Widgets seem to the next big thing for online marketing. Web widgets and desktop widgets have been around for a while now, with web widgets being more successful (no download and install), but haven’t had a major impact on online marketing, until recently. Many online businesses already use widgets to attract more people to their sites. Sites like Amazon.com use widgets to allow bloggers to show their favorite Amazon products on their blogs. More and more companies are starting to use widgets as a source of traffic to their sites. With the expansion of social networks, Facebook for example, widgets have come into focus. Apart from their original purpose, widgets embedded into social network profiles are perhaps much more than just small content boxes. With the growing popularity of social networks, widgets represent a specific online marketing channel since they appear on personal profile pages seen by other people on a social network, usually people who are friends or colleagues, in other words a specific audience, that is otherwise unreachable. This means widgets now carry a dimension of personal recommendation, as well as the content served within. Nick O’Neill over at AllFaceBook wrote an interesting post where he goes deeper into an analysis of Facebook’s effect on the widget economy.

MarketingSherpa released a special report on widgets usage (open access until Sept 28), which showed some interesting results. According to the report, some marketers have seen incredible ROI from widget based campaigns (as much as 1250% !), while others have enjoyed more moderate results. CTRs have been in the range of 3.5% .

Widgets are definitely starting to create impact as marketing tools. Even though they are still underdeveloped as a marketing tool, widgets will probably become an interesting online marketing channel, and should be considered in an overall internet marketing strategy. Although many companies use widgets more as a tool for increasing brand awareness (low conversion rates), there are obviously examples of widgets delivering satisfactory results in terms of traffic and conversion. This probably depends on the business industry, but testing is the only sure way to know if widgets are going to give good results for a particular business. Widget production is not expensive, and allows easy performance measurement. Are you considering widgets as a marketing tool?

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