In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 23, 2007:

Using Google Analytics to Compare Traffic from Different Periods of Time [ProBlogger]

Google Analytics is great for a quick, day-by-day overview of traffic. It’s also great for getting into the nitty-gritty of the how, where, when, and what of your site’s traffic. But as Darren Rowse shows us, it’s also a great took for comparing traffic from different periods of time. Curious to see how your site is performing now as opposed to this time last year? Or last month? Or last week? Rowse not only shows you how to generate the report, but also talks about the types of information that can be gleaned from a comparison of traffic.

How & Why to Sponsor Blogs — 4 Hands-on Tactics (Beyond Google) for Media Buyers [MarketingSherpa]

Two things are changing in the online advertising world: 1) more people are coming online to advertise; 2) more people are looking for options outside of Google for online advertising. Ok… there’s a lot more than that changing in the online advertising. And a lot of the people looking for other ways to advertise aren’t doing so exclusively of Google - they’re looking for multi-prong, integrated advertising and marketing on a variety of Internet properties. Blog sponsorship is quickly becoming a popular way for advertisers and get their messages to the masses. Unlike advertising in the strictest sense of the word, sponsorship is a more intimate arrangement. And as MarketingSherpa Content Director Anne Holland points out, the relationship between bloggers and companies they write about should be dealt with differently than “the rest of the public”. An influential blog can quite literally hurt a company badly. Ask Apple. Sponsorship is not only a scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours financial arrangement, it also helps open the lines of communication between your company and the popular bloggers in your market.

Marketing and ROI [eMarketer]

So what forms of marketing have the best ROI, you ask? According to a couple of studies cited by eMarketer, direct mail and email tend to garner the most return. Furthermore, 31.5% of the companies involved in one of the studies said that they had not embraced consumer-generated media (CGM) because there was no clear ROI associated with it. I find it ironic that the same study suggests that 6.5% of responding companies didn’t embrace CGM because they didn’t want consumers that close to their businesses. Haha. They want us to get close enough to use their stuff… just not close enough to have an opinion on it! But I digress. The best way to know what’s going to work well for your organization is to try everything and measure the return. Sometimes that’s not quite as easily said as done. But creative marketing requires equally as creative tracking, right?

Another work week is now underway. It’s ok to be a little sad. But on the bright side, the dreaded Monday is already on the way out!