Hello, my name is Skyler Cook and I lead the social media marketing efforts here at comScore. While our team is busy putting the final touches on the 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review (coming soon to a landing page near you), I thought I’d get in on the reflection by reviewing our most popular blog posts from the past year. All things considered it was a very dynamic year in the world of digital media, and the variety of topics covered in our top posts reflects that.

Without further ado, here are the 10 most popular comScore Voices Blog Posts of 2010:

1. comScore Announces Media Metrix 360 Measurement Platform Now Open + New Program for Start-Ups
2. 2009: Another Strong Year for Facebook
3. Update on the Evolution of comScore Media Metrix 360
4. The Time is Now for Women to Stand Up and Start Up
5. Growing Number of Smartphone Users Bodes Well for Mobile Web
6. Chatroulette Takes the College Crowd by Storm
7. Live Streaming Video Jumps 600% in Past Year
8. Changes in the Search Landscape and How They Impact Search Measurement
9. Americans Get “Smart”: iPhone, Android and the Accelerating Adoption of Smartphones
10. Who Will Rid Us of this Meddlesome Click?

Now that 2011 is in full swing, what topics would you like to see covered on the comScore Voices blog? Send a tweet to @comScore and let us know! If you haven’t already, subscribe to the blog RSS feed or email to get all of 2011’s new posts as soon as they are posted.

With the 2011 Super Bowl just around the corner, we thought now would be a good time to take a step back and think about what actually makes a Super Bowl ad – or any ad for that matter – successful.

Super Bowl ads are known as the pinnacle of creativity and entertainment in advertising. Given their vast reach among an audience eager to see and hear what advertisers have to say, the Super Bowl provides a unique and valuable opportunity for marketers, something certainly reflected in the cost of advertising slots (a 30-second slot this year will cost about $3 million). These high-cost spots mean high stakes for advertisers, making it essential that they deliver a strong, compelling and memorable ad. To take full advantage of the opportunity the Super Bowl presents, marketers must do more than just ensure their advertising gets a few laughs from the audience. After all, truly breakthrough creative does more than entertain – it informs, elicits feelings and influences thoughts in a way that connects a message to the brand. This connection is what ultimately drives long term branding and increased sales for the advertised product or service.

While there are many paths to great creative, years of research on the drivers of strong advertising have enabled comScore ARS to identify a battery of content elements – such as the inclusion of brand differentiating key messages, demonstration of product/service convenience and claims of superiority – that have been proven to have a strong relationship to in-market sales outcomes. Using these insights, comScore ARS has created a tool that combines and weights these creative elements to produce a technical score, which essentially quantifies the extent to which an ad includes the right mix of elements necessary to increase the likelihood of driving sales. Our clients use this tool as a quick and simple pre-launch assessment of an ad’s overall quality or to rank a variety of ads to help them decide which they should use and when. On the post-campaign side of the equation, they also use it to understand at a high-level why the ad might not have performed as well as planned.

For the purposes of this analysis, we used the tool to evaluate one of the most talked about ads from the 2010 Super Bowl: Google’s “Parisian Love”. This ad was coded for the presence of the relevant content elements and then assigned a technical score. It received a score of 51, which places it among the top quintile of ads we’ve observed over the years.

So what does this score actually mean? Simply put, the higher the score, the higher the likelihood for that ad to drive increased brand sales. And, as a point of reference, based on a comScore ARS benchmark, a score of 30 or higher indicates an average to above-average ad where anything with a less than 30 score is considered below average. Below is the historical breakdown of how more than 8,000 ads we’ve tested over the years have scored against these benchmarks.

To understand why Google’s tug-at-your-heart-strings ad was almost universally lauded as an evocative ad that layered up to higher level benefits of the world’s most popular search engine, let’s dive into a little deeper analysis…

The score for “Parisian Love” benefitted from the existence of several elements – or key ingredients – traditionally predictive of advertising effectiveness. One such element was the effective use of music to convey mood and emotion. Another effective element was the demonstration of product convenience (i.e. the use of the search engine shown throughout the 60-second spot). But perhaps the most significant reason behind this ad’s strong score was the existence of certain structural elements, including the prominence and heavy use of the Google logo, and the prominence and demonstration of the actual product. As a result, it is unmistakable to the viewer that the benefits conveyed in the ad are linked to Google search.

