SUMMARY:
What are some of the world's heaviest Net marketers planning for 2006?

Ad:tech quizzed 680 marketers who spend an average of 44% of their total ad and marketing budgets on the Web. Key results:

o Search takes the top spot from email

o Search averages 34% of online budgets

o Behavioral ads have lost some of their luster

o RSS feeds and in-house blogs are favorite ‘emerging tactics’

See details and six handy charts below:

#1. What worked (and what didn't) this year in online ads & marketing

Over the past few years, search and email have been neck and neck in the race for top performer among online marketing tactics. Email to house lists has edged out search, until now. 52% of marketers said that search performance is ‘Great – outperforms other tactics’ compared to 47% for house email. In fact, favorable evaluations for both tactics rose from last year’s survey (41% for search and 45% for email) – but the nearly 10 point rise for search carried the day.

Why the jump in positive feelings about search? One reason may be that keyword prices stabilized in the second half of the year, so marketers are getting more for their money. At the same time, top marketers (and ad:tech attendees tend to be ahead of the curve) are increasingly using more sophisticated methods for identifying high performance keywords, such as scanning weblogs for keywords that correlation with conversion.

Meanwhile, email to house lists remains a solid second fiddle. Unlike search, where pricing, tactics and technologies are in flux, email returns and methods were largely stable in 2005. Though open rates declined due to filtering, clickthrough and conversion rates were essentially flat year over year.

For the first time, behavioral targeting lost some ground, dropping from third to the fourth spot in our ‘Great’ performers list, and getting a 36% rating for strong performance, down from 41% in last year’s survey. That’s not a huge drop, but it may be significant because it’s the first time that the tactic has lost ground.

These charts detail the two ends of the spectrum of marketers’ tactical evaluations. First, the percentage of marketers describing ‘Great’ results:

And, the breakdown for tactics getting ‘Poor’ reviews:

Rented lists stayed ‘on top’ for 2005, with negative reviews hitting 52%, up from 43% the year before. That said, in a separate question asking marketers what they’d invest in if they had some ‘extra’ budget, email lists score well. It may be that marketers aren’t putting the necessary dollars into list rental to see decent returns. Bargain hunters in this area tend to see poor results.

The other big mover in 2005 was the banner ad category, with a rise in negative reviews from 24% to 39% in this year’s survey. The explosion in rich media ads may be the cause, as traditional banners have to fight for attention with more compelling media (see the upswing in interest in video ads below).