Moderator:
Dax Hamman, VP, Digital Media, iCrossing
Panelists:
Roy de Souza, CEO, Zedo
Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO CPM Advisors
Div Bhansali, Director, Self-Service Products, AOL Advertising

Attention search marketers: display is not just for branding anymore – performance display can work for you! Display is largely under-utilized by search and direct response marketers, and this panel aimed to change that gap. How does direct response marketing use display? The panel was moderated by my colleague Dax Hamman, VP of Display Media at iCrossing, and proved to be another useful panel with actionable insight; including several key take-aways for search and other direct response marketers to leverage when considering their marketing mix.

Rob Leathern, CEO of CPM Advisors started off with some helpful insights; “For search marketers, did you know you can use same reporting and info for display as they do for search through the Google Content Network? Also, use your existing search copy that performs for your display campaigns. Keep in mind that translation doesn’t work in all cases, but it is a good starting point for testing and tweaking over time. Re-targeting is big for performance display; we see the ROI is between 5-20 times higher than normal display campaigns.”

Recognizing the whole world of display may be new to some search marketers. Dax asked the panel to explain the difference between exchanges and networks, as you hear a lot about them, but how do you know which to go with? Roy de Souza, CEO of Zedo offered this information, “Exchanges are self-service whereas networks are sales-oriented with service. Networks tend to have higher quality inventory while the remaining inventory typically goes to exchanges. Direct marketers are beginning to convert to display because of issues of scale with buying search inventory – there’s just not enough, and those who get this concept are doing well in display.”

You might ask, “So who is doing it well?” You know all those terrible teeth whitening and belly fat ads you see? It turns out they are making a killing – and doing performance display RIGHT. Below are some insights and lessons we can all learn from this group of, ahem, marketers:

Success lessons from the teeth whitening and belly fat guys:

•  Mass market products
•  Buy on networks, not exchanges
•  Use a LOT of different creative, test and iterate frequently
•  Optimize campaigns like a search marketer
•  Don’t always push direct response, rather direct them to an interstitial page with testimonies
•  Text ads can often make sense
•  Sometimes all you need to do is switch up your background color

“Really focus on optimizing creative. Simplicity is the key. And combine that with basic targeting and bid competitively on networks,” offers Div Bhansali, Director of Self Service Products for AOL. So what if you’re not a mass market product advertiser? Let’s say you don’t have teeth whitening and belly fat pills to sell, what then? How do you compete with these guys for optimal ad space when they are bidding so competitively? “We (AOL) have to hold ourselves to higher standard with our inventory than the exchanges so you can bid competitively against these mass marketers on our network.”

“While unsavory, the FTC, in conjunction with publishers, will start to crack down on these mass marketers as they have been artificially inflating CPMs, but they do have a place in the market. We can learn from these guys. They teach the marketplace – and when the teeth whitening goes away there will be another scam of the month with more to learn from,” said Leathern in reference to the concern that such scammy mass marketers are affecting the marketplace adversely.

Alright, all very good to know, so to wrap up would the panel please offer some basic getting started info?

What is an average CPM and CTR across the board (depending on category, product, etc)?
•    Average CTR across the industry is 1%; anyone getting more than 2% is doing well
•    CPM averages $1.00; of course this varies and depends on quality of inventory
•    Display opens up so many varieties and variables; know what you’re selling, and who you are targeting, this will affect your cost

What is a reasonable budget to start with?
•    $5 – 10k for testing; but remember there are creative costs
•    Creative (and having lots of it to test and optimize) is crucial
•    Remember the long-term performance you will get out of investing initially in creative

If you were a start-up or just getting into display, how would you plan your DM budget across search / display etc?
•    Look at the potential upside (ROI) vs. cost of testing
•    Look at hybrid opportunities like text ad products and set up the right testing methodology for learning for future planning

All you search guys ready for that display testing? Well if you need one more stat to sway you – remember search + display campaigns see a 30% lift over just plain old regular search campaigns. Nice!

Alisa Hansen is Senior Social Media Analyst at iCrossing

I bring up Kevin Bacon because I believe engineers working in Google Labs enjoy playing this game as well, as evidenced through their latest offering, Google Social Search (GSS).

