Trends

Online Video Advertising

With most U.S. homes connected to broadband, the viewing of online video has never been easier.  Whether watching a short clip on YouTube or an entire TV program, almost three-quarters (72%) of Internet users view videos online — amounting to 144 million people.  To school marketers, this presents a huge – and largely untapped – audience to reach.

Video ads run during online full-episode TV programs yield deeper brand impact than corresponding on-air TV ads, with the difference most pronounced among younger viewers age 13-34.

What accounts for this variation in impact between online video and traditional TV? Data shows that web video viewers are more engaged and attentive to the programs they are watching, which is likely a function of the viewing environment and the oft-required active mouse-clicking to initiate and continue content. Online video is also still a relative novelty compared to traditional forms of media.  Further, and most significantly, reduced ad clutter and the inability to easily skip ads are considerable recall-enhancing factors.

While creating a unique ad specifically for use in online video may be desirable, advertisers might want to consider that TV ads re-purposed for online full episodes actually generated the top results. It may be that the TV executions possess higher production values, or that online full episode viewers still prefer the absorptive and passive nature of traditional-style TV spots.

Mobile Video

When smart phones first came out, many people wondered whether a TV-addicted culture would care to watch video on such a small screen.

New data from the Nielsen Company indicate that watching mobile video is indeed getting more popular, but it’s far from a threat to the TV business.

In the fourth quarter of 2010, 22 million Americans watched video on a mobile device — just under 10% of U.S. mobile phone users. Meanwhile, according to Nielsen, during this same period, 286,648 million Americans watched TV at home.

So to put this in perspective: The U.S. mobile video audience is about 0.07% the size of the U.S. TV audience.

Still, a mobile video audience of 22 million people is nothing to sneeze at. And that group is growing.

According to Nielsen, “In the fourth quarter of 2010, more Americans watched video on their mobile devices than ever before. On a year-to-year basis, the number of people watching mobile video increased more than 43%, while the amount of time spent doing so was up almost 7%.”

Nielsen reported that Americans who watch video on mobile devices do so for an average of 3½ hours per month, but that varies greatly by ages. Americans age 17 and under who watch mobile video do so for more than seven hours per month; for those age 50 and over, it’s just more than two hours per month.

Nielsen didn’t say which kinds of videos people are watching on mobile devices, but it probably comprises mostly YouTube videos and news, music or sports footage, rather than full-length movies and TV shows.

Nielsen’s numbers include video viewed through smart phone and tablet apps. But they do not include mobile games, which are a hugely popular and often video-rich mobile activity.

Search Engine Optimization

As pay-per-lead internet leads continue to convert at lower percentages, schools are investing more in optimizing their own sites. So you have just obtained a twelve page search engine optimization campaign proposition, but the only thing you can determine is how much you will need to pay on a monthly basis. The other phrases are in a foreign language that you have never heard of and incorporate words like pagerank, present position in Google, key phrase demand and competition. simply to mention a few!

Don’t despair, with this quick SEO lesson, you’ll be able to sound like an expert soon.

An SEO campaign (search engine optimization campaign) is targeted at increasing the rankings of an internet site in search engines which would subsequently bring about more guests (and hopefully more students) to your site.

There are a couple of factors that would have an impact on your position on search engines like Google:

Google page rank: Pagerank can be a value that’s given to a webpage based upon how important the search engines find that web page to be. This value can be between 0 and 10, with zero being a very low page rank and 10 being the greatest possible page ranking. For a internet site to be classified as important, a page rank which is between 3 and 6 is more than adequate – only a hand full of internet sites can boast with a page ranking of 10.

Incoming back links: When you’ve got a lot of incoming back links to your webpage (inbound links from other websites to your webpage) this furthermore contributes to your websites status and definitely will play an vital role in your search engine ratings.

Keyphrase research: Before a search engine optimization marketing campaign can begin, it’s important that proper research is carried out on your key phrases. The demand (number of lookups for your specific keyword each month) needs to be compared with the competition (the amount of sites who competes for the specific search term) to determine which keywords are the best to target. As an example, if only 10 individuals each month searches for pink polka-dot swimsuit, and 300 000 sites compete for this keyword, is would not make sense concentrating on this search phrase – the demand is not high enough and the competition way too high.

Competitive analysis: This is an evaluation of the internet sites you will be competing against. Their webpage ranks as well as number of incoming back links are two of the variables that will be considered when this analysis is done.

Present placement in Google: The current positioning for a specific key phrase in Google, is the position where your webpage currently shows for the search term in question. If you are focusing on the word insurance, it will be of no use if your webpage only shows up on page 25 of the insurance results. Internet users almost never searches further than the top 10 results, therefore it is essential that your internet site performs well on search engines like Google.

On-site optimization: This is the term for the amount of energy that will be necessary to setup your web site correctly for SEO purposes. Home page title, keywords, description tags, meta tags and so forth are a couple of important items to check on your existing webpage.

Now that you shall no longer be SEO-uninformed, you can make an informed decision on the search engine optimization proposal you received!