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WOLFGANG DIGITAL
THE DIGITAL MARKETING SCIENTISTS
Wolfgang Digital (formerly OnlineAdvertising.ie) is frequently featured in the national media. Here are some examples:
The Sunday Business Post - McElhinneys study offers insight into ROPO effect
15 June, 2014 – Google announces upcoming research online purchase offline analytics. In the meantime Irish retailer McElhinneys conducts its own study which finds 66% of sales happen in store after online research. McElhinneys represented Ireland in the European E-Commerce awards in Barcelona on June 17th.
The Guardian – Content Marketing Strategies and ROI for B2C Marketers
29 January, 2014 – We were delighted to take part in an online discussion on Content Marketing on the Guardian. The discussion brought a range of experts from different disciplines together and resulted in a variety of topics being discussed. Here’s a summary of what was discussed -> Content Marketing on The Guardian
The Sunday Business Post – Online retail revenue increases by 25 per cent
26 January, 2014 – We analysed online revenues of 20 Irish websites (spanning retail, travel and charity). We found that online revenue in 2013 was up 17 per cent on 2012. Average retail (or ‘e-tail’) revenue was up 25 per cent last year, and increased by 42 per cent in the fourth quarter. The full analysis featured in the Sunday Business Post.
Silicon Republic - Facebook news feed ads 51 times more likely to be clicked than display ads – study
4 January, 2014 – A study we conducted on Facebook Ad CTRs was featured on Silicon Republic the day after we published the results of our study on our blog.
Our findings reflect a similar study by AdRoll last year, which concluded that news feed ads were 49 times more likely to generate clicks than display ads.
Read the article here: Facebook news feed ads 51 times more likely to be clicked than display ads – study
Newstalk - Digital Marketing Series – Search Engine Optimisation and Advertising in association with FCR Media
5 October, 2013 - Bobby Kerr discusses Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Advertising with Anthony Quigley co-founder of the Digital Marketing Institute, and Alan Coleman CEO of Wolfgang Digital.
Listen to the podcast here: Search Engine Optimisation and Advertising in association with FCR Media
Morning Ireland – REPORT: Smart Phones Being Used For Lost And Found Purposes
6 August, 2013 – RTÉ’s Mark O’Flynn reports on how smart phones are being used for lost and found purposes. Our CEO, Alan Coleman puts smartphone ownership into perspective, and highlights how recent developments in social media can help in finding lost property.
Listen to the podcast here (piece five): Smart phones being used for lost and found purposes
Sunday Business Post – Real Views: Capitalise on the internet and reap rewards
By Alan Coleman
28 April, 2013 – We hear a lot about learning from failure these days. But I think modelling success is a far more worthwhile exercise.
It is important to analyse the factors that contribute to an award win, a strong financial quarter, a well-received presentation, even a successful long-distance swim in the sea.
Understanding how to integrate these factors into the next project is a key skill for any entrepreneur. It is well-documented that three-quarters of the money spent online in Ireland is going overseas.
While Irish consumers have been quick to move their lives online, Irish businesses have generally been slow to follow. The high street is blaming its falling revenues on the recession but, in reality, the recession is only half the story.
The other half is that people are now spending their cash in the world’s biggest shopping centre. It’s called the internet and, unfortunately, a lot of Irish businesses have yet to capitalise on this rapidly-growing opportunity.
Those Irish businesses that are winning in the new digital reality are those that are ambitious in their investment, find great staff or service providers and understand that winning business online is an interactive process.
If you are in your 20s and you want to start your own business, now is a great time to do it. You “know everything”, you have little in the way of commitments and you have healthy levels of the requisite blind faith.
A great approach is to identify a growing market. Find a space within that where you could realistically become the best show in town within two years, and pour yourself into it.
There are a really exciting crop of young entrepreneurs bringing energy and fresh thinking to their industries in Ireland right now. I am a big fan of Dave and Steve Flynn of the Happy Pear, Colin Harmon of 3FE, Paddy Cosgrave of the Dublin Web Summit, Niall Harbison and Lauren Fisher of SimplyZesty, John Mahon and Eoin Cregan of Bodytonic Music and Joe Macken of Crackbird, to name but a few.
These ballsy disruptors are reshaping their respective markets.
Alan Coleman is chief executive of Wolfgang Digital
Read th
21 October, 2013 – This piece features Alan Coleman and includes a discussion which revolves around preparing your business for Christmas shopping online.
Listen to the podcast here: Prepare Your Business for Online Shopping
is and more in the Sunday Business Post Digital Edition
Sunday Business Post – Best in Class Honoured at Annual Awards
$17 March 2013 – The 600 leading players in the Irish digital media industry gathered earlier this month to celebrate the tenth annual Samsung Digital Media Awards, held at the Convention Centre Dublin.
