Of course, one of the most powerful ways to maximise the efficacy of your online display marketing is retargeting which effectively gives you another bite at the cherry. Site retargeting allows you to follow users who have visited your site – but have failed to convert – and serve them timely display ads as they browse other sites.

Dynamic retargeting is more persuasive still by instantly generating an ad that displays the exact item that the user had previously researched. Who hasn’t been influenced by that cunning display ad reminding you about those beautiful heels that you were looking at on ASOS just half an hour earlier?

Yet marketers who limit themselves to these retargeting practices are ignoring the many other powerful retargeting techniques at their disposal which include search, SEO/SEM, email, contextual, engagement, and social.

Search retargeting
Indeed search retargeting, which works more as a prospecting tool, is an increasingly potent option for retailers. Ads served from search retargeting platforms follow a shopper around the websites that they visit long after the initial search results page.

So when a user performs a search on any major search engine, the browser remembers that search term and targets the user with a display ad based on their search terms as they explore other websites. This means you can engage those users who have not yet visited your site, but have searched for terms related to your product portfolio.

For example, when a shopper searches for “designer heels”, and then browses online, through search retargeting the shopper will start to see display ads for designer heels from a particular shoe retailer. Since the shopper hasn’t yet visited the site of that shoe retailer, the advertiser has the opportunity to acquire an entirely new customer.

Just like traditional search, search retargeting takes advantage of user intent. The potency comes from providing display ads within a context that is relevant. The relevancy and recency between the search and the follow-up ad delivers a powerful one-two punch.

By retargeting search users with display ads, marketers can benefit from recency beyond the search engine results page. Furthermore, since search retargeting ads are served on display inventory rather than search engine inventory, marketers can take advantage of choice keywords without the cost of keyword bidding.
As a cost-effective way to prospect for new customers, retailers can benefit vastly reduced cost per click over SEM.

Social retargeting
Retargeting on Facebook Exchange (FBX) retargets ads directly into an individual’s news feed, allowing marketers to place the right ad in front of the right consumer at just the right time. As a retailer, you can benefit from using FBX by retargeting ads to Facebook users who have actually visited your website and looked at a product.

AdRoll: Facebook Exchange News Feed by the Numbers

Indeed by all accounts, FBX is delivering exceptional results. AdRoll, one of the world’s largest retargeting platforms, recently analysed more than 1 billion impressions across 547 advertisers running retargeting on FBX right-hand side, FBX News Feed and standard web retargeting. The advertising company found that click-through rates for news feed ads were 21 times higher than for standard web retargeting, and 49 times higher than for RHS ads on Facebook. In addition, the average CPC rate in the News Feed retargeting ads were 54% lower than the cost of right-hand side campaigns and 79% lower than web retargeting.

Hot on the heels of the success at FBX, Twitter announced earlier this month that it is experimenting with ways to make advertising on Twitter more useful. In a trial that is currently running only in the United States, Twitter is allowing brands to retarget website visitors or people who match particular email addresses. Twitter will display promotional content in an individual’s tweet stream if that user has shown an interest in the advertiser.

Email and CRM retargeting
Email retargeting gives retailers the opportunity to turbo-charge their email marketing campaigns with online display advertising. With email retargeting, a user is cookied after opening your email, and added to your retargeting pool which allows you to retarget them with display ads in just the same was as you do with retargeting. This can be a highly effective technique during sales times or for bringing back customers after they’ve abandoned their shopping cart.

With CRM retargeting, retailers can re-engage past customers with online display ads even if these customers have not visited your site in a long time. CRM retargeting allows you to serve display ads to people with nothing more than an email address, and gives you the opportunity to expand your cookie pool and reach consumers during all stages of the purchase funnel.

While retargeting techniques deliver results, it’s important for retailers to know the difference between a helpful reminder and a full scale bombardment. Individuals can be spooked when they see ads suddenly appear for the exact same items that they had been researching, and no-one wants to be chased around the web with the contents of their abandoned shopping cart in hot pursuit.

This article was first published in Marketing Magazine.

As mobile becomes a critical part of business strategy, the role of mobile apps is becoming integral to many organisations, no matter what their line of business.

In this podcast, Simon van Wyk, Founder of HotHouse, is joined by Iryna Newman who is the the head of mobile at OpenTable, the world’s leading provider of online restaurant reservations which seats more than 12 million diners per month via online bookings. Prior to this, Iryna was head of mobile acquisition at Groupon.

