I’m really excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the Pair Up web conference in London on 8/9 April on the future of web advertising.  PairUp is a conference for everyone who works (or wants to work) in the world of the web.  It’ll bring together well known names and pair them up to talk with some of the hottest teenage talent the web has to offer.

Clearly, I’m no longer hot teenage talent…  Anyway, I can’t say too much yet about who I’ll be paired up with, other than the fact I think it’s a fair chance they’ll be closer to my 18 month daughter’s age than to my own.

I’m really excited about the opportunity this is going to provide to meet new people with fresh ideas, and I think the fact we’ll pair up in this way is particularly relevant to the talk my partner and I will give.  Because whatever the future of web advertising brings, advertisers will always want something new and original. New and emerging talent pools are a great place to fish for that.

One of the things the conference organisers want me to touch on is how web advertising got to where it is today.  Of course, there’s been a tonne of developments and innovation since the web started, but some key constants have always been there.  Advertisers buy audience,  Sales execs are driven largely by short term targets which often create conflict with product people and lack of a good sales operations process and advertiser programmes can make it harder to make a decent profit selling inventory on your terms.

But what about the future?  I’d be interested to know what people think.  What’s the best way for an advertiser to get their message across today?  How does that vary across devices? What constitutes the most effective KPIs (key performance indicators)?  Is the web a branding medium, a direct response medium, or is it a platform for local and niche audiences?

Finally, as a site owner or publisher what opportunities (or obstacles) are there to you monetising your website?

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

OpenX, the freely available ad server management system is a great product – of that we’re in absolutely no doubt. Innovations, such as the creation of the OpenX Marketplace and a recently announced strategic alliance with Microsoft add to what is already a great solution for publishers who want to take control of monetising their own inventory.

There are of course products out there to rival it – like DoubleClick/Google Dart – but the ease of entry for OpenX makes it an obvious starting point.

For the last 18 months we’ve been running OpenX on our own server. We’re yet to upgrade to version 2.8, which is required for Marketplace – and once we’re there I’ll be interested to see how broad the marketplace is. I expect that it’ll be heavily skewed towards US advertisers – Marketplace is only really going to work for our clients if it can credibly compete on a local level with Google – notwithstanding OpenX’s ability to work with Google Adsense anyway – and for that it will need UK advertisers in its marketplace.

If you’re thinking of using OpenX for your business, what route should you go. OpenX offers 3 options – a free Community Hosted, Enterprise Hosted and then the option to install the software on your own box and go Community Download.

A few months ago we thought we saw an opportunity to migrate from Community Download to Community Hosted. The benefits seemed obvious:-

Plenty of ad impressions

Free Hosted offers a 100 million ad impressions per month. You only need to pay (by virtue of moving to Open X Enterprise Hosted) if you need to exceed this – the idea being I guess, if your level of ad impressions isn’t generating the cost of the monthly fees (which start at $999) then you’re doing something wrong.

Enterprise does offer telephone support as part of the contract – the only version that offers any structured support beyond the forums.

No need to worry about version upgrades or your own server management

An appealing benefit to us at the time was that using Community Hosted meant that we didn’t need to upgrade our server’s OS to facilitate an upgrade from PHP 5.1.2 to PHP 5.2 to make the move from OpenX 2.6 to 2.8. While the free hosted version makes no guarantee of uptime, we logically reasoned that OpenX hosting their own software should be able to make a better fist of it than us (not that we’ve ever had problems ourselves)

The reality was somewhat different…

Communication

When problems occur with OpenX Community Hosted, you need to go to the site and find out the status yourself. Which means, if problems occur, you’ve usually been alerted to it by your client, not your service provider (aka OpenX) which is not ideal.

Support

The only support comes via documentation and the forums. From time to time OpenX staff or super-users will chip in, but there’s no reliable structured support – or even the option to buy in as a premium service, unless you go Enterprise.

Time Zone

The bulk of Community Hosted seems to be managed on the US west coast. The timezone has two impacts. If problems arise, in the UK, you’re on your own till 4pm. Often, from 4pm, the admin tools can be hard to get continual access to because of demand. I have to say, both of these observations are anecdotal.

The conclusion we’ve reached

We’ve now gone back to deciding the best way for us to use OpenX is to go the Community Download route – even though that means we’ve got to do a fair amount of work on a server upgrade to get there. Businesses can run OpenX on a dedicated server, with regular back ups, for a cost of £150 month plus whatever admin time needs to be costed, to a service level of at least 99.5% uptime. This is significantly cheaper than a starting price of $999 per month, for an extra 0.25% guaranteed uptime and support for going with Enterprise Hosted.

