Tracking Email Campaigns Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free Web analytics tool that can be integrated with your email marketing campaigns to gain valuable information about the subscriber activity on your site. This data can be used to increase the effectiveness of future campaigns, and thus boost sales conversions, subscribers, or other campaign goals. In fact, according to a 2005 JupiterResearch report, using Web analytics to target email campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and 18 times the profits compared to regular mass email campaigns.

Today I am going to talk about how you can easily tag your email links in Google Analytics so you can better track your email marketing campaigns. Before we begin, make sure you have a Google Analytics account for your Web site, and verify that it is set up to track conversions. This involves placing a piece of code on every page you want to track on your site, including each conversion or order confirmation page.

What is Link Tagging?

Link tagging involves adding additional information (i.e., variables) to the destination URLs used in your online ads so Google Analytics can detect and associate each link with a specific campaign.
You can tag any number of online activities, including banner ads, paid search ads, or emails. Once a visitor responds to the ad, Google stores a cookie on his or her machine and is able to connect her ongoing actions with the original ad.


How to Tag Your Links

Tagging your links is very easy using Google's URL Builder.You merely need to identify the proper information to place into each of the following variables:

· Source

· Medium

· Term

· Content

· Campaign

Source

The source identifies who is delivering your message to the customer. It also defines the origin of your message. Examples include Google, Yahoo, a Web site you are advertising with, or the name of your newsletter.

Medium

The medium is the means that is used to deliver the message to the recipient (i.e., CPC, banner, email). For an email marketing campaign, you will use "email."

Term

This is the term or keyword you purchased and is only used in paid search tracking. Therefore, it will not be included in an email marketing campaign.

Content

The content variable can be used to perform A/B testing on two versions of an ad. For instance, you can send out two email newsletters and determine which one performs better for you by tracking them separately. You can also assign different content attributes to different parts of a single email. For instance, you may want to tag your header, special offer, footer, and product links. When you use a different content variable for each specific link in your creative, you are able to determine the effectiveness of each part of your email.

Campaign

This is the name of your campaign. You can be running one campaign on several different mediums. Use a descriptive term or slogan like "February Promotions" or "Get in Shape for Spring."

Once you have identified your specific campaign variables, simply enter them into the Google URL Builder, and click on "Generate URL." Then replace the original URL of the link in your email with the new one. You'll need to repeat this for each link in the message you're working on, as well as every future email broadcast you send.


How Is My Email Performing?

Now that you're successfully tracking email campaigns, it's important to know how to access the data. To begin, log into Google Analytics and click the "Traffic Sources" tab. Then click "Campaigns." All of your campaigns will be listed here for the time period you selected. You can click on a specific campaign (i.e., February Promotions) to see the full campaign summary. The "Segment" drop-down box has a long list of options, including "Source," "Medium," and "Content." You can use this feature to track the origin of your traffic, the specific email it's coming from, and the call-to-action that's generating the traffic.

Spend some time exploring Google Analytics and learning how to use the technology. The program's full capabilities surpass the scope of this article.

Integrating Google Analytics with your current email marketing reporting tools helps you understand how customers and prospects respond to your ads and interact with your web site. You will have instant access to all of the clickstream data users generate as they move from page to page across your site. This means you can find out who left your site after previewing your landing page, and who started the process of purchasing a product but strayed to another part of the site. You can see who reviewed product or service information, and who didn't. Essentially, this will allow you to identify what is working in your campaigns and what is not. Then you can tweak future campaigns to see an improvement in performance and ultimately, an increase in sales conversions.

Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers

Yesterday, Chris Sherman from Search Marketing Now presented another webinar jammed packed with useful information. This session entitled ‘Multi-National Search Marketing: Effective Strategies for Global Marketers‘ was sponsored by iProspect and moderated by Claire Schoen.

Chris was a perfect speaker due to his experience covering search and search engines since 1994. He is the author of several books, including ‘Google Power’.

