Here’s an interesting fact straight off the interesting fact press. New statistics from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers claim that US Internet advertising revenues are down 5.3% from the same period last year. Not insubstantial at $10.9 billion for the first half of this year, the fact that the numbers are down at all in light of the dramatic drop in ad spending offline is somewhat of a surprise. A break down of the figures reveals that search makes up 47% of these revenues, followed by display/banner ads (22%), and classifieds (10%). Rich media and lead generation both contribute 7%.

With global advertising expenditure expected to fall 9.8% this year, according to Media agency giant Carat (that’s up from earlier predictions of a 5.8% fall) you might even argue that a 5.3% drop represents a form of resilience. Figures for overall advertising declines in the UK and Western Europe are worse than the global drop with a projected decline of 16.3% and 11% respectively. On the bright side of their research, Carat believe that Internet advertising spends will rise 1% this year, globally although that’s compared to whopping 16.4% growth last year.

While we’re on the matter of online ad spends and trends comScore and Starcom USA claim in new research that only half the number of US internet users now click on display ads.

So what do all these statistics tell us? What are the conclusions to be drawn?

Well the figures tell us that companies are watching their media spends like hawks, reluctant to invest in anything that can’t offer top dollar returns, value for money and they are driving down prices accordingly to cut costs. Consequently, offline ad marketing is suffering major trauma. Terminal trauma for many printed and TV brands.

Online marketing though not doing as well as it was is bearing up relatively well – largely due to it’s core strengths of being highly targetable, flexible and measurable plus the fact that more and more people spend more and more time online as they turn away from traditional media.

That clickthroughs on display ads are falling reveals the importance of other digital marketing techniques, SEO (search engine optimisation) that offers organic profile, SMM (social media marketing) that builds online audiences and PPC (pay per click) as companies apply packages of online PR/SEO to fulfil their business objectives.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Link Building, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), SEO Copywriting, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.