A record number of entries were received this year, reflecting the growth of the sector and demonstrating how critical and the digital medium has become to organisations from SMEs and NGOs to multinationals.
In acknowledgement of the growing level of interest and entries, the number of categories in this year’s Samsung Digital Media Awards was expanded to 25.
An exciting addition to this year’s line-up was the Trailblazers Award, which was presented to the Dublin-based Digital Marketing Institute. The award is presented to a company which has helped showcase Ireland on the international stage. The Digital Marketing Institute recently signed a €3 million contract with the largest training body in Asia – NIIT India – to offer digital marketing education overseas. Some 25,000 students in India will be up-skilled in this area over the next three years. Ian Dodson, chief executive officer with the Digital Marketing Institute, said he was delighted to accept the inaugural Trailblazers Award on behalf of the institute. “It is a true honour to be recognised in this way at the Samsung Digital Media Awards, such a prestigious event in the annual business calendar. Our vision is to offer cutting-edge, career-focused training programmes in the emerging areas of the knowledge society, and we believe that, with our expertise in certification and training, we can create a globally competitive workforce for the digital marketing industry.”
Dublin-based Wolfgang Digital beat off stiff competition to win the coveted 2013 ‘Grand Prix’ accolade, an award that is presented to the most highly-acclaimed project of the year.
Wolfgang Digital’s winning entry ‘Maximizing Mega Monday’, was given the top grade by the adjudicating panel across all 25 categories. The panel said that this was an outstanding achievement that marked a significant victory for Wolfgang Digital, a company described as having ‘continued to buck the recessionary trend to grow its business exponentially year on year”.
Wolfgang Digital also won the new award for ‘Best Integrated Media Campaign’, as well as ‘Best Search Marketing Campaign’ for the ‘iClothing Piggyback Plus’ campaign.
The adjudicating panel described Wolfgang Digital’s winning campaign as being an “innovative, integrated campaign with a suburb and interesting strategy, as well as being engaging, clear and eye-catching”.
Another new addition to the list of awards this year, ‘Best Online Advertising’, went to OMD, one of the country’s leading media agencies, for its innovative ‘Dacia’ campaign, which ‘Best Digital Media Agency went to Cybercom, a creative agency which employs 50 people in Dublin and London.
An innovative SME called Funky Christmas Jumpers, now in its fifth year producing Christmas jumpers and socks, beat off strong competition to capture the award for ‘Best SME Using Digital’.
This year’s gala dinner and awards ceremony was hosted by Aprés Match comedian Barry Murphy.
Newstalk – Down To Business – Preparing Your Business For Online Shopping
21 October, 2013 – This piece features Alan Coleman and includes a discussion which revolves around preparing your business for Christmas shopping online.
Listen to the podcast here: Prepare Your Business for Online Shopping
RTE TV – The Business
Sunday Independent - Specialising in Google AdWords
Alan Coleman founded specialist Google AdWords agency OnlineAdvertising.ie three years ago, after the post graduate course in digital marketing he planned to take was unexpectedly cancelled.
Undeterred, he decided to set up his own online advertising agency.
“Despite the course getting scrapped, I knew that digital marketing was going to be essential for the future success of any Irish business, online or offline,” he said.
“There is no recession online; it’s a purely offline phenomenon. E-commerce sites received 52pc more visits in 2010, and online transactions were up 36pc during the same period. That is beyond growth, it’s boom time.”
OnlineAdvertising.ie offers a full range of advertising online services and specialises in Google AdWords. It currently has over 40 domestic and international campaigns in operation.
“Most Irish AdWords advertisers are at the unconscious incompetence’ stage of the learning curve, they literally don’t know how much they don’t know! We add value because we take the time to fully understand their competitive offering; we than leverage all the Google AdWords tools and features to maximize the businesses online returns,” Coleman explained.
He added that with conventional offline marketing techniques it is more difficult to ascertain what worked and what didn’t.
“The value of online advertising has been proved again and again as it is measurable.
“Every time an ad is clicked on or an online sale is made the transaction can be analysed. If you can measure it you can manage it.”
Sunday Independent
Starting a business, Spring, 2011
Online ad changes drive rise in click-through rates
WITH SERCH advertising retaining its dominant share of the online market, one agency capitalizing on its appeal is Google AdWords specialists Wolfgang Digital.
It has increased its headcount from three to seven so far in 2012 and expects to employ a total of 12 by the end of the year.
Changes in Google’s privacy policy introduced on March 1st, has fuelled further growth in the search advertising market, says Wolfgang’s chief executive Alan Coleman.
