Marketing/Ecommerce Research

Survey : online fraud 2009

Michael Bloch — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:36:26 +0000

According to an annual CyberSource Corp. survey, Ecommerce merchants feel they are winning the ongoing battle against online fraud. Key findings from the survey include: - Projected losses to U.S. and Canadian eCommerce in 2009 are expected to be $3.3 billion, down from $4 billion in 2008. I’m not sure if that figure takes into account the [...]

Search - Google, Bing win; Yahoo loses

Michael Bloch — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:58:04 +0000

comScore yesterday released its analysis of the U.S. search marketplace for October. There’s more joy for Google as usual and also for Bing, but Yahoo’s fortunes in the search area continue to fade. According to comScore, Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches in October 2009, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share, up [...]

Page load speed and Google rankings

Michael Bloch — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:13:19 +0000

The widespread adoption of broadband should have brought us all blistering page load times. But some designers and programmers decided to suck up that extra bandwidth with complex pages that really don’t need to be. This bit of news might have them reconsidering. Matt Cutts from Google said in a recent interview there is strong lobbying [...]

Paid content survey results

Michael Bloch — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:15:17 +0000

Contrary to popular belief, it seems that a lot of folks might be willing to pay for online newspaper content after all according to a recent survey - if the price and content is right of course. Rupert Murdoch has been pretty vocal about charging people to access content on his online newspaper properties. He’s copped [...]

Asia Pacific Internet audience growth

Michael Bloch — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:43:43 +0000

comScore, Inc. released a survey report a few hours ago on the growth of Internet audiences in the Asia-Pacific region The survey found that the Asia-Pacific region has seen significant growth in the past year, increasing 22 percent to nearly half a billion active users, with most individual countries in the region experiencing double-digit growth rates. [...]

Chargeback repeat offender blacklist

Michael Bloch — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:47:41 +0000

A free service is available to merchants to blacklist card holders who issue chargebacks without good reason. Chargebacks are the bane of online merchants and it’s a sad fact that some customers like to issue chargebacks as soon as something isn’t to their liking. Some will threaten a chargeback from the get-go rather than try to [...]

Spam tactics in subject lines

Michael Bloch — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:48:06 +0000

It’s interesting to see some marketers and newsletter list owners, particularly in the information product and B2B sphere, still having to resort to tactics used by spammers to try and get their email through. If something looks like spam, it will often be treated as such. I’m referring to subject lines like this: F*ree rep0rt What [...]

Google Caffeine preparing for rollout

Michael Bloch — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:56:32 +0000

The sandbox has been taken down and the announcement has been made. Google Caffeine is headed for prime time.. soonish. Caffeine isn’t a fluffy Google app, but a major change to what is under the hood of Google search. I wrote about Google Caffeine back in August and then promptly forgot about it. I visited the [...]

Twitter cybersquatting rampant

Michael Bloch — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:53:02 +0000

A survey of Twitter accounts for 100 big brand advertisers has found that few have ownership of the Twitter handles that correspond to the names of their companies or their brands. According to Adage, among those who have fallen victim to Twitter cybersquatting are General Motors, Comcast, Mastercard and Nestle. Hyundai, also affected, are so incensed by [...]

Murdoch may ban Googlebot

Michael Bloch — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:49:23 +0000

Media baron Rupert Murdoch doesn’t seem to like Google. That may be somewhat of an understatement. Earlier this year Mr. Murdoch accused Google of stealing content it doesn’t own and urged media outlets to fight back. “Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights? Thanks, but no thanks.” Rupert plans to have people pay for [...]

Socially conscious outsourcing

Michael Bloch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:44:51 +0000

Outsourcing is very prevalent among online businesses and there’s now a way to be a bit more socially conscious in the way we go about it. Sweat shops are by no means confined to the physical world of goods production. Web workers, be they programmers or marketing help chasing inbound links, are often paid miserable wages. [...]

Ecommerce sales go backwards

Michael Bloch — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:33:47 +0000

Retail ecommerce sales figures are gloomy, but the light at the end of the tunnel may not be an oncoming train. comScore, Inc. recently released its Q3 2009 retail ecommerce sales estimates - U.S. online retail spending came to $29.6 billion, *down* 2 percent versus year ago. Q3 2009 is the first time on record according [...]

Ecommerce conversion barrier survey

Michael Bloch — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:26:28 +0000

I often write on various surveys about shopping cart abandonment, but it’s often overlooked that not every person browsing our sites and using our shopping carts is at the point of being ready to purchase. iPerceptions’ “Retail/E-Commerce Industry Report Q2 2009″ found that well over a third of visitors to the sites they surveyed are in [...]

Google page preview

Michael Bloch — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:40:47 +0000

An interesting new feature from Google is called “page preview” As you may have guessed, it provides a thumbnail shot of a web site next to the relevant listing. The accompanying snippet is quite a bit longer too:

Ad buying scams

Michael Bloch — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:44:14 +0000

Phoney ad buyers are causing havoc around the web by getting unwitting publishers to help them spread malware. This is an important issue for all site owners who make their money from ad revenue to be aware of. The scam usually operates in this way: A party claiming to be an ad executive or marketer approaches a [...]

