We came across a compelling piece of research, 'Mobile Life', and article published this week by TNS:
One in ten UK consumers now use ‘mobile wallet’ whilst one in five use mobile banking
The use of ‘mobile wallet’ technology amongst UK consumers has more than doubled in the last 12 months with more than one in ten people now making payments via their mobile, says Mobile Life, a TNS research paper into use of mobiles in the UK. Moreover, one in five UK consumers now use their mobile to perform basic banking functions such as checking their account balance - also up more than 100% on last year.
Thanks largely to the surge in smartphone technology and the accessibility of such products to the wider market, in the UK 11.9% of consumers now use their mobiles to make payments online. The figure, up from only 5.9% twelve months ago, means more than one in ten of us now uses mobile wallet technology. The percentage of people who regularly bank via their mobile is now 20.4%, up from 9.7% in 2010, again demonstrating the rapidly growing adoption of mobile technology.
Mobile wallet technology allows the consumer to use their phone like a debit or credit card to pay for items online or in-store. It doesn’t require a bank account and can be topped up with money to store in order to facilitate easy transactions at any time. Mobile banking encompasses the more basic functions of online finance, like checking your account balance or making purchases securely, both of which can be performed either through apps or mobile internet.
Stephen Yap, Group Director at TNS Technology, said, “The huge increase in the use of mobile wallet technology in the UK shows the dramatic effect technology is having on our lifestyles. The incredible success of the smartphone is encouraging people to migrate many of their key online activities onto their mobile. In the last twelve months in particular the openness of the Android platform has increased handset competition and driven down prices, meaning that more and more people are able to use their handset as a payment tool.”
“As we become more familiar with smartphones and as mobile networks improve, we should see this number increase further, until mobile is the primary platform for most everyday online functions, including making payments,” said Yap. “Soon we could be seeing phones as our primary portals for all online needs, particularly as the growth of the cloud will place less emphasis on storage space and more on mobile access points.”
On the rise in mobile banking, Yap said, “The increase in mobile banking is a further proof point that mobile is the coming platform. Banks need to get their house in order to ensure that their mobile offer is as strong as their online one, as this could rapidly become a key differentiator for consumers.”
As soon as the March Budget was announced, we saw a spike in interest in 'first time buyer' mortgage related queries online. Clearly the FirstBuy scheme has generated interest: queries shot up immediately and have shown a continued rise since then.
Source: Google internal
For advertisers and providers with an interest in this sector of the market, this gives a window of opportunity to capture customers, while they research and may look to purchase alternate mortgage products online.
We've looked at trends in what people are searching for and put together a keyword pack (access here) which is a good starting point for advertisers looking to expand their coverage of the first-time-buyer sector. In less than one month since the Budget announcement, there have been over 80,000 queries against these specific terms.
Remember that there are many free Google tools to help you build out AdWords campaigns in the Opportunity Tab within your AdWords account.
A big thank you to everyone who joined us on Wednesday for our first 'Google Loves Mobile' Financial Services event at The May Fair hotel. The feedback so far has been really positive and we hope to run more events like this in the future and make them even better, so please do take a moment if you were at the event to let us know what you thought.
We had a day full of great speakers - we heard from Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive!; Google's Ian Carrington and Amanda Rosenberg; then Jon Mew, Head of Mobile for the IAB; Daniel Rosen of AKQA and lastly Reto Meier from Google, before heading into an engaging panel session. Jedward were also seen wandering the hotel, so a day of big hitters ;)
You can revisit the presentations from the day (for the speakers who used slides), and download them here
You can also watch video versions of Amanda's mobile Search and Display demos:
Thanks again to everyone who contributed, and we hope to see lots of you at the next Google UK Finance event!
Take a look at the YouTube UK Homepage today, for More Th>n's 'More Than Freeman' campaign - proof that you can make a splash with insurance!
Their Click-to-Play masthead plays a short clip from the 'rooftile' home insurance ad and then leads through More Th>n's branded YouTube channel for more TV ads, a 'making of the ads' film, and other features such as links through to follow on Twitter and Facebook.
