Tag Archives: marketing

What are your company’s value propositions and differentiators?

Posted on by

Just re-reading a great article from Jeffrey Gitomer in the local business journal. It resonated with me because we preach this to all of our clients when talking strategy for their marketing and sales efforts. Everyone needs to know their value propositions & differentiators because if you don’t then you are just another product or service that you will market as a “commodity”. A better question is do you know what your value proposition is?

Everybody has their set of products and/or services. Most have spent some time coming up with “differentiators” so they can tell why they are different. But true value combines what the client or prospect perceives to be in favor of them combined with what you perceive is in favor of them – hence the value proposition.

Are your Brand and marketing strategy reaching beyond the product or service itself to a relationship with your clients? Where are the areas where the most value you provide is perceived by your clients? Whether you consult Fortune 500 clients or sell shoes, you need to craft, create, and control the perception of value your product or service. Social media is exploding because it helps create this value and gives businesses more access to each customer relationship and therefore the ability add more value and integrate themselves with a client. In the case of services, your presence out in the web channels can add to building trust, in the case of shoes – how many people they can see are talking about them will add “perceived value” to your shoe or Brand of shoes.

Perceived value can also far outweigh the actual price paid. That value can actually help justify the price in a client’s mind. Everything you do needs to drive the prospect/customer to perceive value and the value you give provide to them. Price objections are typically more about them not perceiving enough value – it also you just need to change their perception and your content, messaging, and social media strategy can all help you change that perception.

Work on developing these propositions and you will see your revenue grow. Here are some helpful marketing toolsto help you craft your marketing and web strategies.

Using Your Web Analytics To Make Actual Business Decisions

Posted on by


I have spoken with a number of people who have websites, and some who even have Analytics. (usually Google Analytics, because it costs $0.00) One of my favorite questions to ask is “what do you most enjoy looking at in your analytics that helps you?” and usually the response to this unfortunately is “how many people are coming to my website.” That’s all and well and good, but lets take a minute to look at the concept of “Segmenting Your Data”.

I doubt that you are looking at an overview dashboard and are actually going to figure out anything you’re ready to make a decision on. So what should we as internet marketers be looking at that will actually help us make decisions.
I often speak with people who are spending a gob of money on various online marketing opportunities, and I want to to see if what they are getting for their hard earned money is actually worth something. Lets take this a step deeper. One example is to look at conversions rates and/or goals (if you’re using Google Analytics) and segment by either the traffic sources and/or the campaigns associated with those traffic sources. If you’re not passing in variables for traffic source, medium, and campaign with your various advertisers(for example, a banner ad) I would recommend starting to do that right now. The variables below apply to Google Analytics, and are very useful when passed into your destination URL’s:
  • utm_source=
  • utm_medium=
  • utm_term=
  • utm_content=
  • utm_campaign=
And this would be an example of using these variables to establish where some traffic actually came from using our website. bevelwise.com/?utm_source=ourblog&utm;_medium=textlink&utm;_campaign=using-your-web-analytics. What this will do for measurement, is assign the following variables when you click as such:
  • source=ourblog
  • medium=textlink
  • campaign=using-your-web-analytics
You could then reference all the clicks that came in through any campaign online/email campaign to goals that you have pre-determined and set up for your website and use them to further drive your marketing objectives and strategies.
Getting back to the concept of segmenting you would always want to be drilling down into your data and breaking out specific variables and sections of that data that mean something to your business. Having someone who is experienced with reading your web analytics is just as important as having a CFO that knows how to read a balance sheet and it can help produce better financial results. I’ve heard someone say before, “oh we know what our website is doing, because we put analytics on our website.” Interpreting those analytics and helping to make actionable decisions for your organization involves much more than knowing the basics of what analytics tells you. Do you know what areas of your website’s content is delivering the best results? Do you know where your advertising $$ are being best spent?
Bevelwise does seo from grand rapids, MI which includes Google Analytics measurement and will put our skills up against anyone out there in the Midwest. Would be happy to help you with your search engine optimization, web strategy, web analytics and all marketing from a measurement perspective. You will get insight to drive all your marketing initiatives if your website done and measured correctly.

