Online Video Advertising Spending Growth
US online video advertising is becoming a growing trend as research reveals increased value to online advertisers. Due to higher attention levels while watching videos online, user engagement on YouTube is amplified 140% over TV. In 2008, the percent change in spending for online video advertising was 126.5%, with forecasted growth of over 40% through 2012.
Higher attention levels for YouTube videos over TV alone is by itself a fact worth noting for internet marketers.
Google “Caffeine” Boost
Google is currently testing a new search index infrastructure for web searches, code named “Caffeine”, intent on returning relevant results more quickly. It’s deemed one of the largest behind-the-scenes updates to their search technology within the past few years. The update will not change the user interface or the ranking of ads on the search engine, but the change in indexing methods may subtly affect the first page search results. The placement and prominence in results of recent news articles, videos and blog entries related to the search will likely be affected.
The Value of SEO vs. PPC Traffic
A new study by Engine Ready, called “SEO vs. PPC – The Final Round”, concluded that visitors who arrive at a retailer’s site from paid search ads are 50% more likely to buy than those who come from clicking on a natural search link. The study was based on traffic to 26 e-retail sites in a one year period that ended June 30, 2009.
Paid search also provided a higher conversion rate of 2.03% compared to 1.26% from organic search, and paid search visitors bought more at the site, with an average order value of $117.06 versus $109.27.
Note that this explicitly for retail sites. We would expect numbers to be different for information products and lead generation sites, potentially quite different.
Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
Facebook paid nearly $50 million to acquire the social media aggregator FriendFeed, which allows users to organize their friends’ activities across social-media services in one place. FriendFeed’s employees will join the Facebook team and their four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams. Facebook will continue to operate FriendFeed.com as a standalone site for now but plans to eventually integrate the two products.
By Jessica Manganello
Paid Search Staff
Sources:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007219&Ntt=us+video+advertising+spending+growth
http://issuu.com/google/docs/survivalofthefastest
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10307613-2.html
http://www.engineready.com/sem-resources/industry-studies/trafficsource.pdf
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124993350820120361.html
