According to the statistics they published by US based digital solutions provider GMS Local, who specialise in SEO help for national brands, their recent white paper “Perception vs. Execution: Examination of Brands’ Local Business Strategies”, indicated that 69% of marketers who participated in the survey answered that they spend more than the national average on local marketing strategies; according to the data, on average 25% of total budgets are spent on local marketing and advertising, conversely the survey actually found that while marketers may see the benefit, and recognise the importance of establishing a local presence and investing in local online activity to promote their business, in reality there is a significant gap between what marketers see as important, and how they implement their strategies.

It transpired that 33% of the businesses that participated in the study have yet to implement even basic local digital SEO to help achieve a positive impact on new business generation, even missing simple steps such as registering with online business directories.  The report also found that while marketers recognise the benefit of promoting their business amongst local networks, although it is not implemented on the same scale as they perhaps claim, they anticipate an increase in the allocation of their budget that is dedicated to local search over the next three years:

“Eighty-three percent of marketers surveyed expect their local online spending to increase at a greater rate than the projected national growth (25 percent) over the next three years. Such growth supports the expansive consumer activity happening in the local digital marketplace, where up to 20 percent of searches conducted have local intent (jumping to 40 percent on mobile devices)”.

By engaging with local consumers through national advertisers, communicating with a broader base of clients, maximising the potential of platforms with extensive local footprints, organisations can extend their presence within close proximity to their business operations.  Merely recognising the importance f these steps is not enough however.

While building a global brand and presence across the web is integral for worldwide businesses, when it comes to smaller operations, ensuring maximum exposure across a local network of potential customers is crucial.  One of the most effective means of reaching out to local clients is through SEO help for local businesses, building a foundation from a company website, through to the basics such as registering with local directories such as those provided by Google, establishing a footprint on a local network and ultimately making it easier for local clients to find businesses in their area.

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Citi analyst Mark Mahoney has produced a document taking the statistics generated by comScore in one of their many online studies, which indicates that across a range of markets, including the key industries: media, retail, travel, auto, finance and health, the biggest players within these verticals are deriving the larger proportion of their web traffic from Google’s search engine, influenced by their portfolio of PPC Management solutions.

Although it appears from the reports findings that Google’s dominance slipped ever so slightly, according to Mahoney: “Google has gone from delivering 17 percent of all the traffic to the top 30 Websites in 2010 and 2011 to 16 percent in 2012”.  Google has seen it’s ascendancy decrease fairly dramatically within the health sector, their traffic share dropping from 24% in January 2010, to 21% in the same month a year later, and down to 15% in January of this year, according to the data.

Google has long been the top “traffic referrer” and provider of PPC management solutions for some of the worlds biggest websites and across a range of vertical markets, however the report does highlight the significance of Google’s continued reign over other search engine providers, especially in what the report identifies as a “fluid” market; and one which Mahoney concedes is incredibly competitive; with Yahoo and Bing following in the shadow of Google’s dominance over global search and PPC management.

The report assesses the raw data provided by comScore and outlines some of the key trends within US search markets.  Out of 30 of the most traffic heavy sites in the US, Google ranks as the number one provider of traffic for 23 of these, and the report notes that: “by contrast, the #2 (Yahoo!) and #3 (Microsoft) influencers accounted for 11 percent and 6 percent of traffic to the top 30 Websites”.

Both Bing and Yahoo have seen little movement in these verticals from 2010 to 2012, although Yahoo can take some consolation from the fact that they have remained stationary in their position over the years, and given the general “market perception” that Yahoo! is a “deteriorating asset” the stasis in this particular research is perhaps heartening.  Although Mahoney does point out that for Microsoft the figures would prove “something of a negative surprise given signs of Bing Search market share gains”.

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MySpace, Twitter and Facebook have all joined forces in the creation of an add on for browsers, that wages war on the Google “Search, plus Your World”  campaign, which returns personal information from Google+ subscribers, when users are logged in to their Google account, providing relevant results from Google+ alongside the usual web results listed in response to a search query, providing a more “personal experience” in what Google fellow Amit Signal, via the Google blog post, called a move to develop a search engine that “understands not only content, but also people and relationships”.