“We’ve seen click-through rates increase dramatically, in some cases doubling.”
The new consolidated privacy policy means that private data collected by one Google service can be shared with its platforms, including You Tube and Gmail, facilitating more targeted advertisements.
Developments such as Google’s Ad Preferences Manager will also help digital marketing evolve. Coleman believes, as consumers can ask Google to stop showing them advertisements for irrelevant products.
“People’s perception towards advertising will swing from seeing it as mental pollution to a useful service” he says.
Coleman forecasts that the agency, which until recently was called OnlineAdvertising.ie, will double its staff to 25 next year. It’s hiring policy reflects the greater desirability of data analytics skills in today’s recruitment market.
“We actually don’t hire marketers we hire people with very strong maths and analytical ability.”
“Digital marketing platforms such as Google AdWords and Facebook are built by engineers, so it makes sense to recruit and train people who think like engineers.”
Irish Times
Irish Marketing Journal – Bring On The Specialists
Key Performance Indicators
ln February, a small agency called Wolfgang Digital(OnlineAdvertising.ie) won the Gold Medal for the Best Digital Advertising Agency at the Digital Media Awards 2011.
The significance of this award is manifold and has exciting implications for the paid search industry in Ireland.
Wolfgang Digital is a stand-alone, paid search-only agency. They don’t do anything else. At the time I met with its owner, Alan Coleman and it had 18 clients (as you are reading this, that number is increasing). lts success is documented and acknowledged by its clients and by Google, which will be publishing two success stories for Wolfgang Digital clients in the coming months.
One could argue that Wolfgang Digital has the best business model for paid search in our industry. It charges by the hour. There are no flat fees and it does not take a percentage of the media spend. Short of hiring a paid search position in-house, this is the only way that paid search support will work to achieve the best possible results. As it is seeing massive increases in sales and conversion rates for its clients, it is also looking at performance-based billing models – which will be a win-win for the agency and its clients.
Every Wednesday, the agency cocoons itself away from client inquiries and conducts a ‘learning day’ to keep up with the multiplicity of changes Google makes to its search platforms. Google makes changes to its system about once every three days. If your search account managers aren’t keeping up with those changes, you’re losing valuable resources for your campaigns – and these guys understand the value of learning in spades – and so do its clients. lf your search campaigns aren’t currently availing of things like ad extensions, automatic tools or if you don’t know that Google just removed the ability to manually target ad position, your search provider isn’t keeping up with the sweeping changes Google has made over the last few months – and it’s costing your campaigns in ways you haven’t yet recognized.
While Wolfgang Digital is making its mark and having an impact with its client base, the recognition it received at the Digital Media Awards is as much about the industry itself as it is about its agency. That the judging panel for the Digital Media Awards recognised the significance of this business model as well as the success it achieved is a very welcome sign that Ireland ‘gets it’-which is of great importance now more than ever before.
Even though Wolfgang Digital is a rival to my own business, I am so impressed with its work, its ethics and its results, that I could not help but champion this agency because it is a great benefit to the online market in Ireland – and the more this market grows the better it is for everyone involved.
Irish Marketing Journal
By Stephanie Courtney
The Sunday Business Post – Online Ad Agency Makes Light Of The Recession
Alan Coleman went into business after a Post Graduated course in Digital Marketing that he had planned to take was scrapped due to lack of interest.
Now, less than four years later, his company, Onlineadvertising.ie, has grown so much that he has over 40 international campaigns running. Last week, they won the gold medal for Best Digital Advertising Agency in DMAs (Digital Media Awards).
Based at the media cube at Dun Laoghaire, Coleman offers clients a full range of online advertising services, and his firm is a specialist Google AdWords agency.
“I had a few businesses before,” said Coleman. “I sold smoothies at festivals around Ireland, and I had a lunch delivering service. Then I saw the potential for business online. There is no recession online, and I am shouting this from rooftops.
“The recession is purely offline phenomenon. Online markets are growing by double digits every year. Visa reported that online transactions grew by 34% last year, which is massive growth, ” he said.
“What we have seen with our e-commerce clients is that they are doing very well with their campaigns and getting great returns for their investments.
“That’s not surprising, but what is surprising is the number of offline businesses tapping into the online growth and doing some really great business.”
Coleman, who took on a full time employee last year, has introduced new “acquisition technology” into online campaigns, meaning that advertisement costs are paid for based directly on sales.
“What’s amazing about online advertising is that every single element of a campaign is measured – every time someone has seen or clicked on an add, or is on a site. And every time a sale is made, it’s measured too, so we can now track sales back to the first time that an ad has been seen,” he said.
Sunday Business Post
By Donal Gorman