Competing Metrics: PR Impressions vs. Online Clicks

So I started a recent post about competing metrics in the form of PR impressions reported by generic demographics of a TV show spot/mention and it's relationship to targeted online clicks. Though online clicks may not be in the billions, there is one significant difference...Online Clicks are targeted when it comes to search engine marketing campaigns. To say that PR impressions are bloated would be too PC at the present with search growing to a $6B industry in 2006. This thread offers some feedback into the very nature of what is important when comparing apples to oranges...

From Robert Charlton:
"Click-throughs and conversions, of course, are the name of the game... though there's also that intangible called branding. It's been argued that the kind of result, paid, organic, or a combination of the two, influences the branding effect. These things are very hard to measure, and just looking at raw impression numbers, with no weight being given to them, can be extremely misleading. But you could make a strong argument that search impressions are more likely to be effective than the PR impressions you're competing with."

Continue the post here.

MarketingSherpa Blog Awards Are Posted!

Though I wasn't a winner in the Search Marketing category it was awesome to be on the same playing field as all of these upper crust blogs that I pull from and reference on a daily basis. Maybe with a little advertising, I could even do this full-time...?

Congrats to all the winners, everyone deserves it and SERoundtable rocks! Thanks to everyone who nominated me.

Advertising Haiku for You from Google

The ad pods include either four or five such entries and comprise either a small rectangle of about 120 by 90 pixels or simply one long line of text.

Google released a new, smaller form of AdSense text ads (via SearchEngineLowdown) in a variety of vertical and horizontal sizes. The ads display just one short title for each ad, often consisting of only one word each, which may put further strains on the copywriting skill requirements that have already reached haiku-level difficulty.

Internet advertising totaled over $2.8 billion for the first quarter of 2005

“While the online audience gets bigger and broader, the TV audience continues to fragment, even as the cost of advertising spots rises,” notes Tom Hyland, Partner and New Media Group Chair, PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Add the growth of broadband in the home, which enables advertisers a platform to deliver rich media, and brand advertisers have a new mass audience to target. The economics are too compelling for marketers to ignore.” Excerpt from the IAB.

As rising costs of advertising...exactly; place your dollars in search, the revenue-generating all-star in your marketing mix. When it comes to speaking of reaching various audiences at all points of the day, no matter what phase of the buying cycle they are in, search is the most cost-effective. Hands down.

As Blogging Goes Corporate, So Does Your College Roommate

Blogging is becoming quite the tactic in every marketer's toolset. Reaching out to the masses with a personalized message is becoming the most travelled route to getting their attention.

The Wall Street Journal reports that blogging, once seen as a subversive voice of the unwashed masses, has gone corporate. Danone’s Stonyfield Farm Yogurt, Microsoft and many other companies are now paying people to write blogs for marketing, recruiting and other purposes. According to the Journal, about 4 percent of major American corporations have blogs that are available to the public. The story also reports that online job sites such as Dice.com and Monster are posting more ads for corporate bloggers.

So if you're in school still, it might be a good idea not to skip those writing courses at 7am. Blogging has become a corporate position and it may be useful to those wondering what they are doing at the end of May. There are multiple sites that allow you to setup free blogs:

AOL Journal
Blogger
Blog Easy
Blog City
Journal Space
Mod Blog
MSN Spaces
tBlog


6% of the entire U.S. adult population (internet users and non-users alike) have created blogs. That’s one out of every 20 people.
New data on blogs and blogging from PEW