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No surprise - it's the Senator for Illinois, followed by the former First Lady:

The Republican nominee has some catching up to do - no doubt because the Democratic nomination contest siezed the media's attention in the UK. Barack Obama clearly leads both.

This got me thinking...what factor did Bill Clinton play, or not play, in his wife's defeat? A quick search shows up an interesting trend; Hillary's biggest spike in the UK was triggered by Bill Clinton criticizing the press' attitude to Obama...and search volumes for them both started to converge as volume for "Hilary Clinton" declined.

 

 

The same happened in the US, too, although with a different pattern. Seems Senator Clinton could never escape the former President, even online.

 

 

Note: the US elections receives heavy coverage in the UK and there are over 155,000 Americans in Britain.

I'm always fascinated by what the public search for - and how they search. So whilst waiting for Germany vs Poland to restart I decided to look at searches for the Euro 2008 finals.

Do the British care as none of their teams (or the Irish) are playing? Looking at Google searches in the last 12 months for "Euro 2008" and "Euro2008" it's clear they do care, to a degree at least:

 

 

Note the spike (D) when England play and fail to qualify. Ouch. Failure really does make good news copy and raise search volumes.

So how does the level of interest in Euro 2008 compare to back in 2004, when England qualified? The screenshot below shows the results for "Euro 2004" and "Euro 2008" over the years - and 2004 has a lot more interest, even though a lower percentage of the UK population were online (with slower connections and computers).

 

 

Of course, Google data for 2008 ends in mid May, but the trend is there - 2004 saw more interest than 2008, including in the run-up. So have the sport-loving public switched interest to the Derby on Saturday or the tennis instead?

 

 

Well..no. It seems their interest has mainly gone elsewhere...maybe the DIY, gardening, short break and BBQ food websites are quietly benefiting...and there are some happy wives and girlfriends around, too.

However, these financial shoppers did constitute an attractive target for marketers, as they tended to have good credit, medium-to-high incomes and be well educated and employed full-time. Online application rates varied widely, from a high with credit cards to a low with savings accounts. Likewise, the importance of brand or category terms fluctuated according to the type of product or service, but overall, the field seemed relatively open.

Fast forward two years and the landscape looks considerably more crowded. With financial services as with many other industries, customer acquisition has become more challenging and also costlier as brands are crowded out by resellers and other lead aggregators. Consequently, getting the right information onto the first page of search results is harder than ever, yet also increasingly crucial.

Data from researchers ranging from Forrester to comScore to Jupiter show search to more ingrained than ever in the financial service research process. How to compete in this environment? Trying to outspend the lead aggregators is a losing game, but providing and promoting quality information through search is a strategy worth considering. Consumers are asking the questions, and the big financial services companies could find a hook by giving them the answers they're looking for.

The increase in spend is no surprise, and re-enforces the healthy nature of the digital advertising industry (full survey here as a PDF).

The in-house statistic caught my eye (hey, it would, we're an agency):

"Since 2007, the proportion of companies conducting PPC and SEO exclusively in-house has declined. Correspondingly, the proportion of respondents using an agency for both disciplines has gone up."

This re-enforces what a prospective client said to me a few weeks ago: that he wasn't hiring an agency just because they had expert staff; he was hiring them because they had more expert staff with experience of more verticals and with restless minds that would come up with new ideas and push his campaign forward.

Other highlights from the survey (1,000 respondents):

• 63% of companies planning to increase their paid search (PPC) budget
• 61% planning to increase their search engine optimization (SEO) budget

The survey also lists the problems respondents find with SEO and PPC:

The biggest problems preventing paid search marketing success are as follows:

• Keywords too expensive (38%)
• Lack of internal resource (36%)
• Lack of budget (34%)
• Poorly converting website (29%)
• Competition (28%)

The biggest problems for company respondents in terms of SEO are:

• Lack of internal resource (45%)
• Difficulty of implementation (33%)
• Lack of budget (27%)
• Lack of know-how (25%)
• Poorly converting website (23%)

Some common themes, here...and it's interesting to note that a poorly converting website isn't higher up both lists.

If a website converts visitors at a higher level than the vertical average, then expensive keywords suddenly aren't so expensive, less time has to be put into squeezing campaigns for every last conversion to counter the poor site performance (helping with the resource issue, too, even if an agency is used) and the impact of competitors is at least in part reduced...

It's time site design was seen as the number one requisite of search campaigns - sites should convert at a good rate, and be built on a platform that empowers marketing professionals and their agencies to make changes without waiting 3 weeks for a distant IT department (sometimes so distant they are on a different continent) to make changes (which they will charge internally for, meaning small changes are unprofitable).

The most successful search campaigns are built on a solid foundation - a website that is flexible, with landing page testing capabilities, full tracking and analytics, good usability, is SEO friendly, and can be changed quickly.

And if you need a website like that, I know just who you should contact... :-)

The full report is here, some highlights:

- Online advertising grew from being the smallest market sector in 2003 to the third largest in 2007;

- In the UK advertising sector, online was the biggest driver of growth - accelerating nine times faster than the entire advertising sector;

- Total display advertising spend saw a 31% year-on-year increase; banners, skyscrapers and embedded rich media including video grew by 45% to £592 million;

- Long tail monetisation continues to be driven by sales houses and networks -  accounting for 40% of display advertising in 2007;

- PPC is not slowing. In 2007 search grew by 39%, in line with overall growth, to £1.6 billion (£1.2 billion in 2006), while its market share remained the same at 57.6% (57.8% in 2006).

Cheap laptops, catch-up TV services like iPlayer and social media websites are cited as key drivers of growth.

The survey takes approx. 15 min's to complete via this link.

Just take this survey about the UK digital industry, apparently approved by the IAB.

 

There's a lot to take in from the EIAA's pan-European Mediascope Europe 2007 report, so here's one table that catches the eye:

Top 10 most popular online activities across Europe 

• Search - 87% (note search is bigger than email, not second)
• Email - 81%
• Communicating via social networking sites - 42%
• Instant messaging - 37%
• Music downloads - 31%
• Listening to radio - 31%
• Watching TV, film or video clips - 30%
• Rating and reviews - 27%
• Sharing thoughts on forums - 26%
• Downloading a film, TV or video clip - 20%

The sites states the research is based on 7,000 interviews across the continent - which actually doesn't seem that many; it also states "The study involved 7,008 random telephone interviews with over 1,000 respondents in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the Nordics respectively and 500 respondents in Belgium and the Netherlands respectively. Interviews were conducted throughout September 2007."

Read more here.

Source: VNU