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

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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Google.ch 2010 Zeigeist – a.k.a Top Searches in Switzerland

Christophe Bernigaud — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:43:56 +0000

This is a good index to set goals in your Google Analytics, for Google Adwords benchmarking exercise, your general country specific SEO works, i.e. your general SEM strategy

Every year Google publishes via its Zeitgeist, the top searches people ran on a specific network such as the Swiss network – Google.ch .

A quick analysis of the search keywords and keyphrases on Google.ch shows that social networks such as Chatroulette, YouTube and FaceBook top the listing.

Swiss events such as the Paleo festival in Roman Switzerland or the Streetparade in German Switzerland have raised great interest among the Swizz citizen.

Google.ch top 10 keywords and keyphrases searches:

Facebook
YouTube
Google
Temps
Météo
Wikipedia
CFF
Hotmail
Swiss
iPhone

Top 10 Search keywords and keyphrases with the largest search volume increase in. 2010 on Google.ch

Chatroulette
iPad
iPhone 4
Coupe du Monde 2010 ]
Justin Bieber
20 Minutes Online
gratis-inserate.ch
Facebook
Easyjet
YouTube

Top 10 of personnalities searched on Google.ch

Steve Lee
Kerstin Cook
Laura Kämpf
Menowin Fröhlich
Kesha
Jörg Kachelmann
Simon Ammann
Justin Bieber
Cheryl Cole
Shakira

Top 10 world events searched on Google.ch

Big Brother 10
Haiti
iPad
iPhone 4
Jörg Kachelmann
Menowin Fröhlich
Steve Lee
Vancouver 2010
BP
Volcan

Top 10 Car Brands searched on Google.ch

BMW
Audi
VW
Ford
Mercedes
Honda
Opel
Peugeot
Fiat
Toyota

Top 10 Swiss Events searched on Google.ch

Paléo Festival
Streetparade
Openair St. Gallen
Gurtenfestival
Zürifest
Fête fédérale de lutte
Salon de l’auto de Genève
Greenfield
Foire d’automne de Bâle
Sechseläuten

Top 10 Swiss towns searched on Google.ch

Zermatt
Frauenfeld
Genève
Zurich
Yverdon-les-Bains
Vevey
Zoug
Berne
Lucerne
Lausanne

Top 10 Swiss Cultural happenings searched on Google.ch

Aquabasilea
Chemins de fer du Sörenberg
Europapark
Technorama Winterthur
Parc des ours de Berne
Kunsthaus Zürich
Bernaqua
Musée des transports de Lucerne
Connyland
Zoo de Zurich

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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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Google to digitise 500,000 books in the ‘Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon’

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:03:58 +0000

Abondance brings us further news of the Google book publishing initiative which sees Lyon, France’s second most important city (sorry Marseilles), jumping the gun on Paris and cooperating with Google. The digitisation will involve those books which are out of copyright.

The library houses an important collection of books in the French language and some rare editions from authors such as Nostradamus and Newton. Not all of the books in the collection are in the French language as the Italian, Latin, English, German and Spanish languages also feature prominently. It is the second largest collection in France after the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

Other libraries in Europe which are also involved in the project include Lausanne in Switzerland, and Ghent in Belgium.

For what it’s worth, Lyon is also a beautiful city – speaking as a former resident!

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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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German online advertising to beat 800 million Euros in 2007

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:10:30 +0000

Futurezone brings us the news that the online advertising market in Germany is rocketing and expected to exceed 800 million Euros in 2007. That’s a 67% over the 480 million Euros seen in 2006. The figures are from the Bundesverbands Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien (BITKOM) run by Germany’s national newspaper “Die Welt”. This forecast for the full year is based on an increase of 68% in the first three quarters of the year.

This means that online advertising in Germany is still behind TV and print advertising – but from a growth rate point of view there is no comparison – online is taking off.

This story serves to back up the view that the European online market is growing very rapidly indeed. Germany is the largest economy in Europe and this pace of growth must eventually take it ahead of the UK. The figures don’t include the market in other German speaking countries and areas – such as Austria and Switzerland.

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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 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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Blogs influence European consumers

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

A recent www.accoona.eu searches by language – rather than country. Currently, the EU version runs in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

Following the search you have the option to refine your search by geography, person, company, language or publisher.

