Forrester Research predicts Interactive Marketing spending will reach $76.6 billion by 2016

A new report by Forrester Research forecasts that U.S. interactive marketing spending will reach $76.6 billion by 2016, equal to TV spending this year and comprising 35% of all advertising. That's a huge jump since this year interactive will comprise 19% of all spending, according to Forrester.

According to the report, search and display will remain to be the biggest pieces of the interactive spending pie, comprising 44% and 36%, respectively, in 2016, though search will have lost share from 55% in 2011. Mobile paid advertising and search will experience astronomic development and are surpassing email and social this year.

Google format enables images with AdWords

Last week Google announced a new ad format that may be used to enhance B2B online marketing strategies involving the search engine.

Google Product Ads, a display type that has been in beta testing for a nearly a year, is finally going to be available for all advertisers. The new format shows images alongside traditional AdWords ads, enabling sponsors to current searchers with a visual representation of the products they are searching for.

Unlike normal AdWord ads, the Google Product Ads can be purchased on a cost-per-acquisition basis. For example, an advertiser could pay Google 2 percent on each product sold through the ads. This enables sponsors to avoid paying for clicks that don't lead to purchases, though if their ads are especially popular, it could drive overall expenditures up.

Google Product Ads are set to be available to all advertisers soon.

Google serves the majority of internet searches, which means the new ad format has potential to reach a wide audience of potential clients. According to Experian Hitwise, Google accounted for 72 percent of searches in conducted by American internet users during September.

Source: KoMarketing Associates, LLC

Getting the Most from your Online Marketing Budget

SEO or search engine optimization has become the heart and soul of the Internet marketing industry and many Canadian MSPs and VARs are looking at Search Optimization as part of their overall online marketing strategy.

Each and every reseller or service provider wants to be on the top of search engine results page (SERP). This has created a need for search engine optimizers who alter and optimize the Web sites in such a manner that they become search engine friendly and bring in traffic and revenue to the organizations.

Like any competitive field of business, SEO hasn’t escaped from the hands of crooks and ne’er-do-wells who make tall claims on search engine optimization. It is important for you to detect such frauds before you assign them an optimization job. Here are a few tips which will help you in sorting a fraud SEO service provider from a real one:

• Guaranteed Ranking: The only people who can guarantee you a ranking are search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing but the fact is none of them do SEO! Not even the top ten optimizers in the world in the world can guarantee you a ranking so never fall for such tall claims.
• Quick results: Good SEO is a time-consuming process. It takes time to organically rank a Web site high. It takes at least a month to effectively reflect growth after optimization. So stay away from catchy claims like ‘First page ranking in 15 days’. ‘Guaranteed results in 7 days.’
• Too-Good-To-Be-True Rates: ‘Quality never comes cheap.’ If you choose the wrong SEO service provider, it can be an exercise in futility costing you time and money. The Internet is a great tool to search for market-standard rates. Do not go to optimizers who quote unbelievably low rates.
• Black Hat Techniques: There are lot of unethical techniques for getting your Web site higher ranking on the Web. The down side of this is such practices might invite permanent penalty from the search engines and prove detrimental for your Web site. Make sure your optimizer doesn’t use black hat techniques for optimization.
• Secret and Proprietary: As the owner of the Web site, you are entitled to know what are the exact optimization techniques that your Web site is going through. In case any service provider denies you the information citing secrecy and proprietary information, it is advisable to stay away from them.
• Technical Brainstorming: If your SEO service provider is bombarding you with technological terms and high end techniques it is most likely that he/she is poor with the application of what business is looking for. Good optimizers seldom talk in technical language with their clients and fake optimizers might want to hide their lack of knowledge with such terminology.  The old ‘dazzle them with BS’ truism comes to mind.

Keeping these things in mind will help you in choosing the perfect SEO optimizer for your job.  It is critical that you find a SEO provider who also understands your target market and the industry that you are in.  Search Engine Optimization is not guaranteed, involves hundreds of variables and is a continual process of adjustments and building authority over time. It is a fine mixture of art, science, and research and never comes cheap. And the most important thing – there are no guaranteed results is SEO.

By Stuart Crawford

Source: ChannelBuzz.CA

VAT raised to result in 'More Focused' Marketing Campaigns

A new study has found that the forthcoming rise in VAT will have an affect on marketing campaigns. Email marketing and other types of campaigns will need to become more effective in order to win business once the VAT rise comes into effect, a new study suggests.

According to affiliate network LinkShare, a number of marketers believe that mass marketing techniques will give way to individualised campaigns next year when VAT rises to 20 per cent.


More than one in three consumers said they would be curbing their spending habits once the increase is introduced, while 18 per cent expect to see an increased emphasis on measurement and return on investment.

Liane Dietrich, managing director of LinkShare UK, said the VAT increase could have some benefits for retailers and brands which provide value for money.

"Consumers are savvy and dedicated to the quest for the best value; they won’t go back to pre-recession habits when the economy starts to recover," the industry expert said.

"They will continue to base their decisions on the research and value-driven factors that they have become accustomed to over the last eighteen months."

The research comes just days after a study by Acxiom found that retailers who used creative marketing tactics, such as digital channels, in the run up to Christmas could enjoy more success.

By Sarah Wright

Source: THE DIRECT MARKETING ASSOCIATION (UK) LTD


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Maximize your Online Marketing Campaigns

Different ways to Develop your Online Marketing Campaigns

There are several different ways to make best use of your online marketing campaigns; I would share few with you folks.

E-mail Marketing:

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of writing business messages to addressees. In other words, every e-mail sent to a potential prospects or present customer could be considered e-mail marketing.

Why should we send an E-Mail?

• Improve the relationship level of your customers.

• Replicate Business Opportunity

• Obtain new customers

Social Media Optimization:

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the method of social media activity with the intent of being a magnet for unique visitors to website content.

Social media optimization is related to SEM, but differs in several ways; mostly the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, however improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a method to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites.

In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.

Web Analytics:

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.

Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring website traffic but can be used as a tool for business research and market research. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how the traffic to the website changed after the launch of a new advertising campaign.

Web analytics provides data on the number of visitors, page views, etc to gauge the traffic and popularity trends which help doing the market research.

Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and display advertising.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers.

Pay Per Click Advertising:

Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. 

Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.

Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser's keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site.

Among PPC providers, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the three largest network operators.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.

SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

Happy Surfing!!!

SEO - Search Engine Optimization Services

Must for Websites to Generate Good Revenue via Online Business

When any internet user searches for any information on the internet, what he usually does is use a particular keyword and search in any search engine like Google, Yahoo! or MSN. After searching, the search engines return thousands of results according to the availability and usage of that keyword. Among these thousands of displayed results, the internet users visit only those results displayed on the first page of the search engines.

The best way to draw such huge volume of website traffic is to hold a high position in the first page of the search engines so that the users can find the website easily while searching the internet. Every website owners aims to attain such a position and to achieve this rank they get their website optimized by any well known Search Engine Optimization company.

Among the thousands of websites which get displayed by the search engines, most site owners hire any Search Engine Optimization company to get their website optimized. Due to this, the competition of getting a high rank is fierce among these websites. Each of these sites competes with each other to hold a rank within the first ten. Only those websites, among these thousands succeed which get the best optimization.

Search Engine Optimization has become a must for every website; no website has ever succeeded or survived in the tough competition of the internet world without proper Search Engine Optimization. Each site tries to outrace other to get a high rank in the pages of the search engines. The biggest mistake that a website can do is to ignore the importance of search engine optimization. But if you do not want to commit such a mistake then the best option open to you is the SEO Sevices.