Monday, March 30, 2009

Internet Ad Sales In 2008

From today's New York Times Media & Marketing Section:

Internet advertising rose in 2008, according to a report released Monday, but the growth is starting to flatten.

"The economy has had a significant impact on the short-term growth of the Internet advertising market," David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which contributed to the report, said in a conference call.

Internet advertising grew to $23.4 billion in 2008, an increase of 10.6 percent from 2007, according to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online advertisers, as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers.

That was the only category of advertising spending that grew in 2008 other than cable television, which rose 7.8 percent, according to Nielsen figures supplied for the report,

Over all, total non-Internet media revenue declined 2.4 percent in 2008 from 2007, according to Nielsen. Spending in network television declined 3.5 percent, in national magazines 7.6 percent and in local newspapers 7.8 percent.

Internet advertising rose in 2008, according to a report released Monday, but the growth is starting to flatten.

"The economy has had a significant impact on the short-term growth of the Internet advertising market," David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which contributed to the report, said in a conference call.

Internet advertising grew to $23.4 billion in 2008, an increase of 10.6 percent from 2007, according to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online advertisers, as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers.

That was the only category of advertising spending that grew in 2008 other than cable television, which rose 7.8 percent, according to Nielsen figures supplied for the report,

Over all, total non-Internet media revenue declined 2.4 percent in 2008 from 2007, according to Nielsen. Spending in network television declined 3.5 percent, in national magazines 7.6 percent and in local newspapers 7.8 percent.

Though overall growth was strong relative to other mediums, Internet advertising did not have the large increases of recent years.

Internet revenue dipped in the first and second quarters for the first time in four years. And online advertising in 2008 had the lowest growth rate — 2.6 percent — from the fourth quarter compared with the period a year earlier.

As Mr. Silverman said, however, "it's one of the few things that actually grew in the fourth quarter 2008."

There were some interesting shifts within Internet advertising.

Digital video revenue more than doubled in 2008 versus 2007, growing to $734 million from $324 million. Advertisers were also more frequently using performance-based ads - where they pay only when someone clicks on the ad or buys something after seeing the ad. Performance-based ads made up 57 percent of all Internet advertising in 2008, according to the report, up from 51 percent in 2007. Ads that were paid for based on how frequently they were shown - called CPM-based pricing, for cost-per-thousand - fell to 39 percent, from 45 percent. And sponsorship advertising, where publishers create custom pages and advertisements for brands, was less popular this year than last: it fell to 1 percent of all fourth-quarter revenue in 2008, down from 3 percent in 2007.

Online advertising from consumer-packaged goods companies was a big growth area, rising to $1.5 billion in 2008, up from $925 million in 2007. That was significant, said Peter S. Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who participated in the conference call.

That was "something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. People didn't think this would be the right space to be selling grocery-type products," he said. Now, "customers are becoming accustomed to seeing relatively mundane products advertised and promoted" on the Internet, he said.

Courtesy of www.nytimes.com

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Internet Explorer 8 is released

The 8th version of Internet Explorer has been released and it is better than IE7. It offers the typical enhancements of a new version of a browser including...

  • Tighter security features
  • Faster load times for pages
  • An easier to use interface

One of the most innovative new feature of IE8 is called Accelerators, which is an add-on that make things like mapping an address or emailing the page much faster. For example, if you come across an address on a web page simply highlight the text and click on the button that appears to get driving directions. There are many other Accelerators which people are building which will add many time saving shortcuts.



Another new feature in IE8 is called Web Slices which makes some of your commonly used information on the web available as soon as you get on the web. Examples include keeping track of your eBay purchases, staying up to day with the latest sports scores or the weather in your area. It is similar to a favorite (or bookmark) but it displays the page in a small drop-down window.


Overall it is a decent browser. If you are currently using IE7 you should feel comfortable upgrading. If you are an IE6 user, what are you waiting for? In my opinion, FireFox, Opera and Chrome are better browsers, but if you your used to using IE, then upgrading would be suggested.

