Consumers who conduct searches in local directories are more likely to make a purchase than those who use search engines. According to information from the Yellow Pages Association’s "2009 Local Media Tracking Study," about forty percent of users intended to make or made a purchase after consulting Internet-based or print yellow pages.

"Our biggest value to local businesses is our ability to generate qualified leads from consumers who are ready to buy something," said YPA president Neg Norton, in the article. Advertisers see a high return on investment for their initial cash input, on average about $15 for every dollar on local display ads.

A separate study in referenced in eMarketer found that nearly half of Internet users look for product and service information in yellow pages, compared to ninety percent who use search engines.

But despite this disparity between search media, the YPA study showed that the results from print and Internet yellow pages were favored. 68 percent trust local information over search engines, and 67 percent believe it more accurate.

The study also showed a growth in the reach and frequency of Internet and print yellow pages between the first and second half of 2009. The number of respondents who use print yellow pages grew from 51.5 percent to 57.6 percent, and an increase of nineteen percent in references to print for those who use them. For Internet, the percentage of users grew from 31.6 to 37.9 percent, while Internet yellow pages usage frequency grew 24 percent per user.

"The combined reach of print and Internet Yellow Pages provides small and medium-sized business with the strongest platform available to target potential customers," Norton said. "In today’s fragmented media environment, Yellow Pages’ hybrid approach is the best way to attract consumers who get their information from multiple places before making a purchasing decision."

This year will be the first of double-digit growth after dismal 2008 and 2009, says eMarketer in their new report, US Retail E-Commerce Forecast: Room to Grow. Based off of US Census Bureau data, eMarketer projects that retail for 2010 in the United states will climb to over $152 billion, up 12.7 percent from last year. Online sales in the fourth quarter of 2009 grew by 14.6 percent from 2008.

Growth will continue into 2011, while the economy continues to recover and consumers begin to spend more, says Jeffrey Grau, report author and senior analyst at eMarketer. "But by 2012, e-commerce will resume its pre-recessionary downward growth path because of the inevitable maturation of the online sales channel," he continues.

162 million people will research products online this year, and much of this research will lead to in-store purchases. But over 82 percent of online researchers, 133 million people, will be online buyers. This already high number will rise as young Internet users replace older users. These younger consumers are more used to e-commerce and have a much higher adoption rate.

One of the covered e-commerce categories is retail, excluding travel, digital downloads and event tickets. This category is tracked to grow from $132.3 billion in 2008 to a projected $223.9 billion in 2014. As for online travel, 2008 saw $94.7 billion in sales, counting online leisure and unmanaged business travel sales. A rising category, travel’s growth is a nine percent compound annual rate from 2009 to 2014.

But the Internet is stronger at promoting retail through research rather than sales. “The Internet’s 7.7% share of total retail sales pales in comparison to its influence on store sales,” says Grau. Consumers honed their Web research skills by searching for coupons, comparing prices and focusing on getting the exact product that they need. Instead of going back to their old habits, Grau predicts, the public will keep using these tactics to save money even when the economy improves.

Compete’s Smartphone Intelligence survey sought to find out how smartphone users were using their devices as pertaining to leisure travel. In the company’s blog, Danielle Nohe gave a brief rundown on the data in her March post. In the first section, Compete found that 38 percent of smartphone users conduct some of their leisure travel research and 27 percent conduct some of their leisure travel bookings using their smartphone.

How they use their phone on their trip

• Find information about my destination while traveling - 34 percent
• Check the status of my lodging or transportation reservation - 29 percent
• Research lodging options - 25 percent
• Research destination options - 23 percent
• Research transportation options - 23 percent
• Research on a specific lodging or transportation brand’s Web site - 22 percent
• Research on a specific travel agency’s Web site - 21 percent

It is also important to understand the role of mobile applications when considering how these travelers use their handsets. Of those who download apps, only twenty percent have downloaded travel-related apps. Despite this small ratio, over forty percent of smartphone owners would find apps with travel-related features useful. Specific features were responses:

• Notifies me of unplanned schedule changes for booked trips - 52 percent
• Notifies me of rate changes for planned or booked trips - 48 percent
• Consolidates all my travel reservations into one itinerary - 42 percent
• Helps me manage my rewards/points with multiple companies - 41 percent

This large discrepancy between actual app penetration and potential usefulness points to a lack of integrated marketing. The opportunity is there, since consumers are looking to use their phone to assist them in leisure travel. At least some hoteliers are planning mobile marketing, eMarketer reports in a related article. Worldwide this year, over 25 percent of responding hotels will implement SMS text marketing and a mobile site, and 24.1 will release an iPhone app.

Yankee Group research firm tripled its prediction of total app revenue in 2010 from $537 million to $1.6 billion, set to reach to $11 billion in 2014. Their previous prediction topped out the market at $6.8 billion in 2013. The revised outlook was driven by an increase in the proportion of total downloads of paid apps from eighteen percent in 2009 to nearly one-third this year. Mediapost reports that Yankee believes that app stores are "training consumers that they need to pay a few bucks for quality phone apps."

This effect is bolstered by popular apps that cost even more. MLB’s At Bat 2010 ($15) and CBS’ March Madness on Demand ($10) iPhone Apps are more pricey than the majority of titles. But more significant than single titles, the general level is creeping up. This year, the average paid app costs $2.85, up from $1.99 last year, as eMarketer quotes the report. Multiple titles from a single developer also up revenue, as magazine mega-publisher Hearst is planning with seventy recently released iPhone apps that are micro-targeted and 99 cents or more, with plans to add thousands more.

The free-to-paid ratio differs between carriers, with Verizon having two out of three paid. The BlackBerrys drive these numbers, which have more paid downloads proportionally.