The GSS feature is currently available though Google Labs (think “beta,” for the time being). GSS begins by crawling through your social network accounts and contacts you have already established. Then, GSS tracks one level further to determine which of your friends have had similar discussions within their own social media network.

Once GSS lays this groundwork (be patient, it takes a few days for this indexing to occur), the tool is ready to tell you what your social network has said about topics included in your normal Google queries. The set of GSS results appear after the typical list of 10 search results at the bottom of the page.

The idea is that, while reviews, responses and ratings are helpful when performing research, it’s even better when those thoughts and reactions come from friends and others you trust. And honestly, it’s true that I’d prefer to know what my brother, a ski instructor, thought about a ski resort in Jackson Hole, as opposed to a complete stranger. I know what is valuable to my social network connections; Tony values the nuts and bolts of tech gadgets, Karl is more interested in usability, and my Mom wants to know if something is valuable enough to learn how to use a new service or tool. The overall idea works.

How does GSS know who my connections are in my social media circles?

That’s an excellent question deserving an equally excellent, and simple, answer. Because you must be logged into your Google Account in order to use the tool’s functionality, GSS uses information from your Google Profile (where you can create links of access to Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.), Google Reader (Google’s RSS reader tool), and from your Gmail and chat contacts. For most of us, that’s an awful lot of contacts to cultivate, giving GSS a greater ability to serve our needs.

You can dive deeper into the results if you find that GSS is really meeting your needs. You have two options; you can click on the link under a GSS listing to read more about the topic from that specific friend, or return to the top of the search results page, click “Show Options”, and click “Social” to show a full page of GSS results.

There are two primary reasons why I really like GSS. First, I like the idea of GSS giving me the option to view what my social media connections are saying about my search query topic. Second,  GSS has a smart usability strategy to initially show a sampling of GSS results, and doing so in a section of the page separate from traditional listings. It must have been tempting to simply pepper the GSS results into the traditional results, and that may still occur someday, but this approach gets my vote for a smart strategy.

GSS is not a true “real-time” search, rather it can be categorized as a “recency” search. With the use of algorithms weighing the credibility of each contact within your social network, each listing is assigned a strength that determines its ranking with GSS results. Google News still offers the quickly turnaround time from an article or blog post going live on a site to appearing within universal/blended search results. That time is literally down to a few minutes.

This tool cannot be discussed without touching on the topic of personal privacy. What are we giving away in order to gain the use of this new tool? Some would say that as long as GSS remains as an opt-in, the level of personal privacy could remain in the hands of users. No matter where things go with the GSS product, the privacy discussion will remain the greater discussion of record. Users do not want “Big Brother” to take over their lives, but they do want to tell others about their lives. More and more, we just cannot have it both ways.

Although you may never get within six degrees from President Obama, LeBron James or Oprah Winfrey, you can now easily hear from your own personal circle of influential people with GSS as it stands today, and with whatever this tool will offer in the future.

Michael Herman is a Search Strategist at iCrossing

The five categories we evaluated are the brands’ visibility, usefulness, usability, desirability and level of engagement. Each category has a series of data points associated with it, and we expose all 65 of those data points in the report. Let me stress here and now: our data points aren’t exhaustive. We’re making the methodology available to everyone, with the hope and expectation that we can improve upon it over time, making it an even more valuable tool for evaluating brands in networks.

Spoiler: the number one brand of the ten we evaluated was Google. Probably not a big surprise, but meaningful in a number of ways. (Mild disclaimer: iCrossing started as a search marketing agency, doing significant business with Google. That said, our research was conducted in an objective manner, using as much publicly-available data as possible.) Google fared best on our index primarily because it is, at its core, a digital business. Google’s score was a 7.9, out of a possible 10. So while it was number 1 on our index, there is clearly room for other brands yet-to-be-evaluated that could trump the current number 1. Bottom line: there is opportunity for other brands to benchmark as higher performers, and the brands we evaluated to do better.