For more information about YouTube and the opportunities for your brand, just get in touch with your Google contacts :)
As the snow continues to disrupt travel plans across the UK and beyond, we've seen a peak in travel insurance queries. Travellers concerned for the impact of cancelled flights, missed connections and other disrupted travel plans may find themselves in the market for last-minute travel insurance.
Our advice?
Make sure you have good keyword coverage for seasonal related searches
Try some eye-catching seasonal creative related to snow or bad weather
Ensure your daily budgets are allowing for spikes in queries
Searches around savings pick up immediately after Christmas as people resolve to save more for next year after the expensive festive season. Spotting and having the flexibility to act on this trend can help you cash in on consumer desire to save money.
The two week period between Christmas and the first week back at work represents the best possible time to build cost efficient market share in the Savings market.
While Queries see a huge jump in this window, CPCs move in the opposite direction (32% down in 2009) as advertisers tend to overestimate the reduction in demand over December and misalign budgets during this seasonal spike.
Today, a great example of a UK financial services company using the YouTube homepage takeover masthead ad format to gain brand visibility. Visa are running a 'Pay with Visa' competition and driving traffic to their own competition site through the YouTube masthead.
The YouTube homepage delivers ~9,500,000 daily impressions in the UK
54% of YouTube users in the UK are aged 35+
(Source: Nielsen Sep 2010)
For more examples of finance (and other) brands using YouTube please visit our YouTube Creative Hub
After a quiet period on the blog, we're back with some exciting new research from a partnership with Deutsche Bank and GfK. We've been speaking to advertisers for a long time who have been trying to gain an understanding of how their purchase cycle works, and how they can attribute value correctly to each marketing channel. We know that there is a definite 'research online, purchase offline', or 'ROPO' effect, but many clients struggle to understand the real value that online marketing brings to their business.
Deutsche Bank, GfK and Google recently carried out a cross-channel path-to-purchase study for German financial services purchases. Please get in touch with your account team for more detail, but a few highlights:
The majority of offline purchases are preceded by an online research process, therefore counting the number of contracts concluded online understates the role of the internet
ROPO effect applies to 48.6% of new contracts: these are a combination of offline purchase preceded by an online research process and pure online research and purchase
Pure online sales (10.8%) thus significantly understate the importance of the internet marketing in gaining new contracts
The ROPO figure is much higher than typically concluded and shows that many consumers themselves underestimate their levels of internet activity
Google is used by more than one third of all bank customers who do research on the internet before signing a contract
Research conducted by Google users is more intensive: they visit more than twice as many domains as other users
The average research process begins 7 1/2 weeks before the actual contract signing - so it is not the last click that counts. A continuous supply of helpful information can strengthen customer loyalty.
With the arrival of Google Instant, we've been receiving some questions around how the autocomplete suggestions are generated, and how this might affect advertisers. Google Instant utilizes the same technology as Google Suggest (now called Autocomplete), so it's worth revisiting this feature to learn more.
As you type in the search box on Google Web Search, Google's autocomplete algorithm offers searches that might be similar to the one you're typing. Start to type [car ] and you'll be able to pick searches for car tax, car games and car insurance (to name just a few). Type some more and you may even see a link to the page you are looking for.
How autocomplete works
As you type, Google's algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users' search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the predicted queries shown have been typed previously by other Google users. The autocomplete dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries. In addition, if you're signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you've done in the past.
Cross post from the Official Google Blog, by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea — people can get results as they type their queries. Imagining the future of search, the idea of being able to search for partial queries or provide some interactive feedback while searching has come up more than a few times. Along the way, we’ve even built quite a few demos (notably, Amit Patel in 1999 and Nikhil Bhatla in 2003). Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search-as-you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search-before-you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed.
As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant. Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.
Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant:
Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.
Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:
To bring Google Instant to life, we needed a host of new technologies including new caching systems, the ability to adaptively control the rate at which we show results pages and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system. In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think—all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google.
