Internet Marketing
May
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1.1 Trillion Display Ads Delivered in Q1 2011
2011 at 01:45 pm Posted by Sherri Sharp
comScore has released an overview of the U.S. online display advertising market for Q1 2011 based on data from comScore Ad Metrix, indicating nearly 1.11 trillion display ads were delivered to U.S. Internet users during the quarter. Facebook accounted for 346 billion impressions, nearly double the number it delivered in Q1 2010, and accounting for nearly one third of all display ad impressions delivered.
Facebook led all online publishers in Q1 2011 with 346 billion display ad impressions, representing 31.2 percent market share. Facebook's market share has increased 15 percentage points from 16.2 percent in Q1 2010. Yahoo! Sites ranked second during the most recent quarter with 112 billion impressions (10.1 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 54 billion impressions (4.8 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 33 billion impressions (3.0 percent).
AT&T ranked as the top online display advertiser in the first quarter with 19.5 billion impressions, accounting for 1.8 percent of display ads. Experian Interactive ranked second with 16.6 billion impressions (1.5 percent), followed by Scottrade ranked third with 11.2 billion (1.0 percent) and Intuit with 11 billion (1.0 percent). Groupon entered the top ten display advertisers at #7 with 7.7 billion impressions (0.7 percent).
Posted in: Internet Marketing
September
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This Sunday - Church, Football, Check Email?? Why Sundays Might Be The New Tuesday.
2010 at 03:22 pm Posted by Sherri Sharp
In my household, we have a very polarized practice on what our iPhones are used for on the weekend. My husband in the entertainment industry almost always has something going on that prohibits him from taking a break from emailing, texting and taking calls. I, on the other hand, primarily turn mine on for Pandora and iTunes. But this blog post from Caroline Ruggiero at Marketo has me thinking a little differently about ongoing client email blast campaigns. While most experts will say there's no such thing as the perfect time to send your email offer or newsletter, conventional wisdom holds that Tuesday—generally speaking—is the best day for a campaign, and Friday the worst.
"The theory behind the rule of thumb makes sense," notes Ruggiero. "Email too early in the week and people are too busy with their actual work to open or focus on your message. Email end of the week and your message will get buried in a barrage of messages everyone has to dig out of come Monday morning."
But her own preference for browsing work email on Sundays made her wonder if Sunday could be the new Tuesday for email marketers. Although the weekend is a time to unwind, she explains, "it's also a time to catch up on newsletters, lower-priority messages, and feeds without the distraction of, well, work. I am absolutely more open to reading marketing messages in this quieter, more relaxed setting."
There's some evidence that she's not alone in her habit:
• An AOL survey found that 62% of respondents checked their work email over the weekend.
• According to a Pew study, two thirds of Americans do work-related research at home.
The only way to know whether your B2B audience reads email on weekends is—of course—to test it. "Perhaps," says Ruggiero, "your key target might be guilty of indulging in some Sunday work email, just like me."
Sunday might work. Don't just assume that weekdays are the best time to reach your customers. If you check your email over the weekend, it stands to reason that they might, too.
Posted in: Internet Marketing
September
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Two Google Posts in Two Days! A Is for AOL: The Alphabet According to Google
2010 at 05:43 pm Posted by Sherri Sharp
Very interesting. I wonder if this is tied to Google's revenue stream in any way. Hmmm. Ken Wheaton from Advertising Age just posted an article about the fact they have discovered Google's new Insta-Search function pulls up major marketers:
Today Google unveiled its latest advance: search results show up as you type. This strikes us as slightly more useful than, say, Google Wave -- especially if this rolls out for mobile. But we want to give props to Jeff Jarvis who tweeted earlier today the results of a little experiment he started. The Buzz Machine blogger typed one letter into Google and see what turned up. Intrigued, we did the entire alphabet. And it's heavy on marketers! We're unsure how personalized or localized this is. Our first few results matched up with Jarvis' results. Let us know in comments if you get anything different (and where you're located).
* A = AOL
* B = Bank of America
* C = Craigslist
* D = dictionary
* E = eBay
* F = Facebook
* G = Google
* H = Hotmail
* I = Ikea
* J = Jet Blue
* K = Kmart
* L = LIRR (Long Island Railroad)
* M = Mapquest
* N = Netflix
* O = Orbitz
* P = Pandora
* Q = Quotes
* R = realtor
* S = Staples
* T = Target
* U = UPS
* V = Verizon
* W = weather (with Walmart as second)
* X = Xbox
* Y = Yahoo
* Z = Z100 (a radio station in New York)
Posted in: Internet Marketing
July
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2009 at 05:29 pm Posted by Sherri Sharp
Most of us have had a brush in life with someone that just wasn’t there for us – a parent, spouse, a friend going through a hard time of their own – but do we really have to deal with this experience with our customers?
Now, the term “emotionally unsubscribed” is being used to describe those who never seem to open your email messages, but continue to receive your campaigns because they never ask to be taken off your list. In a post at the UK DMA Email Marketing blog, however, Dela Quist argues for an alternative term that relocates the negative prefix—unemotionally subscribed. In other words, these recipients remain interested in your product or service, but they just don't need it right now. "They would prefer to ignore your messages until they are ready to buy," he says, "because it is easier than unsubscribing and having to remember your URL, or Google you at a later date."
To make his point, Quist cites some interesting client results:
• Ten percent of one company's revenue in 2008 came from subscribers who opened not a single email in 2007.
• An outstanding offer from another company generated approximately $113,000 in sales from subscribers who had not opened the previous 25 to 40 email messages.
"With very few exceptions," Quist says, "when it comes to sales and marketing, long-term inactivity is perfectly normal. After all, how often do you actively interact with marketing communications of any kind from a car dealer, insurance company, estate agent, bank, consumer electronics retailer, hotel chain, etc.?"
