May 2008 Archives

Firefox 3 is now in its first Release Candidate version prior to full public release and I'm still very impressed by its 'awesome bar' functionality - which lets you use the browser location bar to search through your web history.

As I have previously blogged, that could threaten the surprisingly high proportion of branded search traffic through search engines which represents repeat visits to sites - almost 37% of all search traffic according to research last year from Atlas.

But Atlas also reports that 22% of traffic via search engines is first-time visits to sites from branded searches - people searching for 'dell' or 'dell.com'.  I think it would be quite simple to offer a version of Firefox with a database of brands and URLs pre-populated into its SQL Lite database.

That way, a search for 'tesco insurance' would create a dropdown like this...

I populated the database in this instance by browsing through to the relevant sites.

I'd say that this is easier for the user than bothering to do a search for the brand - and is clearly better for the brands who would no longer need to pay a handful of pence to Google for each click on a trademarked search term.

Ah, haven't blogged for a while, but luckily Precision Marketing has come to the rescue by publishing an article I wrote on digital's over-obsession (I think) with data.  Here it is:

Data, data, data. Everyone in digital marketing loves data. All those beautiful ones and zeros, streaming in realtime from websites, banner campaigns, email and all the rest.

Sadly some of that data isn't quite as solid as we might hope.

"Take something as simple as a visitor to your website. No two analytics companies have precisely the same definitions for a visitor, or a unique visitor, or a repeat visitor. So it is pretty much impossible to run two different sets of analysis on your website, and to get the figures to agree.

Avinash Kaushik, Google's analytics evangelist, writes about customer pathway analysis: "What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing." He is equally scathing about one of the most quoted online metrics, the website conversion rate.

When it comes to allocating sales to online activity, the standard rules for calculating cost per acquisition are just plain silly. To use a fight analogy, the last punch wins - which means that the last recorded click on a banner or text link gets all the credit for the sale. In truth, the 'fight' was won by a long and random combination of editorial, online advertising, Web searches and any amount of offline activity.

I suggest that once in a while the digital industry ignores its mountains of precious data, and instead bases its decisions on nothing more scientific than hunches and instincts.

We might just start thinking that eye-catching display campaigns on leading portals have more brand value than text links on dozens of affiliate sites. We might believe that search marketing is about as good for building brands as a small classified ad or that online advertising which is fun, involving and relevant is also more likely to build positive brand attributes.

As an experiment, ask your agency or web team to report on digital activity without touching Excel or Powerpoint. Ask them to tell you a story about how your customers felt before your campaign, how they were moved by it, and how it made them feel afterwards.

You just might discover more insight in that story than in the next million cells of Excel.

I'd guess that many visitors to the BA site for Terminal 5 will be looking for some kind of reassurance that British Airways and BAA have finally got the airport working properly.

Instead you find a website which is blindly pretending that nothing ever went wrong in the first place.  Here's the page on the baggage system which in reality was so disastrous that it led to some 20,000 bags being stranded at Heathrow and ultimately meant that flights had to be cancelled to avoid more chaos.

'Baggage has never moved so fast' boasts the website.  'The baggage system... will move your baggage as fast as 30mph on a total of 18km of belts. The long conveyor belts and intelligent baggage carts running on miles of rails mean that your bag can reach Baggage Reclaim in around 15 minutes.'

Or never, in the case of many bags.

Wouldn't it be better to at least acknowledge that with all this technology there are bound to have been teething problems, but things are much better now?

For most sites, clicking the logo will bring you back to the home page.  But clicking on the 'Upgrade to British Airways Terminal 5' logo actually brings you to an apology for how bad things have been - which is a strange use of the word 'Upgrade'.

Ah well, perhaps the web master is too busy lugging bags around the baggage system - which by the way was 'road tested to perfection'.

Oh dear!  

Another day, another map!

We've already done our first campaign aimed at Polish immigrants to the UK, so I was interested to see a recent report 'Floodgates or Turnstiles' by the Institute of Public Policy Research.  (See also http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7370955.stm for more interactive maps from the report.)

The map below shows the distribution across the UK of registered migrants from the "Accession 8" countries which joined the EU in May 2004: Poland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The picture seems to be more one of the Lithuanian Fish Farmer or the Slovakian Fruit Picker than the stereotypical Polish Plumber so beloved of the tabloid press.  It's astonishing how the hot spots of immigration are generally not the major cities, but agricultural areas like the Highlands of Scotland, Norfolk and Herefordshire.

That's quite different to other waves of immigration in the past. And as the IPPR points out, another major difference is that it is very easy for migrants from Eastern Europe to return home on the same cheap flights that brought them to the UK.  In fact half of all migrants may already have returned.

With free mobility across the EU, we can't take it for granted that the UK will always be the most popular destination for migrants. With parts of the rural economy now very dependent on migrant workers (not just agriculture, but tourism as well) we could well see the marketing challenge of the future being to persuade workers to stay a wee while longer in the Scottish Highlands.