Last year we wrote a post on ad-blocking, where we spoke about what it is and how you can take steps to protect your business model from it.

Next into the arena comes ad-viewability. Put simply it’s the move towards ads that are at least 80% viewable on publisher websites and it’s come about because of the proliferation of ad units being served at the bottom of pages where the impression fires off but the user may never scroll to the bottom of the page and actually view it.

What this means for the agency or client is that they’re paying for an unit that the customer doesn’t see. Agencies are now making moves to pay only for viewable ads, which the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) defines as 50% of the pixels in view for one second for a display ad and 50% in view for 2 seconds for a video.

Group M took a stance in 2015 stating the move towards at least 80% of their ads being viewable. So what does that mean for publishers? Well it means that you’re going to have to take a long hard look at all of the ad placements on your site, lazy load them, and bring them more in view.

Do some analysis on how people use your site, where do they typically scroll down to and what do they click on? There are tools like Hotjar available to help you dive into the detail before you begin changing all of your ad placements.

It also means you need to review the types of ads that you’re selling to ensure they’re appropriate for the placement and appropriate for the audience. Long gone are the days of filling remnant inventory with any old ad placement, which also means you need to investigate your business model and define a strategy to future-proof your revenue.

If you need some help thinking through the best way to go about it and what the options are that are open to you, contact us for more info.

Publishing, SEO

Updated – Top 5 tips for SEO Success

By Anne-Marina on

April 5, 2016

- Publishing, SEO

SEO can be a complicated beast to the uninitiated. There are no real rules published by Google so it really is a skill-set that is entirely based on experience and history. These are our top 5 tips for SEO success – whether you’re in real estate or e-commerce.

1. Checkout how your site is rated in terms of speed
With the launch of its Accelerated Mobile Pages program, Google and the rest of the world is increasingly rewarding the speed of delivery. Run a diagnostic on your site and then fix the related problems. Not only will your search ranking thank you but your users will too. Recent data shared by Google shows that the probably of a user bouncing from your website increases by 32% when the page load takes 1 – 3 seconds.

2. Use Unique Meta-Descriptions
Each of your products, or properties, should be set to include a unique meta-description that accurately describes your product or property thereby helping Google to find your page with more context.

3. Don’t keyword stuff
You know what they say, less is more. Google’s code (or googlebot as it’s commonly known) is pretty sophisticated and it can tell when you’re trying to pull the wool over its eyes. So don’t go crazy on the keywords, use the most relevant ones and don’t be overly repetitive on the page. It knows when you have relevant content, so trust in its expertise and make sure the content makes sense for a human too.

4. Review your site errors
If you’ve got lots of people coming to a page and not converting (either buying or contacting you) then it’s worthwhile reviewing your website errors and checking to see if there are pages not found or not loading properly. Good for the user, good for Google.

5. Add a sitemap, and markup your data
If it’s available to you, use google rich snippets to give more colour and context to your content. You can use them for products, events, recipes, news articles and video. They’ll then show your content at the top of the page with a bit more detail – images, review ratings and descriptions.

If you have questions on how to optimise your existing site without reinventing the wheel, hop on over to our SEO Strategy page.

Product Management

How getting your user persona and content model right will improve your SEO

By Anne-Marina on

March 7, 2016

- Product Management

If you’re publishing a website that is driven by content, as most are these days, then there are two key building blocks you should begin with before you even consider hiring a designer or developer:
1. User Personas that will visit your site
2. Content model of your site
Getting these two simple things correct at the very outset will ensure your site is setup to be well ranked in Google search results. It’s the online equivalent of surveying the land and putting in deep foundations when you build a house.

