Senior/Intermediate .NET Web Developers

We currently have positions for senior and intermediate .NET web developers to implement web applications for internal and external projects. Marker Studio is a leading independently owned New Zealand based full service digital agency, founded in 2000, and part of the Marker family of companies. You will be working on significant sized projects for many well known organisations in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, using the latest development tools.

We are ideally seeking someone with the following skills and experience:

• Passion for web application development
• Experience with ASP.NET/C#/SQL Server
• Experience with JQuery
• Understanding and project experience with Kentico CMS (ideally you are a Kentico Certified Developer) or similar .NET CMS
• Love working on projects that deliver outstanding user experience
• Familiarity with Agile development methodology and Microsoft TFS
• An understanding of and hopefully some experience with responsive design and HTML5
• Experience with SQL Server data warehouse and business intelligence projects would be a bonus
• Problem solving skills
• Great communication skills
• Ability to work in a team environment
• 3 Years + commercial experience
• Self motivated, organized with time management skills

You will be working in a relaxed environment where your input and ideas are valued.

We are located just off Ponsonby Road in Auckland Central. Apply direct and come in for a chat. If you have any questions about the role, please do not hesitate to call Jon Beattie, Managing Director, on 021 434 133.

careers@markerstudio.com

Most social networks, or any form of media for that matter, follow the same evolution. First there are a couple of enthusiasts who make the product to see if it works. Then people come along and start using their service. Then everything becomes more and more corporate and the people who built it in the first place have to start thinking about profit and loss (if they haven’t sold the platform by now.).

Facebook has followed this pattern. By introducing new ways for companies to advertise they hope to see revenue advertising while still keeping the public happy, who are there mainly for social reasons. Just check out how the Sponsored Stories now appear in your news feed – also on your smart phone – to see how the advertising opportunities have evolved over just the last year.

If you run a business of some kind, you may have already jumped on the Facebook bandwagon and have already started spending on advertising campaigns. Well, chances are that you’re spending too much.

Before you keep putting money in, learn how to cut your ad costs on the site.

Simple Tips to Help You Cut Costs

Employ Detailed Targeting

The more targeted you can make your ads, the more money you’re going to save. In short, this is because you’ll have to launch fewer ads and campaigns, and you won’t have to spend nearly as much on bidding. Targeted ads receive higher CTR and bring you a much better ROI. Split up your campaign per gender, age, interests etc. and define a narrower scope.

Also, if you manage to narrow down your targeting and find your customers – people who follow up on your goals – then you obviously will see better return compared to broad targeting where a lot of people who are not interested will get exposed to your ads.
 

Use Sponsored Stories

Another way to amplify customer engagement, and in the long run give you value for money invested, is to use Sponsored Stories.  They will put your ads in prime position on the site and experience much higher user engagement, meaning you’ll need fewer ads and will ultimately spend a lot less money.

A sponsored story stems from an organic story (e.g. a user liking a Facebook page, commenting on a post or checking-in somewhere), and by sponsoring that organic story the story’s reach is increased and thus gets more exposure.
 

Launch New Ads and Evaluate

Facebook advertising is an ongoing process and you always have to evaluate the numbers and statistics to see how you’re doing. Is there something in the copy you can make better, would another image give higher CTR or is there a certain time of day where your ads perform better?

When you do a lot of testing and tweaking, and also target different demographics, you will come up with ads that you know work with different parts of the population.
 

Carefully Track Your Costs

With the proper ad-management tool, you can track your costs and figure out what you’re doing right or wrong. For instance, you can use a third-party tool and launch more campaigns with fewer ads. After tracking the data, you can easily control your bids and find a happy medium that gives you a high CTR for a much lower cost. This is only possible when you’re using a platform that enables you to split, launch and track easily.
 

Post Written By: Craig Robinson, an online writer for a facebook campaign tool, Qwaya. He also loves to write different topics about social media strategies and often engages in some forums and social context.

Marker do not necessarily use or endorse particular products, services and strategies or take the views discussed on guest posts.

For advertisers, mobile is where many businesses still need to turn to to take advantage of cheaper and higher quality clicks. While investors are watching for Google to get more revenue in the mobile space, right now it is great for AdWords advertisers since it is still less competitive than desktop.

But not all websites can take advantage of this. Your website must be, at minimum, mobile-friendly. It has to render well before AdWords will let you send mobile traffic to it. Your site then needs to be easy to navigate and use on a mobile device. Otherwise, you will get poor quality visits from delivering a bad mobile experience to users. Think about how people will interact with the site, the forms you want them to fill and the content that they need to see.

Check how your site performs on mobile and evaluate how you are bringing in mobile traffic.