The add on is an open sourced code named “don’t be evil”, directly quoting Google’s own inimitable strapline, which is available from a website entitled ‘Focus on the User’.  Social media has proved to be a lucrative platform for marketers looking to increase their position in Google’s rankings, and maximise their exposure when it comes to Google Search Engine Optimisation in the UK, hence the battle is hotting up, especially since Google made the self-serving changes to their search content, as the brains behind ‘Focus on the User’ explain on the site’s home page:

“How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded”

The code is designed to eliminate what Facebook, Twitter and MySpace perceive to be Google’s ‘bias’ when it comes to it’s own social network, listing their potentially outdated Google+ results in search listings, in the place of more up to date and relevant content posted on any other social media sites.  The complaint from Twitter’s quarter is that since Google launched “Search, plus your world”, Google+ content is now prioritised over and above other information available from alternative social media sites, even in the case of them publishing more recent, or even relevant content to the search user.

Launched in late January, the browser add on seeks to redress the imbalance when it comes to Google’s monopoly over Search Engine Optimisation UK and global SEO markets, giving web users the option to view the results that a search query would have returned before Google made their self-promoting update.  Using Google’s own ‘relevance measure’ according to the ‘Focus on the User” site, their code looks at: “the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+”.

For anyone who wants to try out the add on, it can be added to a browsers bookmark bar from the ‘Focus on the User’ site, but as yet it is not compatible with Internet Explorer browsers.

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If you haven’t already heard the speculation on the SEO grapevine about the first of Google’s Panda updates this side of 2012, then the confirmation from Google that the algorithmic update, referred to across the industry as version 3.2, might come as a surprise.

Online SEO Agency Search Engine Land received confirmation from Google that the reports circulating across the web are in fact true; a data refresh of the Panda algorithm took place last week.  Google have indicated that it was merely a data refresh, and there were “no additional signals or algorithm changes”.

Some websites that were affected by Google’s alterations to their search results ranking algorithm, during the global rollout of their Panda update in April 2011, when an estimated 12 percent of search result rankings were affected, have seen their search rankings improve with the latest updates.  The impact that was felt by a number of sites, who witnessed a decrease in their traffic levels, have since reported that with the subsequent (almost monthly) updates, such as this latest data refresh, they are now seeing their pre-Panda site traffic levels restored.

Since the impact of the Panda rollout last year, a number of SEO Agencies have been closely monitoring any algorithmic changes, as well as their effects across the web. Many are now surmising that this latest data refresh was intended to re-establish any higher-quality sites that may have been unfairly impacted by the changes to Google’s algorithm, as well as those who should have been affected and remained untouched by the update; such as the “low-quality” sites that Google sought to rank lower in it’s results listings when the changes were originally made early last year.

Google’s war on low-quality content featuring high up in their search result listings was augmented last week by the additional changes made to their page layout algorithm, making it easier for Google users to access the content that is relevant to them and relating specifically to their search query.  The changes were made in response to feedback provided by Google users globally.

Any websites that are ad-heavy ‘above-the-fold’, featuring minimal content and an ‘excessive’ number of advertisements at the top of their webpages, will have seen their ranking in Google’s search results impacted by the changes.  Any sites featuring an ‘excessive’ volume of advertising, or relying heavily upon link building, with “shady” linking practices, will see their rankings slip over the coming weeks, as Google focuses in earnest on promoting sites with relevant, quality content, as SEO Agencies continue to monitor the changes and their ultimate impact on SEO.

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In Google’s own words: “we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience”.  As ‘Distinguished Engineer’ Matt Cutts goes on to explain in his blog post on the subject:

“In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.”

In a bid to constantly improve the services that they provide their users, Google has listened to the feedback and responded accordingly.  This will not help SEO for any business that relies heavily on advertisements; to what Cutts terms “an excessive degree”.

In order for any sites looking for SEO help to increase revenue and stimulate new business, in order to maximise the position of their website in Google’s search result listings, a readjustment will be required, as Cutts notes: “sites that don’t have much content ‘above-the-fold’ can be affected by this change”.

It is anticipated that the change will impact less than 1% of global searches, however when considering the numbers on Google’s scale; 1% is not an insignificant number.  It is estimated that Google receives several hundred million queries per day across it’s portfolio of online services.

