Homepages are most important to US marketers

Forget about RSS feeds. Forget about online video, blogs or social networking. US advertisers believe their own websites are their most effective online marketing tool, followed by email and search.

by Kristina Knight

According to Outsell Inc.'s recent Annual Ad Spending Survey, US marketers will spend about 12% of their advertising budgets in 2007 on their own homepages. Beyond business websites, advertisers will spend the most on email marketing and search marketing (49%).

Advertisers are worried about click-fraud, but not enough to cut back on search budgets. The study revealed that search budgets will increase by about 40% this year as more marketers pour money into pay-per-click and paid search campaigns.

Google and Yahoo are the most likely culprits to receive the biggest chunk of that increase in spending, with about 58% of small companies saying Google's keyword search was preferred and 32% saying Yahoo's search features were preferred. Medium sized companies also preferred Google to Yahoo, although large sized companies ranked the two engines as basically equal. The percentages from small and medium sized companies may become closer next year when Outsell will account for Yahoo's Panama search platform.

The study also revealed that advertisers will increase online spending by about 18% over 2006 numbers. Marketers are expected to push nearly 22% of their total ad budgets into the online space this year.

Tags: email marketing, online advertising, paid search, search marketing

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"Forget about RSS feeds. Forget about online video, blogs or social networking."

Kristina, not sure if that messaging was for dramatic effect, or if the suggestion is to actually forget about these things. Smart marketers will find ways to integrate RSS on their home pages. More companies will continue to leverage the power of blogs, video and audio (podcasts) via RSS feeds as well. Paid search will become more effective and yeild higher conversions as intelligent search marketers do this.

I appreciate what the research is saying - but for marketers serious about maximizing what they do online, "forgetting" about RSS, blogs, video and social networking is like forgetting that Google radically changed its search algorithm two months ago specifically to index that kind of content.

Considering the new opportunities for search engine visibility, one could argue you would be better off forgeting about your home page. Ok, maybe that was for effect - but I think you get the picture.

Posted by: Jason Cormier on July 20, 2007 22:35