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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Mondays and Tuesdays remain the busiest online shopping days during the holiday season, showing 25 percent greater activity than the rest of the week, yet consumer holiday shopping behavior differs greatly by industry, according to the 6th Annual Atlas Holiday Shopping Report released today. Atlas also predicts the busiest online holiday shopping day will be Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2006. Tuesday, Dec. 13 was the busiest online shopping day of the 2005-2006 holiday shopping season, with shopping activity 51 percent above the average for the time period. Atlas predicts that the pull of procrastination (moving the date closer to Christmas) and the push of the fear of shipping delays will result in Tuesday, Dec. 12 being the peak date in 2006. <http://www.atlassolutions.com/institute/insights.aspx#holiday> <http://www.atlassolutions.com/institute/insights.aspx#holiday>
Fourth-quarter 2006 online retail sales (excluding travel) in the U.S., eMarketer estimates, will total $33.2 billion, up 22.7% over the same period last year. This forecast is arrived at by taking the historical quarterly retail e-commerce sales estimates produced by the Census Bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce as a baseline.
According to a survey of 100 e-commerce executives by The e-Tailing Group, 66% have been investing in pay-per-click marketing for more than two years. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 the most sophisticated, 54% of marketers surveyed rate their organizations at 7 or higher in PPC marketing sophistication. Yet many continue to find managing PPC programs challenging. The time spent on managing the programs ranged from less than five hours per week, reported by 32%; to 21 or more hours per week, reported by 33%. Of those surveyed, 99% have just three or fewer people working on these campaigns in-house, notes Freedman. ROI is the primary measure of success for PPC campaigns but 27% of those responding said they did not know how their cost of conversion compared with the total dollar value of each sale. Benchmarking metrics gathered in the survey include the fact that 47% of merchants report average cost-per-click of less than 50 cents and 49% report that 20% of visitors or fewer come into their sites as the result of PPC campaigns.
Amazon has two Q&A services in quiet development. Nownow and Askville each attempt to answer people's questions in their own way. Askville is a web based service that allows users to ask and answer each other questions. Users can earn points within the system for asking questions as well as answering them. Best answers are chosen by the group of question asker and answerers, where the asker gets one more vote than the answerers This service is very similar to Naver's Knowledge Search, Wondir, Yahoo! Answers and Live QnA. Askville rewards users with Coins, a virtual currency that will be redeemable in another community named Questville slated for release in early 2007. NowNow is a mobile question-answer service that has a new twist on it. It is going to use Amazon's own Mechnical Turk to handle the answers. It is free during the testing phase. The service is currently in closed Beta. Check the NowNow FAQ for more info.
Online advertising company Adify Corporation rolled out its new Build Your Own Network (BYON) platform at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco yesterday, giving business owners, advertisers and publishers the tools they need to build their own ad network. With the BYON tools, Adify claims users can construct ad networks in a matter of weeks, with the company handling more complicated tasks like reporting, tracking, billing and tech support. "The Internet is poised to break free from the one-size-fits-all network model and deliver the same level of segmentation to advertisers," said Adify CEO Larry Braitman in a statement. "We envision thousands of niche or vertically-focused ad networks emerging to meet specific market needs, driven by entrepreneurs and enterprises who are members of the specific communities they serve." Traditional media organizations like the Washington Post's Newsweek Interactive are using BYON to support existing networks and create niche networks from scratch. The Post uses BYON for its Sponsored Blogroll program that connects bloggers and advertisers. Adify's BYON was one of the few 13 companies selected to present at the Web 2.0 Conference's Launch Pad workshop, which showcases new and innovative product launches. <http://www.adify.com/> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Bellevue's InfoSpace Inc., makers of a variety of online and mobile services, has introduced Zoo.com, a search engine meant to help children aged 8-13 search the Internet while filtering out sexually explicit content. Like other meta-search services from InfoSpace which compile results from multiple search engines, Zoo.com will consolidate search results from Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia, as well as news results from ABC News, Fox News and Yahoo. The engine filters the results against a database of more than 50,000 adult words and phrases, to reduce the risk of children's exposure to inappropriate or harmful material on the Web. Content pertaining to guns, violence and unlawful drugs is also filtered. In a test of the service conducted by Seattle P-I Report Dan Richman, if a search uses a preflagged word or phrase, Zoo.com returns no results and displays the notice, Search cannot be completed.
According to a new report released by Internet measurement company Hitwise, during the month of September, nearly one out of twenty US internet users visited a top 20 social networking site, nearly twice the percentage of visits from 2005. The Hitwise US Consumer Generated Media Report looks at social networking, photo sharing, and online video. Social networking monolith MySpace came out on top, raking in 82% of the traffic generated by the top 20 social sites, up 51% since March. Other networks like Bolt, Bebo, Gaia Online, and Google's Orkut also experienced phenomenal growth. Stats for photo hosting sites like PhotoBucket and Flickr also saw increases since March, while visits to video sharing site YouTube shot up 249%, making it the 26th most visited domain in the month of September.
You've heard about the ten-second rule? No, we don't mean the rule that says food which is dropped on the ground can be safely consumed if retrieved within ten seconds, (as immortalized by Bill Murray in the animated classic "Osmosis Jones.") This ten-second rule recognizes that not all Website visitors are created equal. Many entities arriving at your web site may appear to be human visitors, but in reality are anything but. Unfortunately this inhuman traffic is counted alongside your human visitor, so you can see why "number of visitors" data can be faulty. A few of the factors that lead to non-human visitors include: Bad Bots: Bots are robots that visit your site to extract data from its pages. "Good" bots include search engine crawlers like Googlebot and Yahoo! Slurp. You definitely want good bots to visit your site so your pages will show up in search engine results. But bad bots don't play by the rules. Out to harvest data like email addresses, they don't announce themselves, preferring the cloak of anonymity that masquerading as a human visitor gives them. The bad bots know if they were to identify themselves for what they really are, webmasters would simply block the bots and reduce the shady activities. So they simulate human behavior and end up skewing your statistics. Fraudulent Clicks: A very real, rapidly growing problem, click fraud occurs when someone (or some computer script) knowingly clicks on your PPC ad with no interest in your products or services. Whether they're trying to fraudulently make money from the traffic being sent to your site or are maliciously attacking your ad budget, one thing is clear: when click fraud occurs, your wallet deflates while your stats inflate. Monitoring Services: Uptime monitoring services are "good" traffic in that they provide a useful service. By probing your site as if they were human visitors, they alert you to problems human visitors might be experiencing. They will, however, skew your data. Any of the above examples can cause a spike in a simple visitor count or an upward trend. Getting past this bogus information and to the actual human behavior requires a willingness to examine the data, not just take comfort in the stats. Looking at a variety of stats in conjunction with visitor counts helps give you perspective. Qualified Visitors: A metric must be defined to bring into focus only "qualified" visitors. Different sites have different methods of defining this, but a fairly universal method is to include only those visitors that spend more than 10 seconds on the site. This will exclude many bots and instances of click fraud because those entities are likely to visit for a very short time. It's worth noting, however, that the 10-second-or-more label may inadvertently exclude a small number of real human clicks, like those who click through from an ad, don't like what they see on the single landing page, and immediately exit. The practice of exclusion will obviously reduce your metrics, but gives a clearer picture of whether your site is improving. ********************** |
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