Chris started out the presentation by outlining that he’ll cover why we might want to go global, what types of campaigns work best and how to do it.

The first slide discussed the fact that a lot of people perceive that Google has taken over the earth. Yes, Google is dominant and if you are running a search marketing campaign, you understand that Google’s reach can give you that global coverage. Chris said we may ask ourselves why should we should bother going multinational since Google has a global reach. But, Chris believes there are other opportunities out there.

The market share and what the reality really is.....

comScore does a monthly report on worldwide search share. Google does have the dominant share - about 63% - that’s just under 2/3 of all the market share worldwide. Despite the all the media about the Yahoo/Microsoft merge, the reality is that Yahoo worldwide, they are number one in terms of the number of people who visit them. In terms of search - they are number 2. If you aren’t using Yahoo, you could be missing out on certain benefits - particularly worldwide.

The number 3 player is Baidu.com - they are the dominant player in China. Over time as the Internet expands in China, Chris believes those numbers for Baidu will go in the double digits very quickly.

There is a tie for number 4 - Microsoft sites and NHN Corp. Finally, the other 90+ search engines have a 13% market share. If you actually start drilling down you’ll find some of these players are dominant in certain regions.

Key Players (source comScore)

• Google totally dominates North America and most of Europe.
• Yahoo is dominant in Asia, except for:
  • China (Baidu 61%, Google 20%)
  • South Korea (Naver 74%, Google 4%)
  • Russia (RIndex 57%, Google 23%)

Why Go Global

Almost 1/6 of the population is out there searching and doing about 61 billion searches per month. If you drill down, 75% of all searches are outside North America. To Chris, that is the most compelling reason you want to consider doing a multinational search marketing campaign.

To Translate or Not

Chris posed the big question…‘do we have to go through the details of translating?’

• Depends on your goals. You can have a strictly English campaign and it will work best for global brands and products with the same name in all cultures.
• An alternative is to mix campaigns that mix and match English and target market language (keywords, ads, creative landing pages, etc). Takes a bit of experimenting to discover what works best with this mixed approach.

Key: Search Behavior

• Varies from country to country.
• Chris discussed how people use different search terms, have different eye tracking, and result scanning patterns, different click through styles. Studies have proven the differences between North American searchers and others - like those from China.
• This means you will likely need to do translation, search optimization and cultural optimization. You need to make your content appealing to the search engines and the searchers through their various needs that they are expressing through their search behaviour.

PPC or SEO or Both

• Chris counseled us that if we are going multinational, we will have to commit a reasonable amount of resources to ensure the campaign is successful. Even before we being, we should consider whether a paid search or natural search campaign is more likely to be effective in a given market.
• Sherman feels that in larger markets - you are probably o.k. to do either - or both if you have the resources.
• However, for smaller markets, you should consider each individually. (In smaller countries where you could be targeting the millions or hundreds of thousand of people - you need to carefully consider who is the market leader in those countries).

Targeting Your Markets

• Use your marketing department to carefully weigh the probability of ranking with both country size and internet reach. Remember that Internet reach varies greatly (example, China is under 20% while other countries have much greater Internet reach - but with a smaller population).
• Do you have sales and logistics resources in a market? May not need them and may be able to successfully do it all online, but if you can’t you need to have the resources in place.
• Are we able to handle shipping, different currencies, duties and taxes?
• What about support? Do our support people speak the language? People may want to call or send an email. Do we have the people in place to handle this?

All of these things will impact whether the search marketing campaign can be successful.

Process

• First thing is to find good translators
  • Must know local idioms (need to understand the local dialect, terms etc).
  • Must be able to translate unique or technical terms for your product, service or brand
• Translate text, images and navigation. A lot of people overlook translating images and navigation - you need to make the user experience rock solid.
• Crucial - Make sure SEO is involved from the beginning. Don’t want to do SEO as an afterthought - get them involved right from beginning so that you’ll end up with a more effective website and the SEO specialists can help you avoid potentially costly mistakes.

