Abbreviated Marketing News Round-up

Posted by on Jan 19, 2010 in Blog, Marketing News Round-up | No Comments

One Third of U.S. Internet Users Now Post Status Updates

A third of all Internet users in the U.S. now post status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook at least once per week. According to new data from Forrester Research, more than half of what the report calls “conversationalists” are female and 70% are 30 years old or older. Forrester’s data also shows that 59% of all U.S. Internet users now use social networks and that 70% consume content on social media and social networking sites.

The Cost Of NOT Branding

It’s a simple formula: Recession requires more tactical spending. This year’s budget = + online spend + social activity + lead generation campaigns—brand investment. When the dollars get tight, spend shifts to more tangible, less expensive marketing programs with the promise of shorter-term returns (or at least lower costs). Not that there’s anything wrong with saving a few bucks wherever you can get the job done more efficiently. But when saving money becomes the goal instead of a guideline, something big always suffers—and it’s usually the brand.

While this is an important problem within the B2C community, it is absolutely URGENT within the B2B community. B2B marketers in large numbers have seen their marketing resources cut back dramatically for anything that isn’t expected to generate significant near-term flows of qualified sales leads. Why? Because absent good metrics to connect brand or longer-term asset development to actual financial value, these items were seen as strategic luxuries that could be postponed.

App Stores Are Big Business: $7 Billion in 2010

According to the analysts at research firm Gartner, mobile application stores are expected to generate revenues of nearly $7 billion over the course of this year. That figure is a combination of the $6.2 billion spent purchasing the mobile applications themselves combined with an additional $0.6 billion generated through advertising revenues from in-app ads. Not surprisingly, Apple dominates this market, accounting for 99.4% of the market as of last year, states the report.

Over the course of 2009, mobile applications’ download revenue exceeded $4.2 billion with eight out of every ten apps downloaded offered free to end users, says Gartner. Going forward, the analysts predict mobile application stores’ revenue will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013. That revenue, again, will be a combination of paid applications and free applications running ads

Abbreviated Marketing News Round-up

Posted by on Jan 18, 2010 in Blog, Marketing News Round-up | No Comments

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.

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Posted by on Jan 15, 2010 in Blog, Marketing News Round-up | No Comments

Google Says Average AdWords CTR at 2%

Google seldom comments on click through rates on its flagship AdWords product. It is, after all, where they get most of their income. With millions of searches performed every day, however, the rate doesn’t have to be very high for them to clean up.

And, as it turns out, it’s not. In a thread on the Google AdWords Help forum, Google employee AdWordsPro responded to a question on what a “general” guideline for expected clicks might be. While naturally, there’s a lot of variation among industries and specific keywords, it’s interesting to see a Google employee comment (albeit vaguely) on an average CTR.

Behind China’s Search Engine Market

Mathew McDougall tells me it will become “disastrous” for American firms to reach a Chinese audience once Google.cn shuts down.

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Different search engines in China attract specific types of consumers. Without Google, the audience segments become blurred, McDougall says. He explains that Google might be a better choice for advertisers wanting to reach educated, professional and “upwardly” mobile user groups. On the other hand, Baidu dominates in cities where the average Chinese consumer resides.

Yahoo Adds Feature to Import Google Adwords Campaigns

Yahoo is set to release two search advertising tools in Sponsored Search next week before the company reports earnings on Jan. 26.

Despite the agreement with Microsoft to power the search engine’s backend infrastructure, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo continues to invest in advertising and consumer search tools. This time the company is releasing Network Distribution, and Import Campaigns.

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The Import Campaigns feature provides an easy way to convert campaigns from Google AdWords into Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns. Advertisers that are ready to convert Google AdWords campaigns into Yahoo Search Marketing simply select the browse button to upload files. Select the “Import File” button to start the process. The feature provides a summary of the information being converted.

How Google Ranks Twitter Tweets

Google has adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithms to keep Twitter tweets indexing and serving up in real time. David Talbot tells us the technique relies on PageRank technology, which helps to index and find relevant Web pages with traditional Web search.

Details in Technology Review, published by MIT, explain that relevance and authority play a key role. The more pages that link to a page—and the more pages linking to the linker—the more relevant the original pages rank. Talbot details the process.

