Archive for July 2009

Another simple tutorial this week, but one which again can really add value to your website. As a website creator, do you have problems turning your words and numbers into something that looks good on a web page? A table may be the right way to go about it. Watch the tutorial and then have a good adding a table.

How did you get on? Do you have a good example that the rest of us can have a look at? Leave us a comment below.

We’ve spoken a bit before about click fraud. This occurs when someone clicks on a Pay-Per-Click advert for any purpose other than to visit the website of the advertiser, with a genuine desire to look at their products and services.

‘Pay per click’ is one of the main sorts of advertising on the web. Perhaps obviously, the advertiser pays when someone clicks on their advert.  Every advert that appears in the Search Engine Results Page on Google is a pay per click advert.

There are three main types of click fraud. The first is called ‘innocuous’, where users click on adverts accidentally, or habitually click on a particular advert. They weren’t deliberately intending to visit the website of the advertiser, but do so by accident.

The second two types are both ‘malicious’. The first are clicks carried out by competitors to an advertiser, to drive up costs for that advertiser. The 2nd are carried out by website owners, who click on adverts on their own website, since they make money every time an advert on their site is clicked on.

Google claim to detect and filter out these malicious clicks so that advertisers are not charged for them. Google don’t reveal how they work out what is a malicious click since, they say, that would prompt the perpetrators of the click fraud to develop more complex click fraud techniques.

As reported over on Techcrunch, a company called Anchor intelligence has released a report that outlines the amount of click fraud that exists. The report covers January to June 2009.

The report shows that click fraud appears to be on the rise with 22.9% of all clicks being click fraud of one sort of another.

The report also breaks down the click fraud rates by country. In the UK, click fraud is around 17.7%, relatively low in the click fraud league. By contrast, in Vietnam has a click fraud rate of nearly 50%. No other country comes close to that.

And it’s not like Vietnam is an anomaly due to its low click volume. It is, apparently, the sixth biggest market in the world for pay per click advertising.

Here’s some good visuals reproduced from TechCrunch:

What does this mean if you’re building a website with WebEden? Well if you use pay per click advertising to drive traffic to your site, be assured that you’ve got – on a world scale – a low risk of paying for fraudulent clicks. There’s not going to be a lot you can do about avoiding these fraudulent clicks, but just trust that Google and others are not charging you for them.

If you run AdSense adverts on your website, the overall message has got to be: don’t click on your ads! The chances are the Google can already detect from your IP address that it’s you who is clicking, and will therefore not credit you with any cash. The risk you take if you do click on adverts on your own site is that Google will terminate your AdSense contract, since you’re breaking their Ts & Cs.

Have you been the victim of click fraud? Or have you maliciously clicked on a competitors’ adverts? Leave us a comment below.

Do you ever feel that you can’t get away from people talking about Twitter? That every chat show, phone in, newspaper (and blog) article is packed with the latest from the micro-blogging site?

You’re probably right. All this free publicity is the sort of coverage most companies would give their eye teeth for.

This media space has a value. News monitoring service VMS has said that the free publicity generated for Twitter in just the last 30 days equates to a value of almost $50 million.

That adds up to around half of what Microsoft in planning to spend on Bing this year. And that’s just in the last 30 days!

The study said that of the offline coverage Twitter received, 57% of the value was on TV; 37%in newspapers; and 5% in magazines.

VMS Chief executive Peter Wengryn said to AdAge magazine, “”This is huge, We looked at online coverage of Twitter versus Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn’t think anything was more popular than Google.”

If we compare that through to Microsoft’s newest search engine, Bing managed to generate $573,834 (£364,000) of coverage.

But what does all this free coverage actually get Twitter? The short answer is: more users. The service reached 21 million unique users in June, up 14% on the previous month.

As we mentioned in our ‘5 things Twitter doesn’t want you to know‘ post, Twitter has big plans to grow its user base to 1 billion by the end of 2013. With all this free publicity, that job has been made a lot easier.

But every story has its day, and this coverage can’t last forever. Can Twitter boost its users before we tire of hearing about it? Leave us a comment below.

