Internet Ads: The Numbers Are In

Internet adsThe Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reports that ad revenues last year were up 22% from the year before, hitting $31 billion. Here’s the biggest news:

  • Mobile ads grew the most of all categories, up 149%, or $1.6 billion
  • Search was the largest category with a 47% share (up 27% to $11.7 billion)

Digital video rose 29% to $1.8 billion and display advertising made up the rest with 35% of all revenues.

“This historic moment, with an especially impressive achievement in mobile, is indicative of an increased awareness from advertisers that they need to reach consumers where they are spending their time—in digital media,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of IAB, in a press release.

Ad Revenues versus Ad Spending

Internet ad spending is huge – the next biggest after traditional television advertising. $31.7 billion of ad spending in 2011 was on Internet ads. Retailers spent the most (22%), followed by telecom (12%), and leisure and travel (8%).

Unsurprisingly, Internet ads’ revenue growth has outpaced all other media outlets’ over the past seven years. Retail has seen the most growth in Internet ad revenues, followed by financial services, telecom, auto, then computing products tied with leisure travel.

As for the minutiae of what makes a great Internet ad, that our business. Let’s talk about whether and what kind of Internet ads are best suited to your business. iQM.

The PDF of the full report is here.

Internet Traffic Will Quadruple in Four Years

Internet trafficSo you were just getting used to hearing data referred to in “gigabytes”, GB, or “Gigs” – and now the Internet world has moved on. We are now dealing with zettabytes of data. One zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes.

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast and statement, there is and will be explosive global growth in Internet traffic, which is expected to quadruple by 2016. This is fueled largely by the speed at which smartphones, tablets, and Internet-enabled TVs are flying off the shelves; the growing accessibility of Wi-Fi and faster high-speed connections are all contributing factors.

Computers may have been responsible for 94 percent of consumer Internet traffic last year, but that number is expected to decrease to about 81 percent. So where’s the growth? Mobile Internet traffic – which is forecast to increase 18 times between now and 2016.

The Internet Traffic Explosion

  • 2016 will see 3.4 billion Internet users — half the world
  • More than half of global Internet traffic is expected to come from Wi-Fi
  • Average broadband speeds will nearly quadruple
  • The greatest demand for bandwidth will come from video: streaming entertainment as well as business videoconferencing

Imagine the equivalent of 278 million people simultaneously streaming an HD movie each hour. That’s where Cisco expects consumer demand to be — orders of magnitude greater than it is now. Cisco says it expects dramatic changes in “the network requirements needed to deliver on the expectations of this ‘new normal.’“

Businesses need to get mobile, connected, and visual. Reel in your Internet traffic with Video production, mobile apps, Internet marketingsocial mediablogs, and more: iQuarius Media.

Google Penguin: Checklist for Businesses

Google PenguinSocial Media Soothes Where Google Hits You Hardest

For small- to medium-sized businesses who find their rankings adrift with every new wave of Google algorithm updates, finding a way to generate traffic without having to rely on Google might seem like a dream come true.

As with the latest Google Penguin algorithm update, designed to weed out Internet pollution and spam, Google is getting more specific about how websites are judged on quality. They want quality and relevancy at the top.

Well, as businesspeople and marketers with real content to promote, we can’t complain about that, can we?

The Consumer Shift Away from Google

If we think of Google as a single marketing channel, albeit a big one, we are headed in the right direction — because there are other sources of traffic and link juice, and they are getting more and more powerful by the day. Why not go straight to the source? After all, consumer behavior has shifted towards reliance on social media, as opposed to Google. And Google may help them find specific products like no other source but, through social media, they are getting brand information, recommendations from friends, and reasons to buy.

The bottom line is that people – and by people, we mean 60 percent of the entire U.S. population – use the social networks. So dip in.

Google Penguin: Checklist for Businesses

1. Get people, as opposed to Google, to share your content.

Do you have gorgeous photo galleries, videos, infographics, and other visual content? Put them on Facebook ,Twitter, and Pinterest. Be funny. Be inspiring. Most importantly, be social and shareable.

2. BLOG

We can’t stress this one enough. Good, fresh content is something that both people and search engines look for. When you blog regularly, it helps build your brand and gives your readers a reason to come back, but it also forces search engine crawlers to continually index and rank your site.  And Google Penguin gives particular weight to fresh, original blog content.

Push out blog posts regularly. Hire an Internet marketing company with great writers to help. Get guest blogs, and guest blog on others’ sites to establish yourself and your blog. Blogging is a big part of how Internet marketing is done these days, and it is simply too big a deal to ignore.

3. Go visual with Pinterest and YouTube.

People latch on to visual content. Visuals, particularly video, can pack a whole lot of information into a short time frame. And visual content is infinitely shareable, made even more powerful by both Pinterest and YouTube – two sites that are GREAT sources of traffic.

