Marketing Pilgrim

The results of a new poll from Harris Interactive indicate that Internet advertising isn’t as effective as search engine marketers would like to think. When asked what medium’s ads were most helpful in making purchase decisions, the 2500+ American respondents indicated that first television, then newspapers, then search engine ads. Internet banner ads fared even worse:

• 37% said television ads were most helpful in purchase decisions
• 18% said newspaper ads
• 14% said search engine ads
• 3% said radio ads
• 1% said Internet banner ads

Perhaps most revealing, however, is the math. Those numbers don’t add up to 100% because another 28% (rounding effects) said that none of those ad media were helpful in purchase decisions.

The Harris poll also asked about what kinds of ads people ignore. Again, the banner ads didn’t do so well:

• 46% tended to ignore Internet banner ads

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paidContent has two pieces of good news for Hulu in the past week—they’re commanding not only similar ad prices to broadcast television, but also 10% of the online video ad market.

From a Bloomberg report, paidContent shows that, for some shows, CPMs on Hulu are actually greater than they are for broadcast TV. And when I say broadcast TV, we’re talking primetime, new episode, time-slot-leading network television. (None of that cable syndicated rerun stuff!) Bloomberg’s example:

Marketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series “The Simpsons” costs $60 per thousand viewers, Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. wrote in a June 18 report.

How can the Internet, with demonstrably fewer viewers (another example, the NCAA basketball championship game, drew 17.6M TV viewers and 7.52 Internet viewers), command such high CPMs?

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A study of twelve people is not statistically relevant, but it does make for interesting headlines!

According to the Catalyst Group, 1 in 3 Google users preferred the search experience of Bing over the search leader. OK, so that was actually 4 of the 12 total people that Catalyst studied in a report obtained by TechCrunch, but hey, Bing will take all the good news it can get, right?

What is amazing is that when the test subjects were asked to rate Bing on specific criteria (visual design, organization of features, filtering options, and relevance of results), Bing handily beat Google in everything but result relevance. Arguably, that is the most important criteria, but most of the study participants thought that both search engines tied on result relevance. So even though Bing ranked better on design, and tied on relevance, that was not enough for most of them to switch.

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Bing’s flash in the pan—supposed to burn out a while ago—is extending every day, at least in one important area: paid clicks. So far this month, we’ve seen that

• Bing might be making more per query than Google
• Bing saw an 8% increase in paid clicks and a 20% query volume lift
• Bing is taking a hardline on click fraud
• Bing is increasing its searcher penetration and overall share of SERPs (in the post with the best Bing title ever: Pre Bing Sting With a Post Bing Bang?)

Efficient Frontier is back again this week with more good news: Bing continues to see increases in their paid clicks:

According to our data analysis, Bing expanded its share of paid clicks for the two weeks post launch. Bing’s share of paid clicks is up 13% for the second week post launch as compared to pre-launch. And, it represents an incremental 5% lift over the first week.

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Two recent reports illustrate the power of Twitter in two important metrics—driving visits and purchasing power. Hitwise analyzes overall downstream traffic for Twitter, while NPD Group takes a look at downstream purchases generated by Twitter.

Hitwise took a look at the most popular categories of downstream traffic for Twitter, comparing them with Facebook, Google UK and Hotmail. Nearly a quarter of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to entertainment sites, and another ~15% went to social networks:

Source: Hitwise

Interestingly, Twitter also leads in downstream traffic to news & media sites, lifestyle sites and music sites—and, taken with a new study from NPD Group, that’s good news for the music industry. As Reuters reports:

active Twitter users buy 77 percent more digital music downloads on average than non-users. Additionally, 12 percent of those who have bought music in the last three months also report having used Twitter, versus 8 percent of overall Web users.

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Forbes and Google have released a new report called The Rise of the Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate and Filter Business Information.

It’s a fascinating read–mostly because it highlights the difference in internet habits of C-level executives,  based on their age. Why is this important? Because those executives that are under 40 will likely, in the next 5-10 years, be the ones taking over the CEO role.

