Abbreviated Marketing News Round-up
January 18th, 2010 | Published in Marketing News Round-up
Top Ad Networks for December: AOL, Yahoo, Google
AOL Advertising, the Yahoo Network and the Google Ad Network were the top three internet ad networks in the US in December 2009, according to a ranking of the top 15 ad networks based on their reach among US internet users, by comScore, Inc.
For December, the AOL network reached 187 million US internet users – or 91% of the total audience – and grew 8% over the same period in 2008, comScore reported. The #2 ranked Yahoo Network reached 180.9 million users (also up 8% over December 2008), and the #3 ranked Google Ad Network reaches 178.1 million (up 9%).
The fastest growing ad network by audience reach among the top 15 was Microsoft Media Network US, which grew 31%.
Email Follow-Up Brings Abandoned Shopping Carts To Life
Email marketing firms are often hired to develop systems and tactics that are looking to serve as what another industry may refer to as “a closer.” Shoppers graze online retail sites and place items into a shopping cart, but then abandon the process.
It’s an engaged audience that would seem to be low-hanging fruit for marketers. How much money is left on the table, as it were? A new report from Experian, which owns the CheetahMail email marketing business, shows that 61% of items left in an online shopping cart are not purchased.
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The research found that email campaigns with no offer brought an open rate of 15% and click rate of 12%. Those with a special offer had 11% and 7%, respectively.
More importantly, research found that no-incentive-emails had a transaction rate of 2.9%—compared to 1.8% for those with an enticement.
New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers
New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.
United States Internet Speed is on the Decline
According to Akamai’s Q3 State of the Internet report, the United States’ internet speed did not qualify for a place in the top ten list of countries with the fastest internet in the world, and its average overall speed has actually decreased by 2.4% year-over-year from 2008 to 2009.
The United States actually ranked 18th out of 203 nations tested in terms of average connection speeds, falling behind speed leaders like South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong.
Would Apple Dump Google for Bing?
This week’s BusinessWeek cover story is about the increasingly competitive relationship between once-cozy Apple and Google. It contains a bold forecast by Jonathan Yarmis, a research fellow at consulting firm Ovum:
Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. [Apple CEO] Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple’s engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, Yarmis says. “I fully expect [Apple] to do something in search,” he adds. “If there’s all these advertising dollars to be won, why would it want Google on its iPhones?”
Well, Apple would want Google on its iPhones because it sells phones. Hands up, who wants a Google-less iPhone? But there’s a nagging truth here: Search engines on mobile devices haven’t been figured out yet. Typing text into a little box is aggravating. Voice-powered search tools have a high goof rate.