4. Stay on top of Google+.

In an effort to push Google+ further into the social realm, Google Penguin is giving its content and users unnatural importance in search engine results pages. Take advantage.

5. Optimize your Facebook and other social network profiles.

  • Buy social ads
  • Interact with relevant businesses
  • Make sure people see your URLs
  • Fill out all your profile info
  • Pull in your blog stream
  • Link to your profile on important keywords on your site
  • Do newsworthy things and publish them

***

What To Do

Google Penguin cares about relevancy, quality, diversity, and freshness — because these are the things that will ultimately make for a better Google search experience. What may seem like an initial hit to some of your Internet marketing efforts may be the best thing that ever happened — because it can push down those that are gaming the system, and help you and your brand rise to the top for being the cream of the crop. Just don’t slack on Google Penguin and social media best practices, some of which we have outlined for you above.

If you haven’t started in social media, start yesterday. If you’re there, do more. Get help — dedicate a team to it. This is a full-time job. Hire a full-service Internet marketing team. Iquarius Media’s number is 407-362-6503. We can:

  • Stay on top of your social media profiles
  • Start your blog and do exhaustive research, then have dedicated writers create your blog content
  • Produce videos and motion graphics
  • Custom-fit these and other Internet marketing services to you and your company

If you have questions, ask them. Ask us. You can do that here, on Facebook, on Twitter, or on Google+, to name a few.

Pinterest Jostling for Place Among the Top — And Winning

pinterestPinterest is still invite-only but new aggregated data indicates that it is taking its place among the social media behemoths in referral traffic:

  • Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Twitter
  • Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google Plus (G+), LinkedIn, and YouTube combined

The data was collected from more than 200,000 publishers who collectively reach more than 270 million unique monthly visitors each month. Facebook still accounted for more than a quarter of the referral traffic. Subculture-centric Stumbleupon held on to its number-two position, while similar bookmarking site Reddit was also among the top.

This is Huge: Pinterest > Twitter

The biggest news here has got to be the Twitter connection. Twitter’s micro-blogging platform found its power in its concise, 140-character bursts of information – posts are quick to craft and easy to share. Along with its URL shorteners making it more than easy to put active links in posts, Twitter was a powerful source of referral traffic for businesses and marketers.

It now looks as if Pinterest is occupying a similar niche, with the added dimensions of being visuals-focused. There is power in pictures — and Pinterest is remarkably beautiful, and its content is infinitely clickable.

We’ve blogged about Pinterest before. We’re also marketers who have been eagerly watching Pinterest grow since the beginning. If you’d like to know more about how we can leverage Pinterest for you, contact us. Ask your questions. We would love to share what we know.

 

Google+ Reaches 90 Million? Kind Of.

google+ larry pageGoogle CEO Larry Page announced last week during the year-end earnings call that Google+ (Google Plus, or G+) now has over 90 million users. This is in addition to the amazing growth in the single month of December, where Google+ saw almost 20 million new sign-ups, much of it through the millions of brand-new Android devices unwrapped during the holiday season, according to Google+ watchers.

Google+’s last official estimate, in October, was 40 million users. And though Page claimed that 60% of Google+ users engage with Google every day, he did not specify if these 54 million users were engaging with Google+ pages or the other wide range of Google products.

Google also reported its first $10 billion quarter, and they’re up 50 million Android devices since last quarter, bringing it to 250 million.

At any rate, Google+ is only 6 months old. It took Facebook almost a year to reach one million users. Google+ had 10 million in 16 days. On the other hand, Facebook is expected to reach the billionth user mark by the end of this year.

(Do any business owners have any doubts right now as to the reach of social media networks? If you do, please, call us. We’ve got some talkin’ to do.)

As for Google+ and Larry Page, we’re going to file this under “one to watch.”

Motion Design at iQuarius Media

motion designFrom 2D to 3D, we use the latest technology and tools for powerful storytelling and fluid animation.

Nothing grabs an audience like eye-catching motion design, whether it’s: video graphics for your home page, as part of a web-distributed video, or even interactive ROM business cards.

iQuarius Media creates sleek motion graphics that are engaging, imaginative — and beautiful.

3D Animation

Whether you want to add a dimension to your existing visuals, or you want to bring something in your imagination to life, 3D animation adds a dramatic layer of reality to your material.

The Motion Design Process

We can start you from scratch. Or we can join you at any point in your current process, at any of the following:

  1. Concept
  2. Making decisions about intended audience and: art direction, cinematography, length, tone, soundtrack, etc.
  3. Making decisions about distribution: frequency, saturation, channels and markets
  4. Script
  5. Visual elements: live action, graphics, segues, etc.
  6. Live recording and sound design: music, backgrounds, sound effects
  7. Editing, compositing, and encoding
  8. Distribution and Internet marketing

 Call us and we’ll help you across the finish line.