Video SEO Benefits your Overall SEO Strategy

Posted on by

Optimizing video has always posed great opportunities in the SEO world, and all companies should find ways to leverage this medium. The internet has become more diverse and more visual over time, and that’s not going to slow down. It’s easy to start with the basics of where you host the video, what titles, descriptions, and content you load into the video. The harder step most of the time is distributing the video and getting press and rankings from it. Often time this means instead of saying where are we hosting, or publishing the video it means saying, how many places are we going to post the video to. YouTube, Hulu, MySpace are just a couple of examples. How are you leveraging your social media channels to get visitors to see your video, and hopefully make it go viral? Do you even have social media channels? You should and this is content that those channels will find enegaing if you do it right.

One thing to be aware of with Google’s most recent change to their results page (if you haven’t seen it, it’s on the left sidebar) is where you can refine searches based on a variety of factors. For example, you can scope your search for just news, shopping, images, videos, books, blogs, updates, and discussions just to name a few. The thing I want to point out here is the more people are going to scope by video. Then when you get into those results you can further refine the videos by duration, posted date, relevance, quality, and even source. This expands on the options that we have to optimize video. Now businesses can take into account when they are making videos are they going to be short, medium, or long, and at what quality are we publishing. This also plays into the question of where are we posting our videos? All of these factors are going to continue to play a role in the evolution of video SEO and interactive media.

A short video or “webmerical” can go a long way with helping your web strategy and online exposure. If you are looking for a company to assist with a video or your online marketing or web strategy, contact us @ Bevelwise.

Emotional Marketing Messaging vs. Facts Based Rational Messaging

Posted on by

I was just re-reading an Article from earlier this year in Advertising Age that talked about why emotional marketing messages beat the rational ones. They looked at 880 case studies, covering two recessions to see if there was any difference between the “good and bad times”. What was determined was emotional advertising was twice as likely to generate profit gains than the rational ones, with the campaigns that use both, splitting the difference right in between.

The biggest difference was the emotional marketing reduced price sensitivity, which helped companies to be able to hold more firm on their pricing (with a better economy, it would allow you to probably charge a premium). Emotional advertising allows one to create a sense of differentiation for your brand and helps it appear to be worth “more” to the customer. However, a person that would respond to more data driven advertising or rational messaging, is typically more analytical so it is expected that they are more price sensitive because they would be one that “does their homework” first.

Balancing this in the Internet age takes some effort because of how Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Websites, and everything can spread more quickly – especially through industry trade channels. If you combine that with the fact that 80%+ people research what they want to buy online (especially if it is not a standard consumable good) then you have to make sure your message reaches across all mediums.

If you ask most business owners, “Would you like to be able to keep 1% more through your price or increase your volume 1%?”, holding that price would be more to the bottom line that the equivalent increase in sales volume. Your marketing needs to help you achieve that.

Should I put my marketing dollars into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, or a blended online media strategy?

Posted on by

How do you know if you should use Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Can I get better results from Pay-Per-Click (PPC)? These are the main two strategies in use today, especially for the small to medium enterprise. Both strategies are entirely different and it can be difficult to decide which one is best for you or how to combine both strategies for maximum effectiveness.

You have to determine what you are trying to accomplish via the web and your website. That will drive everything else. If you don’t have the right objectives for what you want to accomplish, then you can wind up wasting a lot of money trying to figure it out and feeling like all you did was “spin your wheels”. SEO and PPC are the best sources to drive you targeted traffic and only pay for targeted traffic, but you have to be intentional about them and what you expect from each.

SEO and PPC continue to grow as more and more people are using the Internet and become more web savvy. It is the best source for people worldwide to find information they want on a 24 hour basis. That will keep these two industries growing. Let’s back up a second and define these a bit closer for some of those people who might know much about these subjects. SEO takes place on your own website site. There are pieces and parts to a website that the Internet search engines, crawlers, and indexes look for to determine if your site is a good match for particular keywords and search terms. Most experts will tell you that parity has been reached in search, so now it comes down to the user experience and how fast a search engine gets you to the results and relevant content you were looking for.

PPC refers to advertising on a search engine that charges on a per click basis whenever a visitor clicks on one of your ads. The order of ads is an algorithm and Google (62% of all searches), Yahoo (20% of all searches), and Bing (formerly MSN and 10% of all searches) all use different ones to determine the best match. This will continue to change now that Yahoo and MSN/Bing have announced their partnership for search – so we are sure a new algorithm for these sites will emerge soon and cause another adjustment. The newest factor in the game for Google is what is known as quality score. It has always used this to rank your site and pages organically, but now it is a factor in how well your PPC campaign will perform. Yes, how well your landing page and it’s URL are optimized will effect what you pay per click, who shows up on the top of the list, and if you bid the most, you are not guaranteed the #1 spot. This is directly related to that “user experience” criteria.