Why is this all important? iCrossing is convinced that brands who benchmark well on our index will be the brands that perform best in digital networks. And brands that perform well in the spaces where their customers increasingly spend their time, are likely to improve their overall business performance. Simply put: building a connected brand, means building a better business. We hope you enjoy the Index report, and the Primer on our Connectedness philosophy. We look forward to your comments, too.

Finally, in the coming weeks we’ll be rolling out a dedicated area on icrossing.com to keep the conversation about connectedness and our index going. Look for it, and get engaged in the dialogue.

Adam Lavelle is Chief Strategy Officer for iCrossing.

Google’s share of natural click share rose 0.79% points from August to September, and rose 1.98% points year-over-year, with a total share of 76.68%. Yahoo! declined slightly month-over-month, from 11.83% to 11.10%, though year-over-year Yahoo! has lost 3.03% point share of all search traffic referred, declining from 14.13% in September 2008. Bing natural search traffic increased by 0.15% points from August to September, though it rose an impressive 1.75% year-over-year.

AOL declined in share year-over-year, from 2.16% share of search market in September 2008, down to 1.75% share in September 2009, a 19% drop in overall share of traffic. Ask.com continued to remain at the bottom of the list with 0.41% total share in September 2009.

Stan Pugsley is director of business intelligence for iCrossing.
Rob Garner is Strategy Director for iCrossing.

Paid Search Implications:
Representatives from Yahoo! informed iCrossing late last week that the Yahoo! Search Submit Pro program (YSSP) will end December 31st, 2009.

Search Submit Pro lets advertisers create titles and descriptions that are displayed as algorithmic search result listings. The program can automatically generate result listings that best match user queries. The information can be updated frequently, independent of changes to clients’ Web sites.
Search Submit Pro also allows advertisers to include Web pages that might otherwise be excluded from algorithmic search results. Examples include sites that require cookies or session IDs, sites with Flash content and information stored in content management systems, or sites that aren’t well crawled because of Web site design. Search Submit Pro remove the guesswork and lets clients decide which content should be included.

Yahoo!’s decision to terminate YSSP is related to Yahoo’s partnership and proposed use of Microsoft’s Bing search results starting mid-2010. The partnership involves a variety of integration challenges and Yahoo’s YSSP is clearly one of these areas. Yahoo! is eager to remove any potential complications, including intermingling YSSP’s paid listings along with Bing’s purely organic listings. In order to remove this obstacle, Yahoo! has elected to terminate YSSP as a service offering.
iCrossing will continue to manage the YSSP program for clients through the end of the year and there are no expected alterations to the current process.

To date, there has been no mention of an alternative program and we do not expect this to emerge. As a result, current YSSP listings will be replaced by natural, organic listings. The traffic and conversions currently generated through this program will, instead, be delivered through organic search results. The importance of organic search results as powered by Yahoo (and eventually Bing), will increase with the termination of YSSP.

There were no related announcements regarding Yahoo!’s other feed-based programs: Travel Submit and Product Submit which will continue to run as they have been.

Natural Search Implications:
With the end of Yahoo! Search Submit Pro, there are several natural search implications that advertisers should consider:
-For companies that rely heavily on Search Submit Pro as an alternative to natural search optimization tactics, their programs will likely feel a great impact to their “natural” visibility in Yahoo!, in terms of both revenue and traffic referrals – in effect, some businesses may lose most of their natural visibility in Yahoo organic results.

- If businesses are using Search Submit Pro as a workaround for an un-crawlable web site, then it is likely that they are also receiving little to no visibility in Bing as well, and will derive no benefit from Bing rendered results in Yahoo! when they become available in 12-24 months. An SEO strategy is recommended for companies who wish to both mitigate traffic and revenue loss from YSSP, and also to gain new traffic and revenue from all other major engines.

- Expect fluctuations in Yahoo! position visibility reports. There is likely to be shuffling of search results as YSSP results are replaced with regular natural listings. For example, if competitors for your top keywords are using SSP to gain their presence, you could see gains on Yahoo! if they drop. Likewise, if SSP is currently responsible for some of your Yahoo! natural presence, your Yahoo! reported visibility may drop.

