by MC Marketing Charts

Travel site categories accounted for 4 of the 10 top-gaining web categories by percentage change in January 2012, including Transactions sites, which grew 28% month-over-month to 3.7 million visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix data. Car Rental sites reached 6.2 million visitors during the month (up 22%), while Hotels/Resort sites attracted 33.2 million visitors in January, representing a 18% increase. Ground/Cruise sites (16%) also posted double-digit gains.

TravelPN.com ranked as the category leader among Transactions sites with 798,000 visitors, an 11% month-over-month increase. Viator.com came in second with 642,000 visitors (up 9%), followed by WWTE.com with 442,000 (up 86%) and OneTime.com with 278,000 (up 48%).

Within the Car Rental site category, Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company led with 3.2 million visitors, up 14%. Avis Budget Group ranked second with nearly 2 million visitors (up 19%), followed by Hertz with 1.3 million (up 21%), CarRentals.com with 793,000 (up 30%), and Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc., with 790,000 (up 27%).

Meanwhile, Marriott secured the #1 position in the Hotels/Resorts category with 5.1 million visitors (up 30%), ahead of Disney Parks & Travel with 4.8 million (up 36%), Hilton Hotels with 4.6 million (up 25%) and Expedia Hotels with 3.3 million.

Americans Check Out Job Options Online

Career Services & Development site categories also performed well in January, accounting for 3 of the 10 top-gaining web categories. Traffic to Job Search sites rose 27% in January to reach 24.2 million visitors. Indeed.com Job Search was the category leader with 13.7 million visitors (up 33%), followed by CareerBuilder.com Job Search with 9.8 million (up 27%), Monster.com Job Search with 5 million (up 28%) and SimplyHired.com with 3.5 million (up 42%).

Training and Education sites also saw increased traffic, up 23% to 14.7 million visitors. LiveCareer.com led the category with 1.2 million visitors (up 58%), trailed by AesopOnline.com with 940,000 (up 44%), FastWeb.com with 736,000 (up 30%), and Learn4Good.com with 599,000.

Tax Sites Still Spiking

Tax sites ranked as the fastest-growing category, a position it also held in December. More than 30.7 million Americans visited a Tax site in January, up an impressive 357% after rising 29% a month earlier.

According to comScore data, total US internet audience inched down to 220.2 million from about 220.4 million in December.

by Douglas Wray

Deals Prove Influential

by MC Marketing Charts

26% of consumers in Q4 said that they were buying more of their Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) basket on deal compared to the previous year, while 1 in 3 consumers indicated that they were purchasing 50% or more of their basket on deal. 53% of shoppers said they stock up on items because they are on sale. One-third of the respondents said they buy brands other than their preferred brands because they are on sale.

According to an October 2011 survey by Accenture, about 2 in 5 US consumers would switch from brand name to generic grocery items as a result of a 10-20% price increase, and roughly 1 in 5 would also make the switch given a price increase of less than 10%.

by MC Marketing Charts

US retail e-commerce spending reached a new peak of $161.5 billion in 2011, representing a 13% increase from $142.5 billion in 2010, according to February 2012 figures from comScore.

Online retail spending reached $49.7 billion in Q4, marking a 14% increase from $43.4 billion in Q4 2010, and a 27% rise from $39 billion in Q4 2009.

In fact, Q4’s growth rate was the 9th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and the 5th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth rates.

The top-performing online product categories in Q4 2011 all grew at least 18% compared to a year earlier. These were: digital content & subscriptions; jewelry & watches; consumer electronics; toys & hobbies; and computer software.

by MC marketing Charts

Data from Econsultancy’s “2012: Email in Action” indicates that 69% of marketers are including social sharing icons in emails, while a further 13% have a plan in place to do so.