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Europe studies the Web 2.0 phenomenon with TAGora

Sante J. Achille — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:52:57 +0000

TAGora is a Research Project funded by the European Union. The TAGora project aims at exploiting the unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction and social networks.

The project will develop along several lines:

A systematic and rigorous data collection campaign that will produce reference datasets and make them available to the scientific community at large.
The design and implementation of innovative techniques and tools for the analysis and mining of data.
The construction and validation of modeling schemes for the observed phenomenology, involving the comparison of experimental data, simulation and theoretical constructions.
The design and deployment of innovative, proof-of-concept tools aimed at better structuring and navigating information.

The kick off meeting was held on July 14th. The evolution of the project can be followed via the blog.

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French reject .EU domains as Cypriot registrations beat the French

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 14:56:32 +0000

French registrations of .EU domains show a clear rejection of the name by the French. After 24 hours, the French have only registered one fifth the number of domains (48,000) that the British have registered (260,000) – even though proportionately the countries are virtually the same size. But French registrations at are also significantly behind Germany (370,000), Italy (78,000), the Netherlands (145,000), Sweden (60,000) and registrations from Cyprus (73,000).

In the first day of trading in .Eu domain names, over 1.2 million active names were registered through the 1,000 accredited registrars according to EURid live statistics.

The UK lead in the first four hours – says EURid – however Germany soon overtook the UK.
Marc van Wesemael, Managing Director of EURid has expressed satisfaction at the progress saying, “We are satisfied to see that the interest in .eu has been so large and that many already regard .eu as a useful complement to Internet’s national top level domain names”.

Could President Chirac have had some influence over this? Will the French catch up later? We’re taking no bets.

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Rush for .EU begins “most important top level domain ever”

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 11:26:14 +0000

The BBC reports on the opening of the doors of EurID to allcomers trying to register one of the valuable .EU domains – now on a first come first served basis. Already 300,000 have used the sunrise period to register a domain where a previous claim existed – such as a trademark or trading history.

Markus Eggensperger of Lycos claims that “It’s the most important top level domain we have ever seen,” and “Eventually the .EU could rival the .com”.

As we say in the UK, that’s probably “poppycock” but then you never know. Still noone can say how .EUs will affect search engine rankings as the use of .fr or .de has been a very easy way to identify the country of a particular site.

Go and get you .Eu – but don’t switchover today!

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Portal offers 100,000 books scanned for searching in German

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 09:41:56 +0000

A fascinating cross-lingual scientific search engine called Dandelon.com - a collaborative project between the university libraries of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and AGI – information management consultants, together with GBV – has reached a landmark 100,000 books scanned and prepared for searching. This is claimed to be the the largest European collection of searchable tables of contents of scientific books.

The search engine enables scientists, academics and researchers to discover relevant texts whatever language they are stored in – from one of the co-operating libraries. There is even a visual map view of the query terms!

So Google isn’t the only library cataloguing project!

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Switzerland reported to have 4 million web users

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 10:06:17 +0000

According to the Swiss Media Research and Studies organisation (la société Recherches et études des médias publicitaires (REMP)) reported by Edicom, the number of web users in Switzerland now exceeds 4 million representing around 60% of the population. Between April and September, 4 million people accessed the web at least once, says the report – which means that 200,000 more are using the web.

Intriguingly, the growth was greatest in the smaller Italian area of Switerland – around the Ticino canton leading to Lake Maggiore in Italy. Swiss German and French speaking areas managed growth of 5% – although of course this is a larger number of actual users.

Home use has grown more rapidly than work use with more than two-thirds using the internet at home. In the last 3 years, says the report, it is search which has increased most substantially with – alongside gaming.

Unfortunately for money focused-Switzerland, stock market access has actually declined!

The WEMF / REMP report

Read more about Internet Access on Multilingual Search

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Mirago opens its Swedish pay per click engine to advertisers

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 14:11:03 +0000

Mirago chose to launch its new advertising network in Sweden at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Stockholm where the first advertisers were formally signed up to advertise. Mirago is a UK-based pay per click search engine and has been building indexes throughout Europe over the last months.

