Qube Media.

Nobody's looking at your banner ads

'Internet users tend to avoid fixing their eyes on anything that looks like advertising', New Scientist reported last week – and the phenomenon has been dubbed "banner blindness" by Nidhi Mathur of Hewlett Packard's research lab in Bangalore, India.

Obviously, this poses a massive problem to advertisers – especially if the stats New Scientist quotes are correct: only 3 people click through for every 1,000 ad impressions.

How are online advertisers combating 'banner blindness' – by putting ads onto the pared down 'print this page' versions of their clients' websites. Sounds like a good idea at first – and initial studies show web users do remember ads they've seen on their printouts more than those online.

But many, like psychologist Joanna Bawa, believe this effect will be ephemeral: 'people are increasingly resistant to ads generally, and will soon figure out what's going on.'

Here at Qube, we're seeing a growing trend: clients are starting to realise that a smarter way to spend their online advertising budget is to take an approach that doesn't interrupt the attention of their potential clients.

By assigning quite a small percentage of their overall advertising budget to search engine optimisation, social media marketing and online PR, they are generating more engagement and click-throughs from people who are already showing an interest in their goods and services. And that means more sales.

Best of all, all this activity is fully trackable – just a thought for those of you deciding where you can most effectively allocate your budget.

Check out the article on the New Scientist website >

Search marketing client wins

Just a quick update on some of our client wins... we've just won the search engine marketing consultancy and campaign for a soon-to-launched private jet charter company in addition to the search marketing and content consultancy for a global specialist recruitment company...

Improved image recognition for Google search

New Scientist reported that Google's image recognition for search is about to make leaps forward.

Traditionally, it's hard for a computer (or Google's infamous 'algorithm') to 'see' or understand an image - especially when it needs to relate that back to a users search term. That's why on the most part, image search relied almost solely on the text that accompanies the image.

But that's all about to change.

"Now researchers at Google have combined image recognition with their ranking software to sort pictures according to their visual characteristics. The highest-ranked are those that have the most features in common with the whole set of images found for a particular search query," reports New Scientist.

Read the full image search article here.

Apollo's Pad party has started!

The first 5 episodes of the new puppet comedy show Apollo's Pad are now live.

Watch the episodes

We're hiring again: web marketing consultants, producers and assistants

We're looking for talented and experienced web marketing consultants and web producers. We're also hunting for intelligent, capable marketing assistants - we'll be posting the full job specs for all three positions on the Qube website shortly.

If you think you've got skills that would make you a good addition to our Brighton-based web marketing team, get in contact. But you must have relevant web marketing experience and a knowledge of search and social media marketing.

Email us to tell us more about you and your experience: jobs@qubes.co.uk

No agencies please. Really. Not maybe, not we'll think about it. Just no agencies.

Will Yahoo's fate give Google dominance?

Yahoo's currently stuck between a rock and a hard place and whatever decision it now makes is raising concerns about the online competitive landscape.

Following Microsoft's hostile takeover bid, at $31 per share, and with no other offers, shareholders could get lawsuit-happy should they turn it down.

As Michael Arrington at TechCrunch points out, the only other solution might be to outsource search advertising to Google, which could boost cashflow and justify snubbing the big blue beast.

Yahoo's pride aside, Michael goes on to say that Microsoft might be seen as the more competitive way to go by the DOJ (who could put a stop to either deal), rather than Google swallowing up one of it's market rivals.

While in principle this makes sense, how much difference would it really make? In Q4 2007, Google took 77% of total search marketing spend, with Yahoo taking a comparatively measly 18%.

One company engineering a monopoly is always a bit worrying but if marketers and advertisers have already decided Google's where they want to spend their money, is there really much left to monopolise?

LSI - the new SEO?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing apparently (although for Shamen fans it'll always be Love Sex Intelligence).

Instead of stuffing copy with keywords SEO style, LSI is about using synonyms to optimise search ranking. Interesting article on it on Seopher.com.

Widening the scope of search

The ability to search for images and video based on their actual content, rather than keywords or other accompanying info, gets closer.

Google has lodged a patent for a method of allowing their search robots to read text that appears in image and video files, which they'll be able to index for search.

This means they'll be able to index information that's never been available before, widening the scope of search massively.

What we search isn't always what we seek

Gerry McGovern has some interesting things to say about how our perception and use of words changes when we search.

Search is a form of 'mental behaviour', says McGovern, and there are many ways of saying the same thing.

While we may be searching for a 'dirt cheap hotel', when we arrive at the page, those same words may be unlikely to inspire confidence because, as marketing material, they leave a lot to be desired.

So that's the conundrum for search marketeers. What your customers search for isn't always exactly what they want to find.

Read Gerry's full article