The remaining 18% not including sharing icons or planning to do so may want to look at analysis released in January 2012 by GetReponse, which examined more than 2 billion emails sent by its clients, and found that emails that include social sharing buttons have a click-through rate 115% higher than those do not (5.6% vs. 2.6%).

by FullTraffic

Do you think that social media marketing benefits your business? If so, then you are definitely not alone. According to a recent study conducted, a whopping 97% of marketers believe that social media marketing is helpful to their business. Conducted in November 2011, participants of the survey consisted of 700 marketers from all around the world. Aside from revealing just how valuable social media is in the marketing industry, the study also shed light on how marketers are using social media, and how the various networks stack up against each other.

Why Social Media?
So what do marketers get out of social media? When asked about its benefits, 88% of respondents answered that social media can increase brand awareness. On the other hand, 85% of them also said that blogs and sites like Facebook and Twitter allow them to talk to members of the community, while 58% said that they were able to increase sales and partnerships because of social networks. Meanwhile, only 41% of respondents answered “cost reduction” as a benefit of social media.

Regarding Facebook fans, 44% of marketers value fans because they can potentially turn them into actual customers, while 18% of respondents believe that fans have higher conversion rates and make purchases more often.

The Social Network Scoreboard
The study also asked marketers to rank various social networks according to their importance. Unsurprisingly, Facebook emerged on top, with 94% of respondents ranking it as the most significant. It was followed by Twitter (74%), Blogs/Blogging Community (41%), LinkedIn (32%), YouTube (30%), and others (6%).

Social Media Spending
When it comes to shelling out funds, findings show that 75% of respondents are planning to increase their social media budget. This statistic could indicate a lot of things. It could mean that businesses will be investing more on employing social media experts and community managers. You can also expect to see companies spend more money on Facebook ads, Promoted Tweets, and the production of viral Internet campaigns.

The Yardstick for Measuring Success
When it comes to measuring ROI, the study found that “Marketers currently have no standard measurement of social media success.” But this doesn’t mean that social media ROI can’t be measured. 38% of marketers measure success with the amount of likes, comments, and interactions that they get, while 24% use revenue to measure ROI in social media.

by Stephanie Williams, SplashMedia

Nowadays, businesses know that a social media presence is necessary to build up and maintain solid support from customers, and Facebook is a big part of that. However, if your brand doesn’t increase Facebook engagement, over time, supporters will leave you high and dry. The good news is that increasing your customer’s engagement on Facebook is now easier than ever, thanks to custom tabs. What are custom tabs, you ask? Why, they’re a chance for you to get your business the attention it deserves, that’s what!

Custom Tab Tips for Better Engagement

Custom tabs allow you to create a buzz around your brand by giving your friends easy access to parts of your page and, by extension, of your business that they might be interested in. You see them a lot in pages for stores, where a tab might be created to enter a sweepstake or to grab a coupon for in-store or online use. Some nonprofits use custom tabs to garner support for new programs or initiatives and engage donors. No matter what type of business you have, you stand to benefit greatly from using custom tabs, because not only can you get new likes, you can get your friends to support you by sharing your tabs with their friends, who will in turn like you and share it with their friends, and so on and so forth. Tabs are more than just exposure — they help you build your base, the way that you want. That is, of course, if you do it correctly. Here are some tips that will help you determine how your custom tabs should be created in order to increase Facebook engagement and get folks talking about your brand.

