Great news for all those who have booked on our Masterclass, apologies to all those who wanted to attend but missed out.

Our Masterclass on 24th July has sold out

http://www.enhancemedia.co.uk/services/training/open.php?pid=15

We will be running our annual “Online recruitment - The year ahead” conference in January next year, we will obviously keep you posted.

I will literally be able to say “Book now to avoid disappointment”!!

Cheesey!

Latest figures out from www.hitwise.co.uk…

Google search properties accounted for an incredible 87 percent of all UK searches for the four weeks ending 31 May 2008, increasing by 12 percent compared to May 2007.

In comparison, Yahoo! search properties accounted for 4.09 percent of UK searches in May 2008, a 2 percent increase compared to April 2008.

MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased 2 percent compared to April 2008 and Ask increased 6 percent.

Amazing.

Last night the NORAS glitterati descended on the Sports Cafe in a sea of wii, lager and carbohydrate rich food to fight to be the NORAS 2008 Pool Champions - ‘the biggest prize in online recruitment’.

The group stages were complicated and saw the elimination of GAAPweb, Secs in the City, Osborne Brook (who built the NORAS website) and ABCe. The knock out stages then followed

Quarter finals

Enhance Media beat 1JOB.co.uk

reed.co.uk beat Guardian Jobs

Eteach.com beat Times Online - Jobs

jobs.telegraph.co.uk beat Leisure Jobs

Semi finals

Enhance Media beat reed.co.uk

jobs.telegraph.co.uk beat Eteach.com

Final (best of 3)

jobs.telegraph.co.uk beat Enhance Media (2-0)

Thanks to ABCe who co-hosted the event with us. Highlights included Dylan’s magnificent pot of the black to eliminate Secs in the City (last year’s champions), Eteach.com (real dark horses of the night), the dogged determination of Leisure Jobs and of course AJ and Freddie from jobs.telegraph.co.uk who took the big prize.

Back on May 23rd 2007 we predicted that the internet would be the biggest recruitment advertising medium in the UK by 2008. We were wrong, and think it will take until at least 2009.

All this is based on AA, IAB and WARC recruitment advertising revenue figures and our predictions for the future. Since the last prediction we’ve had the actual figures for 2007 in and they show that press recruitment advertising (in particular regional press) declined at a slower rate last year than we expected it to. We’ve revised the predictions for future recruitment advertising revenues - they can be seen here you can also compare these predictions to the previous year’s graph.

We’ve used average rates of change over the last couple of years and as you’ll see it now shows that online revenues will exceed trade press revenues this year and regional press revenues next year. Let us know what you think and expect another prediction based on the 2008 figures this time next year.

So BT, Virgin and Talk-Talk is in talks with Phorm to trail a web-wide behavioural targeting system. This came with a lot of backlash from many customers worried about their privacy. The goal is, to be able to track people’s web usage in order to tailor make advertising campaigns for the individual.

People not only find online advertising at some points are irritating but the fact that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) may be able to track your movements on the net is an invasion of privacy.

But looking at the bigger picture and reading the small print, is this not a good thing? Firstly online advertising is only irritating when the adverts are not relevant to you. Imagine viewing adverts that interest you while surfing the net and help you find what you are looking for.

Secondly, BT, Virgin and Talk-Talk have said that the IP (Internet Protocol) address information will not be transferred to Phorm and will not be used when trialing the web wide behavioral targeting system. The IP address is the unique number that identifies your computer and ultimately you.

Phorm have said that everything would be completely anonymous, and that Phorm will never be aware of the identity of the user or what they have browsed.

The battle lines are re-drawn, the finger is on the metaphorical trigger, the 5^th of May is just around the corner. If you haven’t reviewed your PPC advertising campaign, you should.

As of the 5^th of May 2008, Google are easing their search rules, letting anyone bid on copyright keywords and phrases and a great deal of major companies intend to bid on their rivals’ names and even products’ names. These rule changes will bring Google in the UK in line with Google in the U.S as they have been doing this for the past 4 years. It’s not quite the free-for-all everyone may picture though, as any of your copyright terms will still be banned from being included in your competitions adverts.

Still, to ensure you rank above your competitors for your brand terms, you would have to ensure your “quality score” is good while you might have to increase your existing bid. You should:

        (a) Ensure your adverts are accurate, and try including the copyright terms in the advert copy,

        (b) Ensure your landing page is search engine “friendly”, keyword rich and relevant.

        (c) Have a good CTR (Click-through rate), as this is one factor that will help ensure a higher “quality score” and, in theory, a lower cost.

It is always best to speak to an expert, or even Google, if you are unsure about what you can and can’t do - as Google will “punish” those breaking their “ever-changing” rules.

Firstly, if you are not familiar with the search engine layout: when you search for something, the results page will appear with “sponsored links” at the top and to the right. In the middle (under and to the left of the sponsored links) are your “natural” or “organic” listings.

Quite simply, PI (or Paid Inclusion) is where a company would pay a search engine to be listed in their “natural” or “organic” results page listings among the normal results.

This often works on a pay-per-click basis or an annual fixed price. Most search engines offer this (and have been for many years) with exceptions like Google, ASK, MSN.

Eyebrows have been raised over whether this is right or wrong and whether it would be best keeping a natural listing just that - natural and free.

In theory, PI does not guarantee that a company’s site will be listed above any other sites’. It should just allow indexing of your site (or just the pages you wish to index) to be done on a more frequent basis instead of having to wait for the search engine spiders to crawl your site naturally.

As announced the other day, the IAB / PwC online advertising spend research shows that the value of online advertising in the UK was £2.8 billion for 2007, this gives the internet a 15.3% market share for all ad budget spent in 2007 (making it third behind press display 19.9% and TV 21.8%).

The IAB also break down the £2.8 billion into the various different online advertising formats, the highlights of these are

- Paid for search listings - £1,619 million
- Banners - £467 million
- Consumer classifieds - £297 million
- Recruitment classifieds - £287 million
- Everything else (email ads, tenancies etc) - £143 million

Online classified revenue has grown in the following way over the last four years

H2 2007 - £145 million (2007 = £287 million)
H1 2007 - £142 million
H2 2006 - £112 million (2006 = £215 million)
H1 2006 - £103 million
H2 2005 - £88 million (2005 = £182 million)
H1 2005 - £94 million
H2 2004 - £67 million (2004 = £121 million)
H1 2004 - £54 million

So, not quite the £300 million that we were predicting for 2007 (we must update that graph!), but not bad. Given the current economic climate it’ll be interesting to see the figures for H1 2008, they should be out in approximately October this year.

Some great news from the IAB last night…

“Online advertising has grown from being the smallest market sector in 2003 to the third largest in 2007, with a new high of £2,812.6 millions. This represents a 38% year-on-year like-for-like increase, taking the medium to a market share of 15.3% (up from 11.4% in 2006).”

The full results are published on Thursday. Here at Enhance Media we predicted that the online recruitment market would be worth £300m

For your chance to win a very special, limited edition “Howeru” t-shirt! Go to Tim’s blog and make your prediction.

This isn’t a football score, but a result from the ‘Great British e-test’, the findings of which we’ve published today. The actual figures showed that those living in Central London are the most e-savvy in the UK and have an average e-score of 72.9 (out of 100) and that people living in Torquay have an average e-score of 49.4, making Torquay the least e-savvy town in the UK. Here’s what Sky News and WebUser have to say about the results.

You can buy the results of the Great British e-test as a pdf for £49 + VAT here - the results booklet includes some great data on UK internet users and compares the demographic profiles of people that have completed 30 different online activities (including applying for a job, writing a blog, using social networking sites etc) and you can take the e-test that generates findings for the research here.