Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Fake web traffic has long plagued the online publishing world, but Dr. Paul Barford, computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin, is claiming the problem might be worse than suspected. And it's costing some of the top online advertisers millions in wasted ad impressions.

Dr. Barford, who is also the chief scientist at startup MdotLabs, is slated to present a study at an Internet security symposium Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where he we will claim that 10 traffic networks are serving up more than 500 million invalid ad impressions a month.

"We estimate the cost to advertisers for this fraudulent traffic to be on the order of $180 million annually," he said in a statement in advance of the presentation.

Dr. Barford reached his conclusion by posing as a web publisher and signing up for several different traffic generation services, also called PPV networks, which he filtered through software that uses anomaly detection to identify fake website traffic....

Web application performance monitoring company New Relic studied some 42 billion page views. Because many tech savvy sites use New Relic to improve performance, this data provides not just an indicator of where users are today, but where they’re going.

 

Companies like Google and Facebook have had access to vast amounts of data on how consumers behave on the web for years. Now you can get access to this same kind of Big Data, even if you don’t have their scale.

 

Here are four key insights from the Quarterly Web And Mobile Benchmark...

One in eight (12%) consumers in the UK have stopped using or buying a brand due to negative comments on social media, according to research from SAP UK & Ireland.

The survey of 1,000 UK online shoppers highlighted the need for brands to engage with customers online. Twenty-two percent of consumers have bought from a specific brand or retailer based on a recommendation they have seen on a social network....

Here are some top analytics to avoid when measuring marketing ROI and proving revenue.

I recently wrote about how to build a data-driven marketing team. But what metrics should that team track? There are literally hundreds if not thousands of possible marketing management metrics to choose from, and almost all of them measure something of some kind of value. The problem is that most of them relate very little to the revenue and profitability metrics that concern the CEO, CFO and the board....

Here are the top categories of metrics to avoid....

With talks of the new Google Penguin update and how social media can help stabilize and improve a site’s performance online, site owners are increasingly focusing on social media marketing campaigns. The question is – how do you really know how effective your campaigns are, and how can you determine ROI?

 

Of course, the ultimate way to track the effectiveness of your social SEO campaign is increased revenue, but there are other forms of tracking that can be beneficial as well. After all, not everything you do is going to generate an instant increase in revenue. In this article I will discuss how to track the effects of your social seo efforts, and the best methods and tools to add to your toolbox....

Did you know that a recent study showed that almost half (44 percent) of moms have gone on to make a purchase after a friend posted a recommendation or liked a product on a social media site?

 

We’ve been here before, of course (many times), but it bears repeating – moms and social media make a great mix, and if these socially savvy ladies are a demographic fit for your business then you should absolutely be engaging with them – frequently – within your marketing campaigns.

 

You need more proof? Moms love to share information about products. Your products. More than nine in ten (92 percent) pass along information about deals or finds to others, and 78 percent of moms follow brands on social media to get coupons and discounts (compared to 55 percent of other folk).

 

They’re mobile, too – 89 percent of moms use their smartphone to check social media on the move....

Social Media has had a terrific ride for the past several years, but the days of easy growth are gone. In fact, the days of easy anything in social are behind us. For many brands, 2013 will be a year of social media disappointment.

With so many consumers spending so much time in social media and expecting so much of brands, our investments in social will continue to grow, but that does not mean our results will grow, at least in easily measurable ways. Certainly, all of our brands will earn more fans, see more comments and collect more retweets, but we all know this is no longer enough--our bosses want to know the business results we are delivering, and fans simply are not a business benchmark.

Success in 2013, more than ever, will be measured in difficult metrics and not easy ones, and increasingly, it will come not just from the Marketing department but from every corner of the enterprise. To succeed in 2013 and beyond, organizations must recognize how social media is altering the way we live, work and conduct business and not just the way we kill time on Facebook.

Here is where (I believe) social will grow and where it will stumble and stagnate in 2013...

Social media duties are treated more as add-on job functions, and don’t often get a dedicated internal team, details a [download page] new Ragan/NASDAQ OMX Corporate Solutions survey. 65% of the survey respondents – the majority of whom hail from organizations that employ more than 100 people – said that social media tasks are assigned on top of current job responsibilities. 27% said they have an internal team that works exclusively on social media, while an additional 5% said they have both an internal department and use an outside agency or partner. Just 3% said they fully outsource all their social media efforts. That 3% figure reflects an apparent unwillingness to spend dollars – rather than time – on social media, a trend that was found by Reply! recently, in research examining SMB use of paid social media services.

The Ragan survey found that when it comes to tools used to measure social media, a 59% majority rely on free tools, while 35% use a combination of free and paid tools. Only 6% use only paid tools, the most popular of which are Hootsuite (31%), Radian6 (25%), and Vocus (17%). (Among free tools, Google Analytics and Google Alerts both easily lead all others.)...

Do you know why your content marketing campaign is going to fail? It’s not because you can’t write great content… it’s actually because you don’t know how to promote it.

You can learn how to write great content, but if no one reads your content and links to it, there’s no point in putting it out there....

The rise of Big Data provides marketers with an unprecedented level of insight. But too often, it's easy to get buried in the data. Using billions of transactional data points from thousands of Eloqua customers, 40 Must-See Charts for Modern Marketers contains ready-to-use benchmarking data that you can compare your own results to.

Download your free copy of these key insights gathered from real marketing performance data across several disciplines, including:
Email marketing;
Lead management;
Social media;
Events management....