From a strategic standpoint, “Parisian Love” also appears to hit the mark. Google is already a clear leader in the search market and is a tool that the vast majority of the American public uses on a daily basis. It therefore makes sense that Google might want to communicate higher order emotional benefits rather than communicate the functional benefits of search, with which everyone is already familiar. This ad effectively communicates how essential a role search plays in helping people make the important decisions in their lives, which ladders up to the emotional benefit of enjoying life and positions Google as a trusted advisor and friend. This ad also serves as an effective defense against Bing’s competitive positioning as a “decision engine” by showing how Google enables and facilitates consequential life decisions. And perhaps most importantly, this ad did an exceptional job of connecting the message back to the brand, so that people weren’t left saying afterwards: “I loved that commercial with the search results. Who was that for again?”

Effective ads don’t just entertain, they link the benefits to the brand. For the 2010 Super Bowl, it’s clear that Google got the message. Now it’s time to see which brands will experience the same Super Bowl advertising success in 2011…

comScore just released our annual U.S. Digital Year in Review report, which does a deep dive on key digital media trends of the year. 2010 was another great year for the digital media world, as we not only saw the industry claw its way back from the recession but through continued innovation it managed to expand and attract more consumer and advertising dollars to the medium.

Here are the highlights:

1. E-commerce is back, but is morphing: In total, US ecommerce grew 10% to $142.5 billion, and the 2010 shopping season delivered the first ever billion dollar shopping day -- on Cyber Monday. Price incentives and deals such as coupons, free shipping, group buying, and daily deals of all sorts continue to grow in importance, and are likely to become a permanent part of the e-commerce fabric going forward, even as economic conditions improve. So yes, online sales are alive and kicking, but deals are a big part of it.
2. Digital couponing comes alive: 2010 saw the rise of group buying and flash deal sites such as Groupon, LivingSocial and Gilt.com as heavy discounts and local offers attracted consumers across the country. The number of visitors to Groupon and LivingSocial each experienced triple digit growth (712 percent and 438 percent, respectively) as a good deal has proven too hard to resist for many Americans.
3. Facebook now leading the mindshare battle: In Q4, Facebook widened the lead it took earlier in the year vs. Google and the three major portals, and now accounts for just north of 12% of time online—and it seems to be climbing. Three out of every 10 internet sessions includes a Facebook visit, and Facebook accounts now accounts for 10% of all pageviews in the US. “Facebook” was also the top organic search phrase in 2010 with nearly 2 billion searches on that term–3 times greater than the next most searched for term. In short, it’s a behemoth--and getting bigger.
4. Web-based email is waning: Total usage of web-based email dropped 9% in 2010 with more precipitous declines occurring among younger age groups, particularly teenagers. It’s clear that communication is shifting not only to other platforms, but to other devices. (If you plan to email your kids and you want a response, be sure to send them a text and tell them, like I have to.)
5. The Search battle gets bigger and wages on: The search market grew by 12%, driven both more people searching, and existing searchers searching more. Google remains the clear leader, receiving more than 2 of every 3 searches, with Yahoo! in second at 16%. Innovations such as Google Instant and contextually driven search ended the year with Google and Microsoft making share gains of .6 share points and 1.6 share points, respectively.
6. Display ad growth continues, and more big brands join in: An all time high of 4.9 trillion display impressions were served in 2010, up 23% from last year. More than 1 in 3 was served from a social networking site; 1 trillion were on Facebook—a first for any publisher. Big brands are starting to think bigger in digital—the number of brands that served over a billion impressions was up 30%, from 80 to 104. Telco giants AT&T, Verizon and Sprint were all in the top 10 as they’ve historically been, but some of the traditional branded players such as Disney and Mastercard also stepped up significantly. Will 2011 be the year that the brand dollar floodgates open? Time will tell.
7. Video adoption continues to climb, and online TV is now mainstream: More people watched video, and those that did watched more of it. The video audience grew by 32%, and time spent grew by 12%. The average American watched 14 hours of video in December. Hulu continues to be a big story, attracting twice as much viewing as the Top 5 broadcast sites (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CW) combined. The proliferation of both publishers and platforms is contributing to changing behavior—creating not only more video users, but more and more ‘cord cutters’ (people who consume TV content solely online.) Based on activity in the back half of the year the rate of change is likely to continue or increase, making video an increasingly important part of the digital experience.
8. Video ad market takes shape, but still pales in comparison to TV: As a percent of online video consumption, video ads continue to climb. At year end, 16% of videos viewed were ads--a significant increase vs. 12% just six months earlier. However, as a percent of total time spent, video is still in its infancy. In TV, commercials make up 25% of viewing time; in online video, it’s just 1.6%. That suggests that while video has clearly become integral to mainstream internet usage, the video ad market is still just a whisper of what it’s likely to become.
9. Mobile market getting ‘smarter': U.S. smartphone penetration surpassed 25% in September, helping to usher in a new era of mobile media consumption. As smartphones begin to take over the mobile marketplace, behaviors like email usage, music and video consumption, and mobile commerce are beginning to emerge in a meaningful way.
10. Android vs. iPhone battle heats up: 2010 was a big year for Google Android devices with the platform now accounting for 28.7 percent of all smartphones (up 23.5 percentage points from just last year), as it bypassed Apple in the last part of the year to become the #2 smartphone operating system (RIM is still #1). With the Verizon/iPhone deal kicking off 2011, watch for competition between Google and Apple to heat up even further as they vie for the loyalty and dollars of smartphone consumers.