This was written by team members from the iCrossing Search Media and the Natural Search teams and presented by The iCrossing Search Council. The iCrossing Search Council is led by Rob Garner, Collin Cornwell and Chris Wallace.

It seems to be the new buzz phrase right now, and it’s what a lot of marketers are scrambling to achieve because they believe all other marketers have it. The reality is quite different and very few have reached this evolutionary point, and are actually quite some distance from doing so.

Definitely not a sexy topic, but an important one if your advertising programs are going to be optimized.

For some marketers, attribution is just sneaking on to their radar as they hear more and more about the benefits of investing in this area – whilst the marketer of 2008 wasn’t looking for this solution in earnest, the marketer of 2010 will be. For those who have begun to explore, they have uncovered a series of barriers, some of which are technical and some are organizational. It remains on their ‘to do’ list, but is perhaps being pushed down and down by more pressing matters.

Last week I spoke on an SMX panel in NY to discuss the ‘attribution battle’ alongside Sara Holoubek (SEMPO President and Chair of our panel), Roger Barnette (Search Ignite), Kevin Lee (Didit), Alan Osetek (iProspect) and Tony Wright (WrightIMC). The key takeaway was actually that anyone solving this problem is ahead of the masses – within a room of approx 120 people, half had budgets of over $50k and of those about 8 were doing any kind of attribution, but only 2 kept their hands up when asked if they were happy with it.

I suspect the dissatisfaction is partly due to the expectation they had before going into this, perhaps hoping to see accurate models that explain the impact of every click, impression and social mention and to be able to tie them back to the revenue generated. If so, then they would definitely be disappointed as attribution should be considered a macro exercise and not a micro analysis tool.

Hopefully with this article I can provide an overview of the important factors of attribution modeling, and some of the choices that lie ahead of you.

Firstly, why do you want attribution modeling?
Have you actually stopped to think about that question? According to a recent Forrester survey, more than half of web decision makers think it will make them smarter and provide them with a better understanding of their customers’ online behaviour. When I talk to our iCrossing clients and push for a more granular reason, what I hear typically falls into one of two buckets – the need to understand the right media mix and need to take into account view-thru data from display.

Let’s take a typical client setup before.

There will be our proprietary I2A tracking solution that we use for monitoring the performance of our SEO and SEM campaigns, and this tool can also feed us data on direct load. There will often be some affiliate software, an ad server (typically DoubleClick for us) will be present if the client is running display and finally a site side analytics solution – Omniture and Core Metrics being the most common for our clients. Each of those tools has a different approach to tracking and each one of them will have tracking code that is fired at a different point in the click stream. Already we can see why 100 percent accuracy is not possible!

CoreMetrics will provide reports that show how all marketing efforts add up nicely to 100% of the revenue generated through the website. Whilst there are many ways to implement such a tool, we very commonly see the 30 day cookie window using a last click look back model. By its very nature this favours some channels over others, and it has no sight at all of post impression display data as no click was generated.

Hence attribution modeling comes in to play to give display back the value we and the industry know it has. (See the case study at the end of this article for our latest numbers on the uplift display has on search and site traffic or click here).

The results from this exercise will naturally help solve the 2nd common request, which is to understand media mix modeling and where to invest your spend. If the model demonstrates an impact on natural search from certain placements, then it might make sense to invest further in that area even if the ROI is low.

Secondly, let’s address the barriers to getting this done:
We have already considered the technical mismatch of data above, and the more you dig, the more potential problems will be uncovered. A nice place to start though is to do a little housekeeping and check that your cookies are all capturing orders and revenue in the same way, i.e. net or gross, inclusive or exclusive of sales tax etc, and then to check the cookie windows are set equally. A 30 day window is by far the most common, but that doesn’t mean its the right choice for your business – make sure you are considering the buying cycle of your product or service.

But are you ready for the internal battle? If your organisation has invested in a tool like CoreMetrics that investment goes along way beyond just the license fee; you can bet a lot of folks have spent a lot of time tweaking it to be just so and also on extensive training. And so a barrier can sometimes be reliability on legacy systems and ways of working.

