There was an interesting report released by AIB Europe in late June where it showed the meteoric rise of digital spending across Europe in 2016. The topline was that digital spending in Europe grew by 12% in 2016 compared to 2015m with the market now worth €41.9 billion per annum. The big mover was “mobile display” which grew by 53% in the year and it accounts for 33% of the ‘display’ market.

Across Europe the market loos in good shape except for spend on print and OOH.

Looking towards home, the in the Republic of Ireland we spent €444 million on digital in 2016 up from €338 million in 2015. This is a 32% growth year on year making us the third fastest growing country in Europe in terms of digital spending.

Here’s a breakdown of the spend per category in Ireland according to the IAB. Within those figures there will be duplication i.e. some of the number for mobile will be contained in display and paid search.

	2016	2015	Ch
Display	196	135	45%
Classified	29	27	7%
Paid Search	196	175	12%
Mobile	100	51	96%
Video	47	24	96%

An interesting portion of the research was the top twenty sites in Ireland. This was a snapshot by comscore in December 2016. One point is that the table differs markedly from the table in 2015. The reach is much lower across the table than the previous year and it may simply be a change of methodology.

Anyway looking at the table we see that Google, Microsoft and Facebook are streets ahead of other sites. Interestingly, it puts the Irish Times site ahead of the Independent’s by some 32,000 per month. RTE is behind both at 477,000 and the Daily Mail pulls in 338,000.

To p   2 0   s i t e s     i n   I re l a n d
Media/Measures	Visitors (000)	% Reach
Total Internet	2,909	100.0
Google Sites	2,448	84.2
Microsoft Sites	1,747	60.1
Facebook	1,222	42.0
Yahoo Sites	882	30.3
Amazon Sites	865	29.7
Distilled SCH	832	28.6
Irish Times Group	546	18.8
Independent News & Media	514	17.7
Wikimedia Foundation Sites	498	17.1
RTE.IE	477	16.4
Linkedin	475	16.3
eBay	465	16.0
BBC Sites	460	15.8
Apple Inc.	451	15.5
BitTorrent Network	438	15.1
Dropbox Sites	438	15.1
Spotify	343	11.8
TripAdvisor Inc.	339	11.7
Mail Online / Daily Mail	338	11.6
Valve Corporation	320	11.0

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Interesting numbers from the ABC, but this time it’s their ‘e’ numbers. Ever since The Sun went behind the paywall, with moderate success, we’ve kept an eye on web traffic for The Mirror to see how it fairs without that competition.

They’ve had a decent month breaking through the 2m mark, but still a good bit to go catching up with the Guardian and The Mail. But there was some buried information in the ABC release. For the first time it published the numbers for they Mirror’s ‘tablet edition’ – a replica of its print edition, but it's not an app.

A total of 34,000 people subscribed to its free Monday to Friday version and 5,000 forked out £3.99 for the Weekend edition. Small numbers given that the daily Mirror sells 965,000 ever day (865,000 M-F and 1,154,000 Sat) and 935,000 every Sunday.

But it revealed that 960 individuals have a subscription to the M-F edition for the Irish Mirror which is 0.2% conversion to the Irish Print edition (the UK edition ratio is 4%). And 113 individuals paid the £3.99 for the weekend edition!

Just to take a quick look at the other numbers the ABC published. The mail online is by far the winner with a near 40% increase year on year and a daily reach of over 9m people. It’s only a matter of time when they tailor a solution to monetise that traffic. 

Web	Daily	Monthly
Mail Online	9,810,129	161,320,058
theguardian.com	4,595,213	85,259,691
Telegraph.co.uk	2,951,609	60,977,459
Mirror Group Digital	2,023,770	42,880,543
Independent.co.uk	1,355,770	29,894,151
Metro.co.uk	835,980	19,549,963
Standard.co.uk	197,930	4,550,480

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It slipped into the ABC email, hoping to remain unnoticed perhaps. But along with the monthly ABC’s was the website audit for independent.ie for August 2013.

Unfortunately this audit is not directly comparable to their previous audit as the sites under scrutiny are different. This audit covers independent.ie only whereas the previous one for March 2012 covers all of it products (grabone.ie, findajob.ie, globrix.ie etc).

The results are below and show that, on average, just short of a quarter of a million people visit the website every day and 4m people visit the site every month. Using the daily average we can say that when someone visits they read roughly six pages per visit.

While data like this is welcome, and given that there was an 18 month gap between audits we could say very welcome, it still falls short of informative. You only have to look across the water to see what information news organisations there provide in their certificates to focus on how drab the information provided by independent.ie actually is.

All the rhetoric emanating from Talbot Street regarding the ‘digital future’ seems to be lost in this certificate. I can look at the Daily Telegraph’s eABC Cert and tell at a glance that 25.5% of their daily uniques are through a mobile device, a figure that’s lacking in the independent.ie numbers. The days of reporting a simple number of visits are long gone. 
Again, like the audits for the print product – always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

	Daily Average	Monthly Total
Uniques	354,140	5,921,735
Page impressions	2,068,350	64,118,859
Pages Per Visit	5.84	10.83

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I normally keep a tighter rein on the outpourings of comscore, but have been sadly remiss of late and missed two gems from an Irish perspective- it’s a sad reflection that we have to look to a US based organisation to get some solid figures on Ireland.

The research was conducted in September 2013 and shows that eight out of ten Europeans visited News & Information site in September. The Nordic countries lead the way taking the top three spots, followed then by Ireland with 96% of Irish internet users visiting a News & Information site that month. It interesting to note that we are passionate about news consumption - so long as it’s free!  

Another piece of research they conducted concerned the site that we vist in Ireland and how they compare to the same data last year.

As you can see, the most visited site was IN&M (independent.ie, their regional’s, grabone.ie etc) with just shy of a million people visiting one of their sites in September. The Mail online nicked the second berth from the Irish Times this year, but both papers recording a drop in visitors over the year.

The Guardian and Telegraph record 422,000 and 326,000 visitors a month in September 13. Considering that they sell around 3,000 print copies here each every morning, it’s something of a leap in ‘interest’ for those titles.

The Mirror Online gained 66% in web visitors here over the year and it has to be down to their revamped and Irish only website. And just to show the depth of our culture we have the New York Times and Gazeta included in the top ten!

 

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The latest Comreg statistics were released and as usual, throw up an array of data, too much to be all consumed here, but for a quick scan of the numbers I have taken out some of the salient points.

As with the data every quarter some of the numbers can be a little confusing, solely down to the rules pertaining to the data collection. For example we have a mobile penetration of 118% in Ireland (more mobiles than every man, woman and child in the country).
The reasons for that is that they are based on SIMS which are also used in mobile broadband and the way the data treats 'live connections' with a connection still considered live three months after cancellation.

We currently have 1.67m internet connections in Ireland, 31% of these coming from mobile broadband subscriptions.

We had 2.97m 'active' 3G sims in quarter two of 2013 – where active is connectivity in the past 90 days. Comreg estimate that once you take away the mobile broadband numbers out of that figure you get 2.44m smartphones/tablets active or a 53% penetration of the total mobile market.
What's unfortunately missing here is the growing number of people with tablets and Ipads without a sim connection– but still active on the internet through freely provided wifi. So that 'mobile' internet access number could be much higher if the latter body were accounted for.

The data on WIFI gets very blurry unfortunately. The data only takes into account WIFI hotspots provided by the likes of Eircom, Bitbuzz etc. It doesn't take into account the WIFI access provided by your local café or bar.