So go ahead, rattle off a few of these fun facts off at your next cocktail party, office get together or romantic Valentine’s dinner. (Being married to an internet guy myself, I will probably do the latter!) Better yet, if you haven’t already downloaded the entire 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review Report, you can do so here. Clearly, in 2010, digital proved resilient, progressive, and competitive. I can’t wait to see what this year brings.

We hope you enjoy and that it gives you a few things to think about to maximize your success in 2011!

Ever since the announcement that the iPhone would be joining the Verizon network, ending Apple’s carrier exclusivity with AT&T, the industry has been awash in speculation over how this change would affect the mobile landscape. Mobile users tend to have a certain degree of carrier loyalty, which may either come from satisfaction with the service or switching costs (both real and perceived). Of the major carriers, Verizon has the highest loyalty with 85% of its customers indicating a satisfaction level of at least 7 on a 10-point scale. It is therefore not particularly surprising that even the allure of the popular iPhone was not able to pull many happy Verizon customers away from their network.

Due to Verizon’s high customer loyalty, the iPhone’s share of the smartphone market had largely stagnated in 2010, remaining right around 25% of the market for most of the year. (Of course, the total number of iPhone users increased as the smartphone market grew, but it was not able to extend its share of the market.) Meanwhile, Android took the smartphone market by storm, jumping from 5% market share in December 2009 to 29% in December 2010, as it captured many of Verizon’s customers looking for a touchscreen phone with app market capabilities.

On January 11, Verizon made the official announcement that it would finally offer the iPhone, and the consumer interest was immediate. The number of unique visitors to verizonwireless.com jumped 28% from the beginning of the year, and was 9% higher than the same week a year earlier when Verizon was heavily promoting its new Android phones. But it wasn’t just that more people were visiting verizonwireless.com, it was what they did when they got there that stood out…

comScore conducted an analysis of visitor behavior to verizonwireless.com during the two-week period from January 9-23, which showed an exceptionally high level of visitors both seeking information about the Verizon iPhone and ultimately completing pre-orders (on February 3) for the devices.

