Finally, I have started a new blog about Marketing. You can see it at www.convertinc.com. Who will be the first to comment? So – I moved some old professional posts there, and will be posting there a couple of times a week. This blog will still survive, but will focus on general thoughts, ideas and of course feminist rantings.

Take care, and thanks for reading .

- The typical clickthrough rate is between 0.1-0.3%. Clickthroughs on display advertising has been going down since the beginning of the internet (In the 90s people clicked on banners out of curiosity, now people are less enthusiastic).   

- Display advertising accounted for 22% of the US Internet Advertising revenue in 2006. This is well below the 56% market share it had in 1999 before search marketing came along.

- More targeted ads get a higher clickthrough, at about 0.5%

- Video ads increase clickthrough to 0.4% (doubling from the typical 0.2%) .

- Behavioral and demographic targeting also increase clickthrough rate to up to 1.5% .

I got these results from both public resources and by phoning a dozen or so sites and ad networks. I am very surprised how low the clickthroughs are on display advertising – just another reason to stick with search marketing.

I actually have been in business for two months, but I have been so busy with customers that I haven’t had time to focus on branding – which is a great problem to have. Thanks to my two best friends from highschool for creating my logo and my name .

It’s worth noting that television marketing is being usurped by the Internet as we speak. Yep, the new primetime is 9-5 and encompasses URLs, not remote controls.

This should be more fun than an amusement park for B-to-B marketers. As one example, software professionals — who often belong to online communities and have company purchasing-decision authority — are ripe for offers.

They had speakers from both Forrester Research and from Umbria, a company that specializes in getting marketing intelligence from the blogosphere. The Umbria speaker definitely stole the show with some of her insights and case studies. The idea is that companies can use blogs to listen into conversations about their products and services in a way that they never could before… since it is all public.

"As people blog about the new iPhone, what they thought of Borat and how they take their cookie dough, they provide a wealth of unsolicited opinions that can be mined for valuable information about how a target audience thinks — and consumes."

Basically, Umbria does a search on blogs for a product or trend using the standard tools (Technorati and Google) or something similar except they remove all of the spam – this represents a huge amount of blog posts (creating fake blog posts is a way to improve search engine rankings). They are then able to approximate the age and gender and location of the blogger based on a number of criteria, such as language, paragraph length and timing of posting. Some of the measures seem arbitrary and I don’t agree with them (ie. they said that it takes women two paragraphs to say the same thing that men say in one). However, they do pull some interesting information.

You can see here, a press release on their recent study on Organic and Health Trends. An interesting finding that she mentioned is that a lot of people love going to Organic Foods stores because they enjoy the samples . I think companies like Umbria and the Attention Company have it right – listening is important.  I am looking forward to see how this idea fits into the dusty world of traditional market research.   

The main reason why you want a local site is if you can offer something that no one else can offer.  The first question that you have to ask is "would my users and/or advertisers benefit from having a local site". Reasons can include:

1. Advertising space is limited. For example, on a high-traffic site, Canadian advertisers can be drowned out by American ones.
2. Product offerings differ by country. A central site does not account for differences in distribution or customization by country. This can frustrate users who keep seeing what they can’t have.
3. Local content is useful. In my experience, I have seen a lot of effort put towards creating local content, with rarely a reward. One good example of local content that I experienced was Canadian healthcare cost savings case studies, since our healthcare reimbursement system is dramatically different from the US, it made sense to have local studies instead of leveraging theirs.
4. Regional Languages. Sometimes languages differ by region. Anyone who has tried to create one site for Quebec and France understands this (French is a very rule-bound language, but it is not only one set of rules!)

Ultimately I believe that one day new technologies will obviate the need for local sites. For example, advertisements, content and product offerings could be served dynamically depending on the location of the IP address (or language settings), modified slightly to account for regional language differences. For now, this is still an important issue.   

