Trend: Online Marketing What works and what doesn't

Even though you may have decided on using online marketing but making a decision on what kind of media to utilize to maximize Return on Investment(ROI) is difficult. MarketingSherpa in its annual survey asked some of the biggest Internet marketers what tactics worked (and what didn’t) in the past 12 months and where they plan to spend most of their budget in the coming year which points out to some very interesting trends in the world of digital marketing the results are basically from USA market. While paid search ads is the strong favorite the trend seems to be towards Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because of lower costs

Paid search continues to be a strong money maker for more than a third of the marketers surveyed, but that number is down steeply from the previous year. The decline reflects an increase in competition that raised keyword prices and lowered ROI.
SEO continues to increase in popularity. Its low costs and high returns make it a leader among more than half (57%) of the marketers surveyed. Those numbers were 45% in 2006 and 33% in 2005.
The percentage of marketers achieving high ROI with email marketing took a dip for both house and rented lists. These figures likely reflect consumer fatigue with the platform, causing lower returns.

Upcoming Trends: Behaviorally targeted ads
It increased 10% percentage points while contextual advertising fell 8%. While Contextual ads show up based on the content of a web site. Behaviorally targeted ads that is targeted to a specific individual based on that user's previous surfing behavior. People are more likely to click if the ad reflects their interests.So if you have visited several travel sites then you’ll see an ad about travel. This is expensive for smaller retailers but larger brands can target ads based on interest and see a strong response.
Negative TrendsPop-ups and pop-under ads

The “worst Web ad of 2007” award goes to pop-ups and pop-unders, which no marketers claimed provided a significant ROI.

and to see that among almost all major Indian websites are these days are filled with such ads