Advertisers targeting Sweden now have access to the pay per click services as well as index paid inclusion and other premium services.

Mike James, European Business Development Manager explained, “We’re rolling out the network throughout Europe but chose Sweden as one of our earlier destinations because it is a well developed market, broadband access is high and the Swedes are used to buying online. But we aim to cover all markets in Europe and will be launching in Italy in the next couple of weeks.”

Mirago has already built indexes in the UK, France, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Spain. The company expects to launch advertising facilities soon in all of those countries but has already opened in the UK, France, Germany and now Sweden. Italy will be next followed by Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway.

Mike James also explained that unlike Google, Mirago has built separate indexes for each country identifying sites using such factors as local domain names and other features which he wasn’t at liberty to reveal. Interestingly, he highlighted the fact that the company has built different methods of ‘normalising’ its results pages to deal with different language demands. “Swedish is different to French because it has full characters rather than accented characters which have to be treated in a different way,” he explained. “There is no danger of polluted results between the very similar languages of Scandinavia such as Danish and Norwegien because we have built separate indexes”.

Mirago has 15,000 active campaigns, handles 1/2 billion enquiries per month and has 700 partner sites which feed Mirago results – and it is actively talking to potential new partners in Sweden.

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Berlin: Travelocity says travel consolidation will cut search engine revenues

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 07:50:54 +0000

Speaking at the eyefortravel Sales and Marketing in Travel Europe conference in Berlin, Jan Oetjen, Travelocity’s managing director Germany, said that the search engine revenues would be cut following the likely consolidation in the travel industry. “We all know that travel is a major buyer for the search engines, consolidation would bring down the costs which travel companies pay.”

He expected more consolidation – but said that this depended on whether the industry “commoditised or personalised” its approach.

Speakers at the conference expressed the view that the search engines have become the new travel distribution system virtually replacing the dedicated GDS system.

Meanwhile, Expedia Europe director, Bruce Redor, attacked the meta-travel search engines. “I believe they bring greater choice,” he said but went on to heavily criticise the approach largely basing his argument on the fact that the travel inventory companies would not be able to cope with the scale of response needed. “Expedia handles 1,000 requests a second,” he said, “And that’s just for the flight path queries”.

Navneet Bali, formerly from e-bookers, is developing a new travel search engine or meta search tool in India under the brand Allcheckin.com. He believes that such travel search engines offer transparency and that customers are looking for that.

Google’s vertical market manager – travel UK – Daniel Robb – revealed that Google has undertaken a major pan-European study of travel search and will be releasing its findings in events throughout Europe in the next few weeks. For the UK, he said that 93% of travel searchers use Google, 34% Yahoo and 18% MSN. The study was principally based on existing Google users and demonstrates a multiple use of the engines.

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Online advertising sales drooping for loans in Western Europe

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 06:42:56 +0000

Trade Doubler reports a drop in online advertising sales for ‘loans’ in July in Western Europe whilst other sectors remain bouyant.

The Trade Doubler advertising network covers the UK, Scandinavia, France, Germany, Spain, Benelux, Ausria, Switzerland, Italy, Poland and Lativa.

NMA.co.uk

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Google or Yahoo or Ebay might buy worldwide publisher

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 14:24:46 +0000

According to Brand Republic the big online brands could well move into the traditional media by buying a firm called Trader Classified Media.

Trader Classified Media (not ‘trade’ as reported elsewhere) owns 575 print titles and 56 web sites in 20 countries including the US, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Russia amongst others.

What could this mean for the globe? It is possible that the 575 sites could be used to take image advertising from the Pay Per Click systems giving the image side of this type of publishing a quick lift.

At the moment, it is speculation – but it is widely reported and thus highly likely to be, at least in part, truthful.

Google and Yahoo! look at tie-up with traditional media firm – Media Bulletin – Media news by Email – Brand Republic

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Firefox browser use expands rapidly in Europe

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 12:37:19 +0000

XiTimonitor has published a study showing that Firefox is truly taking off with European audiences.

Norway and Portugal have been the fastest growers in the last with 19% and 15% respectively. Five eastern European countries score for the first time – Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Ukraine and Slovakia. Top scorers are Finland, Germany and Poland.

XiTi – Etude Xiti Monitor

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