But some alarming data, but not so surprising data, was that based on SMS and MMS. Viber, Twitter, Instragram all which can be accessed via WIFI have made SMS volumes look very poorly. Peaking at 3.229 billion SMS messages sent in Q4 2011 the last quarter shows we sent (only) 2.44 billion in Q2 2013. It's down 25 on the peak and down 10% on the previous quarter. It equates to an average of 450 SMS's sent per mobile in the last quarter – stating that at an average of five per day seems a little easier to digest.

Mobile voice traffic is beginning to increase again with 2.75 billion minutes consumed in Q2 2013 or 500 mins a quarter per phone (five and a half minutes per day on average).

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Stuck in the ABC data yesterday was the web data for rte.ie and interesting reading it makes. The audit is for October 2012 and we have comparative data for October 2011.

The state broadcasters site is visited on average by 443,000 unique browsers (roughly equivalent to people) every day and 4.8m browsers every month. There are 3.9m pages read every day and 121m every month.

Compared to last year the total number of unique visitors is up 6% but their engagement has slipped marginally as the total number of pages viewed per day is down 2% both per day and per month. The number of pages viewed per visit dropped from 9.5 to 8.8 per day (-7%).

The audit splits the browsers into web and ‘app’* and it clearly shows that the ‘app’ is crucial to attracting visitors. App visitors now account for 30% of total visitors but 50% or all page impressions. App visitors are up 75% year on year and app page impressions are up 29%. Conversely, whilst there 57,000 more app visitors year on year, those using the apps to access the RTE’s website are viewing significantly less pages, 25% less - more visors but less engagement.

This increase in mobile access has lead, I’d suggest, to the marked drop in both requested downloads and AV plays.

According to the ABC, an app is: “A program with a clearly defined purpose typically referred to as an app when installed on a handheld device”. So, you can assume from the explanation that rte.ie being accesses directly, not via their app, is included in the all web browser figure - which is misleading and underestimates mobile access to their site.

Serverd:	Oct-12	%	Oct-11	%	+/-
All Browsers - Daily	443,993	100%	419,054	100%	6%
Page Impressions - Daily	3,910,703	100%	3,978,646	100%	-2%
Pages Per Browser - Daily	8.8		9.5		-7%
Web Browsers  - Daily	310,257	70%	342,538	82%	-9%
Web Page Impressions - Daily	1,947,890	50%	2,457,386	62%	-21%
Pages Per Browser - Daily	6.3		7.0		-10%
App Browsers  - Daily	133,736	30%	76,516	18%	75%
App Page Impressions - Daily	1,962,813	50%	1,521,260	38%	29%
Pages Per Browser - Daily	15		20		-25%
All Browsers - Monthly	4,836,963	100%	4,563,632	100%	6%
Page Impressions - Monthly	121,231,805	100%	123,338,034	100%	-2%
Pages Per Browser - Monthly	25.1		27.0		-7%
Web Browsers  - Monthly	4,344,123	70%	4,344,894	82%	0%
Web Page Impressions  - Monthly	60,384,592	50%	76,178,989	62%	-21%
Pages Per Browser  - Monthly	13.9		17.5		-21%
App Browsers  - Monthly	492,840	30%	218,738	18%	125%
App Page Impressions - Monthly	60,847,213	50%	47,159,045	38%	29%
Pages Per Browser - Monthly	123.5		215.6		-43%
Requested Downloads	22,386		40,168		-44%
AV Plays	177,066		268,752		-34%

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News research from Eircom under the eircom Household Sentiment Survey(eHSS) shows an absolute trend in terms of smartphones and tablets.

They estimate that the penetration of Smartphones is currently at 50% of the population, which is slightly at odds with the figures released by ComReg in March. They estimate that there are roughly about 2.3m smartphones connected in ireland, whereas the eHSS have this figure at 1.6 million. The differences could be the base of the population in the eHSS survey (+15?) and that the Com Reg figure is included in part with some tablets with 3G capability. 

But the real story I the survey I think is that meteoric rise in tablet penetration. They estimate that, by the end of this year, there will be 1.2m people in the Republic with access to a tablet. That’s a phenomenal number given that the iPad (the pre-cursor to all tablets) was only launched Q3 2010.

The survey also points out that the average household has now four separate devices to access the internet. It makes life a little difficult for publishers having to ensure that their product appears attractively on each device.

The graphic below was shown recently at a Press Gazette conference. It shows the various digital routes used to access the Guardian broken into day-parts alongside a tracking of the print product usage throughout the day (that tracking wasn’t explained).

The data for that graphic was taken from late 2012 and I’d say that it has shifted somewhat in favour of tables and the mobile guardian (non app).

In my opinion, tablets are really the last roll of the dice, digitally, for many news organisations. With penetration levels of 1.2m tablets in this country by the end of this year it’s a clear signal that the tablet/smartphone mix is really the only avenue forward. 

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Some of the great theories in economics (and finance) are predicated on caveats that allow the theory to be conclusive, but in reality would not necessarily be the case. Take for example the theory of the Capital Assets Pricing Model (if you haven’t heard of it you can thank yourself lucky). One of the pillars of the original theory is that all “players” in the market share the same information! Yes, indeed.

Some of the information below might point to a potential lifesaver for the newspaper industry, but the one thing to keep in mind is a payment model. I read a newspaper at €1.90 per day is a completely different mindset and loyalty to I read a newspaper, free online.

But with emerging technologies and content delivery in a fashion that people want, not just in the way that content is delivered given the constraints of code and browsers, would people be prepared to pay for content? If so what is their price point? They have a value on a physical product what’s their value for the same digital product?  Its most likely the price they are charged now – free!       

There are three routes a publisher can go down: Hard paywall – subscription needed; Metered paywall – 10 free articles accessed a month before you need a subscription and finally freemium paywall where certain section are free and others are subscription only.        

The original ‘smartphone’ adopted 3G and WIFI and therefore allowed media owners to have their publications viewed on a device other than a PC. In order to do that with a bit of structure they had to adapt their publications to the all pervasive APP. And it looked at one point that the web would still exist but only to be viewed through some sort of APP.

It was only back in April 2010 that the iPad was first introduced and it made the publishing industry sit up and think. The products size with a 9.7” diagonal screen (an A4 page is 11.7” diagonal) and the particularly tactile nature of its use it had many similarities to the relationships to interacting with magazines and/or newspapers.

Some news organisations saw that this could well be the way forward and many stick rigidly to their Gutenberg press principals. So, now that nearly three years have passed, it worth taking a look at how the interweb population has adopted to these products with an array of stats. The statistics come from a variety of sources and there’s not one absolutely definitive statistic on the number of tablets accessing the net.       

The core of these come from ComReg who measure the number of active SIMs in Ireland and the number of these that would be smartphones/tablets (they make no distinction between either). 

ComReg estimate that there are 5.5 SIMs in the Republic with 42% or these being considered smartphones/Tablets (they would be counting tablets with a SIM card). So you could extrapolate out and estimate that the smartphone share would come close to 45% and bring their numbers to 2.5 million units.

Year Q3	Sims	Smart/Tablet	Share
(e)2013	5,644,225	2,535,951	44.9%
2012	5,533,554	2,305,410	41.7%
2011	5,473,757	1,922,485	35.1%

But the tablets are far from SIM dependent and wouldn’t all be caught in the above numbers anyway.

