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.

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In a survey of shoppers in four states, nearly four in 10 told cross-channel commerce solutions provider CrossView they preferred to receive promotional messages from retailers by email. It was the most popular communications channel, with direct mail drawing about a quarter of respondents and text messaging coming in third with 18%. Just 9% of shoppers were interested in promotional messages on social media.

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After coming back strong in Q1, US paid search spending continued to regain strength as 2010 went on.

According to SearchIgnite, year-over-year paid search spending was up 14% in Q2, compared with a gain of 11% in Q1. Spending was down slightly, by 2%, quarter-to-quarter—considered a normal part of the summer slowdown in marketing activity.

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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.

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CHART OF THE DAY: Microsoft’s Head Of Sales Blames Facebook For Low Online Ad Prices

Social networks, with their massive inventory of page views, have much lower ad rates on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis than the Internet at large. ComScore reports that Facebook and MySpace only get a $0.56 CPM on average, while the Internet at large gets $2.43.

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According to a new comScore release, more than 123 million Americans visited newspaper sites in May, representing 57% of the total U.S. Internet audience, as the New York Times Brand led the category with more than 32 million visitors and 719 million pages viewed during the month. The average visitor viewed 22 pages of content on the New York Times. Tribune Newspapers ranked second in terms of audience with 24.8 million visitors, followed by Advance Internet and USA Today Sites. Top Newspaper Groups (May 2010 Total U.S. Home & Work Locations)   Total Unique Visitors (000) Total Pages Viewed (MM) Average Pages per Visitor Total Internet Audience 215,691 592,519 2,747 Newspapers 123,897 5,339 43    The New York Times Brand 32,530 719 22    Tribune Newspapers 24,753 359 14    Advance Internet 18,053 326 18    USA Today Sites 16,771 154 9    WashingtonPost.com 16,677 178 11    McClatchy Corporation 13,987 216 15    MediaNews Group 13,362 141 11    NYDailyNews.com 12,502 122 10    Hearst Newspapers 12,017 195 16    Wall Street Journal Online 11,325 115 10 Source: comScore Media Metrix , June 2010 Read more at www.mediapost.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Craigslist’s Traffic Crashes Into eBay

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put out a massive report on Internet stocks today, and this chart showing eBay’s tanking traffic jumped out at us. Mahaney says, “these long-term very negative traffic trends point to the possibility of sustained eBay U.S. Marketplace underperformance going forward.”

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Digital Migration Hurts Traditional Media Revenues More than Expected

Digital Migration Slams Publishing, Radio The annual decline in 2009 revenues in several traditional media categories was more severe than originally forecast, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers research. Most striking was the decline in out-of-home revenues, which fell approximately 13% in 2009, compared to a forecast of about 7%. In addition, radio revenues declined about 9%, compared to an approximately 7% forecast.

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Top Search Engines by Share of Visits April vs. May 2010

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Retailers Slow to Take Full Advantage of Mobile

Retailers, meanwhile, are just starting to launch mobile commerce offerings, and have barely begun to offer capabilities targeted to in-store shoppers:

10.7% of retailers use mobile advertising to promote sales and special offers 6.5% have a mobile ecommerce site 6.1% have an iPhone app 2.8% distribute mobile coupons 1.4% use mobile search ads 1.4% have search apps for other mobile devices

Meanwhile, a whopping 79.4% are not using m-commerce at all. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Only 40% Of Web Ads Use Adobe Flash

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Very Effective SEO Objectives by Primary Market

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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

MySpace

Although now overtaken by Facebook, MySpace is the second largest social network, experiencing in excess of 60m unique users each month.

According to Knol, MySpace has more than 115m active monthly users globally with, on average, 300,000 new people signing up to the site every day.

Twitter

Over the past twelve months, Twitter’s year-on-year growth rate has broken the 1000% barrier.

It also found that Tuesday is the most active day for Tweeting, followed by Wednesday and then Friday. Read more at econsultancy.com

YouTube

If YouTube were a country, it would be the third most-populated place in the world. Read more at econsultancy.com

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The proportion of online retailers with mobile-tailored sites has tripled in the last year but still remains small, according to a new study. In its second annual mobile commerce audit, digital strategy firm Acquity Group found that 12% of the top 500 Internet retailers had sites optimized for mobile phones, up from 4% a year ago. And despite all the buzz around mobile apps, the share of companies with downloadable mobile apps is only 7%, up from 2% last year. Only 5% had both a mobilized site and an app and only 2% had an e-commerce-enabled app. In terms of specific devices, 11% had apps for the iPhone — up from 1% last year — but few had ones geared to other smartphone platforms such as Android, Palm or the BlackBerry. Only 12% of retailers had mobile sites that allowed customers to complete a transaction through checkout on at least one type of smartphone, and only 2% offered apps with check-out capability. Read more at www.mediapost.com

Many more small businesses have plans for the coming year, and more than three-quarters consider integration of e-mail and social at least somewhat important. A majority plan to allow users to sign up for e-mails directly from social media sites like Facebook. This tactic allows e-mail marketers to grow their lists—cited as the top benefit of integrating social and e-mail by one-third of respondents—by allowing consumers to use their channel of choice and sign up on their own terms.

Read more at www.emarketer.com

CHART OF THE DAY: iPad Is On Track To Be The Fastest Selling Mobile Device Ever

After less than 80 days on the market, Apple has sold 3 million iPads and according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty, it’s on track to be the fastest selling mobile device in history.

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Outsourcing Plans for Key Marketing Functions

SUMMARY: In this week’s chart, we’ll take a look at the outsourcing plans for key marketing functions including search engine optimization, email design and content development, social media and more. You will learn what percentage of organizations are currently outsourcing various key marketing tactics and which tactics are the most likely to be outsourced in the future. Read more at www.marketingsherpa.com