SEO tries to change your overall search engine ranking by looking at your URL and analyzing all of the content on your pages and meta data (behind the scenes) to see how good of a match that page and your website is for a particular keyword or search phrase. This also needs to happen page by page – having the same information on every page or in every page’s meta data, will actually discount your URL to the search engines. It needs to be specific to what they will find on that page. Also, putting too many different items on a page will not allow you to optimize it to its full extent to produce maximum results. It will also not allow you to effectively optimize for each item because what you can do and the “space” available for optimization, do not allow for the words and phrases you need (for example, a title tag really needs to be less that 70 characters in length). SEO is also considered a long term solution. You cannot do it just once and let it go for 6-12 months. You should pay some attention to it monthly after your initial optimization takes hold (like 120 days after their first pass on your site). Consider this just like changing some of the content on your website, this will help the engines pay attention to you. Ultimately you would want your optimization to allow for you to not have to pay for clicks on your brand name and your top 5-10 keywords and phrases because you already have page one ranking for them. Be prepared for this to take 120-180 days to really start to show some results but that is based on where your starting point is.

Bottom Line of what you can expect

PPC:

  • Instant Traffic and results if it is done right
  • Pay for what you get – no residual effects
  • This is extremely intentional – to an industry, geographic market, product or service
  • Optimize for performance, negative keywords, etc
  • Can pause at any time so little risk
  • Typically done with lower budgets
  • Can control what it says, when and where it runs and to what audiences
  • Is now tied to how well your landing page and website are optimized with Quality Score
  • Once you reach your daily budget it shuts down
  • Easier to target a specific market or industry

SEO:

  • This is a marathon, not a sprint solution
  • If you are optimized, you will always rank for the keywords and phrases you want – it will never shut down or reach a budget
  • Results are harder to measure – because of all the ways to drive traffic
  • Need to set metrics and goals prior to starting it
  • Start with an amount to get started and have someone spend some time monthly continuing these principles if possible
  • Will need to update and change as strategies and search engines change their algorithms and competitors change their websites, PPC and SEO strategies
  • Allows you to rank for higher priority keywords and broaden your exposure through PPC
  • Delivers the most qualified traffic – this comes from people who are actively seeking out products and services that you offer and not just browsing the web.

So what should you choose?
Well, it depends on how much money you are willing to spend, what your time line is, your goals and how you want to measure results. It is easy to blow through money with PPC unless you test, optimize and pay some attention every month. Typically it will produce results in the first 30 days but you will always have to pay for them. If you want to position yourself for long term results and establish your presence to your target audience and market, then spending some time in SEO will help be your solution. SEO is more permanent depending on your strategy and will build long term equity for your website, PPC will drive results and help you be specific to a particular industry, geography, or time period. If someone finds you through organic/natural results, you typically have more credibility because that is harder to accomplish and anyone can “pay” for advertising. If you can do it, we would recommend balancing both of them. Set your goals and then allocate X hours a month optimizing your site and equivalent dollars to PPC, but always be evolving and optimizing.

Using Twitter in your Marketing Mix for Businesses

Posted on by

Twitter is a good idea for your business if you believe in Social Media as a way for humans to connect and engage in conversation. Twitter can bring great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn and grow as a company. Twitter is like blogging except you only have 140 short characters to communicate your message. It is like instant messaging except it is public and can attract traffic to your website. A Tweet is not directed to just one person because it is visible to anyone.

Twitter is a way to drive real traffic to your site. The way to use it is to build a network of “followers” and people/companies you are “following.” Following people shows that you are not just talking about yourself but also listening to what your potential customers and industry leaders are saying. By interacting with others you are giving people reason to listen to you as well. Think of Twitter as an intercom, not a megaphone.

When setting up your company’s Twitter profile, create your company image that lets your brand stand out. Put up a picture… make it your company logo. Make sure you fill out your profile bio/info. This authenticates your Twitter profile.

Follow your brand and industry in Twitter conversations. Use Twitter Search to look for conversations about topics that are of interest to your company. Look for conversations about your brand, competitors, and words about your industry. This is a great way to build and improve your network. Engage with your potential customers. Try talking about their interest too, not just yourself… you need to show that you are a human. If you are going to bother Tweeting, it means that you want humans to connect.

