To learn more and see some great demos, slides and presentations go to html5rocks.com.

Here are some examples we have found to get you thinking. There is no reason for design and imagination to be compromised for the web.

http://beetle.de – excellent experience, just hold down on the down arrow key. (Use your arrow keys)

http://bartaz.github.com/impress.js/#/bored – This is mostly using CSS3, with some help from javascript.

http://www.nikebetterworld.com

http://www.nike.com/jumpman23/aj2012/

http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/ball_pool/ – html 5 canvas, connects with the accelerometer in hardware.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/NewsGlide/ – A brilliant example of what can be achieved. Great UI, transitions and user experience.

http://www.npr.org/webapp

http://bostonglobe.com – The responsive design, touch optimisations, and saving articles for later make this one of the leaders of the pack in online publication.

http://html5.labs.ap.org

http://optimus.usatoday.com – Single page loading and article browsing make this a very nice experience

http://captaindash.com – A very smooth ‘one page’ website. Making the most of css3 and javascript.

http://learnlakenona.com – A great slide navigation menu with a well used multi layer sliding background to create a feeling of movement.

http://www.kipling.com.br – Very nice full screen images with smooth transitions and slide show.

http://360langstrasse.sf.tv/page/ – This site literally takes you on a journey. Navigate and move down the road.

It is not a case of ‘should we have a mobile strategy?’, but ‘what is our mobile strategy going to be?’. How is your company going to take advantage of mobile?

Some recent research by Flurry shows that there is a huge mismatch between consumer time spent on a media (TV, Print, Web, Radio and Mobile) and the ad spend when it comes to mobile. Not surprisingly TV commands the greatest level of ad spend, at 43% and 40% of consumer time. Mobile on the other hand claims 23% of consumer time and yet only 1% (yes one percent) of ad spend goes on mobile. Astonishingly print gets 29% of ad spend whilst only having 6% of consumer time.

Agencies and marketing departments are still caught in an advertising model that has been doing the rounds since advertising first took off. TV, print and radio all have a greater percentage of ad spend than the consumer time spent, whereas Web and Mobile don’t. If mobile and web are combined they account for 45% consumer time, yet only get 17% of ad spend. Amazing.

In the year 2000 there were just over 390 million internet users, now that figure is nearly 7 billion. The internet was a big deal in 2000, the tech bubble predictable grew and then popped. However business’ knew that they had to have an online presence. In 2011 there were 1.2 billion mobile web users, and yet business’ are slow to realise the importance of mobile.

As mobile data packages improve, speeds improve and access to open WiFi (hopefully soon White-Space) improve so to will the numbers in mobile browsing. The price of smartphones is dropping all the time, Orange have a touchscreen pay as you go handset for under £40. So called feature phones are getting less and less shelf space, now just occupying a dark largely unvisited corner.

Questions you should be asking yourself:

Is my website optimised for mobile browsing?
How does it look on my phone, and my tablet?
What is the experience like?

If you mostly come away with a negative feel then you should really be doing something about it – get in touch. If you are a commerce website, then you must find a way to optimise your store for mobile viewing. M-commerce is on the up and up. With a smartphone shoppers are able to research a product and compare prices in an instant. Your site could benefit from these keen to buy shoppers.

If you are a local business, are you listed on Google maps? This is a must. One in three mobile searches have local intent (according to google), if your business is not listed you are missing out.

Advertising on mobile is an area that present some brilliant opportunities for – but not exclusive to – local businesses. The ads can have an instant click action to make a phone call. A direct response. This is far better than a click that will be charged for and yet may only result in increasing the bounce rate.

Reading / watching material

http://youtu.be/9GalBu_cEkM – Google mobile facts and stats
http://youtu.be/CjUcq_E4I-s – Google mobile facts and stats

http://www.google.com/ads/mobile/advertisers/ – learn more about advertising on mobile

http://www.iabuk.net/disciplines/mobile-marketing – Internet Advertising Bureau

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2012/2012_Mobile_Future_in_Focus – ComScore Mobile Future in Focus 2012

Domino’s say 13% of digital sales come from a mobile or a tablet, £10 million from the iphone app alone.

Macmillan’s mobile site accounts for almost one-fifth of total traffic

The impressive growth of smartphone usage from 2010, to 2011

More of a technical guide from Smashing Magazine, well worth a read

Targeting Users:

Well lets start with the most obvious point. Users. If you have a website you are either advertising your services or your products. With PPC you can target specific users with keywords, geo-location targeting, placement targeting and language targeting. This means that your ad content is going directly to the user who is looking for it. You can design your marketing campaign to meet the user exactly at the stage they are at: Is the user ready to buy? If so they will be using specific keywords (these are known as the short tail), is the user still deciding what products/services to go with? Then they will be running searches using generic search terms (also known as the long tail).

