Holiday E-Commerce Sales Surpass $23B - 12/29/2006
Media Post - by Mark Walsh, Friday, Dec 29, 2006 6:00 AM ET

ONLINE HOLIDAY SPENDING IN 2006 increased 26% over last year to $23.11 billion for the nearly two-month period ending Dec. 26, according to data released Thursday by comScore Networks. A late surge of Internet shopping in the week before Christmas--a 38% jump over the year-earlier period--helped push the total to new levels.

'That online retail consumer spending for the year-to-date has surpassed the $100 billion mark is a testament to the continued growth and strength of the online marketplace,' said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks, in a prepared statement. He added that retail e-commerce now accounts for 7% of U.S. consumer retail spending, excluding gas, autos and food.

Amazon led all retailers in online holiday sales, followed by Dell.com, Yahoo.com, Walmart.com and Ticketmaster.com. BestBuy.com, Walmart.com and Ticketmaster.com posted the biggest gains over last year, with each site increasing sales by more than 50%.

E-commerce sales growth was fueled mainly by buying in big-ticket and popular gift categories including jewelry and watches (up 67%), video games (64%) video game consoles (63%), event tickets (55%), and consumer electronics (39%).

The 26% increase in 2006 online holiday sales is just slightly more than the 24% gain in e-commerce activity during the rest of the year. Web retail sales from January to October increased from $62.6 billion to $77.5 billion, according to comScore."

US Online Retail Breaks a Record...Again
An all-time record for online sales in one day was set on November 27 when US online sales totaled $608 million. That record has already been broken.




Though this total is impressive, the record has already been broken.

According to comScore Networks, a mere one week later, on Monday, December 4, a new record for spending in a single day was established, as consumers opened their wallets online to the tune of $647 million. This was 26% higher than the total on the corresponding day of last year and it is $39 million more than the total spent on Cyber Monday."

eMarketer.com - Online Ad Spending to Outpace Overall Ad Market Growth

DECEMBER 8, 2006

Internet advertising continues to gain on other ad categories.


ZenithOptimedia forecasts that global Internet advertising spending will grow by 28.2% in 2007, at the same time ad spending in other media will grow by only 3.9% — in other words, online ad spending will grow seven times faster.


This disparity speaks volumes about the ongoing seismic shift in the world of advertising. However, the shift to the Internet among US marketers is even more dramatic. eMarketer's latest ad spending projections were released on Wednesday (see Internet Advertising Will Weather a Sluggish Economy). These put growth in US online ad spending at 18.9% in 2007, within an entire advertising industry set to grow by only 1.4%."

MediaPost Publications - Study: Online Video Influences IT Purchases - 11/14/2006
Study: Online Video Influences IT Purchases
by Wendy Davis, Tuesday, Nov 14, 2006 6:00 AM ET

A new study by Universal McCann and KnowledgeStorm suggests emarketers should consider ads in online video, and social networks.

Researchers surveyed over 5,300 business and IT professionals. Nearly all respondents said they viewed online video sites.

63% of respondents said they view online videos at least once a week, another 27% view videos once month.

82% of people share video at least monthly (44% do so once a month, 32% weekly, and 6% daily). A majority said online video had an impact on work-related IT purchase decisions.

In Online Spin Today,
Seana Mulcahy notes:

The latest Future Spending Index from consultants Retail Forward Inc. just came out, predicting that shoppers will increase their spending in October. The Future Spending Index stands at 99.1 in October, up from 92.7 in September. There are some critical factors that seem to be boosting consumer confidence: gas prices finally dropping, the stock market hitting new records and job openings.

and

52 percent of consumers plan to shop online. These consumers plan to spend about the same as they did last holiday season. Up Market consumers (those with incomes of $75,000+) are predicted to spend 20 percent more online, while Down Market consumers ( Incomes less than $22,500) say they don't shop online.

A holiday shopping forecast by The Performics 50 states that fourth quarter 2006 online sales will eclipse those of last year by 53 percent. This will be about equal to the total sales of both Q1 and Q2 2006, combined. The company also noted that competition for higher-priced, more popular keywords in sponsored search engine advertising has increased significantly.

E-Mail Marketing Getting High Click, Open, and Conversion Relative to Cost

WebSurveyor Corp.'s August survey reveals that web merchants plan to increase e-mail marketing spending efforts. 18.4% expect to grow their opt-in lists by more than 50% within the next year, while another 25.1% will increase their lists by 16% to 50%.

Reported by Mark Brohan in a recent article, he says that 73% of chain retailers, catalogers, virtual merchants and consumer brand manufacturers taking part in the monthly survey on e-mail marketing, spend 5% of their marketing budget or less on e-mail marketing, yet just over half of respondents, 50.6%, report that 6% or more of their sales come from e-mail marketing, with 25% saying the proportion is over 11%.

63.8% of retailers conduct up to three e-mail campaigns each month and another 25.2% conduct between four and eight campaigns, says the report. 62.8% also indicate that they've increased the frequency of e-mail campaigns in the past year.