What are User Personas?
User Personas are a term thrown about a lot by “digital people” trying to make the landscape seem more complex than it is, but there’s nothing complex about them. At a base level, your user personas are the groups that your client base falls into – broken down into all the relevant information that client may be looking for and their habits and likes. For example, if you take our site, some of our customer user personas would fall into the below categories:

1. Small to Medium Sized Publishers
– Typically a business that is sub-75 employees
– Produces content that is distributed online (via websites, mobile apps, content aggregators etc)
– Has a small tech team but limited holistic digital expertise in the form of product management or SEO specialists
– May have one or more sites that are not yet responsive in nature

2. Real Estate Companies
– Franchise, regional or national
– May have an IT team but no in-house digital expertise in the form of product management or SEO
– Require assistance on improving their online presence to maximise customer leads on potential properties for sale

3. Start-Ups
– Still in the stage of boot-strapping, yet to hire digital expertise in-house
– Need help with turning their idea into a product and doing the logistical thinking around factors that could impact that product’s success
– Actively pursuing a product in one of the following areas: mobile apps, responsive websites, music streaming, mobile SMS & IVR
Or, another example would be a real estate website. Think of all the possible customers it has and then list those customers in order of importance, e.g.:
– Prospective Sellers
– Potential new franchisees
– Property Developers looking for contact details
– Other agents who want to work for the company
When creating user personas try to come up with as much detail as possible. Make them a real person, give them a name, age, family status etc. All of this information will assist you in getting inside that persons head and will ensure your site is best tailored for them.

I’ve got my user personas – now what is a content model?
Your content model should be the next thing to consider. A content model is exactly that, a description of all the types of content you plan to include on your product or website, information on how that content will interact with one another and details on what type of content should be structured versus not structured. Google gives ‘extra points’ to sites that have a well structured content model which makes it easier for it to read.

By having structured data, you can then more easily manipulate that data in future without having to reverse engineer your code. An example here may be a recipe website which has been created with a structured content model and taxonomy. Having this in place means that you can easily search on all recipes which are “Thai” in cuisine and you can sell advertising against those. It also allows you to easily extract that data from your CMS and promote it via a partner website. You can more easily manipulate that data by running a database query so that for every occurrence of the word “chicken” inside ingredients, you can insert a sponsor name in front.

Building the foundations that your business runs on is more important than the speed with which you get your website live. Solid foundations will lead to a more sustainable, stronger, business in future. If this article has inspired you and you’d like to find out where you can improve online to better your business, contact us for more details.

User persona image borrowed from Roman Pichler – if you don’t know agile and want to learn, his books are a great start.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

How will ad blockers impact ad-funded digital businesses? #advertising #media #digital

By Anne-Marina on

August 19, 2015

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

It seems that ad blockers are getting more and more air time these days, with many in the digital media industry confused about just what they mean for your business. We’ve taken a look and have given the basic facts on what you need to know if your online business is ad-funded.

What are ad blockers?
Ad Blockers are a software tool that users can download and install to run on their browser (on any device) which will prevent your ads from showing. They can be downloaded for free, or users can opt to pay for a more premium version. Some run on an open-source honour system, requesting that users pay what they think is fair. Typically, they block any ads from being shown on a page, for example on smh.com.au:

With ads:

Without ads:

For the end user, they get a much clearer reading experience and, one would argue, a slightly faster load time.

What is the usage of ad blocking software?
As with any product, there are always early adopters and usually they fall into the categories of adult entertainment, gaming and tech. So if your business falls into one of those categories, it’s time to start coming up with a backup plan. There are 144 million ad blocker users worldwide, which is growing at a rate of 70% year on year. As it grows, your potential revenue pool shrinks – so it’s time to act now. Usage is highest amongst those between 18-29 and skews towards the male demographic.

Who are the companies who are building ad blockers?
There are a good few options out there for users: Ad Blocker Plus, uBlock, AdGuard, Fair Blocker but contrary to popular belief this isn’t something being done only by the little guys. Apple’s next iOS release (iOS9) will make ad blocking a reality for web developers, allowing them to create extensions to prevent ads from loading and block cookies amongst other things. All of which goes hand in hand with some improvements they’re making to their News app (a similar idea to Flipboard), where they are encouraging digital publishers to provide their content and opt-in to iAd (Apple’s ad serving software). So when ad blocking goes mainstream on iOS, the only way to monetize digital content through ads will be through Apple’s own ecosystem.

