel, the greater they trust independent review sites.  And - rather depressingly for the travel industry - the more they travel, the less they trust the information provided by holiday companies.

One thing I'm interested in - and where we may do further research - is whether social networks like Facebook will become even more influential than vertically-based review sites.  The logic goes 'I value the opinions of other people, but I particularly value the opinions of my friends and peer group'.