Google Starts Getting More Personal Today (1/10/12)

google peopleStarting today (Tuesday), Google search results will start looking different more frequently for different people. Google will start including content from their social network, Google Plus (G+), including photos and comments, when it performs a search. This way, search results will be more intimately tailored to each user. The search engine will even start incorporating content from their older photo service Picasa.

This feature will automatically be made available to all English-language searches conducted by users who are logged into Google. This is just one step toward one of Google’s most ambitious goals. Eventually, Google hopes to amass enough information about each person’s individual preferences and interests in order to provide custom-fit search results. Google is calling this functionality “Google, plus your world.”

People signal what’s important to them through what they do and share on the social networks, and it’s this information that Google is in the business of curating. Facebook has greater insights into personal tastes, though, because of its 800 million users sharing 1.5 billion photos each week. This is the territory that Google is hoping to encroach on with these new additions to their search.

Here’s the part we wanted business owners to hear.

In more general searches, like “music”, “sports”, “fishing”, “design”, you name it, Google will generate a drop-down box of suggestions from companies, people, and places that have accounts on Google Plus. Couple that with Google’s ability to localize search results — and the fact that Google Plus signed up 20 million users in December alone – and the implication for companies is huge. This brings the idea of targeted traffic to soaring new heights.

[Existing clients: Call us, as always, if you want more information on how Google fits into your marketing strategy and what we can do for you. Potential clients: Ditto.]

Basic SEO Strategies

If you don’t plan on using the services of a specialist or establishing a budget for your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices, you definitely ought to, at a bare minimum, make a few modest changes to your website.

Small details can have a powerful effect on search engine results and you will get far more website visitors if you understand what you’re doing and why. You don’t have to be an expert to get started. You just need a a little time for researching and a few days for executing the important changes to your website.

Keyword and Key Phrase Research

The most significant component of SEO is keyword research. You will need to determine which key phrases will drive visitors to your website and start composing a handful of posts that contain those keywords. There is a fine line between providing useful content for your users and publishing an article simply because you want your website to be keyword-rich. You have to concentrate on your users, and you should not position keywords and phrases in any other sentence just because you are seeking to boost your search engine ranking.

Link Building and Development

Another significant element of SEO is link development. If your website’s hyperlink is found on numerous pages, search engines will undoubtedly recognize it. Preferably, you will receive this recognition by submitting top quality subject matter and insightful articles and observations.

Stay Real and Natural

One of the most frequent errors website owners make in SEO when attempting to strengthen their search engine positioning is going too far. You may often notice content that does not make sense because a keyword is used in every sentence; or you may notice websites that have a list containing dozens of links as a result of link exchange. You don’t have to submit your website to thousands of article directories,  and you should not concentrate on adding your links everywhere on the net. This can work against you. A single valuable link is worth more than 1,000 links on new websites, so try turning your focus to quality, not quantity. If you think about what your visitors want to see on your website and figure out a way to keep them engaged.

Keep Going.

After that, it’s a matter of keeping fresh content coming so you can get in — and stay in — Google’s sights. Preferably, you’ll push out new content every few days. If you’re a company or individual that everyone’s talking about in their blogs, in the news, in magazine articles, in interviews and reviews, that counts as fresh content. However, most of us don’t set the Internet abuzz like that on a regular basis. We need to send out our own material and toot our own horns to get Google and the other search engines to take notice. And all this content needs to be tagged, keyworded, and promoted. Fresh content every few days — or more frequently, if you have the time.

On second thought, do you have the time? Don’t you have a business to run?

Our phone number is (407) 362-6503. Or, if you prefer, message us here.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaigns

Pay Per Click(PPC) advertisements are the sponsored links that appear above or to the right of search page results. Pay Per Click created the revenue stream that built Google as it stands today.

As part of your integrated marketing strategy, Pay Per Click campaigns can be the quickest way of increasing your visibility and reach. It can mean first-page search engine exposure.

When you enter the game, you’re up against hundreds of competitors. Do you know who is targeting the keywords that YOU want? How many companies are competing for the same, qualified traffic? We can help you find out. It can help you narrow in on opportunities that your competition is missing out on — that you can capitalize on. Pay Per Click campaigns entail bidding on the keywords you want and that are relevant to your brand. With our sophisticated techniques and intensive research, we can help you identify the best possible keywords that are being used by your target audience to seek out services and products that you offer. Careful targeting can mean customer conversion — more sales. Take advantage of our experience in bid management and optimization, as well as our understanding of the technology — and technique — that drives Pay Per Click advertising.

407-378-7817