Abbreviated Marketing News Round-up

Posted by on Jan 14, 2010 in Blog, Marketing News Round-up | No Comments

Per-Person Online Video Viewing Jumps 13%

Total video streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were all up in December 2009, led by 13% growth in time per viewer, according to US online video viewing data from The Nielsen Company. The December 2009 Nielsen VideoCensus reveals that unique viewers of online video topped 137 million for the month, representing a 10.3% year-over-year increase. Total streams viewed totaled more than 10.7 billion, a nearly 12% increase over 2008. Approximately 78 streams per viewer were watched, a 1.4% increase over 2008. Time per viewer increased 13.2% to 193.2 minutes, Nielsen said.

Just Two in Five Americans Read Newspaper Daily

Just two in five US adults (43%) say they read a daily newspaper—either online or in print—almost every day, while 72% read one at least once a week and 81% read one at least once a month, according to a December 2009 Adweek Media/Harris Poll.

The study found that one in ten adults (10%) say they never read a daily newspaper.

A similar study by Scarborough Research found that 74% of Americans say they still read a newspaper with at least some frequency. Readership levels in that study were higher among the affluent, educated and white-collar workers.

Gartner: Mobile To Outpace Desktop Web By 2013

Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013, according to a new forecast by research firm Gartner. That’s an even more aggressive outlook than Morgan Stanley’s projection that the mobile Web will outstrip the desktop Web in five years.

Gartner estimates the combined installed base of smartphones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will surpass 1.82 billion units by 2013, eclipsing the total of 1.78 billion PCs by then.

But the firm warns that many sites still are not optimized for the mobile Web, even though cell users expect to make fewer clicks on their phones than on a PC. To successfully expand into mobile, publishers will have to reformat sites from the small form-factor of handheld devices.

VW Is Back In Super Bowl After Nine Years

For the first time in nine years, Volkswagen of America will advertise during the Super Bowl. The company will premiere a 30-second spot—the first from new agency Deutsch L.A.—during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIV. The ad uses the “Das Auto” tagline introduced in 2008.

It will be followed by a new retail-centric campaign that the company says is meant to “increase model awareness and familiarity by reminding consumers of all the new Volkswagen products on the road,” per a company release.

International Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study

How do your email programs measure up against peers worldwide? Silverpop analyzed 7,000 emails sent to 188 countries to find the answers. Our latest study goes beyond traditional metrics to provide a baseline scorecard that enables you to gain a better understanding of where you stand.

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Posted by on Jan 13, 2010 in Blog, Marketing News Round-up | No Comments

Is Google Customer Service Hurting The Brand?

Through its short but illustrious history, Google has largely avoided the kind of bad PR that seems to inevitably plague a brand of such power and scale. The brouhaha over the brand’s decision to cooperate with Chinese authorities despite a pledge to “Do no evil” was quickly forgotten. The only real PR “disaster” on Google’s record is over an offensive Michelle Obama image in its top results. All that may soon change if Google cannot manage the growing problem over its customer support for the brand’s Nexus One “superphone.”

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So having never sold hardware before, it is possible Google did not fully appreciate just how much customer support a first-generation device requires. Evidence? Google’s Nexus One service and customer support is all online.

Magazines Lost a Fourth of Ad Pages in ’09

Just how bad was 2009 for magazines? Try 58,340 pages. That’s the number of advertising pages that American magazines lost last year, according to Publishers Information Bureau figures released on Tuesday.

Between 2008 and 2009, magazines lost, on average, one-quarter of their ad pages—the worst drop in the decade of data that the bureau, which measures virtually all major American magazines, had readily available. It is significantly worse than even 2001, when pages declined by 17.2 percent from the previous year. And magazines ran only about 170,000 ad pages last year, versus about 238,000 in 2001.

Can The Nexus One Add $20 Billion To Google’s Market Value?

How much exactly is the Nexus One line of Android phones worth to Google? The folks at Trefis have modeled Nexus One sales into their financial forecast for Google and estimate that it will account for nearly $20 billion of Google’s market cap (based on its target price pf $659 per share), accounting for 9.3 percent of the total. That is more than its estimated contribution of ad and search partnerships (5.1 percent), Google Apps (3.2 percent) or YouTube (2.4 percent). Only search ads account for more of Google’s total value (68.1 percent).