Some of you may or may not know, it is our company policy that new sites we build will be supported on the current and previous version of all of the major browsers (IE, FireFox, Opera, Safari and Chrome) which covers over 99% of all internet users. Some of you may ask "Are you still going to support IE6 now that IE8 is out?" which is a good question because IE6 is now two versions old and falls out of our policy. The answer is we will for now because IE6 still has quite a bit of market share (it's currently at 17% and falling), but it's days are numbered. We'll be sure to let you know when we stop writing extra code to ensure that new sites we build will work with IE6.

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Actionable insight into your advertising and website design

Just discovered this great Google Analytics overview video on their conversion university channel. Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you. Here is the video from Google.

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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Print or SEO?

The Grand Rapids Press announced in yesterday's edition that they are making employee cuts and possibly future cuts to delivery in the coming months due to the "current economic climate." Publisher Day Gaydou had been keeping this under wraps but had to come clean with readers after the Ann Arbor News and other Booth Newspapers announced their cutbacks yesterday. The Ann Arbor Press is shuttering it's entire print organization just weeks after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did the same.

What does this mean? Further evidence that newspaper readership is declining, and if you are a marketer still using print advertisements as your primary marketing channel while ignoring local search, then you are missing the boat.

Take this opportunity to reassess the ROI from all your marketing channels. Ask yourself if traditional media is achieving the objectives needed to be profitable.

Internet Marketing, be it Paid Search, Organic Search, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc) and web portal advertising should be a key part if not the cornerstone of your marketing mix.

SEO (search engine optimzation) is most important though. There are endless reasons why search engine optimization must be implemented into your marketing strategy before you are left in the dust of your competition. Here are the top 5:

  1. Absence of risk. In many cases, paid advertising is subject to click fraud risk and competitor's black techniques (such as using software that would click your ads thousands of times without any real profit to your site; however, you pay for each click to the search engine). High-tech pay-for-performance programs (such as Google AdWords) claim to have advanced protection against such behavior (and they do have), however the risk can never be reduced to zero. SEO is free of any risk. Unless you spam or make obvious mistakes, it cannot damage your business.
  2. Reliability. Banner ads or paid search engine placement work until the marketing budget depletes. Then, the site disappears from the listings, and your returning customers cannot find you any more (new visitors cannot find you either). SEO helps buffer this process, so you can gradually reduce the advertising budget as you're increasing your results obtained from organic search engine listings. Also consumers are more likely to purchase from a site ranked high in the search engine results than from an evidently placed advertisement
  3. Brand awareness. A web site having a high ranking means more people see the name of the company and become familiar with the company and its products, even if they haven't made a purchase. A surveys show that consumers are twice as likely to recognize businesses ranked in the top three in search engine results than those appearing in banner ads.
  4. Targeted traffic. Search engine optimization brings paying customers to your door step. The customers that SEO bring you are long for your products/services as they have entered your websites keywords/phrases into the search engines. SEO will further help you transform visitors into buyers by analyzing their behavior once they find your site. You will learn how to transform these visitors into buyers by utilizing the content of your website in the most effective manner possible.
  5. Affordability. In comparison to banner ads, which cost between $2500 to $35000 a month and outsourced SEO plan costs as little as $1000.

These are only 5 of the reasons which substantiate why SEO is the single best investment for all marketers.

Think about it. And don't forget to recycle!!

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jQuery and Google Event Tracking

A while back I was doing some looking around the net for a solution to easily add event tracking to our websites. I found a great little script that did just that over at blog.immeria.net.

Now, we use a lot of jQuery, it's a tool that I can't believe I was able to live without in the past. If you are doing any kind of work on the web and have not looked into jQuery, you should do so now.

Back to the issue at hand. I wanted to make a jQuery solution that would have the same functionality (basically) as the tool I found at immeria.net. And now, to give back a little I'm going to post my extension to the gaAddons.js here.