The downside is of course that you’re taking on support and liability for a product that ultimately you don’t control – but the experience from using either Hosted version versus Community Download is at least the latter is one you can set your own internal SLAs around with your clients.

With a community of over 50,000 publishers its easy to see what OpenX are struggling to maintain support of the Community Hosted version – but they should remember that, for many people, this route will be their first experience of the solution. After our experience of Community Hosted, I’m not sure I’d trust OpenX to provide me with decent service for Enterprise, even though I guess this is where all their resource goes. OpenX would do well in my opinion to take a leaf out of WordPress’s book with regards to offering a hosted and downloadable product side by side.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Did you know that if you have a computer at work connected to the Internet then it’s possible that you might need a TV licence? This would even apply if you were using your laptop or mobile phone in the office and it was plugged into the mains, because once it is, then it’s no longer covered by your home licence. If however you don’t use your computer or phone to stream live TV then you are exempt, but how the TV licence bods determine whether you do or don’t, I don’t know.

This law just strikes me as a nonsense. As an employer, unless I find some way of restricting my staff from accessing live TV streams then it would seem clear that I’d need to buy one just in case one of my team decides one day to catch the latest on a breaking news story, rather than focussing on their miggly endeavours!

The thing is, it was never ‘our’ decision, as business owners, for broadcasters to start streaming TV content online. It’s inevitable that they would and I’m really glad that they do, but then to decide that this now means businesses need a TV licence too places just another unnecessary cost on firms.

On Radio 5live this morning they had some chap on from the licensing gestapo and he said the process for catching unlicensed businesses involves sending out letters, and then if these are ignored, visiting the premises with a view to proving that computers are being used for this. I really wonder how they’re going to get this proof. Unless they actually catch someone in the act of watching a live TV stream, I don’t think they can have any actual rights to start looking at the histories of browsers on machines, or to demand business owners demonstrate how they restrict this content from being viewed.

Of course, they make out they will catch you, and, of course, they don’t disclose how. But I don’t think there is a how which is definitive enough to stand up against all arguments, although by maintaining this stance proprietors and directors will of course just get the licence anyway. Which of course we all should, if its the law – and let’s be clear here, I’m not advocating we break it either. That doesn’t change the fact though that its a stupid law, and the confusion over it is just another reason why convergence of media makes it harder to keep the licence system running. TV licenses will go the same way as Radio ones… In general, if a law is easy to understand, then it’s a law that makes sense. Murder is against the law. Easy. When laws are shrouded in confusion, it generally a sign that it’s a lousy law, which has, at best, a tenuous reason for existence. In this instance, as an additional tax on businesses.

If a licence fee is justified for being able to watch broadcast TV on a PC, then maybe the TV Licence authority should ask to get a law passed which makes all broadcasters have to run a pre-roll message before any TV stream which states the need for a licence. Or even to check your right to watch that sort of content via some kind of database and a sniffer that determines location, hardware type and if its connected to the mains or not. The point being, somehow, on an open web, it needs to be made crystal clear to users when they are just about to break the law.

Of course this won’t happen, but until then, I don’t think any business need fear a visit – but if you do get a knock, pull your power lead out of your phones and laptops, use Safari with Private Browsing turned on to stream your content on all other PCs – and if they demand to look at your PC’s settings to see what you’ve been up to just refuse.

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

This is the next post in Alick’s series on our miggle website fundamentals, “a functional website is just the starting point for an effective online business”.

______

I always have this vision of a guy – maybe back in the 1930s at the height of the last depression – sitting in his office, elbows on desk, head in hands, staring at his brand new telephone and waiting for it to ring. He’d heard that all his competitors had got a phone and thought if he got one too, the business would come. So he got it installed, but never figured out why it didn’t ring.

I see a similar thing happen with business websites. How many can say that their site’s working for their business the way they want it to?

For the purposes of this post, we’ll assume your website is a great website – focussed on the needs of your audience and/or current and future customers, providing the features or functions that match those of your competitors in a way that makes it easy for users to get what they want and encourages them to come back for more. But we’ll also assume that its not delivering the return on the investment you wanted – so why is that?

In most cases it’s because too much focus, time and money was placed on the build and the design – and not enough thought given to what time, money and resource would be required to get it seen.

The common problems we see are:

* The front page never changes
* No new content gets added
* No promotion of special offers
* Worse still – as a combination of neglect on the three points above, out-of-date content is featured on the website
* Broken links – or searches on Google link to pages that can’t be found
* Offline advertising and literature are not referencing your website
* No money is spent on online advertising and marketing.

They exist because:

* No one within the business ‘owns’ the website
* No budget has been allocated to the website
* Somehow the business believes that because everyone can access your site, everyone will.

