webqem blog

The new Fidelity Investment Managers website www.fidelity.com.au is now live after many months of collaboration and hard work between webqem and Fidelity’s teams.

The new Fidelity site is another in webqem’s growing collection of Mura-driven sites.  It provides Fidelity with a flexible and easily adaptable CMS, well placed to target content toward specific audiences and market segments, and attract new user registrations.

Specific goals for webqem’s information architects, design and development teams included:

• Re-alignment of the information architecture and site content to deepen user engagement and deliver Fidelity’s renewed brand strategy
• Copywriting and re-focus of key site content to better convey Fidelity’s voice and character
• redesign and update of the site look and feel in line with Fidelity’s new visual identity
• navigation restructure and  delivery of new tailored content and tools
• selection and integration of a new Content Management system – flexible, scalable and easily adaptable
• integration of dynamic data feeds and rich Flex and Flash-based data visualisation tools

One of Fidelity’s goals for the new website is to deepen its relationship with targeted audience segments and to expand the range of investment tools and knowledge-based insights available for Advisers.  Financial Advisers can also access educational content on the site and be awarded CPD (industry-recognised) points toward their continuing professional development.

Fidelity previously had a number of third party tools and applications hosted in disparate locations and with wide variance between visual styling.  All tools have now been incorporated within the new site and redesigned to reflect Fidelity’s new visual identity.

All roads now lead to the website.  With lots of new reasons to visit.

webqem has been managing AdWords campaigns for a number of clients over the past four years, in financial, retail, health, and software markets.

For the last few months we have been running paid advertising campaigns at Google AdWords, Facebook and LinkedIn, observing striking differences between the three platforms. A major factor would be due to the different levels of targetting possible.

Each platform does allow a measure of targetting, as follows:

AdWords campaigns can be targeted:

• geographically (eg 20km radius around Sydney),
• by language
• by network (eg Google search, search partners, or display network partners)
• by device (eg desktops, phones with browsers, mobile carrier or operating system)
• by keyword
• by placement (for the display network)
• by demographic/gender (if available for display network)

Facebook campaigns can be targeted:

• geographically (eg 10 miles around specific cities)
• by age, gender, relationship status, language, education level, workplace, birthday
• by interest.

LinkedIn campaigns can be targeted by three of geography,company size, job function, industry, seniority, gender and age. Note that interests cannot be specified with LinkedIn.

Each platform allows bidding by CPC or CPM, and we tested both for each platform.
We compared the results of advertising a new online retail site providing hire services across the three platforms.

LinkedIn’s lack of targetting by interest or keyword left it lagging in third place, with the lowest click through rate, and by far the highest cost per click. LinkedIn’s suggested price for the demographic we targeted was over $4/click. LinkedIn visitors typically stayed on site for less than 30 seconds, and converted poorly.

Facebook provided the lowest cost-per-click – around 2/3 the cost of AdWords visitors. Facebook visitors tended to stay on site for around a minute, but only 10% came back for a return visit. They also converted very poorly. CPC advertising was clearly better than CPM advertising on Facebook for our client, with a much higher effective click through rate.

AdWords was a clear winner, with excellent click-through-rates, high pages per visit, low bounce rate, and solid conversion rate. The cost-per-click was acceptable, with the highly targeted campaign having excellent quality scores and numerous keywords with double-figure click through rates.

It does have to be said that organic traffic also performed outstandingly, with a high time on site, and double the conversion rate of the paid traffic. This was true for both Google and Yahoo, although Google provided 30 times the amount of traffic as Yahoo.

Google Adword’s ability to target an audience by keyword at a time when they are actively searching for infomation made it the best performer by a long way, for return on investment.

However as a branding platform for a new site, Facebook did provide a cost-effective method for a large number of impressions.

Here are illustrative figures from Google Analytics:

The Adobe eSeminars are a great way to learn from the masters through live presentations. Our very own industry expert Larry Adler will show you how to make dramatic improvements to your business with Adobe Connect Professional.

You’ll discover how to:

You’ll also get all the tips and best practices for effective online marketing campaigns, covering communication tasks such as live meetings, on-demand presentations, e-learning and rapid content creation.

