Consumer research, decision making and online word-of-mouth

Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling reviewed an interesting Yahoo! study examining consumer behavior in choosing local services and providers in five vertical categories: legal, real estate, home improvement, health care and vocational education. Respondents included 2,500 consumers that completed a transaction.

Top line findings:

• Healthcare: 53% used insurance provider directories while 44% relied on a search engine
• Real Estate: 51% used a real estate vertical search engine versus 44% who used a major search engine
• Legal: 36% referred to a search engine while 25% used the internet yellow pages
• Home Contracting: 36 % used a search engine while 26% used the internet yellow pages

Greg relays that Yahoo found in every category that 75% of consumers relied on recommendations from friends and family during the research process. Along those lines, “Yahoo’s study found that local merchants who encourage customers to post online reviews and ratings benefit from the same kind of impact seen through word-of-mouth endorsements from family and friends.”

"The practical message for local businesses and service providers is this: have a professional website and make sure that it’s properly indexed and can be found by consumers using search engines."

Sphere: Related Content

Q3 '08 Internet ad spending at $5.87 billion, plus 2% over Q2

Q3 '08 Internet ad spending at $5.87 billion, roughly even with last quarter, plus 2% over Q2. 2008 revenues so far $17.3 billion, plus 14% over the first three quarters of '07. - The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC).

• A slew of analyst firms have reduced online ad industry revenue forecasts.
• The rate of growth between Q3 '07 and Q3 '08 was less than half the same period between '06 and '07. 
  
• Q2 revenues grew 12.8% over Q2 '07.

TechCrunch

Online advertising will weather the storm better than other advertising sectors because of cost-effectiveness and measurability.

Sphere: Related Content

Le Web sémantique par Nicolas Cynober

Excellent post sur le web Semantique par Nicolas Cynober, aussi repris par TechCrunch ce matin.

"Le rôle de ces technologies est fondamentalement très simple. Elles permettent de partager et d’enrichir tous types de données de manière structurée. Les

 applications webs deviennent alors hautement interconnectées dans un sens que l’on ne mesure

 pas encore."

With about 35 conversational posts a day, the semantic web is definitely not losing traction. Online advertising metrics might be looking downwards but the Web as a whole is certainly not going to lose speed any time soon .... until the next revolution.

 

Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web

Sphere: Related Content

Local interactive ad spending growth down to 8% in '09

• Local interactive ad spending growth to slow to around 8% in '09, from 47% this year, as  as offline media spending falls 1.4 percent - Borrell Associates

• While accelerating some budget shifting trends, the financial conjoncture makes it difficult to truly predict what will be

Sphere: Related Content

Obama's $8 million online advertising spend mix

Barack Obama's campaign could account for at least half of all 2008 online political ad spending - FEC reports analyzed by ClickZ News

• $8 million through October to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, news Web sites, ad networks, and in-game ad firm Massive
• Google collected $3.5 million from Obama for America
• Yahoo remains distant second with $673,000
• The campaign spent over half a million dollars on social networking sites
  
• Facebook took in over $467,000
• Time Warner (most likely CNN.com): over $337,000 by October
• Politico: $146,000
• WashingtonPost.com: $100,000
• The Weather Channel Interactive: over $108,000
• NBA.com: about $21,000 in September

"The ability to target ads locally is important to any political candidate using any medium, but Obama's campaign took local targeting to a new level. Before several state primaries, and then again before the general election, the campaign customized online ad creative for residents of different states. During the primaries, display ads with tailored messages showed up on news sites in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and others. Later in the year, a variety of state-specific ads appeared, telling people to "Register to Vote for Barack Obama and Other

 Candidates For Change," and providing the last day they could register in their state in order to vote.

• John McCain 2008
  
• Obama for America
  
• Democratic National Committee
  
• Republican National Committee
  
• Hillary Clinton for President
  
  

Borrell Associates predicts spending online by 2008 political advertisers to hit $17.7 million.

IceRocket reports over 5,500 posts about "barack Obama" a day in average, with a very impressive surge during election week.

Sphere: Related Content

Online advertising: Boost or Bust?

A couple interesting reports out today

1. Global Budgets To Boost Online Advertising
   
2. J.P.Morgan Slashes Outlook

• Total dollars spent on Internet advertising will continue to increase, the Rubicon Project
  
• Millions shifted from traditional advertising budgets into online
• Web advertising a global industry less subject to any one country's economy
  

And On the other hand,

• JP Morgan issued an advisory to investors attributing the downgrade to "further economic deterioration" weakening demand from online advertisers.
  
• Calling for an annual rate of online advertising growth of 25% in '07 and 13% in '09 from 28% and 19%.
  
• CPMs to remain depressed and sell-through rates will worsen.
• Lowering fiscal '08 and fiscal '09 domestic display to $7.95 billion (11% growth) and $8.45 billion (6% growth) from $8.15 billion (14% growth) and $9.43 billion (16% growth).
  
• Lowered U.S. search growth estimates to 23.4% in '08 ad 17.3% in '09 from 27.4% and 25.5%.
• Global search ad market expected to expand 34% in '08 vs. 36%.

Sphere: Related Content

Crosswind landing

Aircraft are generally directionally stable and have a tendency to point into the wind direction. In situations where a crosswind is present, the aircraft will adopt a yaw orientation with respect to the runway and will drift laterally as it approaches the runway. These pose significant safety issues when safe operation of the undercarriage requires the body and the velocity of the aircraft to be aligned with the runway at touch down. The landing gear on the B-52 included an unusual feature to counteract the problem: all landing gear bogies could be steered, allowing the aircraft to land with the wheels facing the direction of travel even if the nose was not pointed in the same direction.

crosswind landing is a landing maneuver in which a significant component of the prevailing wind is perpendicular to the runway centerline.

Sphere: Related Content