Ideas and Concepts from Damian Davila
While behaviorally targeted ads have been heavily criticized by privacy advocates, the data from a 2009 Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) study suggest that they will continue to be used by marketers and publishers.
Here are the 2 main highlights from that 2009 NAI study.
Continue reading “Behavioral Targeting Doubles Ad Effectiveness”
Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that U.S. Latinos is part of the recovery in advertising spending worldwide.
Hispanics make up 12.3% of the total US Internet population in 2009, and that number will increase to 13.9% in 2013. The U.S. Latino presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as U.S. Latino Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.
A company that is truly aware of this trend is Microsoft with its current Bing TV ads called ‘Los Links’.
For career sites, there’s no business like the recession business!
With the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting an over 9% unemployment rate in June 2009, it appears that job search sites will continue to show an accelerated growth during this economic recession.
On August 6th, 2009 eMarketer reported that more than 65 million visitors have rushed to job search sites in June 2009. Most of the top 10 career service and development websites in the U.S. (ranked by unique visitors) have experienced double digit percentage increases in the number of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009.
June 2009 data from comScore pegged growth in unique visitors to career resource sites at 10% over the previous year, with seven of the top 10 sites seeing at least double-digit increases. More than 65 million visitors checked out career sites in June.
“The top three sites in the category—CareerBuilder, HotJobs and Monster—have maintained their leadership positions for several years now, but there are also a few upstarts in the industry making some noise,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president, in a statement. “Certainly with millions of Americans reevaluating their careers right now there is opportunity for continued growth and innovation in this segment of the online marketplace.”
What are the most common search terms at career sites? Here’s the list:
These job search terms are closely aligned with the job categories of the list of over 3 million jobs that can’t be filled, released by Fortune back in February 2009.
Among all the excitement from career sites, there appears to be no discussion about this fact: the combined number of page views from the top career sites wasn’t even close to that of Craigslist back in 2007.
— craigslist.org — monster.com — careerbuilder.com
According to data from Compete, lately Monster has been able to start getting closer to the number of unique monthly visitors of Craigslist, however it’s important to remember that Craigslist doesn’t operate the large marketing and advertising expenditures that Monster does. Furthermore, the other 3 sites that showed healthy numbers of unique visitors from June 2008 to June 2009 (Careerbuilder, Indeed, and Hotjobs) have a long way to go to reach the monthly unique visitor numbers of Craigslist and Monster.
For how long will Twitter survive?
That is one major question to tackle. And the guys at TechCrunch are surely busy trying to give the best possible answer.
After all, they do have the staff and the inside information available for the job.
Wait a minute…what inside information?
According to Michael Arrington on July 14, 2009:
The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents publicly and sent them to us earlier today. The zip file contained 310 documents, ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employees.
My personal favorite is this spreadsheet with cash flow and revenue analysis from Twitter, here’s a peak:
Earlier this April 2009, eMarketer calculated that Twitter would have 12.1 million US adult users in 2009 and 18.1 million in 2010.
The 18.1 million number for 2010 appears to be far smaller than the one from the confidential Twitter documents that TechCrunch claims to have in its power because they estimate the Twitter population at a 100 million. (Note: Twitter’s USA population represents about 40% of its total population.)
The Harvard School of Business points out another problem for Twitter, there is growth in quantity of users, not in quality. People are just not tweeting:
While some people find Twitter highly addictive (myself included), since Oprah, Ashton & Co. have joined in, everybody knows that soon Mom and Dad will be joining and Twitter could become…so 2009!….next year.
Maybe. Maybe not.
In June 30, 2009, we reviewed at idaconcpts that talking about Latinos as a group is difficult because this group has so many commonalities with various ethnic groups, that trying to seggregate websites between Latino and non-Latino is a strategy that spells disaster.
According to Dr. Korzenny from the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at the Florida State University, when compared to other ethnicities, U.S. Hispanics appear to consume more digital content. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Latin America is part of the recovery in advertising spending worldwide.
Even though the total advertising spending in Latin America is much smaller than that in North America, (ranging from 18% to 21 from 2009 to projections for 2010 and 2011 by eMarketer) savvy marketers, Internet startups, and companies in general, should be aware of 3 obvious trends:
1. Latin America holds the key for a better understanding of the Hispanic market in the U.S.
According to the Immigration Informaiton Source website, in 2006, 47.2 percent of immigrants reported Hispanic or Latino origins. Therefore, it is not a suprise that Business Week’s Douglas MacMillan reported that of marketers that target minority groups, 95% tailor messages to Latin Americans. However there is still much to be learned about the field. Click here for an insight into how to approach the U.S. Hispanic market.
2. According to eMarketer, Hispanics make up 12.3% of the total US Internet population in 2009, and that number will increase to 13.9% in 2013.
3. The U.S. Hispanic presence in the Internet is not only going to increase in quantity but also in quality as Hispanic U.S. Internet users are poised to have the highest purchasing power.
Welcome back!
Back in March 2009, we reviewed how to measure the click-through rate (CTR) of your e-mail permission marketing campaign with Google Analytics, so I believe it would be very useful to now provide you a benchmark to compare your collected CTRs. For Internet startups, these will be critical benchmarks.
Earlier this July 2009, eMarketer just released a list of e-mail marketing open rates worldwide, by industry and list size for the second half of 2008.
But before I show you these e-mail marketing open rates, let’s review some e-mail permission marketing fundamentals that you must gather:
With these metrics you will determine:
Once you have your open rate and CTR, now you can compare them to these benchmarks provided by eMarketer:
Ladies, grab your Wiimote!
eMarketer projects $443 million will go toward in-game advertising spending this year in the US. But marketers should take note that women make up a substantial portion of the audience for that advertising.