E-mail marketing consultants consider an open rate of about 20% and a click-through rate of 4% to 5% to be a highly effective e-mail campaign.
- 26.5% of participants in the survey report open rates of 20% or more (11.2% reported 20% to 25% while 15.3% said more than 25%)
- 11.8% report open rates of 16% to 19%
- 14.6% report e-mail open rates of less than 5%
- 6.2% say open rates of 1% or less.


Click-through and Conversion averages are growing:

- 17% report e-mail click-through rates of 16% or more
- 28.9% report click-through rates of 6% to 15%.
- 20.2% of respondents report e-mail sales conversion rates of 1% to 2%
- 26.5% with conversion averages of between 2.1% and 4%
- 14% with conversion rates of between 4.1%
- 10%, and 3.2% with sales conversion averages greater than 10%


Compared to paid search, he says, which can absorb up to 50% of a big retailer's total annual online marketing budget, e-mail marketing remains relatively inexpensive.

- 41.6% of all retailers taking part in the research spend less than 1% of their total annual marketing budgets on e-mail. That compares with
- 31.3 % spend between 1% and 5%
- 13.8% commit 6% to 10%
- 5.6% spend from 11% to 15%
- 3.8% from 16% to 25%
- 4.1% with e-mail budgets that account for 25% of their overall marketing budgets

Google Removing Top Adsense Ads Based on Searchers Behavior

"A WebmasterWorld thread reports that the top blue AdWords ads have been removed from the Google search results page. But in fact, it seems to be a user by user setting. Some users will see the top blue ads and some users will not. What does it depend on? It seems it is based on your ad clicking behavior."

Bill: Refresh a search a few times and Google will stop displaying ads at the top of the results.

This is good news for SEOs, providing more search results above the fold to researchers in the early buying cycle who don't usually click on ads.

Supplemental Results at Goggle just got way fresher!

Results are now much fresher, and thanks to Rusty Brick I found a cool way to check results.

Supplemental results are stored in a separate index than main results, and different spiders are used to index them. I expect they aren't spidered as regularly and are considered less unique/valuable pages to the searchers than the main index results from the same site. If your key message content is on supplemental pages, non-supplemental pages will dominate in the search results. Basically if your page is in the supplemental index, Google has decided it's content is not unique and there is better information out there. A view Supplemental information link is displayed after all search results and I'm assuming is rarely (.0001%) ever used.

To see all site supplemental results do a search in Google for www.url.com/ *** (include space).

Example:
Search "site:industry.siemens.com/ ***, envirex" and you'll see all the pages/files in the supplemental index with the word "envirex" on it. You can even add a negative or positive variable example "+.swf".

To see the number of supplemental results rolling out in google data centers, use the main URL (The tool adds the space and ***, Note it doesn't work for sites having more than 1000 pages) automatically using this tool http://oy-oy.eu/google/supplemental/ unfortunately It doesn't work with variables.

Industry Benchmark Reveals Site Search Impacts One Third of All Online Sales for Leading Retailers

Coremetrics LIVEmark Index Indicates Site Search Users Purchase 86% More Often and Spend 11% More

"San Mateo, California - April 20, 2005 - On-site search engines are used by consumers in more than one third of all visits that result in a purchase, according to LIVEmark Index data released today by Coremetrics, the leading provider of hosted Web analytics and precision marketing solutions. Coremetrics LIVEmark Index data collected during the second week of April also showed that site search users purchase 86% more often and have an 11% higher average order size than the typical site visitor."

Note: The LIVEmark Index includes over 110 leading web leading web retailers in seven sub-categories: Apparel & Accessories, Specialty Retail, Sports and Outdoor, Home, Garden, General Merchandisers, and Books/Music/Video.

Time of Day Impacts PPC Clickthroughs

September 06, 2006

By The Marketing Experiments Journal

Marketing Experiments examines significant differences in clickthrough rates depending on the time of day.

When one sets the parameters for a particular Google AdWords campaign, it is all too easy to ignore the impact of the time of day at which your ads are shown.

Recently we decided to go through a very large amount of AdWords data to try to determine at which time of day we would get the highest clickthrough rate.

First, here is how we broke down the different times of day. We segmented the day into six segments, or "zones," of four hours each.

We then went through our data to determine, across four different research partners, whether the conversion rates achieved varied significantly according to the time of day.

As you look at this data, keep in mind that we are measuring only clickthrough rates across six different periods of time.
There are other factors to consider before making changes to your campaigns:

• While conversion rates for one particular campaign may be high early in the day, the volume of traffic may be considerably higher later in the day.
• Your clickthough rate may also impact your average cost per click, as Google adjusts your costs according to clickthrough rates at different times of day.

In other words, be sure to take all factors into consideration as you refine your campaign.

With regard to clickthrough rates at different times of day, here is what we found out:

There are significant differences in clickthrough rates depending on the time of day.

As mentioned, this is just one element to consider when fine-tuning your campaign. But when you see a change as high as 61.15 percent between different "zones," it is a strong indicator that the time of day at which you show you ads is a factor you need to take seriously.