Based on the quantity and quality of leads generated, companies said email was their best lead generation program, followed by live events, website registrations and webinars. The effectiveness of online channels, coupled with the fact that prospects indicate the web is the first place they look for more information, makes it natural for companies to be increasing their investments in web design, email marketing and search engine optimization.

See more at www.emarketer.com

According to a February–March 2010 survey from office services firm Regus, smaller companies see the most success, with nearly half of small businesses around the world having acquired a customer through social networks. Large companies were less successful, but more than a quarter had seen social success through customer acquisition. This was despite large companies being more likely to devote budgets to social marketing.

See more at www.emarketer.com

Many social media marketers are eager to tie a hard number to the value of their efforts. To that end, firms have attempted to analyze the worth of fans and followers on social networking sites like Facebook.

Digital consulting firm Syncapse and research company Hotspex have come up with an empirical formula that puts an average value of $136.38 on the Facebook fans of the site’s 20 biggest corporate brands. Most of that value comes from how much the fans will spend on the brand’s products, with additional dollars coming from customer loyalty, recommendations and earned media.

The study found that people spent significantly more on products they were fans of, compared with consumers who were not fans. In the case of many of Facebook’s most popular food and beverage marketers, fan spending was more than double that of non-fans.

The pattern of increased fan spending held across all of the top 20 brands on Facebook, with differences ranging from 51% for Oreo fans to 168% for fans of Nokia. Read more at www.emarketer.com

Criticism of behaviorally targeted ads by consumers, privacy advocates and the government has led to uncertainty in the market, which eMarketer expects to reach nearly $1.13 billion this year. Research from the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) indicates the high value of those ads, for both marketers and publishers.

The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad. Clickers found behavioral ads more relevant, but the NAI did not study how likely they were to click in the first place, a key component of effectiveness.

CPM rates were likewise significantly higher for behaviorally targeted ads, with the average price of a behaviorally targeted ad 2.68 times greater than that of a run-of-network ad. Retargeting also provided higher CPMs.

See more at www.emarketer.com

Retailers that want to connect with their target audience online would do well to go where their customers already are. And according to the “2010 Social Media Report” from ForeSee Results, 69% of online shoppers regularly use social media sites.

The overwhelming winner in terms of shopper presence was Facebook, with more than one-half of respondents using it regularly. YouTube took the second spot, with former giant MySpace far behind its rival. Only about one in 10 online shoppers surveyed used Twitter.

See more at www.emarketer.com

See more at www.emarketer.com

SUMMARY: Competition between companies and their affiliates is natural. Affiliates can be very effective at creating revenue-generating traffic through search so there’s an inherent tension in the system. See the main attitudes/policies with which merchants attempt to deal with this issue.

See more at www.marketingsherpa.com

The Online Publishers Association and ComScore, both seriously interested parties, did a study of 80 campaigns for 50 top brands which was tracked across the top 200 highly trafficked sites and concluded:  1. The 80-20 rule applies to clicks. Eighty percent of the clicks come from 20 percent of the people exposed to the ads. At very best only 1 in 5 ads draws a click whether that was the intention of the ad or not. 2. Displays Ads Prompt Search. Queries for terms exposed in display ads were search 50% more often a week after exposure and 38% more often even 4 weeks after exposure. If you see something that intersects your interests or your personal wish list, you are more likely to search for it directly when you’re ready to buy. Direct and brand advertising interact synergistically online and offline.   3. Display Ads Drive Site Engagement. Those exposed to ads spent 34 minutes per unique visitor on the sites exposed. This is hard to believe in terms of the time spent on site and the amount of “lift”. Maybe it just measures the vagaries of site architecture and navigation. 4. Brand Exposure Bumps Up eCommerce. Those exposed to brand ads spent 7% more on average when they bought. This feels like advertising orthodoxy; exposure drives awareness, consideration and purchase. It’s possible that added impressions convinces customers to trade up a little. Read more at blogs.imediaconnection.com

The 2009 Omniture Online Conversion Benchmark Survey, conducted in July, reveals that most marketers miss opportunities to increase conversions. About 80% of the 1,000 online or interactive marketers responding to the survey do not serve up personalized content to Web visitors, not do they promote Web site content based on performance metrics.

Forty-two percent of marketers participating in the survey spend less than five hours per week optimizing advertising media. Less than one-third frequently test online content. And 70% of the content decisions that appear on Web sites are made by one person, unsupported by data.

See more at www.mediapost.com

Your ads are often not selling the products that you designed them to sell. We have found that upwards of 48.38% percent of the time people end up buying a product different than the the one featured on ad they clicked on, and upwards of 11.28% of the time they bought a similar product, but not exactly the same product as the ad they clicked on.

For each keyword and product combination we looked at, we placed them in to one of three buckets: Exact, similar and unrelated. “Exact” would mean they purchased exactly the same product or product category of the ad they clicked on. “Similar” would be if they looked for XYZ sleeping bag, but purchased ABC sleeping bag, meaning they still purchased a sleeping bag, but it was a different brand or model from their search. “Unrelated” represented when the users search had no relation to what they ultimately purchased. After conducting this analysis, we found the following information: Read more at searchengineland.com

ad:tech and MarketingSherpa collaborated on another year-end survey of more than 1,200 marketers. Here are some of the most intriguing results about their plans for marketing during a recession this year. Three charts offer looks at which tactics marketers will use the most and which tactics they expect will offer the best ROI.

See more at echo4.bluehornet.com