Click fraud and ROI

Michael Bloch — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:28:30 +0000

A recent report says that click fraud is down on the same quarter last year. It’s good news, but something that hasn’t changed…. .. click fraud is still way too high and many merchants aren’t aware of the impact on their bottom line. Click Forensics last week released what it calls “advertising audience quality” figures for the [...]

eBay’s Top Rated Seller program

Michael Bloch — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:45:30 +0000

In case you missed the rollout (as I did) - in a strategy to woo shoppers back to eBay, the company changed qualification criteria on discounts for US merchants at the beginning of this month. Sellers will now need to work even harder to avoid low feedback scores; but will reap the rewards in [...]

Virtual goods - money for nothing

Michael Bloch — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:43:42 +0000

The virtual goods industry is set to become a $1 billion business this year in the USA, and is expected to grow 60% in 2010. The information comes from Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market, 2009 - 2010, a new research report that focused on the size and future of the virtual goods [...]

15 years of banner ads

Michael Bloch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:25:08 +0000

It was October 27, 1994 when banner ads first made their appearance. It’s hard to believe there was a time when they weren’t around. It seems the first banner appeared on Hotwired.com and the site was also the first commercial web magazine to attract high profile corporate sponsorships dollars on the web. Here’s how the banner looked [...]

Treading carefully

Michael Bloch — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:02:21 +0000

User generated content, be it in the form of comments, forum posts, profiles, article contributions or otherwise, can really enrich a site.. and cause their share of headaches too. In one project I worked on, I had occasion to gently tap a community member on the shoulder who had decided to do his own thing, [...]

Toilet roll style sales page record

Michael Bloch — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:14:30 +0000

I believe I’ve just seen the longest “toilet roll” style sales letter page ever. From the top of the sales page to the first call to action was an incredible 37 screens long. I’ve written on the topic of (what I call) toilet roll sales letter pages before and detailed the formula - the concept can [...]

2009 holiday online shopping survey

Michael Bloch — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:56:37 +0000

With the silly.. er.. holiday shopping season approaching, merchants increasingly turn their thoughts to grabbing a slice of the action. A recent survey by MarketLive polled more than 1,000 consumers about their shopping habits for the 09 holiday season. Among the key findings: - 55 percent of surveyed shoppers plan to do their holiday shopping online this [...]

The half million dollar banner ad

Michael Bloch — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:56:46 +0000

Imagine you owned Twitter. How much would someone have to offer you to have a banner ad for their business displayed across the Twitter network for just 24 hours? Does half a million bucks sit ok with you? According to Marketing Vox, marketing company uSocial.net recently offered Twitter $500,000 to place a banner ad on the [...]

Monetizing your Twitter stream

Michael Bloch — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:13:10 +0000

Want to generate some cash from your Twitter account? This might be a goer- a new ad network for Twitter publishers that has already attracted some big names. I’m not overly into Twitter, although I use it for a couple of projects a couple of minutes a day and it does send quite a few visitors. [...]

The most expensive keywords

Michael Bloch — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:34:54 +0000

A recent report from AdGooroo highlights some of the most expensive (or highest paying - depends on which end you’re working) keywords around. If you’re an AdSense publisher with a high ranking site on any of these terms, good luck to you! If you’re an Adwords advertiser targeting these terms, all I can say is [...]

The death of PageRank?

Michael Bloch — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:26:13 +0000

The PageRank feature in Google Webmaster tools was recently removed. It seems that Google wants webmasters focusing more on other issues rather than being fixated on PageRank scores. Whether it will be removed from the Google toolbar and when is unknown. Nowadays Google is only updating the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a [...]

Who are you?

Michael Bloch — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:05:33 +0000

I really want to know. (Apologies to Pete Townshend.) Actually, the thing is I may not really, really want to know. I may not bother to open an email with a vague “from” and/or subject line; or accept a invitation from someone I don’t recognize. Today I received an invitation via LinkedIn from someone whose name doesn’t [...]

Search engine wars - October update

Michael Bloch — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:22:17 +0000

Is the honeymoon over for Bing? I feel it’s a little early to be making those sorts of predictions - although some already are - but Bing has lost some market share this month after a promising upwards trend in previous months. According to Hitwise, after having 9.48% of U.S. market share in August, Bing dropped [...]

Herd behavior and scarcity

Michael Bloch — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:26:58 +0000

Most of us like to think we’re individuals and not sheep, but the herd mentality runs deep, often operating on a subconscious level. Most of us who have worked an online business probably already know this, but a recent study has confirmed people are inclined to purchase a product if they are told that another item [...]

M-commerce has (finally) arrived

Michael Bloch — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:39:43 +0000

It seems like I’ve been reading about M-Commerce (ecommerce via mobile phone) being the Next Big Thing for years and the prediction has been repeated for so long, I had pretty much tuned out. But it looks like Amazon have made it a reality for the masses. Amazon has launched their Mobile Payments Service (AMPS), a [...]