CoreMetrics et al are great tools, there are only problem in this case is their lack of ability to see the effects of post impression display. Therefore we are looking at a longer term educational program, helping your teams to understand why you want to consider an additional model that allows all marketing elements to be included.

Thirdly, how do you model the data?
On our panel, SearchIgnite showed a few screenshots of their reports for attribution, and they seem like they definitely do the job – I couldn’t help wondering if they work too well though. Roger explained how they tried several models for the client in question, before settling on a cascading attribution model. What were they looking for though? Were different models tried because the previous ones had not revealed the result everyone was looking for in the first place?

SearchIgnite have taken the right path by remaining flexible in their technology as this is such a new area, but does that flexibility create more problems than it solves? How do you determine which model is right for you?

First click?
Last click?
Weighted attribution?
Equal attribution?
Cascading attribution?

The problem with flexibility is its ability to be flexible!

If I am a marketer responsible for a display budget, I am going to push for a very different model than the marketer holding the SEM budget. One possible solution to the argument is to take the “daddy says so” approach – what do Forrester say. Conveniently they have developed a model that is easy to understand and replicate and would make an ideal starting point.

But there must be a really simple solution?
Actually not, but there are many companies, approaches and tools that can help you in one form or another.

Technology vendors such as ClearSaleing and TagMan provide a universal tracking code that can be dropped on to your site and will identify all your other marketing pixels with the same unique code so that the data matching can be done more efficiently. A tool like TagMan also manages your pixels away from the site, and so tag changes no longer need IT resources.

iCrossing (and other agencies) approach this from the dashboard perspective. Our analytics team accept that clients have historical tagging situations and work to collect the data from those legacy systems and map them together to achieve the outcome. The data can be presented quantitatively in Excel or qualitatively in a management dashboard.

There are also options to use ad serving tools and what is being called ‘path to conversion’ analysis; both DoubleClick and Atlas have moved in this direction but the solution requires all data to flow through their system and they typically only work for media spend, not NSO, affiliate etc.

And Akamai could very well be one to watch. Akamai’s primary business is as CDN (Content Distribution Network) working with busy websites and ad servers to distribute their content globally across servers so that every viewer has a speedy experience. But this means they have a sites content flowing through its servers already and we can see from the click stream that they are dropping a cookie from their own domain. It may well be that they are seeing enough data to attribute across channels, but only time will tell.

What’s the payoff?
I felt like our audience at SMX were a little deflated by the end of the session; many had come for that one piece of info that would solve the problem for them, but left having discovered its actually harder than they first thought!

The trick is to get started, to take small steps and try and chip away at the understanding.

To me it’s like when I was a kid and I would go find my kite that was inevitably at the bottom of the cupboard somewhere, all tangled and knotted up. I could spend the best part of the day untangling every knot in that string and miss the best part of flying time, or I could get about 80% of it done and go out and fly my kite. The next weekend perhaps I could invest a few minutes into unravelling the remaining 20% and fly it that bit higher.

Of course, I could have cut the string off completely and just started again! And some of you reading this will have such a complex legacy tracking system that you could spend your career trying to unravel those knots. A fresh start is an option, consider cutting off the string.

But when attribution works and the problems are solved, the resulting data can be very insightful.

iCrossing published a capabilities deck on a travel client that showed what sort of information becomes available when this problem is solved. There had been many research papers that had looked at the display and SEM overlap, but very few that also took NSO and direct load into account too.

You can view the report here. The headlines from the campaign are listed below, and what’s important to note is that without this data, it is likely the client would have removed their display budget and seen their overall marketing ROI go down.

- 13.7% increase in natural search visitors
- 2.5% increase in unique visitors
- 14.8% increase in paid search click thru rate
- 11.2% decrease in paid search cost per click

Useful resources for learning more:
RIP Last Click Wins (eConsultancy)
The Effects of Display Media on Search Traffic (iCrossing)
Cross Channel Attribution Modeling in Action
Attribution Management Buyers Guide Part 4 & 5 – Display Advertising and Exclusions (Adam Goldberg / ClearSaleing)
Marketing Attribution Models (Jim Novo)
How to Move to a Best Click Model (TagMan)

Dax Hamman is Vice President of Display Media for iCrossing.