For any business adopting standard practices utilising SEO to help increase their web footprint and maximise the exposure of their brand or business online, that is likely to be affected by these changes, the solution proposed by Google is to revise page layouts to ensure that relevant content is accessible to users, with a focus on providing the “best possible user experience”, as Cutts goes on to explain:

“If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes [...] on a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.”

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“Right now in Washington D.C., Congress is considering two bills that would censor the web and impose burdensome regulations on American businesses. They’re known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House.”

Extending their reach outside of the States and across global internet sites, the act will allow intellectual property owners to shut down foreign sites where they have a copyright claim, demanding that search engines such as Google remove the site from their listings, and that ISP’s prevent visitors from accessing the site, as Gizmodo’s Brian Barrett explains:

“The language in SOPA implies that it’s aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that’s why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction).”

The main cause for concern, should the bill go through, will be the ability for IP owners to demand that sites are shut down, once a notice has been served to those believed to be infringing copyright laws, with nothing more than a “good faith belief” that their copyright has been infringed.  Sites such as Google will be given five days, from the point a quarantine notice is issued, to comply with the demands.

The global blogging platform WordPress joined the blackout on Wednesday, in protest against the proposed SOPA bill, which saw their usual homepage replaced with the following statement:

“Many websites are blacked out today to protest proposed U.S. legislation that threatens internet freedom: the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). From personal blogs to Wikipedia, sites all over the web — including this one — are asking you to help stop this dangerous legislation from being passed.”

The implications would be far reaching; completely annihilating any opportunity for plurality across worldwide internet sites, and giving IP owners the opportunity to monopolise markets, with the flimsiest of unregulated claims against a given site, claiming a “good faith belief” that a site is infringing their copyright ownership.

The term “good faith” in itself is a paradox under the circumstances, when it has the potential to be used in order to eliminate all existing competition on the web, as Barrett goes on to note:

“Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a “good faith belief” that they’re hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.”

Momentum for campaigning against the bill has been slow, perhaps because potential backers felt it was unlikely to be passed, but the progress of the bill has been such, that the White House is now opposing the proposed legislation, side by side with influential business men and women and founders of internet technologies.  The bill is still popular amongst the House of Representatives, and although the vote has been postponed, with recommendations that alternatives to the SOPA act be reviewed, to maintain the ‘structure’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ of the internet, many are still campaigning for it to be thrown out completely.

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The data confirms what we already knew about the power of SEO when it comes to generating new business and increasing revenues, and also indicates that SEO forms an integral role in the broader marketing strategies for many organisations.  In response to these latest findings, Top Click Media Reviews SEO for Surrey Businesses, and how starting the new year by investing in SEO and expanding on existing approaches, and implementing new strategies and publishing information across platforms about your brand or business online, will improve the web footprint of Surrey businesses through SEO, as well as driving revenue by extending the reach and client base of Surrey based businesses online; start the new year with a boost in sales and revenue.

It is crucial for businesses in Surrey looking to improve their existing approaches to SEO, that a strong presence is established through the main search engines, for the purposes of Top Click Media’s Review of SEO for Surrey Businesses, the focus will remain on Google as the most popular global search engine provider.

Social Media has dominated the marketing landscape for the last twelve months, and it continues to expand it’s network on a global scale; through sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ Pages, businesses are able to establish a presence across a range of social networking platforms; these are particularly useful tools when it comes to SEO for Surrey businesses, looking to maximise the exposure of their brand, products or services online.  Enabling Surrey businesses to maintain contact with a network of existing and potential clients is one of the best ways to build up confidence in a brand or Surrey business.

As well as using Social Media as a platform to communicate with other internet users, Surrey businesses can also augment their online presence, and make contact with potential clients through a portfolio of products from Google, including AdWords Pay Per Click campaigns, one of the most effective SEO tools for Surrey businesses.  Top Click Media Reviews these as an integral service for most Surrey businesses looking to adopt SEO in order to increase sales.

But for these approaches to take full effect, an established web site, providing detailed information about your business, services, contact information, and even customer reviews is the best foundation for any Surrey business looking to use SEO as a platform to drive their business forwards this year.

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“Last month we introduced Google+ Pages to provide a new way for you to build a public identity on Google+. We’ve been listening closely to your feedback and today we’re introducing several new tools and controls to help you better manage your pages”.

