We identified three discussion points from the forum and some fresh new statistics to highlight the role of mobile use in the consumer path to purchase. All sources are from #mmaf2013.

Pervasiveness of mobile:

• 91% of smartphone users have their phone within reach 24/7
• Americans spend 119 minutes a day on mobile devices
• We check our phones every 6.5 minutes (150 times daily)

Mobile Commerce

• Mobile-assisted grocery shoppers buy 8% more
• Home Depot’s sales from mobile are projected to exceed $650M by 2016
• 10% of all Starbucks transactions are now done on a mobile device

Mobile Marketing

• Mobile media spend for digital clients increased 400% from last year
• Mobile marketing will generate $400 billion to US Economy by 2015

For more information, visit the MMA Global Events page.

Following the exciting automotive year-end shopping season, Compete and Twitter partnered together to understand the impact that Tweets posted by automotive companies have on the consumers who see them.  Specifically, we wanted to know whether Tweets influence consumer behavior; are people exposed to an automotive Tweet more likely to visit the manufacturer’s website and take action by locating a dealer, looking at offers or building their own car.

To answer these questions, Compete observed 3,289 U.S.-based Internet consumers and 593 U.K.-based Internet consumers who saw Tweets from over 700 companies within the automotive space (manufacturers, dealers, aftermarket/parts and 3^rd party online resources) from September 1 to November 30, 2012.  We limited the scope of the study to desktop browsing only (no mobile or table activity) and exposure on Twitter.com only (no Twitter clients were included in the analysis).  We also studied the behavior of two control groups comprised of a similar set of consumers who visited Twitter but did not see an automotive Tweet and who were simply average internet users.

Compete and Twitter uncovered two key findings highlighted below:

1. Twitter users, U.S. and U.K. alike, who see Tweets from an automotive company are more likely to visit their websites or conduct a branded search

We found that Twitter users who were exposed to an automotive Tweet visited those automotive websites or conducted a branded search at a higher rate than general Internet users. This finding is true for manufacturers and dealers as well as specific categories like aftermarket/parts.

Key takeaway: Twitter users are auto enthusiasts. Twitter is a medium for advertisers to impact consumers’ consideration sets from the point of initial decision to purchase.

2. Conversions are influenced by auto Tweets

Auto Tweets not only influence consideration, but they drive Twitter users to take lower funnel actions such as locate a dealer, request a quote or explore financing options.

Key Takeaway: People who see an automotive Tweet are more likely to make perform a lower funnel activity. This means Twitter users arrive on an automotive website with a higher intent to get information to help inform their purchase decision.

Compete and Twitter also uncovered other findings around how exposure to Tweets influences visitation by type of auto manufacturer as well as other interesting results.

Click here to download the full U.S. whitepaper or here for the U.K. whitepaper.

Image from: Digital Touch / Shutterstock

Attribution modeling vs. path to purchase analysis: What’s the difference between the two? Which model is better?

The purpose of both models is to establish optimal touchpoints for consumer interaction with the brand and to achieve the best cost savings and customer experience. Attribution is ad-centric; path to purchase is consumer-centric. Attribution modeling is prompt; path to purchase modeling is deep.

In attribution modeling, marketers use the data generated from tagging ad placements to understand the degree of influence each ad has on the consumer. Attribution analysis apportions “credit” for each conversion among the ads, essentially prioritizing which ads are more effective than others.  Marketers can then use that information to change strategies by re-allocating media spend to the ads that had the greatest impact.

The path to purchase analysis concentrates on the sequence and intensity of each relevant behavior that may eventually impact a consumer’s decision. Exposure to an ad or a click on a paid search ad are all accounted for (attribution model), but so are the visits to a competitor’s site, a review site, the use of a search engine on an aggregator site, seeing a product placement in a YouTube video, etc. The approach is exploratory – no prior assumptions are made about consumers’ behaviors.

So which approach is better?

Attribution management, at its basic level, is almost real-time. The results of users’ exposure/interactions with ads are immediately processed, weighted, translated into algorithms and fed into media optimization engines. But in today’s diverse and fragmented media ecosystem, paid ads are hardly the main factor steering consumers to purchase. Other purchase factors include: earned media, word-of-mouth, competitive activity, seasonality and much, much more. Ad credits can only be allocated between the entities that can be tagged, and this external, relevant data (not immediately available) has to be collected, cleaned and matched to campaign data. This turns the entire process into another media mix modeling exercise – and slows the process to a halt.

An alternative approach is to identify where and when consumers are most open to marketing messages during the purchase process – and then strategically optimize advertising at the stages of consumer decision making when ads matter the most.

The path to purchase approach serves such a purpose. By looking at the entire industry rather than at an individual advertiser’s campaign, the path to purchase analysis discovers previously neglected touch points that result in a loss of prospective customers to the competition. With this, digital marketers can re-allocate resources and spend to remedy the situation.

So, which model do you like now?

Image from: Political Parties / shutterstock

News and political blogs grew 11% in April with over 14 million Unique Visitors (UVs)–making it the one of the Top 20 fastest growing categories (according to Compete PRO). It was a busy news month–reflected in the second fastest growing site online: CNN.com. Below are ten of the news and political blogs with the largest increases in monthly UVs. The list naturally split almost evenly along party lines: six lean left and four lean right. The top two sites in the category both made the list: The Blaze, with over four million UVs and Politico with just shy of two million UVs.

I noticed major differentiator between the liberal and conservative blogs on the list: their incoming traffic sources. The Liberal blogs[1] received more traffic from Google, while Conservative blogs[2] received more traffic from Facebook. All six of the liberal blogs on the list received more referral traffic from Google than Facebook. Google was the top incoming traffic source for all but one of the liberal blogs–The Ledge, which is a subdomain of NYTimes.com. Facebook was the top incoming traffic  source for three of the four conservative blogs. Facebook was not even on the top 25 list of incoming traffic sources for one of the conservative blogs, RightPundits.com. Not surprising, as their Facebook page only has  357 ‘likes’ [as of 5/17/2013].

[1] Liberal Blogs: politico.com, thelede.blogs.nytimes.com, good.is, firedoglake.com, americablog.com, globalvoicesonline.org.
[2] Conservative Blogs: therightscoop.com, rightpundits.com, freebeacon.com, theblaze.com.

We’ve compiled a list of the most popular digital marketing stories online this week. Enjoy and happy competing, marketers!

Buying Tumblr will give #Yahoo an additional 15 billion pageviews a month. Multiple sources claim Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, is near closing a $1 billion deal to purchase Tumblr–and its 107 million microblogs. Besides the impressive numbers, Tumblr would make Yahoo look cool again. But, Tumblr is already hugely successful on its own. Do you think the deal will go through?

How to get your back link data, how to analyze it, and how to quickly see if you have problems. Search Engine Watch put together a comprehensive and easy to understand beginner’s guide to link analysis. Benchmarking your site against competitors can help decide where to focus your online efforts.

Have you tried these 5 new Google AdWords features? If you are an advertiser or PPC manager, you’ll be excited about upgraded sitelinks, a new keywords planner, display planner, ad group level mobile adjustments, and an upgrade center for enhanced campaigns.

Google+ is the latest social media site to adopt hashtags. Google announced a handful of updates to their social media community at their I/O conference this week, which you would have already experienced if you’ve logged into your account since Wednesday. The most useful update to marketers is the new ‘related posts’ tags, similar to hashtags on Twitter–making it easier to share and discover related content. Missed all the I/O news? Get caught up with this summary and analysis of the 2013 Google I/O from Jeremiah Owyang.

Image from: Turbotax / usahitman.com

In our increasingly digital world, online accounting and tax services are a huge industry: the category of 52 sites had nearly 62 million Unique Visitors (UVs) in February, the height of the tax filing season. How did consumer tax-filing behavior compare to last year’s tax season? Here are some insights I pulled from Compete PRO:

People put off thinking about their taxes. In January 2013, tax sites had four million fewer visitors than in January 2012. The peak of tax season was in February this year per usual, but tax sites had only two million more monthly visitors than the previous February–not making up for the lost traffic in January.  The expected traffic drop in March was less severe this year: accountancy and tax services websites had nearly 45 million UVs in March, 12 million higher than the 33 million in March 2012. Traffic remained high in April with 42 million UVs to the category, 10 million more than the previous year.

