This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.

Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.

The Android platform has its largest share in the US and the UK, but has a much weaker share in other countries. This could change in the near future as new phones emerge that run Android, such as the Nexus One.

Docomo and KDDI are the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, and account for 12% of the mobile browser share platforms.

Canada seems to like the iPhone and iTouch, with 86% of mobile internet users using this platform to access the internet.

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Mobile browser market share map

But I am here to tell you how Open Site Explorer and Microsoft Excel combined can help you when researching links against your competitors.

Let’s use the term “shoes”. First of all, let’s see how the top 10 compare in terms of external links. To do this, I will run all the URLs in Open Site Explorer.

And then filter all links to show only Followed links from external pages to this page.

And then export it to CSV. You will get a nice excel file with all the links (up to 10000, but not many pages will exceed that number) that linkscape think are relevant. Cool. Let’s do that 10 times, with all the URLs in the top 10.

So now that you have done this for the 10 URLs, your computer may look a bit crazy with all those 10 windows open. In one of the spreadsheets add a column named “Destination URL”. In that column you will have to include the URL that those links pertain to. Like this:

Do that for all the sites, and move all the data under one same spreadsheet. Add a filter in the header, order it by Page Authority. You can also add colour for each of the sites, this will make it easier to see things at first sight. At the end you will have something like this:

That looks interesting but let’s filter it so it only shows links with “shoes” in the anchor text.

That looks even more interesting. Here is where you should think how you can use this data. Here are a couple of ideas.

Do the links correlate to rankings?
Pivot tables are great. I don’t know much about them, but I really like them, I wish I knew more. You can create a pivot table to count how many links each site. I only took those links with page authority of 15 of greater, and I made a nice graph out of it:

Look at that! Magic. The first few positions seem to correlate to the links. Office is first, Faith second. It does seem to be not as accurate when the number of links are similar, Clarks is third in links, but sixth in rankings…

What have we learnt? Looking at the number of links can be good if you only want a general overview of the situation. It can give you guidelines, but not certainties. If I was any of the competitors I would imagine that having around 100 links with “shoes” in the anchor text would probably give me a spot on second or third position.

Where can I find new site that may want to link me?
I am glad you ask. Let’s say that you manage office.co.uk. To filter the links so you only see the ones that are linking to competitors do the following. Order by Destination URL (A to Z) and cut/paste all the links pointing to your site into a new sheet (Sheet2). You will have to go back to the sheet with all competitor links and create a column named “linking me”; in that column you will have to paste the following formula: “=COUNTIF(Sheet2!B:B, B2)>0”. That will work as long as the URLs are in column B.

That formula will return whether that URL is linking to you too. If the result is FALSE, then they are not linking to you, and you can approach them.
In this example, if you were managing office.co.uk, there are 554 URLs that are linking to your competitors and could potentially link to you too!

Conclusion
These are just two examples of hundreds where a bit of analysis with Open Site Explorer and a bit of Excel can help your campaign. It will give you a good snapshot of what your competitors are doing, where are they successes and their failures. Do some research before planning your campaign!

How useful did you find this post? What data did you get out of OSE and Excel?

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Open Site Explorer and Excel, a link made in heaven

To recap; Google’s been offering the choice for advertisers to have 4 additional site links to their Paid Search ads. One of the major positive aspects of site links is to shorten the users navigation to conversion as well promoting seasonal services or products.

However, another great benefit of the site links is… gaining visibility on highly competitive keywords.

I’ve been running site links for one of our clients. One of the site links is based on the keyword ”Theatre tickets”. As you can imagine this terms is one of the most competitive and expensive keywords found in its particular sector.

Nothing exciting?

For the period between 23rd December 09 and 21st January 2010, the “theatre tickets” generic campaign had fairly decent results in terms of conversation rate. But the ‘theatre tickets’ site link performed even better, with a conversation rate 216% higher for 92.5% cheaper!

This really shows how beneficial site links can be to a paid search campaign, particularly when concerned with highly competitive generic terms.

It also seems that generic keywords placed in site links have a positive effect on brand CTRs too.

