Small Businesses Adopting Paid Search Advertising At Faster Rate!
By: Laurie Sullivan, Wednesday, March 24, 2010
It appears small businesses have become more comfortable with paid search advertising. The average small business spent $2,149 on search advertising in Q4 2009, up 30% sequentially and up 111% compared with the same quarter in the prior year.
That’s according to a report released earlier this week by search marketing firm Webvisible that examines trends among WebVisible’s U.S. advertisers from Q4 2008 through Q4 2009. It represents nearly $22 million in U.S. small business advertiser spending in Q4 2009 from more than 12,000 individual advertisers. Also included in this report is an analysis of Q4 2009 data from more than 10,000 advertisers in the United Kingdom.
Some of WebVisible’s clients in the United States began to move a portion of their search engine budgets to Ask in mid-2009, which resulted in a share of spending increase of 4.5% for Ask from Q3 2009 to Q4 2009. Google automatically syndicates its ads to Ask, but advertisers can take advantage of Ask’s lower CPC by directly advertising on the engine, the report explains. As a result of this manual change, share of spending on Google dropped by 4.5% in Q4 2009 over Q3 2009.
For Yahoo Search and Bing, the share of advertising spending didn’t change in Q4 2009, compared with Q3 2009. Yahoo Search accounted for 26.4% of total budgets, while Bing accounted for 10.5%. Bing’s share rose 0.8% compared with the prior year, while Yahoo’s share fell 6.6%.
The majority of the small businesses advertising with WebVisible choose to include a call tracking number in their ads, and many track clicks with options that can include a custom landing page, email forms, and videos. During Q4 2009, 3.9% of clicks resulted in a call for those advertisers who had a call tracking number fell 0.6% sequentially, but increased 0.8% from the prior year. [Read More…]
New Methods of Analysis..
What is a paradigm shift?
By: Brandt Dainow
First, a bit of background about the concept of a paradigm shift.
A paradigm shift is a sudden jump from one way of thinking to another. The concept comes from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” He wrote that science doesn’t gradually evolve a little at a time, but as a series of peaceful plateaus punctuated by violent upheavals. During these upheavals the conceptual world view (or paradigm) is replaced by a new one. Think Darwin, Einstein, Galileo. He showed that the intellectual violence of these upheavals was caused by people stubbornly trying to hang on to the old paradigm they were used to, even when it didn’t work any more. In science this generally means we move into a new paradigm when the scientists who grew up with the old one retire.
I hope to shift, fundamentally and gently, the way we think about metrics in this article.
The problem with users
We need to identify unique users on the web. It’s fundamental. We need to know how many people visit, what they read, for how long, how often they return, and at what frequency. These are the “atoms” of our metrics. Without this knowledge we really can’t do much.
If you look in detail at how metrics software works, you’ll see that it operates by negative logic. The raw data is page views and whom these were served to. The software is designed not to identify which set went to one person, but to identify sets which went to different people. It determines who the unique visitors were by looking at pages viewed at roughly the same time and deciding whether they went to the same person or not. In other words, to identify unique individuals, you have to identify different people. [Read More…]
Play It Safe, Grow Your Email List Slower and Smart!
By: David Fowler is the director of email strategy for Lyris.com
Thank You David For This Excellent Article!
Greetings, my fellow email marketers, and welcome to another round of “You Bet Your Email Life!” In this episode, contestants answer the perennial question: “What’s the best way to grow my email database before the holiday shopping season starts?”
Option A: “I found somebody who will sell me a million fresh email addresses for only $500! Problem solved!”
Option B: “I won’t be able to hit my quarterly sales target if I email just to my small house list, so I’m going to rent a bunch of lists to extend my reach.”
Option C: “I need to find new ways to attract more customers to my in-house mailing list, and try to reclaim subscribers who don’t act on my emails.”
Okay, contestants! If you chose Option A, you may as well start shutting down your email program now. Otherwise, the ISPs and blacklists will do it for you because of the spam complaints and spam traps you’ll set off.
Option B isn’t much more attractive, because you’re still paying money to send your email to people who didn’t specifically request it. If you’re careful, you might move the needle a little.
Option C takes the most time and effort, but it’s also the most reliable way to build a email database of genuine addresses belonging to people who really do want to receive your email.
This method won’t magically solve all your list problems in a day. Neither will buying or renting lists, which can leave your email program in pieces.
Buying Email Addresses Can Buy Trouble..[Read More…]