In this election year, where is the meaningful policy debate and discussion in our newspapers and news websites? In the place of factual reporting we are served a daily dollop of unashamedly partisan opinion. It’s on par with the tittle tattle of celebrity gossip mags.

It’s hardly surprising then that Australians are consuming significantly less traditional media and replacing it with their own personally curated news and content. While friends, acquaintances and colleagues share a large number of political news stories and posts, it’s easier to filter out rants and raves and see one-sided opinion for what it is. On social networks, your friends aren’t selling their opinion and interests as news.

Hooked on social

According to 2012 data from Experian Marketing Services if the time Australians spent online via personal computers were compressed into one hour, 14 minutes of it would be spent on social media, while just 4 minutes would be spent on news.

To illustrate this point, the figures published by Hitwise on the number of visits to the top three news sites in the country for the week to 22 June 2013 look like this:

1. news.com.au 6,975,399
2. Sydney Morning Herald 6,353,675
3. ninemsn News 6,118,397

Compare this with their data on visits to social media sites over the same period:

1. Facebook 94,164,765
2. YouTube 80,800,628
3. YouTube Mobile 15,577,599

With the election coming some time later this year, I wonder if team Rudd or team Abbott understand this, and more importantly, can take advantage of it. After all, if you can’t get a fair hearing across traditional media, there are other, more potent means.

Obama/Romney learning

Cast your mind back to the US election last year. Even as late as the morning of the election, Romney’s senior advisers were certain that he had the numbers to win decisively. It was not a matter of being cautiously optimistic, they were supremely confident. A massive fireworks display was set up to initiate the victory celebrations for Romney in Boston.

Back at camp Obama, confidence was also high. They too had done their numbers. By the middle of the afternoon on Election Day campaign workers in the Romney camp were reporting a surprisingly large voter turnout in areas that favoured President Obama. States they had expected to be called early were not. Pennsylvania went to the President, then so did Ohio. The Romney camp couldn’t believe they had been so wrong.

Team Obama’s confidence was well placed. Rather than relying on their ability to sell their policies and encourage supporters to get out and vote via traditional media, they chose instead to crunch data, combine biographical information with consumer habit data, and micro-target voters with breathtaking speed and efficiency.

This data also helped inform and drive the campaign’s media buying, and helped them create detailed models of swing-state voters that were used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct marketing and social media.

Using insights from complicated data modelling, team Obama avoided the traditional route of buying ads in local news programming and instead counted on Obama’s 50 million or so social media connections to spark a network effect. It was the same data analysis which led them to buy advertising, to great effect, during unconventional programming, like “Sons of Anarchy,” and “The Walking Dead”.

Mining data
At this stage, the election here is looking like a decidedly one-sided affair. But both the major parties would do well to take note of the Romney-Obama result and the unconventional electioneering techniques used by the victor.

Does either party know, for instance, how many voters in urban areas are more likely to use a mobile phone than their laptop as their primary means of internet access? Or who is using Android v iOS devices and which social networks are preferred by swing voters in crucial seats?

If the US experience is any guide, they should. Data mining and social insights can win elections.

About the Opportunity:

The length and needs of each job may be different, however some duties would include:

• Collaborating with internal teams and the client to understand the requirements of the project
• Generating concepts and modeling ideas
• The creation of wire frames, sitemaps, user flows, scenarios, functional specs and prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity
• Providing guidance to the development team to build your solution
• Conducting user experience audits and heuristic evaluations
• Collaborate with the design team

About You:

You’re a strategic thinker, a methodical executer, someone who never loses sight of the bigger picture. You live and breathe user-centric design methods, many of which you have tried and tested through real world experience. You’re able to help turn business objectives, user needs, and technical possibilities into world-class online solutions. You enjoy brainstorming ideas with creative teams and work well combining both left and right brain thinking. You will have 5+ years’ experience in UX, designing for mobile, tablet and desktop, as well as experience collaborating with front end developers and visual designers. Experience with MS Visio, Axure and Omnigraffle, Adobe CS or similar tools, is a must.

Interested?

Send your details to  careers@hothouse.com.au and we will contact you based on our ongoing project needs.

About the Opportunity
HotHouse is looking for a Project Manager to join our team. This role will manage cutting-edge projects for one of our key clients, and is accountable for project delivery across our four practice areas. This includes: managing the project from implementation through to successful completion, managing and contributing to the formulation and definition of technical scope and objectives of the project, devising accurate estimates for proposals and developing project plans that specify goals, strategy, scheduling, risk management and resource allocation. You will also manage both internal and external relationships to ensure the success of your projects, identifying and scheduling project deliverables, milestones, and required tasks, and contributing to continuous improvement of processes, systems and procedures.