Advertisers on your Site links blocks. Ready? Get set? Go!

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Proof: Site Links Increase Conversions and Visibility

In case you haven’t already heard (most have!), Apple have announced the release of a new product, the ‘iPad’. It’s expected that it will be released in the UK June or July time. There’s still lots of people wondering what exactly it is/does, hence me writing this post.

What is it?

Apple say…

“Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price”

On first impressions you could mistake the iPad for an oversized iPhone.  Apple are aiming to gain market share from the likes of netbooks (those underpowered mini laptops) and Ebook readers already on the market such as Amazon’s Kindle.

What does it do?

The iPad attempts to do everything that your laptop can, while offering almost everything your smartphone can do as well (apart from make calls, I think!). You’ll be able to do your work on it, with the release of an iPad version of iWorks (Apple’s version of office), access iTunes, iPhone apps, play music, upload your photos, wacth video, browse the web and access your email.

iBookstore

Possibly one of the biggest uses that I understand the iPad to have is to be able to read stuff much easier electronically through the iBooks app. Books, newspapers you name it. For the avid reader that doesn’t want to resort to the small screen of their iPhone and wants the convenience of having a range of materials ‘on tap’ the iPad seems like a good idea. As you can imagine the crippled print industry has been getting more than excited about this.

The iBook store already has major contracts with some of the large book publishers such as Penguin and Harper Collins, it’s software is also using the open source book software so once you pay for them you can read them on other pieces of hardware (like the Amazon’s Kindle) too.

Who will use it?

Anyone, but existing Apple customers will know best. Apple are claiming that millions will already be familiar with the iPad having never previously owned one, through the familiarity they already have with using other Apple products such as the iPhone, iPod Touch and iMac. I for one don’t doubt their claim.

The Techy Bit…

• Screen 9.7 inches
• Memory: 16/32/64 GB
• Multi touch screen technology
• 1.5 ibs and 0.5 inches thin
• 10 hours battery life
• Wifi
• 3G
• Dock Connector port

There’s a lot of criticism about Apple’s new gadget already. Perhaps what a lot of people forget is that Apple has been a ‘follower’ into markets many times before. They watch, look at new ways that media can be absorbed, from the innovators and then go ahead and create awesomely user friendly products that take those markets by storm. Apple is one of the few companies that really get away without following the normal product development rules, the brand, the usability and the tech just work. Examples include; from nowhere to the number one music seller (online at least!) with the iPod, and from nowhere to the number one smart phone (iPhone).

Will we see Apple come from nowhere to be the number one book seller? Or will it just be the netbook market that it really impacts? Maybe it’ll just flop altogether!

I, like a lot of people, won’t be investing just yet, but I have no doubt that as it’s refined and the market grows they’ll get to me too!

What’s this all got to do with digital marketing?

We all know that the web has been growing and expanding, impacting industry by industry. Some are yet to be majorly affected, others like retail and travel have been massively impacted. The shift from brands existing in channels to now living in networks has made brands change the way that they market themselves forever.

More recently we have seen how the web is going to create the new age for the music industry, with the introduction of iTunes and Spotify. Could it now be the publishers’ turn? The cause of so much debate recently (Murdoch Vs Google).  Will we see more subscription based models emerging, finding a middle ground between paid for and free content, kick started by new technologies such as the iPad and the iBookstore as the music industry was by the iPod and iTunes.

Watch this space.

Additional reading

• Mashable have a very comprehensive guide
• The First part of yesterday’s keynote presentation

Image credit: CC Flickr user myuibe

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The Hype: Apple iPad

Last Friday I presented at the NMAlive event* on Online Engagement Demysitified event, running with the hopeful title “How Engagement Measurement Will Change the World” (see slides above).

As ever, it was a good opportunity to revisit the theme of engagement measurement and think about how we talk about it at iCrossing.

We’ve effectively spent the last four years looking at how you quantify and understand the concept of engagement. It’s only with evidence and actionable analysis that the idea of connected brands, organisations in touch and in dialogue with with their customers and stakeholders online becomes real.

