'Net Features

The Digital Future in Focus

Peter A. Prestipino — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:00:00 GMT

Comscore released its annual report examining trends in the digital world including social media, search, online video, digital advertising, mobile and e-commerce. The 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus provides several key insights and highlights what these trends mean for the coming year.

“2012 promises to be an exciting year for the digital media industry as the explosion of available content and proliferation of web-enabled devices drive the evolution of the digital consumer, creating new opportunities and challenges for the entire digital ecosystem,” says Linda Abraham, comScore CMO and EVP of Global Product Development. “In order to be successful in this new paradigm, digital marketers must understand the key trends shaping the current marketplace and what that means for the future of their businesses.”

Some of the report’s most interesting highlights, which can be accessed here, include:

- Social Networking accounted for 16.6 percent of all online minutes at the end of 2011 and is on track to surpass Portals as the most engaging online activity in 2012.

- Bing had a positive growth trajectory in 2011, closing out the year by surpassing Yahoo! for the #2 position among core search engines for the first time in its history

- More than 100 million Americans watched online video content on an average day to close out 2011, representing a 43-percent increase versus year ago.

- A staggering 4.8 trillion display ad impressions were delivered across the U.S. Web in 2011 as brand advertisers continued to shift dollars to the digital medium.

- Ecommerce growth rates versus the prior year remained in double-digits to significantly outpace growth at brick-and-mortar retail.

eTapestry Integrates with Constant Contact

Peter A. Prestipino — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 02:00:00 GMT

The leading software platforms are those that make the most (and best) third-party integrations available to their users.

Blackbaud’s fundraising software eTapestry has just announced such a platform integration, partnering with email marketing service provider Constant Contact. Through the integration, nonprofits will be able to target donors by segmenting and updating their lists directly from within the Communicate section of eTapestry's platform.

“The integration of eTapestry and Constant Contact has greatly simplified how we manage our email communications,” says Dave Redelfs, Open Arms International’s director of operations, and a user of both Constant Contact Email Marketing and eTapestry. “By reducing the number of steps, we are saving time that we can better dedicate to our mission of transforming Africa, one life at a time.”

Path Analysis: Google Refreshes Search Funnel Reports

Peter A. Prestipino — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Google has made several improvements to its AdWords Search Funnels, a tool initially released in 2010 that enables advertisers to better understand the series of search impressions and clicks that ultimately result in conversion.

Google today provided a sampling of the improved features which include the ability to compare data ranges - giving advertisers the ability to see how their funnel has changed year-over-year.

Google has also given advertisers the ability to access drill-down dimensions (campaigns, ad groups, keywords) via tabs, which are accessible from the top left of the Search Funnels tables. Finally, advertisers are now able to view the total number of conversions and conversion values side by side in new histogram reports.

Here's How jQuery is Creating the Interest in Pinterest

Linc Wonham — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Startup social networking site Pinterest has been gaining a lot of attention recently – most of it good, but some of the most recent news hasn’t been so great.

But good or bad, the online visual pinboard is one of the hot topics of the day and traffic to the site is skyrocketing. As this relates to the design and development world, one of the positive results of all this interest in Pinterest is the increased attention that’s being given to its engaging website design.

It appears to be using a very popular jQuery plugin called Masonry, created three years ago by David DeSandro. In DeSandro’s own words:

“Masonry is a dynamic grid layout plugin for jQuery. Think of it as the flip-side of CSS floats. Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically, positioning each element in the next open spot in the grid. This minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, like a mason fitting stones in a wall.”

And below is the designer's visual explanation of Masonry:

The design community has been enthusiastic about jQuery Masonry since DeSandro’s initial release, but until Pinterest came along there hasn’t been a Masonry site that’s received so much attention in so little time. Perhaps this will send Masonry right into the mainstream of everyday Web design, or perhaps Pinterest is doomed to fail and Masonry will fall back into the shadows outside the view of the general Web populace.

I certainly hope that's not the case because it is a very useful tool that inspires great designs. To help inspire your own designs using jQuery Masonry, below are five examples.

Pinterest

J. Walter Thompson

Scrolldit

Puma

Up Magazine

Dollar-a-day Hosting for Video Neophytes

Linc Wonham — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Online video hosting service vzaar has launched a new package that hosts up to 250 videos for less than a dollar a day.

The idea behind vzaar Express is to give smaller businesses that may be new to video marketing the freedom to experiment until they’ve found the approach and message that’s right for their brand.

“At vzaar, we are constantly searching for ways to make video marketing more accessible and efficient,” explains vzaar CEO Stephen McCluskey. “As we studied the video space closely, we found a very real need for a more cost-effective professional video hosting solution. In response, we’ve developed a new pricing model to give businesses the best value for their investment.”

