Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: July 21 - 31 2004

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July 31 2004

Marketing email delivery success rates

A recent report by Return Path has demonstrated that the overall deliverability rate of permission based email campaigns can vary by as much as 10% depending on the day and time that mailings are sent out.

Deliverability success was gauged by a number of different aspects, including they time of the campaign, the ISP, spam filter triggers and other issues. 

Hour of day:

Highest delivery rates: 6-10am ET (2% above average)
Lowest delivery rates: 10am-2pm ET (3.1% below average)

Day of week:

Monday showed to be the most successful day of the week, with Saturday having the lowest succesful delivery rate overall.

Day/hour

Worst days- Saturdays or Sundays between 10-2pm.
Best days- Monday, followed by Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday in order of success.

July 29 2004

E-Commerce Site Trend Report

The ad-serving giant, DoubleClick has released their Q1 2004 E-Commerce Site Trend Report. Some results:

• Visitors 25% more likely to add items to a shopping cart than in Q4 2003, but 14% less likely to complete the checkout process - indicating a tendency to shop around

• For every dollar sold, five dollars worth of items were left in abandoned shopping carts.

• 14.7% of user sessions that resulted in sales were driven by in-site search features.

• 56% of people who placed items in a cart commenced the checkout process, but 60% of carts were abandoned.

Read more of this interesting report. Looking for information on ecommerce software? Read our shopping cart guide or software reviews.

Ad serving trends

Still on the topic of DoubleClick reports; also recently released is their DoubleClick Q2 2004 Ad Serving Trends report. Some results:

• 468x60 banners still hold the lion share of all image based creatives at 30%, but that's down 2 points from Q1. Average click rate was .40%

• Average click-through rates for all ad types was .56% - a decline of 17% on the previous year.

• The use of horizontal leaderboards, (728 x 90) grew 384% over the previous year.

• Rich media click rates increased to 1.17%, up from .98% in Q1 2004

Read more of Ad Serving Trends report.

July 28 2004

Verisign report on ecommerce growth & security

VeriSign, Inc. has released the third edition of the their Internet Security Intelligence Briefing. Some excerpts:

Internet Usage and Growth

• Ecommerce continued to grow over the previous year, with Verisign merchant clients transactions increasing on average 13.2%
• Continuing growth in the number of (DNS) queries, which totaled more than 400 billion per month in the first half of 2004. 
• .com registrations grew by 23 percent and .net by 20 percent during the first half of 2004, compared to the same period in 2003.

• Marked increase in multi-vector worms activity in the first half of 2004. 
• Exploits are being released more rapidly following public announcements of vulnerabilities.
• Top countries in terms of fraudulent transactions, were led by Cameroon, with 100% of transactions determined as risky. Runner-up: Nigeria (96 percent), Indonesia (93 percent), and Slovenia (92 percent).

(Phishing is the term applied to the use of forged e-mails and fraudulent web sites created to trick people into divulging personal details such as credit card numbers and account access information)

• Verisign found that 37% of phishing emails pointed users to sites located outside the USA; most commonly to destinations in Korea, China, Poland, Brazil, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia and Indonesia.
• The majority of phishing attacks were launched between 9:00 p.m. - 4:00 a.m. EDT

Read the entire Verisign Internet Security Intelligence Briefing.

July 27 2004

MyDoom virus querying search engines

MyDoom O, the worm that's been creating havoc since last year, has added another weapon to it's arsenal; search engines.

When the virus infects a system, it searches for files on the computer for domain names. Once it finds one, it then queries search engines including Google and Yahoo for email addresses associated with these domains.

The amount of activity from thousands of infected machines caused some problems for Google and Yahoo today through being bombarded with virus generated queries, but both companies state that they have the issue under control.

Read more about MyDoom

Telephone & live chat vs. email support 

According to a recent Connell Associates study and reported by eMarketer, while respondents to a survey favored telephone and live chat as options for customer service, satisfaction with those means of communication is not necessarily high. While email support was rated as the most convenient, only just over half said they were satisfied with customer service via this medium. The results on all options show one major common element - there's a lot of room for improvement. Read more.

Just on the subject of live chat software, if you're looking to trial this on your site, check out our live chat software/services guide that also contains a free trial offer.