RedC, the research company here, estimate smartphone penetration is 46% (as of Jan 2013) in 2012, so could we reasonably estimate that this will be 48/9% by the end of 2013? In an interview on Sky with Comet CEO in January, he put the growth in sales for his stores over Christmas squarely down to shifting tablets. Furthermore he said that at one point they were selling three tablets a second in store across Britain and Ireland.  The same RedC research put Tablet penetration at 23% here in Ireland in 2013 (and again they are not in the main 3G devices). Tablet pricing is dropping rapidly for non OS products and this will have to drive further growth over 2103.

Google through their Thing Insights has the penetrations of Smartphones and Tables across Europe. They estimate that Smartphone penetration at 43% and tablet at 10%. The field work for that data was Jan/Feb 2012 – so we can expect a rise in tablet ownership since then.

    

In research conducted by ComScore they estimated that two out of every five tablet owners in the US have accessed news on their device and one in ten do so on a daily basis.

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The October RTE web stats dropped in today showing that the broadcaster had a 6% rise in daily traffic over the year although its daily page impressions were down close to two percent- more volume, slightly less engagement. But, on average each person looks at about eight pages per visit.   

Curiously, their streams were down substantially, with the average daily AV plays dropping 34% in the year. You can do all the theorising you like as to that statistic and not knowing enough behind the core stats, I’m not going to attempt even an educated guess.

The really interesting part of the figures come in the split between the web based browser and the app. Now, I think that at this point it’s worth throwing this out: The app is just that – straightforward enough. The web based viewing would be pc and smartphone via the web and likewise any tablet via a browser. Not that it makes much difference, but I’d like to see a split between desk based and phone or tablet.

The App based visits now account for 30% of the total visits, up from 18% last year. But the app user accounts for 50% of the sites page impressions. The “app” visitor views 15 pages per visit compared to six for the desk chained visitor. Even given those differences the app page views are down 26% and they pages per visit are down from nearly 20 per visit. 

Serverd:	Oct-12	%	May-12	%	Oct-11	%	Oct V Oct
Total Browsers	443,993	100%	415,808	100%	419,054	100%	6.00%
Total Page Impressions	3,910,703	100%	3,780,803	100%	3,978,646	100%	-1.70%
Pages Per Browser	8.81		9.09		9.49
AV Plays	177,066		209,193		268,752		-34.10%
Requested Downloads	22,386		22,437		40,168		-44.30%
Total Web Browsers	310,257	70%	304,834	73%	342,538	82%	-9.40%
Total Web Page Impressions	1,947,890	50%	2,031,837	54%	2,457,386	62%	-20.70%
Pages Per Browser	6.28		6.67		7.17
Total App Browsers	133,736	30%	110,974	27%	76,516	18%	74.80%
Total App Page Impressions	1,962,813	50%	1,748,966	46%	1,521,260	38%	29.00%
Pages Per Browser	14.68		15.76		19.88

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Latest data from Comscore shows the state of the Internet in the European region.  It shows that in the European region nearly 400m people went online in June 2012 and spent, on average, just shy of 26 hours online during the month.

In our own case, Ireland had 2.8m people online in June 2012 who spend on average just over 20 hours online.  Really to look at the figures in a more balances way would be to see the percentage penetration of each country (which I might return to).

In terms of ‘engagement’, surfers in the UK spend nearly eighteen hours a month more online than the Irish. In fact the UK spends more time on line than any other European country (by contrast, the Austrians spend little or no time online – only 13 hours per month!). Given that Hitwise suggest that the most popular search term in the UK is ‘Facebook’ you can guess where they spend that time on line.

While the Irish have, over the year, spent slightly less time on line on average the number of visitors online has increased by a fairly substantial 16% the 3^rd highest increase after Italy and Russia. Why there would have been such an increase in net users could be down to a growing increase in mobile devices/tablets. 

Country	Total Unique  (000)	Average Hours	#	Total Unique  (000)	Average Hours	#	Total Unique (000) +/-	#	Hours +/-
Worldwide	1,491,181	24.0	11	1,383,098	23.1	10	7.81%	6	3.90%
Europe	397,762	25.9	7	368,624	26.1	6	7.90%	5	-0.77%
Russian Federation	58,803	23.6	12	48,738	22.9	12	20.65%	2	3.06%
Germany	51,825	24.5	8	50,128	23.9	9	3.39%	11	2.51%
France	43,214	27.7	4	42,374	27.6	4	1.98%	17	0.36%
United Kingdom	37,665	37.9	1	36,867	33.0	2	2.16%	15	14.85%
Italy	28,568	16.6	19	23,341	18.7	19	22.39%	1	-11.23%
Turkey	23,779	26.8	5	22,967	31.1	3	3.54%	10	-13.83%
Spain	21,880	24.4	10	21,518	26.2	5	1.68%	19	-6.87%
Poland	18,579	27.9	3	18,193	25.8	7	2.12%	16	8.14%
Netherlands	12,006	32.6	2	11,968	34.1	1	0.32%	20	-4.40%
Sweden	6,319	21.8	14	6,173	23.0	11	2.37%	13	-5.22%
Belgium	6,223	21.9	13	5,965	20.2	17	4.33%	8	8.42%
Switzerland	4,978	17.5	18	4,676	18.9	18	6.46%	7	-7.41%
Austria	4,868	13.5	20	4,688	14.0	20	3.84%	9	-3.57%
Portugal	4,501	20.2	17	4,169	21.2	14	7.96%	4	-4.72%
Denmark	3,726	21.1	15	3,655	20.7	16	1.94%	18	1.93%
Finland	3,434	24.5	8	3,355	22.7	13	2.35%	14	7.93%
Norway	3,313	26.7	6	3,234	24.8	8	2.44%	12	7.66%
Ireland	2,438	20.4	16	2,094	20.9	15	16.43%	3	-2.39%

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I am waiting (hopefully) for a release of the RTE audited figures for their website which should be released around now; I thought I reflect on some of the recent goings on from their previous website stats.  

Firstly it’s noteworthy that there had been a substantial increase, between October and May in the number of visitors to RTE sites via their unique ‘app’ - up from 18% to 27% of total visitors. But the app visitors seem to have a fairly ferocious appetite for data. They accounted for a quarter of the visitors but for nearly half the total page impressions.

Given the data presented for the daily traffic, those visiting through an app would call, on average, sixteen pages, those not on an app, would call usually seven.

But to further confuse the issue, the app – is strictly that. It’s not a loose moniker for pages viewed on mobile device – it’s strictly pages viewed through the app. If you’re on a mobile device and don’t have the app installed, then you (should be) redirected to “m.rte.ie” whose data falls under the “Total Web Browsers”.

It’s a pity there is not a mobile/non-mobile split.    

Serverd:	Daily May 2012	%	Daily October 2011	%
Total Browsers	415,808	100%	419,054	100%
Total Page Impressions	3,780,803	100%	3,978,646	100%
Pages Per Browser	9		9
Total Web Browsers	304,834	73%	342,538	82%
Total Web Page Impressions	2,031,837	54%	2,457,386	62%
Pages Per Browser	7		7
Total App Browsers	110,974	27%	76,516	18%
Total App Page Impressions	1,748,966	46%	1,521,260	38%
Pages Per Browser	16		20

 

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Beginning on the 25^th of Letshost made a few changes and, according to an email from them “upgraded the firewall as it was not working correctly” – naturally and on reflection, I’d prefer if they had simply left the firewall alone. 

From that date, the servers are now blocking access to Googlebot crawlers (or more specifically their IP addresses). This means that when the bot goes to look at a web page it has stored in its index, the new Letshost firewall configuration throws the bot a complete curve ball (see below) and Google then marks this page as a 404 – or not found. The graph above shows the suddent rise in the 404 errors.

Below shows a selcesion of the IP adresses that they have blocked  (although they may have whitelisted a few of thses now. 

What’s worse is that once the page is returned as a 404, Google can remove  that page from its own index and thus insuring that the page won’t be returned in search results any further.

Constant emails to the support team result in nothing bar an attempt to pacify – but little to correct the situation.

he real point is that if the server is blocking access to these IP addresses on one of my sites, then there is a good chance that it’s blocking access to other sites as well. Its only when the individuals in control of those other sites realise that this is happening can begin to take action.

Anyhow, if they are not aware of this error on the Letshost firewall, I think it’s incumbent on me to educate them..          

Tuesday: I see today that I have 75 soft 404's, however many of these are returning a response to 'fetch as Google'

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In an interesting article yesterday in the Irish Independent, it noted how so many websites have been ‘hamstrung’ by the latest Google algorithm change, affectionately known as ‘penguin’. In this change the search engine specifically targeted websites that ‘gamed’ the engines in the past and got decent results on the back of it. The way they managed to get these inflated rankings was through a range of nefarious methods: Keyword spamming, backdoor pages, link spam – to mention but a few.

The Google Webmaster Forum is now chock-a-block with website owners complaining that their sites have all but disappeared in the engines since the update. Why? Because their sites contravened Google’s quality guidelines and they were penalised for this. Do I shed a tear? No.

If you are going to link spam, literally filling forums, and normally forums that have nothing to do with your industry/business, with links to your site using the exact same key phrase – then there is going to be some payback!

And some news sites mention that it really only hit small businesses: then they are the people that have not being paying attention – or perhaps have let someone take over their ‘SEO’, in this case was simply link spamming!  

You can get all the quality guidelines here or, make life easier for yourself and go through this pdf and assess your own site. It is genuinely no rocked science, its logic.             

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On the subject of spam – here’s an interesting one. You can do plenty with the Google search bar other than your “normal search”. You can use search operators to get a different look at websites.  Here’s one you can do that’s fairly interesting. In the search bar key in the following

Site:mysite.com

But substitute ‘mysite.com’ for your own website. This then shows you web pages that Google has indexed. Now, if you are a keyword rich site (ecomm perhaps) you can go further, using the site operator again search for a keyword  (red widget in this example)

Site:mysite.com  red widget

This will return all the pages the Google feels should be in search results for a search for “red widget” – but we’ve limited it to only your own sites pages.  The page at the top of that results list in the page that Google feels is the most appropriate for that search term.

Sometimes that page is a surprise to some companies as it may not be the “red widget” product page. Knowing the page that Google preferred can make focus a little on the SEO so as to “move” that to another, more desirable, page.        

Yet another interesting operator is “inurl:keyword” – this will throw up any site that has that keyword in the title. Where gets is really interesting is looking for hacked sites – and the nice one to look for are sites with a Pharma Hack. These are sites that have been compromised and are now selling (unbeknownst to their owners) a variety of medical enhancements. I don’t want to use the exact word here but you’ll get the drift      

inurl:little blue pills

Then restrict your search to Ireland and bingo – many of the sites that have been pharma hacked. Naturally, there are sites that are using that phrase “legitimately” as in the Irish Times with a report on the product. But many of the sites are selling the little blue pills through a backdoor on a site.  The link here shows the Irish sites that’s have been hacked or new pages produced in the past year. Just be careful opening these pages. Make sure you have a decent anti virus programming in case some of the scripts get nasty. 

And it’s the great and the good.  From a Travel Agents site, to one of the Enterprise Boards site and a creative agency and so on.  

These sites are going to be seriously downgraded in the current Penguin update. The note here is to check your site in the search engines every once in a while, make sure it’s secure – latest patches, secure directory permissions and the such.    

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Yet another interesting summary on the state of the Net for Comscore and the penetration of the internet across various different countries in Europe.

It’s not really a precise science to look at the numbers in isolation, as the relative populations have to be taken into account. Looking just at visitors The Netherlands has the highest internet penetration of any of the countries under scrutiny at 72%. Ireland lies #12 with a 535 penetration. If we were to allow to merge this figure with another from Social Bakers it renders an interesting statistic. The latter suggest that there are 2.089m Facebook users in Ireland – therefore it could be argued that 88% or Irish internet users are registered with Facebook.

The UK spend 38.2 hours a month in the ‘net Austria the least at 15.1 hour. The UK spending two and a half times more time online that Austria. The Irish are tending towards the bottom at 21.5 hours. Our engagement is proportionally lower than other European countries

	Visitors (000) (%)		Rank	Average Hours per Visitor		Average Pages per Visitor
World-Wide	1,438,877			24.4	13	2,353	14
Europe	379,402			27.8	6	2,982	5
Russian Federation	52,486	37%	17	24.5	12	2,730	8
Germany	50,856	62%	8	25.8	11	2,977	6
France	42,939	66%	5	28.6	5	2,903	7
United Kingdom	37,477	60%	9	38.2	1	3,450	2
Italy	24,225	40%	16	18.8	19	2,027	18
Turkey	23,302	32%	18	32.2	3	3,845	1
Spain	21,612	47%	14	27.4	7	2,401	13
Poland	18,194	48%	13	27.4	7	3,208	4
Netherlands	11,992	72%	1	34.3	2	3,398	3
Sweden	6,231	66%	4	25.9	10	2,697	9
Belgium	6,068	55%	11	20.8	17	2,286	15
Switzerland	4,790	63%	7	19	18	2,027	18
Austria	4,745	56%	10	15.1	20	1,648	20
Portugal	4,286	40%	15	21.2	16	2,186	16
Denmark	3,682	66%	3	23.3	14	2,411	12
Finland	3,387	63%	6	26	9	2,591	11
Norway	3,272	67%	2	28.9	4	2,627	10
Ireland	2,355	53%	12	21.3	15	2,071	17

There was also a very interesting fact from a media perspective. Although Comscore reckons that the Mail online gets 20m unique visitors in November 2011, the eABC suggest otherwise. It may be down simply to a different interpretation of statistics or a definition of the numbers. The eABC say that the Mail online get 80m unique browsers per month. A huge difference that isn’t easily explained suffice to say that one is measuring unique visitors and the other unique browsers.

Anyway, the Mail online is still the biggest news property on the Net followed by the Guardian. But, the interesting thing is that over 13% of all the visits to the Mail online are preceded by a visit to Facebook (I took care to couch that phrase in the same way that comscore did). Whether it’s the traffic directly from the Mail’s Facebook page (which I doubt as they place stories there sparingly) or, more likely, having Facebook users linking to their pages and thus driving traffic. The Turkish website Milliyet.co..tr was even more reliant on Face book deriving nearly one in five visitors to its site form Facebook.

Love it or Loath it, the online media have to recognise the power of Facebook when it comes to driving traffic to their sites.

Top 5 Media	Audience	% Facebook
Mail Online	20,068	13.10%
Guardian.co.uk	15,705	12.80%
Hurriyet.com.tr	10,429	10.00%
Bild.de	9,663	14.80%
Milliyet.com.tr	9,628	18.90%

 

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There have been some very interesting studies conducted recently into the world of the ‘Daily Deal’ and coupon redemption. Perhaps one of the more interesting of these was conducted by Rice University in September of last year and again in June of this year.

But.... if you've been tempted, have a look at something we cooked up, a daily deal calcutator 

Their research findings are a fantastic guide to any business tempted by the lure of a daily deal. Whilst many of the business running these deals are very satisfied with the outcome, many are not. There are some parts of this fairly intricate equation that businesses can influence and some are completely out of their control.

There are so many elements involved in these Daily Deal promotions that it’s really very difficult to isolate and pinpoint one or two key factors. In their September research, Rice University maintained that the two key drivers to success or failure of a Daily Deal were Employee Satisfaction and the coupons effectiveness in attracting new customers.

Employee Satisfaction is a massively important element. These promotions will (should) increase the workload of your staff or they may face extra hours. If there little in the way of recompense for the extra work, then it’s going to be an uphill struggle to succeed.

Another element that makes these promotions work is the number of new customers that return to an establishment and spend at full rates and your staff have a vital role in securing repeat customers.

However Daily Deal customers, the survey concluded, don’t tip or tip very poorly. They spend as close to the voucher value and leave. If you're in a business where your staff work off gratuities, then these daily deals have the potential to create a few HR and satisfaction problems.

A business has some influence on the number of vouchers sold. The number of vouchers sold was seen as not having a huge impact on whether the promotion made/lost money. However, the non-financial element is that your business gets exposure to new customers that it wouldn't normally.

Factors that increase the number of coupons sold are the redemption period and the upper limit of the number of vouchers. In terms of duration, the longer the further out the expiry date the better. It gives you the opportunity to sell more and its makes the promotion a lot more flexible. Placing an upper limit on the number of coupons available is also a factor on the numbers of vouchers sold. Placing a limit can create a bit if exclusivity and an urgency to buy. And naturally the face value and the discount will have an influence.

In their most recent survey (and it should be remembered that these were American businesses) they estimated that only 56% of the businesses using daily deals actually made money on these promotions. Why they did/didn't make money is down to a litany of different factors and it’s something we’ll be returning to in a few days.

Encouragingly 80% of the deal users were new customers which is exactly what a business is trying to attract. New customers mean you’re not cannibalising your existing customer base in the promotion and the key here is to get as many of these new customers back to spend at full price.

Amazingly in the survey around 20% of customers didn't redeem their voucher, even after paying for them in advance. What happens to that revenue is of particular importance to an SME and it can be the difference between profit and loss of the venture.

Firstly, the customer has no way back, their money is gone. So who palms the money? Some daily deal sites are sometimes a little loathe to part with this unredeemed voucher revenue so make sure, before you sign up to a deal site, that you know what’s going to happen that revenue. Normally the split should be same as the voucher split.

Non-Redemption rates in the order of 15% to 20% across the daily Deal sites has spurred on a massive secondary market in selling vouchers that are not going to be used. In the past customers who realised, for whatever reason, that they would not be able to take up the offer they have bought were simply burned. But now, sites like CoupRecoup allow these customers to ‘sell’ the vouchers that they are unable to use.

This new market has the potential to blow a big hole in the Daily Deal business model as the revenue for the unredeemed coupons can be the difference between success and failure of a promotion. Take that revenue away and the promotion could be sunk.

Deals of a high value and a low discount, in the region of 25% of the face value, are the deals that will be the most profitable. But the low discount flies in the face of the normal Daily Deal experience and will be resisted by the daily deal sites.

The survey found that there was little between the sites in terms of loyalty from businesses. If they used site X one day they have no problem considering using a different one another time. Some business types in the survey were very slow to try a second promotion. 43% of restaurants were willing to try again. Again a huge influence in this category could be the human element.

With only a certain amount of money around the costs of the Daily Deals has to come form somewhere. In the survey the businesss the participated said that they cut Yellow Pages spending by 27%, newspaper and magazine by 21% and direct mail by 17%.

If you're thinking of having a look at the Daily Deal you shoud keep a few things in mind:

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An amalgam of statistics here combining data from ComScore and Akamai, the internet network people.

Looking at just some of the data that leaps out: Irelands very low average hours per visitor in comparison to its near neighbours. Irelands stands 5# from the bottom and is 63% less than to of the list The Netherlands in first place. The good folk in the Netherlands have, according to comScore, a high propensity to be on Linkedin and Twitter. The latter is most likely pulling up the time spent on line.

Likewise we don’t exactly eat through the pages when online, as a consequence of our limited time online. Its best expressed on a levelling minute per page across the countries where we are an even more disappointing second from the bottom, Norway being last. But maybe it’s the lack of speed which leads to frustration, poor page turns and overall dissatisfaction.Ireland ranks very badly for the number of connections above 5Mbps and very strongly on the number still connecting at below 256k. I can’t think of life at 256k.

Location	Total Unique Visitors (000)	Average Hours per Visitor	Average Pages per Visitor	Minute per Page	Unique IP Address	Avg. Connect Speed (Mbps)	% Above 5 Mbps	% Below 256 Kbps
Austria	4,676	14.1	1,485	1.8	2,707,456	4.1	21%	0.40%
Belgium	5,944	20.5	2,085	1.7	3,634,481	5.5	47%	0.30%
Denmark	3,649	21.7	2,256	1.7	2,402,586	5.3	40%	0.50%
Finland	3,349	26.0	2,396	1.5	2,566,196	4.8	30%	0.60%
France	42,335	27.8	2,682	1.6	23,114,330	3.5	12%	0.40%
Germany	49,993	24.1	2,638	1.8	33,838,723	4.4	23%	0.70%
Ireland	2,079	21.5	1,953	1.5	1,497,652	4.9	23%	2.40%
Italy	23,210	18.3	1,762	1.6	12,292,015	3.4	10%	1.10%
Netherlands	11,963	35.2	3,467	1.6	8,145,603	7.0	56%	0.60%
Norway	3,227	26.5	2,156	1.4	2,830,190	5.2	32%	0.80%
Portugal	4,146	21.5	2,034	1.6	2,583,045	4.8	34%	0.30%
Spain	21,450	26.8	2,449	1.5	12,453,087	3.0	8%	0.80%
Sweden	6,161	25.0	2,423	1.6	5,847,005	5.1	29%	1.30%
Switzerland	4,666	19.6	1,923	1.6	2,841,311	5.6	33%	0.60%
UK	36,660	33.9	3,079	1.5	22,186,550	4.3	22%	0.70%

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In an effort to try and bring some reality as opposed to hype Daily Deals, we've put together an interactive spreadsheet sheet to try and help you get to the bottom of the numbers.

There are so many variables it can really be a bit of a nightmare. But hopefully below will at least give you an indication of how a potential promotion might do.

There are a few items that you can fill in with certain levels of confidence and others that are very much picked out of the ether. One those, it’s best to try and err on the side of caution.

1. Face Value: is as it says; the normal selling price of the goods or services you are going to offer.
2. Voucher value is the promotional price. The discount to the right is worked out automatically.
3. The number of vouchers you expect to sell (be realistic!)
4. Vouchers redeemed: the percentage of all those sold (3) you expect to be redeemed.
5. What portion of the coupons will be new business.
6. How much (one average) does a regular customer spend? If you are a food outlet, I’d suggest you calculate that average without alcohol
7. What is the full cost, to you, of the product/service you are selling?
8. The percent of sales above the voucher, people buying more than the offer.
9. What percentage amount above the coupon will that be?
10. Of the news customers (in 5), what portion will return?
11. The Daily deal site – they will clip the ticket – but for how much?
12. It’s a catch all: would you have to put on extra staff to deal with the coupon or back it up with marketing/advertising. Any extra cost you have to incur because of the coupon promotion has to be added in here.

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In a resent look at the car hire market, in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), some very interesting points were brought to light. Anything in the motor business, whether it’s dealing with the new sales, second hand sales or rental is hugely competitive. The foreign car rental business is massively competitive and it’s on this we are going to concentrate.

Just as a small aside, and one that as a country we have to be able to capitalise on: Hitwise recently released their Travel Quarterly Review – an overview from a search perspective of the travel and related markets. This quarter they analysed the UK searches for ‘flight destinations’. By Flight destinations searches it means search phrases that have a fight slant to them and a specific city destination. So, this could be expressions like “cheap flights Dublin” or “Dublin Flights” etc.

“Flights/Dublin” ranked 4^th (up for 11^th in the same period last year) of all the city destinations searches from the UK. It’s not a bad showing for the Capital being forth on that list of potential destinations.

Anyway, once all the bookings have been made there is always the issue of Car Hire. Sticking, for the moment, with the Hitwise research their fastest moving expression in the first quarter of 2011 was “car hire Spain”.

“Hire” being the appropriate term here in this neck of the woods. If you are optimising for the visitors from the USA then that has to be amended to “rental”. Really the numbers are split equally so this means you have to optimise for both.

Of the top ten clicked sites for that and related expressions (both organic and paid) of ‘Spain car hire’- the majority of them receive 70% or more of their traffic from paid search. If we take that further it suggests that the ratio, for Spain car hire terms, is about 1 to 2 organic to paid.

Sticking with the ‘Car Hire Spain’ we had a look to see how well covered the number one site was in the UK in terms of that expression. I wouldn’t call it empirical research by any stretch of the imagination but it does show where they may have just edged ahead. These are only on page factors and don’t take into account any factors such as external links and page rank.

Item:	#1	#2
In URL	P	O
Body Text	P	P
Page Title	P	P
Links	P	P
Image Alt	P	O
Description	P	P
Headings	P	P

Finally to our own parish, and a fairly perplexing, if not worrying item.

Site	Car Hire in Spain	Car Hire Spain	Hire a car Spain
www.carspain.com	1	3	1
www.carrentals.co.uk	2	8	23
www.arguscarhire.com	4	-	27
www.carjet.com	5	5	5
www.economycarhire.com	6	7	-
www.argusrentals.com	7	1	2
www.rentspain.com	8	6	3
www.rhinocarhire.com	9	-	13
www.carhire.co.uk	10	-	-
www.autoeurope.ie	-	4	6
www.all-in-car-hire.com	-	9	22
www.amigoautos.com	-	10	-
www.easycar.com			10

The introduction of the fairly innocuous word ‘in’ throws the whole search standings into disarray. Without the ‘in’ our own Argos Rentals is displaced to #7 for the expression. With the ‘in’ it moves to the top slot!.

A site search on Argus Rentals using a strict search on “car hire in Spain” returns only three pages. One page has the expression in its title – so that’s fair game. The other two pages don’t have the expression in their pages whatsoever! So why, one muses, are they indexed under that expression?

Just like the way Disney ranked number one for ‘exit’, it’s most likely the same thing. The external links pointing to the site are most likely driving that particular expression.

 

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Taco Bell, the Mexican/American fast food chain, recently got itself into a spot of PR bother. A customer took offence to the amount of beef contained in her beloved Taco and so offended was she that she took a class action suit against Taco Bell - as you do.

The law hired firm came out blazing and claimed that the mixture was only a paltry 35% beef, the rest was "other ingredients".

The people at Taco Bell (I’m at pains not to use the initials of “TB” as I think they have suffered enough in the publicity department) were not impressed and responded that it was in fact 85% beef. Jumping to the end of that particular story, the Law Firm are cowering under a bed somewhere as they as much admitted the 85% was incorrect and they got it wrong. Taco is considering counter suing. Taco defended their patch rigorously and took out full page ads asking (aka veiled threats) the law firm to publicly apologise.

But during the height of “beefgate” they decided to turn to social media and, more specifically, their loyal Facebook customers. They assumed ‘Loyal’ because 5.5m of these would be worriers had ‘liked’ Taco Bell on their individual pages. It was only natural to assume that these people would now lay down their lives and come to their aid in Taco's hour of distress.

In order to curry favour with these folk, Taco offered them coupons for a free ‘Crunchy Taco’. As the retail price of each offer was $0.99 there was some $6m potential downside for Taco, if it all went to plan.

Amazingly, only 3% of the 5.5m fans liked the company (or offer) that much to redeem the coupon. Was there some misguided thinking that their Facebook fans would do their bidding and take up the offer? A "like" on Facebook, it transpires in this case and possibly many others, can be as sincere as a kiss from a hooker, and a $0.99C kiss at very best.

Or perhaps the idea of printing out a coupon and heading over to Taco Bell to redeem $0.99c worth of Beef really seemed like too much trouble. Granted 165,000 people thought it was a good idea. Or perhaps a mix of the above, Taco misjudged the loyalty of fans and the offer wasn't enough.

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Some very interesting Facebook statistics are available at Social Bakers. So we put a few of these together here, just to give you an idea of what’s happening on Facebook as we write.

Firstly we will look at Facebook penetration worldwide. There’s really two ways to look at this; absolute numbers or penetration as a % of the population.

In numbers, the United States is, naturally, way ahead of the rest of the field with over 150 million Facebook users or the equivalent to half of its population. Ireland’s figure is always going to be low in comparison and we have 1.9m Facebook users, or just shy of half the population.

When looking at the numbers, it’s worth remembering that Facebook was originally only in the English language. It wasn’t until early 2008 that it began to translate in to French, Spanish and German. So some countries may only be beginning to adopt the Facebook format as it becomes localised in their language.

#	Country	Users	Growth	Pen.
1	United States	150 495 520	-1.11%	48.51%
2	Indonesia	38 517 540	9.50%	15.85%
3	United Kingdom	29 773 160	2.88%	47.75%
4	Turkey	29 283 440	10.85%	37.64%
5	India	28 580 560	29.57%	2.44%
6	Mexico	26 417 680	20.67%	23.49%
7	Philippines	25 023 920	10.47%	25.05%
8	France	22 600 860	7.43%	34.89%
9	Brazil	20 612 240	53.72%	10.25%
10	Italy	19 710 920	6.90%	33.93%
57	Ireland	1 995 200	7.37%	43.16%

The numbers in terms of penetration are, if nothing, slightly funny. The principality of Monaco having the highest penetration in the world! It’s easy for the smaller states to get a high penetration rate and after Monaco and the Falkland Islands the rates drop off rabidly. Ireland lies a decent 28^th in terms of penetration showing that we ‘box above our weight’ in relative to our population size.

China lies 212^th with a penetration of a mere 0.04%. But China has its own social networking sites and the biggest, Renren.com, has about 70m users alone.

One figure that did jump out was that of the Vatican State which has only 20 users. And before you muse, no, the boss doesn’t have his own Facebook page, but he does have his own social networking site pope2you.net (even has its own iPhone App).