Papa John’s Becomes Super Bowl Sponsor

Papa John’s Pizza is extending its January “National Football Month” marketing program with something it has never done: sponsorship of Super Bowl XLIV as well as the NFL. The deal makes Papa John’s “Official Pizza Sponsor of the National Football League and Super Bowl XLIV.”

Andrew Varga, CMO of the Louisville, Ky.-based company, tells Marketing Daily that the short-term agreement ending in March came about because “we have been working with NFL franchises in nine local markets over the last three or four years and for the activating programs locally it has been a great sales boost for us. As we started to see better and better results with those nine teams, it made sense to do something bigger with the NFL.”

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Posted by on Jan 12, 2010 in Blog, Marketing News Round-up | No Comments

Starbucks Most Popular U.S. Chain According to Mobile Check-In Data

Loopt, the location-based mobile application that was a precursor to Foursquare, reports that Starbucks is sitting pretty at the top of the checkin food chain in 2010.

Loopt did some creative manipulation of its wealth of place data and put together a list of the 75 most popular chains based on checkin volume over the past few weeks. Starbucks is far and away the most popular chain with a checkin volume that is nearly 32 times that of In-N-Out Burger (which ranks 54th on the list).

More Targeted Ad Dollars Less Profitable

According to a new study from the MIT Sloan School of Management, Online advertising can be much better at targeting certain demographics than its traditional media counterparts, but as more competition enters the space, these advantages do not automatically translate into greater profits. Sloan Assistant Professor Alessandro Bonatti writes that the same search and other technology that has enabled advertisers to target particular audiences, such as men between 25 and 35 years old who work on Macintosh computers, is also creating greater on-line competition for the same audience, thus reducing the profitability of advertising on any targeted web site.

Instant Price Changes In Banner Ads

Imagine changing prices in your content management system, and have the ads on the Internet reflect the changes immediately. In a move toward the real-time Web, Liquidus is working on a feature in its BannerLink ad that allows advertisers to alter prices from their content management system, and have the changes reflect online as soon as they occur.

The next product version also will have automated “human voiceover” capability. Today, Liquidus’ ad offers a text-to-speech feature, where a script automatically generates a voiceover. Newly created technology, scheduled for release between July and September, will let Liquidus record sound bits of human speech and stitch the script together.

Abbreviated Marketing News Round-up

Posted by on Jan 11, 2010 in Blog, Marketing News Round-up | No Comments

An Introduction to Website Split Testing

It’s a fact of life that when people hire a web designer, they don’t just want a website, they want a website that does something! There can be a world of difference between these two things. The “action” they need the website to take for them can be one of several common things: selling products for their business (an e-commerce site), generating sales leads, and/or providing free information in the hope that the visitor will make a purchase from the company at a later date.

Super Bowl Ad Prices Fall; Still Cost Millions

TNS Media Intelligence said Monday that 30-second commercials during next month’s Super Bowl on CBS are selling for between $2.5 million and $2.8 million. That’s a drop from last year, when ads averaged $3 million on NBC.

Some big players like Pepsi and General Motors are staying on the sidelines. This leaves holes for smaller companies like Diamond Foods and Dr Pepper Snapple to use the Super Bowl to get their wares in front of 100 million viewers who are practically guaranteed to watch their ads.

It’s unclear how much revenue Super Bowl advertising will generate for CBS. Nearly all of the 62 commercial slots have been sold. While not conceding that ad rates have slipped, CBS said the pace of sales has been better than it was for NBC a year ago.

Best-Liked TV Commercials of 2009

TV commercials featuring Clydesdale horses, a candy-eating llama, a pampered puppy and a golf-savvy baby made the 2009 list of the top 10 best-liked TV commercials, as reported by The Nielsen Company. The media measurement firm also released is lists of the top 10 most effective product placements on brand opinion and the top 1o programs with product-placement activity.

Growing Your List Via Social Media & Blogs

Social media can help grow your brand and possibly your revenues, but have you thought about how it can also help grow your email marketing list? Let’s explore some ideas for how to capitalize on this hot marketing medium.