Optimized Translated Content

• Chris warned us that English content that’s optimized does not automatically become search friendly when translated. Translation is an art and may alter the content in such as way that it doesn’t rank well at all in your target market.
• Similarly, you can’t simply translate English PPC ads and landing pages.
• Tip: Translate your keyword list first, before any other content. Get a good sense of those critical keywords that you are hoping to capture with the searchers.

The Long Tail Varies

• The long tail means targeting less common keywords or phrases - that long tail exists in all other languages but it is not the same in all other languages.
• Romance language searches tend to use fewer, more common words.
• English & Dutch/German searchers tend to use more terms and less common terms. Right now, long tail will probably be more effective in those languages.
• Paradox? In the UK - nine keywords account for 5% of all searches.

What About Duplicate Content

• Chris said he is often questioned about duplicate content in multinational campaigns. If you have the same language content on multiple servers in different countries, you may be subject to duplicate content penalties. Be aware, but don’t necessarily be alarmed. They may only be trying to find the main source of your content, regardless of where you are located in the world. However, if you are finding that search engines are getting confused, you may need to do some work changing content, or putting it into other formats etc. Really boils down to your individual situation.
• Content translated into different languages and hosted in different countries is not duplicate content to search engines (at least today…) May change but today isn’t a concern.

The Right Domain

What should the right domain be - a dot.com or a country specific domain?

• Boils down to your intent. If possible, go for both - especially for companies trying to target regions with regional pride, you will want to go for country specific domain.
• For example, IBM has one global website, with subdomains for individual countries.
• Sony, by contrast has local domains in all countries.
• Be careful of those ‘choose your country’ top level pages! If you have a dot.com and are going to redirect to another country - don’t make those pages search engine hostile! You want the search engine to be able to find the country specific domains. Make sure navigation on homepage - no matter what you do with it -better not block the crawlers from finding the content on all the different websites you create.

IP Address COnsiderations

IP Address gives the physical location of where the server is based.

• Chris said he has found that when search engines are ranking content, they will look at the IP address to decide whether it should give more weight in country specific results to sites with local IP addresses.
• Challenge: legal or residency requirements in some countries. In some cases, you may need to prove you have some legal presence in that country before you can get a local IP address.
• Google’s webmaster tools allow you to specify country, and Microsoft says this capability is coming.

Crucial - Localized Links

• Localized links are crucial when you are going into a multinational campaign. It is not enough to translate and set up a site in a different country.
• As with any site, it needs links pointing to it to rank well in search engines.
• And most of these links need to come from local authority sites, not from the mother ship or out of country sites.

Multi Country PPC

• Can be the most cost effective way to have multinational reach.
• Geotargeting can be very precise.
• Translate both ads and landing pages.
• Use PPC as a research tool to help identify most effective keywords in a specific language/country.

Global Brands in Multiple Countries

• For global brands in multiple countries, Chris suggested we trust the offline brand experts here.
• Some cultures like and accept global brands (ex. China) - others prefer homegrown, localized brands.
• Especially important - emphasizing brand attributes in a culturally appropriate way. You have to be sensitive to that and don’t neglect images!

Consider Smaller Markets

• PDF report ‘Global Search Report 2007′ by einternet is available online and has a wealth of information.
• Ex. China is on track to become the number one in terms of searches on the Internet but they have a low penetration of the population. Conversely, Denmark has 70% penetration and there is another search engine beyond Google that is popular. Report is full of good information that can help companies choose smaller markets.

Conclusion

• Chris concluded by stating that multinational search marketing offers a very appealing way to reach more customers, but it is not for everybody.
• Success requires deep, localized knowledge of markets. If you don’t have that knowledge, you need to reach out to a partner that has that knowledge.
• Campaigns must be optimized and tailored for both language and culture. Not enough just to take optimized content, translate, and expect it to work in another country. Have to tailor that information for the language and culture you are trying to target.