Evaluating engagement has become increasing sophisticated. Right now the social media analysts in the UK are re-mixing the whole idea of search and social media data as a research discipline in incredibly exciting ways for clients as diverse as banks and soft drinks brands. Our work in this area has been profiled in two Forrester case studies on our projects for Channel 4 and Toyota.

The technology has moved at an incredible rate too. We started with social network analysis visualisation and a lot of manual work on collating data. Over time the expertise of out technical department, performance insight experts and insights from our journalist team have all been fed into new approaches to using our own tools and those of technology platforms like Brandwatch and Buzzmetrics. We remain open-minded as the the best technology and metrics mix for any particular campaign or brand.

What has remained a constant though for the past two years or so, is the basic framework that we use when developing an evaluation, iCrossing’s Framework for Measuring Evaluation (see diagram).

Three things we have learned about evaluating engagement are:

1. It can drive creative: Good evaluation of engagement delivers data and insight that constitute “live research”, which in turn - with the right processes and platforms in places - allows “live creative”, creative played out in an agile way, responding to how content is being received and re-used. It was this realisation that allowed an insight from web analytics to inspire the hyper-miling creative in the Toyota iQ campaign which was the outstanding success in that project.
2. User-centred perspective is key: Measurement mentality is shaped still by the channel media world we come from. The emphasis is too often on simply the brand’s and its marketing messages’ “impact” or “penetration” of target consumers. Colleagues from iCrossing’s user experience team have ensured that user behaviours and how they change during engagement have remained our focus in developing measurement approaches for engagement. This has also meant that we have been able to step out of the sales-funnel model of measuring (which ends with a sale) and create a model in which a purchase is an elevated but not always the ultimate form of engagement.
3. Stories+numbers: “Stories and numbers” have become a mantra for us over the past couple of years. It helps us to remember that both are equally important to meaningful measurement. Numbers without stories don’t travel far in organisations, don’t affect change, inspire action, without stories that make the meaning easy for people to grasp and communicate to others.

This last point gives us the justification for the title. As Alan Moore put it, “social data is the black gold of the 21st century” and it is engagement evaluation where we are closest to unlocking the value of this data to organisations. The insights and data (stories and numbers) that are being created need to travel further in organisations than the marketing and PR functions. They are so valuable that they create the business case for wiring organisations differently, having the connections between “departments” like PR and customer care stronger, the lines between “divisions” blurred and eroded.

Being able to understand and act on engagement data will change how brands - and more broadly all organisations - function.

* If you’re not familiar NMAlive’s a particularly useful format for speakers and delegates alike. Here’s what I like about it:

• Concise and well -priced: The events are on a Friday for the morning only - it’s easy to justify a morning out of the office.
• Short-lead time: Events tend to be organised about six weeks out, which means the topic is fresh - in this instance related to big brands using Cost Per Engagement (CPE) as a means of setting payment for publishers.
• Mix of people: It seemed all parts of the media/marketing complex were represented well: clients, agencies, media owners and obeservers. It makes for interesting, direct discussion (as does the size - about 100 people max).

It’s a winning formula I’d hope to see emulated by other publishers / event-organisers.

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How engagement measurement will change the world

The auto suggest feature aids the user by analysing the characters that are being typed into the search box and suggesting possible search terms that the user may be looking for to speed up the search process – and also highlight possible search refinements to return more targeted results.

The recent development brought out by Bing is that these suggested search terms are being informed not only by user search behaviour but also by breaking news and trending search queries:

“In fact, we recently incorporated breaking news and hot trending queries within autosuggest. Updated every 15 minutes, trending queries balance timeliness and relevance to connect you with the most prominent or topical events happening now.”

The following examples from Bing’s announcement post highlights this new feature action:

If you didn’t get a chance to watch the Golden Globe Awards, autosuggest helps you get to the latest news and recent winners:

Whereas through Google you would see the following result:

Curious to know when Tiger Woods will return to golf? Start typing “Tig” and autosuggest surfaces relevant queries that can help connect you with the latest news:

And again in Google you would see the following:

So what does this mean:

This new feature is another development brought out by Bing that challenges Google on being a market leader for innovation within search. Google built its market share through delivering better, more relevant search results than its competitors. If Bing is to really start gaining market share from Google it will be by delivering more relevant results to users, which in this case is by being more topically relevant.