The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!
As part of our current rollout, Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms.
We’re very excited about today’s announcement and hope that you are too. Give Google Instant a try and let us know what you think!
Advertisers whose businesses revolve around market volatility will know that increased volatility translates to increased opportunity. This relationship is extremely apparent when we look at online trends. Having looked back at the VFTSE over the past two years, and compared volatility to paid search click volume against related searches on Google, we see the strong and immediate impact that the markets have on online user behaviour.
Source: Google Internal and VFTSE
The important thing to notice here is that online search reflects macro environmental trends immensely quickly. As soon as markets move, potential consumers of your products are also on the move, and as the above correlation shows, volatility immediately translates to increased demand via online search.
Advertisers would be well advised to track trends closely using tools such as Google Insights for Search, and be able to respond with dynamic marketing budget allocation to ensure you don't cap the click leads you can capture. Ensure that you are covering all appropriate keywords with relevance to spreadbetting and forex and greet potential customers with fresh, tailored adtext.
You might have seen NMA's vertical focus piece on Finance from the 26th August. It's chock full of advertiser points of view from the sector, and raises some interesting discussion points. Our own head, Ian Morgan, was asked to comment on some trends and issues affecting the financial services market, such as social media, consumer interaction, keyword management, and mobile marketing. These are all key issues and ones we're bound to be discussing further in coming months.
Key discussion points:
The UK financial services industry is back to its fastest growth rate since September 2007 (Source: CBI)
The financial services industry has been slow to take up social media, due to concerns over regulation and the traditionally conservative nature of finance sector marketing
Some advertisers have managed to break the mold and lead the way with successful social media campaigns, for both traffic acquisition and brand awareness/engagement
Consumer appetite for conversation and reassurance is strong, raising a challenge for all financial services advertisers to formulate a response to this demand
Strategic search management is vital. Keeping abreast of online consumer demand and reacting by appearing against relevant keywords (including longtail) and providing tailored adtext will allow advertisers to gain cost effective leads. Using new ad formats such as Sitelinks will allow better traffic management and help guide users to the most relevant of your products or offers.
We encourage all financial services advertisers to have discussions around these important areas. Innovate where you can, learn from others in your sector, and most importantly, test and learn!
We're excited to announce the launch of Ad of the Year, an award hosted by YouTube in partnership with Campaign. Check out the YouTube channel, youtube.com/iloveads, where agencies and advertisers can upload your best and most creative ads of the last 18 months. All video ads that ran online or on television are eligible to enter and the aim is to find the most creative and entertaining ads. The ad that captures the imagination of the nation!
How it works
An expert panel will review submissions and shortlist 28 ads, which will be put forward for the public vote. The winner will be announced and celebrated at the Campaign Media Awards on 17 November and receive a homepage takeover on YouTube, worth £75,000 and approximately 11 million views. Entry is free, all entrants need to do is upload the ad. No forms, no formalities!
Timelines
Deadline for entries: 23 September 2010
Shortlist chosen by expert panel: 1 October-14 October 2010
Public vote: 15 October – 3 November 2010
Winner announced : Campaign Media Awards, 17 November 2010
Future Plans
After the awards, we plan to make the iloveads channel a hub for great ads on YouTube.
We hope you're excited by ads too, and will submit your entries via youtube.com/iloveads!
We increasingly find ourselves speaking with finance advertisers about attribution modelling, and specifically about the consumer clickstream. What click journeys do users undertake before finally arriving at your site to get a quote or make a purchase? And vitally, how do you attribute value to each of these clicks in a fair and effective way, so that you can re-invest in keywords accordingly?
In an effort to better understand user behaviour around path-to-purchase, we recently undertook a study with Nielsen. There are some useful insights which we hope advertisers can use in conjunction with their own data to facilitate conversations around path-to-purchase and attribution.
We've been talking about mobile search marketing for some time, and advertisers in the Finance sector are increasingly forming strategies and starting to make moves in this area.
