The official Simply blog

From the 28^th – 30^th June 2010 Simply.com will be exhibiting at the Online Marketing Show taking place in the Grand Hall, Olympia, London.

Simply.com will be present on stand number A308 to demonstrate our revolutionary platform and discuss our latest targeting technology.

The Online Marketing Show is the largest event to showcase the most up to date trends in digital marketing, proving visitors with invaluable information and opportunities to meet with best suppliers and thought- leaders in the industry.
An event not to be missed by anyone looking for the latest best performing communication strategies.

Register for the Online Marketing Show and gain unlimited access to Marketing Week Live, the UK's largest integrated marketing event.

We hope to see you there!

Online advertising made simple 19.05On Friday 21st May 2010 Simply.com exhibited at the Business Start Up show at London Excel.

Matthew Brown, UK Marketing Director gave a presentaion to over 100 delegates at the event about how to be effective at online advertising, making it simple to understand by anyone in business.

Due to the huge popularity of the seminar, please find attached a copy here for any one who could not make the talk.

If you have any questions please get in touch

Recently Simply.com UK sent a survey to over 25,000 businesses to better understand firstly how they do their online advertising, and secondly to get feedback from Simply customers.

Out of all the businesses that responded to the survey, only 31% said that they advertised on the web and most of these had an online advertising budget of less than £10,000 per year. Nearly 70% of them spent lower than £5,000 per year on online advertising.

Using An Agency Or Advertising Online Directly?
One of the key questions which we asked was whether customers are using an agency or whether they are doing their own online advertising.  One of the surprising results was that only 15% use an agency, 75% advertised directly and the remaining 10% did both.

These businesses were also asked which channels they currently use for their online advertising. While 65% use Google Adwords, 53% advertised on specific sites, 18% used Yahoo, 12% advertised on content networks and 24% advertised on social network sites.

Does Online Advertising Yield Results?
52% of the businesses did not find that online advertising was profitable for them and nearly the same number said they could get traffic to their site but had difficulty converting this to business. 

This is a common problem with small businesses. They don’t have the budget to employ an agency and run online advertising directly, as borne out by the results shown above with 75% of businesses not using an agency. Furthermore 46% of the respondents felt that they did not have the time to set up campaigns.

The Cost of Online Advertising
Fees for pay-per-click advertising typically consists of a fixed management fee and a percentage of the ad spend, and while this may work for larger businesses spending £1000 or more per month, the fixed fees become too high for smaller businesses  to make it worthwhile. Also agents often require a minimum 12 month contract which small businesses can’t commit to.

Online advertising with Simply however provides the benefit of agency support but without the cost. There is a minimum spend of only £5, no monthly fees, no hidden costs, and customers only pay for clicks they use.

The Difficulty of Online Advertising
Using Google Adwords directly requires a good understanding of quality score, AB testing of advert creatives, how to set up campaigns properly, whether to set keywords to broad, phrase or exact match, etc; and if businesses don’t take the time to understand how to do search engine marketing, they are not likely to have a successful campaign.
Simply.com however makes the process of setting up a pay-per-click advertising campaign “simple” as the name implies.

Customers simply enter their daily budget and sector and Simply does the rest. Our proprietary technology optimizes customers’ online ads automatically using behavioural, yield and contextual targeting.

Simply also has a strong support team which customers can call at any time for help and advice.  The Google campaigns which customers set up are monitored and improved by a team of qualified adwords professionals, and there are clear and simple online reports which show a campaign’s performance in real time.
Also small businesses trying to advertise directly online can also do so with the same Simply account.

Online Ad Performance
Another feature which sets Simply apart from other online advertising networks is our proprietary ad targeting technology, driven not just by content, but also on user behaviour. 

Simply’s aim is to focus on “users” rather than on “content”.  When optimizing the ad delivery Simply start off by allocating an equal weight to yield, contextual targeting, and behavioural targeting, and as click-through data is accumulated, more ads are sent to the targeting method which works best. 
Research conducted by Simply Labs show that ads served using the Simply targeting method performed 107% better than ads served on the overall ad server market.
When the Simply service was described to the survey respondents, 48% said they would try it. 