About you
Your customer centric approach will be evident in the way you manage and communicate with your clients. You will live and breathe best practice and consistent process, and be responsible for defining, maintaining and enforcing the project quality system for all stages of the work. You will have at least 5 years’ experience as a Project Manager in the Digital space, with a strong commercial acumen and knowledge of risk analysis and management methods. You will be results driven, proactive and adaptable, with the ability to work under pressure when needed. PMBOK, PRINCE2 certified or equivalent is ideal.

What else do we offer?
HotHouse has an eclectic group of fun and friendly people. We provide a range of benefits including; breakfast daily, fruit, a chill out zone (complete with ping pong and foosball tables), pizza Wednesdays, cake and pastry day, a café style coffee machine and regular social events and activities.

If you are passionate about the web and you want to blaze trails in the digital world with some of the friendliest people in the business, we’d love to hear from you.
Interested? Please send applications to careers@hothouse.com.au

Since 1994 HotHouse has been at the forefront of digital marketing, providing innovative digital solutions to some of Australia’s best-known brands including Toyota, Foxtel, CPA and BP. Ranked by Forrester as one of the top 3 Interactive Marketing Agencies in the region, HotHouse employs over 80 digital professionals across 4 practice areas, spanning Mobile and Web development, Brand and User Engagement, Marketing Optimisation and Managed Services.

Conveniently located just 15 minutes from the CBD, HotHouse offers a fantastic work environment and the opportunity to develop your career working with some of the friendliest people around.

About the opportunity:

Reporting to the Client Services Director, this position will play an integral part in the Client Services team. You will be responsible for managing a portfolio of work for our key client Toyota, providing advice on their digital strategy, generating opportunity and coaching and mentoring team members. Your success will be measured by a strong client relationship, a clear strategy aligned with client and business objectives, commercial management and developing the account by working with the delivery teams to produce quality, cutting edge solutions.

About you: 

You will be passionate about all things digital, have previous experience in a Digital Account Director role, coupled with proven experience managing large client assignments. You will possess exceptional relationship building and stakeholder management skills, and understand successful teams are based on collaboration and open communication.

You will be able to demonstrate a portfolio of successful client activities in the digital space and articulate your role in making these a success. A strong understanding and appreciation of the web and digital marketing encompassing strategy, creative, development, media and analytics is essential. You understand online media, banners and online advertising is only a fraction of the digital landscape.

And if that hasn’t got you excited:

Ask anyone within the business why they enjoy working here and there are two things they always say: the people, and the ability to work on interesting and rewarding projects at the forefront of technology.

HotHouse has an eclectic group of fun and friendly people. We provide a range of benefits including a chill out zone (complete with ping pong and foosball tables), corporate gym rates, regular social events and activities, pizza Wednesdays, cake and pastry day, fruit, and a café style coffee machine.

If you are passionate about the web and you want to blaze trails in the digital world, we’d love to hear from you. Email your CV to careers@hothouse.com.au.

Please note: only suitable candidates will be contacted.

You will…

• Play a key role in the Client Services team
• Assist Account Directors and Account Managers with:
  • Market research
  • Preparing client presentations
  • Updating the progress of existing marketing projects
  • Coming up with new ideas for marketing projects
  • Team coordination and administration
• Contribute to the overall success of HotHouse

You are a person with…

• Relevant Tertiary Qualification
• Strong desire to continue learning and growing your career in digital media
• Excellent communication and organisational skills
• The ability to work both collaboratively and autonomously
• A positive, proactive attitude
• Problem solving ability
• High attention to detail
• Strong Microsoft Office skills (ideally some experience in PowerPoint)

And if that hasn’t got you excited:

Ask anyone within the business why they enjoy working here and there are two things they always say: the people, and the ability to work on interesting and rewarding projects at the forefront of technology.

HotHouse has an eclectic group of fun and friendly people. We provide a range of benefits including a chill out zone (complete with ping pong and foosball tables), corporate gym rates, regular social events and activities, pizza Wednesdays, cake and pastry day, fruit, and a café style coffee machine.

Apply now…

To apply please send your applications to careers@hothouse.com.au

NAB’s latest Online Retail Sales Index shows that Australians spent $13.5 billion online in the year to April 2013, while Roy Morgan Research pegs online retail spending significantly higher at $24 billion. While there’s a large disparity in the two reports, the message is clear: Internet shopping is the new norm in Australia. Online shopping has reached a critical tipping point and online spending affects just about every sector of retail.

