nielsen - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Overall advertising spend in the US rose by 0.6% last year, but online ad revenue continues to rise, growing by 18.9% compared with 2006.

These figures (PDF) are from the Nielsen Company, and show that online advertising is still growing much faster than all other categories, though growth has slowed from 35% between 2005 and 2006.

A new study from Jakob Nielsen suggests that average returns from usability work have fallen "substantially" in the last few years.

The average ROI from the projects surveyed was 83% - down from 135% six years ago, but high enough to show that they are still well worth the effort.

Businesses should beware of adding too many Web 2.0 features to their websites, and instead concentrate on getting the basics of user experience right.

This is the view of web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who argues in his latest post that, while features like user reviews can benefit consumers, others can make sites overly complicated.

Social shopping communities have become increasingly popular for online shoppers when researching their Xmas purchases, according to stats from Nielsen Online.

Nielsen's analysis (pdf) of the 1,000 most influential blogs (ranked by number of inbound links) finds that gift recommendations are dominating holiday discussions on these sites.

Google has attempted to boost its ability to target TV ads by striking a deal to use detailed demographic data about TV audiences from Nielsen.

Nielsen's data covers TV viewers' ages, gender and marital status, and will be added to the information Google already gleans from set top boxes.

Internet users worldwide trust someone else's opinion of a product or service more than any other form of advertising, while mobile text ads were the least popular,  according to a global survey by Nielsen.

Nielsen surveyed 26,486 web users in 47 different countries, finding that users seem to trust more traditional forms of advertising over search and mobile ads.

Spanish newspaper El Pais is suing Nielsen for an ‘unjustifiable’ downgrade in the number of unique users it attracts to its website. Ouch.

El Pais, owned by Prisa, is annoyed at the downgrade because media buyers rely on panel data provided by firms like Nielsen and comScore to determine where to place ad campaigns. The BBC has the lowdown here.

It seems to me that this reflects a bigger issue relating to the blind faith in panel data among advertisers.

Another nugget of wisdom from Jakob Nielsen - website visitors will often ignore heavily formatted areas of a website as they look too much like advertising.

The usability guru says surfers have trained their brains to ignore 'fancy formatting', in a form of banner blindness. This suggests that ads should be made to look more like actual content in order to attract attention - something Jakob also covered recently.

Jakob Nielsen has released another eyetracking study that throws unethical advertising techniques into the spotlight. Only this time, it is from a publisher's perspective, and while interesting it's nothing particularly new.

The study investigates the effectiveness of 'making ads look like content', and concludes that more users will take notice of such an ad.

A majority of visitors to websites of monthly magazines in the US are accessing the content online rather than paying for a copy, according to a survey by Nielsen//NetRatings and MRI.

An average of 83% of visitors to the sites of the 23 high circulation monthlies that were featured in the study did not read the magazine offline.