Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: November 11-30 2004

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November 20 2004

Kids leading the way in web page consumption

According to Nielsen Netratings, children aged between 2(?) and 11 accounted for the largest growth in comparison to other age groups. The average number of pages viewed by this age group was 264, more than double the number from 2 years ago. The report points out that this doesn't necessarily reflect that kids are spending more time online than 2 years ago, but they are digesting content at a faster rate, some of that due, in my opinion, to the uptake of broadband.

Read the report 

November 18 2004

Fraud - merchants getting savvy

A recent report on Internet News states that while the total $ value of fraud for 2004 will be 37% more than 2003, fraudulent sales will account for 1.3 percent of total sales - a drop of .1% over last year. Concern regarding fraud has caused merchants to reject far more suspicious orders than in previous years. Preventative fraud measures such as AVS and CVS are also at an all time high.

Read more of this report.

Merchants, learn more about protecting against online fraud

Shopping cart software Learn more about shopping carts or read our reviews of some the best shopping cart software around! Need to learn more about merchant accounts or payment processors? Try our ecommerce guides

Google's scholarly search

With the differences in results pages (SERPs) between the various search engines becoming increasingly less; big players such as Google are focusing on providing customized results for specific niches. If you're an academic or student, Google's new offering is sure to interest you - Google Scholar.

According to the Mighty G, Google Scholar allows the searcher to find papers, theses and technical reports from a wide range of academic sources. I tried it a few minutes ago, but each search kept generating a 404 error. Perhaps it detected that I was a high school dropout ;). Anyway, I'm sure it's just a temporary glitch and Google Scholar will prove to be a very useful tool to those with a higher level of formal education than me :). 

November 16 2004

Making money marketing to Moms.

eMarketer has published some interesting figures relating to the email habits of mothers; taken from a Lucid Marketing and BSM Media survey. Key findings included:

• 67% check their email 3-4 times a day
• 27% prefer communicating by email
• 66% spend more money with firms that provide useful information via email
• 71% say email influences purchase decisions
• 96% of Mothers use email

Read more of this report

Read my article on web marketing and women

November 14 2004

Newspaper loyalists turn increasingly to the web

According to a report from Yahoo, over 72 percent of newspaper "loyalists", those reading a newspaper at least 3 times a week, access the Internet at least once a day - whereas only 42% read a newspaper each day. Participants stated they accessed the web each day because of the range of available content, currency, convenience, and the ability to control what they read.

Not only does this survey show the ever increasing preference of the web over traditional media, but also that offline marketing in newspapers may still be of benefit to direct potential clients to online destinations. 

One of my clients uses print media very effectively - they save on newspaper space and therefore cost by stating their special offers quite clearly, yet briefly, in their print ads and really highlight the fact that more information is available from their site.

Read more of this report.

MSN complements new search with blog

Have you tried the new MSN search yet? I mentioned last week that Microsoft had been using Inktomi powered results - and Inktomi is owned by Yahoo. On Thursday, Microsoft unleashed it's own search technology to the public and I'm quite impressed with it. Whether it will be a serious challenger to Google, it's way too early to tell. What is *really* impressive is the PR exercise MSN have launched - a blog dedicated to their search engine. No more do you have to grumble about spam listings or irrelevant results in forums, you can post a comment straight to msnsearch's WebLog.

There's not too many posts up their yet, but the MS staff looking after the blog appear to be quite friendly, open to constructive criticism and more importantly - they seem to be acting on feedback.

New marketing book review

Just published today is my review of Henriette  Martel-Lawson's first book - "200 Marketing Ideas For Your Website". It really is a good read and well worth considering as an addition to your electronic or real world book shelf.

November 12 2004

Fear mongering over domain name ownership

ICANN, the industry body that controls domain names, have introduced new policies regarding the transfer of domain names. This has caused a great deal of confusion and have led some Registrars to warn their clients that the new procedures will cause an increase in "domain jackings"- where an unauthorized party takes control over a domain name. Registrars are advising all their clients to "lock" their domain names. There's nothing wrong with locking a domain, it's easy enough to do and does improve security, but it seems that this panic is somewhat unfounded.

My understanding of the new policy is this: The registrant still needs to initiate and authorize the transfer, and must provide valid identification - it's only if the *losing* registrar fails to reply to the transfer authorization from the gaining registrar *after* the registrant gives authorization, then the domain name will be transferred automatically.

One of the reasons that ICANN have implemented this new policy is that some Registrars have been known to ignore transfer authorizations from a gaining registrar in order to keep an account. I've seen this happen first-hand several times over the years with some big name registrars.

Read more about the new domain name transfer policy - both for and against.

In the market for a new domain name? Read our domain name guide.

Ad serving trend report highlights

DoubleClick has released their Ad Serving Trend Report
for the third quarter of 2004Q3 2004. Amongst the findings in relation to ads displayed over their huge network:

• Rich media comprised 43% of all ads served
• Click-through rates for all ads served was 0.62%.
• Rich media click-throughs were at 1.17%
• Only 16% of advertisers used frequency capping*
• 468 x 60 banners accounted for 25.2% of all ads - a decline of 4.8% over Q2
• Leaderboard ads (728 x 90) accounted for 9.3% of all ads served

*What is frequency capping?

Frequency capping is a feature where the advertiser can control the number of times an ad is displayed to a unique visitor. I use frequency capping on Taming the Beast.net so that the popunders on this site only display once every 12 or 24 hours in an effort not to annoy you all too much :).

Download the Ad Serving Trend report (PDF 60kb)

Learn more about Banners: design tips, sizes & targeting 

Free web traffic statistics How many visitors hit your site? How long do they stay? Try a free traffic monitoring service

Virus writers faster at exploiting flaws

A new variant of the MyDoom worm that began spreading earlier this week is one of the fastest ever exploits of an announced MS vulnerability.

From various reports I've seen, the average time for virus to be developed after a flaw has been found and announced on underground networks is around 5-6 days. The new MyDoom variants, MyDoom.ag and MyDoom.ah only took 2 days before they were released. There is no patch from Microsoft at this time, although XP2 users should be safe.

Learn more about MyDoom.ag and MyDoom.ah

November 11 2004

UK Ecommerce thriving

Partial results or a survey mentioned on the BBC site is showing ecommerce to be alive and well in the United Kingdom. Key findings included:

• Small businesses with web sites up 16% on 2003
• 73 percent of UK businesses have sites with information about their products and services.
• The percentage of businesses that reported they benefited from technology rose a staggering 45% on 2003

Read more 

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