To discuss the latest trends in retail, Simon van Wyk, founder of HotHouse recently caught up with Paul Greenberg who co-founded pure play Internet retailer Deals Direct and is now the inaugural CEO of the National Online Retailers Association (NORA) – the voice of new retail.

Last year Mary Meeker’s state of the Internet presentation promised, “you ain’t seen nothing yet” in terms of the reinvention of virtually everything brought on by technology and access to the Internet.

At the end of May, the analyst-turned-venture capitalist from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, delivered her 2013 presentation on Internet Trends, with her colleague Liang Wu. The presentation, as always generated plenty of excitement and optimism from the tech industry and anyone who works in the digital world. Beyond just the numbers, the key take out this year is that the pace of change has accelerated as technology and connectivity transforms everything in its path. By way of example, Meeker highlights the re-imagination of business process, asset-heavy products and services, research and development, and learning tools, and points to scores of transformative businesses challenging and usurping the status quo.

Age-old businesses and models are replaced with new ways of doing things. The Internet has indeed changed everything, and this change is showing no signs of slowing.

Mobile Growth
Of particular interest to everyone in marketing is the huge growth in mobile over the year. Mobile devices will continue to displace traditional media and computers. While there are now 2.4 billion internet users across the globe, which is up by 8% from last year, the vast majority of these new users are accessing the web using mobile devices.

Indeed, there are now 1.5 billion smartphone subscribers worldwide, up 30% from a year ago. Yet as there are more than 5 billion mobile phone subscribers on the planet, this represents massive growth potential as users switch from feature phone to smartphones. Mobile devices now rack up 15% of all web traffic, compared with 10% last year.

Interestingly, while mobile usage continues to explode, and now accounts for 12% of US media consumption time, US marketers only spend 3% of their advertising budgets in that medium. The key take out here is that marketers are still spending money in the wrong places and mobile related marketing has huge potential for growth. Faster, more powerful, better connected devices are enabling us to have better digital experiences, empowering us to do more. This in turn is fuelling our use of devices over traditional computers, and allowing us to increase consumption of content such as video, simply because the experience is a good one.

Photo- and video-sharing from mobiles is also growing rapidly. In fact, the number of monthly active users of Twitter’s iOS video service Vine which launched less than 6 months ago, already accounts for about 8% of monthly active users of the iPhone in the US. Snapchat’s number of “snaps” per day has grown to 150 million in April, up from virtually zero just last year.

Tablet Love Affair
Also showing steep growth is the uptake of tablets. As fast as the Apple iPhone became the smartphone du jour, the adoption of Apple’s iPad is growing at a rate three times faster.
In the last quarter of 2012, tablet shipments surpassed those of desktop PCs and notebooks for the first time. For marketers, optimizing mobile apps and mobile websites has to be a primary goal.

New Technology Cycle

There’s a great slide in the presentation citing a quote from Digital Equipment Corporation founder Ken Olson from way back in 1977, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”. This sits alongside a front cover of Barron’s magazine from 1999 with the headline “Amazon Bomb”. The point that Meeker is hammering home is that while adoption of smartphones and tablets continues to grow, we are already rapidly entering the next major technology cycle.

It’s also a new era of buzz words: wearables (tech-enabled clothing and accessories), driveables (connected cars), flyables (mini drones) and scannables (QR coded everything). And while some of this may be more than a little hard to swallow, Meeker insists that these new categories (and buzz words) are coming, faster even the emergence of mobile everything. This in turn will lead to a new revolution in personal data from the plethora of connected devices. Meeker reports that the amount of global digital information that is created and shared such as photos, videos, tweets, and more grew 9 fold in the last five years to nearly 2 zettabytes, and the emergence of sound and new layers of personal data will escalate this number further.

Learn From China

Interestingly, the number of iOS and Android users in China has surpassed the number of users in the United States. Meeker also revealed that Chinese people spend more time on mobile and the Internet than their US counterparts who spend more time watching television and listening to the radio. Meeker points to the massive amount of innovation in China in the form of mobile and service apps that we could do well to emulate.

More Geeks Required
On a final note from Mary, with the era of wearables, driveables, flyables, and scannables, fast approaching, Mary argues that the world needs more computer science graduates. In the US right now, she tells us that IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, and Qualcomm have 10,000 job openings between them. For marketers, this tech enriched future heralds the need to build symbiotic relationships with the geeks. It also marks a change in the marketing dynamic. While we all know that traditional advertising doesn’t work like it used to, there are huge opportunities to marry tech smarts with value-driven content to build brands.

