Recent figures published by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in Australia show that the online advertising sector continued to buck the trend seen by the wider advertising market and recorded further healthy growth in 2009, with a 9% year-on-year increase to reach $1.87bn to the end of December.

The results from the quarterly Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER), compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), also showed that for the three months ended 31 December 2009, the total expenditure was $513m - the largest fourth-quarter recorded and an increase of $50.5m, or 10.9% from the fourth-quarter of 2008.

The IAB says that the continued growth of online advertising expenditure comes at a time when the industry is expecting a decline of up to $900m in the Australian advertising marketplace for 2009 due to the impact of the global financial crisis.

The general display advertising and search sectors both performed well for the full year, with search and directories advertising accounting for just short of $1bn or 50.5% of total expenditure, representing a growth of 17% year on year. Display advertising grew by 7.2% and accounted for almost $500m or 26.6% of the total expenditure for the 12 months. Classified advertising continued to lose share and saw a slight decline of 2.3% year on year, accounting for 22.9% of total expenditure for the year.

Within the general display figures, email based advertising comprised $9.3m of advertising expenditure for the last quarter, up from $7.9m in the previous quarter. Video based advertising increased its share of advertising expenditure from $4.7m to $5.3m for the same period.

Little change was reported in the pricing methods for online advertising expenditure, with the Direct Response pricing method comprising 26% in General Display advertising and CPM 74%. CPM pricing is based on a straight Cost per Thousand pricing methodology, sponsorship, or CPM-like Pricing, while direct response based pricing is based on a non-CPM display methodology. This may include any pay per click, pay per sale, pay per action or pay per lead.

Labels: online advertising, research

Some new research published by comScore shows that display advertising appears to be more effective at influencing users' online behavior in Europe than in the US. A summary of the study has been published by ClickZ, and reports that display ads in the U.K. and Europe drove substantially more traffic to advertisers' sites and promoted a greater number of trademark search queries than in the US.

The comScore study suggests that users in Europe are 72% more likely to visit an advertiser's website, having previously been exposed to display ads, compared with a 49% lift in the US. The research also found that European users are 94% more likely to conduct a search query on an advertiser trademark after seeing an ad, compared to 40% being more likely to do so in the US.

The results seem to show a good level of impact in both markets, despite the decline in clickthrough rates from this form of advertising. comScore suggest that the differences in behaviour could be the result of lower average levels of exposure to online adverts in Europe, compared to the US, which helps drive higher response levels. Also search activity is higher in the UK, meaning that driving users to search could be easier. There is also some evidence that creativity in Europe, and in particular by UK advertisers, means that awareness and clickthrough rates can be higher.

Labels: online advertising, research

The Google Webmaster blog has posted an article about managing multi-regional websites. This covers many of the questions often raised by international companies who have developed, or want to develop, different country versions of their website, including in different languages. There can be a number of issues that need to be considered in these cases, including domain name structure, duplicated content and of course maintaining and updating content efficiently.

The Google post is a brief introduction to some of these issues and reviews the main issues to consider in planning the domain structure as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. It reviews the geotargeting factors and how this can affect the visibility of websites on Google's regional results, as well as the best ways to deal with duplicate content.

Labels: google, webmaster tools

The New York Times reports on the case of Pandora, the Internet radio station that has survived over 10 years of setbacks and barriers to grow the online business to the successful position it now holds. Having struggled to find investors, battling record labels over royalties and losing a large audience outside of the US due to publishing restrictions, Pandora is now attracting interest from investors and is considering to move to a public company status.

The article outlines the stages that Pandora has gone through to now be a profitable company with a bright future. It says that Pandora's success can be credited to perseverance and adaptability in the changing online market, with the support of an intensely loyal user base and a willingness to shift directions when it faced difficult times, changing from a business to consumer model, from subscription to free, and from computer to mobile (taking advantage of an iPhone app to stream Internet music to users).

Labels: internet business

The Google AdWords blog has announced a new feature to help brand advertisers who use the AdWords content network. Although most AdWords campaigns are aimed at achieving a direct response from the advertising, brand advertisers tend to use display ad formats to raise awareness and purchase consideration for a product or service a person might buy at a later date (or often a combination of the two).

Google has now added a new feature which filters out "below the fold" inventory - that is, ads that might be served up onto a webpage, but are not actually seen by the user if they don't scroll down the page far enough to see the advert. This will enable brand advertisers to be more selective about where ads appear as the filter allows them to choose to show ads only in places that appear on the user's screen when the page loads, without requiring them to scroll down.

Google's blog says that with a host of different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, it's hard for advertisers to predict where an ad will land, since the same placement may appear differently on each user's screen. Therefore to simplify the process, Google has implemented a statistically driven solution to determine which ads are above and below the fold. This statistically driven model only considers ads "above the fold" if they are completely on-screen when the browser window loads.

