iPhone is now the #1 mobile advertising device worldwide

AdMob, the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace, Wednesday announced that the iPhone is now the #1 mobile advertising device worldwide, displacing the Motorola RAZR. The iPhone experienced strong traffic worldwide to become the #1 device, with 37 percent of requests coming from outside of the US.

The iPhone experienced particularly explosive growth across AdMob’s network after the company launched its ad units for iPhone sites and applications in July 2008. There are currently more than 400 applications and sites in the AdMob's iPhone Network. In October 2008, AdMob reached more than four million unique iPhones, approximately 30 percent of the devices in the market.17 percent of iPhone requests came from Western Europe and 8 percent from Asia. Top markets worldwide include the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and Switzerland. In the US the iPhone is the #2 device behind the Motorola RAZR and in the UK it is the #3 device, behind the Nokia N95 and Sony Ericsson K800i.

Worldwide requests grew 13.8 percent month over month to 5.8 billion. US requests grew 7.9 percent to 2.2 billion and UK requests grew 16.0 percent.

Sony Ericsson passed Motorola to become the #2 handset manufacturer worldwide. Apple jumped ahead of LG and RIM to become the #5 handset manufacturer worldwide.

The top 10 devices worldwide, in order, are the Apple iPhone, Motorola RAZR V3, Nokia N70, Motorola KRZR K1c, Motorola W385, Nokia 6300, Nokia 3110c, Nokia N73, Motorola Z6m, and RIM BlackBerry 8300.

India Online 2008

The India Online study helps in understanding the status and net usage behavior and preferences of online Indians. It not only provides the most recent estimates on the Internet user-ship, growth and penetration in India but also gives a highly ‘insightful’ understanding of the current net usage behavior and preferences of various types of online Indians. 

Online user base touching 50 million in India, 1 in 5 users coming from rural areas. The total base of internet users in India stands at 49.4 million currently. 82% of online Indians come from the urban areas and 18% from the rural areas. At these levels, the penetration of internet stands at 4.5% of the total population of India. Net is the ‘dominant’ medium in the homes of online Indians. 

Almost 9 out of 10 regular internet users accessing the net from home or place of work do so ‘daily’ (though only 33% of cyber café based internet users access the net on daily basis). More importantly, Internet users who access the net from home tend to be relatively ‘heavier’ users of the internet as compared to the ‘offline’ mediums (TV, newspaper and radio). Regular internet users tend to be the lightest users of radio, followed by newspaper and then TV. 

Internet usage in India has shown a healthy growth in last one year. More importantly, it is showing clear signs of evolving and becoming the ‘dominant medium’ of interacting with the world for a good proportion of the regular online Indians. It is increasingly becoming more and more relevant and meaningful in their ‘personal’ lives (and not just their work lives). However, online buying has not really picked as much this year, making net more of a ‘window shop’ rather than an ‘online market’ in any true sense of the word (except for the travel products maybe).The fact that the bulk of Indian consumer mass comes from the vernacular Indian world, the increasing usage of local language websites is one of the most important elements of internet usage to watch for in the future. 

Availability of relevant and meaningful local language content and applications on the net, together with affordable access, may become the biggest enabler (or the biggest limiting factor) in the future growth of Internet usage in India.
- JuxtConsult, June 2008

5 Ways to Convert Offline Strategy to Online Marketing Success

You may tend to look at offline and online marketing differently, building separate strategies and marketing plans for each. This may not be the most efficient way to grow your business. Most goals and strategies that work offline apply online as well (and vice versa). The underlying concepts are the same, but executions differ. Some examples follow.

Targeting and Differentiating

Targeting and differentiation are based on the premise that each of your products, services or ideas is useful to some people and not to others. That premise is the same whether your business is online, offline or both. You differentiate your business from competitors so that people can understand the benefits you bring to them that others do not. You target your audience by delivering marketing messages so that those benefits are exposed to the people that need them. Offline, that could mean advertising in certain newspapers your target customers read. Online, those same messages can be delivered directly from your Website, through pay per click advertising or through emailed newsletters.

Increasing Repeat Sales

Your existing customers (or clients) are important to you whether they were acquired virtually through a Website, or physically through a retail store or salesperson. They have already bought into the benefits you bring to them and are likely to purchase more if given the opportunity. Those opportunities to increase repeat sales can be offered online, offline or both.

• Communication with existing customers can encourage repeat orders. Offline, this can be through mailings or catalogues. Online, emailed newsletters or RSS feeds can keep customers up-to-date on new products, discounts and other news of interest. 
   
• Customer service can make ordering easier for both repeat and new customers. Offline, "operators standing by" can help customers through the process and suggest appropriate add-ons to an order. This can apply online as well with live customer chat. 
   
• Loyalty programs are another way to increase repeat sales by existing customers. Those who purchase repeatedly from you receive some compensation (such as dollars back or free product). This type of program can work online as well as offline. Offline, customers present their loyalty program number or card directly. Online, they fill in a promo code or comment field stating they are loyalty program members.

Testing

Testing is a marketing and research concept that can be implemented both offline and online. When marketing offline, in order to improve conversion or response rates, we often test by exposing different versions of a program to sample audiences before fully implementing the program (through a trial postcard mailing, new product test markets, or other marketing research methods, for example). The exact concept applies online as well.

One way to conduct online testing is by split testing different versions of your sales (or other Website) page. Using split testing software or a script, you can rotate through different versions of a Web page to see which is most effective. Just as with offline testing methods, you can analyze the conversion or response rates of each version to see which performs better. In fact, online testing is easier because the logistics are easier; unlike similar offline tests, there is nothing to print and distribute to the target audience.