During this two-week period, comScore measured more than 3 million total visitors to the Verizon iPhone landing page on verizonwireless.com. Among these visitors, 37% requested more information about the Verizon iPhone, a strong indication of interest. (A similar analysis of visitors to the Verizon iPhone landing page on Apple.com showed 60% requesting more information.)

On February 3, 2011, Verizon and Apple began accepting pre-orders at 3am, resulting in a rush from interested customers to secure their new devices. The Verizon landing page stated simply “iPhone 4. It’s here.” and promoted the 8GB version at $199 with a 2-year Verizon contract and the 16GB version at $299 with the same contract.

That day alone, millions of people visited verizonwireless.com, with 38% visiting the Verizon iPhone pre-order page. Of those visiting the pre-order page, 39% actually completed a pre-order transaction – an astounding conversion rate that doesn’t account for the number of visitors who tried to complete their order but had technical errors due to Verizon’s systems.

It will be interesting to watch Verizon’s success with Apple devices progress, especially as the new iPad is released with both AT&T and Verizon, and as Apple unveils the newest version of the iPhone this summer. Clearly 2010 was the year Android surpassed Apple; however, 2011 is shaping up to be the year Apple re-ignites its market share growth.

The most recent report from the National Federation of Independent Business (“the voice of small business®”) showed a modest increase in optimism, but this positive trend was blunted by small business owners’ continued skepticism about the future and continued hesitancy to spend and hire:

“Manufacturing and exporting are leading the recovery—industries and activities that are not labor intensive—while construction, an industry historically dominated by small firms, remains depressed,” said NFIB chief economist Bill Dunkelberg. “While recent political rhetoric favors small business, it is belied by the actions of policy makers whose new policies and activities almost exclusively support big businesses. While the economy is moving forward, albeit at a snail’s pace, it is not nearly fast enough to dramatically improve the unemployment situation, which continues to languish.”

The sluggishness in hiring by all companies following the most recent recession is dramatically shown in this chart from the Calculated Risk blog:

The current loss in jobs has been deeper and lasted longer than we have seen in any recession since the end of World War II. The trend line suggests that it will be years until we get back to an unemployment level of 5%, which is generally considered to be acceptable.

Another indication of the employment challenges we face going forward can be seen in the recent employment data and summarized by Charlie Cook in the National Journal Daily:

“While the unemployment rate fell to 9.0% (the best since April 2009 and the second consecutive month of declines in the rate, which went from 9.8 percent in November to 9.4 in December), only 36,000 new jobs were created, the lowest level in four months and nowhere near the 150,000 to 200,000 generally considered necessary to keep up with population growth and chip away at chronic unemployment.”

Despite the economic challenges that remain, comScore data show that in the online world small-to-mid size smaller retailers have begun to slowly regain some of the e-commerce market share they lost to their larger rivals during a period when the 25 largest retailers were able to leverage their greater financial resources and be more aggressive in terms of price reductions and deals:

As can be seen in the above table, while small-to-mid size retailers have lost 5.6 share points over the past twelve months, if we look at the most recent two quarters (i.e. Q3 to Q4 2010), their share has increased by 1.5 percentage points. I believe this improvement is the result of two factors that became clear during the 2010 holiday shopping season: (1) more retailers finally being able to step up their promotional efforts and offering more aggressive deals (e.g. free shipping, which increased dramatically in importance during the past holiday shopping season) and (2) increased spending in the online channel by all consumer income segments, with a larger number of retailers benefiting from this positive trend.

Looking forward, e-commerce should continue to gain an increasing share of consumers’ spending. The convenience and savings from shopping online are simply too attractive to resist. As this trend continues, it is to be hoped that all retailers – large and small -- will continue to see an improvement in their sales and that this will increase both their business confidence and their need to hire additional employees. The U.S. employment situation clearly needs all the help it can get.

A couple weeks ago, the Web Analytics Association announced a new code of ethics for the web analytics community to promote adherence to protocols that safeguard the privacy of web users. The code outlines five guiding principles for web analytics professionals: Privacy, Transparency, Consumer Control, Education and Accountability.