Why would an agency develop their own app, you ask? Well, initially for fun – we had a few mobile developers and social/search geeks itching to cook up something neat for iPhone. As digital media people, we were looking for a tool to help us keep tabs on our ever-expanding tag clouds and since we couldn’t find one we liked, we had to make our own. And of course we’d be lying if we said we don’t like to show off our design and technical skills. But we also wanted to present an example of our philosophy on mobile applications – make them useful, usable and sticky. We’ve worked hard to make Say What? all three and we’re looking forward to hearing what you think.

Don’t get us wrong – we don’t actually believe apps are the new web – the browser will morph but it’s here to stay. And with HTML5 on the horizon, many of the current limitations on mobile browsers will soon be eliminated – so why build apps at all? If you believe the statistics from Pinch Media (the free analytics suite used by most iPhone developers) the majority of free (read: branded) applications have a very short shelf life. And most of us can probably attest to this – I’ve downloaded 200+ free apps, many of them branded, since January of ‘09, but I only use a handful on a regular basis. Of course I’m constantly downloading new stuff – right now I have 33 apps on my iPhone that I’m test driving. But there are a few constants I can’t live without – Amazon, Wholefoods, NYTimes and Netflix are indispensable. And sure, the info they provide is or could be made available to me via their website but I’ll take the app every time.

Why? It gives me fast and easy access to exactly what I want – no hunting, searching or scrolling through navs and drop downs necessary. Sifting through all the info on a website is one thing at my desk – quite another when I’m on the go. This may sound simple, but simple is what it’s all about. Think of it as enabling your users to break off the little piece of your site – your brand, really – to take with them for easy access. I’m a more consistent and loyal customer of aforementioned brands for just this reason – their iPhone apps make my life easier.

That’s exactly what we’ve aimed for with Say What? – making your life a little easier by enabling you to track what’s being said and where people are saying it about the things that are important to you. We look forward to sharing our experience with our own branded app as our user base grows and to hearing your thoughts on what it does for you via the reviews section in the AppStore. We have a few others brewing, both for ourselves and for clients, so keep an eye on Great Finds to see what comes next.

Rachel Pasqua is Director of Mobile Marketing for iCrossing.

It used to be very common for a media planner to ask the client for the demographic details of who they are targeting and simply plug this information into something like @plan. Often this would be supplemented with contextual info, i.e. shopping, travel, personal finance, but essentially the profile of the audience was the key criteria.

What about intent?
What about the buying cycle?
What about discussion or debate?
What about interactions between friends?

If a media planner ever comes to you with a plan based solely on demographic, geographic and socio-economic factors then get ready to ask lots of questions as to why they think it’s the best use of your money. It has its place, but not like it used to.

Today we know so much more and it should be utilized. To give just one example, my team will commonly utilize the data of who is connected to who on the social sites, tapping into the theory of bird’s of a feather flock together. This is data that wasn’t available only 12 months ago.

We also use social tools to probe discussion and identify niche sites where decisions are being made based on recommendation. Our results say that is significantly better than demographic profiling.

And now we have the media exchanges.
Arguably the catalyst to a huge media revolution.
A fad and buzz phrase two years ago.
The facilitator of so much to come.

As a live transactional platform the exchanges allow us to bid in real time on every impression; sitting in a virtual auction house we can review a visitor’s credentials and state our claim to be the ones to show them an ad. This allows for search, site and social retargeting all to exist.

Yahoo’s Right Media is certainly transactional, DoubleClick seems to be on the right path; for AdEcn, we are still waiting. But the era is here. Exchanges allow media to be bought live, the value being set by the purchaser using the data that they have.

To be a hot media agency in three years time you have to be in the data game. You have to have your own secret sauce that means you make the right decision to raise your hand or not when you are sat in that auction house. Whether you build technology or partner with an existing platform, the decision has to come from somewhere.

