So, as a media company, we understand the pay for play mentality at Google which reads as follows:

“Look, we (Google) are going to give you lots of cool stuff to use, (mostly) for free, but for all of that, we’re going to track every move you make. Every click. Every link launched. Every search conducted. Every video watched.”

And for most people, it appears that from a market perspective, they’re willing to make this tradeoff.

But what about for those that don’t? Can’t Google give us an option to pay for all things Google in an untracked mode? Wouldn’t that add to their narrow list of revenue streams and please 100% of all customers on both sides of the fence?

Many media companies are making this option available. We’ve noticed that Google is a major holdout. If not for the customer’s sake and in the spirit of not being evil, than would could it be?

Only Google knows for sure.

So Facebook as most people know was started as a visual representation of the annual yearbook for high school and college aged kids.  Fast forward to making Facebook as a concept as available to everyone across the planet and 500,000,000 people later, it’s not only an established brand, but something nearly everyone has/does.

But could something that was made for the web, move towards an archaic and dying print world?  It could very easily.  Enter the world of Facebook as a scrapbooking phenomenon.

In a promotion for French telecommunications company Bouygues Télécom, DDB Paris recently devised a way to take your Facebook profile offline.  The agency noticed that while people may share their most treasured memories and photographs via Facebook, the constantly changing nature of their Facebook pages means that they can quickly be forgotten, or lost amongst the amount of info stored in a profile. So Bouygues Télécom created the option of turning your Facebook profile into an actual book.

Take a look…

Customers could pick up to ten friends to include in their book, and also pick the timeframe covered, whether it be a birthday, wedding or other significant event. As these images of Francis Peric’s book show, the styling of the books were also thoroughly in keeping with Facebook’s look. The application was a huge success, with the limited edition run of 1,000 books all requested within one hour.

What do you think?  Would you take your online world to the dying world of print for a keepsake?  I think many, many people will try this and many more companies will crop up to offer these type of social network or “Facebook Scrapbooking” services.

Time will tell.

An Introduction to Website Analytics

Website Analytics or website statistics can provide you with floods of information regarding who your visitors are, how many of them there are, where in the world they live and even how long they browse each web page. Most websites, especially out of the box sites, will have such a feature contained within the package, but this valuable tool is very often not exploited as it should be and is used just for a quick reference.

Website Analytics Programs

There are many large companies whom offer free website analytics programs to owners of websites. They gain information for themselves on website habits and you have access to lots of free information that can help you to grow your business more quickly. The accuracy of certain programs will differ, so ensure you spend some time researching your options before deciding to stick with one brand.  Some analytics providers are Google Analytics, Unica, Coremetrics, WebTrends and Omniture.  Do you own search for website analytics software and you’ll see them all.  But there is another missing piece that you shouldn’t forget about when it comes to analytics and that is testing the design of the website.

What About Website Design Analytics?

What is often overlooked is website design analytics.  Testing your website’s design with consumers at the design, wireframe, comp or QA stage will help save money, time and headaches with post launch issues that don’t relate to site analytics.  In other words, testing the designs with consumers prior to launch helps you flush out bad designs, navigation, copy and layout schemes.  And best of all, you’re doing so with your target market.  And you’re doing it PRIOR to production release.  After the site goes live, website analytics are essential, but don’t forget to “bake into” the design what your target consumers want, need and prefer from your website’s interface.  It’s what they deal with.  Not code.  Get that right from the outset and you’re in much better position to analyze your data from your website without having to worry as much about interface design issues.

Advertising Research and Design Improvements

Advertising research should be done to ensure the correct target markets are determined and that the content of the advertisement is effective with the consumers in those target markets.  The vast majority of websites today contain advertising on their site through affiliate marketing, Google’s AdSense or through various ad networks.  Website publishers will also advertise their own website and company elsewhere through AdWords and other offerings.  A study was run in 2008, which advises that at least 68% of all advertising is almost entirely ineffective and brings no business with it.  It is not true that any advertising is good advertising.

How Can I Run This Advertising Research?