This new code of ethics asks web analytics professionals to take the pledge and personally agree to adhere to the practices outlines – independent of their employer’s endorsement. We at comScore were glad to participate in the crafting of the final language of the document and would like to express our wholehearted support of it. We encourage other companies in our industry to do the same.

At a substantive level, the code of ethics will help ensure transparency to consumers in how their digital behavior is being measured, while protecting their personally identifiable information. This sort of transparency is essential to enhancing trust between business and consumer by ensuring responsible use of analytics while working to allay consumer privacy concerns. It is essential for our industry to hold itself to the highest possible standards, so that we may continue to generate value through the use of analytics. We know that measurement enables monetization, so if the digital media industry hopes to maintain this privilege into the future it is incumbent upon all of us to be a part of the solution.

Far from being dead, GRPs look very much alive these days -- at least for advertisers and agencies dealing with large brand focused advertising budgets. True, GRPs are not the only answer, but they are instrumental in the evolution of digital from a narrow, direct response medium to a broadening brand-oriented medium.

The switch from click-oriented measurement to audience-oriented tools is becoming a reality in more and more places every month and for more and more advertisers every quarter. Thanks to tools such as our Reach and Frequency and AdEffx Campaign Essentials, the availability and application of audience-related measures such as reach, frequency and GRPs creates the right environment for a revolutionary change, aimed at changing the stance of those marketers currently reluctant to go digital because they don´t understand or simply don´t see the communications effectiveness and cost efficiency of going digital.

For advertisers this is a clear opportunity to finally develop their digital knowledge in close relationship with the traditional non-digital knowledge. Similar KPIs, and a richer and deeper list of additional KPIs in the digital side, beyond audience, create a shared vocabulary – which means no more translators making a living of their translating skills.

For media agencies it´s an even clearer opportunity: recovering the position of media planning leaders. Since the beginning of the ad-serving era, media agencies have been working basically under only two key measurements: impressions and clicks. Rather than big multimedia surveys or sophisticated planning optimizers, everybody was told the new reality boiled down to number of impacts and ratio of reactions.

Wrong.

Neither of these two measures explains all the different steps to be taken from impact to sale. Neither of them is the best way to measure the long-term brand-building value, which is the aim of many campaigns. Even worse, the simplicity of these measures and their naïve application creates a situation in which the only competitive advantage open to media agencies is to be cheaper - which means buying cheaper. This is bad for them – prestigious companies with great strategy and media knowledge; bad for the media because it pushes down their costs; and bad for advertisers, who end up not knowing whether what they buy is the best or cheapest option.

This is changing right now. The ultimate impact of these changes (will they just affect KPIs? Buying and selling? Or will this create a GRP-driven media market?) remains to be seen…

Earlier this week comScore released our inaugural Mobile Year in Review report, a comprehensive 30-page report full of data, charts and graphs highlighting the key mobile media trends of the year in the U.S. EU5 (UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy), and Japan. 2010 was a landmark year for the mobile marketplace, as we saw companies push the envelope in product innovation and consumers begin to widely adopt new behaviors in the mobile environment.

Below is a summary of what we see as the top ten overarching mobile trends of 2010:

1. Phones Keep Getting ‘Smarter’: Smartphone adoption continues to increase across the U.S. and Europe, with most markets surpassing 25-30% market penetration for smartphones. The proliferation of new devices hitting the market in 2010 – including the iPhone 4, Blackberry Storm 2, and Motorola Droid X – has given consumers strong smartphone options across wireless carriers that is helping this segment of the market gain traction.
2. iPhone Dominates Device Sales: The top two devices sold in 2010 in both the U.S. and EU5 were the iPhone 3GS and iPhone4, respectively. The #3 device in the U.S. was the Blackberry Curve, while the #3 device in the EU5 was the Nokia 5800 – XpressMusic.
3. Android Storms Smartphone Market: 2010 saw Google’s Android platform grab hold in the mobile marketplace in a big way. In the U.S. alone, Android’s share of the smartphone market jumped from 5% to 29% in just one year, and it leapfrogged Apple to become the #2 smartphone platform after RIM. The number of different smartphones running Android certainly helped accelerate this trend, as did the desire for many consumers on Verizon to opt for a smartphone with a strong app economy.
4. The App Ecosystem Blossoms: iPhone paved the way for the app ecosystem to emerge as developers create new and interesting apps for consumers every day. While most early apps were developed primarily for the iPhone, we are now seeing vibrant app ecosystems for Android, Blackberry and others.
5. Email Shifts to the Mobile Phone: 2010 saw usage of PC-based email decline, particularly among teenagers, and it appears that much of that email activity is moving to people’s mobile devices. While Blackberry was once in a league of its own in terms of email functionality, many other devices have since caught up, and consumers are responding. Email now exists across media and mobile devices will continue to be a growing part of that trend.
6. Location is Everything: Location-based check-in services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places all entered the digital lexicon in 2010 and have begun to gain consumer adoption. Other GPS-enabled apps like Google Maps and Garmin have also proved to be among the most popular and widely downloaded.
7. Social Owns Mobile: Social media is one of the most prevalent and fastest-growing activities on the mobile phone. In the U.S. the number of mobile social media users grew 56% to lead all content categories, and in the UK Facebook accounts for 40% of all time spent on mobile sites.
8. Mobile Commerce Readies for Lift-off: Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, has yet to gain traction in a significant way, but as smartphone adoption accelerates, technology has begun to facilitate mobile transactions. The next phase in m-commerce will be the emergence of the “mobile wallet” with direct payments coming from the mobile device, with Starbucks leading the way among merchants in installing the technology for such payments.
9. iPad Redefines the Mobile Landscape: Apple’s blockbuster launch of the iPad in early 2010 set the stage for a completely new category of device to emerge, as several other tablets and e-readers hit the market by the end of the year. As a reasonably sophisticated computing device that is also mobile, the iPad has given new definition to the types of behaviors in which consumers will engage in the mobile environment. The iPad is also causing time-shifting in how and when consumers engage with content, with the iPad showing a high percentage of activity late at night as people wind down for the evening.
10. Mobile Advertising Market Takes Shape: As mobile media consumption increases, it was only a matter of time before the mobile advertising boom began to take shape. Apple got into the act with the introduction of the iAd, which has already attracted many of the top brand advertisers like AT&T, Citi and Disney. Expect to see more and better quality ad units alongside mobile media content in 2011.

You can see from this selection of highlights that 2010 was another outstanding year, and this year promises to shine even brighter. If you haven’t already downloaded the 2010 Mobile Year in Review, you can do so here. We hope you enjoy and that it gives you a few things to think about on your way to success in 2011…

In a recent comScore survey, it became clear that while consumers are feeling better about economic conditions in the U.S., the majority still feel that that we have problems:

As we’ve tracked consumer sentiment over time, it’s clear that to fully understand the trends that are occurring one has to look at the differing attitudes of the key income segments. In the following chart we ask consumers to identify their single most pressing economic issue from a list of four: rising prices, unemployment, the financial markets and home values.

While jobs remain a key concern (with 36% of all consumers citing unemployment as their key economic issue), the rapid emergence of rising prices as the number one concern is all too evident, especially within the lower income segment where prices have supplanted unemployment as the number one worry by a significant margin. Even among the upper income segment, rising prices are now on a par with unemployment concerns. And when one delves into the price issue, it’s clear that gas prices dominate, with “rising gas prices” being cited by at least 20% of each income segment as the main economic concern. Below is a chart showing the rise in gas prices over the past three months:

While the turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa has driven up oil prices significantly, as yet we’ve not seen any disruptions in production or supply. However, the current Libyan unrest appears to have spread to a major oil producer for the first time, causing the price of “Brent” crude to hit $105 per barrel — a level not seen since September 2008. Going forward, it will be important for the digital economy to keep a close eye on oil and gas prices because a look back in time tells us that rising oil prices have historically had a dampening impact on e-commerce spending, as the charts below illustrate:

As gas prices began their rapid climb in 2007 (and later as they caused a knock-on increase in food prices) this gradually reduced the amount of disposable income in consumers’ wallets - to a degree that caused a slowdown in e-commerce growth beginning in late 2007 and into 2008. By the time gas prices had dropped again at the end of 2008, we were in the midst of a full blown recession with the meltdown of the financial markets, plummeting house prices and soaring unemployment. It took us until 2010 to see a recovery in e-commerce spending and the return of double digit growth rates.

