Marketing Pilgrim

As online marketers most are concerned about click fraud. The endless battle to make sure that when you are buying a click it’s a real click and not something else. Marketers lose sleep over this every night but ht economy may have created a whole other category of fraud called “friendly fraud”.

First, I am not sure where we are headed when we can call fraud “friendly fraud” like we find in an article over at the Wall Street Journal. Sounds too much like “friendly fire” and there is nothing friendly about that. So what exactly is it? According to the article

Online merchants are fighting a surge in so-called friendly fraud, as more consumers try to get out of paying for their Internet purchases in the recession.

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In a report from eMarketer there is a mixed bag of news for online sales from Q1. The study that was done by Forrester Research and Shop.org shows an overall increase in online sales of 11%. Nice number for sure considering the daily doom and gloom that seems to dominate the economic news of most days.

Digging into the findings just a bit reveals how that increase is not something that appears to be felt across the board. Overall, 58% of those using the online sales channel experienced an increase in sales. When you put it that way it seems to say that the increase may be more a result of some areas showing bigger increases which were offset other poor performers. The chart below reveals the weak spot.

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While Amazon makes the big splash with Kindle 2 and fends off potential lawsuit regarding its technology, Sony has cut a deal with Google that is a classic.

As reported at cnet, in a partnership with Sony, Google will provide over 500,000 titles whose copyrights have expired which include literary classics like “Sense and Sensibility” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. This move takes the number of titles to that the Sony offering has to 600,000 vs. the 250,000 for the Amazon offering. These include German, French, Spanish, Italian and other language translations as well.

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Michael Stebbins—Market Motive

Whilst not technically a session I was fortunate enough to hear Michael Stebbins of Market Motive present a little mini-presentation in the Expo hall, which grabbed a lot of people’s attention. I was away from my laptop but managed to type up notes on my iPhone.

His presentation was titled: 15 stupid things you can do to your website:

1. Using lots of JavaScript menus so search engines can’t crawl your website properly.

2. Using stupid keywords—ones that are too competitive or no one is searching for. Michael suggested picking mid-range keywords and work your way up.

3. ‘No Crawl’ added to the robots.txt on the test site, but then accidentally copying that over to the live site when it goes live. This could include using the ‘disallow all’ command in the robots file of a test site and then unwittingly copying that robots.txt file over to the live website.

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E-consultancy reports that a recent study conducted by the UK National Customer Satisfaction Index scored retailers, e-commerce reported a stunning score of 82 points for Q4 2008 (out of 100). Why is this news so interesting? Because the average retailer customer satisfaction score is 74.8.

Amazon and Play.com helped e-commerce separate itself from the rest by posting 85 and 87 satisfaction scores. I had a feeling Amazon would be ranked high on this list, but I’m really surprised to see Play.com achieve such a high customer satisfaction level. I haven’t personally played around with their site too much, but hopefully this will give them some much deserved attention in the conversion-world for their great work.

I must admit, when I saw Ticketmaster’s score of 74 a small part of me jumped for joy. I don’t think I’d rate their site that high, but I’m glad I’m not the only one. eBay also received a low score of 79. Sites like John Lewis and Tesco were not considered e-commerce Web sites, instead they were placed in an “other” category.

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According to the New York Times, Yahoo plans to announce today that they will be including video and images in their paid search ads. Traditionally, Yahoo’s main source of ad revenue came from display ads but the shift in that market had an effect on them in the 4th quarter of last year when display ad revenue was down 2% but search was up 11%.

We all know that Yahoo is looking for a piece of the pie that Google has at the parent’s table while Yahoo is left at the kid’s table looking for scraps regarding paid search revenue. This effort shows that there is still some fight in them. Will it work? Who knows these days.
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Below is an example cited in the article for Pedigree dog food.

I don’t have a dog but I guess they figure that dog owners looking for Pedigree need to see a video. Pedigree thinks so.