Results driven:

With PPC campaigns you will start to see which campaigns are working and which campaigns are not. You are able to test and refine your strategies almost everyday. This may be with keywords or re-wording ads, maybe bidding more on a keywords maximum CPC’s so as to gain a better ranking for your ads. You will also be able to tell what users are finding compelling on your website by using programs like google analytics in conjunction with adwords. You can track and test landing pages. Assuming that you’ve linked a different landing page to different ads and ad groups, It will start to become obvious as to what users are interacting with on your website. So you can adjust your website layout/design to better accommodate the user.

Budget control:

This is the point were most people start to get nervous. The assumption is that for a PPC campaign to be successful you need to ply thousands of pounds into the campaign. This is not true. If anything it is a fairy tale in online marketing. In fact you can decide the exact budget that you want to operate within. Adwords will automatically stop the campaign when it reaches the budget. The adwords campaign manager is the one responsible for the day to day running and ultimately the success of the campaign. They can choose to bid on high value keywords that will drive traffic and conversion, or target low value keywords that will drive traffic but probably not conversion.

What about false clicks? Well google cleverly have come up with an algorithm that can identify when an ad is occurring invalid clicks, if this does occur they will resolve the problem within a few moments of the malicious clicks.

SEO

One of the myths of online marketing is that PPC and Organic search are in opposite camps, in essence that they are rivals in online marketing. This is not true. In fact PPC forms a base for organic search to be successful.

1. Keyword optimization, with your PPC campaign you are able to see which keywords your users are searching for so you are able to implement those keywords into your websites content, meta data, tags, etc.
2. Traffic and ranking. The more traffic you have going through your website the better your google ranking is. PPC targets specific users who want what you are offering, and drives that traffic towards your website. If your website is a quality website (googles definition for a user friendly or optimized website) then users will spend more time on it, thus giving you not only ranking points with traffic but also points for usability (remember googles focus is the user first, so be creative with how your users can interact with your website.)
3. Implement, test, refine. You are able to get immediate results with adwords. For example, you are trying out a few new lay out, and are unsure of which to use. You set them up live and link them as landing pages to verious ad groups, and see how users respond to them.

Value in PPC:

If being able to specifically target users, gather data result within 24hrs (although I would suggest maybe gathering results on a campaign only after a few weeks to a month, this will allow for any variants to average themselves out), being able to control your budget daily and monitor it minute by minute, or even just using a PPC campaign to refine your organic search campaign doesn’t show you the value of PPC. Then I would assume you are a part of the 18% of the UK population that does not have access to the internet.

After all is said and done, there are many ways to measure the value of your websites ROI. It is the results that matter in the end, and those results may be in the form of better understanding your target market, or a user completing an interaction on your website. Regardless of what they are, PPC can help you reach every goal you’ve set out to achieve with your online marketing campaign this year.

AS an integrated media agency Angel believes in creative thinking when it comes to websites and online marketing campaigns. Whether it’s a social media campaign, Organic search, PPC campaign or redeveloping your website from the ground up. We have a web solution for you. Why not send us a brief and see what we can do for you?

We are given a clue to the reason that QR codes can be successful in it’s name. QR stands for Quick Response. As the uptake of smartphones continues so to do the means by which a company is able to directly communicate with smartphone users. People are getting more and more used to using bar code reading apps to hunt for products, get reviews and compare prices. These same apps can read a QR code, and more and more people are realising this.

All a QR does in encode text in a 2D barcode format, so if there is more text the QR code looks more busy. A URL is text and can there for be turned in to a QR code so can a vCard (a digital business card). It is in these areas that QR codes are very useful.

Tesco has been using QR codes to enable people to shop, eBay had a store in Carnaby Street for 2 days over Christmas following the same model, and Glamour with PayPal have experiemented with this.

A QR linking directly to a vCard, YouTube video demoing a product, or collecting fans on facebook is a great way to get a quick response. Using a URL shortener service usually means you’ll get some basic stats on the success of different campaign.

A criticism of QR codes is that they are dull. They are two tone patchwork squares. However they don’t have to be. There are a number of customisation services out there, one of the better ones is qrhacker.com. This site makes it very easy to create some interesting, colourful QR codes.

It is important not to use a QR code just because you feel you have to. Things to consider:

What is the point in the quick response, is it needed?