The process can be very complicated and for reasons of impartiality, it is a good idea to employ an market research firm that specializes in advertising research with consumers to provide a analysis and to help you draw an accurate conclusion. They will not only make a thorough assessment on their own opinion on how advertising can be improved, but they will explore other methods of information retrieval to improve your ads as well..

The first stage of the process is to report to you the findings from the advertising research. This will note improvements, tweaks and suggest areas to be amended within the market. The second stage is when these new advertising designs are shown to general members of the public. This can sometimes happen via a online surveys, where participants can view the advertisements and post their views on each one. Another valuable source is through an evaluation session where groups of people who sit within the range that you aim to sell to, will discuss en-masse what they really feel about your advertising.

All of these tactics work to varying degrees and are suited for varying ad formats.  The key isn’t the tactic.  The key is the strategy and that advertising research be embedded into your DNA when creating, editing and modifying ad creative of any kind.

Why Logo Design Branding is Vital

Your logo is what your customer will see next to your name when you are advertising or posing for business. It is what will eventually be the identifier for your business when glanced at only for a second, once the name has become a brand no matter what size, from your customer’s perspective.  To achieve that, testing is required.  In essence, logo research and testing helps you create a logo that effectively represents your company.  Your logo needs to be different from any others and most importantly, and it needs to be memorable. There are many logos owned by large companies that are easily identifiable by look alone, and your aim is to replicate that reaction, this is called logo design branding.

How to Brand Your Logo

A marketing research firm specializing in logo research and design testing will be able to not only assist with the design of your company’s logo, but through the analysis of the data, you can effectively position it within the market that suits it best. Brands are “adopted” by consumers so must be memorable and extremely strong. It is rare to see a company rebrand itself successfully without fully understanding what appeals to their target audience and pulls a response from them about what they do, what they stand for and the realization of the expectation.  You can see why logo branding need consumer based data as a foundation for what the design eventually becomes.

Corporate Identity and Logo Design Branding

A corporate identity embodies the persona of your business so with your new winning logo design, your brand identity needs to be properly exposed into the market. The way in which this is done needs to be considered and we suggest that consumer logo data supplied to the design teams will help make help you.  One without the other will not work.

Do Advertisements Magazines Work?

The answer is sure.  But there are many factors in play.

It is of course widely known that people across the world enjoy reading topical magazines, the market while shrinking, still has an outstanding size and the marketing for advertisements in magazines is a treasure trove to be tapped into.  It’s really the last bastion of revenue for magazines as the content has moved toward the web.  That said, people still enjoy holding and re-reading the printed word.  The market that your advertisement will reach is vast and you need to think of every reader as a potential customer. This requires ad testing.  It’s unavoidable.  The cost of placing an ad can be thought of as an investment if positive ROI is the result.  However, because the costs are often very high and the potential outcome could easily far exceed the costs if successful, you need to get your advertisement right.  The only way to hedge your advertising bet is with ad testing.

Know Your Market in Advertisements Magazines

It goes without saying that if you are selling gardening tools, your advert should be placed in a gardening magazine and likewise if you are selling wallpaper, a home design magazine will be the niche of choice. However, if your product or provided service is more generic, a marketing research will be able to aid you in the correct options to select from and help you tailor your ad message to fit the intended audience. Once the audience has been determined, ad testing data will be able to help to you understand who the readers are and what style of ad will press their buttons and make them long-term loyalists to your brand.

Ad testing data gives you knowledge and consumer insights you need to make sure the ad investment pays off.  The effectiveness of your ads, with all the competitive ads in all mediums out there,  needs to correctly describe your company and attract all of those untapped customers into contacting or buying from you. As the page can be browsed for much longer than a television or radio advertisement would be, it needs to contain relevant and clear information, to prevent them from turning the page too quickly.  And only ad testing can help you solve that before the ad goes live no matter what the publication is.

Performing a Logo Survey

A logo is designed to be instantly recognizable by those whom glance at it. With a successful logo, anyone will be able to link it to your business or brand name and understand what type of company your business is.  So how can you ensure that the logo you have or are designing will resonate with your target audience?  Great design isn’t enough.  With competition today, you need to conduct a logo survey.

How can it Help My Business?