Where does all this sit legally?
Coming after the business model of a company is nothing new and the internet has transformed the business model of many a company – you only have to look at the music industry to see that. Some ad blocking companies maintain a whitelist which insists that:

Ads are easily identifiable
Ads are non-intrusive to the user experience
Ads must be appropriate for the site that they are being served on

All of which seems to be reasonable. But one company, AdBlock Plus, when reviewing those sites that have requested white-listing, makes a determination of the size of the company, and if they are big enough, then has their parent company request a fee before going through the white-listing process.

What are your options to defend your business revenue?
It’s clear customers have had enough of intrusive pop-ups, overlays and interstitials. At a time when the other buzzword in the industry is viewability, how do you make sure your advertiser clients get their ad seen by your users without hampering the site experience? Native content is one way to go. Rather than having advertising that doesn’t relate to your users, have the kind that is meaningful and useful for them. Just make sure not to ad serve it – otherwise, it’ll get blocked in the process!

Professional Development

E-Publishing: How you too can be an author

By Anne-Marina on

May 30, 2015

- Professional Development

One of the great things about the digital revolution is that it has broken down barriers to entry in lots of industries – one of them being publishing. Did you ever dream of being an author when you were young? Now you can…

Publishing on Kindle and iBooks is pretty easy. We’ve written (and published) 2 kids books using the Kindle Publishing and Sigil open source tools.

If you’ve got kids and want to check the books out, you can find them here.

Product Management

#Responsive versus fixed width website design – does it really matter? Top 5 tips.

By Anne-Marina on

March 6, 2015

- Product Management

In short, yes. These days the internet is accessed through a plethora of devices: desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile and even smart watch. So what do you do when it comes to designing your website and which device do you design for? The majority of internet traffic is migrating towards tablet and mobile – Facebook apparently has more than 70% of its access from mobile devices – so you need to design for them all, and the only way to successfully do that is to design responsively.

1. Start with the user and the content
Content, content, content. Who are you building the site for and what types of content do they expect to see? How are you planning on connecting your content so that your user can find more content that is relevant to their needs? Think about the types of use cases that will be involved and what that means for your content length, style and tone.

2. Make the decision to design responsively, not adaptively
True responsive design continues to change even after the page has loaded – unlike adaptive which loads the size of page most suitable for the device size it believes you are on. You can see this in action by dragging your browser window to make it bigger and smaller – if the site resizes, it’s responsive; if it doesn’t, it’s adaptive.

3. Mobile First
Do the most difficult thing first, so now that you’ve established your content hierarchy, work out how that’s going to fit on the smallest possible screen size. What will it look like? Is it logical? Will someone be able to use it while they walk? Crack the mobile layout and the others will flow way more easily.

4. Test and Roll
This should really go without saying, but make sure you’re testing your design, not just for functionality, but for usability. Don’t design for an end state that a user might not want. Technology moves too quickly now to do end state designs for every screen of a site, so do the design as part of an agile development process. You’ll thank me later.

5. Make sure your designers and developers communicate constantly
A great design is fabulous, but if the effort to do that outweighs the business value associated with that feature then you need to revise the design – and vice versa. If the feature has masses of business value, make sure you tell the designers so that they can spend a bit of extra time on it.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

What gets better traction for publishers? Mobile Web or Apps?

By Anne-Marina on

February 13, 2015

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

A study from eMarketer notes that adverts on mobile web gets considerably more click throughs than adverts displayed via mobile apps. It’s a fairly significant difference, with 35% on mobile web, and 26% on mobile apps. So what does that mean for publishers who run an advertising model? Likely that it’s time to pursue a two pronged strategy similar to the one that the New York Times has been attempting.

Give those customers who are new and find you via search, Facebook and other social channels access on the mobile web with ads and native sponsored content and focus the effort on developing apps which are single purpose and not free to download – similar to the New York Times Now app which is $6 per month and gives users a summarized version of the top stories from NYT.

