Blog

We continue to hear that people no longer watch television in its traditional format. This continues to be the view of several commentators. This tends to be opinion, rather than fact.

Like Shakira's hips - the numbers don't lie.

Last month Depaul U.K launched an App called IHOBO with Publicis London which has now become one of the most popular Itunes downloads.

Google have finally released a new web indexing system, Google Caffeine. It may seem a bit odd for the world’s number one search engine to change something that wasn’t broken before but with the continuous evolution of the web, Caffeine promises to return searchers with more up to date, relevant content then before from not only text based content but from video, images, news and real-time updates.

In May this year Google unveiled their latest product, Google Secure Search. Secure Search or SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is Google’s very on secure search engine, or in Google’s words:

“SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. When you search over SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can't be read by any intermediary party such as employers and internet service providers (ISPs).”

Last month, Google Local Business became Google Places and a Local Business Listing became a Place Page. Google also released some astonishing facts on Google Places. There are 4 million Place Pages worldwide, 2 million in the U.S., estimates put this as 10-15% of all U.S. businesses have a Place Page. 20% of searches on Google are related to location, that’s 1.28 billion per month.

On Monday 7th June, SPAR will become the first advertiser to run a truly local advertising campaign on Spotify, using a postcode-specific targeting strategy conceived by MEC Manchester.

Once you have set up your campaigns, adgroups, adtexts and keywords in Adwords you still need to be able to track their performance. Google conversion tracking is a free, simple way to do this. Once our conversion tracking tag has been placed on the ‘thank you’ page of the website we can then see exactly which keywords have driven conversions. These 'conversions' are attributed to the last click; in other words the last keyword they searched and clicked through on before converting.

Digital Radio UK are set to try and convince more radio listeners to move to digital listening after they announced this week that they would be launching a month long scrappage scheme on 22nd May, designed to get listeners to trade in their old FM/AM radios for a shiny new digital radio.

Following on from Google announcing page load speed to be a ranking factor, they have had a patent granted that was filed in 2004 for a new ranking signal, semantic closeness. This is when Google uses the HTML structure of a webpage to view how close words are together and determine a visual structure of the webpage that is semantically meaningful.

Google have recently announced a new element to ranking factors for websites – page load speed.

Currently page load speed is only a ranking factor on searches made through google.com although it will be rolled out across all counties and languages soon.

We’ve got a wealth of information at our fingertips. Alongside subscribing to the latest consumer data, market reports and profiling systems we’ve uncovered a plethora of free information on the net available to all. Government affiliated organisations conduct hundreds of surveys every year and the resulting data sets and reports are made available to the public.

I’ve compiled a list of both useful and useless facts from free of charge sources below. Some are invaluable, some random and some rude!

We've always known radio as 'the trusted medium', with its enviable close relationship with listeners. A new report from OFCOM suggests that radio is also the most trusted source of news, beating both TV and the internet in a survey of 1,824 people in 2009.

Last week Google announced that it would be rolling out personalized search for all users of Google, including those who are signed out of iGoogle. It used to be that personalized search just ran for people using iGoogle. It was based on the user’s web history and the users Google account. Users could bump up certain sites for certain keywords by click on an icon in the results or if your web history showed you visited a certain site a lot it would automatically appear higher in the results.

Facebook is now by far the most popular social network in the world. It now plans to decentralise their site, breaking down the barriers that keep its users on the site. Facebook users may soon be able to show their interactions on other sites on their Facebook, with the introduction of a ‘like’ button that webmasters can place on their web pages.

The recent Ofcom Children’s Media Literacy Audit has shown that 25% of children aged 8-12 have a profile on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace. This comes despite the fact that the minimum age set by these sites is 13 years old. 83% of these children say they have set their profile to be seen by friends only. However this still leaves 17% of the age group that have profiles that are significantly underage, and open for all to see. Alarmingly one in six parents of the age group had no idea their child was involved with a social network, although it should be added that of those that did, 93% said that they checked what their child was doing on them.