Recently in Online media planning Category

This month DoubleClick published a useful benchmark of online advertising performance rates across all activity in 2008.  This is pretty much the most solid data you'll ever see on display advertising performance, based according to DoubleClick on: "hundreds of advertisers, thousands of campaigns, and tens of billions of ad impressions."

It's a useful set of benchmarks showing for instance variations in click rates by size and format of ads.  The data is also split by geography - which shows some fairly disappointing results for the UK.

The table below shows the average click through rate across all formats (static image, flash, video) for the main economies in Europe, plus the United States.  (The DoubleClick report has worldwide performance data for twenty nine countries).

Country Overall Click-through Rate
Spain	0.14%
Germany	0.13%
France	0.12%
Italy	0.12%
United States	0.10%
United Kingdom	0.08%

This is really disappointing - and not just for the online advertising industry.  As the Guardian recently pointed out, the British newspaper industry is also desperately hoping for a renaissance from online advertising.

So why the poor performance.  Probably no single reason, but possible reasons would be:

• banner fatigue - advertising creative not being refreshed often enough
• lower percentage of inventory going on larger sizes / more static formats
• larger percentage of media going out across networks which tend to deliver a lower CPC
• more brand advertising versus direct response campaigns

Any more ideas anyone?

I’ve published my slides from a presentation I gave yesterday at the Financial Services Forum looking at the impact of insurance aggregators from a search/media perspective.

Most surprising thing for me was the rise in searches for the term “compare car insurance” alongside a down trend for “cheap car insurance”.  The rise of aggregators like Go Compare really seems to have changed searching behaviour.

Great post by Mike Butcher on TechCrunch arguing that AOL may be contemplating a sale of Bebo.

One strategic issue I can see with Bebo as a media property is that it is very very strong with kids of school age – but as kids get older, they seem to gravitate to Facebook.

If Facebook can hold its audience from the teen years into their twenties and thirties, clearly that’s going to be more valuable to many advertisers.

Whilst I don’t doubt that AOL is probably looking at some disappointing numbers from Bebo right now, I’d be surprised if they decided to sell at what (I hope) is close to the bottom of the market.

That’s especially because Bebo has delivered some great innovation around ad properties, particularly around online soaps like Kate Modern. It’s easy to pigeon-hole Bebo as a social networking site – but it is also an important delivery channel for video.  And video, as bandwidth increases, will be the channel of the future.

Google's results for the fourth quarter of 2008 came out yesterday and look typically impressive overall.  

There were plenty of reports of Google's Street View spy cars being spotted around the UK last year, so presumably we won't have too long to wait for Street View being introduced here.  

There I was in a post-Chrome haze thinking warm thoughts about Google, when the FT spoils my mood by reporting on the first major attack on the advertising alliance between Google and Yahoo.

"a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90% of search advertising inventory and states ANA's concerns that the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising."

The alliance will also impact on UK advertisers.  My view is that the alliance will particularly drive up the price of niche terms on Yahoo!, which are something of a bargain at the moment compared with the same traffic on Google.

From the perspective of a digital agency, you sometimes get the feeling that the entire world is using either Firefox or Safari.

But in fact the real story of the last few years has not been the remarkable rise of Firefox (and I am a massive fan, of course!) but of the resilience in Internet Explorer's market share.

I cobbled together the graph below (click on it for a larger version) from browser statistics up until the end of Q2 2008 from TheCounter.com.  (This will understate the impact of the launch of Firefox 3 on the 17th of June - Wikipedia quotes a share of 19.73% for Firefox in August 2008.)

So Firefox has eaten into Internet Explorer's market share - but as of June 2008, IE still enjoyed 78.3% of browser usage.  Over the last two years, Microsoft's share of the browser market has dropped by just eight percentage points.  For the majority of users, there have not been compelling reasons to switch from a browser that is stable and works pretty well.

Those who were dissatisfied with Internet Explorer will already be using Firefox or Safari - and it is these early adopters who are most likely to jump once again over to Google Chrome.

I've been thinking for a while that the one area where Google's domination of search is just a tiny bit shaky is around control of the browser.  That's why I got excited about the 'Awesome Bar' in Firefox 3, with its convenient ability to search through your browser history. 

And suddenly it really does look like we might have another browser war on our hands.  Internet Explorer 8 is now available for download in its second pre-release beta.  And around an hour ago came the news that Google is launching a new open source browser - Google Chrome - tomorrow. 

There are signs that Google has acted somewhat hastily to get the launch of Chrome out the door.  They admit that they sent out a comic book release explaining the thinking behind chrome a little early.  And the browser's homepage - www.google.com/chrome - currently hosts a hand-coded 404 not found message.

So a quick take on this news.  Anything that speeds up or improves internet access can only be a good thing.  Pushing the envelope on the web browser could potentially kick start a new wave of site development as companies look to take advantage of new functionality.  And Microsoft does seem to have been somewhat asleep at the wheel with its browser developments - IE7 came out almost two years ago, a lifetime ago in web terms.

On the other hand, Google needs to be careful not to flirt too closely with the 'M' word - its domination of search is clearly monopolistic, it owns one of the largest ad serving companies and is a major player in many other sectors.  Control of the browser as well may well just be a step too far towards global domination.

And this, presumably, is why Google's announcement is of an open-source browser, and they stress that any improvements they have engineered in - for example - javascript support, will be shared with competitors.

So welcome to Chrome.  A shiny, friendly metal... nothing for us to worry about. 

Probably.

  

Following swiftly on from Google's decision to allow a one-click unsubscribe to ad targeting on Google and Doubleclick, Yahoo has now announced a similar one-click unsubscribe from ad targeting on its site. 

Yahoo's announcement comes as part of its response to the request from the House of Representatives committee early last week for information from thirty major internet companies about their ad targeting plans.

Looks like this is  becoming a hot issue on the other side of the Atlantic - don't expect any political developments in the UK though, as parliament is well into its long summer holiday right now.  I wonder if any prominent UK brands will start offering a similar opt-out to targeted advertising.

I think that privacy and control will be big issues in digital marketing this year, so it's interesting to see that Google are now offering an explicity opt-out from cookies set either by Google or by their adserving network Doubleclick.  This button is very prominently displayed on Google's main page about Advertising and Privacy.