CPM price for large websites is dropping

PubMatic : AdPrice Index: "eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped dramatically by 52 percent from 38 cents in March to 18 cents April. Medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Small Web sites managed to improve their monetization, increasing from $1.18 in March to $1.29 in April."

You could see this as proof of "The Long Tail". Or it's just a sign that for large websites it's just too much work to offer higher-priced targeted ads. Most "large" websites I know mainly do Run Of Site or even Ron of Network campaigns for their display ads.
Another possible reason is because there's a big gap between pages that attract lots of traffic (like webmail, forums, contests) and pages advertisers want to be on (like portal-style content pages).

In any case: time to move on to more interactive and permission-based advertising.

Couple of advices for Social Media and buzz campaigns

Last week I attended Marketing 2.0 Conference in Paris. Great opportunity to meet new persons who are part of the leaders in the buzz market like Emmanuel Vivier, CEO of Vanksen group - and contributor of this blog too- and to catch up with a couple of great marketing speakers and persons like Mary Beth Kemp, Forrester principal analyst.

I stole a couple of minutes from their busy agendas to ask them recommendations for marketers willing to 'begin a Social Media effort' as opposed to' launch a social media campaign'.

In the first video below, Mary Beth is explaining Forrester POST approach. POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. If it should stand for only one key message it would be this one: don't start at the end of the process thinking technology is key. Getting to know how your audience is engaging - or not- with existing social platforms and defining objectives are the success factors to determine the foundations of your strategy, then chose the social tools you're going to tap into or develop for your own community. Mary Beth is also referring to the Social Technographics Forrester has been working on: great tool to understand and categorize how consumers are behaving online. For more info on the topic, I advice you to read the Groundswell blog and contact Mary Beth. Start by listening to her 3 min wrap up :


Mary Beth Kemp, Forrester Principal Analyst from Rolling Talks on Vimeo.

As for Emmanuel, I challenged him at the end of those 2 hectic days with the uneasy task to sum up his inspiring 1 hour long presentation featuring best buzz campaigns. He did a great job doing so in a bit more than 8 min. No magic formula, but a couple of viral successful ingredients based on his wide experience with a number of brilliant campaigns. Worth listening till the end.

Emmanuel Vivier, CEO Vanksen group from Rolling Talks on Vimeo.

online advertising heat maps

Here’s an interesting new way to look at consumer engagement with your online advertising: clickmaps from FlashTalking.

Clickmaps are essentially a heat-map showing where consumers interact with your ad above and beyond regular click tag reporting. As regular readers of my blog will know, I’m a sucker for cool visualisations and relate more to pictures than stats.

The creative and strategic implication being that it helps us to garner better understanding of what drives consumer engagement. Or in regular parlance, draws the eye.

Here’s some examples. To make it work, use the fade option - fade out the map, watch or interact with the ad, finally fade the clickmap up again for the interaction view/heat map.

Sony Playstation - the Call To Action buttons seem to be getting the most of the action.

Virgin Mobile - clearly the opportunity to wax the guy and then wax him him more at the end wins out. Poor bugger.

Social networks - see the social media options, especially share trailer being high points of engagement.

I certainly know some peers and clients who would also appreciate this more visual representation of data than having to wade through reams of stats to the point where they're pushing pins in their eyes for blessed relief. You get what’s working in an instant.

Be interested to know what you think.

Nicholas Gill
bluurb.wordpress.com

Power to the people

A very detailed worldwide comparative study on Social Media behaviors and - since done by Universal McCann- esthetically very energising. Hat tip to Michelle Blanc.
Research highlights from Trendspotting :

1. Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.

2. Asian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region

3. All social media platforms have grown significantly over the three Waves: Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3

4. Social Networks: 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content: 55% of users have uploaded photos, 22% of users have uploaded videos

5. The widget economy – 23% of social network users have installed an application – 18% of bloggers have installed applications in their blog templates

6. Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers) – 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog

7. Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation – 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog – 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs