Global Search Engine Marketing & Social Media News And Analysis » Spain

European Interactive Advertising Association Report Dec. 2010

Sante J. Achille — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:47:35 +0000

The European Interactive Advertising Association has published the EIAA European Media Landscape Report Summary, December 2010.

The key findings of the report include:

521m 16+ year old people in the 15 European countries sampled
According to EIAA’s latest Mediascope Europe study 76% (396m) of all 16+ year old people across 15 European markets surveyed use different media simultaneously with almost a third (30%) using the internet whilst they watch TV
A third (33%) of Europeans cannot live without the internet, equal to the percentage of Europeans who claim they cannot live without TV
54% (279m) of Europeans use the internet in a typical week spending 12.1 hours online
16‐24 year olds use the internet more frequently than they watch TV – 79% of this younger demographic use the internet between 5 and 7 days each week while 76% watch TV as regularly
More than 8 in 10 (83%) online Europeans use a broadband connection and over half (52%) of these broadband users are wireless
The most popular web activities amongst all European internet users include;
- email (76%), communicating via social networking sites (45%)
- instant messaging (40%)
- watching film, TV or video clips (32%)
- contributing to ratings and reviews (27%)
71% state that as a result of the internet they are staying in touch with friends and relatives more, half (50%) have chosen better products or services and 47% are better able to manage their finances online
55% of European internet users actively change their mind on what brand to buy after online research

Other relevant information provided in the report:

51% access the Internet on a PC
14% access the Internet via a mobile device
43% watch or downloading films and video or stream TV
80% of the population in Norway Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands access the Internet at least once a week, with the European average fixed at an estimated 54%

Source: http://www.eiaa.net/

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Christmas 2010: a snapshot of Online European Shoppers

Christophe Bernigaud — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:13:48 +0000

Today Monday November 29th is ‘Cyber Monday‘. The biggest shopping day of the year?

Or is it Monday December 6th 2010 referred as ‘Mega Monday‘ where sales are expected to hit over €uro 1million per minute…

October 2010, IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index is expected to increase by 16 per cent in 2010 vs. 2009 for online Christmas sales, reaching £6.4billion.

Different forecasts come from various sources. For instance, Hi Media expect the European online Christmas sales to represent over 10 per cent of the European overall Christmas sales, representing respectively €uro 32 billion of the overall €uro 313 billion.

The UK, Germany and France will represent the highest total spend for the Christmas 2010 season, accounting for 65 per cent of the overall European Christmas spend:

UK – €uro 77.2 billion
Germany – €uro 64.5 billion
France – €uro 62.5 billion
Spain – €uro 31.2 billion

Denmark, Norway and Sweden are forecasted to spend the least overall at €5.4bn, €6.1bn and €9.6bn respectively.

How strong is online Christmas shopping in Europe?

UK – highest in Europe with €uro 13 billion – i.e 17% of the overall 2010 UK retail Christmas sales
Germany – €uro 8.2 billion – i.e 13% of the overall 2010 Germany retail Christmas sales
France – €uro 6.3 billion – i.e 10% of the overall 2010 France retail Christmas sales
Spain – €uro 624 million- i.e 2% of the overall 2010 Spain retail Christmas sales

Norway will spend €uro 0.73 billion online and Denmark €uro 0.61 billion.

Pierpaolo Zollo, from Kelkoo says: “Internet sales across Europe are set to be more important than ever this Christmas, with consumers spending record amounts online, and online commerce acting as the primary driving force for overall retail growth during the festive season.”

Don’t forget to track your online audience thanks to free simple tools such as Google Analytics and make sure you run an online reputation management program.

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Hitwise Ventures Outside English With France Launch. Oh la la!

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:53:25 +0000

Everyone in the online world depends on having good data in some way or other. Until ComScore rolled out qSearch in 150 countries, there was very little comparable data available to compare activities in different countries. Frequently, people would ask me what I thought of Hitwise and mostly I had to reply that I had very little to do with it (difficult if most of your work is not in English to consider an English-only tool). Now Experian is changing that by launching Hitwise in France. So that means we will know what’s going on in France right – or “Now You Know” to coin a well known phrase.

Well it’s not really quite like that. Note that in the introduction above I’m talking about ‘compare’ as opposed to measure. What the Hitwise move will do is to give us a different basis for comparing activity in France. It does not mean that we have either not been able to measure things before OR that there is no data available on French websites as the Xiti tool from AT Internet has been around for a long time. Whilst AT Internet does have operations outside France – France is its home base.

There is also the famous Baromètre which measures the shares of French, German, Spanish and UK search engines. Currently, this is showing Google advancing against all-comers – though when you are Google and you have 94.2% in Germany, 92.8% in Spain, 89.2% in France and 90.8% in the UK – are you really worried about Bing which performs best in France with 3.6%. Time will only tell.

Experian launches Hitwise Internet measurement services for France

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Email Marketing Consumer Report 2009

Sante J. Achille — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:57:43 +0000

ContactLab has released the results of a new study on the use of Email amongst European users. Habits, trends, and use of newsletters is examined for the following markets:

Italy
Spain
France
Germany
UK

The results are organized in different reports and in local languages (and English), along with a European Report released in all languages (English, Italian, French, Spanish, German)

You may download the reports here – Email validation is required

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Dear Twitter, A Five Person Localisation Team is HUGE

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:05:16 +0000

Twitter announced via its blog that it is adding support for French, Italian, German and Spanish to the languages supported by its interface. Until now the system has only been available in English and Japanese. In its blog post it describes these languages as “Commonly referred to using the acronym FIGS and are often the starting point for services like Twitter when its time for more language support”. The languages will be added via a crowdsourcing interface.

There are some issues with this announcement. Firstly, the fact that Twitter has chosen to go for “FIGS” in other words French, Italian, German and Spanish is a habit which is very typical of English speaking companies because they assume they must be the most important languages. They may be, but they may also not be. What Twitter should have done (maybe they have and they don’t want to say) is checked what languages their users are working in and followed that – always play to your strengths. There’s a good chance they should have been looking at languages like Korean, Russian and Arabic – rather than FIGS. Another factor to take into account is that the FIGS languages use the same alphabet as English so users will, and have been, able to interpret what it’s all about more easily than speakers of Russian, Korean or Arabic.

The second issue is they’re using crowdsourcing ‘because they have a small team’. The Twitter interface is not large in localisation terms and it would have consumed less of their resources to have used traditional localisation for this small number of languages. It only makes sense to use crowdsourcing if they’re planning to localise in a very large number of languages. Dear Twitter, a few person team on a project like this is HUGE for most people not small!

Equally, they’re not even looking at the major language issues which Twitter faces such as people who wish to Tweet in multiple languages. Currently, some are opting to Tweet in two accounts to use two languages to avoid losing followers. Twitter should add more sophistication to this side of their system.

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Google expands new trademark policy – but sidesteps Europe

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:12:38 +0000

Following the expansion of their trademark policy to the UK last year, Google has widened its looser trademark policy which basically allows all-comers to bid on trademark keywords increasing the cost of trademark advertising via the number one search engine and allowing competitors to aggressively buy each others ‘marks. The new change expands the ‘we won’t intervene’ approach to a total of 190 countries. The change comes into force on June 4th.

However, Google has sidestepped the key European countries with the strongest legal rules and where cases have cost Google most in fines (see list below). From calculations, the removal of protection for trademarked terms increases advertiser costs by as much as 80% – as well as taking revenue from additional advertisers on those terms. The policy, therefore, enables Google to increase its adverising take from advertisers. The approach also affects major global brands most significantly – because they generally spend proportionately more on advertising their brands because it is those brands – and the associated products – which have made them global.

Google has long struggled to persuade blue chip advertisers to move more of their advertising budgets to Google Adwords – this is step which leaves them with no choice. However, it is a dangerous move as it could also contribute to tipping the ROI see-saw towards other newer forms of promotion such as social media and Twitter.

Having received no significant kick-back from its UK change of a year ago – it’s no surprise that this is being rolled out now. Probably, another year will pass before more countries – especially European ones – are added. I predict that France, where the courts have levied the largest fines against Google, will be the last to go.

So the following countries (European Union countries in bold) will not see the change – at least yet. Via Search Engine Land

Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Czech Republic
Cyprus
Denmark
Finland
France
Greece
Germany
Hungary
Italy
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden

Australia
Bahamas
Brazil
China
Iceland
Macau
New Zealand
Norway
South Korea
Switzerland
Taiwan

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Comscore has Facebook taking first place in Spain

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:23:21 +0000

According to Comscore Facebook took first place in Spain for the first time in February. Comscore’s statistics also put Facebook in 6th place of most popular web properties worldwide with 275 million visitors in February. This works out at a 314% growth in Comscore’s Europe.

With the addition of Spain, Facebook now has first place in all European markets with the exception of the Netherlands, Austria, and Ireland – where it is 2nd; Portugal where it is 3rd, Germany where it is 4th and Russia where it trails in 7th place.

It should be noted that Comscore’s Europe is a non-existent entity. Their definition of Europe is neither geographically nor governmentally-based – it is merely where Comscore has panels. The Europe of the 27 nations alos includes countries such as Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia as well as several other states. As Facebook does less well in the slavic based world – Comscore should really say “Facebook is number one in Western Europe”!

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Forrester Research, Inc. data on mobile instant messaging (IM) in Europe

Sante J. Achille — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:16:50 +0000

A recent study from Forrester Research, Inc. indicates mobile instant messaging (IM) on the rise in Europe with 26.7 million users in 2007 and a projected 80 million users in 2013.

The survey was conducted on a sample of 22.000 consumers in:

France
Germany
Holland
Italy
Spain
Sweden
UK

Three years after the launch of IM mobile operators appear less than enthusiastic about this technology, fearing cannibalization of profits deriving from text messaging services (SMS), however the growth of IM is seen as “inevitable”

Niek van Veen, analyst di Forrester Research identifies IM as a means to differentiate mobile operators services and improve user experience.

All this will have a significant impact on web and search technology as mobile devices become an integral part of work and leisure.

Source: Spot and Web – N.15

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24 European states go borderless under Schengen

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:54:49 +0000

The Schengen agreement has been extended from 15 countries to 24 giving a wider borderless Europe with no internal border controls or checks and an open market of over 400 million people. Coming into force on the 21st December, the Schengen agreement makes physical inter-trade between bordering countries easier to manage for marketers. As Europe opens its borders, and search grows quickly in Europe, Schengen makes European business roll-outs more attractive and achievable with faster distribution and lower border costs.

The new countries joining the agreement are:-

Czech Republic
Slovakia
Poland
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Estonia
Malta
Slovenia

I decided to test this with a visit to the most northerly Balkan state of Slovenia travelling from Austria through a 5 mile tunnel to the south side of the Alps. True enough the European blue flag and stars had become the standard border crossing notification and the rows of kiosks and border controls were empty and unmanned as we headed to the capital Ljublana.

Ljubljana is a town of around 230,000 people with a pretty baroque style and attractive old quarter. The local search engine is “Najdi” and the local domain is .si.

The Schengen agreement was first signed by five countries in 1985 in a small Luxembourg town ‘Schengen’ – these original five were later joined by ten others and the agreement came into force in 1995. The agreement basically means that the internal borders between the treaty countries are removed – but that those same countries cooperate to strengthen the outer border using the Schengen Information System – a database where data is exchanged. There are also special rules on how police forces work together.

The original five countries were:-

France
Germany
Netherlands
Belgium
Luxembourg

Other countries which joined up to 1995 when Schengen was finally realised are:-

Spain
Portugal
Greece

Countries who joined after 1995 but before 1997 are:-

Italy
Austria
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Iceland
Monaco

The Schengen Agreement has only ever, in part, been deployed by the British or the Irish for fear of it encouraging immigration and terrorism – though it doesn’t seem to have helped much staying out.

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EURid suspends 10,000 .EU names squatted in China

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:14:09 +0000

The .EU domain registrar management organisation, EURid has suspended 10,000 EU domain names which have been apparently legally registered by a Chinese woman – reports out-law. EURid has the power to remove the domain names from the woman – but has said that it would prefer a court to do it.

According to reports, the woman was buying the names to sell on to other parties at higher prices – nothing new in that then. EURid says that is has received complaints – not particularly new either. One key point is that only European-based organisations are allowed to hold .EU domain names.

Out-law carries this great quote from EURid, “When we screen our data bank we see that some people have an amazing amount of names. Nobody needs 10,000 names.” Strange. You’d have thought that EURid had a little more knowledge and insight about the industry in which they operate. Perhaps that’s why there were so many complaints at launch!

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Google webmaster tools starts to think international

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:20:03 +0000

At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language – but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list – and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment – for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting – perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway – but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr – even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case – contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical – hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

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European travel market to hit 25% of transactions online

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:52:22 +0000

A report by PhoCusWright Inc says that the European market on average will hit 25% of transactions carried out online during 2007 – this figure was achieved in the US in 2004.

There are, however some key differences in European markets:-

UK and German buying patterns are most similar to the US
France is behind the average thanks to low outbound travel and fewer low cost carriers
Spain and Italy are further behind thanks to lower broadband access and less internet use (and let’s face it if you live you don’t need to travel so much do you!!)

Via www.hotelexecutive.com

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Google to Acquire Spanish owned and started Panoramio

Marina Zaliznyak — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:08:06 +0000

The fact that I’ve been silent for some time, doesn’t mean that the Spanish internet isn’t churning up stories. In fact, there are quiet a few. I’ll start with the latest and for many one of the most impressive. If anything, it’s a good sign for Spain and will have plenty of local internet entrepreneurs on their toes. During Google’s Developer Day 2007 held on May 31st, a local acquisition was announced in Madrid. Google has agreed to acquire Panoramio, a small, but certainly very ambitious and successful Alicante based company.

The official announcements can be found in Google’s Blog as well as Panoramio’s. The Spanish blogosphere is buzzing with the news. Panoramio is based on Google Earth. The gist of it’s utility and it’s main attraction is that Panaromio allows users to associate photos with locations. This way, users help create and share a have a photographic atlas of the world. Panoramio has been working closely with Google Earth for over a year, integrating Panoramio as a layer into Google Earth. A very logical and visually exciting extension of Google Earth, which has in turn helped Panoramio grow their database. The acquisition is also timely with the integration of Streetside views.

According to Eduardo Manchon of Panoramio, “The integration of photos from Panoramio in Google Earth has been so successful since John Hanke suggested it that we see the acquisition of Panoramio as a natural consequence. We have tightened our relationship with Google Earth more and more in recent months, and at the end we decided to walk one step further. After so much work together, honestly, we couldn’t imagine a better scenario than selling Panoramio to Google.”

As far as I know the the amount that Panoramio was acquired for has not been disclosed by neither of the two parties. Whatever the amount is, the acquisition is certainly motivational for hundreds of other Spanish start-ups—Google doesn’t have a blind spot for Spain.

There’s an official Q&A posted by Google. Take a look. Better yet, experiment with Panoramio.

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Ya.com reveals their own video and photo sharing services—YaTV and YaShoot

Marina Zaliznyak — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:40:40 +0000

Spain’s leading online portal and telecom, Ya.com has launched YaTV and YaShoot in order to compete with YouTube on a local level, here in Spain. Both of the Web 2.0 services use Ya.com’s proprietary tagging service, Etikedo, to help organize photos and videos on YaTV and YaShoot. Etikedo consolidates photos, videos and links, where users can tag their favorites. Much like hundreds of other similar services available all over the world.

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Google’s Isabel Aguilera confirms the rumor: Google is working on a mobile phone

Marina Zaliznyak — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 17:17:41 +0000

A number of Spanish online sources are reporting on a recent rumor, now confirmed by Isabel Aguilera,Google’s Managing Director in Spain and Portugal—Google is working on their own mobile phone. Google Phone? gPhone? Confirmed, right here in Spain.

The news seemed to catch everyone off guard. Was that something that was really supposed to surface?
Certainly it’s not a surprise. Nowadays Google seems to be working on everything and with all of the solutions currently available, a phone that consolidates all of the features (Gmail, Google Maps, mobile advertising, etc.) seems like the next logical step. However, the Spanish blogosphere has it’s doubts as to whether the newsflash was entirely unintentional. Up until now, Google’s headquarters have been unwilling to comment on the rumor. Now, the cat’s out of the bag.