Use it to gain fans and followers, to share your contact details, to demo a product or provide more information, to easily enter a competition, and so on. When people scan a QR code they may expect something extra for their effort, not just standard desktop brand / person / company / store website.

Where will the QR code be displayed?

Statistics show that print material generates by far the most scans, having a QR code on a website may not be that useful when a click will do.

Where is the QR code going?

The assumption has to be made that a person will be scanning a QR code with their phone, so be sure that the content being displayed looks good on a phone, or better still is optimised for mobile viewing.

Measure the success.

Use a URL shortener to monitor the success of a QR campaign. This will also have the added benefit of creating a less cluttered QR code

Test and test.

It is vital that you test the QR code. If you have customised it does it scan? Is it going to the correct URL? How does it work on other handsets?

Resources:

http://goo.gl – Google’s URL shortener, stats provided
https://bitly.com – URL shortener, stats provide

http://www.qrlme.com – A social QR code generator (likes, follows, vCard all in one)

http://www.qrhacker.com – create and customise a QR code.

http://contentdeveloper.com/2010/01/how-to-customize-qr-codes-with-your-brands-identity/ – information on customising a QR code.

QR Strat from Alex Blagg

Oh look a silly toddler doesn’t know how to use a magazine. In the old days they were busy turning pages and scanning for the latest baby deals currently on at Tesco. Not so now. Now a magazine is a broken tablet. Look at their chubby hand trying to touch and pinch and zoom, a baby is now born to use a tablet. Evolution has worked quickly here. Ignore this at your peril.

Ignore babies? Ignore evolution? No, and no. Ignore the fact that people expect touch functionality and a different user experience at your peril. Users expect an experience that involves swiping and touching. Whilst the insinuation that the PC is doomed seems a bit premature, there is no doubt what so ever that the tablet will become more and more common. We know that smartphones are taking over, but tablets are slightly different. Developers and website owners should be happy to see the rise of the tablet as it is far easier to adjust to the needs of a tablet user than that of a smartphone user, primarily due to to the fact that the screen is larger.

What both have in common is that they use touch to navigate. There is an obvious need for websites to understand that they have to take this in to account.


Here are our four golden rules:

• make your site responsive to screen size, especially for mobile
• where possible use gesture based navigation (swiping through a gallery)
• give your links sufficient padding for fingers, they are less accurate than a mouse pointer
• media queries are your friend

Whilst people may not be so bothered to browse the Internet on their smartphone, they will certainly be browsing the internet on a tablet. No mouse, no keyboard, just a finger or two. It doesn’t take too much effort – far less than creating a platform specific app – to modify a site to provide a good user experience for the new wave of mobile device users.

Useful resources:

http://mediaqueri.es/ – nice showcase of media queries in action to create responsive websites.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ – written in May 2010 this is now core text for anybody wanting to know more about responsive design.
http://css-tricks.com/css-media-queries/ – learn more about media queries.
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ – an increasingly popular framework.
http://cssgrid.net/ – grid systems make it easy to create a responsive website.

South Africa Tourism were looking for a way to show the UK how wonderful South Africa is. We came up with a campaign we called “My Mission”, where we sent four celebrities on Missions to discover new experiences in South Africa, and through a flash application, we gave people the opportunity to create custom “My Mission” holidays and enter a competition to join our celebrities abroad.

South Africa Tourism were looking for a way to show the UK how wonderful South Africa is. We came up with a campaign we called “My Mission”, where we sent four celebrities on Missions to discover new experiences in South Africa, and through a flash application, we gave people the opportunity to create custom “My Mission” holidays and enter a competition to join our celebrities abroad.

South Africa Tourism were looking for a way to show the UK how wonderful South Africa is. We came up with a campaign we called “My Mission”, where we sent four celebrities on Missions to discover new experiences in South Africa, and through a flash application, we gave people the opportunity to create custom “My Mission” holidays and enter a competition to join our celebrities abroad.

South Africa Tourism were looking for a way to show the UK how wonderful South Africa is. We came up with a campaign we called “My Mission”, where we sent four celebrities on Missions to discover new experiences in South Africa, and through a flash application, we gave people the opportunity to create custom “My Mission” holidays and enter a competition to join our celebrities abroad.

South Africa Tourism were looking for a way to show the UK how wonderful South Africa is. We came up with a campaign we called “My Mission”, where we sent four celebrities on Missions to discover new experiences in South Africa, and through a flash application, we gave people the opportunity to create custom “My Mission” holidays and enter a competition to join our celebrities abroad.