Nielsen Shares Predictions for Advertising Trends in 2010

Where is Advertising Headed in the New Year?

It's the time of year when not only does everybody reflect upon trends and happenings from the year past, but they also look forward and make predictions for the coming year. Nielsen has shared its projections for the top advertising trends for 2010. These are:

1. Optimizing media convergence is a top priority.
2. New models emerge to take advantage of smartphones.
3. More cross-media ad campaigns surface.
4. Commercialization of social networking hubs increase.
5. More interesting and interactive online ads appear.

"A better understanding of media convergence will manifest in order to deliver a better return on investment," the firm says. "The ability to accurately measure activity and link online ads to offline purchasing behavior will be critical."

Nielsen says accurate mobile measurement will be required for advertisers to stay ahead of "snowballing growth" of that media platform and that the massive growth of online games will lead the way for more successful interactive and cross-media advertising campaigns. The firm expects growth in innovation and adoption in this area.

Of course social media will continue to provide new opportunities and Nielsen thinks there will be increased use of more creative advertising and content models online.

John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online says the next phase of the Internet will be the "audience-centric web" and will be characterized by the audience being the center of everything, "online" no longer being an island, and richer business opportunities due to richer data being consumed.

"Whether it’s reaching men aged 18 to 24, women with incomes of over $150,000, heavy users of Tide or Hispanic teens, the match of consumer need to marketing message starts with the audience," he says. "In the audience-centric Web, that richness of insight will now be available to online marketers, just as it has been offline."

Nielsen also shared its top five cross-media trends for 2010, which include: convergence in demand, second and third screen initiative growth, continued audience fragmentation, new and varied approaches to content, and the formation of multiple distribution opportunities.

Duplicate Content Owners Catch a New Break from Google

Google Now Supporting rel="canonical" Across Domains

Google announced that it now offering cross-domain support of the rel="canonical" link element. If you are unfamiliar with this link element, Google's Matt Cutts discussed it with us here. Basically, it's a way to avoid duplicate content issues, but until now, you couldn't use it across domains.

"For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to [have] duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects," says John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst with Google Zürich.

Do you have legitimate reasons for having duplicate content? Tell us about them.

"There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects," he says. "This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel='canonical' link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel='canonical' link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

Mueller gives the following ways of handling cross-domain content duplication:

- Choose your preferred domain
- Reduce in-site duplication
- Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
- Use the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable gives three reasons why the addition of cross-domain support for the rel="canonical" link element is really important:

1. Some hosts don't allow webmasters to deploy 301 redirects
2. Some site owners aren't technical enough to implement a 301 redirect
3. In some cases, webmasters do not want to redirect users but rather only search engines (i.e. pagination, weird filtering, tracking parameters added to URLs, etc).

To use the link element, pages don't have to be identical, but they should be similar. According to Google, slight differences are fine. You should not point point rel="canonical" to the home page of the preferred site. Google says this can result in problems, and that a mapping from an old URL to a new URL for each URL on the old site is the best way to go.

You should not use a nonindex robots meta tag on pages with a rel="canonical" link element because those pages would not be equivalent with regards to indexing, Google says. One would be allowed while the other would be blocked. Google also says it's important that these pages aren't disallowed from crawling through a robots.txt file, because search engine crawlers won't be able to discover the rel="canonical" link element.

By Chris Crum
webpronews

Email Marketing Budgets Set For Increase In 2010

Social media to play bigger role in email marketing

Nearly half (40%) of email marketers plan on increasing their budgets for the channel in 2010 and 47 percent said their budgets would stay the same, according to a new survey by Silverpop.

In the coming year, more than half (52%) of email marketers said increasing customer loyalty was a top email marketing goal. Overall, 51 percent of respondents want to drive incremental revenue with their email program; 65 percent of those with larger email budgets says that's that their top goal in 2010.

"When consumers' purse strings tighten, savvy marketers remain respectful but attentive, so their brands are top of mind when their customers are once again ready to buy," said Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop.

"Today's marketers are mindful of the important role relationship building plays in a successful marketing strategy, and they understand the unique ability of email to engage customers."

While marketers remain positive about the role email will play in meeting their goals in 2010, they are also prepared to face related challenges. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said the biggest challenge in the coming year will be "inbox clutter.

Overall, more than eight out of 10 (84 percent) plan to include social media into their email programs in the coming year, and 38 percent will add SMS. Marketers with budget increases are even more likely to add these to their programs; 89 percent will incorporate social media and 44 percent SMS.

"Linking email to popular social networks can be a very successful strategy," Nussey said. "If the messages are timely and relevant, recipients will share them with their networks, and the opportunity for additional exposure increases exponentially. And as customers become more mobile, their marketing must reach them in more timely ways and through channels such as SMS."

By Mike Sachoff

webpronews

Yahoo, Bing Trade Market Share Again

Search companies hit all-time low and two-year high, respectively

Despite a number of positive developments, Yahoo did not have a very merry November according to the latest statistics from comScore. In fact, as the company's share of the search market dropped again, it hit an all-time low, landing at 17.5 percent.