Basically what I did was take what the gaAddons.js script does and wrap it in a nice little jQuery plugin that uses the $() selector functionality to add event tracking to all a tags on the page.

It should be noted that this script will only work with the New Tracking Code (ga.js), and not the Legacy Tracking Code (urchin.js). So if your site is still using the old code you will need to update.

The plugin uses the standard jQuery syntax to call. Say I wanted to take all a tags with the class of "trackable" and attach the google event tracking code.

$("a.trackable").gaAddon();

Simple as that. There are a few options that can be passed in:

  • useEventForOutbound

    • Sets whether to use trackEvent or trackPageview to track the click event for regular page links

    • default is true

  • useEventForDownload

    • Sets whether to use trackEvent or trackPageview to track the click event for downloads

    • default is true

  • fileTypes

    • Regex expression to set which filetypes to track downloads of

    • default is /\.(doc*|xls*|ppt*|exe|zip|pdf|xpi)$/i

  • trackInternal

    • Sets whether to track clicks on internal links as well as outbound links

    • default is false

Now, if i wanted to track ALL link clicks on my site, and use trackEvent, I would need to first include jQuery and the gaAddon.js scripts, then in the activate the gaAddon with something like the following:

$("a").gaAddon({ trackInternal: true });

Have a download and tinker jquery.gaAddon.js

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Monday, March 23, 2009

Full Press Release of eMedia Solutions now being Bevelwise Media

Here is the full press release and story of why we changed our name. Happy reading. Click here to read it.

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I Want A Mouthguard!

Okay, true story that relates to the frustration of NOT using the web for purchases. My 12 year old daughter plays indoor soccer. After watching her get barraged with high powered shots on Saturday, I decided she needs a mouth guard to protect her braces. I had been told that Shock Doctor made a special mouth guard's for kids with braces. So, I decided to start my search at the largest sporting goods store in town, MC Sports. (why order online for a $15 mouth guard and pay the shipping, right?) Well, MC's was sold out of all youth mouth guards, so I bought an adult size for braces. Never mind that the indifferent sales clerk never bothered to check with another MC location, or offer to get me the item off their web site. This was very poor customer service which is a whole different issue. So, frustrated, I left the store with the adult mouth guard which turned out to be too big. Before I made another trip across town to Dunham's sporting goods, I called ahead to ask them if they had any mouth guards in stock for kids with braces. The clerk on the other end of the line had no idea what I was talking about. A mouth guard for braces, huh? So, he put me hold and after 5 minutes, I hung up. More wasted time. Another dead end. Now what, she had another game on Sunday so I had to have that mouthguard. I wasn't sure where else to go in town, so that night I figured I would just get iit on the web, so I went to Google and searched for "youth mouth guards for braces", here were the search results:

youth mouth guards for braces


I selected the first Google Base result from HitRunScore and bought a Shock Doctor Youth Mouth Guard for braces for $14.99 plus shipping. Problem solved, I just hope I get it before her next game. As for MC Sports, they should be doing Google Base for their store and allowed me to pick it up locally just like other retailers, (see Best Buy, Target, etc). They don't get it. And the poor service at MC's and Dunham's makes it unlikely I will be back in those stores anytime soon.

MC Sports offers ortho youth mouth guards on their site, but the clerk never knew that I am sure. What a disconnect. How about Google Base MC's? Your warehouse is less than a mile from the store I was in! Here are the web sites for the retailers mentioned above:

http://www.dunhamssports.com/home/index.jsp

http://www.mcsports.com/home/index.jsp


Get a clue guys!

Friday, March 20, 2009

The H1 Debate? Where should I put it?

There has been much debate recently about where to place the H1 -- does the H1 belong on the logo? Or as the page's title? It's a rather hot topic right now, so a site called H1Debate.com has launched in which you vote for the proper H1 placement via Twitter. Here's what I voted and why.