#	Country	Users	Growth	Pen.
1	Monaco	29 020	1.68%	94.88%
2	Falkland Islands	1 940	1.04%	76.20%
3	Iceland	206 520	0.03%	66.85%
4	Gibraltar	17 420	0.46%	60.32%
5	Faroe Islands	29 100	0.48%	59.32%
6	Brunei	211 760	0.77%	53.61%
7	Singapore	2 475 720	0.98%	52.66%
8	Norway	2 458 920	0.07%	52.58%
9	Hong Kong	3 705 200	1.37%	52.26%
10	Chile	8 477 580	0.29%	50.62%
28	Ireland	1 995 200	0.04%	43.16%

Down to the top brands in Ireland as determined by the numbers of fans each brand page has. The winner, by a long shot, was Baileys and one would assume that it’s the brands international presence that gets it over the million. In second place was Blackberry followed by the nation’s staple diet, Guinness. But that brand had split itself into Guinness and Guinness Ireland.

The latter page makes for interesting reading – as fans seem to have a real affinity with the brand and post up some great comments.

As for the (other) Guinness page… well if you wall still has a large graphic trying to ‘get you in the mood for St Patricks Day, well I think is time to have a chat with the person/people looking after your social media strategy. I appreciate it a page dedicated to St Patricks Day, but it’s the page that visitors land on and that should be looked at.

#	Name	Fans	Growth
1	Baileys	1 154 717	11.09%
2	BlackBerry UK & Ireland	283 197	23.49%
3	Guinness Ireland	263 368	18.26%
4	Jameson Irish Whiskey	235 437	27.02%
5	Guinness	216 822	20.56%
6	Mr. Tayto	138 061	29.28%
7	Ben & Jerry's Ireland	88 122	447.00%
8	Smirnoff Ireland	77 660	23.69%
9	Centra Ireland	74 032	26.55%
10	A|wear	72 935	19.78%

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In order to see exactly how your pages are seen by search engines you can use an online ‘search engine simulator’. There are plenty of them about but there may be some variations in the results. Using this facility will show you what words and phrases are going to be indexed in that page.

It’s an excellent way to look at your pages. Its takes away the distraction of graphics or flash and strips the site down to its most basic. And that’s the way the site will be seen by and indexed by search spiders.

A word of caution, some sites look absolutely fantastic to the human eye, readable and navigable. Take for example the retail site of Brown Thomas. A lot of care and attention has been taken with this site and it’s very easy to negotiate. However the home page is all flash and therefore cannot be read easily by a search engine.

You can see the results of what a spider sees in that page below – very little. More importantly the rest of the site is a blend of Flash and HTML and would be of some use to a spider. But the home page has no spider navigable links to the rest of the site and therefore it’s like a bullet in the head of a spider entering that page.

Its not exactly a big meal for a spider!   

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Here's a interesting take on the recent Google Panda update – specifically on Google.com. Below is the before and after of an Irish website whichwas competing for a fairly competitive key phrase. Before the update we had tracked it in and around 10^th# and it had been relatively stable over that months up to that give or take a position or two. The landing page for that keyphrase on that particular site was, well, a bit light and really didn't live up to the promise.

After the "update" they currently reside in 75^th#. That has to hurt.

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Some interesting stats and facts have come to light this month – in this instance concerning the rise and rise of m-commerce.

In a report conducted by Tamar (UK Based Research) suggest that 19% of consumers will do their festive shopping via a mobile handset in 2010. I’d hazard a guess that there are also a huge number of individuals that will conduct their primary research on a mobile but might leave the “last mile” to be concluded elsewhere for a variety of reasons (some set out below).

Tesco in the UK expect 10% of their sales will come through a mobile. Understandable as Tesco customers would already have their details registered and it’s simply a matter of signing in and doing the weekly shopping when you’re getting the evening tube to Tooting Broadway. And that seems to be key – the convenience and safety of having your details already gathered and stored on a retailers site.

The survey suggested that many more would go the m-commerce route if their fears over security were allayed. There is also the logistical issue, and again, the security aspect of using a credit card in a public place. Then there’s the physical and mental anguish of attempting to key in a 12 digit credit card number (and all the other relevant paraphernalia that goes with it) on, say, public transport. If you don’t have the digits and dexterity of a seamstress, then the last mile is best conducted elsewhere.

In the UK 54% of the top 20 retail sites had either a mobile app or a dedicated mobile web portal. But it still leaves nearly half that have neither. In those that had not yet adopted the m-way were some glairing exceptions that have no mobile offering– Play.com, Currys, HMV, Comet and Carphone Warehouse, to name a few. One would have thought that some of those would have been beneficiaries of the m-commerce solution.

There’s no doubt that the mobile devices will begin to dominate the web and that companies will have to gear up to transacting via mobile.

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An interesting digging match is ongoing in London over the use of trademarks and Google adwords. The case was taken by Interflora against M&S over their used of the trademark name “Interflora” as a keyword in their adwords campaign (CPC of the keyword is €0.63 here).

The case even dragged Google in with Interflora looking to hit them in the suit as well. However the ruling stated that Google simply facilitated third parties and did not mean that Google itself was using the mark.

The court ruled that a third party could be liable

'in the case where the ad does not enable the average internet user, or enables that user only with difficulty, to ascertain whether the goods and services referred to therein originate from the proprietor of the trademark or an undertaking economically connected with it or, on the contrary, originate from a third party'

So basically, if the ad misleads the viewer to thinking that they are in fact getting good for the trademark owner, when they are not, then it could be an infringement.

At this point the court hasn’t ruled as to whether M&S actually infringed the Interflora mark in this case, so the case will continue to rumble on.

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The Sunday Business Post ran adverts for Sherry FitzGerald last Sunday where the adverts carried QR codes. The codes, once read in an appropriate reader on a Smartphone, will link the advert to the sherry FitzGerald website. And fair enough, it’s a bit of innovation in an arena that slow to innovate.

A follow-up article this week gave the impression that this was somewhat ‘cutting edge’. Whilst Sherry may have been the first to use the QR code in an advert, its far from cutting edge.

Similarly, there was a story in the Irish Times in April extolling the virtues of the technology and somewhat beaming at the fact that their joint venture paper, The Metro Herald, will begin to experiment with the technology.

Considering that The Sun were using the technology in November 2007, it really cant be considered as innovative.

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EuroStat, the research body for Europe, published some interesting comparative figures in late September, which I finally get to comment on (not that the boffins in the EU are holding their breaths waiting for my comments!).

The survey was conducted in the EU 27 countries and a further four countries to cover a ‘euro zone’. The questions are fairly basic but at least we are able to draw a competitive between ourselves and the rest of this Eurozone.

Looking at the stats it has to be remembered that there are massive regional differences. Some countries adopted to the Internet much quicker (some due to geographic factors) and some of the countries – the ‘accession’ countries - are really just getting to grips with all the new technologies. As soon as I began to look at the recent statistics, I began to glaze over.

Not because I found them dull and uninteresting but, due to the structure for the European Union, the data becomes particularly repetitive. The same group of countries features on the top of each list and, likewise, the same group feature at the bottom of the list. So, the easiest and most efficient way to look at this was to distil the information into the table below which gives a synopsis of where we stand on certain topics relative to our European Neighbours.