After this very informative presentation, there were a few minutes for questions.

How would we find out about legal residency requirements? - If you are trying to establish a site in a specific country, the hosts in that country will spell out what is require. For example, in Australia you need an Australia Business Number. Go directly to a particular host based in a country and find out the requirements that are necessary to actually register a site there.

How do you find translating services in a specific country? You can go on the web and find translation services, the key there is to get a translation service that can also work with an optimizer. The best thing to do is seek out a local SEM firm or a global SEM firm and see what they can do because they are probably going to have the contacts to do this type of work. Do not rely on automated translation systems - these are rough only and will backfire in an overall search marketing campaign.

Directories? They are emerging as a good resource and they are gradually becoming better at accommodating advertising needs. Directories are very good if you have the time and resources to find the good ones. They can give you very good reach for not a lot of cost/effort.

Source: http://www.10e20.com/blog/2008/02/13/multi-national-search-marketing-effective-strategies-for-global-marketers/

The 19-Hour Website Analysis, in 20 Minutes or Less

Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I’ve found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research. Complete website reviews can be time consuming and often produce many more hours of work beyond that.

One of the problems is that people tend want to skip right to search engine optimization forgetting that users matter. Many people want to rush into the marketing without realizing that the website itself is part of the marketing process. This is a shame.

Investing in SEO and PPC marketing, without having performed a thorough analysis of your website is largely an exercise in vain (and yes, even new websites often need a usability analysis!) You don’t have to have a perfectly usable site in order to rank well in search engines, but it is increasingly difficult to rank a site without a strong usability focus, unless you’re in a very niche industry. And even if you do rank well, without good usability you’re losing more customers than you need or want to be losing.

Where do you start in performing a usability review?

One of the hurdles many people have in performing a usability review of their own site is that they don’t know where to start. Over the past several months I’ve written a number of posts outlining various usability and website architectural elements that should be a part of any detailed review process. But going through each of those can take many hours.

Being able to do a quick-scan through a site can be a very handy skill. It will help you uncover some glaring issues without having to invest hours upon hours of time all at once. After you have performed your quick scan and have fixed the bigger issues, you then have an opportunity to go back and perform a more thorough analysis.

Here is what you need to know in order to do a quickie usability review. I’ve also provided links to my previous posts that provide you with a lot more detail and will help you perform a more thorough analysis as time permits.

19 steps for a quickie usability review

Website navigation

Site wide navigation, including top, bottom and side navigation, should be as user-friendly as possible, ensuring that your visitors find what they expect when they click a navigation link. Check to make sure your navigation shows a logical flow of topics, subtopics and subject matter within the site and it enhances the users ability to find key information.

Content

The content of your website is your #1 sales tool. Content weighs heavily both in terms of how users interact with your website as well as how visitors are able to determine what you offer and what each page of your website is about. Always write for your visitors. Give them the information they need in a way that spurs them to action.

Website Design

How the site is developed, along with the underlying coding structure, plays a significant role on whether your site meets the usability requirements of your audience. Check to make sure the overall design looks clean and doesn’t feel cluttered. Colors and fonts should be easy on the eyes and should enhance rather than distract from the visitors experience.

Home Page

Your home page is the single most crucial page of your site. It is essentially your store front. Your home page should identify your site and direct your visitors to the most important information, the information they are most likely coming to your site for. Keep it clean and focused and drive your visitors quickly to the sections that are more apt for selling.

About Us Page

Visitors that find their way to your About Us page tend to have a higher conversion rate than those that don’t. This is where the visitor gets to know you and your company. Make sure the page contains information on company history, biographies of managers and your mission statement.