July 25 2004

b2b companies spending more on web marketing.

In a recent Forrester survey commissioned by Unica Corp., 280 b2b senior marketing executives were asked various questions about budgets for the year ahead. Approximately 43% of respondents said they would increase spending on marketing via the Internet. Read more.

July 24 2004

Hackers paying more attention to SSL

As more ecommerce merchants are understanding the importance of online business security and the low hanging fruit has been picked; it appears that the attention of hackers is turning to towards compromising more secure technologies with a view to financial gain.

Netcraft has reported that scans of servers running SSL have been at higher levels than normal over the past week. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, the technology that transmits data in an encrypted form and in a way that only the intended recipient receives it - well, that's the theory anyway. Sites/pages using SSL are easily identified by the https:// prefix in the browser address bar and a lock or key displaying in the browser status bar.

SSL hasn't been without it security holes - recently, vulnerabilities were found in mod_ssl, which is widely used in Apache servers running OpenSSL. A patch was released, but some hosting services are notoriously slow with security updates. 

You can check what your host runs via the Netcraft site and inquire with your hosting service as to whether their patching is up to date. This isn't being nosey or bothersome, you may save yourself and others hosted on your server a whole heap of heartache.

Heat being turned up on SEO companies

I've been reading some *really* bad press of late relating to a number of flashy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) companies. While it's a shame that the industry is suffering from a somewhat poor image at the moment, it is good to see these unethical operators being exposed.

In regards to who these companies are, you may have noticed in my writings that I tend not to mention web technology organizations with questionable ethics by name. This is because information floating around the web is quite often like a game of Chinese whispers and I don't wish to make accusations of practices that I haven't experienced first hand. I also don't want to deal with law suits from disgruntled people :).

Having said that, I do feel it's useful to alert people to the problems with this particular industry. If you're considering hiring an SEOP (Search Engine Optimization Professional), think about it long and hard and ask the person or company a *lot* of questions before parting with your cash. It's not just the initial fees you could lose - if you hire the wrong person, your online business could be paying the price for a long time to come. Your site could wind up totally banned from the major engines - forever.

If you can afford the time to study up on optimization, in many instances it's better to do it yourself; because nobody will care as much for your business than you. 

Learn more about hiring SEOP's or doing it yourself.

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July 22 2004

Russian web extortionists arrested

Over the last 12 months online blackmail has become a rapidly increasing problem. Tech savvy criminals have been emailing site owners, particularly those involved with online betting, demanding large sums of money. If the site owner doesn't give in to the demands, the site is inundated with data - a denial of service attack; which takes the site offline.

Law enforcement agencies haven't had a great deal of success in tracking down the perpetrators; but a few days ago, 3 Russians were arrested whom police believe are part of a much larger group. You can read more about these arrests on Reuters.

It's a great shame that so many phishing, extortion and other scams seem to originate from Eastern Europe. It gives the whole region a bad name. For many internet merchants, mention the term "sale originating in Eastern Europe" and the immediate word that comes to mind is "fraud".

Eastern Europe has thousands of very skilled web professionals living in abject poverty due to the economic/political infrastructure of the region. Many of these people offer their skills to Western companies at *very* cheap rates, but unfortunately others opt to generate income via illegal means. 

While I have no sympathy for those who choose to engage in online fraud, I do hope that things improve for the people in these countries very soon as I firmly believe this will cut down on online fraud. 

I've worked with many talented Eastern European programmers and developers, and to learn about the day to day challenges they face within their own countries is a real eye opener. Things we take for granted such as reliable telephone service and electricity supply are so fragile over there. Internet access is still incredibly expensive and of low quality. Many younger developers are drafted into the armed forces. This interrupts their progress at a time in their lives when they can learn the most in the shortest space in time. All these things greatly affects those people trying to establish a name for themselves on the web. 

Many payment processing companies such as PayPal will not support Eastern European countries yet, making the process of paying programmers and general ecommerce activity so much more difficult. The continuous frustration, the lack of proper policing and small business support proves to be too much for some and they turn to cyber crime.

The lure of capitalism and the development of a capitalist society has been a very long and painful experience for these countries - I often wonder whether they would have been better off remaining socialist societies.

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