Question	EU27	Ireland	Ire Rank
Use internet Daily	43%	39%	18
Send Emails	53%	53%	15
Find information on Goods/Services	50%	46%	18
Order Goods and Services online	32%	36%	12
Internet via Modem (Dial-up)	11%	18%	4
Sell Over The Internet	10%	3%	20
Use internet Banking	29%	28%	15
Use Internet to look for a Job	13%	9%	19
Internet Online course	3%	3%	15
Internet replaced time with off-line activities	8%	2%	31
Individuals regularly using the Internet	56%	57%	15
Downloading/listening to/watching music/films	28%	19%	25
Read Online Papers online	25%	17%	27
Download of music/films Daily	2%	1%	28
Mobile internet Access	3%	2%	20

A shameful statistic is that we have the forth highest rate for dial up access via modem (the Box Brownie of internet connections) in Europe. We have a poor take-up on conducting business over the net (from a merchants point of view) with only 3% of individuals selling over the Net compared to a 10% EU average. Conversely, we have a higher propensity than the EU average to ordering goods and services online! Internet Banking has had a good take-up, we stand close to the EU average. But that average is particularly distorted with the Nordic Countries having a huge take up in internet banking (naturally) up to 75%. Where we score particularly low in comparison is surrounded by media according to the survey. We rank at the bottom of the tables for Downloading Music daily at #25, listening to radio or watching television on line still hasn’t grabbed our attention with the same gusto as our neighbours. Newspapers: According to the survey close to one in five read a paper/magazine on line but that’s the way below the EU average. We rank last in only one statistic:  “Internet has replaced time with off-line activities” – a resounding No - we have not surrendered to the screen. Ireland Internet Statistics from Eurostat 2009. Interesting comparisons between Ireland and it’s EU neighbours on a myriad of internet related statistics.

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Further to the post yesterday and whilst I am waiting for some updates, I decided a look over the pond might be in order. If we thought that our market was competitive for car insurance, then the UK would take your breath. Flick through any of the Golds or Paramount channels and you will see an array of direct and comparison sites for Car insurance vying for eyeballs. Anyway, I did the same as yesterday and took the top sites currently appearing in Google.co.uk to see where they would end up, if and only if, the Caffeine formula was applied in its current format. Mr Cutts suggests that when it is applied that it will be a “fundamentally big change” – so we might as well see that the possible outcomes would be so that we can either begin to try and see why the movements are taking place. Taking the top 30 results in Google.co.uk under ‘car insurance’ the outcome under Caffeine would be:

	Sites
Stationary	6
Down	6
Increased	12
Joined top 30	5
Left top 30	5

Trying to gauge the ‘volatility’ of this movement is particularly difficult. Just how volatile was the change? Adding the sum of the difference (the sum of the absolute changes between Google and Caffeine) yields a negative number - not that I would read too much into that as some of the changes were so severe that they throw up a negative number that you would never recover from. But still the burning Question: What element of this formula allows Aviva to hold court at #4 now and plummet to #62 overnight in the proposed change. What does it hold in its arsenal now that will be deemed a ‘dirty bomb’ in the new formula. And, more importantly, is that really fair? As for the Post Office and the Co-Op Bank they have been hung, drawn and quartered for their misdemeanours.

Google	Caffeine	Change
1	1	0	www.confused.com
2	2	0	www.moneysupermarket.com
3	3	0	www.comparethemarket.com
4	62	-58	www.aviva.co.uk
5	4	1	www.directline.com
6	12	-6	www.tescofinance.com
7	16	-9	www.churchill.com
8	8	0	www.saga.co.uk
9	9	0	www.admiral.com
10	5	5	www.swinton.co.uk
11	15	-4	www.theaa.com
12	13	-1	www.swiftcover.com
13	11	2	www.morethan.com
14	10	4	www.esure.com
15	14	1	www.kwik-fitinsurance.com
16	7	9	www.elephant.co.uk
17	197	-180	www.postoffice.co.uk
18	200	-182	www.co-operativebank.co.uk
19	6	13	www.gocompare.com
20	22	-2	www.endsleigh.co.uk
21	24	-3	www.gocompare.com
22	22	0	www.diamond.co.uk
23	25	-2	www.tescocompare.com
24	20	4	www.sheilaswheels.com
25	23	2	www.q4.com
26	138	-112	www.rac.co.uk
27	56	-29	www.asdafinance.com
28	19	9	www.privilege.com
29	28	1	www.onlyinsurance.com
30	26	4	www.bell.co.uk

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With Google testing its current beta search engine “Caffeine” its worth having a look at one incredibly competitive market – Car Insurance. It’s interesting to see how the different companies square up to each other now – and how, under the proposed changes of Caffeine, will the rank thereafter. It should be noted that this search engine is very much in development and that the results should, like the engine, the treated as beta.

There are no guarantees that after the new formula has been adopted the results here will be the same. As people comment on the results Google should take those on board and adjust their fire.

Caffeine	Google	Diff	Site
3	1	-2	www.pibasure.ie
4	2	-2	www.pibasure.ie/car-insurance.aspx
1	3	2	www.quinn-direct.com
2	4	2	www.quinn-direct.com/car-insurance
5	5	0	www.insure.ie
6	6	0	www.bestquote.ie
7	7	0	www.fbd.ie
12	8	-4	www.quoteme.ie
17	9	-8	www.moneysupermarket.com/motor
15	10	-5	www.nononsense.ie
14	11	-3	www.aaireland.ie/car-insurance
11	12	1	www.carinsurance.com
19	13	-6	www.aviva.co.uk/car-insurance
10	14	4	en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_insurance -
x	15	x	www.mansfieldinsurance.ie/car-insurance.aspx -
29	16	-13	www.swiftcover.com/ - Similar -
x	17	x	www.autotrader.ie/ - Similar -
x	18	x	www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?
x	19	x	www.autoquotenow.com
x	20	x	www.thegeneral.com/ -
18	21	3	www.iseeq.com/c/car-insurance.htm
x	22	x	www.progressive.com/
23	23	0	www.zurichinsurance.ie/
28	24	-4	www.axa.ie/Car-Insurance/AXA-Car-Insurance.aspx -
8	25	17	www.hibernian.ie
x	26	x	www.gocompare.com/car-insurance
20	27	7	www.insure4usa.com
27	28	1	www.aib.ie/personal/insurance/
25	29	4	www.tesco.ie/finance/carinsurance
x	30	x	www.swinton.co.uk

In the early results there is a small bit of movement. I say small by way of absolute numbers, but those shifts could be worth serious volumes of visitors and money. PIB assure and Quinn-Direct swap positions in the top five and Quoteme and FDB fall out of the first page completely which could be fairly serious in terms of traffic volumes. The term  “Car insurance” was searched 40,500 time in July by their peak was in March with 50,000 searches.

The only evidence of how rank is reflected in click through for a particular position was for AOL data. Applying their statistics and the peak figure for “car insurance” it implied that position one, pibasure,  currently gets 21,000 hits a month for that term. If the Caffeine rules were applied they drop down to position 3 and, with it, a drop to traffic levels of 4,000 a month in that position. Theses figures are possibly a little “academic”. But even taking that into account there has to be a volume difference between position 1 and 3, maybe not as much as the AOL data would lead us to believe, but some difference all the same.

The thinking is behind the move has never been explained (and never will). I can deal with what (theoretically) determines rank now, but what are the changes here - why will some sites be given such a proposed boost under Caffeine? What ‘act of god’ has boosted Hibernian from page 3 to page 1 overnight? If they can get there after the Caffeine formula, why are they not there now? And conversely, why would Mansfield Insurance be knocked off their spot at 15 to find themselves knocking on the door of page three after the purge. Are they better results (as is the acid test with G)? In the beta results for this expression they have included Yahoo Finance and Alliance in the results – which I don’t have an issue with.

But also included in the results is Money Supermarket at #17 (nearly in place of one of our own!) which is ridiculous as it’s for a UK residents only and is as useful to an .ie search for ‘car insurance’ as …. well you know.

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