So what data should you care about? I am seeing providers over the last few months that are doing every combination you can imagine, often without really knowing why. The consistent fact is no one has all the data, everyone needs to look at 3rd party sources. Combine this fact that we no longer care about aggregate audiences, but instead the individual who is expressing the intent, and we see the dependency on other sites grow.

So that’s where the invisible ad unit comes into play. If I have a bunch of potential buyers tagged through one partner but want to know which ones are most likely to convert now, I need to know where they are in the conversion funnel. I need to see what they are looking for and what they are being exposed to.

I need data.

So if I am selling the latest gizmo, wouldn’t it be valuable for me to know what products they are looking at on a tech blog?
Or what they are bookmarking on Digg?
Or what they bought from Dell or Best Buy in the last 30 days?

I might not want to place the ad on those sites as the context is wrong, but I would happily pay to put my iCrossing pixel on the site to collect the data. Then when I am sat in the auction house wondering if to raise my hand, all I need to check is if they are they flagged with my “about to buy” pixel. If yes, I would pay a nice premium.

And the industry is starting to experiment. Travelocity are arguably the first out of the gate with a public product offering to run a search retargeting campaign out on the exchanges based on searches a visitor to their site did.

Make sure you understand that – Travelocity are not selling a unit on their site. Instead they are using their value as a major travel site and effectively selling that by facilitating a buy elsewhere.

So cool! We will see this more and more in the future, and the potential is huge.

One of my predictions from this is that some sites will make all their revenue from advertising without ever carrying an advert.

Twitter and Facebook, are you listening?

Dax Hamman is Vice President of Display Media for iCrossing.

@mchammer gave an inspirational keynote…sans PowerPoint (even I didn’t mind, though I love PowerPoint). There’s a lot to take away from a man who made it big in music in the ’80s, lost it all, and is reborn through social media…and he has almost 1.5 million followers on Twitter.

Here are 7 things I learned from MC Hammer about social media:

1. Social media is to Hollywood like Napster was to music. Hammer felt entertainment companies and labels were doomed and are too slow to adapt.

2. Social media is about being at the center of your brand. He was referring to the importance of listening and joining in conversations to give people a more holistic perspective of who you are, which led to this comment:

3. “I’m more than just about parachute pants!” Enough said.

4. You can’t wait until disaster strikes before you decide to setup a Twitter account. That will be too late and you’d be tweeting to 2 followers!

5. Not a fan of ghost Twitterers for brands. You can’t outsource this to Asia.

6. He felt MySpace still had a place in the world as a music destination and wanted to see better filters for music discovery. Wasn’t a fan of the deals they have cut with labels.

7. “I look at Facebook and I see a diamond mine.” He was suggesting he could do something to monetize a site that has 250-300 million users

For more on my day at the conference, go to strategydude.com.

Edmund Wong is Senior Vice President of Strategy & Planning for iCrossing.

1) who came to my site?
2) how did they find their way to the site?
3) what did they do on my site?

The challenge is then to improve our knowledge and execution in all three of those areas.  Benchmarks help to us to set the context for our efforts. We have calculated a set of benchmarks for the second question -  “how did they find their way to the site?”  Or in other words, what are the industry norms for visitor referrals by traffic source?  These data are drawn from a sample set of about 30 million visits to approx 100 domains.

Across all industries, the average share of visitors by traffic source is:

- 51% from direct to URL visit (no referral)
- 27% from non-search referrals (not including paid media)
- 21% from natural search (organic search)
- 1% from social media direct referral

When looking at the domains by industry, the averages vary widely:

Important Note: Important Note: Paid referrals (display, search, and affiliate) have been excluded from this analysis.  Twitter referrals from non-browser tools like Tweetdeck are also not included due to the fact that their referral source is masked.

Industries with high brand affinity and repeat traffic, such as Financial and Retail, see more direct visits,  and will focus on other sources mainly for new customer acquisition. While those industries on the other end of the list must be in a constant program of SEO, social media outreach, and paid media purchasing to maintain their traffic volume.

These benchmarks represent a snapshot of how things are, but not necessarily as they should be. iCrossing is in the business of building connected brands that engage with visitors at all points of the customer journey.

Stan Pugsley is director of business intelligence for iCrossing.