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A halloween of spookily augmented reality at Asda

When I was a kid, riding trolleys down supermarket aisles and giving my twin brother beats in public were the symptoms of my boredom at the local Tesco or Asda.

That was before ‘retail-tainment’ involved the smartphone or tablet.

The supermarket is the perfect crucible for ‘retail-tainment’. Outside of big cities, supermarkets are captive markets, often entailing a long visit with the family, and competing with rival stores on a weekly basis.

Winning the battle to keep kids obedient or event interested in store would be a boon for any supermarket chain.

At the moment, there are supermarkets such as Asda that are synonymous with family, but none that have mastered retailtainment. More apps and in-store challenges with rewards will provide an effective antidote to the rogue use of toys by children that then abandon them in the bakery aisle.

Asda is using Zappar to offer kids the chance to be greeted by Sir Spook in 400 of its stores. Combined with some physical events, pumpkin carving and the like, they’re aiming to be the family supermarket at Halloween.

How to win at driving app downloads

According to Juniper Research’s latest report, they forecast that over 160bn apps will be downloaded globally onto smartphones and tablets in 2017.

Although the UK is the most expensive country in the world to drive app downloads, with 58% of the country owning a smartphone and 19% owning a tablet, the UK represents a lucrative territory to crack now and increasingly so in the next four to five years.

Here we’ll take another look at InMobi’s App Insight Report, released last week, and reveal some key insight and advice on how your company can best drive app downloads on mobile and tablet.

LinkedIn users are more interested in your company: stats

Twitter may be the most effective social media channel for news distribution but LinkedIn is a better way to reach the audience that cares about you.

LinkedIn is now responsible for a staggering 64% of all visits from social media channels to corporate websites according to our research, which tracked an average of 2m monthly visits to 60 corporate websites over two years.

By contrast, Facebook accounts for 17% of such visits, while Twitter is on just 14%.

Has Hummingbird changed SEO forever?

When Google announced at the end of September that Hummingbird had been live for a month or so, many questioned how such a significant change could have happened without it having been detected earlier.

Amit Singhal, Head of Google’s ranking team, talked about Hummingbird being the first time a completely new algorithm had been implemented since 2001 and that it impacted 90% of search queries.

However, the visible impact of this algorithm change has been less significant than many recent algorithm updates, such as the May 2012 Penguin update.

West End retailers slow to adopt in-store technology: stats

Retailers in London’s Oxford Street and Regent Street have been relatively slow to emply digital technology to improve the in-store experience for customers, so says a new study.

Tech provider Omnico has carried out a survey more than 90 retailers for uses of 17 different technologies, including reserve and collect, wi-fi, kiosks, iPads and more. 

The retailers studied are using an average of two technologies, while 30% of retailers don’t use any at all. 

Web technology has a big part to play in the future of the high street, so who’s using what? 

Six advanced ad text testing considerations

Your adverts and their messaging are integral to your PPC success. Like the campaign itself, they need constant optimisation, revision and testing.

Planning is probably the most important part of ad text testing. Without a solid plan you are simply going to stick a load of messages out there and see what comes back.

This can lead to unfair testing practices and ultimately, worse results.

Find out what you should be considering when it comes to ad text testing…

US mobile paid search spend up 66% year-on-year: stats

Marketers in the US are continuing to invest heavily in mobile paid search across Google and Bing/Yahoo, with the total spend on tablets and smartphones up 65.9% year-on-year to 28.7% of search budgets.

Taken individually, spend on tablets increased 87.6% compared to Q3 2012, while the increase on smartphone was 118.1% in the same period.

The increased investment is unsurprising considering the consumer shift towards mobile search and the recent roll out of Google’s Enhanced Campaigns. 

Data included in our own Mobile Commerce Compendium shows that search is one of the top three most popular smartphone activities behind email and making calls, so it’s inevitable that marketers will begin ramping up their investment in this channel. 

Facebook ads: ROI and conversions increase in Q3

Analysis of Facebook advertising performance in Q3 has found that the platform has improved across numerous key performance indicators (KPIs).

It comes off the back of a strong performance in Q2, when there were also improvements across the board compared to Q1.

The data from Kenshoo shows that CPC has dropped 9% in Q3 compared to Q2, while revenue per click (RPC) has increased 1.73x.

Similarly, the average conversion rate has increased 2.36x while revenue is up 2.16x.

Social media ROI: a data-driven case study

Recently I’ve been running a variety of social ads to promote the Festival of Marketing, but due to a glitch in our purchase process, measuring the exact return has been more difficult than usual.

Luckily I’m able to see the silver lining in any cloud, so I thought I’d use this opportunity to talk about how data correlation can help uncover hidden social ROI. 

Six ways to optimise your search marketing for Christmas

With Christmas make or break for retailers how can they make the most of their paid search budget in the run up to the big day?

In these ultra-competitive times the peak Christmas period can be make or break for retailers. With up to 40% of sales happening around this time, under performance doesn’t just harm your company,  it could be fatal to your business.

Paid search is a proven way of delivering buyers to your website, but how do you maximise its impact, while minimising costs?

Based on Kour experience there are six steps to optimising your search engine marketing for Christmas success:

Five examples of brands that are nailing Pinterest

As of September 2013, three year-old social site Pinterest has over 70m users, and according to a study by Shareaholic, Pinterest is driving more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google+ combined.

There are also many instances where Pinterest has driven more sales than Facebook, which currently sits atop the social media mountain, so it’s clear to that Pinterest is an integral social media channel for retail brands.

It’s very easy for a brand to simply set up a few boards, pin some pretty pictures of their own products, achieve a few hundred thousand followers, dust their hands and walk away.

So which brands are doing something more than that and creating a deeper engagement via Pinterest?

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