Over the past few years search engines have been developing new offerings in both their Paid and Natural listings, for example the site links that now appear for brand searches, and digital marketers are defining more and more synergy tactics between these disciplines.

With the launch of this new development, the integration of live twitter results into search engine results pages, the popularity of social networks and the ever increasing speed at which search engines are indexing content - we now have to consider real-time marketing and the social implications of the Internet in how we continue to develop our online strategies.

If the first decade of this millenium was about developing Paid and Natural Synergies then the second decade is all about Search and Social Synergy.

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Bing out suggests Google with new feature

Like most people, I’ve spent the last week watching the depth of the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti reveal itself with an increasing sense of horror and disbelief. And probably like most people, I’ve donated as much as I could afford to the relief effort via the Disasters and Emergency Committee (DEC) website, because, as one colleague put it: “There’s pretty much nothing else that I can practically do to help the people of Haiti.”

The story that has been playing out on our TV screens and newspapers is truly shocking, and there seems to be a battle going on over which story the media wants to tell. What’s going to sell more papers or get more views or viewers? The story of “hope” (the one word headline on the Sun’s front page on Monday) - that people are still being pulled out of the rubble alive nearly a week on from the earthquake? Or the story of “human evil” - that “thugs” (as the Metro’s front page so eloquently described the Haitian earthquake survivors) are “looting, shooting and lynching” (the Telegraph) as a response to humanitarian efforts to provide them with food and water. (The fact that we’ve all donated £25million so far tends to suggest the Sun got it right again!)

Of course, the need of the media to create simplified, exaggerated, panic-driven narratives in order to grab attention from their competitors is nothing new. But as my sister (who works in the digital communications team at the Department for International Development  - DfID) explained to me as she worked a Sunday shift whilst visiting me this weekend - the way that the media tells these kinds of story has had a direct impact on the amount of money raised by DEC in the past.

I was fascinated, then, to see that her emergency shift supporting the DfID press office with their communications relating to relief efforts in Haiti wasn’t so she could help with press enquiries. Rather she was working to publish updates on DfID’s own website, and pictures and relief plan details directly to social media places such as Flickr and Twitter and on their blog pages. I watched her upload this Creative Commons map (which she sourced from Wikimedia) showing the exact location of the Leogain to Flickr, a region of Haiti that no one had yet managed to get to, and where DfID co-ordinated rescue teams were planning to travel to next. In a situation like this, providing pictures, updates and information directly to people like you and me - rather than relying on the press to tell the story - means that we are able to make up our own minds whether we think that this is a cause that’s worth our money without the filter of headlines, editors and ad sales targets.

Personally, I find this a very easy decision to make! But for those who might be worried that their money might somehow end up being “looted” by “thugs”, these images and updates tell a pretty clear story.

I’d really recommend adding DfID and other relief co-ordinating agencies to your social media feeds and streams if you are interested in getting a clearer understanding of what is happening in Haiti. With news breaking today that a second earthquake  measuring 6.1 shook the island this morning, the success of social media to help raise awareness about the need for donations could make a big difference to Haitian survivors.

IMAGE CREDIT: Michael Haig / Department for International Development via Creative Commons licence

HEADER IMAGE CREDIT: The U.S. Army

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When ROI is truly a matter of life and death

We recently had a session looking at the Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) feeds that we run, and an interesting point came out of it. This point was about the amount of coverage a brand could have on a single SERP where there are Natural Search results, Paid Search results, and Product results from Google Product Search.

What are CSE’s?

Comparison Shopping Engines are sites like Shopping.com, Nextag, and Ciao, where retailers can submit a product feed of all their current stock, and these sites can then provide their users with huge lists of products in a selection of categories. Retailers can gain incremental sales from users who may not have used search in their purchase process. The CSEs make their money from charging a CPC on all the referrals to the retailer sites.