One of the key features for business users includes the ability for 50 managers to have access to a Google+ Page with admin rights, enabling them to login and make changes and updates to a primary page.  Each manager can have their own credentials with the ability to: “publish posts, respond to comments, add photos, change profile information”.

For any marketer using Pay Per Click and social media as a platform to engage web users with their brands, or products online, who want to know what social interactions are taking place; without having to stare at their page every second of the day to keep track of communications, the addition of notification settings is a welcome inclusion for existing Google+ users:

“Another feature we’ve added is a way for you as a page owner to get notifications about actions on your page. With this change, you’ll be able to customize the notifications for your business page separately from your personal profile, allowing you to choose the level of detail that’s most appropriate for you.”

With customisable options you can select which specific interactions are important to you, and decide what communications you would like to receive notifications about, as well as having the freedom to adjust how you are notified through the “delivery preferences” setting.

The team at Google+ has also augmented the way that connections and +1’s are displayed on Google+ Pages, making the number of ways people have connected with your brand or business more explicit to users accessing your social outlet:

“We’re also making a change to the +1 count shown on your Google+ Page. Starting today, the bold count on your page will include both your +1’s on Google+ and across the web, as well as the number of people who have added you to a circle. This change will not affect the way +1’s are counted or displayed on ads or search results.”

The changes represent Google’s continued commitment, when it comes to developing their social platform for business users, engaging with Pay Per Click and social media to extend their online reach, and maximise the exposure and profile of their brand or business.

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Since the inception of Google+, very little has been said about the global popularity of Google’s new social media project by the search engine giant itself, with no official statistics being provided that widely publicise it’s initial success, following the sites launch in June of last year.

In December the “unofficial Google+ statistician” Paul Allen, ran a query associated to surnames that had been used to sign up to the service, in order to identify the number of users logging in to the social networking site, and settled on 62 million following his research; with predictions that the number would climb to 85 million by the beginning of February this year.

Digital business analytics service ComScore also reported that Google+ was home to 65 million users in November; the difference between their study and that of Hitwise being that ComScore, and also Allen, refer to the number of visitors, while Experian Hitwise measured the number of visits to the Google+ site, a more vague indicator of the number do users actually signing up to and using the site on a regular basis.

The speculation from various quarters across the industry indicates that interest in Google’s social media platform is steadily growing; as does the overall impact of digital media marketing on the IT industry.  Although Google+ seems to be enjoying increasing popularity, it is still a long way off proving a serious threat to the likes of Facebook, which boasts over 800 million active users, half a billion of which access the site on a daily basis, and Twitter with a reported 300 million plus users.

According to industry observers cnet, Google has been making a number of changes to a variety of platforms, in order to integrate their social site fully across their existing portfolio, and establish the site as a key component part it’s web offering and digital media marketing platform:

“Google has been integrating Google+ with other technology such as Android, Picasa, Web Albums, Gmail, search, and Reader, using the service to unify Google technology and to cross-promote its products.”

Recent studies conducted by ComScore indicate that social networking is as popular as ever, with an estimated 82% of web users aged fifteen years or over using the net to access social media sites, and almost a fifth of time spent surfing the web is on social networking platforms; making it the most favoured past time globally, and a lucrative market for digital media marketing.

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The announcement came via the Twitter advertising blog, which provided an insight into the changes, and how they would affect marketers already using Twitter as a platform to communicate with existing clients, as well as circulating their brand amongst web audiences, utilising digital media marketing in order to extend their reach online:  “we are introducing enhanced profile pages that help marketers create an even more compelling destination on Twitter for their brands” they said.

Enhanced profile pages have been rolled out amongst a limited number of advertising partners and charities, including American Express, Bing and Intel, with the new format being made available to wider audiences over the coming months.

The update retains Twitter’s communication centric focus through succinct and concise messages, with the emphasis being on what people are saying about their business, and how they are saying it.  While businesses are limited to just 140 characters per tweet, the new twitter ‘advertising’ pages provide a number other devices to maximise the exposure of a brand online through digital media marketing, such as larger header images for a brand or business to display their logo:

“Communicating with users isn’t just about what you say. It’s also about how you say it. Now, your profile page does more to help you make an impression with a large header image for displaying your logo, tagline, and any other visuals.”

