Marketers miss up to 55% of online ad response: AICPA study.

Like other business entrepreneurs, CPAs who market their services through online advertising may not be realizing the full potential of this medium.

U.S. spending on online advertising is growing at more than 20% each year and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 15% through 2010. However, marketers are missing more than half of all responses. In fact, 55% of follow up to online ads appears to occur up to 30 days after the ad has appeared and not always in the most obvious ways, according to "Beyond the Click, Maximizing Advertising ROI in B2B ENewsletters," a new online advertising study by the AICPA's electronic media group and Bay Street Group LLC.

The study found that financial professionals online were almost as likely as the direct clickers to save the ads for future reference (30% versus 34%). And they were actually more likely (19% versus 14%) than those who clicked on the ads to forward the advertising information to their colleagues or to make or recommend a purchase based on those ads. Further, marketers are misunderstanding the power of latent response, when targeting finance professionals.

The research also found that readers who were exposed to enewsletter ads, but who did not click on them, could recall the ads almost as frequently as readers who did click on the ads (22% versus 28%).

"Content-driven e-newsletters for financial professionals seem to have much longer shelf...