When sharing content, it is very important to only share information that is useful/fun/interesting. Otherwise, you might sound like you are “preaching” a sales pitch about your company or products to people and they might tune you out. Twitter is not a one-way conversation.

Share content that spreads rapidly such as:

  • New Content/data
  • Links to cool/relevant sites
  • Industry articles
  • Interesting blog posts
  • Videos (funny ones get spread the most)
  • Slides and presentations
  • News releases
  • Podcasts

Information that rarely gets shared:

  • Product info
  • Free trials

After you have wrote some “tweets,” added profiles to follow, and gained followers, you can check out how your profile ranks. Here is a cool free tool to grade your Twitter account: www.twitter.grader.com.

Tips to make Tweeting easier:

  • Use tools like “TwitterFox,” “TweetDeck,” or “Twhirl” to make managing Twitter easier and faster
  • Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about your company. Try to participate where it makes sense.
  • Use tools like TinyURL http://www.tiny.cc/ or http://bit.ly/ to shorten long URLs (because you only get 140 characters)

Twitter can be a great way to attract customers, network, and interact with your current customers, but you have to understand the Twitter culture or you could actually turn these people away. Time to Tweet! Feel free to contact us at Bevelwise if you have questions or need some help.

References:

http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/

Improve Adwords Pay-per-Click (PPC) Quality Score to Lower your Cost-per-Click

Posted on by

It can be very confusing to understand a keyword’s quality score. How does Google concoct my score? What’s a good quality score to receive? Why bother improving quality scores?

Bevelwise complied a bunch of information from the AdWords blog and help center to help clear this up.

Quality Score ensures that Google only shows relevant ads to its users. Searchers want to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily and Quality Score helps Google show more relevant ads. To make sure that your potential customers see your ad, you need to pay attention to Quality Score. It also influences your ads’ position, and it partially determines your keyword’s minimum bids, which can help reduce your budgets.

Quality Score is used in several different ways, including influencing your keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and estimating the first page bids that you see in your account. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position.

Quality Scores 1-10

  • 1-4: The keyword isn’t very relevant to users, and as a result may have a very high first page bid. This means that the keyword is not performing very well for your website, or even for your competitors sites. Try experimenting with variations of this keyword by using plural/singulars or grammatical tweaks. If you’d like to keep advertising with this keyword, you can optimize instead. To do this, try lowering the first page bid, writing a more targeted, relevant ad, or improving your landing page content.
  • 5-7: This keyword is performing well, and there isn’t a need to worry too much. On a grading scale, our AdWords Specialist at Google, said “a 6 or 7 is equivalent to an A-.” It may have a mid-range first page bid, and the keyword may not be very costly. Optimization can lower your overall costs, draw more clicks to your ads, and result in a better return on your investment (ROI). If you want to further optimize, try using more targeted ad text and keywords or improving your landing page content.
  • 8-10: The keyword is extremely relevant and may have a high click through rate (CTR), relevant ad text, and a unique, relevant landing page. The first page bid for this keyword may be low. This keyword is very relevant and effective for your ad campaign. Our AdWords Specialist at Google, said that it is very rare to get this high of a quality score from Google.

Quality Score Formula:

  • The historical click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google
  • Landing page quality
  • The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
  • The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
  • Relevance of ad text (especially the title)
  • Historical account performance (CTR)

How Quality Score Impacts Your PPC Campaign:

  • Cost-Per-Click – A keyword’s Quality Score influences its CPC – that is, how much you’re charged for a click on your ad when it’s triggered by that keyword. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its CPC, and vice versa.
  • First Page CPC Bid Estimates – On your Keyword Analysis page, you’ll see a metric labeled ‘Estimated bid to show on the first page.’ This metric, also called the ‘first page bid estimate,’ approximates the cost-per-click (CPC) bid needed for your ad to reach the first page of Google search results when the search query exactly matches your keyword. The estimate is based on the Quality Score and current advertiser competition for that keyword. Ad placement will still be dependent on Quality Score, your cost-per-click (CPC) bid, your budget and account settings, and user and advertiser behavior.
  • Eligibility to Show Up when Searched for – Every time one of your keywords matches a search query, our system evaluates its combined Quality Score and cost-per-click (CPC) bid to see if it’s eligible to enter the ad auction. Keywords with a higher Quality Score will be eligible to enter the auction more easily and at a lower cost. Our goal is to encourage relevant ads for our users, so our pricing system is designed to favor more specifically targeted ads and keywords.
  • Ad Position – Ads are positioned on search and content pages based on their Ad Rank. The ad with the highest Ad Rank appears in the first position, and so on down the page.

