Business Spam

Daily I am getting emails from company who have acquired my email address, sending me their business message, and yet they have no idea who I am. I get offers asking me to buy steel or asking me to be their partner in some way. Don’t these companies know that their message is going into the trash folder?

If you are going to try to win business via email, make sure that you have some type of relationship with the person receiving your message!

Which Click Made the Sale?

I recently read an interesting article highlighting studies made of click conversions. The question asked in the article was what site sending you a referral gets credit for creating the sales and consequently that site receiving more of your advertising dollars? The obvious assumption is that search engines create most of your sales because they create most of your traffic, but is this really true?
Atlas Study Critiques ‘Last Click’ Attribution, June 10, 2007 from http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3626112

Here is a quote from the study, “Right now when you look at how advertisers are evaluating their campaigns, when a sale appears on their Web site, they credit the last ad or click with the entire credit for that sale. And more often than not that last click came from Google,” said Young-Bean Song, vice president of analytics for Atlas. “So wow-holy-cow, it looks like Google is responsible for the vast majority of sales on the site. The consequence of that is month after month, they buy more Google and cheap advertising space.”

Further research from this study found that two out of three consumers who eventually took a responsive action were reached by ads across multiple portal sites before actually going on to make a purchase, and that consumers reached across multiple publishers were twice as likely to convert as those reached only on a single publisher.

From the perspective of websites like Emporis, is it possible that we are helping create business for advertisers but the search engines are getting credit for the sale! Can I prove that? Probably not, but studies like the one mentioned above may create questions about how marketing budgets are used and what sites are really effective.

The Atlas Institute is a division of advertising technology provider Atlas. It conducted the survey by analyzing media campaigns of 16 advertisers across major manufacturing, retail and health sector Web sites.

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