Widget Marketing & Optimization

A 360i POV, available in full on your client extranet

Overview
Widgets present ways to syndicate content to consumers’ social network profiles, blogs, personal homepages, and desktops. The most successful widgets can quickly become massively viral, but even moderately successful campaigns can offer cost-effective branding, engagement, and search engine optimization value.

What Are Widgets?
Widgets provide a way of syndicating any form of digital content to other websites or the desktop, with the widget producer controlling the content and design of the widget and the consumer controlling where to post it. Widgets are alternatively called gadgets (by Google), applications (by Facebook), and, on occasion, badges.

Global Widget Reach
According to comScore, there were 178 million unique web widget viewers worldwide in April 2007, with widgets collectively reaching 21% of the global online audience. In North America, widgets reach 40.3% of the region’s internet users. comScore’s metrics do not currently include desktop widgets or Google gadgets, and the reporting period dates prior to when Facebook applications launched. Widgets can be expected to disproportionately skew toward consumers under age 30, with especially heavy penetration among teens and college students. Several of the most popular widgets are photo-sharing applications that have scaled largely on MySpace.

Three Types of Widgets
There are three types of widgets, and they can all be used to achieve different goals. A comparison table is provided below.

Desktop Widgets: Users download the widget and may keep it running constantly in the background.
Pros: They provide a pervasive brand experience for the widget producer even if the user is offline.
Cons: They require downloading, and they’re only seen by the user who downloaded it. Examples include WeatherBug’s live weather updates and Southwest Airlines’ Ding! deal alert.

Personal Web Widgets: Users post the widgets to their personal homepages such as iGoogle.
Pros: For users who set their personal homepages as their browsers’ start pages, the widget may be viewed every time the user’s online.
Cons: They’re only seen by the user who added it, and the user has to regularly visit his or her personal homepage for the widget publisher to get the most value.

Public Web Widgets: A user posts a widget publicly to social network profiles, blogs, online communities, and other sites. The best widgets stay on those pages indefinitely. Facebook Applications also fall under this category, though such widgets function best when customized to take advantage of the community functionality on that particular network.
Pros: They scale -- if the user installs one widget, it can be seen by many people, and the user can install it on multiple sites.
Cons: The publisher needs to provide new content regularly to keep the widget fresh, or it must be highly interactive so that users can constantly experience it in new ways.

Widget Marketing Goals
Widgets present ways to syndicate content and extend branding rather than drive traffic or sales directly from the widget. Establishing direct response goals for widgets should generally be avoided, though there are exceptions, such as the Southwest’s Ding! alerts.

Marketers can use a range of metrics to measure widget marketing campaigns, depending on the content of widget, where and how it is hosted, and the overall campaign goals, including: the number of user embedding the widget, the number of sites where each user embeds it, pageviews, interaction rates and engagement metrics, ad revenue (for sponsored widgets), and search engine optimization value.

Widgets and Advertising Campaigns
For marketers who want to participate in reaching widget users without getting involved in the challenges of creating a widget from scratch, widget sponsorships and widget ad networks are emerging. Visa, for instance, sponsors the Forbes.com news feed widget, and many related advertising opportunities are in the works. Google, meanwhile, launched its Gadget Ads for promoting widgets in any standard ad unit.

SEO Value of Widgets
There are several ways to consider search engine optimization with widgets:
1) Develop links. For web widgets on public pages such as MySpace profiles and blogs, including text links in widgets can provide some SEO benefits. Widgets can potentially offer similar value as being included on someone’s blogroll (the list of permanent links on a blog), but the backend of the widget will determine if that’s even possible.
2) Optimize for widget directories. Google, Yahoo, WidgetBox, SpringWidgets, and Snipperoo are just some of the directories where consumers can find widgets. Widgets should include optimal keywords in the titles and descriptions on those sites.
3) Increase search shelf space. For any query, the more links you have in the top ten natural search results, the more you own that term and gain a major competitive advantage. A page for your widgets is one more opportunity for visibility. This isn’t a commonly used strategy yet, but it can provide incremental value. The object here is to optimize the page that the widget is on.
4) Support Digital Word of Mouth strategies. Widgets, if they truly offer some sort of value to the consumer (in terms of utility, entertainment, self-promotion/ego inflation, or some other benefit), can be a great hook to encourage links back from blogs and online communities.

360i’s Recommendation
360i has developed widgets for several of its clients, and they have to date proven successful at achieving the goals established at the onset of the campaigns. These widgets have all been components of broader marketing programs, a strategy we strongly recommend, rather than developing widgets in a vacuum. We are also working on testing advertising campaigns with Google and other widget ad networks. We welcome exploring widget strategies with you.