Adapting To Change

Offline or on, trends and customer preferences change over time. To compete, you must change with them. This means adapting all of your marketing and products/services over time, whether they are Web or "brick and mortar" based. By thinking of your offline and online activities as two different ways of marketing the same business marketing strategies, you can more efficiently incorporate those changes to all of your offline and online activities.

Trusting Your Intuition

"Going with your gut" is one strategy you aren't likely to find in any marketing book. After a certain amount of business experience, your intuition will, at times, come to a strategic conclusion before your brain does. If your intuition has a good track record, trust it. Here's why:

Every business – online, offline or blended – has an optimal marketing strategy uniquely its own. This is not only because each individual business is a bit different, but also because strengths and weaknesses (as well as preferences) of those involved create an environment like no other. In other words, given identical circumstances and identical marketing programs, the people involved will manage the execution differently in each company, creating different results. Those differences – the abilities of you and your people to execute some programs better than others, or to work with some outside agencies/services more effectively than with others – create more variables than can be easily captured by analysis. Your intuition, however, can capture those variables and guide you in making the best choices, whether they apply to online or offline marketing activities.

Goodbye Web2.0

What is the impact of the SearchWiki on SEO?

With the release of SearchWiki on Thursday, questions are flying around regarding the potential impact that this could have on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  The ultimate question being - If users can ultimately control their own results, then could this be the very beginning of the end for SEO? 

After hearing of the release, and reading the theory here I was initially concerned regarding the extent to which Google will use this data. Google have come out and said that user feedback data gathered will have no impact on current rankings, but they will not rule the impact it could have on future rankings. So what can we take from this? 

Firstly, Google would not be able to use the data they have just started to collect as an algorithmic factor for several reasons. Any algorithm factor is almost certainly heavily scrutinised by statisticians, ran through impact models and very heavily tested before it gets anywhere near being included in the ranking algorithm. To say that SearchWiki data is not a ranking factor now is a bit of a no brainer, but this is likely to be simply because the Google engineers and statisticians do not yet have enough data to work with.

The fact that Google have not come out and openly said that this data will never be used as a ranking factor can only be taken one way. Google want to use this data in the future to form part of the “user feedback” section of the algorithm, working the data alongside click through rates, bounce rates and analytics data they already have in plentiful supply. Whether Google do use this data or not will depend on many factors. Will there be a significant enough number of active SearchWiki’ers? Will SearchWiki data correlate with existing user feedback data? Are any trends that they find significant enough to be blanketed across all keywords? 

So how will this impact SEO in the future? Very little, if at all – and this assumes that Google do find the feedback data valuable enough to include it as part of the algorithm. Google have already been taking user feedback into consideration when ranking result pages for some time, so if your site was performing well previously, it is obviously going down well with users and shall continue to do so. The SEO fundamentals remain the same, making sure your webpage is relevant enough to the users search query as possible. 

Where are Search Engines Most Likely To Innovate?

I though it would be a perfect time to present my own theories on how search engines might be innovating their technologies.

QUERY INTENT DETECTION

It seems that all of the major engines have eschewed disambiguation in favor of attempting to automatically determine the query intent of a user. My guess is that more robust user data and greater analytical and data mining capacity will result in even more personalization and assumption of intent.

SEARCH TERM PATTERN ANALYSIS

I believe we’re going to see a lot more tweaking of results and rankings based on how a user has conducted a series of searches from the past. I’m also guessing that advertising is going to be served and tracked to visitors based on search patterns - imagine a Google AdWords interface where you can target any searcher who’s made searches for “used cars” and “seattle” in any combination of search strings over the past 30 days. Powerful stuff, right?

VERTICAL GROWTH

Ask’s 3D interface is clearly the future of vertical results, and it’s hard to argue that for many searches at the head of the demand curve, Ask is providing the categorically “best” SERPs because of this. With expansion into specialized results for recipes, local, news, video, images, flights and many more, I suspect that the other engines are going to try playing leapfrog, rather than catch-up. This will probably mean some very unique interfaces and a whole new set of challenges for search marketers.

SOCIAL DATA INCLUSION

I may have plenty of bones to pick with Scoble, but that doesn’t mean his ideas are wholly without merit, though I think the directions of his predictions were pretty far off. My guess would be that data from sites like Facebook, Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Techmeme and others may eventually find a place in both relevancy detection (by attempting to match behavior with intent) and ranking (using temporal data & human preferences & sharing information).

SEARCH & DISCOVERY SUGGESTION

I can’t look at the success of sites like StumbleUpon & Digg without thinking that search engines have to be experimenting in those fields. I imagine there are already efforts to attempt to provide “discovery” type information, searches, suggestions, etc. to users of the engine. Picture a new tab at Google that offers “search phrases you might be interested in,” based on your search history and other profiling data.

LINK PATTERNS OVER LINK NUMBERS

PageRank was, without doubt, a remarkable innovation, but brute link juice may eventually fall to more sophisticated analyses of how, when and where certain sites and pages link.

MAJOR VERTICAL FRACTURING

Why would you run a real estate search on Yahoo! or Google when you can do it on Zillow? Why run a local search on those engines when Yelp offers so much amazing data (full disclosure - they’re a client)? Could Avvo do this for the legal industry? Could Technorati (or someone else) do it for the Blogosphere? The possibility that some verticals might be stolen away in large chunks from the major engines is certainly a possibility.

ANSWERS OVER RESULTS

Naver in Korea has shown that when done right, a collection of human answers can be preferrable to a list of relevant web pages. This could be another option for fracturing, a possibility for more vertical creep or even an opportunity for a whole different kind of engine. One thing I see fueling the potential is increased mobile search - that market is still drastically underserved.

SEMANTIC AI

Picture a Googlebot that could not only read your pages, but “understand” what you were saying. A truly intelligent engine is probably still a decade or more away, but with every leap forward in contextual perception, the engines are going to be churning out better and better results.