They can be mitigated by:

* Allocating a budget within your business to promote your site
* Ensuring someone has the skills and the time to make updates to your site to keep it fresh, accurate and reflective of your business
* Having a clear plan of what you can reasonably expect from your site.

Our most successful small business clients have got themselves to the stage where their sites have paid for themselves. In every case, it’s been because they’ve been prepared to spend at least the same again as they spent on the build to ensure their online investment returns with interest.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

The online travel industry is an extremely competitive one. Big name brands all compete on the same keywords for the top search rankings on Google’s homepage (as well as on Yahoo! and MSN search), so when The Cooden Beach Hotel, a private hotel in Bexhill, asked us to manage their search marketing, we were up for the challenge.

Firstly, we was asked to redesign their website, which helped because, as with all the websites we build at miggle, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is considered throughout the website build process. We identified The Cooden Beach Hotel’s best keywords and prepared website copy both search engine friendly and useful to the user.

The preparation paid dividends. Not long after launching The Cooden Beach Hotel’s website, we were achieving first page search results on our chosen keywords. This in itself was great when you take into account the very competitive market.

So, from a natural search point of view we were doing well. Our selected keywords were ranking the website on the first page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but in such a competitive market place you can’t rest on your laurels. Being pro-active is a must in search marketing, so we continued working with The Cooden Beach Hotel to improve their search rankings.

The miggle media team decided to run a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign using Google Adwords, with the aim of achieving maximum exposure in both paid and natural search for The Cooden Beach Hotel.

As mentioned in our previous post, Is Google Adwords right for your business?: “A recent study found that search advertising is still the most cost-effective method of advertising (and it is a fraction of the cost of direct mail, email, online banners or yellow pages), mainly due the fact you can target your market so effectively.”

Our initial aim was to hit the top 3 positions on the Google sponsored ads as often as possible and to drive quality, targeted traffic to the hotel’s booking engine in order to provide a good return on investment (ROI). This has been a great success – now The Cooden Beach Hotel pretty much dominates SERPs on our chosen keywords. The hotel is thrilled with their ROI and have already increased their Google Adwords spend.

The screen grab shows how The Cooden Beach Hotel has the whole page covered giving them the best opportunity to gain clicks, and hopefully bookings. A very successful search marketing campaign.

The following guides you through the screen grab (left):
1) This is one of our Google Adwords ads – competing with some huge brand names means your ads and landing pages need to have a high quality score and be extremely relevant to the search.

2) Local business listing – essential for any business to get listed here and as you can see, can give good exposure. It’s also free to submit your listing!

3) This is the natural search listing – ranked in second place for this keyword. It’s also worth noting that the website link on the first place listing goes to a page which in turn links to the hotel making it another valuable source of clicks.

If you’re interested in search marketing, contact the miggle media team to find out how we can optimise your online presence.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Internet advertising in Britain was the only ad medium to grow in 2008, rising 17 percent and bucking the overall 3.5 percent industry fall, according to the latest reports.

The reasons? Pay-per-click and online display advertising offer businesses what TV, radio, mail and press simply can’t – total accountability, the flexibility to adjust and test advertising messages in real time and pinpoint targeting of your desired audiences.

There are millions of places on the internet where you can buy advertising and lots of different ways you can do it. Advertising comes down to two things – you’re either building your brand or you want to elicit some direct response. There are distinct strategies for both.

In terms of building brand – it’s important to establish what kind of websites have a commercial offering that’s right for you and a relevant audience. You could buy an ad on the front page of Yahoo! and reach many millions of people from all walks of life – it’ll be priced accordingly. But you may find that there are websites that cost less and work better, helping you to access a relevant niche audience.

The migglemedia team can advise you on where you should advertise, what your mix of branded and direct spend should be, bargain advertising opportunities and how to design compelling creative.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

An active community of users can be great for increasing engagement on your site and for your business as a whole. However, it’s no longer a case on the Internet of ‘build it and they will come’. The community elements of your site need a hook and they’ll need a certain level of effort to start them off and to keep them running.

Users will ‘pay’ to join your community using personal data as the currency. You need to give them something back of value that they can’t get elsewhere. Unmet needs on the web are hard to find these days!

Another point to consider: though you’re building community elements to benefit your business, the dialogue and the interaction is owned by the members. They may not behave as you hoped and they may take the conversation where you never dreamed they would. This can be as much opportunity as threat if you manage it correctly.

If you are going to build a community, what’s your hook?

The best community sites have hooks. Flickr has pictures, YouTube has video, LastFM has music, Yahoo! Answers has questions. Facebook, Bebo and Twitter are built around people – the various tools they supply being able to allow people to share interests. Blogs are built around certain subject matter, forums help people resolve problems.

