How do you really measure user engagement in your website. Clicks only scratch the surface of engagement, how do you determine why some did not convert after clicking on your HP? To bring any kind of quality to campaign metrics analysts need to go beyond Clicks and Results so that we can effectively optimize to sites to improve user experience, which in turn will improve conversions. The only problem is that this is extremely difficult when you can

SEO is a complicated process that aims to improve your site’s search engine rankings. Few people understand what SEO is aside from it has something to do with Google Spiders, meta tags and links. SEO is made up of a combination of

Whoever said that an online advertising campaign needed banner ads. The ‘only the good stuff’ online campaign for Doritos is an online advertising campaign where no banner ads were produced, just a plugin that lets users fill adspace with whatever they choose. This was a Student Project that won the ONE SHOW COLLEGE prize and was also selected as the winner of the Doritos live brief.

Clicking through to the site allowed users to download a plug in that could detect where advertising was on the page and then let the user fill that space with whatever they liked, images, videos, stock market info, Google Searches, etc.

A similar product has been available as an add on plug in to Mozilla -Ad Block which lets you prevent your browser from downloading banners.

What I like about this is that is completely kills the competition, or as Digitology puts it – it’s Advertising Genocide. Whilst at the same time embedding the Doritos logo into your toolbar. It also highlights that a series of banner ads does not equate to a valuable online presence. Banners are becoming more and more like the inane ramblings of preachers on the side of the road you walk past quickly even though they might be screaming at you with a microphone.

Advertising online is about being heard, and with Click thru rates continuing to fall online campaigns need to go beyond banners and focus on bigger picture strategies.

The latest online initiative from Nintendo for their new Wii specific title WarioLand – Shake it is a great example of product, content and medium working perfectly together to communicate a solid product and brand message.

WarioLand – Shake it as you can probably guess from the title is defined by its unique game play were the player controls the main character Wario’s movement by shaking their Wii controller. Aside from this element is looks like a pretty stock standard game with similar game structures to many Nintendo titles. So to focus on this ’shaking’ concept which is it’s main selling point the marketing team put together a dedicated You Tube page borrowing from the Icon wars concept a few years ago. The page eventually collapses under the pressure of the siesmic shaking from the game footage, leaving you with a link to the Wario Land Landing Page or to Game Stop where you can purchase it.

YouTube is the perfect environment for this product with so many gamers posting reviews and video’s of themselves playing special moves and secret levels. But the greatest part of this is the surprise element, as your watching you don’t expect the scroll bars and search boxes to fall and collapse, and even if you don’t buy the game it’s definitely one of those links you send to your friends.

With every second person you know now owning a iPhone, the traffic online searching for lastest info and mobile phone innovations is exploding and has got companies responding – even companies that aren’t involved in the mobile phone industry. Check out this campaign for the new Pomegranate Phone, which has features like a projector, global voice translator and even coffee maker all packed into one device.

As you explore the exceedingly ludicrous features you realize that the pomegranate phone is a spoof site for a campaign from Nova Scotia Tourism. Misdirection can be a great way to sell you product, especially if its capitalizing on a current trend. Aside from that this is a great site that kept me engaged all the way to the Harmonica feature. Even though this is a fake phone I hope one day we get HD projector features in our mobiles.

The traditional one way advertising model of brand to consumer has been flipped, twisted and mangled in the new media world today. People don’t listen to brands as much as they listen to the social groups and communities they are part of. With so much clutter in the media space people have adapted ways to block out ads and branding becomes and even harder task. The number of people who bought and iPhone bought it not because of a need but because their friend’s got one. Apple has a  24hr sales force in the millions that are working for them for free.

The viral effect that runs through social communities has a far greater reach than any paid media and is far more cost effective, and most importantly it is coming from a friend or someone respected. So if you want to be heard become part of the dialogue rather than try to interrupt it.

So how do you get your consumers talking about you – listen to them and then let them know that your are by responding -  they will spread the word.

One great example of listening to your customers is the recent EA ad for game Tiger Woods PGA Tour. About a year ago, avid gamer who goes by alias Levinator25 posted a video on YouTube of what he thought was a glitch in the game where Tiger Woods could walk on water to play a shot – the Jesus shot. This video was viewed close to 650,000 times. A year later on the release of the next in the series EA released an ad featuring the real Tiger Woods taking the Jesus Shot. This video posted Aug 19 2008 has already received 2,262,550 views. Whether this increases sales on the game is secondary the boost in respect for the brand in the Gaming community.

After Will Wright’s recent game release Spore, which allows users to create their own game character to play with and inhabit game worlds, comes Sony’s release Little Big Planet which also steers down the path of user generated content. But instead of creating your own characters the game lets you create your own game worlds and then share them with other players around the world. This is one way to ensure endless hours of game play.

Sony have already ear marked the game to be on of their top sellers this year globally. Sony Worldwide Studios president, Shuhei Yoshida in an interview with Videogaming247 said the success of this game “really shows the way the whole industry will be heading. Giving power to the consumers to express their creativity by creating something that’s fun for others to play.”

Sony are so confident in the success of the game that they want lead character Sackboy to become the new face of Sony PS3.

See how players can create their own worlds here.

Yahoo in the US and Canada has signed an advertising agreement with Google and is now preparing to include Google ads in it’s Search Results. This comes after years of Yahoo traffic levels falling in the shadow of Google. And from my own experience trying to maintain stable conversion on Yahoo is getting harder.

On Google’s side they see it as beneficial to the Yahoo! SEM which has been struggling for quite a while now. All adprices will continue to be set by competitive auctions. Yahoo are also going to see benefits. The more Google ads are shown, the more money Yahoo makes because of how much more expensive it is to run SEM on Google. Also it will help where Yahoo struggles with long-tail search queries.

Microsoft however are not to happy about the deal – this will bearly leave Live Search with a 20% share of a the SEM market. Whilst Google have been very specific that this will not mean elimination of a competitor from the market or increase Googles share or search traffic there are still fears Googlisation (Google Monopoly) where Google will be able to charge monopoly prices to advertisers. The issue has been debated alot in terms of commerce, but at the end of the day “It