At Marker, we offer the full suite of digital services including complete digital strategy, website design & build and online marketing to drive quality traffic across all devices & platforms.

We’ve all grown up with the Buzzy Bee pull along toy since the early 1940′s.

But ask the latest generation of New Zealanders’ about Buzzy Bee and they’re just as likely to tell you about Driver Don, Trikey Tom, Mary Lou and a bunch more of Buzzy’s friends who play out their lives in the fictional world of Rolling Downs. It’s a wee village of “wheelers” and “walkers” that lies between Wheelington and Walkland.

Adults may also be surprised to know that these characters were inspired from similar cherished wooden toys produced in NZ by Buzzy Bee’s creator in the late 1940′s.

Their current guardians, Lion Rock Ventures brought the friends to life in an inaugural 13 episode fully animated series in 2009. And now Lion Rock has released a new 52 episode series that started screening on TV 2 this month. This time a real child actually calls Buzzy Bee (he’s host of the radio station in Rolling Downs) in each episode. Make sure you watch out for the Christmas Tale episode screening at 6.25am on Christmas Eve.

And for those of you lucky enough to access iPads this Christmas, head to the Apple App Store to download the first of a series of interactive e-books planned for release over the next few months.

Lion Rock has partnered with leading digital agency, Marker Studio to bring a number of the episode stories to life as themed interactive book apps for the iPad.

On iPads with a front facing camera, the child reading the story is able to become part of the story. They can see themselves in the world of Rolling Downs. “The story content with real world children buzzing Buzzy Bee at his radio station in Rolling Downs provides the perfect opportunity to apply the front face camera technology and let kids see themselves in the story” explains Jon Beattie, Managing Director at Marker Studio. “I haven’t seen this application of the technology in an App before and we are delighted to be showcasing it possibly as a first in the world against the stunning colour palette of New Zealand’s famous icon, Buzzy Bee brought to life in Buzzy Bee and friends. Everything looks amazing particularly on the new retina screen devices.”

The App finishes with a fully animated segment from the Christmas Tale TV episode with the cast singing a poignant Christmas song composed by talented New Zealand composer, Andrew McDowall of Auckland based Digicake Studios. Children and adults can sing along to the words “…Christmas is only Christmas if we can share it with you..” The App includes a narrated option with narration by well known New Zealand stage and voice artist, Jennifer Ward-Lealand.

The App is first of many digital extensions to the brand planned by Lion Rock Ventures. While manufacturing economics means that production of our iconic Buzzy Bee toy is forced off shore these days, Wendie Hall, director of Lion Rock and producer of the TV series hope’s New Zealanders will take some pride that the original cherished toys have inspired New Zealand creativity to bring these toys to life as loveable characters in the digital age.

For more information please contact:

Jon Beattie, Marker Studio 021 434 133
or
Wendie Hall, Lion Rock Ventures 021 650 117

More Images

Not to get this mixed up with Sitelinks, this is marked-up data and is suitable for almost all types of data, (products, music, arts, books, business listings, restaurants, recipes etc.).

Sometimes Google is able to turn your data into this result format automatically if it has been arranged in a way that it recognises. Otherwise, you can choose to structure your data using the microdata or rich-snippet format as outlined in schema.org. But if you already have a site, this can become quite a task depending on the complexity of your data and the additional development cost to implement the format into your templates.

Today, Google Webmaster Tools announced a useful tool to mark-up structured data. It is called Data Highlighter and it lets you easily highlight and tag website data through the GWT interface – without modifying or HTML tagging the pages themselves. You can do this without a developer.

Doing this will give Google a better understanding of the type and format of the data on your site so that it can be displayed in a more user-friendly format on Google search results.

Currently, this feature is only available for highlighting Event data types but should be open to more data types in the future; making these search result formats easier to achieve.

Learn more about this feature by signing into your webmaster tools account and go to Optimization > Data Highlighter.

The problem for Google and advertisers is the quality of mobile clicks tend to be much lower than desktop. But the good thing for advertisers is that there is less competition than desktop, making the CPC cheaper than desktop right now.

Google has been quick enough and proactive in making advertisers aware of mobile usage. However, many advertisers have not been so quick to upgrade to mobile-friendly sites, presenting no reason to advertise on mobile.

Lower CPCs are not enough to convince advertisers either. Those with smartphones are all-too-familiar with our fat fingers touching ads unintentionally and how annoying this is. Those who know how these ads work will be acutely aware that a wasted click has just been charged to the advertiser. Getting these placements to convert into revenue for advertisers is another big barrier to placing higher bids.

Google’s double-tap ad feature for app ads is a step in the right direction. Google and especially Facebook still have a lot of work to do to improve the delivery of mobile ads and bring the competing advertisers to the new and rapidly evolving mobile format.