For organizations with a fully developed video strategy in place, Professional level packages begin at $79.99 a month and include advanced features like playlists, podcasts, subtitles, optimization for iPhones and iPads, and API uploads.

Also new is a redesigned layout and workflow inspired by the usage patterns of businesses that use vzaar most. This means any employee will be able to login, upload and share videos without any training or FAQ fumbling, so the creative minds in the office can focus on more important things.

The changes come nearly three years after Zappos revealed that the addition of product videos improved their sales by 30 percent. Video is also the medium that Cisco estimates will make up over 50 percent of all consumer Internet traffic this year.

Facebook Ad Budgets Grow Faster than Paid Search

Peter A. Prestipino — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:00:00 GMT

Digital marketing software provider Kenshoo has unveiled some interesting growth metrics based on analysis of more than 100 billion ads delivered on Facebook through its Kenshoo Social platform.

Kenshoo customers spent 109 percent more on Facebook in Q4 of 2011 than they did in the whole of Q3. While much of that can be attributed to the holiday, what is interesting about the increase is that it compared very favorably to search channels (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) that, in aggregate, saw a paid search ad budget growth of just 27 percent globally quarter-over-quarter.

“Brands using Kenshoo Social to manage Facebook ads saw impressive response rates leading to large increases in advertising spend that dwarfed paid search budget growth in the 4th quarter," says Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer of Kenshoo. "We see these trends continuing in 2012 and beyond as the Facebook ad ecosystem expands and marketers get more savvy using tools like Kenshoo Social to drive tangible results.”

The Kenshoo analysis also revealed that ad impressions grew by 47 percent in Q4 vs. Q3 2011. Consumers are clicking more as Facebook ads are gaining acceptance too, with clicks growing by 105 percent in Q4 vs. Q3 2011.

Jivox – Video Ads for the Political Landscape

Peter A. Prestipino — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:00:00 GMT

The political season is certainly heating up, and there have been quite a few technology-related releases that can be directly related to a candidate's success. But perhaps none of them will play a more important role than video, as it remains a powerful engagement mechanism.

The latest news comes from video ad company Jivox, which just released customized interactive ads developed specifically for political campaigns. The Jivox Political Ad Kit, according to the announcement, “enables candidates to embed video messages across multiple screens, including speeches and messages on specific issues, build audiences on social media channels and actively engage with supporters.”

With U.S. political campaigns in 2011-2012 spending 100 percent more in online advertisements than during the 2010 midterm elections, according to a recent STRATA survey, expect more news just like this in the coming months.

“Reaching out to voters online has become a necessity,” says Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of Jivox. “Jivox interactive video ads provide incredible advantages for political campaigns. It provides a similar engagement medium to TV, yet reaches a broader audience and increases exposure through interactive social sharing and real-time engagement on any screen.”

VMware Zimbra Comes to Verio

Peter A. Prestipino — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:00:00 GMT

Verio, best known for its online business solutions such as Web and application hosting for SMB marketing, announced the availability of VMware Zimbra for OEM and via Verio partners.

VMware Zimbra, an open source messaging and collaboration platform, expands Verio’s portfolio of hosted email solutions for its OEM partners. The Verio and VMware partnership will also provide branding options for partners to private-label their solutions through the use of Zimbra Zimlets, which are tools for integrating the VMware Zimbra Collaboration Suite with third-party Web applications.

“The availability of VMware Zimbra for Verio offers IT organizations a flexible collaboration platform that can enable greater workforce productivity,” says John Robb, senior director of product management at VMware. “With its rich email feature set, extensive ecosystem, and broad range of partner programs, VMware Zimbra offers new business opportunities for partners to meet the growing demands of small and medium-sized businesses.”

The Dirty Secret of Pinterest - Link Swapping

Peter A. Prestipino — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:04:00 GMT

Social media visual pin board Pinterest, which is now receiving over 10 million unique visitors a month, is apparently swapping out the links submitted by its users for links provided by affiliate network SkimLinks and doing so for profit as an affiliate, according to at least one industry source.

Joel Garcia of GTO Management ran some experiments and found that a pin linked to one of his merchant clients was swapped out for a SkimLinks affiliate link as he was passed from Pinterest to the source page of the pin.

Garcia did note that by using an affiliate link of his own, the affiliate link actually remained in tact (which is very good news for affiliate marketers). None of this, however, is good news for merchants.

The FTC rules on disclosure of affiliate links requires that any content creator that is endorsing or recommending something and receiving a financial benefit for doing so needs to disclose it.

But the law, of course, fails to address how platform providers like Pinterest should be treated in a case like this. Since Pinterest is not actually pushing people to buy something it may simply not apply. The best course of action, in my opinion, would simply be for Pinterest to provide the appropriate FTC disclaimer - and soon.

More from Website Magazine on Pinterest:

- Is Pinterest Doomed to Fail?

Developers' Toolkit Released for jQuery and HTML5

Linc Wonham — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:00:00 GMT

ComponentOne has released of a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development. The centerpiece of the release – called Wijmo – is the data visualization widgets that include more HTML5 chart types and new HTML5 gauges.

Wijmo extends jQuery UI and provides everything from interactive menus to rich charts. This v2 release offers over 40 widgets with many enhancements to existing widgets.

“This is the most complete collection of tools a Web developer may access for creating interactive websites and applications,” says ComponentOne product manager Chris Bannon. “The power of HTML5 is harnessed in the Wijmo collection and with it your Web applications will perform faster, run smoother and be more engaging than ever before.”

Wijmo.com has a live demo that lets visitors explore every widget and highlights the specific features of each. In the Grid Demo, which displays the source code used to create it, ComponentOne shows how the Wijmo Grid surfaces the filtering UI for each column of data.

Users may choose from one of the six professionally designed themes included with Wijmo, from over 30 themes from the jQuery UI project or use ThemeRoller from jQuery UI to create a custom theme to develop a consistent look and feel throughout an application.

Wijmo is split into two kits, with Wijmo Complete being a commercial kit filled with powerful application building widgets like charts and grids and Wijmo Open being completely free and open-source under the MIT/GPL licenses and includes menus, calendars and more.

Both kits ensure that the UI created works in every browser and every device without worrying about compatibility issues. Wijmo widgets support the following browsers: IE6+, Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, and Chrome.

Mobile Web Usage is Doubling Every Year

Linc Wonham — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Global Internet usage through mobile devices – not including tablets – essentially doubled from 4.3 percent in January 2011 to 8.5 percent in January 2012, according to Web analytics company StatCounter.

StatCounter also reports that the use of “mobile devices”, referring to smartphones and feature phones only in their research, to access the Internet has doubled year-over-year since 2009.

“While global Internet usage through mobiles is still under 10 percent, the pace of growth is remarkable,” says StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen.

StatCounter also announced the latest numbers regarding the world’s leading mobile vendors, mobile operating systems and mobile browsers, based on research covering all traffic to the StatCounter network. That data includes more than 15 billion pageviews monthly on a network of more than 3 million websites.

Most likely driven by its dominance in India, Nokia is still the world’s leading maker of mobile devices (again, phones only) in terms of Web pageviews, and Symbian maintained its lead as the top OS in the StatCounter sample. But both brands’ numbers are clearly in decline while Apple’s devices (not even including the iPad) and iOS are making dramatic gains.

Apple is the second-leading mobile device-maker worldwide but leads the U.S. and U.K. markets, and its iOS was also second worldwide with 24 percent of the Web pageviews in the StatCounter sample. Apple’s operating system was first in the U.S. with 45 percent of the views, just ahead of Android with 39 percent. Worldwide, the Android OS was again just below iOS for third place.

The Android browser was tops in North America with a 37-percent share of the pageviews, but second worldwide with 20 percent and behind Opera’s 24 percent. Apple’s Safari browser finished slightly behind Android in both samples.

The takeaway for website owners is of course the exponential rise in mobile access to the Internet since 2009 – about a 100-percent increase in each of the past three years. This should come as a surprise to no one, but it is interesting to see the numbers from different research reports from time to time. The global use of mobile devices to access the Web in 2009, according to StatCounter, was 0.7 percent. It jumped to 1.6 percent in January 2010, 4.3 percent in January 2011 and now 8.5 percent in January 2012.

SEO Meta Data Mechanics: Titles & Descriptions

Peter A. Prestipino — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:15:00 GMT

Inbound links and personal connections carry the strongest influence in search results listings, and today you will discover several tactics to increase both of those counts.

There’s a lot more to securing first-place and first-page rankings, however, than links and personal connections. For that you’ll need to delve into the mechanics of SEO and specifically the meta-data of your individual pages. We’ve analyzed the top listings and drawn some conclusions to help your website dominate the search results pages.

Meta-data was once the single-most important factor in placement (well, that and the type and quality of content on the page returned by the search engines), but no longer. Now meta-data has been deprecated in importance – but it’s still important. Specifically, the title tag and description tag are key, and the best part is that it’s completely under your control.

There are some general best practices as they relate to meta data. For example, it is imperative that each page feature unique (not replicated elsewhere) titles and descriptions. Another best practice is to write for readability and the optimal user experience – meaning it should be descriptive and appealing to users. Finally, since there is limited virtual “real estate” on search engines’ results pages, the length of titles is limited (so we’ll look at that too). Also worthy of note is that Google in particular does not always return the description that is available on the website, but often returns a content section from the page that most closely matches the users’ specific query. That being said, there are times when the description is used – so we’ll look at that as well.

