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Online Marketing

Most Popular Online Marketing Channels Among Corporates

Despite all the buzz around “new media“, the tried and tested forms of online marketing still remain the most popular channels to reach the consumers. A recent study by market research firm Lyris showed that email marketing was still by far the most popular online marketing channel among corporates; followed by the company website. Sorry, mobile marketing has still not caught on and just around 22% of those surveyed having responded positively about having used it.

Here are the various online marketing channels and their popularity in terms of the percentage marketers who used it.

Email Marketing : 97%
Company website : 96%
Social media marketing : 82%
Search Engine Optimization : 79%
Search Engine Marketing : 72%
Mobile Markating : 22%

Does it surprise anyone that companies do not seem to be using SEO as much as one may have imagined? Or is it that SEO has become too expensive and unreliable compared to Social media marketing?

Categories
Online Marketing

AOL Quarterly Revenue Breakdown From Advertising

AOL has been attempting a transition to content-based business model and while it has definitely helped the company find a focus area for the future, the revenues are hard to come by. According to the recent quarterly revenue report filed by the company, the revenues have been gradually falling and the company that made over $1 billion in revenue back in Q1 2008 has barely crossed the $500 million mark this time around. The company is clearly dependent on advertising revenues as the report shows. Close to 50% of AOL’s quarterly revenues are from advertising – a good chunk of it from display advertisements.

Here is the quarterly breakdown of AOL’s revenues. The money made from advertising in each of these quarters is provided inside brackets.

Q1 ’08 : $1.116 billion ($540 million)
Q2 ’08 : $1.043 billion ($517 million)
Q3 ’08 : $991 million ($487 million)
Q4 ’08 : $961 million ($500 million)
Q1 ’09 : $855 million ($432 million)
Q2 ’09 : $792 million ($407 million)
Q3 ’09 : $764 million ($402 million)
Q4 ’09 : $796 million ($459 million)
Q1 ’10 : $655 million ($346 million)
Q2 ’10 : $584 million ($297 million)

Categories
Online Marketing

Display Ads Conversion Rate For Automotive Ads

The mobile ad market has been growing at a quick pace. According to a report by eMarketer, the mobile advertising market is poised to reach $593 million. A study by MediaMind concludes that mobile banners comprehensively outdo standard banners when it comes to click throughs and conversion rates. In their study of automotive ads, MediaMind found that the CTR on mobile banners was 0.21% – nearly double the 0.10% that was noticed on standard banners. These numbers are of course much lower than the industry-best observed for floating ads (2.31%) and commercial breaks (1.98%).

So how does the conversion rate on mobile banners fare? Again, the study found out that the conversion rate on mobile banners was nearly double the conversion rate on standard banners. Here is the average conversion rate on the various kinds of display ads as reported in the MediaMind study

Floating ad : 1.09%
Wallpaper ad : 0.49%
Mobile banners : 0.44%
Expandable Banners : 0.41%
Polite banners : 0.37%
Commercial Break : 0.23%
Standard banner : 0.22%

Categories
Online Marketing

Most Common Ad Banner Sizes

Comscore has published an interesting study that looks into the ad banner sizes and formats. According to the report, the ad creatives are horizontal banners with only a tenth of the advertisements actually sky scrapers. Also, as you may have assumed, 300×250 is the most common ad format – I have personally found this format to offer the highest click-throughs.

Here are the most common ad creatives (and the percentage of impressions)
Banners : 23.1%
Rectangles : 22.7%
Non-standard : 22.1%
Buttons : 20.7%
Skyscrapers : 10.6%
Pop-ups/unders : 0.7%
New OPA formats : 0.1%

Now, here is the share by ad-banner sizes
Medium Rectangle 300×250 : 18.6%
Leaderboard 728×90 : 18.3%
Buttons 120×90 : 14.7%
Pushdown 970×418 : < 0.1%
XXL Box 468×648 : < 0.1%

The last two sizes if you notice are not among the most used banners. They are recent entrants to the Online Publishers Association(OPA) approved ad standards. Expect them to get more common moving ahead.

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Online Marketing

Increasing Email Newsletter Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Popular email marketing solutions provider, GetResponse, has published results from a recent study where the firm concludes that including social media links inside the email marketing message tends to drastically improve the CTR.

Here is an average CTR measured with the following number of social media links

No Sharing option : 7.20%
1 Social Media icon : 8.70%
2 Social Media icons : 9.30%
3 Social Media icons : 11.20%

Among the social media links offered, Twitter was seen to have the most impact. Here is the average CTR of email messages with links to the following websites

Twitter : 10.20%
Facebook : 9.10%
MySpace : 8.70%
LinkedIn : 7.20%
Digg : 5.30%

Categories
Online Marketing

Emerging Lead Generation Channels

With the growth of social media, lead generation has become much more personal and social. Earlier, online lead generation techniques would majorly depend on Search engine marketing to target users looking for a particular solution and advertising to them and consequently generating a lead. However, with social media, marketers connect with the consumers over a long term and generate leads through a more laborious, yet highly converting lead generation process.

According to Unisfair, these are the most popular emerging channels for lead generation (by % respondents)

Social media : 74%
Virtual Events : 39%
Mobile Channels : 34%
Others : 10%


Categories
Online Marketing

Display Ads : Top Online Advertisers In USA

The recession is no longer around. That is the crux of the report ComScore has published which notes that the online display advertising market has seen a resurgence of sorts after the low in 2009. According to the report, Americans viewed over 1 trillion display ads in the first quarter of 2010. This is close to 15% above the number observed during the same time last year.

Here are the companies that contributed to the ad spending and the percentage of online ad impression that was theirs.

1. AT&T : 2.4%
2. Verizon : 2.0%
3. Scottrade : 1.5%
4. Experian Interactive : 1.4%
5. Sprint Nextel : 0.9%
6. Netflix : 0.9%
7. eBay : 0.9%
8. Intuit : 0.8%
9. Privacy Matters 1-2-3 : 0.8%
10. IAC – Interactive Corp : 0.8%

Also, check out the largest publishers on the internet for display ads.


Categories
Online Marketing

Technology Companies Ad Spending Statistics

According to a recent report by Kantar Media, a subsidiary of WPP, Microsoft was the largest advertiser among technology companies in 2009. The report claims that Microsoft spent $518 million or 0.9% of their total revenues in advertising. While the other companies spent lesser, when accounted in terms of the percent of revenue spent in advertising, eBay was ahead of Microsoft, having spent 1.02% of its revenue or $89 million in advertising.

Here are the largest advertisers (across print, online, radio, TV and outdoor) and the percentage of revenue the spending consitutes

1. Microsoft : $518 million (0.9%)
2. Apple : $249 million (0.5%)
3. eBay : $89 million (1.02%)
4. Yahoo : $45 million (0.7%)
5. Amazon : $43 million (0.17%)
6. Google : $11 million (0.05%)
7. AOL : $2 million (0.06%)