Marketing Pilgrim

I’m delighted to share with you the brand new Trackur web site AND announce the launch of the industry’s most affordable white-labeled social media monitoring dashboard.

We’ve revamped the Trackur.com site and also made some usability improvements to the Trackur dashboard–which, by the way, has moved to its new location at track.trackur.com.

Along with the new look, we’ve renamed all of the Trackur plans, and have added some ground-breaking features to the Trackur Ultimate plan. Here’s what’s new:

• Use your own domain name: You asked for it, and we’re delivering. You can now point any domain name to your Trackur Ultimate dashboard and that’s what you–and your clients/users–will see. Your domain name will be used for everything, while we take care of everything else.

Whether it’s a function of the economy or the same ills that have plagued shopping carts since the dawning of e-commerce, there appears to be no letting up in abandonment rates for websites at the true point of sale, the checkout.

eConsultancy reports on several recent surveys and studies that show the trend continuing but few solutions to the trouble being found.

Thanks to a range of factors, including increased customer expectations, as well as behavioural factors such as comparison shopping, basket and checkout abandonment rates are rising.

A recent Forrester survey found that 88% of consumers have abandoned shopping carts, and named the top five reasons given by customers.

The top five reasons for cart abandonment were:

As marketers and just people in general, we depend on statistics and analysis to understand the world around us. We also depend heavily on observation, opinion and perceived expertise of others. We have many different ways to take in information and data about the world around us including social media, which has its pros and cons. The major pro is that we can know have a view of many things that we could never have had before while the biggest con is just that: we can be easily conned.

I have good news and bad news.

First the good news. Marketing Pilgrim editor Jordan McCollum has given birth to Rachel Diana– a beautiful 6lb 9oz baby girl!

Now the bad news. Jordan won’t be returning to Marketing Pilgrim.

I’ll let that sink in. The totally awesome, intelligent, witty, best-editor-a-blog-could-ever-wish-for, is retiring from Marketing Pilgrim to take care of her wonderful family.

Jordan has been a great friend and I’m going to miss her…a lot! I’m sure you will too, so please take a moment to leave her a comment and let her know she’ll be missed.

Who knows, maybe she’ll change her mind!

Andy

There is a plague within the Internet marketing industry. This plague has existed since the inception of marketing online, and will probably continue to exist as long as there is money to be made on the Internet. It’s likely that if you have done anything online you have seen it in action. What plague am I talking about? I’m talking about the plague of the amateur. What’s that? You’ve never of the plague of amateur? Well let me explain.

Google has taken what was once their enhanced listings for local businesses, renamed them Google Tags and is rolling the program out nationwide. With local search becoming more and more important in the Internet marketing landscape this is welcome news for many who are trying to figure out the best way to get the most mileage out of listings that appear in the 7-pack map listing.

Here is what the listing would look like

The Google Blog tells us a little more:

For a flat monthly fee of $25, businesses can enhance their listings that appear on Google.com and Google Maps with a yellow tag that emphasizes specific information such as a coupon, video, website, menu, reservations, photos, or a custom message. Tags do not affect the ranking of the listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.