This is an interesting development and one that should help brand advertisers monitor and control their advert performance and to get a better understanding of how well these work across different sites on the content network.

Labels: google adwords, internet advertising

Google's Matt Cutts has posted a request on his blog asking for web users to submit link spam reports on websites that appear to be using 'spammy links'. The option to submit information about spam sites has been available for some years, but it appears that Google is now making a special effort to catch up, or get ahead, of the type of link spam techniques being used (such as paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers), and so they want to combine manual reports with the new algorithms he says they are developing.

This request is likely to generate lots of submissions from website marketers that want to try to penalise websites that might be ranking ahead of them, although hopefully Google will mostly receive genuine submissions from users who know what they are looking for and will contribute to a 'clean up' of the search results!

Labels: google, links

The latest issue of the monthly Web Search & Marketing newsletter has been published for February, covering some of the recent stories on web search and online marketing trends.

This month's edition covers some more Google products, as it looks at some recent releases of services and new features. Firstly, there is a review of Google's click-to-call phone numbers, which allow advertisers to target users of Internet smartphones and so this creates new opportunities for AdWords advertisers.

This edition also looks at Google's new social networking service called "Buzz", which was launched in February but raised privacy concerns with the way it was introduced. Finally, the newsletter considers what a good month it has been for Microsoft, with the search alliance with Yahoo! being given the go-ahead, as well as the launch of its ambitious new mobile phone platform.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Labels: newsletter

News sites, such as the BBC, are reporting on the legal case in Italy which has widespread implications for video posting sites on the Internet. An Italian court has convicted 3 Google executives of breaking Italian law by allowing the video to be posted online showing an autistic teenager being bullied.

The convictions (suspended 6 month sentences) were due to privacy violations, but the ruling has come under widespread criticism and Google has also posted a blog article regarding the decision and the implications for Internet freedom and responsibility. If firms can be held liable for every piece of content on their site they would face an impossible job of policing and vetting everything before publication, particularly where there a large sites that encourage social interaction, such as YouTube and Facebook.

Google says it will vigorously appeal the case. The BBC report says that there is no indication that a similar case could or would be brought in any other European country at the moment. However Italy does seem determined to pursue such cases and similar ones are ongoing against other firms, such as eBay, Yahoo and Facebook.

Richard Thomas, the UK's former information commissioner and consultant to privacy law firm Hunton & Williams, said the case was "ridiculous". He is quoted as saying that "It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post. I can't imagine anything similar happening in (the UK). The case wasn't brought by the Italian equivalent of the information commissioner but by criminal prosecutors and we don't know their motives".

However, the verdict is likely to have ramifications for content providers around the world. Google said at the trial that pre-screening all YouTube content was impossible and the video at the centre of the case was posted on Google Video in 2006 shortly before the firm acquired YouTube. Italian prosecutors argued that Google broke Italian privacy law by not seeking the consent of all the parties involved before allowing it to go online, yet Google's lawyers said that the video was removed as soon as it was brought to its attention and that the firm also provided information on who posted it. As a result four students were expelled from their school in Turin, northern Italy.

Labels: google, legal issues, privacy

MediaPost reports that Twitter is planning to launch an advertising platform soon, possibly within the next month. This will be the first move towards 'monetizing' the huge volume of traffic that Twitter now generates, to create some revenue back to the business. The challenge facing Twitter is to do this in a way that won't alienate users and makes it clear that 'tweets' or tags have been sponsored or not.

This comes at a time when Twitter is now handling 50 million 'tweets' a day. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the latest data provided by Twitter, which demonstrates the massive growth in the service, from users writing 5,000 "tweets" per day in 2007 to 300,000 per day in 2008 and 2.5 million per day in 2009. The latest figures represent a year-on-year growth of 1,400% in the short comments being posted each day, with the current levels averaging 600 tweets per second.

Labels: social networks, twitter

Hot on the heels of Google's recent phone launch, Microsoft have also announced a new Internet-phone called Windows Phone 7. This has naturally received wide media coverage, including by the Sydney Morning Herald that reports on the radically redesigned operating system that will soon become a serious challenger to Apple's iPhone.

The new phone looks quite different to the iPhone and not as stylish, but since it has been designed from the bottom up and with experience of the existing systems in the market, it is said to seamlessly pull together content from social networking sites and other web services on a scale unseen on competing platforms. Previous Windows Mobile versions have been replaced by a completely new design that integrates Microsoft's Zune music player and the Xbox Live gaming service.

Using Microsoft's own operating system, the new phones are due to hit the market by Christmas this year. Samsung, HTC, HP, Sony Ericsson, Dell, LG and Toshiba have already signed up as early partners and this is clear competition for Google and the market leader, Apple.

Labels: microsoft, mobile search