Online Marketers Spill Beans on Best, Worst Tactics

Online marketers rated what tactics worked best - and worst - in 2006 and those that they plan to focus on, and spend money on, this year, writes eMarketer, citing a yearend 2006 study by MarketingSherpa and ad:tech.

The ad:tech early-adopter (and therefore skewed) sample of marketers, who have on the whole already adopted online advertising techniques, said they anticipate their online spending to increase from 47 percent of the budget to 49 percent.

Those polled said the best-performing online advertising technique was paid search (49 percent said so), followed by house-list email (47 percent), search engine optimization (45 percent), behavioral targeting (34 percent) and contextual targeting (29 percent).

As for emerging tactics that they plan to budget for, the marketers cited blogs/blog networks (42 percent said so), social networking (40 percent), adding RSS feeds (37 percent) and video ads (37 percent). They also plan to increase spending on paid search (34 percent), house-list email (27 percent) and both rich media/video and SEO (25 percent).

The worst-performing technique cited was rented-list email (56 percent said so), followed by pop-up and pop-unders (45 percent), email newsletter ads (42 percent), banner ads (28 percent) and affiliate marketing (26 percent).