Contact Us Page

The Contact Us page could be considered the absolutely most important page on your site. Even if the rest of your site succeeds in the goals, if visitors fail to find the information they need to contact you then you will bring their shopping experience to a screeching halt. Always have multiple contact options and be sure web forms are working properly. Having a phone number listed is also extremely important.

Product Pages

Product pages maintain considerable strategic importance for ecommerce websites. Your visitors enter your product pages not only with an intention to buy something (the most desired end action) but to also learn, research and compare what you have against a competitor. Your product pages must provide enough information to help you visitors make the best decision possible. Be sure that calls to action, such as “add to cart” are readily available along with relevant pricing and shipping info.

Shopping Cart

While shopping car abandonment cannot be completely eliminated, it can be dramatically reduced. It is a failure of the shopping cart page itself that leads visitors to abandon their items which they do, in fact, wish to have. Make sure your shopping cart navigation buttons (update cart, checkout, etc.) are easily found. If you have multiple steps in the check out process, outline those steps and be sure to answer any questions regarding security and shipping.

Forms and Errors

If your web forms don’t function properly or it’s difficult to correct information input errors then you can lose a lot of visitors from frustration alone. Be sure to make inputting data easy by labeling fields properly, keep required information to a minimum and make sure errors are easy to understand and correct.

On -Site Search

Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether. My rule of thumb is if you can’t deliver perfect results 80% of the time then you’re probably better off not having an on-site search. Pay attention to the location of the search bar, place it where it is typically expected, and test, test and test some more to ensure that the results are as expected. Misspell products and search for products you know you don’t carry just to make sure you can deliver relevant results for products you do carry.

Help and FAQ Pages

Building up your Help and FAQ pages can greatly enhance your visitor’s experience with your website, giving them much needed information and possibly saving them a phone call. Keep these pages focused on providing information that isn’t available anywhere else and make sure they are easy to find and easy to read.

Login and My Account Pages

Sites that require users to log in to access certain information and/or purchase products add an additional layer of potential complication to the usability process. Think carefully before requiring visitors to login. Do you really need that? If not, don’t force it. Be sure to provide the benefits of creating an account and link to pages that outline your security assurances.

Privacy and Security Issues

Your website’s privacy information and security settings can be significant hurdles when it comes to gaining trust with your visitors. Be sure you provide links to these pages where best suited and applicable. Be sure to provide as much information you can that gives assurances that their information is safe.

Site Maps

Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The best advice is to make sure all your site map files stay current and are easy to find.

Audience Engagement

Customer engagement goes beyond just getting the customer’s attention, you must keep their attention. This can be done by providing your visitors near immediate gratification. Your content needs to get their attention, tell them what they need to purchase and link out to other important pages that can help them make the purchase decision.

Customer Satisfaction

Above all things you need to make sure your website provides strong customer satisfaction. You can do this by making sure information is easy to find, eliminate broken links and keep pages and images relatively small so they don’t take long to load.

Point of Purchase

Since the “purchase” is the ultimate conversion, it is imperative that you remove as many obstacles from the customer’s research-to-buy cycle as possible. Make sure your products are available or otherwise noted. Adding product reviews and up-sell opportunities can lend to increased sales.

Visitor Trust

Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers. Always providing prompt and complete responses to visitor inquiries. It’s also valuable to provide, multiple delivery options, discounts and allow your customers to provide feedback.

General Issues

The selling process–from initial interest to the very last checkout page–must be able to grab shopper’s attention and proceed to drive them through to the finalization of the sale. In other words, once you have them, you don’t want to lose them. Keep your content organized and clutter-free, make sure the site looks good across the most popular browsers and make sure that you follow up after the sale.

Overall Accessibility

As more and more users gain access to the web, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your website is accessible to all, not just a few. Be sure your website is constructed in a way that it is accessible to mobile phones, text based browsers and screen readers.