In addition, Twitter have included more sophisticated devices in order to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google+ (which according to recent reports saw an increase in traffic of 55% in December), providing users with more flexibility to target visitors with specific messages.

“You can also control the message visitors see when they first come to your profile page by promoting a Tweet to the top of your page’s timeline. This Tweet helps you highlight your most engaging and important content and better connect with your target audience [...] this page and the Promoted Tweet are both free of charge and publicly accessible for the whole world to see.”

As digital media marketing continues to proliferate amongst brands and businesses, the race for dominance between the three big hitters will no doubt continue to heat up throughout the year, with 2012 promising to be an interesting year for change amongst the three key social media contenders, as the main Twitter blog post explained: “what we’re announcing today is just the beginning. We now have a framework in place that we will quickly build and iterate upon to help users connect with whatever is meaningful to them.”

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In both 2011 and 2010 Facebook held four of the top ten search queries posted, with the search term ‘facebook’ recorded by Experian Hitwise as the number one most searched term for both years.  The total query volume for all the Facebook terms featured on the top ten list, grew by 33 percent in comparison to last year.

The social media sites preeminence comes as little surprise with the growing popularity of digital media marketing across industries; the world’s most popular social networking site now has over 800 million active users with over 50% logging in to Facebook on a daily basis, it’s not hard to see why marketers have jumped on the proverbial digital media marketing bandwagon.  According to the Hitwise blog post their statistics also revealed exponential growth in the number of people searching for the social networking site in 2011:

“Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 12 percent compared with 2010. When combined, common search terms for Facebook – e.g., facebook and facebook.com – accounted for 3.48 percent of all searches in the United States among the top 50 terms, which represents a 33 percent increase compared with 2010.”

While the latest statistics from Experian Hitwise demonstrate the increasing popularity of social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (Google’s broadcasting site found itself in second position on the Hitwise poll), which may have firmly established themselves in the consciousness of worldwide users and businesses alike, MySpace’s epic fall from grace was notable by the site’s absence from the top ten search queries of last year; dropping from number 5 in 2010, and the only website that had appeared in the 2010 but not the 2011 listings, apparently displaced by ‘yahoo.com’ making an entry and joining ‘Yahoo’ at number six.

The findings will no doubt add fuel to the Google and Facebook digital media marketing fire, with the search engine giant seeing an increase in the number of searches last year, however according to the Hitwise poll, Google is still lagging behind Zuckerberg’s social site and it’s dominant position:

“YouTube terms accounted for 1.36 percent, representing a 21 percent increase compared with 2010. Google terms (including YouTube) accounted for 1.59 percent – an increase of 27 percent compared with 2010.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook does not appear on the “top lists” published by search engines Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask or AOL, due to the criteria used when collating their lists; when it comes to Google’s at least, their top 10 search queries are based on “rising” search terms, rather than those that prove the most popular overall.

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MerchantCircle is a company that is “dedicated to connecting neighbors and merchants online” and as part of their commitment to supporting small businesses, the social networking site for SMB’s conducted a study amongst 2,500 small business owners, asking each of them: “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?”.  The options available to those participating in the study included: SEO, paid search, mobile, social and traditional media.  The results published indicate that SEO revealed itself as the most popular medium by far.

The purpose of the MerchantCircle study was also intended to reveal the opinions of small business owners when it came to the current economic climate, as well as focusing on the preferred marketing channel of choice, being widely implemented by the US based business owners.  SEO scored the highest with 33%, traditional media came in second with just under 20% and social media fourth with 16%.

As part of their continued commitment helping to support local businesses in Surrey to extend their reach online, Top Click Media reviews Search Engine Optimisation tools available to small to medium enterprises and regularly researches new approaches to local SEO, in order to ensure their approaches support the constantly evolving SEO landscape.   Top Click Media review global approaches to SEO to make sure that the most effective marketing strategies are being implemented when it comes to SEO for local UK based businesses, and the findings of this latest study confirm that the bulk of most marketers budgets are being invested into online SEO campaigns, although MerchantCircle’s ‘Confidence Index’ also revealed that new approaches to online marketing are also being adopted widely by SMB’s:

“newer paid marketing channels like Facebook Ads and group deals are now part of the small business marketing mix, with local pay-per-lead poised for some serious growth in the near future [...] also surprising is the quick adoption of Google Offers relative to the “big boys” in the group deal space like Groupon, Facebook Deals (no longer around) and Living Social.  Local business owners tell us that they plan to try Google Offers more than any other group buying service in the future.”