Monitoring Your Quality Score

Search advertising is a dynamic, evolving marketplace, and the Quality Score of your keywords can fluctuate. Google continually monitors the performance of all ads, keywords, and landing pages to reward high quality ads and encourage advertisers to improve low quality ads. The best way to maintain a high-quality, cost-effective campaign is to frequently optimize your account to help ensure your ads have a high Quality Score.

Improving a Keyword’s Quality Score

Optimization is the best way to increase your keyword’s performance (Quality Score, CTR, conversion rate) without raising costs. If your Quality Score is very low (below a 5), you may be using keywords, ads, or landing pages that aren’t as targeted or relevant as they could be. This can mean higher cost-per-clicks and a potentially poor ROI. Remember: The higher the Quality Score, the lower the price you’ll pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on keywords and relevance of pages to popular keywords. Looking at quality score, if your landing page isn’t viewed by Google as relevant to the search query, you can work improving landing page content, meta tags, image tags, etc to make the page more relevant and possibly improve your Quality Score.

While a high quality score may seem like the most important part of your PPC campaign, the conversion rate is a best indicator. A high CTR or Quality Score doesn’t necessarily mean a high ROI or that people are buying your product or service. The conversion rate tells if your keyword is driving sales, sign-ups, or whatever else your company is trying to achieve.

For more information please contact us or read our whitepaper.

 

References

http://adwords.google.com/support/
http://adwords.blogspot.com/

http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

Advertising of the future is interactive and location sensitive

Posted on by

Dockers has an interactive ad which displays while an iPhone game (or possibly other apps) is loading. The ad, called “Shake down to Get Down”, asks the person to shake the phone in order to make the person on the screen dance. The screen focuses on the dancers shoes which of course are Dockers.

This serves as an increasing trend for organizations wanting people to interact with and be entertained by their brand. One of the first examples I can think of this new type of advertising is Burger King’s subservient chicken which launched in 2004. What makes the Dockers ad unique is how it is embedded as a part of another application and it is mobile.

The ad was built specifically for the iPhone which offer much more functionality than TV, paper, radio or websites. One of the more exciting features of using a mobile platform is location based ads.

Imagine this scenario: you are shopping in a store and you scan/take a picture of a bar code to lookup the price of the item on amazon.com to see if the price you are looking at in the store really is a good deal (available now with the iPhone and Google’s Adroid phones). Soon there after, you might receive a text message informing you that the store down the road has the same item for 10% less then prompts you for turn-by-turn directions on how to get to that store. I would expect to see this scenario take place very soon.

Other new opportunities are available with location and motion based ads such as…

    • A electronics company could display a new rebate enticing users to scan a barcode at a nearby store, then give you directions to that store.
    • A cruise line could offer deals for users in Miami and New Orleans due to proximity to their ships.
    • A soda company may create an interactive bottle of pop that is motion sensitive. The user can shake up the bottle and it splashes all over the screen.
    • A car rental company can determine that a user is outside their typical geography and serve an ad for extra insurance or a CPA ad for a discounted rate.

This is just the beginning as newer technologies become available that we carry around in our pockets. I can think of the new summer baseball movie may offer discounted ticket if you can swing your phone faster than 45 MPH (measured by an accelerometer like what is currently in the iPhone). Then after you try, show the next available show times of the movie for the 5 closest theaters near you.

Mobile is the advertising platform of the future as the viewers are more engaged. It is easy to walk out of a room or skip over a TV commercial with a DVR. Most people skip the first 15 pages of a magazine. Mobile offers tracking for easy ROI measurements, unlike print. And most importantly mobile users are not usually doing any thing else – their attention is focused solely on the device. It is coming soon and it will come fast.

via ReadWriteWeb

ESPN launches local Chicago website

Posted on by

Add ESPN to the list of national news outlets positioning themselves to capitalize on the demise of local newspapers. The “Worldwide Leader in Sports” this week launched ESPNChicago.com, a Web site devoted to the Chicago sports scene. The site will feature a daily Chicago version of “Sportscenter,” ESPN’s signature sports news show, and contributions from ESPN columnists and radio personalities with ties to the city.

