Web marketing will continue to be an area for investment, according to the third annual Adobe Scene7 survey of online businesses.The survey of 474 businesses found the delivery of new rich media and merchandising features, as well as social networking, mobile and personalisation applications were areas of investment cited by 90 per cent of respondents.
Overall, nearly a third of these businesses rated the top features planned for deployment in 2009 as blogs, user ratings and comments, 360-degree spin product views, catalog's and circulars, podcasts, product comparisons, and videos.
The top four features rated as most effective were zoom, visual filtering and advanced search, lifestyle imagery or photos, and search landing pages.
The majority (92 per cent) of all respondents said they would also be conducting customer experience projects within the coming year. But compared to last year, where over 53 per cent were planning new projects within six months, these projects have been shifted to the latter half of 2009.
Doug Mack, vice president of consumer and hosted solutions at Adobe, said: “Web marketing continues to be an area of investment and innovation because, in challenging economic times, it can deliver high-impact marketing programmes that can be easily and immediately measured.”
Respondents also indicated that increased clicks, usage and conversion rates remained the top metrics used for measuring the effectiveness of deployed features.
These metrics, together with revenues and order size metrics, are widely used to measure the effectiveness of online marketing efforts.