March 28, 2013
Between December 2011 and 2012, the median load time for home pages of top North American retail sites (the Alexa Retail 2000) slowed 22% from 5.94 to 7.25 seconds, finds Radware [download page] in a new report. The top 100 sites fared even worse, with load times slowing from 6.4 seconds to 8.23 seconds in that time span, a 28% difference. The researchers attribute the slowdown to increasing page size and complexity, also pointing out that many of the Alexa 2000 sites are not employing best practices for core performance. Read more »
March 19, 2013
[Editor's Note: This is the latest quarterly update to this article, this time containing Q4 2012 data and trend analysis.] There's a strong perception that with the rise of social media, mobile device usage, and other such digital trends, youth have put TV on mute. According to the most recent cross-platform report [download page] from Nielsen, TV consumption is dropping by a larger amount every quarter, but it's still not a seismic shift. The 18-24 group, for instance, watched a weekly average of about 23 and a quarter hours of traditional TV in Q4 2012, about 2 hours and 20 minutes less than they did in Q4 2011. That's about 20 minutes less per day. Read more »
February 28, 2013
92% of the 2012 Inc. 500 companies use social media, ranging from popular tools such as LinkedIn (81%), Twitter (67%) and Facebook (67%) to emerging ones, such as foursquare (28%) and Pinterest (18%), according to a study released in January 2012 by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Interestingly, though, when executives from these fast-growing companies were asked how necessary social media has been for their growth, about 4 in 10 responded that social had been "somewhat" (24%) or "very" (15%) unnecessary. Read more »
February 26, 2013
They may be digital natives, but American teens don't fancy everything digital. According to data provided to MarketingCharts from a new study from Research Now and K&A BrandResearch, American teens strongly favor offline over online ads across a variety of measures. The respondents were presented with several statements about ads and asked whether each statement applied more to online ads (such as on Facebook, search engines), more to "real-life" ads (such as those on the TV, radio, posters, and magazines), or whether the statement didn't apply. The results indicate that online ads have a long way to go in winning over teens. Read more »
February 12, 2013
Retailers trying to keep pace with evolving consumer behavior shouldn't necessarily worry that offering an additional shopping channel will cannibalize sales from existing channels, according to results from a survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The study finds 58% of online shoppers surveyed across 11 markets (56% in the US) said they have spent more with their favorite retailer since they started shopping across multiple channels. But the results aren't all positive: for retailers to profit, they need to be a consumer favorite. Read more »
February 6, 2013
Digital marketing channels have been viewed as better than traditional media for their measurability, but new research from Econsultancy and Responsys [download page] suggests that marketers are having a harder time measuring their ROI from digital channels. Among company marketers surveyed - primarily from the UK (46%) and other European countries (19%) - just 50% rated their understanding of ROI from digital marketing channels as "good" (33%) or "very good" (17%), down from 55% last year. By contrast, the proportion rating their understanding as "okay" or "poor" rose from 42% to 48%. Read more »
January 31, 2013
Newspaper ad revenues are tumbling, and one-third of marketers recently said they're shifting focus away from this medium. At the same time, consumers are spending large chunks of time on social media, something not lost on marketers. But surprise, according to at least one survey [pdf], newspapers remain just as popular among Americans as social networks. That survey, from KPMG International, found that in the past month, 58% of US respondents read a newspaper, while 57% visited a social networking or blogging site. Read more »
January 17, 2013
A new study from ExactTarget has identified the various ways in which consumers and marketers disconnect in terms of their channel preferences and behavior. The study also reveals that consumers and marketers disagree on where companies should invest more of their marketing time and resources to improve customer loyalty. For example, consumers were 27% more likely to say their favorite companies should invest more in email (33% vs. 26%), but 44% less likely to say they want more content about products (14% vs. 25%). Read more »
January 16, 2013
Mobile rich media ads have cited for their benefits by Opera Advertising, Celtra, and MediaMind, but a new report from MoPub [download page] questions their efficacy during Q4 2012, finding that rich media ad units on its real-time bidding exchange received higher eCPMs throughout the quarter, but did not always get correspondingly higher click-through rates. For example, in December, while rich media units received 40% higher eCPMs than non-rich media units ($1.16 vs. $0.83), their average click-through rate was only 18% higher (1.3% vs. 1.1%). Read more »
December 7, 2012
While mobile devices were a big influence on e-commerce sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, mobile phones haven't performed well in paid search. A new report [download page] from Kenshoo that looks at the holiday season through Cyber Monday (Nov. 1-26) finds that while mobile phones captured almost 12% of retail paid search advertising spend and 19% of clicks during that period, they accounted for less than 2% of sales revenue. Read more »