These apps should be directed towards your loyal customers, who are coming to you because of the types of content you provide and the brand recognition you have built up. Key to this strategy is remembering the different use cases that your customers have on mobile, and then the difference use case between mobile web (often a push scenario which is more transient) and apps (a pull scenario which is more consistent). Monitor your results, and in true agile style – inspect and adapt.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

Using new #technology to enhance traditional #publishing

By Anne-Marina on

October 21, 2014

- Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

It’s no secret that traditional publishing (think print newspaper and magazines) have struggled with the dawn of digital and content being freely available online 24/7. In the same way as the music industry have raced to stop piracy instead of embracing the new revenue models that digital can bring, the publishing industry has been trying to lock consumers into subscription models for news content that they can get online for free elsewhere.

It’s worth noting that our founder’s background (way back in the days of very old Panasonic phones), was journalism. She started off wanting to break into the publishing industry, and learned all she could about their main revenue model: paid for by user, supplemented by advertising.

Back then, news wasn’t freely – in all senses of the word – available online, which meant that consumers were happy to pay the price for the magazine or newspaper and be sold to by advertisers inside. Now that consumers have access to publishers all around the globe, you can be sure that whatever news you are reporting is available elsewhere. So it begs the question: what can you offer your customers that they can’t get elsewhere? Editorial Selection

Now there is so much proliferation of content, it makes the relevant and useful information much harder to find. Enter mobile apps like NYT Now. This was an app launched by the New York Times designed to present you with the most important information, summarized by their editors for only $2 per week. Exclusive Content

Again pioneered by the NYT – New York Times Opinion. They took what was exclusive to them (the opinion pieces written by their editorial staff) and packaged it up in an easy to access format for just $1.50 per week. Integrated Content Content that has a presence in your print edition, on your website and in your app. Not just the same content repackaged for the different device or medium, but actually optimised for the device or medium. For instance, using mobile to its full potential. If you own Vogue, and know that your magazine is most frequently read in a hairdressing salon, then why not put an ad in the print version of the magazine to encourage your user to get their phone out and interact with the advert in order to get free hair product? Or use the app and augmented reality to see what they would look like with a particular model’s hairstyle? After you have sorted out your content and established what you have that no one else has, how can you keep the advertising dollars rolling in? Pay per Download – just a few cents
Rather than paying on a subscription basis for access to every piece of content on a particular publication, instead pay on a per article basis. There’s a crowd-funding project on Kickstarter just now called Nanotransactions, the idea behind which is to let users pay just a few cents to access the articles they really want to read. Again, this requires good quality journalism and content that the user isn’t going to find elsewhere. Full disclosure: the man behind Nanotransactions, Nick Ross, is a friend of mine. Enhance your Print Edition
As an addition to your print edition, offer your advertisers the opportunity to insert their TVC into the magazine or newspaper. They get to use content they have already created and use it to further improve their brand presence. Increase your Advertising Footprint
Use mobile or tablet to have customers interact with the adverts inside your magazine, and use this to take their details and pass the leads back onto the advertiser, giving them what you’ve never been able to give them before: qualified leads from print advertising. There is lots of potential out there, but let’s hope that the publishing industry doesn’t go the same way as the music industry.

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Emerging Technology in Advertising, Product Management, Publishing

Ad-Viewability – A Quick Start Guide

Publishing, SEO

Updated – Top 5 tips for SEO Success

Product Management

How getting your user persona and content model right will improve your SEO

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

How will ad blockers impact ad-funded digital businesses? #advertising #media #digital

Professional Development

E-Publishing: How you too can be an author

Product Management

#Responsive versus fixed width website design – does it really matter? Top 5 tips.

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Apps, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

What gets better traction for publishers? Mobile Web or Apps?

Emerging Technology in Advertising, Mobile Optimisation, Product Management

Using new #technology to enhance traditional #publishing

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Digital Strategy

Music & Media Industry Expertise

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