Intuit’s TurboTax remained the most popular online tool, but TaxAct gained momentum. With the arguably the strongest brand recognition, TurboTax had the most UVs all of tax season and positive YOY growth from January to April. “Turbotax” was the highest referring keyword to the tax and accounting category, responsible for 15% of the incoming search traffic. H&R Block was the second most popular tool; however its UVs were down from last year. TaxAct crept up on H&R Block, with YOY growth in February, March and April. With over 4% of the searches, “Taxact” was the second highest referring keyword to the category for the past three month. The growth was organic, as TaxAct actually had fewer paid search referrals during tax season than the previous year.

Last minute filers visited TurboTax and eFile, the only sites whose traffic increased in April. eFile had the least UVs throughout tax season, however it’s the IRS-recommended electronic filing option–the likely explanation for its bump from last minute filers. A Compete analysis from 2011 revealed eFile had the lowest conversion rate compared to the same four taxes sites. Was eFile more fruitful two years later? Compete data suggests no. eFile visitors viewed the most pages per visit–about the same number as the past two years. People  likely spent more time on  eFile because they couldn’t find what they were looking for, not because they stayed to complete their tax filing. Comparably, TurboTax visitors viewed fewer pages, but the site is designed so its product easy and quick to navigate. TurboTax takes each visitor through a short survey to determine which edition is best based on that individual’s needs. eFile immediately asks visitors to enter a hefty amount of personal information to sign up before they even know how much it will cost them.

Looking Forward:

• Tax brands should get competitive earlier, before people are feeling the stress of an approaching deadline. Create content to encourage people to file earlier, instead of procrastinating like many did this year.
  
• Optimize homepages as they are critical  for success. People want all the information they need immediately, without looking for it. Potential customers want to know how a service is different than the competition.

Luckily for all of us, tax season is over. But for tax services providers, the countdown to the 2014 deadline has already begun. Who will be the winner?

Image from: Yahoo! Messenger / Google Play

Yahoo.com replaced Facebook.com as the second most visited website in April, according to Compete’s latest U.S. traffic data. It was a close race, but Yahoo grew less than 1% month-over-month (MOM) to 164.6 million Unique Visitors (UVs) while Facebook’s monthly UVs dropped nearly half a percent to 164.1 million. Google remained king with 171.9 million UVs, a decrease of half a percent MOM.

Instagram.com breaks into the Top 50 sites at #47.

Less than one year after the popular photo sharing app launched its desktop site, its traffic reached 25.2 million UVs in April. This may only be a fraction of its mobile app use, but shows Instagram’s momentum isn’t slowing down. The nicer spring weather may have inspired more photographs: Instagram’s desktop site grew 47% in March, followed by another 9% in April. 34% of its incoming traffic came from Facebook and 12% from Twitter.

Adobe was the fastest mover, jumping eleven spots after a slow month.

Adobe.com’s traffic increased 79% MOM, propelling the site from #27 to #16 in April. Adobe had 65.5 million UVs in April, continuing its seven month trend of volatile traffic (see graph). The spike in traffic was primarily driven by people downloading a software update through its subdomain get3.adobe.com. Another contributor may have been Adobe’s press attention for launching its new mobile video streaming product “Primetime,” and publishing its U.S. Digital Video Benchmark Report for 2012.

LinkedIn’s momentum continues as it turns 10 years old.

LinkedIn.com had a record high 35 million UVs in April, up 36% YOY. The website celebrated its tenth birthday on May 5, 2013. Some interesting demographic stats about its visitors last month: more men (54%) visited the site than women, 45-54 year olds were the largest age group (20%), and the largest income group was 60-100k (29%).

It was a busy news month with NBC News and CNN climbing the Top 50 list.

CNN.com was the second fastest growing site with a 21% MOM increase in UVs. CNN climbed to the #40 spot with 28.6 million UVs. NBCNews.com may have grown less, but it had 34.5 million UVs, putting it ahead of CNN. Americans were glued to the news at the end of April after the Boston bombings. The Huffington Post had a small drop in traffic, but remained the most popular news source online in April at #24 on the Top 50 list. All three news sites had more male visitors than women last month.

Home Improvement keeps building, with Homedepot.com receiving the most traffic.

