Major Developments Major Developments by Calendar Year

February 4, 2014

Top 10 Google Analytics Alternatives

Filed under: 2013 — Tags: , — Ralph C Dreher @ 5:18 AM

Google Analytics is a popular free web analytical tool used to tracks the information of your website. But there are some reasons why people look for other analytics are data limits, premium prices, reporting delays, difficult interface and so on. This article discusses top 10 Google analytics alternatives.

  • Clicky: Clicky is a web analytical tool. It provides the basic information on the visitors of your website. This helps you know how popular your website is as a whole and which webpage content is most popular. You can also monitor your Twitter account from the same control panel like tweets, links, hashtags, etc.
  • Kissmetrics: Kissmetrics is an effective tool that tracks the user behavior on multiple session basis and tracks the conversion rates on each web page. It is also able to track information of the users who are likely to convert.
  • Mint: Mint is the another alternative to Google analytics. It provides information about the visitors including recently visited pages, returning visitors, referral site’s information, most visited content and so on. Another important feature of Mint is Bird Feeder – tracks the feeds subscription pattern of past week, month and year.
  • Mixpanel: Mixpanel is a real time web analytics tool and its dashboard is simple and attractive. It is used to track the user activities on your website within your application. It excels in the areas – funnel analysis, segmentation and report.
  • FoxMetrics: FoxMetrics is a web analytics tool that provides all the essential features that are required to run your online business. It mainly focus on the visitor’s actions and activities on your website. It also provides information of each customer.
  • Woopra: Woopra features are funnel analytics, segmented analytics and retention analytics. These features give your provides real time information about your customers behavior on your website. You can click over the visitors panel to know visitors’ click through pattern, what they are reading and so on.
  • Chartbeat: Chartbeat is real time analytics tool which provides information about real time traffic to your website. It alerts you to know about spikes or downtime (server crash, low loading speed of your web page and so on) in traffic.
  • Open Web Analytics: Open Web Analytics is an open source web analytic tool is with three important features like click heatmaps, DOM click tracking and mouse movement record and playback. It supports WordPress and MediaWiki. It tracks and analyzes visitors’ actions on your website and applications.
  • Reinvigorate: Reinvigorate is a web analytical tool with features like Heatmaps (it shows you where your visitor is click on the page), NameTags, live visitor tracking, referral tracking and so on.
  • Piwik: Piwik is an open source web analytics software. It is customizable and has additional plug-ins, which you can add to your system. It provides complete insight on your marketing campaigns and site’s visitors.

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September 20, 2013

Payment Methods in Internet Advertising

Filed under: 2012 — Tags: , , — Ralph C Dreher @ 8:57 AM

Payment methods in Internet advertising are very flexible. It is an understanding between the advertiser and the publisher to decide how the advertiser pays for the advertisement posted in publishers’ website. There are three ways in which an advertiser can pay the publisher. They are as follows.

Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) or Cost-Per-Thousand impressions (CPT)
“Mille” means 1000 in Roman numbers. In CPM/CPT, the advertiser has to pay the hosting website (publisher), when the number of users to the advertisement reaches 1000. The advertiser is not responsible for any crashes or malfunctioning in the publisher’s website. The advertiser need not pay if the number has not reached the 1000 mark.

It is helpful for businesses if the advertiser publishes the advertisement on any popular website where traffic of users is high. This makes the brand visible to many visitors.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
In CPC, the advertiser has to pay the publisher when the banner ad is posted on the publisher’s website and gets noticed by users and users click on the link of the advertisers ad from the publishers website.

Care should be taken while designing the banner ad. It should be attractive and informative to impress the visitor. Link of the company’s website must also be present on the banner, otherwise visitors might not visit the website. Make sure to post advertisements in websites that are related to your business.

Cost-Per-Action (CPA) or Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)
In CPA, advertiser pays to publisher only when visitor visits the advertisers website and performs some action in the site. Action here means a transaction with the company. This may be either registering or purchasing a product. The advertiser need not pay the publisher, if the visitor just clicked on the banner ad.

CPA has become popular, as the number of websites are in millions and competition is high for posting an ad. This is a fair method, as the company pays to publishers only if he gets any lead or sale. There are two more types of payment schemes within CPC. They are:

  • Cost-Per-Sale (CPS): CPS is the best payment method for advertisers because they can pay for the advertisement only if someone visits the website and purchases the product.
  • Cost-Per-Lead (CPL): In CPL, advertiser pays the publisher only if any potential customer visits the website and registers or orders a product which leads to a sale.

Fixed payment
Fixed payment is the oldest method of payment that was used during the initial stages of Internet marketing. In this type of payment, advertisers pay fixed amount either monthly or yearly to the hosting website for advertising their ad. This method of payment is hardly followed these days.

