Spend on online advertising hit €98.2M in 2009 in Ireland according to research by PWC and the IAB. This is approximately 10% of the estimated €940M overall advertising buget for Ireland in 2009.
This means that there should still be strong growth in the online ad spend for Ireland as it is low when compared to our neighbours. The UK has the highest proportion of online advertising at 30%, followed by the Nordic markets at between 20% - 25% and France and Germany close to the European average of 18-19%.
Google has added significant new functionality into Top Search Queries under the Your Site On The Web menu of Webmaster tools. The new information shows a fine-grained drilldown into your websites performance for its top performing search queries.
There is amazing information to be mined here as it shows the positions, impressions and click throughs for each query. What’s the benefit of this information?
1. Allows you to more accurately assess your SEO efforts for particular terms
2. Gives you an indication of the missed opportunity - difference between impressions and clicks
3. Demonstrates the relative value of positioning (based of the CTR differences for the different positions)
4. Allows you to evaluate the performance of your SERP snippet as a compelling “Ad” based to the CTR for postion 1
I’m sure there’s a lot more information in here and we’re only just tinkering with it at the moment - but definitely worth a look. The numbers look a little odd in some cases but I think that’s related to the relatively small date range for which this tool is currently available. As more data comes on stream I’m sure it will settle down.
Adding a site to Webmastertools is easy - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters just register, add a file or some code to your website to verify and you’re up and running. A must for anyone who wants to know how their site is performing…
The collapse of Ning’s free social network offering and the noises being made by Twitter at Chirp (Twitters first developer conference) underline the need to have a sound business model (yes even online!). Ning was the brainchild of Marc Andreessen (of Netscape fame) a network of social networks. It took in over $120M of investment, had 20 Million visitors a month and over 2 Million networks used the platform… Now staff numbers are being slashed by the new CEO Jason Rosenthal and they are going to drop all free users.
“When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.
My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks[...] drive 75% of our monthly U.S. traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.
So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning[...] All of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.”
Jason Rosenthal
This news is sending shockwaves throughout the internet community (and more specifically the Ning networks who have built businesses on the platform). Unfortunately just having huge numbers of users and masses of traffic is not necessarily a viable business strategy in and of itself. This is also slowly dawning on Twitter and rumblings of needs for revenue streams reared their head at Chirp…
It’s growing at an amazing rate (a couple of weeks ago I notice that there were 3.5 billion pieces of content shared each week - that’s now up to 5 billion!) Given the recent Hitwise data that puts them in the No1 spot for traffic in the US for the first time, I thought a snapshot for March 2010 could be interesting so here it is…
Statistics
Company Figures
More than 400 million active users
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
More than 35 million users update their status each day
More than 60 million status updates posted each day
More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
More than 3.5 million events created each month
More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook
More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
Average User Figures
Average user has 130 friends on the site
Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
Average user clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content each month
Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
Average user becomes a fan of 4 Pages each month
Average user is invited to 3 events per month
Average user is a member of 13 groups
International Growth
More than 70 translations available on the site
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
Platform
More than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
More than 500,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month
Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect
Mobile
There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
Enterprise Ireland is currently seeking new Business Partners to help us create start-up companies. We want to hear from successful business people to partner with us to transform State funded research projects into profitable commercial ventures. Our Business Partners Programme is fast tracking the creation of new companies by giving you access to our portfolio of potential start-ups. It will be your job to lead them to the marketplace. We would like to hear from you if you have:
a strong commercial track record
excellent business credentials
capacity to invest
ability to identify commercial opportunity
vision to transform new technologies into solid businesses
Here are some links to supporting material for the Internet Strategy lecture delivered by John Prendergast to the MBA program at University College, Cork.
Customers may be talking about your brand online - even if you are not!
It’s important to monitor activity around your brand online - here’s a classic customer service nightmare for United Airlines which obviously touched a nerve…
This is a humerous (but clearly serious for the target brand) version of the increasing phenomenon of the consumer hitting back online (more…)
Google is phasing out support for IE6 in it’s Google Doc suite (see below). Hopefully this will help force users to upgrade their browsers, which will be a major benefit to developers. IE6 has long been the bain of QA and testing departments in web design and development houses as it is very quirky (I’m being polite). (more…)
We would like to wish everyone a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year! Best regards from all the team at Aonach. We look forward to talking to you in the new year. Our offices will be closed from 23rd of December until 4th of January 2010
Google have an interesting Internet Statistics resource called Google Internet Stats which they are aggregating from 3rd parties. It looks like a very interesting little widget…
I noticed it’s not as accurate as one might have imagined…
In January 2009, JP Morgan estimated that 2008 worldwide retail eCommerce spending, excluding travel, totaled $438 billion - of which one third ($152m) was in Europe.JP Morgan, January 2009
Now I presume that they meant $152 billion - so as ever with this type of thing you need to check for accuracy and you also probably need to understand the context of the research and the statisitical tools used for analysis. But as a quick thought provoking snapshot of the state of the Markets I think it’s great…
Some of the interesting eCommerce Stats that caught my eye were as follows:
41% of Europeans claim to have changed their mind about what brand to buy as a result of researching choices online,
John Lewis is the latest online retailer to jump on the “click and collect” trend. They are trialling a service which will allow shoppers to order goods online at JohnLewis.com and then go and pick them up at a store. The twist in the tail on this one is John Lewis only has 26 outlets which is quite limiting, so they have decided to include their Waitrose’s supermarkets as collection points. This will extend their reach giving them an additional 213 collection points that are widely distributed. The Waitrose collection points concept is being trialled in Hexham and Tonbridge.
Click and collect services, where goods are ordered online and picked up from a store, are one of the fastest-growing trends among internet retailers. Argos last week reported its Click & Reserve service was up 45% on last year and is responsible for 17% of all sales. Halfords.com were another early mover and their reserve and collect service has driven an increase in multichannel sales of 90% in the year to April 2009, having passed the million customer mark.
This trend makes huge sense for the consumer and the retailer. The consumer doesn’t have to wander round the shop or queue endlessly for checkouts, but can select goods from a reputable brand at their leisure online. For the retailer the upside is this makes the nightmare of shipping goods to individual homes (and trying to find people when they are at home) go away. Indications are that these multichannel approaches also drive more people to the store (above and beyond the online purchasers). Nevertheless, it’s not all easy - it requires accurate realtime stock levels and a slick customer experience both on and off-line to succeed.
