One of our clients is a leading Israeli Mobile Telecom provider.
With an above average percentage of their budget geared towards online advertising (Banner & AdWords), they are both brand oriented and keen on measuring the effectiveness of each campaign they launch.
While it’s pretty obvious that when a banner campaign runs in conjunction with their AdWords, the conversion rises, the extra exposure received from the large amounts of traffic coming and going through a few Israeli portals like Walla and MSN increases recognition and brand value.
This week while looking at the numbers we where able to notice how prominent this increase is, while the AdWords campaign runs nonstop and are divided into several groups which are measured according to different campaign objectives.
During August a banner campaign ran on Walla, the banner campaign was geared towards a massive hiring campaign for support staff (all the Telecoms are strengthening their staff due to changes in roaming laws passed a few months ago).

During August, which should show lower search inventory due to summer lags, the campaign showed a major increase in both search volume and click-through rates.
When comparing the dates of the campaigns, there was a direct correlation between the increased searches (and clicks) to the banner campaign that ran on Walla and MSN.
So what does this mean?
There can be several conclusions, searchers are seeing the banner ads then searching… mmm, maybe and perhaps
Brand awareness increases, probably.
A few other insights from their HR department…. the CVs that where submitted via the Google campaign where of much higher quality (no surprise there).
The cost per CV was substantially lower from the Google campaign.
The Google campaign budget was much lower then the banner campaign yet the number of CV generated from Google was only a bit less.

This is probably one of the smarter moves Walla has made this year.
Former Vertical Head at Google Israel Muli Lahav appointed as Wallas new Marketing Manager.
Muli was one of the first Google first employees in Israel, no doubt his experience and knowledge gained at Google will be beneficial to the ailing Walla.

We wish him luck.

What will Walla, Once Israel’s leading web portal and search engine be able to bring in 2008, probably not much.
Ilan Yoshua hopes differently, in The Marker Week, he lays out his plan for Walla for 2008.
On cant help but think that perhaps Mr. Yoshua not really getting at the source of the problem with Walla, not doubt that he has brought order to a company that was ridden with bureaucracy and indecision, but since Erez Philosoph, Walla’s former founder and creative force left the company, Walla has failed at every added value service it has rolled out.
Mr. Yoshua seems to think that investing in more servers (like the users are missing storage space) will get users to migrate back to walla mail.
Walla is loosing search market share every month, with a failed endeavour at developing at PPC and contextual advertising engine (AdVatange) that bring no real advantage when comparing with AdWords, Mr. Yoshua seems more concerned with pleasing the public and catching up in the race rather then developing something worthwhile. Stating we dont have the engineering resources of search rivals Google and Microsoft, Mr. Yoshua obviously was not aware the gmail and other Google services where written in only several days time by engineers probably no less talented then the once he has one floor below his office.
Its safe to say that unless Walla has some surprises being cooked up (insiders say they will focus on video), Walla will not make second… or third.