In either case, on the 14th this month, in a conference organized by the Association for the Progress of the Mediterranean Region (Asociación para el Progreso de la Dirección de la Zona Mediterránea), Alguilera confirmed that the company’s engineers are dedicating part of their time towards building a mobile phone for better “access to information.” This is one of the 18 projects that are cooking in the Google labs.

Sources:
Noticias.com
Libertad Digital

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European telecoms operators threaten US search hegemony

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:51:32 +0000

The UK’sTelegraph online reports that 12 of Europe’s largest telecoms operators – with one American firm – are planning to launch a mobile phone search engine to rival Google and Yahoo.

The companies concerned include Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and US firm Cingular. Combined, they have a user base of 600 million people – with some 20% in the UK expected to have broadband speed mobile phone access by the end of 2007.

According to The Telegraph, declining mobile phone revenues are forcing telecoms operators to look at all angles – and the lucrative search advertising market is clearly attractive. For telecoms operators it is very appealing to keep a larger percentage of the revenues rather than ’sharing’ with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.

However, both Google and Yahoo have already done deals with mobile phone operators and it is not clear what impact this will have!

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‘We’re all helping to create the Google monster,’ Exalead CEO, SES Paris

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:09:14 +0000

The Google monster came under concerted attack from Francois Bourdoncle, CEO and founder of France-based search engine Exalead in the opening keynote of Search Engine Strategies Paris. The press in particular should be worried about becoming sub-contractors of Google, he said. Whilst at present Google News brings plenty of traffic to sites under the brand names of the press outlets, this would change to Google’s brand in the future. Portals – by which Mr. Bourdoucle is referring to all the major search engines – are the “Walmart of the digital world,” he added.

In a considered talk which revolved around the concept that search is not that effective and there is plenty of room for other search engines despite Google’s dominance, Mr. Bourdoncle explained that an IFOP Omnibus study had shown that 75% of searchers actually have problems finding ’stuff’. 22% think there are too many results and 45% never bother to look at the second page.

Much of search, he explained, now revolved around Yellow Pages-style search where the user knows that a particular keyword produces the set of results they are looking for – even though apparently it is a free text search – the reality is now very different.

The 30 ‘verticals’ which Google now has cannot be presented in the results. Searcher intent is problematic because searchers don’t always know what they want. This was the reason Exalead is focusing on ’search by serendipity’ whereby the user has the option to ‘zoom out’ as well as ‘zoom in’ and to discover things they didn’t even know they were looking for.

He also criticised the new sitemaps collaboration announced by Google, Yahoo and MSN at Pubcon in Las Vegas. He said, “The sitemaps specification is not nice and open and it is not nice and closed”. He believes the initiative aims to close the door to new entrants to the market place.

Exalead aims to profit from the Quaero research initiative by bringing new technologies to the search engine which, he revealed, now has a new infrastructure in place which it has taken 8 years to build. “We have moved extremely slowly but now we’re going to move extremely quickly” he stressed. Exalead, which has offices in France, Spain, Italy and Germany is to be re-launched under a new consumer-facing brand soon.

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Blogs influence European consumers

Sante J. Achille — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:40:54 +0000

A recent Jupiter Research, released a report on the European Online Advertising Forecast, 2006 to 2011.

The executive summary presented by emarketer provides an insight on the European online expenditure future trends. Europeans are buying more online.

Predictions by Internet Retailer see online advertising expenditure rise to an 8.3% of all European advertising spending.

Forrester Research reports that online sales are showing significant increases in Italy and Spain, respectively 31% and 27%.

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Europe leads in mobile internet access

Sante J. Achille — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:03:25 +0000

eMarketer reports on Internet access via mobile devices.

The study was conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and the US. while 29% of European Internet users regularly access the Internet from their mobile phones, only 19% of US users were accessing the web via their mobile devices.

The highest mobile Web penetration was in Germany, Italy and the UK (at 34% each), followed by France and Spain, and the US.

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