10 Things We’ve Learned at Ad:Tech San Francisco

One of the great things about events like Ad:Tech is that you can learn new tools and techniques that will help you grow your sales and revenue. We were fortunate enough to have Superpages.com act as our host at this event. That gave us an opportunity to check out their website, where they offer paid search campaigns, ecommerce sites or hosted websites. guywithlaptop

It also gave us the opportunity to collect a lot of other marketing information and data. This is the kind of information that, sooner or later, becomes useful in your quest to grow your sales and revenue through your marketing efforts.

All that said, here’s some interesting stuff we’ve learned while at Ad:Tech:

Google launches its behavioral advertising model. Google has always allowed you to contextually match ads, but they now also provide advertisers with the ability to reach users based on consumer interests. Interest-based (or behavioral) advertising provides marketers with the ability to reach users based on past interaction, such as visits to a website. In other words, if you do a Google search for “Luxury Lodges in Montana,” don’t be surprised if the next time you visit CNN.com, you see an ad for a luxury lodge in Montana.
In-page Web Analytics provides a way for businesses to dig deeper into their visitor’s behavior on their websites. Unlike traditional web analytics packages, companies like Clicktale.com, CrazyEgg.com and Pagealizer.com offer ways to find out things like: how often people hover over a link without clicking; how many visitors scroll to the bottom of your page; how long it takes for people to fill out certain fields on your forms; what the heatmap of a page on your site looks like based on the mouse movements of your visitors; and do people from different traffic sources behave differently when navigating the page?
Blink X has technology that listens to the speech track of a video and extracts tags that represent key words and phrases spoken within the video. To test this, we went in and did a search for 60 Second Marketer on the Blink X site. Sure enough, Blink X sorted through the videos on their site and showed us all the 60 Second Marketer videos on their site. (Note: The term “60 Second Marketer” was also part of our written description, so this test wasn’t scientifically definitive. But the technology Blink X claims to have is still pretty cool.)
Compete.com lets you see web traffic for your competitor’s websites. For example, you can find of your competitor’s websites and use Compete to find the 5 with the most traffic. That way, you can drill down and find out what your competitors are doing and learn from their experiences.

In addition to the information mentioned above, comScore released the findings of a recent study of online video habits. Here’s a summary of their findings:

78.5% of the total U.S. Internet audience has viewed online video.
The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
98.9 million viewers watched videos on YouTube. That’s 59.2 videos per viewer.
48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace, which is 7.6 videos per viewer.
The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes
The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top 10. (Hulu is NBC’s answer to YouTube. They’re slightly different business models, so they’re not exactly the same, but Hulu is taking the world by storm and is worth checking out.)

Ad:Tech has been a valuable source of information about the newest tools in marketing. Come back soon for more updates that’ll help you grow your sales and revenue.