Homedepot.com’s monthly UVs increased 20% MOM, making it the the third fastest growing site in April. The home improvement store already climbed ten spots last month, but continued to grow with over 30 million UVs in April. This is significantly more traffic than last spring: UVs were up 31% YOY. Lowes.com also broke into the Top 50, at #50 with 24.5 million UVs. The “Home Improvement” category of sites collectively grew 14% last month and 13% over last April.

The list of Top 50 Sites is pulled from Compete PRO and is based on the internet behavior of more than 2 million Americans.

Image from: Business News / Shutterstock

Last month brought tax Season to a close–there was no shortage of financial stories to discuss in April. Where did Americans look to for in-depth financial news, besides the mainstream media? 12.6 million Unique Visitors (UVs) browsed business and finance sites (a group of 55 sites) in April, up 12 percent month-over-month (MOM)–making it one of the fastest growing categories. Interestingly, neither Google nor Facebook was the top source of incoming traffic to the category. AOL took first place, referring a third of the visitors. Why? AOL’s finance property is DailyFinance.com–the top site in the category with 5.4 million UVs last month. Yahoo was the second highest incoming referrer with a significant amount of traffic coming from its subdomain, finance.yahoo.com.

In this week’s Sunday Series, we compiled a list of ten business and finance blog fast movers. WallStCheatSheet.com had the largest UV gain in April, surpassing 1 million UVs for the first time. Yahoo.com was responsible for 89 percent of the incoming traffic to the site, followed by Marketwatch.com. Google was only the third highest incoming traffic source, referring less than one percent of the traffic. Unique Visitors to Bargaineering.com increased 52 percent in April; however, its traffic has fallen dramatically over the past year–down 40 percent since April 2012. The blog received virtually zero incoming traffic from AOL and Yahoo. Some links on the category’s top referring sites would help Bargaineering rebuild its audience.

Here’s a round up of the top digital marketing stories we shared online this week. What were the most interesting stories to you this week? Please share in the comments! Happy weekend, marketers!

Linked in turned 10 years old. To celebrate their special anniversary, LinkedIn created an infographic with all sorts of cool stats. The site now has over 225 users worldwide. Ever considered using LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions? U.S. LinkedIn users have twice the buying power of the average U.S. consumer.

Facebook news feed ads have 197.3% higher ROI than right side ads. Early stats are in on Facebook Ad Exchange’s new news feed ads, and they are promising. News feed ads may be pricier at first, but offer better value than the often overlooked side ads.

SEO Meets Social: How To Optimize For Facebook Graph Search. Both search and social media tactics are necessary to succeed on Graph Search, which offers different search results based on an individual’s connections and privacy settings. Check out recommendations from Search Engine Land to get ahead of the competition on Facebook, now.

Should web video ads be different than TV ads? Most every ad you see online already ran on TV. Many marketers believe that the mediums are too different, and their advertisements should reflect this. Want an example? A three-minute-28-second mini documentary from McDonald’s Canada explains why the chain’s burgers look better in ads than in real life. Weirdly enough, it has been a huge advertising success, with 8.5 million views online in less than a year.

Today we have our own VP of Products at Compete, Conor O’Mahony answering our path to purchase questions. He believes the new digital landscape presents enormous opportunities for brands.

Next week, Compete heads to Miami, FL to host the tenth annual Digital CMO Summit. The event brings marketing leaders together to explore and discuss the digital forces transforming their businesses. With a mix of formal and informal sessions, it provides an unparalleled opportunity to connect with and learn from top executives in advertising, marketing, and media.

This year’s theme is “Path to Purchase.” We’ll be discussing the consumer’s path: a path that is becoming more complex with increasingly fragmented audiences, shifting consumer behaviors and attitudes (many of them subconscious), and even more connected devices. It’s a chaotic, multifaceted journey for marketers to understand, and we’ll spend two days sharing and discussing key insights with industry peers.

In case you missed them, check out who else answered our path to purchase questions on the Digital CMO page of the Compete Pulse!

Name: Conor O’MahonyTitle: VP of ProductsCompany: CompeteLocation: Boston

1. What’s the most interesting purchase you’ve made in the last 60 days?
I love the product design of my fitbit one. It tracks my activity and sleep, and the “apple simple” design is something all product people can learn from.

2. Next month you need a birthday gift, when can we expect to see you buying it?
Earlier than most. It’s something that was deeply ingrained by my father, and means that I am extra early for flights, early when meeting people, and an early shopper. Despite being an Amazon Prime subscriber, I still like to do my shopping with plenty of time to spare.

