Who is in control of your brand?

Optimising your eCommerce is simple math; if you increase performance it directly improves the bottom line.

Online Shopping in Australia is at an all-time high, with 37.6% of us spending a total of $23B. Yet so many big brands are so late to the game. We’ve reviewed a range of studies that will help you either enter the eCommerce game or improve your current platform.

There are many important areas that impact sales, today we focus on some critical components that fall under User Experience & Shopping Experience. Applying just one of these learnings has proven to increase sales by 257%.

I’ve summarised the most important & impactful findings on the VJ Blog in the following categories.

1. User Experience
   1. The checkout process
   2. Checkout load time
   3. Make it easy to fill out forms
2. Shopping Experience
   1. Shipping & Handling costs
   2. Price & Product comparisons
   3. Free & easy returns policy
   4. Choice of delivery time
   5. Ratings & reviews

See my full post on the Visual Jazz Blog: http://blog.visualjazz.com.au/strategy/getting-the-most-out-of-ecommerce/

AdAge has just posted a story discussing a big Nielsen study on Facebook advertising. The study of 800,000 people illustrated the benefits to brand recall and purchase intent. They look at the combination of Earned Media and Paid Media.

The study of more than 800,000 Facebook users and ads from 14 brands in a variety of categories shows a marked increase in ad recall, awareness and purchase intent when home-page ads on the social network mention friends of users who’ve become fans of the brand in the ad.

For standard paid media they found a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent, compared to a control group. And where it get’s interesting is the impact of having both Earned and Paid which resulted in an increase of recall to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds.

But the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds. Brand awareness saw similar bumps: up 2% from just a home-page ad, 8% with a “social ad” bearing mentions of friends who were brand fans and up 13% when a home-page ad appeared along with a mention of friends who were brand fans in the users’ news feeds.

The most powerful outcome from this study was their ‘other’ finding, that purchase intent increased in similar ways.

Purchase intent was 2% higher among viewers of home-page ads vs. nonviewers, but got a four-times-bigger bump, up 8% either from social ads or when ads appeared alongside organic mentions of the brand in the news feed.

And to all you digifolk, clicks only made up a small proportion of the whole picture. (Digifolk are those that have grown up in a world of focusing on click throughs, not good old fashioned reach.)

Only around 130,000, or less than 1%, “engaged” with them by clicking on them

And why’s this so important?

For years we have worked hard to get in front of our audience for 30 seconds, or half a page, with pretty profound results, reaching millions, building great brands and generating revenue. Sure now, with social media, we try to get consumers to tell each other about our message, but that’s still the same outcome – REACH.

As I’ve discussed in other posts our growing addiction to clicks is taking us away from the very valuable outcome of reaching our audience. Yes, if they click it’s great, but we all know how few do, so studies that discuss and highlight impact of digital reach – be it display, search or otherwise – on brand awareness, purchase intent and other metrics add value to our good old friend REACH. It’s not the first study of it’s kind, Nielsen released one last November – funny to see I reacted in a similar way…

Thoughts?

Some good research from Nielsen came out recently as you may have read in B&T and Digital Media that argues the value of online advertising in terms of recall, recommendation & purchase influence.

The research also revealed intention to purchase increased by 4.9% following exposure to an online advertising campaign, with brand sentiment increasing by 5.3%.

Display advertising also correlated with a rise in awareness, with top-of-mind awareness jumping 3.1% while prompted awareness increased by 3.5%. The likelihood of a consumer recommending a brand following exposure to an online advertising campaign also increased by 4.4%.

This leads me to 2 main thoughts

1. How does this compare to TV, print & radio? (using the same benchmarks & research approach)

Without context these numbers might be under or over valued as it could smash or be smashed by these other channels? It would be good to put them side by side to see how they interact. And what’s the impact when multiple touch points occur, say TV & Online, does it improve, reduce, increase, change the impact of the communication?

2. More importantly can marketers drop their addiction to clicks?

Clicks, performance & data are both the power and the Achilles heel of digital media. Thanks to many publishers, like Google, you can buy a visitor to your website. This is great because it reduces the risk, it’s not so great because the value of the exposure to media (banner, search result, edm, etc) is missed, all the focus is on the click.

So what?

I recommend clients establish an ROI (return on investment) calculator, where you add up all the outcomes from a campaign and compare it to the cost of the communication. This helps you learn & evaluate performance in a more balanced and reasonable manor. (I’ve explained how to create an ROI calculator here)

One piece of the ROI puzzle should be exposure, it may not be as valuable, but it has to be considered.

This kind of research helps us understand the value, however, we (marketers) need to assign value to it first, both rationally and in our guts.

This swell article on SMH yesterday arvo enlightens us on the fact that Australians no longer only use mobiles for phone calls & texting, lots of us are using it for email, web browsing and entertainment. These kinds of reports are critical to my job as it helps make or break business cases on where clients should invest their money.

Some interesting results in the research report got my attention including:

• 9% of participants have iPhones
• 32% of respondents accessed social networking sites from their handsets
  • and half of those accessing social networks daily

However, skepticism started to creep in as the second stat seemed a little out of kilter with general social networking site usage in Australia…. So I dug a little deeper into the research report. One of the first places I usually look (and I’m no researcher) is who they surveyed – sometimes this skews the results – and in this case there was an issue.