When they do, we’re going to see a dramatic shift in the way company executives research and contribute to the web.

And there’s good news for search marketers too!

Get your free copy of the report!

I’m not kidding. While they might like you personally, most companies engaged in SEM are beyond disappointed with their returns, according to a new study from SEM firm [x+1].

First, the good news: Almost half of respondents—48.6%—said that the economy has had no impact on their SEM budget. And these aren’t little companies: 39% of these companies represented had a marketing/advertising budget of $5 to $10 million, and 7.5% had even more than that.

Also good: of those surveyed, 55.2% said that the champion of SEM in their company was at the director-level or above—with the CEO being the champion in 13.1% of companies.

But there looks to be quite a bit of bad news here. (I did say your clients hate you, didn’t I?). When asked how highly they’d rate their companies’ SEM performance, only 20% rated it a 6 or 7 out of 7:

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The Online Publishers Association (OPA) would like you to know that just because a consumer doesn’t click on your display ad, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t effective!

In fact, according to its new study, “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online,” OMA says the money you spend on display advertising contributes towards your other marketing efforts. The findings include:

• One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
• Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
• Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
• Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites

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Back in April, Credit Suisse issued a report stating that YouTube stood to lose $470M this year. But now it looks like the financial services company was overly pessimistic (and, really, they’re probably just used to that, with the economy the way it is). New estimates from research company RampRate puts the losses for the most popular video website in the world far more conservatively:

RampRate lowered the estimated bandwidth costs, stating that by locating its data centers in “out of the way” locations like Iowa and Finland, the company saves significantly on the cost of transmitting data. RampRate also took into account peering costs for what they say is a more accurate estimate.

While a $174M loss is still a significant loss, it’s not the sob story we’re used to seeing with YouTube and its tireless search for profitability. RampRate takes a cynical line on Google’s motivations for not correcting reports like Credit Suisse’s:

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23,000 users couldn’t be wrong. Or within the margin of error. Nope. comScore is definitely, totally, 100% correct when they report that their May data indicates Facebook has just barely edged out the formerly most popular social network in the US, MySpace—70.278M to 70.255M.

Okay, even if the difference—0.03%—is well within the margin of error, the point stands: Facebook has at least caught up with, if not surpassed, MySpace in the US.

Facebook has long dominated the world in the social networking sphere—just a few months ago, Nielsen pointed out that they’re the most popular social network in almost every country. But until now, MySpace has held on to its lead in the US.

TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld says that the trend isn’t likely to change in the future:

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When it comes to any kind of reputation management study, I’m normally deadly serious. This is my field of expertise after all.

Today, I’ve decided to have a little bit of fun with Weber ShandWick/KRC Research’s survey of 151 executives in Fortune 1000 companies. Don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for the report, but while reading the summary of findings, I couldn’t help but notice an interesting trend.

Observation 1: 66% of executives believe that the reputation of current CEOs is largely negative.

Observation 2: Of those that suggest CEO reputations are negative, 48% of them still aspire to one day accept the role of CEO.

Observation 3: The majority of these executives believe that CEO reputations will likely improve by the year 2013.

So, let’s piece that all together. Today’s CEOs have a lousy reputation. Their underlings want their job. They’ll likely get their chance in the next 3-4 years. When they take over, CEO reputations will be much better!

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Forrester Research says that marketers say they see ROI on email marketing that’s two to three times higher than any other form of direct marketing. 66% of marketers agree that email is the most cost-effective marketing tool at their company.

So why shouldn’t you waste money on email marketing?

Because wasting money is bad—and why waste money when you can make sure your email marketing is even more cost effective?

The Forrester study takes a look at the email marketing forecast for the next five years, and there’s good news: email will continue to grow in popularity among users and marketers alike. Total spending on email marketing will soar to $2B in 2014 (up from $1.2B this year):

Of course, this popularity means that there’s a lot more competition for email users’ time—and a lot more messages bombarding them, and likely to be perceived as spam. With more than 9000 messages per inbox annually by 2014, users will become even more discriminating about what they read.

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