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2004-11 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
October 2004. Two new ad-serving networks
have launched, rivals Massive, Inc. and inGamePartners (IGP). Both networks will
place in-game ads in online game environments, and can reach any Internet-enabled
video game console or platform, including mobile phones. Advertisers can specify
demographic and geographic targets in both networks.
-source: Media Daily News
2004-09 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
August 2004. Players in the most successful
(23 million registrants) children's online game Neopets.com interact also with
embedded participants such as McDonalds and General Mills. Cross-channel (between
offline outlets and the online virtual world) promotions are developing. Most
(97%) of the kids don't object to the commercial presence.
-source: Neopets, Inc.
August 2004. Click-though rate (CTR) and
also conversion to sale (or other call to action) are definitely shown to be greater
with behaviorally targeted ads than with regular online ads. In three large, testbed
flights involving 500 million ad impressions, the non-revenue call to action (a
registration form) improved CTR by 192 percent, and conversion by 167 percent.
The credit card sale campaign gained 194 percent improvement in CTR from the behaviorial
ads, with an astounding conversion increase of more than two thousand percent.
The customer acquisition campaign gained even more remarkable conversion improvement
of over three thousand percent. Overall effective cost-per-thousand impressions
(CPM) was halved for one advertiser and reduced to one-seventh the normal effective
cost for another.
-source: Advertising.com
COMMENT 2004-08. Advertising.com
is the largest online ad network (and recently acquired by AOL). The network uses
coookies to track users across websites visited. In these campaigns, users who
left a website without responding to the call to action were served repeat ads
at subsequent websites they visited within the network. The repetition worked.
Although the term sounds esoteric, and although the pattern-matching can be infinitely
complex, "behavioral targeting" is often as simple as yes-no, did they
buy yet?
2004-07 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
July 2004. The first major branding survey
in the gaming market by Chrysler/Jeep showed a 27 percent increase in awarenes
of Dodge brands, withalmost 20 percent increase in intent to purchase. This from
the auto manufacturer's online branded game, "Race the Pros".
-source: Daimler-Chrysler
July 2004. Internet advertising spending
will increase from $6.6 billion in 2003 to $16.1 billion in 2009, growing by ten
billion dollars over six years. Offline advertising is increasing as well, although
online advertising is increasing at a faster rate. Search advertising, which has
been fueling the growth during the last couple of years, is expected to grow 30
percent over the next two years, but in an indication of the robust health of
the industry, display advertising and classified advertising are also expected
to grow at close to the same rate, each by more than 25 percent.
-source: Jupiter Research
2004-05 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
May 2004. Google has enhanced its AdWords/AdSense
service to include jpeg and gif images, enabling ads that resemble the common
banner or skyscraper ad. This beta feature is a new departure from its pioneering,
and signature, pure-text ads.
-source: Google
April 2004. Google has enlarged the reach
of its "smart pricing" matrix. The cost of an AdWords ad has always
been lowered automatically to a level just above its next lower bidder, while
the position of the ad in the page was gratuitously raised if it attracted better
click-throughs than a higher bidder. Now, an ad's cost per click (CPC) is automatically
adjusted downward according to algorithmic determination of the value of the page
it was placed into, i.e. if that page is less likely to turn into additional business
for the advertiser. For example, a click from a product's industry newsletter
page may be less likely to convert into a sale than a click from that product's
review or price comparison or search returns page. Among the data subject to analysis
is conversion data from advertisers who employ the free conversion tracking stats
offered by Google.
-source: Google
[COMMENT 2004-05 Google continues to hold AdWords
bidding to one-tier for placement in both the search pages and website content
pages. Advertisers can choose not to appear in the content pages. Overture by
contrast in January introduced two-tier CPC, with separate bidding for its contextual
placements in content pages. Many advertisers prefer to be able to tweak these
things themselves manually, a la Overture, while others are content that Google
insists on perfecting its automatic, algorithmic tweaking on behalf of the advertiser.
No universal metric yet exists to measure the merits of each case.]
April 2004. Business owners have long
yearned for effective local advertising through the Web, this will come a step
closer following the implementation this year of FindWhat's new offering: a pay-per-call
ad-serving system for local businesses who lack a website or who depend on a phone
call to advance a sale. FindWhat has teamed with Ingenio to provide a unique,
trackable phone number coupled with a text ad in its search pages. This appears
to be the first instance of monetizing a telephone call the same way a click currently
is in search advertising. The perceived value, and thus the cost, of a telephone
call is significantly higher than a click-through to a website. Forty percent
of businesses surveyed by Jupiter Research for Ingenio said they would allocate
more marketing funds to such a local service if it were available in their area.
-source: FindWhat, Ingenio
[COMMENT 2004-05. Note our earlier reports of local
search developments by Yahoo and Google. The Ingenio development path if successful
would close the Web and the yellow pages in a seamless circle, and render web
sites perhaps even unnecessary for some businesses.]
April 2004. Falk eSolutions, dominant
in Europe and now opening in the US, offers AdSolution FX, an ad-serving platform
that converts a creative intended for a popup window into a floating rich media
format on the fly, upon detection of popup suppression working in the browser.
Falk says there is no specific charge for the conversion.
-source: Falk eSolutions AG
[COMMENT 2004-05. Analysts differ on predictions
of market share, but Falk seems to be gaining decent customers. Falk estimates
from its stats that 30 percent of popup ads are being blocked nowadays - an advance
on the last reliable metric of 15 percent from Forrester last year. You may already
have seen rich media floating ads appearing in pages that - thanks to blocking
of some kind - you've become accustomed to viewing free of such elements. We note
from subjective experience that rich media is a gentler intrusion than the popup
window, and hard results always show that it converts better. Especially with
Microsoft's decision to make popup blocking the default setting in future systems,
the popup (which is cheap and can be fast to load) seems increasingly threatened.]
2004-03 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
March 2004. The company Revenue Science
gained as new clients The Financial Times and Reuters, to add to an already
top-end list, for its services of ad-serving based on behavioral targeting. The
service tracks users' pathways taken through websites and deduces their preferences
on-the-fly, and serves relevant ads. Behavioral targeting is a new market, already
flourishing in its early stages, and generating strong interest because of its
demonstrated effectiveness.
-source: Revenue Science
COMMENT 2004-03. The personalization of the individual
user experience is today's Grail - the inevitable imperative that inspires ad-serving
networks, paid and unpaid search providers, and the serving of dynamically chosen
and custom web pages of any kind. It may be the single most important concept
underlying the technological development of the Web. The infrastructure created
by such development is of use to any business, publisher, or website owner, in
any field, at any scale.]
January 2004. Games that incorporate advertising
and other marketing content - advergames - are set to surge this year. There are
several different models currently: standalone games which carry advertising,
such as developed by portals like Yahoo and MSN; games developed specifically
around products, such as for BMW and Pepsi; and actual games intended for the
game market but developed in partnership with an embedded advertiser. More varieties
will appear. Results from campaigns so far are good, although advertisers generally
are still tentative about this new medium. Keys to success are distribution (your
market needs to know about your game), registration of some kind for best benefit,
and a viral component (invite a friend to play) for word of mouth. There were
85 million unique user-sessions on online gaming sites in December. The opportunities
are unlimited.
-source: Gartner
2003-11 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
November 2003. Online ads can have an
impact on buyers' purchasing decisions long after they view an ad. Up to 85 percent
of conversions occur beyond the day on which the most recent advertising impression
was served. This confirms the long-term branding impact of online advertising.
There is increasing data to support the theory that users consume the Internet
in often repeated patterns on a daily basis. Both of these conclusions point to
the importance of serving ads at the right time of day for your target. Day-parting
thus becomes as critical to ROAS (return on advertising spend) on the Web as it
has been traditionally in other media.
-source: Advertising.com
November 2003. Paid search continues to
lead the revival of online advertising. For the first half of this year, online
ad spending was $3.29 billion with search engine delivery earning $957 million,
up from $240 million for the same period in 2002.
-source: Interactive Advertising Bureau
November 2003. Television advertisers
should begin to develop alternate models of ad delivery with the rise of ad-skipping
personal video recorder (PVR) technology, and the technology convergence of the
home media network. PVR penetration of the US market will equal 15 percent by
2006. Aggregate audiences are disappearing, replaced by unique "audience
of one" demographics, to be serviced using on-demand models.
-source: Booz Allen Hamilton, SG Cowen
October 2003. Rich-media ads that move
across the page or use Flash animation, combined with pop-ups, doubled in number
over just half a year, from 17 percent of all Web ads in Q1 to 36 percent in Q3.
Larger sized ads are gradually displacing the standard banner ad, still three-fifths
of all ads but continually declining in use. Contextual targeting using keyword
relevance serves up three out of five ads now. The global average click-through
rate (CTR) for all ads is less than one percent, so anytime you get more than
that you're ahead of the game. In the US, CTR for the year is stable in the range
of 0.61 to 0.76 percent.
-source: DoubleClick
2003-07 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
June 2003. The online ad
industry continues to grow. Paid search - keyword advertising - more than doubled
in 2002, bringing in $635 million.
-source: Interactive Advertising Bureau, PricewaterhouseCoopers
May 2003. We hate them
but we use them: pop-up ads generate a click-through 13 times that of the standard
468 x 60 pixels banner and a conversion rate more than 14 times better. Rich media
fails to improve click-through rates but gains four times better conversions.
-source: Advertising.com
2003-03 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
January 2003. The two-year,
20% annual decline in advertising spending finally reversed last Q3, with 1% positive
growth.
-source: Interactive Advertising Bureau
January 2003. Marketers
are beginning to regain their confidence in online advertising: 51 percent expect
a budget increase in 2003, and 57 percent plan to increase spending on email marketing.
-source: DoubleClick
[COMMENT 2003-01. Many analysts predict
modest but encouraging advertising growth for 2003.]
2002-11 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
October 2002. 60% of US
consumers regularly visit local websites, and local content is the third most
popular website destination. Local online ad spending is dominated by classifieds
rather than media buys.
- source: Jupiter Research
[COMMENT 2002-11. A large percentage
of classifieds are employment oriented. Classifieds are a growing and very successful
online venture.]
October 2002. A study showed
that 82% of visitors who admired a specific website believed the site carried
high-quality advertising, while only 36% of those without particular affinity
for the site believed the same. Similar parities were obtained across a variety
of tests.
- source: Online Publishers Association
2002-05 UPDATE - Market Snapshots
of the WEB
April 2002. A new study
mapping Internet advertising with consumer-purchase decision-making demonstrates
growth in brand awareness, message recall, and sales. For the first time, not
only is branding demonstrated to increase from online ads, but, most importantly,
actual sales.
-source: Information Resources, Inc., DoubleClick
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