ESPN hopes ESPNChicago.com will be the first of a series of new sites that will deepen its online penetration in local markets, following an increasingly popular approach for major content providers. Having already built a national audience of devotees of a particular topic, some publishers are targeting subgroups linked by geography and civic pride.

The Huffington Post, the left-leaning news site that enjoyed a surge in popularity during the presidential campaign, late last year began rolling out local sites beginning, incidentally, with Chicago. A Huffington Post spokesman said the launch “has gone very well” and several more cities will be added over the next 12 months. The Web site Politico has beefed up its staff recently to cover more local politics and sell it to understaffed newspapers in those cities.

This local or regional expansion is far from a can’t-miss strategy, particularly in an advertising recession. McGraw-Hill’s BusinessWeek magazine last June ceased publication of “BusinessWeek Chicago” — What is it about Chicago? – less than a year after launch. For ESPN, Chicago makes sense for two key reasons: It’s a city of passionate sports fans where the local papers have been crippled by the industry’s revenue drain. The Chicago Tribune’s owner, Tribune Co., in December filed for bankruptcy protection because of its crushing debt, and the owner of the Chicago Sun-Times has been drastically cutting costs to stem losses and avoid a similar fate.

At least one advertiser is already sold on ESPN’s idea. MillerCoors has signed on as the site’s charter advertiser.

Internet Ad Sales In 2008

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times Media & Marketing Section:

Internet advertising rose in 2008, according to a report released Monday, but the growth is starting to flatten.

“The economy has had a significant impact on the short-term growth of the Internet advertising market,” David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which contributed to the report, said in a conference call.

Internet advertising grew to $23.4 billion in 2008, an increase of 10.6 percent from 2007, according to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online advertisers, as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers.

That was the only category of advertising spending that grew in 2008 other than cable television, which rose 7.8 percent, according to Nielsen figures supplied for the report,

Over all, total non-Internet media revenue declined 2.4 percent in 2008 from 2007, according to Nielsen. Spending in network television declined 3.5 percent, in national magazines 7.6 percent and in local newspapers 7.8 percent.

Internet advertising rose in 2008, according to a report released Monday, but the growth is starting to flatten.

“The economy has had a significant impact on the short-term growth of the Internet advertising market,” David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which contributed to the report, said in a conference call.

Internet advertising grew to $23.4 billion in 2008, an increase of 10.6 percent from 2007, according to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing online advertisers, as well as PricewaterhouseCoopers.

That was the only category of advertising spending that grew in 2008 other than cable television, which rose 7.8 percent, according to Nielsen figures supplied for the report,

Over all, total non-Internet media revenue declined 2.4 percent in 2008 from 2007, according to Nielsen. Spending in network television declined 3.5 percent, in national magazines 7.6 percent and in local newspapers 7.8 percent.

Though overall growth was strong relative to other mediums, Internet advertising did not have the large increases of recent years.

Internet revenue dipped in the first and second quarters for the first time in four years. And online advertising in 2008 had the lowest growth rate — 2.6 percent — from the fourth quarter compared with the period a year earlier.

As Mr. Silverman said, however, “it’s one of the few things that actually grew in the fourth quarter 2008.”

There were some interesting shifts within Internet advertising.

Digital video revenue more than doubled in 2008 versus 2007, growing to $734 million from $324 million. Advertisers were also more frequently using performance-based ads – where they pay only when someone clicks on the ad or buys something after seeing the ad. Performance-based ads made up 57 percent of all Internet advertising in 2008, according to the report, up from 51 percent in 2007. Ads that were paid for based on how frequently they were shown – called CPM-based pricing, for cost-per-thousand – fell to 39 percent, from 45 percent. And sponsorship advertising, where publishers create custom pages and advertisements for brands, was less popular this year than last: it fell to 1 percent of all fourth-quarter revenue in 2008, down from 3 percent in 2007.

Online advertising from consumer-packaged goods companies was a big growth area, rising to $1.5 billion in 2008, up from $925 million in 2007. That was significant, said Peter S. Fader, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who participated in the conference call.

That was “something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. People didn’t think this would be the right space to be selling grocery-type products,” he said. Now, “customers are becoming accustomed to seeing relatively mundane products advertised and promoted” on the Internet, he said.

Courtesy of www.nytimes.com