Digital MarketingEssentials

Online advertising will balloon in the coming years, becoming bigger than all advertising media except direct marketing by 2012, according to IDC.

Internet shines in Beijing

Drastic marketing budget increases are not likely this year for most marketers worldwide, according to a survey conducted by the CMO Council and sponsored by Deloitte Consulting, Market and TechTarget.

The use of search engines as a tool to leverage businesses could certainly be higher, agreed the panelists at a discussion on the future of search engine marketing at the Massive Technology Show in Canada on Wednesday.

In a move that many described as signaling the official death of the page view, Nielsen/NetRatings last July announced that it would no longer use page views as the primary metric for comparing Web sites. At the time, the Internet benchmarking firm cited that the growing popularity of Asynchronous Java and XML, or AJAX - which can refresh content without completely reloading a Web page - as the main reason for the change to measuring time spent on a site.

You're the CMO of a company that makes blue widgets. But when you enter the phrase "blue widget" in a major search engine, your Web site pops up in the 4,500th spot on the results list. Talk about a visibility problem: A study conducted by The Pennsylvania State University, published in 2003, found that 54 percent of users review only the first page of search results, and 19 percent stop after the second page. Clearly, poor search engine ranking is costing the company business. The remedy? You can't write to Google or Yahoo and ask them to please, pleeeeease rank your site higher for "blue widget" searches. Search engines use complex, secret and ever-changing mathematical algorithms to rank sites. To improve a Web site's search rank, marketers can turn to search engine optimization, or SEO.