Marketing Pilgrim

When it comes to online shopping, the desktop still rules over any mobile device, but the tide is shifting at a pretty nifty rate.

E-Commerce company Monetate put together an infographic that looks at the impact of mobile and tablets versus desktops. The data represents only online shopping from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.

Right off the bat, you can see that the desktop lost a little ground this year when compared to last year. Mobile rose from 3.1% to 7.36%, a nice little bump, but I expected it to be higher. And the conversion rates are not so good, but that’s to be expected given the difficulty of processing a shopping cart on a tiny screen.

Tablets are a surprise, rising from almost nothing (1.06%) in 2010, to 4.68% in 2011.

YouTube has done a major redesign and it wants you to think “channels”. They aren’t new on YouTube but now they are being showcased. This is to help the millions of YouTube users get used to the channels especially as more custom content appears in special channels in the future. I could blather on about the features but I really like it when YouTube explains these in a video, don’t you?

This redesign continues to bring the look and feel of Google into a more uniform approach. The new Google bar is doing the same thing.

Personally, I like it. What about you?

There is a lot of privacy and mobile phone these days as it relates to the software that exists on many (if not most) smartphones call Carrier IQ.

It’s to be used, in its purest sense, to help carriers ID network issues. Ah but as with so many other things in the Internet space, it can do so much more and most of it is what no one should be doing which is watching everything you do on your phone including claims of tracking keystrokes. If you want the complete and gory details you can find articles here, here and here. Apparently, the software is used by AT&T and Sprint but not Verizon and Google claims no affiliation with the software and Apple stopped with iOS5.

Everyone expects to see commercial breaks when they sit down to watch TV, but commercial breaks on online videos. . . that’s another thing.

When sites like YouTube began offering up short-form entertainment, people weren’t willing to watch a commercial, before, during or after. So they slapped an Adsense banner ad across the bottom of the vid and called it the cost of doing business.

But online video has experienced explosive growth in the past year and video ads have grown right along with it. Look at these numbers from FreeWheel:

Twitter’s been talking about adding a self-serve option to their ad program for a while now and it looks like it’s finally happening. I say “looks like,” because the only official announcement was a mention at the Business Insider’s Ignition conference.

Now, the press is all over it but Twitter is hanging back. So why aren’t they banging the drums?

The PR rep for Twitter told AllThingsDigital that they’re planning a slow roll-out of the option, beginning with a few, select advertisers.

As with all of our advertising efforts, we’re starting small, testing carefully and making improvements as we learn what works. We will slowly roll this capability out to more advertisers in the coming weeks and months.

Just got used to the black bar running across the top of your screen with all the Google services listed? Well, one should learn to never get too comfortable in today’s online world. Check out the video for the new Google bar. Oh the times they are a changin’. I wonder if Google is gearing up for a big push during a competitor’s impending IPO quiet period? Just thinking out loud ……

From the Official Google blog

So what do you think?