If you look at growth trends for a term like 'car insurance', for queries made on mobile devices over recent months, it's clear that consumers are ready to engage on the mobile platform.
Source: Google internal
The challenge for advertisers is to ensure that your brand is ready to be found in the mobile space, and to facilitate interaction and loyalty with your target consumer. We've formed some high level best practices for mobile marketing:
Be Clear
What are your mobile business objectives? Conversions; Engagement; Downloads..?
Be Found
Build optimised campaigns for mobile, and use engaging ad formats such as Click-to-Call and Location Extensions with Maps
Be Ready
Create a website that follows mobile best practices
Be Smarter
Consistently track and report, and optimise accordingly
Read more in Ian Carrington's (Mobile Advertising Sales Director, Google EMEA) mobile strategy article in Marketing Week
Cross Post from Google Barometer Blog, by Christoffer Klemming and Robin Morgan, UK B2B Marketing
YouTube has long been a place to come to look for information and to connect with other people with similar interests. In the spirit of this, we are proud to launch think with Google - our new platform for sharing business insights and viewpoints delivered in bit-sized, inspiring and actionable videos.
The channel has some of UKs leading thinkers offering their insights on creativity, marketing, business strategy, trends, consumer insights and more; helping you navigate in our dynamic business landscape. Contributors already include Amazon’s Marketing Director Brian McBride, Confused.com’s creative CEO Carlton Hood, innovative author and speaker Don Tapscott and London Mayor Boris Johnsson.
As always, viewers will be able to rate videos, leave comments, subscribe and offer up video responses. The hope is that this will become a thriving business community in the spirit of YouTube – so head to the channel, listen to the thinkers and feel free to make your voice heard.
Cross Post from Google Barometer Blog, by Selina Rennie, Agency Team
Our new YouTube channel, Bubble, showcases the best and brightest YouTube executions to date, be it a cool new viral or a stunning masthead.
The site is easy to navigate. It allows you to browse content by ads, check out the latest YouTube news or take a look at past viral advertising campaigns that have run on YouTube.
If you are looking for some inspiration, take a look at our most popular Bubbles as voted by subscribers of the channel each month.
If you are interested in learning about the benefits of advertising on YouTube, head to the 'How To' section. Here, you can also learn about the advertising formats that are available and how advertising analytics and insights can be utilised to optimise YouTube campaigns.
On Bubble, you will also find some useful videos on how YouTube impacts brand metrics. Here is a taster:
For all of this and much more, visit Bubble today.
The recession has accelerated UK online demand for financial advice. There were over 50,000 searches for the term ‘IFA’ alone in Q1 2010. However most IFAs are not doing enough to be found online and are missing the opportunity to capture these leads.
During June and July, the Finance Team here at Google decided to make support available for IFAs. On this site you can find:
Our White Paper, 'IFAs in the Digital Space' - exploring consumer behaviour and opportunities in the online financial advice market
Our Webinar, 'Google Loves IFAs' - an educational run-through of best practices in online marketing and practical demos and tips for getting started on AdWords
Links to a range of FREE Google tools and resources
Please do give us feedback on this initiative and on what you'd like to see more of in the future.
Highlights from our White Paper:
A marked increase in the demand for financial advice online
Financial search queries have grown consistently since 2005 and were up 19% in 2009 alone.
Advice sites have seen rapid growth during the recession.
The IFA industry has great digital potential
Few IFAs appear against searches for key products and markets let-alone their brand terms on paid search.
IFA related search queries have experienced strong growth while paid search auction intensity has fallen. This creates a cost effective opportunity for new entrants into these markets.
Understanding the evolution of consumer behaviour
The length of finance queries is increasing, as people become more sophisticated with their searches.
These more targeted,‘longtail’ queries are cheaper and increasingly driving more leads.
Understanding product seasonality in your markets
ISAs are a key product in Q2 but the research phase is starting earlier every year.
IFAs are well positioned to drive incremental leads online in the financial protection, mortgages and wealth management sectors
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