Simply User Feedback
Some of the businesses surveyed were already Simply users and we wanted to find out what they said about the service.  Most users were satisfied or extremely satisfied and some of the comments included “ease of access”,” simplicity”, “outstanding support”, “no hidden costs”, “no set-up fees”, and “great customer service”.

One of the key points which stood out in the feedback was the quality of support.

This week Simply.com are exhibiting at the Business Start Up Show at Excel London. The Business Start Up Show is the UK’s biggest business event for anyone starting a business with hundreds of seminars, advice and networking opportunities.


Simply.com will be present on stand 315 and will be giving a seminar on the effectiveness of online advertising at 3:30pm on Friday 21^st May in hall 3.

For free tickets to the show click here

We hope to see you there!

Alternatively, if you can’t make it contact us now on 0845 363 6172 for advice regarding your own simply campaigns.

Thank you to everyone who took part in our recent survey. Your feedback has provided us with some invaluable insights into our service.

So far our results show us that 74% of you plan to continue using Simply.com for your online advertising and 64% are likely or very likely to recommend us to other businesses.

If you missed out on completing our survey, don’t worry there is still time, just follow the link here

You never know you might even be the lucky winner of 6 bottles of champagne!

Simply Special Packs is a new offering designed to allow you to create advertising campaigns on Simply.com with a guaranteed amount of visitors.

Our new Simply Special Packs are designed to give you the same quality of advertising but at special reduced prices.  We also guarantee the number of visitors to your site and what’s more we provide a dedicated Traffic Manager to your account to provide continual support and optimize your campaigns.

Your Traffic Manager will define the best configuration to optimize your campaigns and will constantly monitor and optimize your account to ensure 100% performance delivery.


To find out more about Special Packs call us on 0845 363 6172

Tomorrow May 5th and Thursday May 6th Florence will host Better Software, the first Italian conference on software development for entrepreneurs and managers in the sector. Dada will be sponsoring the event and Antonio Tomarchio will give a speech about Social Apps and Mobile Apps: the 2.0 revolution (tomorrow May 5th at 3:55 pm).

Facebook and iPhone phenomena are completely changing the Internet approach. Trends show that social and mobile apps engagement will create new web-marketing opportunities and for those advertisers, publishers and ADnetworks that will understand the next changes and know how to monetize on Social and Mobile media (with Simply.com for example).

More information on the program clicking here.

The study “Audience Ad Targeting: Data and Privacy Issues” by eMarketer, highlights the exponential growth of investments in behavourally targeted online campaigns.

It shows a growth in the US between 2008 and 2010 of +45%.



The main advantage of behavioral targeting is the ability to only show ads on sites that are relevant to the behavour of the user previous to visiting the site.

Through the use of behavoural targeting publishers are able to increase the relevance of ads shown and therefore click through rates and revenue generated.

Simply.com’s sophisticated software is unique in the marketplace in offering not just behaviourial targeting but also yield and contextual, ensuring the ads shown on your site deliver the maximum revenues possible.

Simply.com has recently extended its services to France.

You can access this new version at:

https://advertiser.simply.com/fr/

Similarly, there's also the French version of the Publisher section.

The launch of this new version is also accompanied by an extension of the Simply.com network for editors and website owners across the French market.

Publisher Anna Bruno has been working on the web for over 10 years

“FullPress.it is a technology and business magazine that will shortly be re leasing a  completely new look Fullpress Agency also publishes two other sites:FullTravel.it,a traveling magazine, and FullSong.it, a music magazine.

We use the Simply.com web advertising service to monetize all three sites.
 
Simply.com is implemented using Javascript code directly into a proprietary software that manages the advertising of all our sites. In terms of performance Simply.com is in line with what is currently available on the market while in terms of flexibility, Simply.com imposes no exclusive as opposed to traditional dealerships: I can say I am satisfied with the new service."