1. Understanding your Facebook audience. Who “likes” you on Facebook? What is it about your brand that attracts them to it? Which of your posts have gotten the most involvement from your audience? Understanding these very important points will give you a better idea of how to approach your Facebook audience. Start a dialogue with your audience to get a feel for what they want to see in your page, and go from there.
2. Ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish?” The reason why people have a hard time using custom tabs is that they don’t have a clear sense of what they want the end-result of those visits to be. Do you want more traffic to your website? Do you want to get people involved actively in an aspect of your brand? Ask yourself what your desired results are, and create your tabs accordingly.
3. Create a tab that gets noticed! Once you know what you want and what your audience wants, it’s time for you to take all of those “wants” and turn them into some pretty cool “needs”. The idea is to create content that is engaging, fresh and unique, so that your friends have reason to come back, and bring friends with them, thus increasing your “likes”.
4. Manage your cool tabs. You can’t just create your tabs and expect them to generate likes forever. You need to create them and maintain them, just as you would any other part of your site. The key, especially when you are creating multiple tabs, is to have a maintenance plan in place. Just remember to keep it cool, keep it simple, keep it interesting, and keep them coming back for more.
5. Tell people about your tabs! Depending on Facebook word-of-mouth alone to drive traffic to your tabs can be suicide for your social media marketing efforts. Don’t be ashamed to use reinforcements! So get your Twitter tweeting, get your Google and Facebook ads advertising, get your LinkedIn linking, get your blogs and your websites talking…you get the picture.

Custom tabs are a fun, exciting and effective way to increase Facebook engagement and breath life into your brand’s social media strategy. Your Like button will feel the difference and your brand will thank you.

Online spending will grow 23.3%, to $39.5 billion, in 2012

“Advertisers’ comfort level with integrated marketing is greater than ever, and this is helping more advertisers—and more large brands—put a greater share of dollars online,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst.

Double-digit growth is expected through 2014, when US online ad spending will reach $52.8 billion. In 2016, eMarketer expects advertisers to spend $62 billion online.

Fast growth has put online ahead of some traditional media, especially print newspapers and magazines. This year, US online ad spending will exceed the total spent on print magazines and newspapers for the first time, at $39.5 billion vs. $33.8 billion. And as online shoots up, the print total will continue to inch downward.

Spending on TV, however, appears largely unaffected by the growth of online. As internet ad spending rises, so will TV—albeit more slowly, and from a larger base. eMarketer estimates TV will grab $72 billion in US ad dollars in 2016, $10 billion more than will go online.

Overall, eMarketer expects total media ad spending to grow 6.7% this year to $169.5 billion, boosted by national election campaigns and gains in mobile spending. Growth will be in the 3% to 4% range for the remainder of the forecast period, with spending reaching nearly $200 billion by 2016. Online will be a major driver of that growth and will represent nearly a third of total media ad spending that year. Traditional media ad spending—aside from a few bright spots, like TV—will stagnate during the forecast period.

by MC Marketing Charts

68.3% of US online holiday shoppers say that the personal product recommendations they received during the 2011 holiday season via email were either very relevant (32.2%) or relevant (36.1%) to them, while about two-thirds said that search delivered very relevant (27.7%) or relevant (38.9%) personalized product recommendations, according to [download page] a survey released in January 2012 by Baynote.Product recommendations delivered in-store via sales associates ranked third (57%) in relevance, with e-commerce sites (56.8%) closely following. There was then a large drop-off to the fifth-ranked method, Facebook, cited by 35.6% of the respondents.

According to a survey released in December 2011 by Emailvision, almost all US and European online marketing professionals believe it is very important (68.4%) or important (28.1%) to send targeted and personalized email marketing campaigns, although only 1 in 5 actively personalize their email marketing content across all campaigns.

Overall, online shoppers appear more willing to share personal information to get a more personalized shopping experience: 20.8% of online shoppers responding to the Baynote survey said they would definitely share their information, representing 28% growth from 16.2% in the previous year’s survey.

by MC Marketing Charts

Emails that include social sharing buttons have a click-through rate 115% higher than those do not (5.6% vs. 2.6%), according to analysis released in January 2012, which examined more than 2 billion emails sent by its clients.

The CTR for emails that included a LinkedIn sharing button was highest, at 9.6%, representing more than 400% growth from the previous year, while CTR for emails containing a Facebook (5.4%) or Twitter (5%) sharing button also performed well above those without any social sharing buttons.

According to a survey released in December 2011, when asked what channels they are planning to integrate email with in 2012, two-thirds of business leaders cited social media marketing, beating out mobile (44%), search (17%), and display (14%).