Google Product Search is a similar to the other CSEs in the way it takes a product feed, but the results are often embedded in the Natural Search results:

The perfect SERP

After our discussions we started mentally constructing a SERP where a brand could be absolutely everywhere…..
Here it is - the actual SERP used is just for layout, so please ignore sites highlighted: (click to enlarge!)

Key

1.    Your Paid results, because you are bidding on this term. Additionally, you could be displaying an “Adwords Plus” result with site links, or a location – effectively dominating the top Paid results.
2.    Your Natural results, because your site is optimised for this term. If you had an indented result as well, you would be dominating the top Natural results.
3.    The Google Product results, in which you are present because you are submitting your feed to Google. These results have ratings taken from CSEs that your site could have.

Those are the obvious ones, and the ones that are going to drive you direct traffic, but we also have:
4.    A Nextag (for instance) PPC result, where they are bidding on the same term, but you feature on their landing page because they have your feed. We have seen many examples of CSEs bidding on product terms.
5.    A Ciao (for instance) Natural result where they are ranking for this term as well, but you feature on their landing page because they have your feed. A lot of these sites will rank very well for some competitive product terms, and your brand could be on their landing page.

This is a bit of a dream SERP for a brand, and I have not actually seen this anywhere, but this would truly be a great example of the benefits of a multi channel marketing campaign, of Paid and Natural Search synergy, and of TOTAL SERP DOMINATION!

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SEO + PPC + CSEs = Total Coverage

Cutting out the middle-man

With publishers increasingly looking to advertising and sponsorship deals to replace lost revenue from dwindling newspaper sales, the Guardian has effectively cut out the middle-man to provide a useful service for its readers. Given the choice I, personally, would much rather a dedicated area within which I can browse a number of brands and ’shop the look’ championed in this week’s style section, than sidebars full of promotion boxes for brands I may have no interest in.

Indeed, online retail analysis has suggested that people shop for fashion online in a different way to how they might shop for other products. Most clothes shoppers know what stores and labels stock what they’re looking for. So, rather than searching for a particular item, they would look for their favourite clothing brands and then search for the item within the brand’s site. As the Guardian Fashion Store offers the choice to search by brand, it fits with this shopping model much more snugly than side-bar advertising could.

Mutual promotion

Many online retailers now create editorial, discussion or community areas on their sites to help build context for their products. But by tying its style editorial in with the Fashion Store, The Guardian has turned the tables somewhat, using products to promote its content.

With items that compliment editorial pieces featured on the home-page or ’shop-window’ of the online store, users can link through to an article to find out why they should be buying this look - promoting both the relevance of the editorial and the products. And such timeliness is intrinsic to the fashion industry.

Link-happy?

Compared to promotion boxes that link out to retailer sites, hosting a site-contained fashion store should mean that users have less incentive to leave the guardian.co.uk to shop the look championed in online editorial.

However, at the minute they could be missing a trick by failing to link to the store, or specific items, within editorial. Of course readers would soon become cynical if all editorial solely featured items sold on the site, but in cases where it is relevant and appropriate to mention such items, user experience may be improved by being able to link straight through to and buy or browse products.

There is a delicate balance between banging the sales-message drum and being useful, and it is this power struggle between advertorial and editorial which sees the publishing landscape change shape so frequently.

What do you think of the Guardian’s online Fashion Store - has it got the balance right?

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The Guardian Fashion Store - a healthy balance?

Google included in their statement that other US companies had been under attack too. It’s no surprise to Google being under attack from hackers. However Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote that the attacks were aimed at identifying advocates for human rights in China.

Google entered the Chinese market and took the decision to censor itself back in 2006. However Google have now decided to change its policy of censoring itself as a result of these attacks and fully open its doors to China.

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”

Back of Google Logo at Beijing - Will Google be forced to turn it's back on China?

There are some fantastic articles on this subject from Search Engine Land and the BBC but we’d love your views on this subject. Do you think Google are doing the right thing? Will Google be forced to turn it’s back on China?

Image Credit: Creative Commons Attribution:  by andreweland

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Google, China and Hackers