Tag: Trends

Online Sales Report Gives 6 Insights for Success

Websites large and small benefit greatly from a good online sales report. It’s a high-yield tactic that requires little time and effort.

Online sales report
Five data points in an online sales report point to total revenue. © Scott Bateman

Websites large and small benefit greatly from a good online sales report. It’s a high-yield tactic that requires little time and effort.

Even the smallest Web site will find useful insights from a simple report tracking sales performance.

A spreadsheet showing six key trends with help even if a site has nothing else but Google AdSense, Media.net or some other remnant provider.

A spreadsheet with these data points will trigger ideas about where to place ads on a site and how many to have on each page.

The report also shows whether site changes are helping or hutting ad performance, what steps to take with ad inventory and other approaches to building revenue.

Continue reading “Online Sales Report Gives 6 Insights for Success”

Site Personalization Matters More to Advertisers Than Visitors

Site personalization is an essential part of any online advertising strategy.

crowdSite personalization is an essential part of any online advertising strategy.

It’s not just essential. It’s critical for long-term growth and even survival of traditional and online media companies.

Two companies that know this well are Google and Facebook. The two largest online advertising companies in the world generated $75 billion and $18 billion respectively in the most recent fiscal year, according to their public financial reports.

Google revenue grew nearly 14 percent year over year. Facebook revenue grew 44 percent during the same period.

Consider that all advertising expenditures will grow less than 5 percent in 2016, according to Advertising Age.

Consider as well that digital advertising online will grow 20 percent in 2016, Emarketer says.

That means the growth of Google and Facebook is coming at the expense of other companies in traditional media. It also means that Facebook’s growth is coming at the expense of other online companies.

Site personalization is key to their success with advertisers. Continue reading “Site Personalization Matters More to Advertisers Than Visitors”

Website Management Needs Cost Controls in Slowing Economy

Smart website management requires a balance of both revenue and expenses to achieve a healthy profit and healthy growth.

Revenue decline
© Promise Media LLC
Smart website management requires a balance of both revenue and expenses to achieve a healthy profit and healthy growth.

When the economy is growing strongly, it is of course much easier to grow revenue as well.

Businesses spend more on advertising, they make more money and they often increase their advertising budgets in response to their growth in revenue.

Websites that rely on advertising for most if not all of their revenue will benefit greatly from this increase in advertising.

They may even be tempted to increase their expenses by using the profits to invest in content, people and technology.

So revenue in a strong economy drives growth and brings the expenses along with it.

Continue reading “Website Management Needs Cost Controls in Slowing Economy”

Email Advertising Needs ‘Visible Impressions’ to Set Rates

Email advertising may find new life by embracing the concept of visible impressions.

Email Marketing
Email advertising may find new life by embracing the concept of visible impressions.

Visible impressions is a new online industry trend that says the value of an ad impression is based on being visible on a Web site without requiring the user to scroll down the page to see it. In other words, the ad appears somewhere at the top of the page.

The concept supports the branding part of online advertising. If the site visitor can see the ad, he or she may register the brand for future consumption. The visitor doesn’t have to click on the ad for it to have credible and measurable value.

But the concept faces a unique challenge in the email marketing environment because of low open rates and images that are blocked by email readers. Continue reading “Email Advertising Needs ‘Visible Impressions’ to Set Rates”

Social Media Tracking for Small Business Guides Time and Effort

Tracking performance in social media accounts can range from a small effort to a big one.

Social media trackingTracking performance in social media accounts can range from a small effort to a big one.

Small efforts make sense for small businesses that simply don’t have the time, staff and budget to do any more.

They have to prioritize tightly to keep the business profitable and growing.

Various Web sites offer social media tools to track brand mentions. They join the legion of other tools that help with search engine optimization, ad campaigns, social campaigns, etc.

After a while, the number of tools, accounts, usernames and passwords becomes unwieldy. The cost for many of these accounts becomes painful. Even worse, some of those sites end up folding, in which case the tools and the data are gone.

How does a small business keep it simple? Continue reading “Social Media Tracking for Small Business Guides Time and Effort”

What is Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising is a category of digital advertising that places ads on social networking sites.

Social media advertising is a category of digital advertising that places ads on social networking sites.

The five largest social media companies at the time of this writing are in order of audience size according to Quantcast are:

  1. Facebook
  2. Twitter
  3. Linkedin
  4. Pinterest
  5. Google+

What makes these sites attractive to advertisers starts with their vast reach.

“Worldwide DAUs (Daily Active Users) increased 19% to 864 million on average during September 2014 from 728 million during September 2013,” Facebook said in a quarterly report. Continue reading “What is Social Media Advertising?”

AdSense Reveals Negative Trend in Mobile Advertising

AdSense mobile ads provide great clues to the trends and the future of mobile advertising.

Mobile web developmentAdSense mobile ads provide great clues to the trends and the future of mobile advertising.

The ad network from Google allows publishers to put advertisers on their Web sites and earn money every time people click on the ads.

The two most common versions of Google AdSense are display ads — both textual and graphical — and “ad units,” which are usually just a few concise text ads.

In recent years, Google has rolled out a mobile version of its advertising for sites that entirely cater to mobile visitors or desktop-friendly sites that also have a mobile product.

The standard size is 320×50, although more recently the 320×100 and even the desktop-oriented 300×250 have become more popular because of their higher clickthrough rates. Continue reading “AdSense Reveals Negative Trend in Mobile Advertising”