What will you do?

- Primary responsibility is designing for websites, web applications, mobile web and native phone and tablet applications.
- Work with the development team to implement the design into the final product and integrate closely with the development process.
- Meet with clients to take designs briefs and present and explain design concepts.
- Participation with internal and client workshops during the requirements gathering and scoping phases.
- Work closely with the project managers to ensure project deadlines are met on target and within budget.
- Provide input into improved processes regarding the design/development workflow process.
- Provide art direction, feedback and mentoring to other designers in the team.

What are we looking for?

- An awesome portfolio of work that will ideally include websites, web applications, and mobile/tablet apps.
- You will have an understanding of the principles of Responsive Design and CSS, although, you will not necessarily be expected to build your own HTML/CSS.

Want to know more?

Find out more about us.

Call Jon Beattie on +64 (0)21 434 133 for a chat or email your portfolio link to jon.b@markerstudio.com.

Bing’s selling point is access to the Yahoo! & Bing audience. With this, Bing takes 30% of the US search market share. For an advertiser, this means we should expect them to deliver 30% of the clicks. To do so, they have included many of the same features we take for granted in AdWords such as longer headlines and sitelinks. For advertisers, search engine performance is about clicks. So it is in the search engines’ interest to help us boost our CTRs.

Bing is trailing and acknowledged the friction & barriers with the platform and has been working to make it easier for advertisers to use.

The problem is that while in NZ & Australia we can still only use the Yahoo! Search Marketing platform which has been outdated over and over. In the US they had the recent Microsoft AdCenter platform which has just transitioned to Bing Ads. So the US always has the latest but the rest of us on the old platforms are not getting any updates or iterations; making it a very difficult platform to use in comparison to AdWords, not to mention the 92% share Google has in most countries outside the US (ex China, Korea & Russia – read Baidu, Naver & Yandex).

There are some unique things in Bing Ads that AdWords does not have yet if we can look forward for the new platform making it to NZ/Australia:

• Negative conflict report. – This report shows you what searches are being missed due to negative keywords and if they are conflicting with your keyword lists.
• Historical quality score report. – Lets you see how quality score has changed over time. This is great to visualise if your QS has improved or not for a particular keyword or group of keywords.

Bing Ads also released an automatic sync feature; pulling your AdWords account or campaign changes into Bing automatically, so you don’t have to make the changes on both platforms. Although, with the subtle differences in platforms, you are always best to work within the platform. This feature is simply for time efficiency and to lower the barriers to using Bing Ads. “You still need to engage with the platform for success” Director of Paid Search Monetization at Microsoft, Mike McMeekin says. The platforms iterate often. Users of AdWords know this very well. So accounts need more and more attention to make use of the features, experiment and maintain.

Segmentation of Real-Time data.

Real-time data has been around for a little while but now you can segment it.
Why is this great? If you have a campaign going in a certain location, or via a particular email/channel/social site etc., you can see that traffic in real-time and know that campaign is performing right now. With that traffic segmented, you can see right there what pages those people are visiting (and if they are converting). This is ideal for watching social campaigns unfold.

Report Shortcuts.

If you are not into making custom reports but you find yourself navigating to the same data and applying the same filters and segments to get the data you need, you only need to do that one last time, then use the new “Shortcut” feature. This will save the report settings into the Home > Shortcuts tab. Next time you need that report, just go there and adjust the date range.

Multi-Channel Funnels API.

This one is for the power users, particularly developers. You can query multi-channel funnels data if you have API access. This is useful to enable channel conversion attribution with cost and other data sources you have internally and if you want to automate the process.

One of these recent ad innovations is “Product Listing Ads”.

To advertise like this you need to have a Google Merchant Center account.

It’s value lies in that you can show much more information about products than you could with a standard text ad. Advertisers have experienced higher clickthrough rates and better quality leads with the use of imagery & pricing.

Ads could also be shown to a broader audience because keyword lists are not necessary. Instead, product data you provide the Google Merchant Center is used to determine which searches trigger the ad. If you still wish to have keyword control, you can create Product Extensions on your traditional text ads as well.

This ad format is currently only available in the US and other select countries. However, it is proving to be very successful for advertisers and useful for searches so we expect it to rollout to NZ eventually.

I have come across the ads myself and it definitely does make searching for products easier. I don’t even begin to scroll down the page. I can browse & compare direct from these links. Subconsciously, these listings are the only options I need and I immediately feel as though I have shopped around. Which is what Google is trying to do – shop around for you.

If you are selling products online, start listing your inventory on the Merchant Center and link it up with your AdWords so you are ready to go.

See AdWords Help to learn how to set it up.