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RevTrax provide SEO Help specialising in the integration of email marketing, paid search, social and mobile media with sales made in store; measuring the direct impact of paid search such as PPC on offline sales; something which in the past has proved hard to do or has been overlooked; the assumption being that on the whole, the affect of online paid search on direct in store sales is minimal.  This however does not appear to be the case.

The two year study conducted by RevTrax has actually found that the real impact of paid search is offline: “for every $1 of e-commerce revenue generated from paid search, marketers can expect to see approximately another $6 of in-store revenue.”

With the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets, it is becoming easier for marketers to start tracking the online-to-offline conversion of sales; according to online news site Search Engine Land, the study was conducted over a two year period, with sales tracked through coupons and unique ID’s:

“Between August 2009 and August 2011 RevTrax monitored millions of paid-search ads and consequent sales for its retail clients. To track in-store sales accurately RevTrax used landing pages with coupons and unique IDs”.

In order to effectively monitor how people use the web to obtain information, and the number of bricks and mortar sales conversions, SEO Help company RevTrax adopted the following strategy in order to measure the immeasurable:

Firstly a paid search advertisement was presented to consumers online, this ad directed the consumer to a mobile or printable landing page with coupon details or a unique barcode, which the consumer then redeemed in store.  The coupons generated were later tracked back to the online search that the consumer conducted and the keyword used.  The study found that for every $1 spent on search ads, $6 was made in store.  On average, a paid search ad generated $15 revenue in store, with 9% clicks generating offline sales, with some retailers reporting that 26% of paid search ads generated sales in store.

According to the Chief Operating Officer of RevTrax, Seth Sarelson, one of the key findings from the study was that may clients reported: “40-50% of customers acquired via paid search were new. This shows that this isn’t just an example of existing customers searching on branded terms looking for a deal”.  The report shows that the impact of SEO Help on overall sales should not be overlooked, even if the directly measurable results of PPC do not appear to be as high as marketers may have at first anticipated; their effect on offline sales should not to be underestimated.

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“184 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in October for an average of 21.1 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience viewed 42.6 billion videos, representing an all-time high.”

According to statistics published by the global leader in digital media analytics, You Tube/Google has an audience of just less than 161 million unique viewers; an impressive figure; and one that is three times that of Facebook, which comes in at second place with almost 60 million unique viewers.  Based on comScore’s findings, VEVO registered in third position with “57 million [viewers], Microsoft Sites with 49.1 million and Viacom Digital with 48.2 million”.

The number of videos viewed online in October broke all previous records, and indicates that the future of digital media marketing lies with the proliferating online video market.  The sheer volume of users, in the US alone, is testament to the increasing popularity of online video sites on a global scale:

“More than 42 billion videos were viewed during the month, with the average viewer watching a record 21.1 hours. Google Sites demonstrated the highest engagement with 7.1 hours per viewer.”

Earlier this year Yahoo was surpassed by YouTube as the second largest search engine, and has the added benefit of attracting users for prolonged periods of time.  The reach of Google’s YouTube platform exemplifies the potential for online advertisements as a platform for marketers to reach potential target audiences, with digital media marketing video ads reaching a growing number of users globally, as more and more people utilise online video sites for extensive periods of time each month.  As comScore goes on to note, 53% of the population in the US accessed online videos 47 times during October on average:

“Time spent watching video ads totaled more than 3.2 billion minutes during the month, with Tremor Video delivering the highest duration of video ads at 614 million minutes. Video ads reached 53 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 47 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 46.5.”

The potential to use promoted video ads as a lucrative digital media marketing platform are vast, and with Google operating their promoted ads in much the same way as their existing search ads platform, it is relatively easy to navigate, and provides advertisers with methods for attracting attention to a video ad, as well as increasing viewers and subscribers to a channel, with the objective of impacting upon downstream conversions.

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