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In a recent Foresee Results survey of online shoppers, nearly a third said they used their mobile phone as part of a shopping trip. That means that 29% of these shoppers stood in a brick and mortar store, and pulled out their phone before deciding whether to make a purchase—which means that these retailers could be filling a significant gap.

Most of these mobile-enabled shoppers didn’t head straight for the retailer’s website:

• 72% ask someone about a product (though the survey doesn’t indicate whether this was via telephone, text message or Internet, eg Twitter)
• 40% send a picture of a product they might purchase
• 24% use the Internet to compare prices
• 15% use the Internet to read product reviews

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Amazon had a great fourth quarter as reported today in the WSJ. Sales were up 18% and profits rose 9%. Those numbers are pretty strong when things are going well but in today’s economy these are outrageous results.

Here’s a few more numbers to drool over. Earnings of $225 million for the quarter ended Dec 31st. This is compared to earnings of $207 million for the same period a year earlier. What’s that you ask a company that’s experiencing growth year over year in this environment? Yup, that’s right. Oh and the $6.7 billion (with a “b”) revenue number for the quarter is very impressive indeed.

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By Rene LeMerle

For the best part of 2008, we heard the common tale of marketing budgets being shifted online, as companies sought affordable and measurable results. It seems the retail sector was no exception.

A report out by search management firm SearchIgnite suggests retail paid search grew 12% in Q4 2008, compared to 2007’s fourth quarter results. The growth trend was consistent across all the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN).

Of the three months in Q4, Nov 2008 was the stand out, experiencing a phenomenal increase of 43%, which suggests retailers we going on the offensive to leverage Black Friday/Cyber Monday activity. Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite said:

Retailers were more aggressive with their paid search spend in the first half of the quarter compared with the year earlier in an effort to capture more consumer dollars ahead of the holidays.

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The Cyber Monday numbers are in, and unfortunately, they aren’t exactly what we all hoped for. According to the New York Times, Cyber Monday had only a 1% increase this year over last. This number came as a surprise as total transactions were up 14% over last year. 

So why the small increase? It all comes down to the order size. Consumers spent, on average, $7.19 less per transaction this year. In 2007 consumers averaged $58.81 per transaction. This year, that number fell to $51.62.

These numbers were calculated by Chase Paymentech’s Cyber Holiday Pulse Index, in which they surveyed 25 of the largest 150 Internet payment processing networks. The decrease in average spend is likely the result or an increased amount of discounts available to consumers this year.

Let’s hope that consumers aren’t as frugal the rest of the month. The biggest online spending day of the year, however, is still coming with “Green Monday” most likely a week from today.

By Peter Young

The specter of a credit crunch/recession has been looming large both in the US and the UK over the last year or so, with resulting bottom lines significantly affected. For many retailers this has seen Christmas come later than in previous years, with many retailers only starting to see the increases in traffic normally associated with the festive time of year.

However according to some research on both sides of the pond, things are starting to look a little brighter. A recent report by Comscore suggested Cyber Monday became the second heaviest online spending day in history (eclipsed only be that of Green Monday, December 10th 2007). For those wondering what all these days are, here’s the overview

The term Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. [1] Whereas Black Friday is associated with traditional brick-and-mortar stores, “Cyber Monday” symbolizes a busy day for online retailers.

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Microsoft announced late yesterday the launch of a new mobile search offering—product search under their Live brand. Microsoft’s browser-based mobile product search, accessible from m.live.com

The Live product search page displays products available in online stores (though the “Near Santa Cruz, CA” in the screen cap below would indicate that brick-and-mortars are also searched), including prices, ratings and reviews. The search results also composite ratings on specific features of the products, including things such as ease of use, and report the results back to you.

A sample generic search results page:

As part of this roll out, Live is also launching the “Find My Location” feature in the UK and Japan, triangulating users’ locations from cell phone towers. The feature, which currently only works with Vodafone, O2, Orange or T-Mobile networks in the UK, is similar to Google’s “My Location” feature, announced in November.

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