Yes, Yahoo's share of the search market shrunk from 18.0 percent in October to 17.5 percent in November, which counts as a sizable slip. Yahoo's biggest competitors, meanwhile, kept chugging along.

To take it from the top: Google's lead remains more than safe as the company managed to increase its share from 65.4 percent to 65.6 percent. At least at this point, there appears to be no stopping the search giant.

Also, in a pound-for-pound sense, third-place Bing made some even more impressive gains. Bing passed the 10.0 percent mark (from 9.9 percent in October) to wind up with a market share of 10.3 percent. This represents a two-year high for Microsoft (and possibly makes a partnership with Yahoo look much less appealing).

Finally, if you're curious, November wasn't a good month for the little guys, as Ask and AOL both lost 0.1 percent of market share on a month-over-month basis.

Doug Caverly

webpronews.com

Twitter Expands Into More Languages

Twitter Now Supporting German

Update 4 : Twitter is now supporting the German language.

Update 3 : Twitter is now supporting the Italian language.

Update 2 : Twitter is now supporting the French language.

Update: Twitter is now supporting the Spanish language.

Original Article: Twitter announced that it intends to roll out the service in the French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages. Currently it's only available in English and Japanese.

Expanding into more languages should have a profound impact on Twitter's growth in new users. The company doesn't plan to stop there either though. Co-founder Biz Stone says that's just a starting point.

Twitter is taking a cue from Facebook and calling upon users to help with translations. The company has launched a tool for people with experience in different languages to suggest translations for the Twitter site itself. "Then, we'll follow up technically," says Stone.

"We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first," he explains. "As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster and we'll have enough material to respond by making Twitter available not only in English and Japanese but also French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well."

Our latest numbers have shown that new user registrations have declined slightly for Twitter. The more languages that Twitter supports, obviously the more useful more people will find it. It has a long way to go to get Facebook-like numbers, but this would be a huge step in the right direction (along with the forthcoming "lists" feature) to step up the game.

By Chris Crum
webpronews

A New Google Answers Site on the Way?

Broken Google Guru Link Mysteriously Appears in Product List

Some Google users have had a mysterious link appear in their accounts when they visit Google's product page. The link is for "Google Guru", and is accompanied by the text, "Ask questions and get answers from online users." Its icon is a question mark.

If it is showing up for you, it is located between Groups and Knol on Google's "More Google Products" page:

According to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Google Guru is a product that was launched in Russia back in 2007. While here in the U.S., the link pointing to Google Guru goes nowhere, the Russian link Schwartz provides goes to something that looks like this:

It's basically a question and answers site. "What is interesting is that Google closed down their Google Answers site back in November 2006, yes over three years ago," says Schwartz. "Is Google Guru their way of getting back into the social Q&A space? Yahoo is dominate right now with Yahoo Answers, maybe Google feels they can make a run at that as well?"

Apparently not everyone is seeing the link to Google Guru at this point, and Google hasn't at this time made any announcements about it that we are aware of. I expect that will change soon enough. Are you seeing the link?

By Chris Crum
Source: webpronews

November Showed Significant Growth for Android

AdMob Shares Findings from Latest Mobile Metrics Report

AdMob, which is in the process of being acquired by Google (regulators are still eyeing the deal), has released its Novemeber Mobile Metrics report. The themes for this one are that the Launch of new devices drove Android growth and the rise of smartphones resulted in a sharp increase in WiFi usage.

"The launch of new Android devices in the second half of 2009 has accelerated the growth of the platform. Six months ago a single Android device, the HTC Dream (G1), generated 92 percent of Android traffic, while in November 2009 the same device accounted for only 37 percent of requests," says AdMob. "The Motorola Droid, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero generated 22 percent, 21 percent and nine percent of Android requests worldwide in November 2009, respectively."



Highlights from the report include:

- 55 percent of ad requests in the US came from devices with WiFi capability, up from only 19 percent a year earlier.

- The Top 5 US devices based on WiFi requests generated were the iPod touch, iPhone, Sony PSP, HTC Dream (G1), and Motorola Droid.

- 36 percent of iPhone traffic in the US was over WiFi, considerably higher than other WiFi capable devices. Less than 10 percent of traffic from the major Android devices came over WiFi.

- The iPhone accounted for 71 percent and the iPod touch accounted for 29 percent of total unique users from Apple devices.

- Android generated 27 percent of the requests from smartphones in the US in November 2009, up from 20 percent in October 2009.

- 88 percent of requests from Android devices came from the US in November 2009, the second largest Android market is the UK with four percent of requests.

The report, which can be viewed here (pdf), examines growth in unique iPhone and iPod touch users since January 2009, finding more rapid growth outside of the US. In November 2009, half of unique users were located outside of the US. This is an increase from 39% at the beginning of the year.

By Chris Crum

Source: webpronews