The one thing to understand about usability is that nothing is set in stone. You can go point by point of any usability guide and still get it wrong. You can overcome that by testing. Whenever a change is made test the results. Make sure it has the intended effect and you get the results you want. If it doesn’t help, change it back and try something else. Over time you’ll incrementally improve overall site usability and find conversion rates climbing as each successful change is implemented.

Source: http://www.emarketingperformance.com/:/1942/search-marketing/the-19-hour-website-analysis-in-20-minutes-or-less/

Browser Statistics

What is the trend in browser usage?

Web Statistics and Trends

Statistics are important information. From the statistics below, you can see that Internet Explorer is the most common browser. However, FireFox has become quite popular as well.

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Browser Statistics Month by Month

2007	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	S	O
December	21.0%	33.2%	1.7%	36.3%	1.4%	1.7%	1.4%
November	20.8%	33.6%	1.6%	36.3%	1.2%	1.8%	1.6%
October	20.7%	34.5%	1.5%	36.0%	1.3%	1.7%	1.6%
September	20.8%	34.9%	1.5%	35.4%	1.2%	1.6%	1.5%
August	20.5%	35.7%	1.5%	34.9%	1.3%	1.5%	1.7%
July	20.1%	36.9%	1.5%	34.5%	1.4%	1.5%	1.9%
June	19.7%	37.3%	1.5%	34.0%	1.4%	1.5%	1.8%
May	19.2%	38.1%	1.6%	33.7%	1.3%	1.5%	1.7%
April	19.1%	38.4%	1.7%	32.9%	1.3%	1.5%	1.6%
March	18.0%	38.7%	2.0%	31.8%	1.3%	1.6%	1.6%
February	16.4%	39.8%	2.5%	31.2%	1.4%	1.7%	1.5%
January	13.3%	42.3%	3.0%	31.0%	1.5%	1.7%	1.5%
2006	IE7	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	N7/8	O
December	10.7%	45.3%	3.4%	30.3%	2.6%	0.2%	1.5%
November	7.1%	49.9%	3.6%	29.9%	2.5%	0.2%	1.5%
October	3.1%	54.5%	3.8%	28.8%	2.4%	0.3%	1.4%
September	2.5%	55.6%	4.0%	27.3%	2.3%	0.4%	1.6%
August	2.0%	56.2%	4.1%	27.1%	2.3%	0.3%	1.6%
July	1.9%	56.3%	4.2%	25.5%	2.3%	0.4%	1.4%
June	1.6%	58.2%	4.3%	24.9%	2.2%	0.3%	1.4%
May	1.1%	57.4%	4.5%	25.7%	2.3%	0.3%	1.5%
April	0.7%	58.0%	5.0%	25.2%	2.5%	0.4%	1.5%
March	0.6%	58.8%	5.3%	24.5%	2.4%	0.5%	1.5%
February	0.5%	59.5%	5.7%	25.1%	2.9%	0.4%	1.5%
January	0.2%	60.3%	5.5%	25.0%	3.1%	0.5%	1.6%
2005	IE6	IE5	Fx	Moz	N7	O8	O7
November	62.7%	6.2%	23.6%	2.8%	0.4%	1.3%	0.2%
September	69.8%	5.7%	18.0%	2.5%	0.4%	1.0%	0.2%
July	67.9%	5.9%	19.8%	2.6%	0.5%	0.8%	0.4%
May	64.8%	6.8%	21.0%	3.1%	0.7%	0.7%	0.6%
March	63.6%	8.9%	18.9%	3.3%	1.0%	0.3%	1.6%
January	64.8%	9.7%	16.6%	3.4%	1.1%		1.9%
2004	IE6	IE5	Moz	N3	N7	N4	O7
November	66.0%	10.2%	16.5%	0.2%	1.2%	0.3%	1.6%
September	67.8%	11.2%	13.7%	0.3%	1.4%	0.3%	1.7%
July	67.2%	13.2%	12.6%	0.4%	1.4%	0.4%	1.6%
May	68.1%	13.8%	9.5%	0.6%	1.4%	0.4%	1.6%
March	68.2%	14.6%	7.9%	0.8%	1.4%	0.6%	1.4%
January	68.9%	15.8%	5.5%	0.4%	1.5%	0.5%	1.5%
2003	IE6	IE5	Moz	N3	N7	N4	O7
November	71.2%	13.7%	7.2%	0.5%	1.6%	0.5%	1.9%
September	69.7%	16.9%	6.2%	0.6%	1.5%	0.6%	1.8%
July	66.9%	20.3%	5.7%	0.6%	1.5%	0.6%	1.7%
May	65.0%	22.7%	4.6%	1.0%	1.4%	0.9%	1.4%
March	63.4%	24.6%	4.2%	0.9%	1.4%	1.1%	1.2%
January	55.3%	29.3%	4.0%	1.2%	1.1%	1.7%
2002	IE6	IE5	AOL	N3	N5	N4	IE4
November	53.5%	29.9%	5.2%	1.1%	4.9%	2.0%
September	49.1%	34.4%	4.5%	1.3%	4.5%	2.2%
July	44.4%	40.1%	3.5%	1.2%	3.5%	2.6%	0.5%
May	40.7%	46.0%	2.8%	1.2%	2.7%	3.4%	0.7%
March	36.7%	49.4%	3.0%	1.2%	2.4%	4.1%	0.7%
January	30.1%	55.7%	2.8%	1.3%	2.2%	4.4%	1.0%