After months of hard work and much collaboration between YHA and the team at webqem, we’re very happy to announce that the redesigned YHA site is now live!  The YHA site redesign was a large project, considering the site has over 2,500 pages. We worked extensively with YHA to better align the website look and feel to YHA’s brand, and to provide better visual weighting to all site elements, to improve user interaction and navigation.

There were also a number of technical objectives in the YHA site redesign:

• Utilise CSS layouts as much as possible throughout the site

• Implement the Mura Open Source CMS, to give YHA greater flexibility and control over content editing

• Increase page speed across the site, by utilising site speed optimisation best practice (CSS Sprites,

separate image domains, compression, content caching)

• Utilise latest HTML 5 techniques including dynamic font rendering

• Widen site pages from 800 pixels to 1024 pixels

The end result is a faster, technically and visually cleaner site that YHA have much greater flexibility in managing going forward.

Adobe has released Presenter 7.0.6, why should you upgrade? The “The Update will install Adobe Presenter 7.0.6 patch on top of Adobe Presenter 7.0.5. It provides fixes for connect issues and also the limited support for Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.”To help you out, Philip Roy from Massey University has created a tutorial. When you’re done upgrading have a look around the Massey eLearning site, it is full of useful tips and tricks around using Adobe Connect.

Adobe has released Presenter 7.0.6, why should you upgrade? The “The Adobe Presenter 7.0.6 Update will install Adobe Presenter 7.0.6 patch on top of Adobe Presenter 7.0.5. It provides fixes for connect issues and also the limited support for Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.” To help you out, Philip Roy from Massey University has created a tutorial. When you’re done upgrading have a look around the Massey eLearning site, it is full of useful tips and tricks around using Adobe Connect.

E-Commerce is influencing the direction of companies more than ever. Forrester Research Inc, have just released an interesting report on Online Retailing in Australia 2010: Technology Investment.

The report supports the notion that E-Commerce is becoming a strong influencer in the direction of companies, with 69% of merchants intend to increase their investment in technology in the year ahead. Further more from these results, 53% nominated the base e-commerce platform as their technology investment priority for the coming year.

Is it time for you to look into E-Commerce for your business? Contact us today to explore the many solutions we offer.

Creative nerds of the internet have been abuzz for the last few days after the release of The Wilderness Downtown. It’s a half video clip, half HTML5 experiment for Arcade Fire’s song, We Used To Wait (link to bad YouTube bootleg)

It’s gotten an interesting response. Mostly, people that have bought into the hype of HTML5 love it and tout it as another reason why Flash is dying. However, others aren’t as impressed.

I for one, think it’s pretty great, but I don’t think it has anything to do with HTML5 or the lack of flash

It’s just the right amount of “interactive”
Halfway through the piece it asks you to write a letter to your younger self, and the interface is fun and playful and most importantly totally intuitive. This small amount of emotion and playful engagement keeps you hooked and helps you remember the experience

The use of multiple windows
This is an old trick, but still a great one. Since early JavaScript we’ve been able to do this, but the way it’s used here is pitch perfect. This is mostly because the overall experience is passive and you’re just watching. There’s a good reason why we can’t use this in ads, but I think its underused enough that its still memorable for most people when they see it in this kind of movie watching context.

The art direction is great
Not “change the world” great, or even D&AD award winning great, but defiantly “highlighted in a good portfolio” great. The grading on the video combines well with the sketchy style of the illustration. The small amount of 3d is tastefully handled if a little low resolution. Even the slight treatment to the Google maps and street-view images is great.

It makes me think of home
I ran it using my actual childhood home address, and the gimmick totally worked on my. I became that runner. I imagined myself going for a run near my old home and flashing back to my childhood. This may not be as effective for you as it was for me, and I suspect mileage may vary based on how long you lived in one home or how good the Google coverage is in that area.

The song is great
As with all music video clips, the star is the song and this is a damn great song. In fact, I love the album. You should go get it. Go on. I’ll wait.

It’s effective
I’ve been listening to the album all day, and recommending it to people. I even wrote a blog post about it.

Yes, a lot of this could have been done with flash, possibly even better. But as a creative its not the technology that impresses me, it’s the idea. Something we need to remind ourselves of continuously as the HTML5/Flash war continues.