Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Online shopping has become a multibillion-dollar revenue stream--not to mention it has completely turned the path to purchase on its head.

What retailer doesn't want a piece of that growing pie? This is where multichannel marketing comes into play. Any successful online marketing strategy, however, begins with understanding--and then catering to--consumers' various shopping patterns and preferences.

To start you on your way, here is a glimpse into the online purchase habits of the modern-day shopper.....

Social media marketing is not just a trendy word, it is fast becoming and in some cases already is a viable acquisition channel for most businesses.

In fact, Hubspot reports that 70% of business-to-consumer marketers have acquired a customer through Facebook. If you are still having trouble convincing your boss that social media is worth the investment, here are 28 must see statistics for 2013 to make him/her jump on board....

Although psychology has been an integral part of marketing for many years, in recent years we have seen it become an even bigger component as more and more consumers turn to the Internet for information. In its most basic definition, psychology is the science of behavior and the mind.  As online marketing develops and grows out of consumer demand, so does psychology and an understanding of how consumers think and behave as they use the Internet for purchasing decisions.

How does psychology work in the process of lead conversion? First, let’s gain a better understanding of lead conversion in online marketing, specifically inbound marketing.  As you may know, call-to-actions (CTAs) and landing pages are an integral part of lead conversion and inbound marketing.

Fake web traffic has long plagued the online publishing world, but Dr. Paul Barford, computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin, is claiming the problem might be worse than suspected. And it's costing some of the top online advertisers millions in wasted ad impressions.

Dr. Barford, who is also the chief scientist at startup MdotLabs, is slated to present a study at an Internet security symposium Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where he we will claim that 10 traffic networks are serving up more than 500 million invalid ad impressions a month.

"We estimate the cost to advertisers for this fraudulent traffic to be on the order of $180 million annually," he said in a statement in advance of the presentation.

Dr. Barford reached his conclusion by posing as a web publisher and signing up for several different traffic generation services, also called PPV networks, which he filtered through software that uses anomaly detection to identify fake website traffic....