So, as we look forward in the hope that job creation picks up, we need to also keep our fingers crossed that gas prices will settle back. History has shown that consumers’ willingness to buy online is heavily influenced by what they have to spend at the pump, for food and for the other necessities of life.

This post was originally published at SearchEngineWatch on February 7, 2011.

Snowpacalypse. Snowmageddon. Blizzaster. For those of us not fortunate enough to live in Miami or Los Angeles, this winter has no doubt pushed our psyches to the brink of insanity. Even a prediction of an early spring by Punxsutawney Phil last week won’t impact our irritation with the soul-crushing deluge of snow this year (ski bums not withstanding). With this being the time of year where “the weather” evolves from meaningless small talk into a legitimate current event, there’s no better time to consider the internet’s role in our relationship with weather and how search fits into the (wintry) mix.

In December 2010, about 85 million internet users visited Weather websites, representing more than 40% of the US online population. Considering this does not even include those getting their weather from other internet driven sources (apps on their desktops/cell phones, blended search results on SERPs, ski/surf reports, etc), that’s quite a considerable reach. The days of waiting for your static weather prediction on the back of the USA today with a high/low are soon to be thing of the past.

Knowing that visits to Weather websites represent a consistently growing part of our everyday lives, it is rather fascinating to see how much more important search becomes during this time of the year.

Visits to Weather websites always begin to spike between November and December, this year demonstrating a 7.6% bump month to month. But weather related search activity increased 44% month to month, and search click-throughs to weather websites increase 56% month to month. With total visits to weather websites increasing by 20% month to month, we can see that while winter weather causes only moderate increases in audience visitation, it produces much more sizeable gains in engagement and search activity.

The increased search activity in relation to the modest increases in visitors offers a few observations. The first is that the winter is clearly a peak season, but the increased activity amongst the already astute consumer of online weather means more opportunities for weather vendors to engage with their customer base, meet their weather needs, and monetize their websites. There’s no shame in attracting repeat visitors.

The second observation is that a huge search increase coupled with a considerably lower increase in visits means that the blended weather search results on the SERPs are likely doing their job and getting weather searchers their answers without having to go to a website. Not the best news for weather marketers, but the increase in visitation is large enough I’m sure they’ll get past it. And this is certainly good news for searchers who are able to answer their questions with fewer clicks.

Third, and in my opinion most important, is that this crazy winter offers a huge opportunity to engage the US online population that is now interested in weather, but does not regularly visit weather websites. Remember, about 40% of the US online population tends to visit weather websites this time of year…a large chunk, yes, but that still leaves 125 million potential visitors untouched. With such large increases in weather interest, it is hard to imagine a better time for a weather publisher to invest in paid search to attract a new and potentially sustainable visitor base. Every new visitor to your website represents dollars in advertising sales, and as they say, it takes money to make money. At this time, less than 1.5% of all of the click-throughs to weather websites are paid clicks…an enormous opportunity to own the space this time of year and increase your reach to the non-standard weather visitor.

Many U.S. marketers often feel like they are dealing with a saturated marketplace, where the online population just isn’t growing like it used to. And while it’s true there may not be as many new Internet users coming online, the real growth opportunity revolves around increased engagement with medium and light internet users and introducing your website to new audiences. It is perhaps not surprising to hear that search is a fantastic way to do that, but can be problematic for many organizations (reasons I am sure you all understand…money, expertise, timing, etc). Just remember that even a basic analysis of market data and seasonal activity can ultimately contribute to your bottom line.