The decision to implement the survey online and to promote the survey via mobile banner ads has some implications in terms of disseminating the results to the wider population.

SOME IMPLICATIONS?

I’d say a little more than SOME IMPLICATIONS – considering the survey is about mobile usage.

If you do a survey of people who are clicking on mobile banner ads it’s pretty stupid to ask them if they use mobile internet and applications – THEY JUST CLICKED ON A BANNER AD.

If AIMIA or the research agency can clarify the number of people that responded via mobile devices the report might be of some value – maybe not.

Footnote: I’m a digital advocate, believe in all things online/mobile/social, but flawed research reports make it difficult for me to judge the potential value of the research & therefore difficult to recommend it to my clients.

UPDATE: 13th October

Marisa from mNet has clarified the issues that I raised in this post in the comments below. Until I’ve reviewed the report in further detail assume that the research is sound. My question is why they didn’t clarify this important fact in the report.

(It was labelled as ‘Australian’s like Youtube ads’ on Adnews…) Take this research with a grain of salt as they surveyed people who have been to YouTube in the last 3 months, kinda going to skew the results (massively!).

Seventy percent of Australian YouTube users enjoy watching ads on the site if they are relevant and entertaining, according to Research International.

The survey found 25% actively seek out ads on YouTube, while one-third of Australian users who see an ad on YouTube click on it.

Professionally produced brand videos are nearly as trusted as user-generated videos, with 49% trusting user-generated videos and 41% trusting a brand feature or segment.

YouTube’s Australian audience aged 14 and over includes 14 to 17-year-olds (7%), 18 to 29-year-olds (32%), 30 to 39-year-olds (20%), 40 to 49-year-olds (18%), 50 to 59-year-olds (13%) and 60-year-olds and over (10%).

Research International conducted the research on behalf of Google, interviewing 3000 males and females nationwide, aged 14 and over, who had visited the YouTube website in the past three months.

YouTube was created in February 2005 and was acquired by Google in November 2006.

Source: AdNews

You may or may not have seen this little story blow up into a fairly heated debate on Mumbrella today.

An agency came under fire today for doing what I, and most others believe to be unethical and wrong. They advertised this job on Gumtree.

“The job requires you to have very good search skills to find conversations online. You will then take on a supplied persona and join in on the conversation.

“You will have to be clever and adaptive, if you don’t know about a subject then you will have to learn how to “sell” yourself as authentic.

“This is NOT spam, you are adding value to the conversation. You are respectful and knowledgeable and most importantly having fun.

“If this sounds like you and you have strong English writing skills, then please I want to hear from you.”

If you’ve got an opinion or want to read the full story, go to Mumbrella, I’ve collated the many heated comments and summarised the views below.

90% of 20 marketers think using fake persona is wrong

The last time I checked

About 3 months ago I did some work researching the viability of developing a mobile website for one of our key clients. We reviewed the potential traffic we could drive through search plus the total traffic already coming from mobiles.

From the research I found that about 25% of Australians had access to 3G (this doesn’t mean they use it) and this % had grown rapidly since the introduction of the iPhone. However, based on potential mobile paid search & our current mobile visitors we were able comfortably get 1-2% of our total website traffic to be mobile, pretty darn low. So we, and the client, decided to hold of on a mobile site and focus on other digital activities.

A profound Sensis research study

It’s 3 months later and Sensis have released a research report (pdf) by Sweeny Research that indicates that 26% of Australians have accessed the internet from their mobile – a pretty astounding number.So therefore all advertisers should start spending more on mobile…

So I dug a little further

So I jumped back into their 2008 report to see what the change was year-on-year and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t there… weird. At this point I got a bit skeptical and something else popped out at me – Yellow Pages (Sensis) just released an iPhone app of their directory – what a perfect time to release research that tells their advertisers to spend on mobile.

So maybe I’m skeptical, maybe it is finally the year of the mobile (which the mobile industry has been claiming for 3 yers now) or maybe not. I’m just questioning the background, approach and validity of the research. Maybe they should’ve asked “How many times have you accessed the internet via your mobile in the last 12 months?”.

My personal recent experience

In a recent campaign for another client, the media agency negotiated some bonus media with a big publisher, some mobile media. The publisher also offered to build a mobile site for the product, as there was no cost or risk to our client we couldn’t resist.

So we received a bunch of banner impressions and a really nice mobile site and we measured the results. This client has an ROI calculator that helps compare the performance of different media online, it calculates what the value of the media was to the business. So, if we calculated the value of the mobile site and the media provided by the publisher it would’ve been worth about $50 – not awesome at all.

What does this all mean?

Now I love and advocate mobile apps and advertising, particularly considering it’s potential growth with iPhone, Google Android and many others entering the market, and telcos rapidly reducing the cost of data. However, will it currently deliver a strong ROI? Is this the best place to spend $50k? That all depends on your marketing objectives, but for some of my clients I’d say no

In a recent report prepared by Sysomos and it indicates that we’re beating massive countries like Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, France, Indian & South Africa in terms of new user sign ups on Twitter.

Full report here: http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/appendix