Between them, all the sites above have millions of users. Those users have to manage many different profiles, as well as the usernames and passwords they use to manage email, online banking, telephony services, etc. If you build another network you are throwing something else into the mix – something else to remember and you’ll be competing for online time against bigger players. That doesn’t mean that you should not try and build the community tools your site needs – but if you think you’ll struggle to make those stand out in a crowd, think about how maybe you could become active within existing communities. Your existing and future customers are already active there after all – and there are great opportunities to use these sites as a pool from which you can fish users.

Which existing community sites could you focus on? Where are the most appealing audiences?

Think about your own use of social networks and communities. Of the sites you use, how are they making money – and how have they made money out of you? Do these communities offer direct revenue generating opportunities, or are the way they contribute to profits more subtle than that?

How will building a community add to your bottom line?

Let’s imaging for a moment that you could invite all the users of Bebo – a site popular with kids – or Facebook to your house or office. Think of what provisions you’d have to make. It’s the same online. Your community needs to be managed, maintained, listened to and catered for. If they don’t – back to the offline analogy – they will trash your house and leave and it’ll look in a pretty poor state for the next set of visitors.

How will you keep the community alive, engaged, entertained and legal?

If you read your news from bbc.co.uk, chances are you’ll go back everyday if you like the coverage. If you meet your life partner on match.com, you’ll never use the site again. Both sites have delivered, but only one retains its customers. The one that can’t needs to be able to continually drive awareness of itself, while always appearing fresh.

What will be our response when our community members don’t play ball and do the things on our site the marketing team promised they would?

The migglemedia team can help you address all the factors you need to take into account before venturing into the world of online communities and social media websites.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Back in December miggle.co.uk teamed up with Brighton Music Scene to produce a short video interview with up and coming New Wave band, Transformer.

The brief was to create a professionally edited piece that used multiple camera angles, made use of the band’s music video and was punchy and modern in style.

Filming took place in Brighton’s PoNaNa club – a perfect setting. We filmed using a professional set up of three cameras, one fixed, one in front and one roaming. Thanks are due to Lee who directed and edited the film.

The results do speak for themselves and act as a great showcase for what miggle.co.uk can do with this medium and we hope to create more engaging, exciting video content soon.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Recently we’ve seen various UK ‘Winter Wonderlands’ in the news. Families have paid handsomely, expecting magical snow kingdoms; only to be met with dank fields, skinny animals, jerry-rigged displays and disgruntled staff.

These businesses had gone a great job of driving an audience to their attractions, but had neglected to consider what their audience would want once they’d arrived.

There is a crucial lesson here that can be applied to all online businesses: Do not waste time and money increasing traffic to a website that is not ready.

Your metaphorical bucket may not have a hole in it, but if it does, then there’s no sense in pouring in more water. And, if there’s already water in it, then it’s worth trying to keep it there.

The migglemedia team start the process of building audience by appraising your site, analysing your stats and looking at the behaviour of your users. Checking for leaks, in other words. We make sure your website is water-tight before encouraging you to invest your marketing budget on audience building.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Once you’ve taken the decision to sell advertising space on your website to other businesses, there are some important issues to consider:

Brand
Can you sell to advertisers who will provide creative that can do justice to your brand? To safeguard your brand values, you will need to decide what you will allow an advertiser to feature on your network.

Selling
Who will be selling your inventory (advertising space)? What’s your revenue target going to be and what levels of CPMs and % sell-throughs do you need to reach to achieve this? How do your sales team derive prices for your various offerings? What are your costs of sales – and what is your profit margin going to be on your inventory?

Inventory
How will you predict future levels of page views and users? Where are the highest value areas for selling display advertising on your site and what is your strategy for dealing with the high value inventory versus the low value inventory? (The answers to these will also help shape where you might integrate Google text ads or banner inventory sold by third party adservers.) How will you deal with auditing ad delivery and charging clients?

Audience
To what extent (and how/when) will you segment your audience on the site to potentially target advertising?

Sales Programmes
What’s your sales programme going to be? (i.e. what do you sell, and where?) What creative formats will you host on your site? Video/Flash/JPG, IAB or non IAB formats?

Scheduling
Who will manage acquisition of creative from the client and schedule the creative on the OpenX server?

Reporting
What information from OpenX will you make available to clients – and will you allow them access to the system to get this information themselves? Who in your business will monitor both the success of house and client campaigns as well as review the effectiveness of the overall sales programme you settle on?

Contract
What contractual agreements will you enter into with your advertisers? How will you cover yourself against service outages and under deliveries? In your whole ad sales process what are the points of failure and what risks do these present to your business? How do you mitigate these?

Find out more:
> Online display advertising

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.