Marketing Pilgrim

Just received a whole host of interesting stats from a study by Yahoo Search Marketing.

[Warning/Disclosure/Caveat: I have copied this verbatim from what was emailed to me. So please don't shop me to the New York Times]

· Luxury travelers are largely between the ages of 40 and 64 with an average income of over 70k and take nearly four vacations per year, mostly concentrated in the U.S. Half of the vacations planned include luxury accommodations or cruises.

· The majority (87%) of all luxury travelers used the Internet and 57% used search to research and shop for travel. 61% purchased their latest trip online.

· 65% of luxury travelers claimed they “couldn’t make a good decision without search�.

Interesting (and long) article at eWeek looks at steps Google is taking to help retailers get their content found by the search engine.

Google officials point to a not surprisingly huge number of purchases that follow Web searches as well as abandoned shopping carts that immediately followed a non-productive site search. A classic example: A visitor searches a retail site for “video camera” or “movie camera” and finds nothing and leaves, when the site was expecting “camcorder” and would have shown him 20 models had he used the magic word.

eBay is now offering RSS feeds for any search result you conduct. Fantastic!

A lot of B2C companies are trying to figure out how to utilize RSS and blogs. Just allowing consumers to subscribe to newly uploaded products, or search results, via RSS is one of the best ways they can improve the user experience.

Hat’s off to eBay!
Hat tip to WMW.

New MarketingSherpa report shows average cost-per-clicks rose in 2005.

Google: up 24.8% from $1.29 to $1.61
Yahoo: up 30% from $1.03 to $1.34

Shopping search engines saw the highest jump, up 36.9%.

Via Nathan.

eWeek reports Google may consider joining Eclipse.

The article doesn’t do a great job of explaining what the heck Eclipse is, but the Eclipse site does…

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software.

comScore and Google have released a new study – “The Role of Search in Consumer Buyingâ€? – which examined holiday related purchases to see which completed online and which offline.

The result? A staggering 63% of all online shoppers completed their purchase by buying offline at a store. The share jumps when you narrow down to certain categories such as Toys, Video Games and Jewelry.

“We find that many multi-channel retailers already understand that search has tremendous impact on both online and offline purchases,� said John McAteer, head of retail, Google. “This research helps quantify exactly how influential search really is for the overall buying process.�

Are you still nonchalent when it comes to tracking negative consumer-generated media? Do you think it doesn’t effect your company? A new study will likely change your mind.

According to the Customer Dissatisfaction Study, released today, more than 50% of American shoppers say a negative shopping experience of a friend or co-worker will prevent them from setting foot in a store altogether.

From the press release…

“This study is unlike anything we’ve seen before because it shows that for every 100 American shoppers, 64 people will be told about a store’s poor products or services and no matter what that store does to entice shoppers – sales, promotions, advertising, marketing – those people will not set foot in their store,” says Paula Courtney, President, The Verde Group.