A logo survey is simple.  You show your existing or proposed logo designs to consumers that match your target market.  We do logo surveys with companies around the globe.  The key is two-fold:  a great design, and a design that your target audience connects with.  With a logo that meets these keys comes higher popularity of your brand and this knowledge from consumers can be worth its weight in gold a million times over.  It’s hard sometimes to take a design that you like but your customers don’t versus a design your customers love but you’re not thrilled with.  It happens sometimes.  But remember this, your paycheck is dependent upon what your customers like/want/need, not what you like/want/need.  Knowing this makes it easier to tolerate.

Branding is powerful.  Try to imagine browsing the shopping aisles looking for an energy drink. Your eye will instantly be drawn to those brands that you recognise from television advertisements or from billboard posters. It is also known that the better known a brand is, the likelihood of customers trusting this brand is higher also. After all, a band wouldn’t be so well recognized if its products or services were not so popular. This just goes to show that a logo isn’t just a logo; it is an important link to your brand.

Employing a marketing research firm to run a brand logo survey on your behalf could be very beneficial.  Survey panelists will be asked such questions as what sort of company do they think they logo represents and what values are entrusted to it. A logo, when designed and marketed well, could push your business onto a new level and help to tell the story of your success.

An ad test or an advertisement test is an evaluation of your ad by consumers  to measure its potential success. An advertisement can be fully produced, in the design phase, or can be an iterative series of ads to evaluate, refine and evaluate again via testing. Whether it is a television advertisement, a radio ad or even a billboard campaign, help should be sought to ensure that it is suitable and due to succeed within its target market before the campaign is launched.

What do you need From the Ad Test?

When discussing the project with your chosen team of expert advertising evaluators, always ensure that you know exactly what it is that you require them to test for you. For example, you might wish to acquire advice from the storyboard stage of the ad development and you might wish to have them help to design the basis for the new campaign.  Some ads will be compared to other similar ones that have proven effective and will be tested for comparison.   Others that are in the latter stages of development will be shown to specific groups of people and a survey will be completed by them to provide honest opinions.  When we conduct ad testing, we work with our clients to find out what stage they’re in, what their target market is and what the goal of the campaign will be (direct response, brand awareness, contest, etc.)  Only when we have all of the data can we compile the right panel for ad test evaluation.  The resulting data is only as good as the information obtained prior to conducting the tests.

Other popular reasons for requesting an ad test is to verify with consumers that an entire series of advertisements link together well and flow correctly. If a potential customer cannot instantly link the ad with your company, brand or offer or sometimes even worse, cannot understand easily how they link, then using the ad testing data can correct these inefficiencies before it goes live on air, on TV, in print or even online.

On-Site and Off-Site Website Statistics

Website Statistics are an important factor to consider when you are building a new website or maintaining a current and working one. You can purchase a package from a company and they will perform various tasks with your site, with an eventual outcome of lots of recommended amendments, which will assist you with the productivity of your business. If nobody visits your website, nobody can buy your product; it is very simple when put into these terms. It might be that the site has been poorly designed, or it could in fact be the complete opposite.  It’s why we do website design evaluations.  The website might be stunning and had thousands spent on it, it could look stunning. However, if SEO has not been considered, the design hasn’t been evaluated with your target audience and layout/navigation properly tested then your shiny website will remain unknown and will not appear on web search results.  And if people do find the site, it’s a quick 3-4 second glance and off they go to your competition.

What are On and Off-Site Website Statistics?

Off-Site statistics are measurements and analysis of how well your website reaches its potential audience. This checks your SEO ranking and the keywords used within your website. It looks at how visible your site is to the outside world and how likely it will be that potential customers will visit it.

On-Site statistics specifically concentrate on particular aspects or web pages of your site. The landing page or home page is the first page that a potential customer will see, so it is vital that your site have the proper website design testing to keep your visitors interested, your customers satisfied in order to build long-term loyalty.  We always advise clients that they keep tabs on both on-off site stat factors.  And our customers usually thank us for that because it helps keep you in tune with the site, tell you how many people click on your pages, where, from what referring sites and then immediately take action on your site further or leave.  All of these stats are important and help you create a site that not only looks good, but acts/reacts well from the consumer perspective.