So, how do we deal with these recipients? Let them take their time. Some of your inactives may well have checked out, but Quist suggests that many more linger for a reason: "They don't need you—yet!"
Posted in: Internet Marketing
July
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The 411 on Affiliate Program Marketing
2009 at 04:56 pm Posted by Colin Warner
By this point, everyone knows (or should at lease recognize) internet marketing tools such as Pay Per Click advertisements, Website Optimization, Blogging, and so forth. However, few are familiar with one of the ''newer'' tools, known as Affiliate Marketing or Affiliate Program Marketing.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an online advertising channel in which advertisers (online merchants that sell products or services) pay publishers (independent parties that promote the products or services of an advertiser on their Web site) only for results, such as a visitor making a purchase or filling out a form, rather than paying simply to reach a particular audience. For example, our agency has recently teamed up with a number of advertisers and brands of products that we frequently use or that we feel would be beneficial for our visitors. You can check them out in the ''Sharp Recommends'' section on the right navigational bar. And since you’re there, check a few of them out by clicking on them. Sometimes the offers that appear for these vendors are a much better bargain than you could find elsewhere.
Personally, when I started using affiliates for some of our clients, I found if VERY tedious to keep track of each individual program, login and username for these programs, and which client's site they were going to be used on. Then when I was trying to find a better solution, the clouds parted and the Affiliate Sun God shined through. As any good marketer would, a company called Commission Junction recognized this “hole” in the marketplace and developed a website (Click HERE to take a gander) to make management of Affiliate Programs simple as pie. On their website, advertisers can create a login and choose from thousands of vendors (with big names including Banana Republic, Xerox, Wall Street Journal, etc.). From your login page, you can track the performance of each, every site they are placed on, and view all of the vendor’s advertising options including keyword ads, text ads, banner ads and more.
Commission Junction has truly made my life easier and I would recommend the site to any marketer that wants to dabble in the Affiliate Marketing Pond. Kudos to them. Now remember, if you know you are in need of a specific product from one of our affiliates, make sure to come back to our site and purchase it through here. All proceeds are going right back into the maximization of this blog so we can continue to offer relevant, quality (or at least we think so) material for our bloggers and bloggettes.
Posted in: Internet Marketing
June
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2009 at 05:18 pm Posted by Colin Warner
This is my first shot at a blog entry for our Agency...hope you enjoy!
In today's business climate, it is well known that you cannot go far in the online community without utilizing the appropriate tools for your marketing strategy. That being said, Google has emerged as the king of the tool shed, with programs like AdWords and Analytics geared towards optimizing your brand’s presence online.
As a marketer, these programs are absolutely fantastic. The information available to me is unbelievable. To give a simple example, I can see how many people from Grand Rapids have accessed our website (http://www.sharpmkt.com), which browser they were using, how long they spent on the site, which pages they viewed, which site they came from, if it was their first time visiting the site or not, as well as pull all of the usual demographic suspects (age, sex, income) etc. It is truly, any marketer's dream. However while I was coming up with this example, I stopped for a second and shifted gears into consumer mode asking myself, ''how much information does Google give out about me?''
So I developed a little experiment. I wanted to see how well I could profile myself as a consumer using both Google Analytics and Quantcast (another awesome website analytics software). First step: access our website from home. I logged on five times to the site, each time erasing my entire browser history. Then, I began to dig. I created a Custom Report in Analytics for the day I had accessed the site. My reporting tree was as follows: All visits, broken down by the hour of the day, then by city, medium (how visitors found the website), operating system (I use a MAC at home), and browser (I used Firefox to access the site).
Total visits: 6.
I also ran a Quantcast report for the same day, singling out males between the ages of 18 and 24, Caucasian, with no kids, an income of $25,000 or less (no comments please), and a Bachelors degree.
Total visits: 6.
There I was, naked as the day I was born. All five visits showed up along with one other person…most likely our graphic designer. Scary how I can tell, isn't it?
Posted in: Internet Marketing
June
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Measuring your “e”ffectiveness
2009 at 02:10 pm Posted by Sherri Sharp
Are you getting good reports from your email vendor or IT administrator? If not, you’re missing some important stats to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns. You should be monitoring trends, clearly matching response to revenue and making sure that you have good open rates. Some statistics that should be examined for each blast or campaign include:
• Revenue per email campaign
• Revenue per subscriber (and subscriber segment)
• Conversion rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Average order size
• New subscriber growth rate
To improve performance make sure you’re looking at the data at the subscriber level or at least subscriber-segment level and not just the numbers in whole.
Posted in: Internet Marketing
May
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2009 at 04:18 pm Posted by Sherri Sharp
Working on a recent client email blast campaign I was reminded how quick we as marketers can be to forget that the segmented, geotargeted list of names are actually human beings with jobs, families and everyday issues like the rest of us.While our client was adamant about touting the great sales offer, we had to gently pull back the reins and get them thinking about why these people in excel spreadsheet boxes would actually care about their product.
To validate our point, I shared a great article from MarketingProfs by Karen Talavera that suggests ways we can keep our communications with people real.
• Speak in conversational terms. Create copy with an approachable tone that initiates dialogue. Customers will appreciate that you're paying attention and acknowledging them as live humans.
• Show your personality. If your company has a familiar spokesperson, persona or character, be sure to leverage its power in your emails. We have higher clickthroughs each time we use one of our client-owners as the voice of the email blast.
• Invite subscribers to join in. Actively encourage user-generated content. There is something about interacting, benefiting, or learning directly from you that encourages better buy-in of the messaging.
Realizing that the goal of any good direct-response effort should be a dialogue will actually get those humans to open up both their emails and their wallets.
Posted in: Internet Marketing