3. If overnight shipping were free, would you order a car online?
The prospect of buying a car online is appealing. Less hassle and less haggling. However, being quite tall (approx 6’4″), I need to test drive a car to make sure I am comfortable in it. I’m not sure I will buy a car online, unless it is a make and model that I know is a comfortable drive for me.

4. How much time is too much time to spend inside a mall?
The answer is either: 1) any amount of time is too much, or 2) there is no such thing as too much time. The first answer applies in most cases; I know what I want to buy, I get it, and then I leave with my primeval “hunting” needs satisfied. However, the second answer applies when I visit stores like Brookstone, the Apple Store, and the Tesla Store.

5. If your company had unlimited funds what’s the first thing you would invest in for 2013?
Acquire Google.

6. Fill in the blank: I blaze my own path by_________?
Making sure I bring a great team along for the ride.

7. Do you prefer the direct route or scenic drive?
I mostly tend towards the direct route. That being said, I did spend a year taking the scenic route around the Pacific Rim.

8. Shopping in South Beach…can’t wait or a perfectly good waste of sunshine?
I’ll pass on shopping, but welcome the sunshine.

9. Give us one parting thought on the current consumer path to purchase.
There have never been more opportunities for brands to hijack the path to purchase. Before digital, such opportunities were limited. Now brands have very real opportunities to gain share in measurable ways, from digital advertising to targeted offers, social reviews to social influence, and beyond. The evolving path to purchase presents a great opportunity for brands.

Image from: Keywords / Shutterstock

In Part One of the Competitive Intelligence for PR series, we discussed finding strategic, engaging sites to pursue. The question then becomes, once you know where to pitch, how do you do it as effectively as possible?

Are the keywords/content in line with what your client wants lift for?

Search referrals hone in on the right keywords:

Keyword reports allow you to view the search terms driving traffic to a domain. This information can aid in planning pitches, subject lines and story ideas.

In the example report below, we are able to view a list of domains that receive traffic from the exact match keyword “gardening.” This report illustrates that bhg.com (Better Homes & Gardens), hgtv.com, and garden.org are the sites receiving the highest volume of traffic generated by the keyword “gardening” being used in search engines. Therefore, if I know I want to craft a pitch or storyline around the word “gardening,” I know exactly which publications are benefiting most from that term.

This, however, doesn’t tell the full story; it’s important to understand which sites rely on this keyword for traffic.

Sites can be filtered by percentage to view exact search referral share. Note, the results above are sites receiving search referrals for the exact keyword ”gardening.” If you are not satisfied with the results and want to examine more sites, you can search for broad matches of sites that had search referrals including “gardening.” For example, sites referred by “gardening tools” would then be included in the results.

Paid versus natural keywords:

Once you have a highly targeted list, you can investigate the quality of the site’s traffic deeper by reviewing the paid versus natural keyword break-out. A website buying traffic for a keyword rather than ranking for it naturally may not be the best fit for your client. High organic search referrals are healthier and more sustainable for the long term.

For a more in-depth analysis, look at the paid and total search referrals for a domain over the past two years. Are there seasonal trends? Have the referrals been consistent? For example, this search referral graph for hgtv.com clearly shows its search referrals spike seasonally in the spring; but, it’s a natural spike–paid search referrals do not increase dramatically throughout the year.

Investigate key engagement and loyalty metrics:

Take a closer look at the actions a prospective site’s keywords are driving. As discussed in part one, engagement metrics can provide further insight into consumer activity on a site. In the search referral reports, average and total time index can illustrate the overall engagement and popularity for a given domain. Both of these metrics are equally important.

A site will have a high total time index due to a high volume of visitors, but if said site also has a high total time or average time index, you know those visitors are engaging with the content. For example, someone planning a garden with an online tool is likely to stay longer than someone searching more generic terms. If a site has a high total time or average time index or a combination of those metrics for important keywords, you’ve found your sweet spot.

Stay tuned for the third installment of Competitive Intelligence for Public Relations. Ever wonder exactly where a site gets most of its traffic from besides search? We will discuss the importance of incoming and outgoing referral traffic, as well as some practical tips for how you can become more competitive with that data.