Online marketing can sometimes seem like casting a fishing line into a deep lake. You feel you have the right bait, the right line and rod, the boat seems to be in a good position, but what lies deep beneath? Companies like Thirdi help you to see what’s in the lake, who’s nibbling on your tackle and tugging on your line, and where all the good catches are.

Let’s continue with the fishing analogy. Just like in fishing you might drop the line down into a school of fish, but if you don’t have the right bait they won’t go for it. Conversely, if you drop the right bait down for the kind of fish you want but it’s nowhere near enough to them you won’t catch anything either…maybe a boot. And just like you can feel nibbles on your line, clicks act in the same way. It may seem like a lot of people are seeing your ad, but nibbles don’t catch fish, and clicks don’t mean you’ve made customers. So how do we interpret click statistics and consumer behavior online?

If a lot of traffic is coming through your site via an ad then you know that it’s doing its job as far as getting eyes on your site. However, we have to look deeper than that. These numbers tell us a lot, but they don’t tell the whole story. When you buy ad space from another site make sure you are able to get the analytics too. Find out how long people are looking at the ad if it’s a pop up- if it’s one second it usually counts as a click to your ad space provider even if users closed the pop up right away. As far as the provider is concerned, someone saw your ad and that’s the name of the game.

Quality clicks are what you are looking for unless you just want to generate blind, rapid site traffic. Many sites do this, and generate impressive ad revenue from it. But if you own an actual product or service and want to connect with a consumer base you need more than ads, you need content. Potential customers need to be engaged. Attention spans have shrunk and we don’t notice traditional ad media anymore- not to the extent that we used to. Even banner click through rates have been declining. Being able to advertise without people knowing that they’re being advertised to is the trick today. Some may find this underhanded, but in the marketing biz it’s seen more as subtlety. Social media has created new terms of engagement that have helped consumers and companies connect in a more fluid and continuous manner, sticking has begun to replace clicking. This is really where understanding consumer behavior online happens, in the dialogue played out in words and actions online. But for a small business it’s hard to imagine the kind of social media presence that a major company with a large consumer base enjoys (or is conversely beholden too as Forrester researchers often stress) There are some basic and simple things that you can do though, to better understand how your web marketing is working.

Find out who is looking at your ads and who is looking at your site, not individual names and addresses and such, but where they are, how long they are staying, where they are going on your site, what they may be looking for if you can discern it. “How are these people behaving?” is the key question, not “how much are they clicking?” .

If you are able to understand these and other things you’ll see that the water is in fact clear, and not deep and dark as it may have looked before. And you’ll know where to put your line and what to put on it a whole lot easier than when you were when fishing in the dark.

Thirdi

Web trackers ComScore recently predicted that $900 million in sales could be spent online today (Cyber Monday), when retailers offer steep discounts and free shipping on their sites. That big number follows an 11% surge this recent Black Friday ($595 million in sales) making this first holiday shopping season after the great economic meltdown of 2008/09 somewhat of a success. I’m going to go one step further and say on behalf of Thirdi and the Senses team that $1 billion could be spent today when all is said and done, because why the hell not? Doesn’t that sound more impressive?

Ecommerce has truly emerged as an increasingly important engine of consumer spending these past few years, and improvements in shopping cart software, website design, and online marketing through social media and other avenues continues to push ecommerce to the forefront of consumer behavior.

Some believe that the next step will be an integration of social media and TV, but there’s been a counterpoint to that claim (by an un-named source close to this Senses blogger who is developing a social media TV platform- apparently it’s tricky!) I think it’s obvious that it will be tough to do the social TV thing because being social and paying attention to Gossip Girl at the same time can be very difficult, as Gossip Girl can be very intense.  So intense that I am commonly silenced and banished from the living room when it is on. So next Christmas shopping season will you be watching the classic Christmas cartoons and ordering things off e-bay during commercials? Probably not, but as the start to this holiday shopping season has shown, the game is changing. TV will obviously have to adapt, as retailers have now discovered. Social media marketing has been a great success as Black Friday sales attest to, and online sales have risen dramatically this Cyber Monday thanks to the evolution of ecommerce.

If you spend any time on Facebook, you’ve probably noticed it’s getting a little corporate in there. Every major brand, from Coke to Huggy’s Diapers has a page. And why wouldn’t they? Ten million people sign up to brand pages on Facebook every single day.

And the same thing is happening, though to a smaller degree so far, on Twitter. Major brands are loving the connection and two-way communication available to them by having a presence on social media sites. The social networks love it, because it brings in money. And clearly we the people enjoy it too. After all, 1,305,000ish Jet Blue Twitter followers can’t be wrong.

But what about those little companies? How can that little mom n’ pop car detailing place compete with the big boys when it comes to getting all social network-y? Well, it seems that, increasingly, they’re hiring experts to help them. That’s right, in this day and age even small companies with small budgets are realizing that spending cash on social network-vertizing is a winning proposition.

And where there’s a niche, there are consultants. For $450, that little car detailing place gets an expert to post Twitter and Facebook updates and generally social network up a storm. Or, for companies with a little more cash, the advertising agency ThinkInk LLC charges $10,000-$20,000 grand a month for integrated marketing services, with a heavy influence on the social networking stuff.

With online advertising spending rivalling or surpassing that of traditional mediums, no company, however small, can afford to ignore the reach of internet marketing. And with many saying that old-school online advertising is becoming less and less efffective, a company with just a few dollars to spend could do worse than using it to up their profile on the big social networks.