Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: December 1-10 2004

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Digital PhishNet V2 - Phishers beware.

Launched recently, The Digital PhishNet organization includes ISP's and banks amongst its membership, as well as close ties with law enforcement authorities and other government agencies. There's some very big names involved; including Microsoft and America Online.

The aims of the organization are to identify, with view to prosecuting, phishers and those who abuse personal information. While Digital PhishNet was established in September, the organization has been revamped to give it a lot more clout.

Amongst the strategies is this page that I came across; warning people that the site they were about to visit was a phishing site. This is a great idea as usually in the past, sites/domain names were deactivated, but that didn't serve to educate consumers. The warning page is simple but should be effective. Kudos to Digital PhishNet and I wish them well in their pursuit of online parasites.

December 8 2004

8.8 billion spent in online shopping in November

Nielsen//NetRatings’ Holiday eSpending Report has found that online consumers spent $8.8 billion in November 2004 (excluding travel)

This represents a 19% rise over November 2003 and a 62% increase over 2002

Online shoppers spent the most on:

Apparel/clothing - 1.5 billion
Toys/Video games - 1 billion
Video/DVD  - 8 billion
Books 621 - million
Music 481 - million

The three biggest growth categories:

Toys/Video games 43%
Videos/DVD 39%
Music 32%

More from the Holiday Espending Report (PDF)

December 5 2004

Minimizing the cost of PPC

If you've investigated Pay Per Click as a marketing strategy, no doubt you've been stunned at the prices that some people pay for the no.1 position. Find out why this happens and how you can avoid excessive PPC advertising costs in my new article.

Firefox uptake increases, users don't click on ads

Many web analytics companies are reporting that IE is still losing ground after the release of FireFox 1.0. IE reportedly now has just under 90% market share. It's still a huge slice in anyone's books, but interesting given the browsers' dominance since it emerged victorious after the browser wars of a few years ago. 

Another trend that appears to be emerging is that FireFox users are less likely to click on ads. Adtech AG of Germany has reported that only 0.11% of Firefox users click on ads, wheras Internet Explorer 6 users clock up a 0.44% CTR, with IE 5.5 users slightly higher. The reasons for this includes FireFox users, as a whole, being more tech savvy and the blockers included in FireFox.

Figures like these are sure to be making the Ad Networks rather jittery. It's not only FireFox that provides popup blocking capabilities, it's also a default feature in Windows XP Service Pack 2. Over the last few months, I have noticed a decrease in popunder revenue. As I stated late last year, it's my opinion that increasing numbers of advertisers and ad networks will turn to such technologies as "popover" ad delivery methods.

Holiday Search Marketing/ECommerce performing better

DoubleClick recently released holiday shopping figures, drawing from data gained from its massive network and partners. Amongst the findings:

• Carting frequency was 12.9%, a 23% increase over the holiday shopping week last year 

• Checkout conversion rates were 64.6%, a 13% increase over last year’s Black Friday holiday shopping week (57%)

• Overall conversion rates increased 38% to 5.8%, up from 4.2% on 2003

• Average Order Value decreased 15% from the same period in 2003

• Shopping cart abandonment stands at 55% - an 11% decrease over the same holiday shopping period last year.

• During the Black Friday weekend, average daily clicks resulting from pay-per-click search campaigns of Performics clients nearly doubled

Read more

Learn how to minimize shopping cart abandonment.

UK online audience hits 23 million, Europe 100 million

Nielsen Netratings latest data states that in the last year, the number of people surfing the Internet from home in the UK has grown by 13% to 23 million. Over 50% of these users access the web via a broadband connection and this segment also spends twice the amount of time online than UK users with dialup connections.

In Europe overall, there has been an average 12% growth in the past year of people regularly accessing the web, taking the total online audience to over 100 million. The country with the greatest growth was France, at 16%. 

The number of people in Europe surfing the web via broadband in the twelve months to October 04 increased from just over 34 million people to 54.5 million people; representing a 60% increase.

Read more - PDF 37kb

December 3 2004

Can spam? yes, indeed

The Can Spam Act, touted by ignorant politicians to be the cure to illegitmate mail woes, has - as predicted - miserably failed in my opinion.

Postini, a company that deals with email security and management for the enterprise released figures a couple of days ago that showed only 12 percent of all email messages processed in November were legitimate. This figure wasn't created from a small sample - the total number processed by Postini was nearly 7 billion. 88 percent were malicious attacks such as spam, phishing and viruses.

In case you think figures like these are trumped up, I can say with some confidence that the levels are correct. ThinkHost, the company I work for, experiences levels of around 80%. In fact, last week we had to buy a couple more servers; their sole function being to filter spam. Scary times ahead for those of us involved in the hosting industry. I still find it quite amazing that many hosts employ no filtering systems at all.

Learn more about how spam and viruses wind up in your inbox.

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Microsoft launches free blog service

Say the word blog a hundred times, no, a thousand. Why? I don't know, was just stuck for an interesting intro :). Every man and his dog has caught the blogging bug; to the point that it barely rates a mention these days. The word "blog" was this years most frequently requested definition from Merriam-Webster's online dictionary.

Anyway, Microsoft have launched their own free blog service called MSN Spaces. I didn't bother reviewing it, there, this story is finished :)

December 2 2004

Free MSN Search site submission tool

If your pages aren't showing up on the new MSN search as yet; then you may want to try submitting the home page of your site to their free submission service.

If it's been a few months since you lasted checked MSN Search to see if your site is listed, then I suggest you check as early in November Microsoft switched from using Inktomi powered results to its own database.

Learn more about search engine optimization in our free guide.

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December 1 2004

Netscape testing cross browser compatible browser

Ah, the browser wars of years gone by, how I remember and hated them. Well, the war is back with a vengeance, thanks primarily to the launch of Firefox 1.0. Internet Explorer has lost a healthy chunk of market share in recent months, now sitting at approximately 90%. That's not too shabby, but the trend does appear to be continuing.

Enter Netscape with their new browser, just to make things really interesting. The major new feature for Netscape is that it operates on two different browsing engines: the Gecko engine (Firefox) and MS's IE engine.

Read more

Making Ecommerce safer between countries

The ecommerce industry is making headway in the efforts to establish a world-wide consumer protection organization dedicated to implementing a secure system for ecommerce between countries.

The Global Trustmark Alliance (GTA) consists of Asian and European countries as well as participants from the Americas. The GTA Organizing Committee has commenced exploring sharing best practices in trustmark programs and common procedures to resolve cross-border complaints. 

Read more

Lycos sticks it to spammers & gets stuck back?

The screen saver uses idle CPU time to transmit multiple HTTP requests to sites that Lycos has designated as being spammers, sending so many requests that it greatly slows the site down. Yes, it's a DoS attack of sorts. Not only will the slowdown impact on the spammers' business, but it should also cause excessive bandwidth usage that the spammer will need to pay for. 

It's a novel idea, but as many industry experts have pointed out, it may cause legal problems as this kind of activity is outlawed in many countries. It's ironic, but the spammer could actually sue those people using the application as they will be doing so with full knowledge of what the application does.

I tried to pay a visit to the MakeLoveNotSpam site a couple of times today to learn a little more about it, but  it was unavailable on each occasion. No DNS error, No 404 error - it timed out, leading me to believe that perhaps a spammer turned the tables on them and instigated their own DoS attack.

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