Most major advertisers have become pretty good at SEO. So, once you have wrung out all the benefits from search optimization, what’s next? How about targeting your message to the right group of consumers at the right time in the right place? That is the principal behind segment-driven marketing.

Compete recently fielded a survey to marketers to see how they are utilizing target segments in their marketing efforts. Overall, the results show that the majority of companies using segment-driven strategies are focusing their segmentation efforts in online and search engine marketing activities.

But there still remains a significant opportunity to improve ROI on web-based advertising by understanding how to use segment-driven marketing more effectively. Some highlights from the survey include:

• 92% of respondents say they are using segments to manage their online advertising and/or search marketing
• 84% of respondents indicate that segment-driven marketing will be more important in their organization in three years (only 39% say it is very important now)
• 76% of respondents say that their segment-driven strategy will be ahead of their competitors in three years

…But returns from segment-driven marketing have been elusive

• 77% of respondents are having trouble demonstrating real business results (i.e. improvements in market share or share of wallet) from segment-driven marketing
• 27% of respondents aren’t seeing improved marketing results from their segment-driven marketing efforts
• Among our respondents, the most consistent obstacle to successful segment-driven marketing has been identifying the right segments

What is Compete’s take on improving segment-driven marketing? Glad you asked. As companies look to get more bang for their online ad buck, we recommend advertisers avoid pursuing the “average” online consumer by initiating more data-oriented, segment-driven marketing strategies.

If you want to learn more about segment-driven marketing, check out a recent webinar led by our CMO, Stephen DiMarco, where he gives real-life examples of successful segment-driven marketing opportunities. And as always, we’re happy to help

The April Fools hoaxes by Google have become widely known in some circles, but judging by the email I got from a friend this morning asking if I’d seen the new Gmail feature of Custom Time, not everyone has caught on. The pages are well done and it’s easy to see how someone not really paying attention could be fooled by some of the “new offers” at first glance.

The hoaxes started back in 2000 but last year was the biggest yet for Google with two fake offers. There were more than one million visits to the combination of Gmail Paper and Google TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) pages in April last year.

Anyway, I wonder if I’ve got a shot at living on Mars…

A recent Business 2.0 article offered a behind the scenes look at the highly lucrative and controversial business of domain-squatting. Featured in this piece was Kevin Ham, a man who has made a fortune simply by driving people to the sponsored links and ads on sites like Agoga.com.

Out of nowhere Agoga quickly ramped up to more than 1.5 million page views per month. Every time browsers click on one of the ads offered on Agoga and similar sites, Ham and fellow “domainers” cash in. It’s that simple.

Continue reading “A Look at Domain-Squatting” »

I’m not lazy, but I like convenience. In terms of the internet, putting all of the content I consume daily on one page is as convenient as it gets. The idea of personalized pages isn’t new. My Yahoo! has let users pick and choose what content would be viewed on their personal page for nearly a decade. Although My Yahoo! was once considered revolutionary, the service hasn’t evolved in pace with the market. For instance, with the exception of RSS feeds, the service restricts users to the confines of mostly Yahoo! provided content.

Net Result - My Yahoo! has seen four consecutive years of declining usage.

Enter the rebirth of the personalized start page, starring NetVibes, iGoogle and PageFlakes. These sites adopted the general My Yahoo! concept and took it a step further by allowing easy, effortless customization and a plethora of widgets, feeds, and podcasts. Everything from checking emails from multiple email clients, to surfing through YouTube can be done on one page.

All indications are that people are into the new level of personalization. Over the last year, Google’s personal page has grown substantially faster compared to My Yahoo!.

New services like NetVibes and PageFlakes are growing even faster, experiencing growth rates of over 5000% and 3000%, respectively.

One could argue that NetVibes is the true evangelist of the new personalized page. They have been aggressively promoting and building their “ecosystem” – an open platform to allow any content provider to create widgets accessible from most widget and blog systems – including Google IG, Apple Dashboard and more. Through the NetVibes ecosystem content providers can build one widget, accessible by everyone.

Here at Compete, we like the open approach so much that we decided to build our own widget using NetVibe’s Universal Widget API (UWA). Note the highlighted region of my NetVibes page below. If you are interested in adding the Compete Widget to your NetVibes page click here.

There has been a lot of talk about the “long tail” of the internet. In December we decided to investigate various attributes of the size of the internet and walked away with two primary conclusions:

• The internet is constantly expanding. In 2006 Compete’s panel visited over 5M unique websites, representing an increase of 77% since 2001.
• The expansion of the internet is not compromising the growth of larger sites – in fact, the larger sites are getting bigger, attracting more visitors and interaction than ever before.

But what about the middle? What we refer to as “The Torso” or sites attracting over a million visitors a month. How many sites are breaking this threshold and how fast is The Torso growing?

In Q1 of 2007, there were 1,718 sites attracting over 1M visitors (U.S.). This represents a 458% increase since 2001. This sets the five year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of “The Torso” at 18.6%. By this time next year The Torso will be comprised of ~2,050 sites!

So who broke the million visitor threshold between Q1 ’06 – Q1 ’07?

Noteworthy additions to The Torso:

• Digg.com: broke the million visitor barrier in April ’06. Digg’s growth continues to impress and as of April ’07 is attracting over 15M visitors each month.
• eMusic.com: EMusic is the I-Tunes of the indie-music labels. I have been a member for years. The songs are considerably cheaper than I-Tunes, no DRM and the community is great at finding talented, but undiscovered artists.
• Foreclosure.com: A natural side effect of the recent real estate boom. Lets hope the growing popularity of the site is not indicative of a real estate crash.
• Gather.com: The social network with a brain is beginning catch on among the adult populous.
• “My” sites: There were “17” sites that broke the million visitor threshold whose domain name began with “my”. Example: mybloglog.com, mygirlyspace.com, myspacestop.com, myview.com, myhotquiz.com… (I’ll stop now).

I am a die-hard Pandora enthusiast. I love being exposed to new music that I don’t hear on mainstream radio, and I enjoy being able to fine-tune my channels to play music that would interest me the most. However, my listening days may be coming to an end, due to a ruling that could put Pandora out of business.

Web radio is fighting back against possible fee increases of the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) that may cripple the industry. The ruling, announced earlier this month, imposes a yearly royalty rate increase set “per performance” from 2006 to 2010. This could be severely detrimental to small web broadcasters, who claim that it could exceed their total revenues. In a WSJ article, the co-founder of Pandora states that if the ruling stands, his company may cease to exist.

Pandora has had some success this year in growing its site visitation by an average of 10% each month. With over 150% growth in unique visitors last year, Pandora’s popularity may come with a steep price. The CRB ruling also indicates that there is a $500 minimum fee “per channel” per year. The ambiguous definition of a “channel” puts websites which offer limitless customized “channels”, like Pandora, in a precarious position.

Continue reading “The Biggest Threat to Web Radio” »