Of all the different methods of payment in Internet advertising, Cost-Per-Action (CPA) is beneficial for businesses. (more…)

July 9, 2013

History of Internet Advertising

Filed under: 2013 — Tags: — Ralph C Dreher @ 9:01 AM

Internet advertising is growing at a rapid pace and it is the fastest growing form of advertising than any other form of traditional advertising. Even though Internet advertising has been around since 1994, which is only 18 years old, it has gained immense popularity, and today it has become a necessity for every business owner to use it as a means of advertising, promoting and selling products and services online.

Imagining life without Internet advertising would be hard. So, lets take a look at the history of Internet advertising and the developments that took place in these 18 years.

Developments that took place between 1994 – 2000

  • Internet advertising or online advertising was started almost a decade ago in the year 1994.
  • In mid 1990s when Internet was new to the people, there was a misconception among the people that Internet is only useful to the scientists and students who are pursuing computer related academics.
  • Internet had become very common and easily available to the people during 1996 and 1997. Then, slowly people started understanding that, the Internet can also be used in various ways.
  • In 1994, HotWired first sold spaces on its website for advertisements to many businesses. This was the start of the Internet advertising.
  • Advertisers began buying spaces on the popular websites where their company’s brand would get noticed by the visitors.
  • Number of websites started growing in thousands and millions, and advertisers felt that it was not good to stick to one popular website. Then the advertisers started buying spaces from many popular websites and made it visible to many audiences.

Developments that took place from 2000 – Present

  • During early 2000, Internet users started identifying the benefits of commercial services on the Internet. This lead to the craze of having a website for businesses/organization, so that the presence of their company is felt in the Internet.
  • Since the start of Internet advertising, there was a constant growth till 1998 ($1.9 billion in annual revenue). But there was huge growth of Internet advertising market in 1999($7.6 billion in annual revenue) and the momentum is still continuing. The revenue is increasing every after year.
  • But the companies were not sure whether the user would visit the company’s website directly. Then came the concept of “banners” or “banner ads”.
  • Banner is a small note located at one side of the website with some information and link to the company’s website. When clicked on that link, user goes directly to the company’s website.
  • Internet advertising actually got noticed by the common people in 2007 with the help of Google. Google in 2007, brought the revolution of Internet advertising.
  • As years passed on, developments in technology and animation advertisements increased, where the use of technologies like flash player etc. came into existence.
    • Animation advertisements are small videos or a movie that attracts the user easily.
    • Animation advertisements make banner ads more lively and attractive.
  • After 2010, with the introduction of smart phones and advanced mobile phones in the market, it became easier for businesses to promote their products/services to the people. These high end phones provided access to the Internet and this is how Internet advertising market grew further.
  • Social networking sites made targeted audiences closer to the companies and the interaction between them has become more simple.

Online advertising has made a global phenomenon, and in the coming years there are lots of surprises in store that will make the online advertising platform easier to use and navigate.

September 14, 2011

Social Media Marketing Helps Increase Customers and Revenues

Filed under: Business — Tags: , — Winson @ 7:43 AM

Gone are the days when businesses used traditional marketing supplements for promoting the products and services. The rise of Internet usage trends has enhanced the mode of marketing by various businesses. Social media has become one of the most effective marketing tools for businesses these days. It is found that social media marketing helps in bringing up new revenues and customers.

The social networking advertising revenues were estimated to reach $5.97 billion in 2011 as per the eMarketer. This is estimated to be a 71.6% increase over 2010. These estimates did not include money spent by the companies on developing their presence on social networks or hiring staff to manage them.

A survey conducted by Regus, revealed that companies operating in the developed markets had a great impact of social networks. It was found that 47% of the businesses worldwide used social networks for customer acquisition in 2011. However, in 2010, the social media marketing was used by only 40% of them throughout the world. Among the different countries studied, it was found that China ranked first in the use of social networks for customer acquisition. In China alone, 65% of the businesses are estimated to use social media in 2011. This is expected as a great growth with only 44% of the businesses using social networks in 2010.

Countries like India, US and UK are only next to China in using social media for customer acquisition. The social networks are estimated to be used by 43% of businesses in the US in 2011. However, only 33% of the businesses used them in 2010 for customer acquisition. However, it was found that the impact of social networks was more for companies operating in the developed markets.

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January 4, 2011

Web Holdouts of Small Businesses are Unsearched, Unfound, Unfulfilled

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: , , , — Winson @ 4:50 AM

Web marketing plays a major part in company’s development by transferring messages, advertising goods and services, all over the Internet. It has high potential of reaching a large market effectively. But many small businesses in U.S are unable to make their business presence felt in internet. It is major drawback for the development of small business.

According to a survey conducted by Neilsen and Webvisible, in last November, though searching for local product or service in Internet by various search engines like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft’s live search, is the No.1 priority for both consumers and small business owners, a huge segment of customer population, is missing out by the small businesses. It is because small businesses spent less than 10% of their marketing budgets on advertising in Internet. It is to be kept in mind that, 44% consumers turn to Internet when looking for local products and services.

According to other data, 40% of consumers say that problem finding a local business exists, as only 44% of the small businesses have their own websites. Small businesses are very reluctant to change their traditional way of running a business, as they found web marketing to be very expensive.

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