Crazy Things Happens in One Second of the Internet - infographic

Have you ever thought, “What is the importance of one second?” Doesn't seem that important, right? You blink your eye and poof!! It's gone. That's true normally, but when it comes to the World Wide Web, one second is extremely crucial as a lot of crazy data flows through it in the blink of an eye.

If the servers of Amazon, Flipkart or any other e-commerce giant stay down even for a second, it results in a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Don't believe it, here is a fact that'll blow your mind. In 2014, Amazon's site was down for a mere 49 minutes and the company lost $4.8 million. Crazy, right?

So, now allow us to explain you the value of a second on Internet. Here are some crazy facts that will make you look at the tiniest measure of time in a new light:

• Amazon and eBay get approximately $3400 and $680 worth of transactions within a second. Also, Amazon ships around 35 items in a second

• 2,488,887 e-mails get sent within a second on the internet

• 22 new WordPress posts are made

• 1160 Tumblr posts are made

• 54,319 Google searches are made by people across the globe in a second

The Worst Metric to Focus on First in PPC

Open any PPC analytics dashboard and you'll start swimming in numbers. Which ones are important and which ones can be set aside? Many people focus on the click-through rate (CTR). That's the proportion of how many people see your ad versus clicking on your ad. So, if 1000 people see your ad and 100 people click it, that's a click-through rate of 10%.

It seems like an obvious metric for success. But speaking from over a decade of personal experience running Adficient, the click-through rate is not the first metric to examine for long-term success. Why? First, it's a lousy way to measure how well you're doing versus the competition. If everyone else has a high click-through rate on the same keywords, your piece of the overall clicks is smaller than you might imagine. Many new PPC marketers also seek a high PPC rate because it means lower prices from your provider, but that's also measured in relation to your competition.

Also, just because someone clicks on your ad doesn't mean they're going to buy. A high click-through rate means you have an ad that people like but it doesn't necessarily translate into purchases. If no one buys, you'll just be paying for all those clicks with nothing to show for it.

So, if the click-through rate is misleading for success, then what's the metric we should look at first?

Win Danny & His Crew Contest Winner 2016 - Today's Homeowner

Danny, Allen and Chelsea help contest winner Tamera Pippin of Lynchburg, Va., with her list of household chores.

The State of Digital Marketing 2016 [Infographic]

This infographic from Smartinsights illustrates the importance of digital marketing to businesses today and the digital marketing techniques that marketers find most effective.

Is Marketing Technology Hurting More Than Helping? [Infographic]

Marketing technology is helping us do our jobs like never before. We can publish more targeted content to more specific audiences. We deliver messages during more opportune moments. And we better understand the impact of our programs.

In fact, marketing technology is helping so much that the number of solutions has grown from around 100 to over 3,800 in just five years.

But often when you solve one problem, you create a new one. Marketing technology is no exception.

Many of the digital marketing solutions we rely on demand a steady flow of fresh, high-quality content, stories and images. Because they aren't connected to a common content source, and have unique content requirements, marketers are spending more and more of their precious time searching, formatting and distributing content to a growing number of platforms.

The situation isn't likely to improve any time soon. The lifecycle of new marketing content keeps getting shorter all the time, so we are having to produce more content all the time.

So how did we get here and, more importantly, what do we do about it. This infographic from WebDAM tells the story.

Instagram Advertising Basics: Get Started in B, A, and C

Advertising in Instagram can be tough, especially when competing with regular Instagram posts and the so-called marketing noise. Make your posts stand out through three basic points: let your company's identity shine on your Instagram profile, create visually appealing content, and focus on the image or video while keeping a short yet interesting caption. Learn how to do these here.

Not long after camera phones were introduced, image-sharing sites, such as Flicker and Photobucket, came into the picture. (Heh.) Social media sites started to become popular in the following years, so the merging of the two was unavoidable. In 2010, founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Instagram, and after almost six years, the site has grown into a community of more than half a billion “Instagrammers” with more than 300 million active daily users.

For any company, reaching out to millions of users every day is a potential gold mine. Advertising on Instagram is old news, but marketing noise has been around for a long time, too. The task is to make sure that an ad won't be annoying for an Instagrammer. Otherwise, it'll just be scrolled past.

Here are three basic things to make an ad clever, interesting, and, most importantly, effective.

How to Improve Your Business's Email Marketing Efforts with Simple Design Solutions

There is a lot of chatter about using heat map analysis on websites, however there is relatively little about using it to analyze marketing emails. Many companies spend a good chunk of their marketing budget on email marketing only to be underwhelmed by the results. There is often little to none actionable data that gives insights into what went wrong with the email marketing campaign. One way to get around this problem is by using heat map software to understand what people find engaging. Using this information you can then design your emails according to that knowledge to create more effective emails.

Easy SMTP and EyeQuant recently teamed up to analyze a number of email marketing campaigns using specialized heat map software. They took a number of different campaigns and rated them based on three different factors. The three factors were a clarity score, an excitingness score and an attention map score. Each email received a score for each of the three factors as well as feedback and pro tips on how to improve each one. The emails came from a wide variety of sources including an advertisement, a trade publication, B2B marketing, financial services, and a product description. They then turned the information from analyzing the emails into a comprehensive infographic (featured below). You can see the results here.