IE	Internet Explorer
Fx	Firefox (identified as Mozilla before 2005)
Moz	The Mozilla Suite (Gecko, Netscape)
S	Safari (and Konqueror. Both identified as Mozilla before 2007)
O	Opera
N	Netscape (identified as Mozilla after 2006)
AOL	America Online (based on both Internet Explorer and Mozilla)

Browsers that count for less than 0.5% are not listed.

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.

These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users.

Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over a five year period, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.

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Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Jupiter: Local Online Advertising Will Be Worth $8.9 Billion In 2012

There are now a range of local forecasts in the market, some more bullish and some more conservative. But all generally agree that locally targeted ads in search, display (including video) and classifieds are growing at rates faster than overall online ad growth.

Recently Borrell Associates put out a new local forecast that offers very impressive local numbers. The company said that "local online advertising," defined as search, "local banners" and video (classifieds are also in there) would reach $12.6 billion in 2008 with "local search" contributing roughly $5 billion to that total.

JupiterResearch's local online ad forecast is quite a bit more restrained. By contrast it says that local online advertising, defined as display, search and classifieds, will be worth $8.9 billion in 2012. Local search is $2.5 billion of that total, according to Jupiter.

The Jupiter report says:

"Local advertising will grow at a CAGR of 13 percent from 2007 to 2012, faster than will online advertising as a whole (at a CAGR of 12 percent). Display and search advertising are leading the way, with CAGRs of 18 percent and 16 percent, respectively, during the next five years. Meanwhile, online local classified advertising, which is a relatively much larger and more mature market, will grow at a CAGR of 10 percent."

Veronis Shuler Stevenson previously estimated that local online advertising was worth $8.4 billion in 2007 and would be worth $19.2 billion in 2011. Of that 2011 number, $6 billion was attributed to local search and online yellow pages spending.

The Kelsey Group is likely the next up with their local search and Internet yellow pages forecast.

The overall local ad market has been estimated by UniversalMcCann to be worth roughly $100 billion annually across all media. However, small business software provider Intuit recently estimated that small businesses spend $110 billion annually on marketing. That's an eye-popping number and probably defines "marketing" very loosely. But most small businesses are local in terms of where they do their buying and selling.

One has to bring some caution to these very large numbers for obvious reasons (unless you're pitching a local startup to VCs). And in local one must also remember that varying definitions can result in wide ranging figures and forecasts.


Source: http://searchengineland.com/080118-093131.php