Inspired by the ride, he made 8 wishes to raise money and awareness. You can see a list of the wishes here. One of his wishes has already been granted- meeting Paul Orfalea, the CEO of Kinkos who has a learning disability. Seeing Orfalea, who doesn’t read e-mails (?!) made me think about how it takes all kinds of different business people to make industry work, not just one rigid type. Paul is hinting that another wish is about to be granted soon. He also wants to be featured by 88 websites, so I am glad to contribute!

As I meet more smart people who have been held back learning disabilities, it stresses to me the importance of making our education system more inclusive. Congratulations to Paul thinking big and for bringing visibility (in a super-original way) to this issue.

Guy Kawasaki, a famous author and consultant is in the top 50 of bloggers on the Internet according to Technocrati, 21,000 people receive RSS feeds via Feedburner and 1,457 receive emails via FeedBlitz. The fact that this blog of all blogs is not earning more is shocking.

This paired with the recent Marketing Sherpa report that shows Direct Mail (DM) leading the pack as far as Marketing spend is concerned upsets me. Direct Mail? You mean those envelopes people receive and throw them away without opening them? Isn’t this killing trees for no reason? DM is ahead of broadcast, and spending on it is many times higher than any kind of Online marketing.

My conclusion from this is that Online Marketing is still in its infancy, whereas mediums like Direct Mail have had centuries to evolve and grow. With the ability to measure online results so precisely, you would think that more marketers would go this route instead of the traditional DM channel. Perhaps since DM is safe and predictable, and there are many well-seasoned Marketing Managers who understand it, decision-makers don’t see the need for change.

But – I think there is definitely some room to grow and innovate within Marketing. Still relying on DM is like still programming mainframe applications. Of course there are subject-matter experts, but that is no reason to keep the whole industry in the dark ages. Eventually as more advertisers see the benefits of online and as the online advertising industry continues to innovate, we will see more online ads… and less junk mail at our doorsteps. 

2. Be Direct: For example, “How to Present Effectively” pulls better than the ambiguous “How to Get More Done”. When people are scanning your site or newsletter, certain titles will jump out at them based on their interests or what is currently going on in their lives. Overall, a specific and direct title is more successful than a general and ambiguous one.

3. Be Current: If you are talking about a catchy subject that is popular (eg. The Starfish and the Spider) use it in the title so that your site or newsletter looks up to date.

4. Be Useful: Titles that look helpful with phrases such as “How to”, “Make Better” “Tips on” pull well. People click on them because they think they can immediately benefit from reading the article.

5. Be Predictable: Include product and service names of what your company is typically associated with. You may have a different strategy coming, or you may want to make a drab product seem more exciting by sprucing up the title, but this is not effective. The web is a big place so if people are on your little piece of it, they want to see specific information on what you offer.

If you are looking for more information on this kind of stuff – check out Marketing Sherpa.

Going to the home page is reflecting the behaviour of the marketers or other people in your organization who may have it bookmarked it or type in the URL directly. To them, it is as if having a banner or promotion on the home page is the same as having a big sign at the front of the store, where all of the customers enter. However, on the web, users can enter from a wide variety of back and side doors – through Google or Live searches, campaign pages or RSS links from other sites for example. So, as you prioritize your development, you should consider how the users are flowing through the site.

How to Put your Homepage into Perspective

Look at your web analytics reports (Omniture, Webtrends, Google Analytics etc) and see where the homepage ranks. You can also check your entry pages. As I said before, right now on the content-site I work on, the homepage is in 5th place behind campaign pages and some articles that rank well on the search engines. This means that more emphasis will be placed on linking from those pages, without being a distraction. On the online job board where I used to work, the home page ranked far behind the search screen and the results screen, so the best cross-promotion opportunities were there.

That being said, if your top page is a campaign page, you may not want to link off of it since it will likely hurt conversions. One good way to cross-promote is to put a dramatic splash about another campaign on the thank-you page. Of course, after you are done with the analysis and the implementation, wash, rinse, repeat – it is time to analyse again! See what the referring pages are to your desired destination pages to see if your promotion was successful.