These “best practices” are easier said than done, of course. But by looking at the search results pages periodically, and, more specifically, at the first-page results (and the first few listings), we can gain an idea of what’s working – or at least what’s most important to the search engines.

To conduct our test, we were logged out of the search engines as it should be obvious that the role that personalization plays today is far too influential in the modern search experience. With our setup in place, let’s hit the SERPs – we’ll look at Google and Bing independently.

Search Engine: Google

Keyword Phrase: Romantic Valentines Ideas
Some general thoughts on the sites in the top ten listings before venturing into the details. Overall, the design of about half the sites were in violation of Google’s recent page layout algorithm. Personally, I found about half of the content below average (and, believe me, I need the help!).

That evaluation aside, just two of the sites were using the maximum allowable length for titles on Google. The average title length of the ten sites returned was 44 characters with spaces. Just one site on the search results page for this query did not have either the title or description provided on the site. The maximum description length on this query was 160 characters (with spaces) and the lowest was just 80 characters. The average description length was 138 characters.

Search Engine: Bing

Keyword Phrase: Romantic Valentines Ideas
In my opinion, Bing actually did a better job of providing a more universal search experience. The first listing was actually a section dedicated to news (one primary listing, two secondary listings – titles only), and had a section dedicated to related images. Also, unlike Google, Bing provided its related search area under the second organic listing. Finally, Bing featured an indication of the freshness of results with two that were indicated as published within the past one day.

Every listing on Bing used the title provided by the website listed. Just one of the ten sites returned (consequently, a Google Blogspot site) featured the exact description provided by the site. The average title length on Bing was 45 characters (with spaces) and the average description length was 136. Five listings used the maximum allowable description length, and just one listing used the maximum title length.

Finding Lost Impressions with Share of Voice Metrics

Peter A. Prestipino — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:00:00 GMT

In November 2011, Microsoft AdCenter representatives indicated that impression share reporting would be coming soon; and, after much anticipation from the advertising community, it has finally arrived.

Advertisers on AdCenter can now create impression share reports and access statistics about the percentage of ad impressions they may be losing because of factors such as relevance, rank or budget.

The impression share reports on AdCenter provide advertisers with some insights into why they may be missing out on some impressions. For example, budget limitations, relevance scores and rank issues all play a role and now advertisers can get a handle on the problem by understanding their specific lost impression share data.

Armed with this kind of information, advertisers can make some intelligent decisions on how to improve their ads’ relevance, improve their ranking or adjust their budgets to capture lost impressions.

Doubling AOV with Behavioral Commerce

Peter A. Prestipino — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:30:00 GMT

The more you know about your customers, the better positioned you are to sell them products - and sell more in general. Online hat retailer Hats in the Belfry can apparently attest to that.

The internet retailer selected retargeting and behavioral commerce platform Steelhouse, an Ad-Tech Innovation award winner, and saw its average order values increase a whopping 95 percent. Steelhouse enabled the retailer to segment shoppers based on their buying habits and then engage them in a 1-on-1 dialogue (go ahead, call it what it is - live chat) with those customers in real time on the site.

As a test, Hats in the Belfry targeted the “Toe-in-the-Water Shopper,” – one who places relatively low dollar item(s) in their cart and then purchases the item(s). The retailer offered a 15-percent discount on orders of more than $75 to Toe-in-the-Water shoppers, and in doing so, increased their average order values from $53.67 to $104.16.

“With the SteelHouse platform, we can deploy real-time offers to dozens of segments of shoppers in order to maximize our average order value and revenue by shopper type,” says James Sackar, ecommerce general manager of Hats in the Belfry. “We’re able to see the results immediately hit our bottom line.”

Google Update Highlights Freshness

Peter A. Prestipino — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:44:00 GMT

Google recently announced several new search quality highlights that were rolled out in January. Perhaps more than any other "theme" from this round of updates, however, freshness seems to be the focus.

Google has essentially made several adjustments/updates to the freshness algorithm it released back in November. While these are apparently minor updates according to the announcement, let this act as a catalyst to accelerate your daily content production as the search engine is now clearly focused on providing users not just relevant results but also recent, relevant results.

Users (and the SEOs who love them, of course) will also see a lot more in the way of news results blended in to their natural results. The improvement to universal search aims to assist Google’s decision process on which queries should show news results, making it more responsive to real-time trends.

Also worthy of note, I believe, is the introduction of more relevant related searches on the results pages. Often at the bottom of the results listings, users see a section called “Searches related to” with other, suggested queries. With this change, Google has updated the model for generating related searches, resulting in more useful query refinements.

Google had a busy month with the modifications it made related to titles in search results, its page layout algorithm improvement and, of course, the much discussed introduction of Search Plus Your World.