Here’s a story that might surprise the marketing people: despite social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter being aimed at ‘young things’, a recent study has shown that it is the older generation who are adopting social media at the fastest rate.

Research from online measurement company comScore has shown that people over 55 are more likely to spend their time on Facebook than visit a travel, business or technology website.

In May, almost 70% of those over 55 visited Facebook, Myspace or Twitter.

That being said, these figures still lag behind a younger demographic: 89% of 25 to 34 year olds spending time catching up with friends on social networking websites.

Social Networking for older people is more than just a passing fad, or a quick glance: the average 55 and over spends 3.7 hours per month on Facebook.

Mike Read, MD of comScore Europe said:  “There continues to be a misconception that social networking is the preserve of the young. While those under 35 years old are certainly the more prevalent users, there is both a sizeable and heavily engaged audience of those 35 and older as well”.

What does this mean if you’re building a website that targets this demographic? Well to start with, you might want to consider advertising on Facebook. Facebook has a self serve advertising program that allows you to reach people based on not just their age, but their gender and interest group too.

Mike Read confirms the idea: “Advertising on social networking sites has a better chance of reaching these older demographics than site categories such as business and finance, which is a critical insight that might be lost for those trying to optimise their campaign against target audience segments.”

We’ll be showing you how to advertise on Facebook in an upcoming tutorial.

The second is that this should encourage you to get to grips with the new social networking tools available within WebEden. We’ve made it really easy for you to reach out and market to people in your social networks; invite them to become members of your site; and update Facebook from your WebEden website.

Even if you thought you are targeting people ‘who wouldn’t be into that social networking thing’, this research indicates you might be wrong.

Is social networking trans-generational?  Are you using your social networks to create interest in your website? Leave us a comment below.

A couple of weeks ago, something unfortunate happened to Twitter. A person calling himself / herself ‘Hacker Croll’ hacked into Twitter’s network and then copied 310 private company files, including emails, memos, partner agreements and meeting notes. He / she then packaged up all these secret files and sent them over to newsbreaking site TechCrunch.

And TechCrunch decided to publish those ‘secrets’.

So often creating the news, Twitter has become a news topic. Their ‘secrets’ are all over the Internet. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

1. Twitter: how big are they going to be? According to their internal figure, Twitter reckon they will have 25million users by the end of 2009; up to 100m by the end of 2010; and a truly staggering 350 million by the end of 2011. Facebook is currently the largest social networking site with 200m users: Twitter think they will be twice as big as that by the end of 2011. But it doesn’t stop there: by the end of 2013 they hope to have 1billion users – 1 in every 7 who walks the planet!

2. Although Twitter is yet to sell anything to anybody at all, they expect to make revenues of $140m in 2010, of which $46m will be profit. Nice eh? That’s nothing – by 2013 they hope to be pulling in $1.54billion, and be employing 5,200 people. I would love to sit in a board meeting when someone is presenting these figures: “And here you see the graph go up… and up… and up…”

3. They’re currently sitting on a cash pile of $45m. Since they are yet to sell anything, this is all money raised from investors. Whilst $45m is just a fraction of the revenues they hope to make, no wonder they aren’t in a hurry to start selling stuff – the wolf is a long way from the door. Co-founder Biz Stone confirmed this in a recent interview with Revolution Magazine: We’re not under any pressure to hit a home run. We want to take our time and get this right”.

4. Twitter estimates that the cost of providing their service freely to each user is about $1 per user per year. And that’s despite the fact that some users post hundreds of Tweets every single day.

5. Twitter has recently kicked around the idea of a themed reality-TV show dubbed the ‘Final Tweet’. The idea, pitched to them by a US production company, involves a clash between teams of entrepreneurs who compete for a $100,000 cash prize.

The fact that all this private stuff has been moved to the public domain might be a bit embarrassing for Twitter. Whilst not denying their veracity, Biz Stone is saying that these files are very much out of date. “Obviously, these docs are not polished or ready for prime time and they’re certainly not revealing some big, secret plan for taking over the world,” he said.

What do you think about Techcrunch deciding to make it all public? Does WebEden fit into the same boat since we’re republishing them here? Does this change your view of Twitter? Leave us a comment below