Online advertising data

Advertisers Favor Studying Effects to Improve Online ROI

2008-04-09T14:02:00.000-07:00

By Abbey Klaassen

Marketers should be looking at more-qualitative tests of their online advertisements if they want to improve their online return on investment, according to an online advertising report out today from MarketingSherpa.

The survey, whose findings are part of MarketingSherpa's 2008 Online Advertising Handbook, polled a variety of marketer clients and agencies about their online advertising tactics, what they found worked and what they found didn't work as well.

Measuring effectiveness
When asked which tactics most improved ROI, 25% of respondents said online ad effectiveness studies increased their online ad returns significantly. That was followed by online focus groups at 23%, upgraded site analytics software at 21%, eye-tracking studies at 20% and multivariate ad testing at 19%.

"It comes down to good advertising is good advertising," said Tim McAtee, a MarketingSherpa analyst who wrote the report. "Good advertising works at a psychological level. When we asked people what tests most drastically affect ROI, it was qualitative tests that affected that."

Marketers, he urged, should focus on ROI rather than clicks, be more aware of how creative elements encourage actions, and match up design tactics with those objectives. For example, if a marketer has a complicated message, video should be used to convey it. Or if the goal is to have people sign up for an e-mail providing more information, then an in-banner registration box should be provided.

Context counts
The report also polled advertisers on the kinds of targeting and placement tactics that were working best and found that contextual targeting was the most effective, with 41% reporting that it delivered great ROI, followed by behavioral, with 37%. Almost 30% of respondents reported great ROI from text-link ads and another 23% endorsed affiliate marketing.

"When you mix the quality with the best of targeting -- behavioral or context -- that's when you really see quite an extraordinary potential for the medium," said Stefan Tornquist, research director at MarketingSherpa.

Still, one of the barriers to marketers using more qualitative measures is figuring out how to marry them to the quant-based measures.

"We're not seeing marketers mix the two and create dashboards that show both the qualitative and quantitative side of things," said Mr. Tornquist. "Part of that is people who have been trained to do these tend not to be trained in both sides of it. They're either the crunchy granola ethnographers or math-based analytics data cruncher."
NEW YORK (AdAge.com)

Search Marketing

2008-04-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

Want to rank better on Google? There's a company you might want to check out, since it might know a thing or two about that. It's called Google.
To be specific, it's called Performics, a division of DoubleClick, which you might recall was acquired by Google earlier this month. While all the attention on the DoubleClick purchase has been on whether it would make Google too dominant in the online-ad space, some search marketers have worried about a different issue: Is it right for Google to own a company that works for better placement on Google?
Think about it. What if the New York Times Co. owned a PR firm that touted getting clients prominently positioned in The New York Times? More than a few eyebrows would rise. And that's exactly the situation with Performics and Google. It's a Google-owned business that aims to get clients better ranking in search engines, with the most important search engine being, of course, Google.

Google says it will run Performics as a "stand-alone business unit" and spend the next few months assessing it and all of DoubleClick's products and services before deciding on future plans. Me, I feel like it should have assessed from the start that operating its own search-engine-optimization firm wouldn't be compatible with maintaining the important trust consumers have in its flagship search engine. I still hope the company will quickly come up with a divestiture plan for Performics.

Let me stress that I have no beef with Performics. The company has been a leader in search marketing. It just doesn't belong in the Google family -- not if that family also contains the search results Performics works to influence.

Google's not alone in this tricky situation. When Microsoft bought aQuantive, it gained Avenue A/Razorfish, which also does search-marketing work. Just like with Google-Performics, that doesn't sit well with me.

If Microsoft gains Yahoo, as many expect, it and Google will have the biggest shares of search inventory out there. It seems enough that they should earn directly by selling their own inventory. They don't need to also earn indirectly by selling services that place listings into those pages. Leave that to the third parties, avoid the conflict-of-interest perception and get out of the search-marketing business. It's no place for an actual search engine to be.
by Danny Sullivan

2007 US Advertising Expenditures

2008-03-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

The US advertising market continued to sputter at the end of 2007 and finished the year with measured spending of $148.99 billion, up 0.2% from 2006, according to TNS media intelligence. Fourth-quarter expenditures fell 0.1% from a year earlier, it said.

“As a whole, the ad market remains stalled and is being engulfed by the spreading pessimism about general economic conditions,” said Jon Swallen, SVP of research at TNS media intelligence. “Fourth quarter performance was indicative of this malaise and early figures from 2008 suggest the growth rate for measured ad spending has not appreciably changed.”

Below, the data issued by TNS.

Measured Ad Spending by Medium

Internet display advertising continued its growth leadership, increasing 15.9% in 2007 to $11.31 billion in expenditures. Consumer Magazines registered a 7.0% gain to $24.43 billion on the strength of higher spending by consumer packaged goods marketers. Cable TV spending surged in the second half and finished 2007 at $17.84 billion, an increase of 6.5%. Outdoor advanced by 4.9% to $4.02 billion.

Among television media, full-year Network TV expenditures declined by 2.0% to $22.43 billion. Spot TV, in the face of difficult comparisons against record-setting levels of 2006 political advertising, plummeted 10.2% to $15.59 billion. Syndication TV fell 1.5% to $4.17 billion.

Ad spending declines in Newspaper and Radio media accelerated during the fourth quarter. For the full year, Local Newspapers were down 5.6% to $22.66 billion and aggregate Radio expenditures slipped 3.5% to $10.69 billion. Both media suffered from spending reductions by automotive, media and retail advertisers.

Share of Measured Spending by Medium

Directional shifts in measured ad spending are revealed by the share allocations of individual media types across time:

Internet display advertising and Magazines continue to gain share, finishing 2007 at 7.6% and 20.4%, respectively, of total expenditures.
The offsetting share declines have principally come from Newspapers and Radio.
Local TV, with its two-year business cycle tied to Olympic and political advertising, has also been edging downwards.

Television advertising

2008-03-24T16:27:00.001-07:00

According to a recent study by Ball State University on the media consumption habits of average Americans, despite the Internet's steady rise in popularity over the last few years, television remains the dominant medium in most U.S. households. On average, the general population spends over four and a half hours a day in front of the tube, making TV watching one of the most common modern leisure activities.

Advertising on television allows you to show and tell a wide audience about your business, product, or service. It allows you to actually demonstrate the benefits of ownership. You can show how your product or service works, and how it's packaged so prospective customers will know what to look for at the point of sale. And even if they aren't looking for it, when they see it they might be psychologically reminded of their desire to have it. In advertising, it often takes multiple touch points to effectively influence consumers' purchasing behavior.

Television advertising has been a popular medium for large retailers ever since the television first began to appear in living rooms. With the arrival of cable television came lowered production costs and the opportunity to reach smaller, more geographically specific markets, making it a viable option for small-to medium-sized businesses as well.

To make an effective television advertising, it's first necessary to have a good script that highlights a strong offer. Ads must also be effectively produced, and it's for this reason that it's often better to enlist the services of an advertising agency, which can help you create an entire campaign.

Top 10 IT / Internet-Based Business/Finance Webs

2008-03-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

The Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately.