The $65 billion hole in the online advertising business
Online publishers and ad networks are struggling to come up with ad formats that increase the effectiveness — and price — of advertising online. But there's a possibility that analog ad dollars turn into digital dimes because advertisers are getting better value elsewhere.
According to Outsell Inc., a media research and advisory company, marketers will spend $66 billion on TV advertising and $42 billion on newspaper advertising this year.
But they're also going to spend another $65 billion on their brands outside of traditional advertising. And online publishers won't be seeing any of that money. It will be spent on other places — like companies' own websites, search engine optimization and social media.
A/B split and multivariate testing: don't forget your most important page
I'm a huge fan of A/B split and multivariate testing. It simply works. And that means more money at the end of the day.
But because this can be a complicated undertaking depending on the scope of your testing strategy, there are often pages that get left behind.
Lightning strikes Amazon's EC2
Cloud computing is growing in popularity and many businesses, both large and small, are turning to the cloud to host critical applications.
Amazon's EC2 is one of the most popular offerings but all it took was a single lightening strike to take part of the EC2 cloud down last night.
Q&A: Simon Joseph of Jessops on multichannel retail
Simon Joseph is Head of Group E-commerce at Jessops, where he is also responsible for Direct, Customer Services and B2B. He has previously worked as E-commerce Director at eXpansys Plc, and at DSG and Argos.
I caught up with him to find out how Jessops has adapted to multichannel retail, in advance of next week's Future of Digital Marketing event, where he will be taking part in our retail panel.
Speed up your site with Google Page Speed
With broadband internet connections so prevalent around the world, it's easy for web designers and developers to get a little bit lazy when it comes to optimizing the pages they create or that their applications generate.
After all, a broadband connection is usually pretty forgiving and can even render certain best practices and good habits entirely unnecessary.
Can you trust Web 2.0 companies with your money?
In a post last month, I pointed out that some of the most popular Web 2.0 companies still haven't figured out Customer Service 1.0.
Even though they're related, customer service is one thing and your money is another.
Adobe's BrowserLab is every web designer's dream come true
Internet technology seems to advance at warp speed but if you're a web designer, the process of testing a website for cross-browser compatibility hasn't improved much since the days when knowledge of Microsoft FrontPage made someone a 'web designer'.
But a new service from Adobe looks set to change that.
Poor conversions: the usual suspects
You've spent lots of time and money building what you believe is a
great website. You've got products or services to sell. You've got some
traffic. Now all you need is customers.
There's only one problem: you're not converting that traffic into customers at nearly the rate you thought you would.
Taking shopping cart abandonment too far?
Shopping cart abandonment. It's the bane of many online retailers and for some, accounts for a significant portion of lost potential revenue.
There are a number of reasons that potential customers abandon their carts and there are a number of common-sense tactics online retailers can employ to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Is SEO the 'goal hanger' of internet marketing?
Prepare yourself for a very loose football analogy... apologies in advance. If natural search (SEO) were a football player, I bet it would be the guy who hangs around the 6 yard box tapping in the goals.
The goal hanger may not be contributing much to the build up play, yet is happy to take all the plaudits for scoring; happy to receive the player of the month awards and can be seen regularly signing autographs.
Why am I saying this? It's no fault of the player. In fact, without him the team would not achieve the same results and he is absolutely instrumental to achieving the overall success. But what about all the craft and skill of the build up play? The hard tackling and running off the ball to help win back possession? A lot of this usually goes unnoticed.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