The general level of downloads is increasing, an annual 1.6 billion predicted to rise to six billion by 2014. At highest title number per user, iPhone owners download an average of sixty per year, over three times other smartphone owners. But potential is highest with handsets that run the Android OS.

"With 60,000 Android phones being shipped every day and nearly 20,000 apps in the Android Market, we believe that Android will be the next breakout app platform," the Yankee report projects.

Categorically, the most downloads are games, search and social networking. Yankee expects that as the market saturates and developers move to Web-based cross-platform projects, "the app frenzy" will subside.

Ad targeting company Media6Degrees mines online social connections to deliver advertising to customers as well as the people that are connected to them.

Media6Degrees’ concept of social ad targeting is different than common perceptions, President and CEO Tom Phillips told eMarketer’s senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson today. While not literally social media data, the Web data used to construct custom audiences for brands does come from the social Web.

Instead of constructing audiences based on demographics, Media6Degrees uses "data that comes from connections between prospects and customers." The brand loyalists are seeds that Phillips gets directly from the client. The company technology and algorithms identify an audience based on the connections between the sites that the seeds visit and the sites that other Web browsers visit.

While there is not an explicit connection between two specific people on Facebook, for example, person A may look at content (images, blog posts, etc) from person B, and we may assume there is a connection based on this. "But it could be someone I don’t know; we both end up at the same obscure food blog or political blog or sports blog—or whatever it may be," Phillip clarifies. The data is empirical, and the connections are measured so that the most productive are valued higher in a campaign.

The business functions as a performance ad network, taking advantage of these connections for major marketers’ campaigns. "The two metrics we measure our performance by are view-throughs to site visits and view-throughs to conversions." These metrics are what clients are looking at when they quantify performance.

Media6Connect does not believe they are making demographics obsolete, but that this approach is more important. "If all the trends are in our favor, then we’ll do a better job finding audiences for marketers than the conventional way," Phillips predicts. If Facebook moves beyond demographics to abstracted data, "it would be huge for us."

At least one industry can expect only a couple more years of sluggish growth, projects AMR International’s "Online B2B Marketing in the United States: Assessment and Forecast to 2013," released February. While growth in the category is forecast at eight percent for this year, it is expected to reach fourteen percent by 2012.

Online marketing will be growing, but some sections will do better than others. Business-to-business "advertising spend on social media and lead generation sites is forecast to grow at an annualized rate" of 21 percent and seventeen percent respectively to 2013.

The marketing mixture of targets for B2B showed an improvement for online since 2008, which only accounted for seven percent that year. In 2013, this is set to reach twelve percent.

While more allocation of strategy and budget are being shifted to different types of online tools, marketers do not plan to marginalize traditional marketing activities. In fact, two-thirds of mentioned marketers believe online must be complemented with just such activities.

In addition, B2B online and offline marketing budget was analyzed by objective. As shown in eMarketer’s additional coverage of the report, in the Fall of 2009, building awareness was the highest priority for combined online and offline budget at 38 percent, with 28% for online only.

Lead generation is the higher online priority, and garnered the highest percentage of online marketing budget, at 38 percent. It received 34 percent of the combined budget.

The lowest combined budget was for customer retention at 28 percent, but a middle-performer for online marketing at 34 percent.

In the same time period, 68 percent of business-to-business marketers who analyze metrics or statistics agree that paid search is effective at lead generation. Of those who are not familiar with the measurements, only 31 percent agreed, and 62 percent were neutral on the question. Between those who use metrics and those who do not, the population was split 50-50.

Baby Boomers expect that technology will help them live longer and keep them better connected, according to several complementary studies. Socially speaking, this section of the population are cultivating their existing relationships and creating new ones at unique rates compared to other age groups.

“Creating and renewing personal connections online is the biggest draw for these boomers,” said Lisa E. Phillips, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Boomers and Social Media .” About 47 percent of baby boomers who use the Internet are members of a social network, she says. The contacts that they make on these networks include family, friends and colleagues.

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Disappointment and a little elation are proliferating after the release of Apple’s iPad. Hype and conjecture were clouds of flocculence preceding the release date, only to congeal into a giant iPhone. Looking forward to the coming reception by regular consumers, who will be the ones who will actually define this new device as a success or failure, begs the question: What do consumers really want from their technology?

The Philips Center for Health and Well-being released a study this month which asked US men and women what activities are made better by technology, as well as what features are of importance in the same.

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Contrary to marketer assumption , consumers connect with brands on social networks for more reasons than to get the latest deals. Not only do they follow brands on Twitter or Facebook to learn more about new products and about the ethos of the brand, some consumers do so more often than to just get e-coupons. Understanding this split in the realm of social marketing is the way that brands stay relevant to consumers.

A study from MarketingSherpa , "Why Consumers Friend or Follow Companies," conducted in December 2009 separated the respondents into three categories: Max Connectors, Daily Users, and All Respondents. Max Connectors are a new type of consumer demographic, one with 500 or more social network connections that is an especially valuable as MarketingSherpa explains, "for marketing, at least in theory, because they can spread a positive brand or product experience so widely." As shown in the survey, these three categories sometimes behave very differently from each other.

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For the first time since 2002, US online advertising is set to drop this year, this time by 4.6 percent. David Hellerman, senior analyst at eMarketer and “US Ad Spending” report author says, “The economic cycle has reached bottom - at least for the online ad industry. In the first three quarters of 2009, spending fell 5.3 percent, but estimates show a smaller loss during the fourth quarter of 2.5 percent.

After this year, projections show growth for 2010 to 2014. The recession has been shown to affect different components of online advertising in different ways. As shown in the report, “paid search will grow by 2.2% in 2009, while classified ad spending will decline by 30.2%.” These same trends continue through 2010 and 2011.

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