Online advertising company Permuto pulled data from the U.S. Census Bureau into a nice infographic comparing people’s purchasing habits in-store vs. online, and it got us wondering: What do you buy online vs. in stores?
(Click the image above for a closer look.)
According to the Census Bureau’s data, the old brick and mortar stores are still responsible for the majority of sales in most of the categories, save for a few notable categories, including books, clothing, and electronics. Since Lifehacker readers are a more tech-savvy crowd than most of the public, we’d guess you tend more toward the buy online crowd. Are you more of a virtual shopper, or do you still prefer to touch and feel before you buy? It certainly varies depending on what you’re buying, so tell us about it in the comments.
A recently disbanded click fraud ring in China racked up $3 million worth of clicks in two weeks. $3 million that we’re aware of. Just how detectable is this whole business of racking up fraudulent ad revenue clicks?
That intricate mess of lines above represents a portion of DormRing1, the click fraud bunch that was caught in China. The lines show the relationship of some of the IP addresses involved in the fraud and how they are connected to some fraudulent ad clicks. The whole network actually “involved 200,000 different IP addresses and racked up more than $3 million worth of fraudulent clicks across 2,000 advertisers in a two-week period.” Impressive and scary at the same time.
The trouble is that no one really knows how much ad revenue DormRing1 collected before they were caught. Click-fraud monitoring services such as Anchor Intelligence, the ones behind this catch, are evolving to keep up with the scale on which these rings are operating. It’s still difficult to judge just how well they’re doing as they’re having to infiltrate forums and gain the trust of the perpetrators in a manner reminiscent of drug busts. But as the criminals are getting more elaborate, the investigations are too.
That good news aside, do me a favor: after you read this post, comment, and all that jazz, refresh the page a few times and—Ah…I mean, heh…just kidding. [Tech Crunch]
While RTB will make ad exchanges even more efficient, it may not be that necessary.
RTB depends on 3 things: 1) inventory, which depends on how many people hit the page to generate an impression, 2) clicks, which depend on people clicking something, and 3) bidders, the more niche you get, the fewer bidders there will be. Inventory does not change rapidly. Clicks take time to accumulate (to yield click rates, which are a necessary ingredient in the RTB calculation). And if there are too few bidders the price of the auction “item” won’t appreciate or depreciate much or rapidly. Because of these 3 things, making bidding real-time versus non-real-time (i.e. overnight) may not make it significantly better or move the needle much on efficiency and ROI.
And RTB will still not save “display” ads. The golden age of display was in the mid 90s when people tolerated ads when they read content. They are now trained to avoid looking at the top and right of web pages So while RTB may increase the ROI of display ads by increasing click rates from a percentage with too many zeros to count to something sligtly higher, display ads are still ignored by users and will still not generate measurable business impact for advertisers.
While no holding company’s results are pretty these days, Interpublic Group of Cos. last week posted particularly poor numbers, swinging to a net loss of over $35 million for the first nine months of 2009 from almost $60 million in profit during the same period in 2008. IPG’s third-quarter revenue fell 18% compared to declines of 14.4% at rival Omnicom Group, 8.7% at WPP (factoring out the effect of acquisitions and currency shifts) and 5.3% at Publicis Groupe. WPP’s reported revenue, including revenue from its big Taylor Nelson Sofres acquisition, rose 16.7%. In the same quarter, net income attributable to IPG tumbled 47.3%, more than double the drop of Omnicom (down 22.5%).
Google changed the game by changing the business model from paying for impressions to paying only when the advertiser gets the click. This helped to cut out the 99% of waste and inefficiency which existed in the industry.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Using words such as “severe” and “surprise” to describe the recession’s impact on its business, WPP, the world’s largest advertising conglomerate, today said its profit was down 47% for the second quarter. And WPP Chief Executive Martin Sorrell said it will be a while before marketing executives begin to spend and take chances the way they did just a few years back.
In a first half earnings statement released this morning, WPP Group announced that digital and direct marketing-related services now comprise 25% of its body.
WPP Group owns labels like 24/7 Real Media, Mediaedge:cia, MediaCom, Mindshare, GroupM and Outrider.
Digital and direct garnered $1.7 billion in revenues in the first half of ‘09, with a projected annual run rate of nearly $3.5 billion total. But it is digital media and advertising that appear to be dominating the segment.
Overall, first half revenues fell 2.9% to $6.4 billion in the first half on a reported basis, MediaPost reports. Like-for-like, however, total revenues slid 8.3% against the first half of 2008.
According to WPP, traditional advertising and “media investment management” have been the hardest-hit amidst the economic downturn.
“On a constant currency basis, advertising and media investment management revenues fell by 7.5%, with like-for-like revenues down 7.8%,” it stated.
Branding and identity, healthcare and specialist communications — which includes direct, internet and interactive — were least affected.
The media conglomerate committed to prioritizing the growth of digital communications, customer insights and strong geographic markets.
Dead simple, handy tool for adding contextual help to any web page or entire site. It is installed on this blog — so go ahead and select something with your mouse.
Install on any webpage or blog by way of 1 line of code:
Select any text, contextual bubble appears, click Wikipedia to get more information about the selected text
When more than 5 words are selected, other options are grayed out and clip2send is the link to click to send the selected part of the page via email. Type in the email address; the subject line is autofilled, but editable; the source URL is automatically cited>
Select text, contextual bubble appears, click Amazon link to bring up results on Amazon.
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I know I am wasting half of my ad dollars; I just don’t know which half — is more like “I know I am wasting 99% of my ad dollars and I know which 99%” – banner ad click through rates are generously at 1%, which means the other 99% is known to be wasted — no more guessing necessary.
Digital advertising is more efficient than traditional advertising and is more measurable (despite being called “unmeasured” media by traditional measurement purveyors — you know who you are). In traditional advertising the advertiser pays for 100% of the media costs (e.g. pay to air the ad on TV, pay to print the ad in magazines, pay for banner ad impressions). If banner ad click through rates are an indication of what percent of targeted users actually like the ad, then only 1% like the ad or the message. So the other 99% either didn’t like it, didn’t see it, or didn’t think it was relevant at the time.
Google changed the game by charging advertisers only for the 1% that clicked (pay per click) not for how many times the ad was aired (impressions, pay per thousand). If advertisers are paying only for the click and not for the 99% other impressions that did not get any clicks, then the 99% of waste is eliminated — making the entire system more efficient.
Now that advertisers have a way to pay for ONLY the “audience” that wants what they are advertising (they show this interest by clicking) there is no need to re-aggregate audiences. When a user searches for something, that is when they are interested or are researching. That is the only time advertisers need to show ads. Any other time, it would be wasted. Large audiences were useful in the “olden ages” of television, print, radio, and banner ad advertising. Large audiences are no longer necessary because advertisers should only care about the 1% that may be interested anyway. Advertisers can save the 99% of media cost that is known to be wasted — good for the advertiser, bad for the media companies.