Video gaming has grown increasingly popular among older players, other demographic groups and particularly women. This fact is a wake-up call for video game developers, as they are now focusing more on casual gaming. The leader in this trend is the Nintendo Wii and this strategy has paid off as in a study of U.S. Next-Generation Video Game Console Usage, for the Nintendo Wii, the % of total minutes used by female gamers is higher than that of its male counterparts in the 25 – 34, 35 -44, 45 – 54, and 55+ age ranges.
According to eMarketer, in addition, 29% of total PC game players were women ages 25 to 54, the largest percentage of any group. Women ages 55 and up were 17% of the market, the third-largest behind men 25 to 54. Older women spent the second-highest number of minutes playing.
“Even with the increased competition from mobile and social network gaming, the console gamer segment added the most new participants to its ranks in the last year,” said Anita Frazier of The NPD Group. Many of those new participants are women.
Although consoles such as the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have Internet playing capability, most game play (62%) is still offline.
Think the highly advertised World of Warcraft is the highest played PC game in the U.S.? Think again. Solitaire (yes, you heard right: Solitaire) is the highest played PC game in the U.S. with 7,750,623 unique players in December 2008, dwarfing the 1,104,334 unique players of World of Warcraft in the U.S. in the same month. In PC gaming, the games that come prepackaged with many PCs (Solitaire, FreeCell, Hearts, Minesweeper and Pinball) are the ones with the most players.
What implications has this on marketers?
Do your homework!
Learn from Nintendo and become aware of casual gaming and the increase of female video players. 2 good places to start are:
Apparently, the Japanese seem to think so. Via the eMarketer Daily, I found that according to Marsh Research, 84.4% of adult Internet users in Japan have felt at least once that the Internet is “scary.” Here is the breakdown: 
Now, why do they consider the Internet scary? 
Notice that at the top of the list appears “when lots of pop-up windows opened”. Have you been a victim of a “rickroll”? Definitely annoying. Extreme use of pop-up ads is what Seth Godin refers to as interruption marketing. You’re interrupting the natural flow of the user experience to say “hey, buy this!”. Remember that ads or communications can only be effective if they are relevant, personal, and ANTICIPATED. You need to employ permission marketing (another Godin term). I believe that the only way to a marketer can make a pop-up ad relevant, personal and anticipated is through the use of a tool such as 4Q from iPerceptions. Here’s a 10-minute video explanation of 4Q by Google Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik.
Here’s an example of how 4Q looks like at the CIO website:
Using permission based marketing initiatives, we can all make the Internet a less scary place. If you want to learn about how to get started with E-mail Permission Marketing, here’s a primer. Once you have read about it, you can learn about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals.
On the last post, we discussed about E-mail Permission Marketing Fundamentals and how to get started with your e-mail permission marketing campaign. Why? Because E-mail Permission Marketing: it works! As promised, I will talk in this post about “How to Measure the CTR of Your E-mail Permission Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics“.
The funnel strategy of your permission e-mail is that people:
How do you measure that?
Simple, you need to use the Google Analytics URL Builder to effectively and efficiently “tag” your link.
Here’s what the Google Analytics URL Builder looks like:
Let’s take for example eMarketer. This company sends daily e-mail updates to people who have a) visited their website, b) are interested in sampling their market data for free before signing up for it (and of course paying for it!), c) have signed up to read the free updates, and d) have provided the company permission to send them daily updates via e-mail. I cannot be more specific about the importance of asking them for permission.
Here’s how they do it:
Notice that there’s no checkbox for the newsletter itself because it is very explicit that the person viewing for the page is signing up for the newsletter. However, notice that there is one checkbox for people who don’t mind receiving news about webinars, event announcements, whitepaper offers, best practices guides, and research briefs.
eMarketer sends The eMarketer Daily: The First Place to Look as a daily e-mail newsletter. Here’s how it look like:
As you can see, there are plenty of links on this eMarketer newsletter but for simplicity I will focus on the boxed link in the picture above. Let’s imagine that the URL of this link is http://emarketer.com/latestadclickcount.
Here’s how we set up the target URL with the Google Analytics URL Builder:
Let’s review the fields:
The resulting link is http://emarketer.com/latestadclickcount?utm_source=newsletter25&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CTR%2Bproducts. eMarketer would use this link as the link on its newsletter.
That’s it! Now eMarketer would have to just wait for the reaction of its The eMarketer Daily recipients.
Once people start clicking on the target link, Google Analytics will start measuring the clicks.
Here’s a sample referrals report:
Google Analytics will report the clicks on the link coming from “Other” sources. The “Other” category will lump all clicks on links optimized with the Google Analytics URL Builder, so that’s why it’s important that you make smart use of the different fields that this tool offers you.
Here’s a teaser for the medium and advanced users of Google Analytics: Once you start using the Google Analytics URL Builder, you can created Advanced Segments to do all kinds of fun segmentation of your data.
So, once you find the total number of clicks on your target URL, you can calculate the CTR of your e-mail permission marketing campaign.
Remember:
Click-through rate (CTR) = number of clicks / number of e-mails opened
I hope that you enjoyed this post. If you have any questions, please leave a comment for this post and I will reply to you within 24 hours.
Thank you for your time!
Disclaimer: I don’t work for eMarketer. I don’t receive any fees or payment for talking about them. I just really like their product.
: )