Historically, the H1 has been on the logo. However, I believe the H1 makes more sense on the title. Why?

From a purely SEO standpoint, the H1 is very important. It tells the search engines what the page is all about. Keywords are super important in your header tags. With the H1 as the logo, you're rendering a powerful piece of SEO ineffective (unless you care only about your brand name).If I'm reading a report or viewing a presentation, I expect the header to be about that page. I don't expect the header to be the logo or brand name, nor to be identical across all pages.

That would just be weird if my presentations all had "Bevelwise" describing every page/slide.SEOMoz (a very well-respected SEO resource) interviewed 37 SEO leaders, and they ranked keywords in H1's as the 4th most important part of SEO.

Google produced their SEO Starter Guide and said "On a page containing a news story, we might put the name of our site into an tag and the topic of the story into an tag." However, the example of the H1 (the name of the site) they gave was "Brandon's Baseball Cards," which is actually very keyword-rich - unlike most logos/brand names (think "Bevelwise"). Additionally, on the next page Google says, to "Imagine you're writing an outline" and "Avoid placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page" - like a logo, for example? Does seeing the word "Bevelwise" over and over help "define the structure of the page?" I suppose you could answer "yes," but that just seems a bit weird to me.

Google's, Matt Cutts also chimes in on the subject in a recent YouTube post, check it out.

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Google's Matt Cutts On Keywords In The URL

Google's Matt Cutts posted a recent video answering a question about the position of the keywords in the URL.
The question asked, does the order of the words in the URL make an impact on one's ranking at Google? Cutts said one should not obsess about the order of the words but he said keywords in the URL "does help a little bit."
Does this mean you should go back to your existing sites and change URLs without keywords to have keywords in them? Cutts says, "If you've got an existing solution that works for you, it's not really worth going back to change your urls. It may worth considering when you're doing a new site." Should new sites have keywords in the URL. He also indicates, "It makes sense if a) it's easy for you to do in your content management system, and b) the keywords are useful and descriptive-definitely don't overdo it."

Here is the video, it is worth watching:

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Friday, March 13, 2009

Question and Answer Sites are exploding

As reported by web monitor Hitwise, this sites have been growing faster than the web itself. Between 2006-2008, use of these types of sites has increased 889%. The report was based on data from eight leading Q&A sites, and of course due to the growth, there are new Q&A sites popping up regularly now on a global scale.

Top sites according to the report: (note this is growing older)

Yahoo! Answers 74.05%
Wiki Answers 18.35%
Answerbag 4.51%
Ask Metafilter 1.8%
Askville 0.85%

Now, this can be a great way to generate back links and get people to bookmark you and really increase your inbound links and exposure on the web. If you have subject matter expertise, you can post to these sites and increase your exposure for your company and website.

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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Free or pay for web content?

There is the age old debate for publications whether to charge for content or make it free. Publications have thought they could make pay for content advertisement free and it would make up for the revenue that was lost from advertising. I believe it really depends on what type of content it is, how valuable that content it, is it readily available from other sources and how timely is that content.

I myself have never paid for content - other then by subscribing to a local paper, I have access to "breaking news" that I would not have had if I was not a subscriber. But that news we never earth shattering and there were other sources I could have got it from at relatively the same time.

As an example, I read an article in my marketing news that stated a study had been done on this and in some cases content can be paid for and it backed up my thoughts above. However It referenced The New York Times trial with this. They have a fee-based access to its editorial pages and had 225,000 subscribers. In 2007 they withdrew that fee. When that was removed they added 7.5 MILLION readers worldwide or a 64% jump in readership. They already had the highest unique vistor rate a month news content providers BEFORE that jum. That jump, just based on selling advertising - if they can fill their available online ad inventory should have generated MORE revenue that the subscriber base.

So if you ask me, free is still king for content, unless is it niche or not easily found through other sources.

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