Some of the many interesting factoids that Meeker revealed include:

• More than 500 million photos are uploaded and shared every day. The majority of these are on Facebook.
• About 100 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• Smartphone users check their devices as much as 150 times a day.
• There are more users of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems in China than in the US.
• On average, 24% of people worldwide say they share “everything” or “most things” online.

This article was first published in B&T.

Jeff Jordan, partner of venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, recently posted some interesting thoughts on Fortune.com on what he describes as two Internet giants locked on a collision course. The article, Godzilla vs. Mothra, the sequel, contends that Google’s biggest competitor isn’t another search engine, but Amazon, the most successful online shopping platform on the planet.

According to Forrester Research, eCommerce sales are expected to grow at an average of 9% a year through 2017, to $370 billion. While eCommerce is clearly the future of retail, Google, it seems, is determined to take a bigger slice of the eCommerce pie. However, it’s not just about eCommerce, it’s about product search too. Something like 30% of online shoppers in the US need look no further than Amazon and make use of its sophisticated product-based vertical search capabilities first before even thinking about searching Google. This of course poses a significant threat to the search giant. After all, Google’s most important slice of ad revenue comes from selling space next to product-related search results.

In his post on Fortune.com Jordan argues, “In my personal website use, I increasingly find myself searching for products on Amazon instead of Google. Shopping on Amazon is a superior user experience and it runs the table on the magical retailer formula of selection, price and convenience. I can buy an item on Amazon in a minute, secure in the knowledge that I’m likely paying the lowest price while getting free shipping and fast delivery.”

He adds, “Contrast that with the shopping experience on Google. Shopping on Google is work. It has infinite selection…if you can manage to find what you’re looking for amidst the forest of search results. You have to work to find the best price, typically by pogo-ing in and out of different search results to check both prices and shipping costs. And when you find a product you want to buy from a new merchant, you need to enter all the payment and shipping information from scratch. Buying on Google takes chunks of an hour, not an Amazon minute.”

Jordan contends that Amazon with its rich shopping experience is able to provide eCommerce merchants with a viable advertising alternative to Google. He also points to a report from Wordstream which uncovers the top industries contributing to Google’s earnings, which include:

1. Finance & Insurance – $4.0 Billion
2. Retailers & General Merchandise – $2.8 Billion
3. Travel & Tourism – $2.4 Billion
4. Jobs & Education – $2.2 Billion
5. Home & Garden— $2.1 Billion

In the retailers and general merchandise industry, Amazon stands apart as Google’s biggest spender. 

1. Amazon – Spent $55.2 Million on Google AdWords
2. Ebay – Spent $42.8 Million on Google AdWords
3. Macys – Spent $35.6 Million on Google AdWords
4. Sears – Spent $34.3 Million on Google AdWords
5. JC Penny – Spent $30.9 Million on Google AdWords

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out how quickly this core business might dwindle if Amazon was a truly global company on the scale of Google and if these major retailers chose to place more of their search ads directly at Amazon and not through the search giant.

Over the past 17 years, Amazon has accumulated vast amounts of data about the actual buying habits of millions of consumers from around the globe. The big question many analysts are asking is whether Amazon will unleash this data and become an advertising platform in its own right. There’s no doubt that an advertising platform based on what people are actually buying is more valuable than one based on what they are searching for or what they like.

Of course, for the time being, Amazon will continue to make its money from wafer thin profit margins compared to Google’s weighty advertising revenue. Yet beyond the business-to-consumer eCommerce environment the two tech giants also compete in the areas of streaming content, 7-inch tablets, cloud computing and daily deals.

Yet the media continues to be awash with stories of Google being a wannabe Amazon, and with good reason. This year alone Google has launched a same-day delivery service trial in San Francisco called Google Shopping Express which it is supporting through the Google BufferBox which are secure boxes dotted around the city in convenient locations that consumers can choose to have their items shipped.

It is clear that these initiatives are all about enhancing Google’s eCommerce capabilities and protecting their advertising business from Amazon. Indeed, with retail transforming into an omnichannel experience where all channels come together seamlessly, the ability to satisfy customers’ eCommerce expectations, and make shopping easy, is key.

Whether Amazon withstands this current eCommerce assault from Google and continues to dominate web shopping, we shall see. One thing is certain, the days of Amazon being an online bookseller and Google being a search engine are long gone.

This article was originally published on Business Spectator.