Ecommerce & Web Marketing Research: March 1 - 10 2005

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March 10 2005

Searchers using multiple engines

Nielsen//NetRatings has reported that only a small proportion of searchers use a single engine.

According to NN, 58% of Google searchers also visited either MSN Search or Yahoo! Search. Close to 71% of those who searched at Yahoo! also visited Google or MSN, and 70% of MSN searchers went to Google or Yahoo.

A further breakdown:

• Google shared - 26% went to Yahoo!, 19% to MSN, and 14% to both Yahoo! and MSN

• Yahoo! - 39% went to Google, 11% to MSN, and 21% to both Google and MSN. 

• MSN  33 percent with Google, 13 percent with Yahoo!, and 24 percent with both Google and Yahoo!

Read more of the report (pdf)

Further learning resources - search engine optimization.

Need to learn about  search engine ranking and optimization strategies, without having to spend months in research? More than just a book; this is one of the most comprehensive training programs published including the book, added tools, videos and a members only forum -  SEO BOOK

March 9 2005

Eye tracking, triangles and rankings

An eye tracking study carried out by Enquiro, Did-it and Eyetools appears to have verified what we've all known for a long time - higher rankings are better in organic search engine rankings. Interestingly, it has also confirmed the same for PPC search results for visibility and click through. I had read some earlier studies that suggested a no.1 position in side bar PPC ads may not be that effective.

The study showed the majority of eye activity during a search occurs in a triangle pattern at the top of the search results page; what has been dubbed the “golden triangle.” You can view a very interesting snapshot of this eye activity here.

Read more about the eye activity/ranking study.

Subscriber perception of email newsletters

A survey carried out by Arial Software in the last quarter of 2004 in regards to newsletters has produced some interesting results. While the survey only had a small sample group (100 people), it provides some valuable insights into subscribers of email newsletters. It appears that generally speaking, subscribers are quite suspicious of how companies handle list information. Some of the key findings: 

Read the full Email Newsletter Perception Report (PDF - 364kb)

Learn more - email marketing threats and strategies

March 8 2005

Ecommerce transactions grow by 39%

VeriSign recently released the fifth edition of the VeriSign Internet Security Intelligence Briefing. Key findings:

• Ecommerce transactions grew by 39 percent in 2004 over 2003.

• Six percent of holiday e-commerce transactions were deemed too risky to complete. 

• Average purchase price per transaction decreased approximately 3 percent to $146. 

• The Monday after Thanksgiving proved to be peak shopping day for ecommerce

• Romania, Vietnam, and the USA were the sources of the highest rate of ecommerce fraud during the 2004 holiday fraud.

• From October 2004 to January 2005, 58% of phishing capture sites were located outside of the United States, up over 50% on the previous year.

Read more about the VeriSign Internet Security Intelligence Briefing

Learn more about preventing credit card fraud

March 7 2005

US teens to spend more this year

While teenage spending was down slightly last year, it has increased by an average of 5% per year over the last seven years; and it looks set to continue over 2005. According to survey results published by Teenage Research Unlimited, 45% of survey participants expected to spend more money in 2005, 37% to spend about the same, and only 17% of teens surveyed believe that they’ll spend less than this year.  

If you're looking for further information on marketing to teenagers, Teenage Research Unlimited has some interesting articles on their site.

March 6 2005

Netscape V8 beta released

Netscape has released a beta of it's new browser, Version 8.0. Included in the new features is a "blacklist" of sites known to distribute spyware or hosts of phishing sites. When a user tries to access these sites, they will be redirected to a warning page. The new version also has the tabbed browsing feature that has been so popular in Firefox. Bill? Billlllllll? Please - add that to IE 7; I'm begging you!

Check out the new Netscape browser. BTW, IE7 should be rolled out later this year.

Google Adsense review

After participating in AdSense for the last 1.5 years, I thought it time to write up a review and some tips to maximize AdSense revenue - I hope you find them useful. If you haven't heard of AdSense, it's an easy way for site publishers, large and small, to generate revenue from their sites via Google's AdSense program. Also included in the article is a review of the ebook below.

AdSense strategies book - 2nd Edition Maximize your revenue! Solid, proven strategies and tips - no nasty tricks. This AdSense revenue guide used & highly recommended by Michael Bloch!

March 3 2005

Live chat turns browsers into buyers

Earthlink recently implemented live chat to see if it could improve on conversion stats and the results were very interesting. 15% of chats converted into sales and 80% of people who participated in chat sessions gave the chat a good or excellent rating.

You can read more about the experiment on Marketing Sherpa. If you're interested in learning more about implementing Live Chat on your site (it's very simple); read our guide to live chat software and services - try out a free service!

March 1 2005

Firefox - gains popularity/security flaws

As I've mentioned a number of times over the last couple of months, often to some rather scathing responses from some visitors; it's only a matter of time before more hackers started to turn their attention towards Firefox. This isn't because it's a poor product - but because more people are using it. Hackers don't waste their time with applications that have little market attention.  Mozilla's browsers market share is now 7.35 percent according to OneStat.com   - and increasing.

I believe it's high time that things were brought into perspective. Firefox is *not* a cure for Internet cancers, it's simply a fine alternative for browsing. It's always been my position that if as many people used Firefox as they do IE, then we'd see an equal number of security problems. 

In the most recent incident, according to iDefense, hackers can gain control of computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Mozilla/Firefox browser. Users are encouraged to download the latest versions to address these issues.

Learn more about drop shipping Dropshipping - an effective & simpler way to make more from ecommerce!

A decade of Yahoo!

10 years ago on Wednesday, Yahoo turned from a hobby to a full time job for founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. From what I understand, what set them apart from many other directories and colleagues at that time was the desire to turn it into a profitable venture. Most of their counterparts were still very idealistic about the WWW and approached it from a purist angle. 

I've often heard people complain that the WWW should be de-commercialized and that it was never intended to be an avenue for making money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, from his book entitled "Weaving the Web" stated:

"Buying books from Amazon.com and stocks from E-trade is not all there is to the Web. Neither is the Web some idealized space where we must remove our shoes, eat only fallen fruit, and eschew commercialism."

Anyway, you can learn more about more about Yahoo's history here. While I couldn't find a snapshot of Yahoo in 1995, you may be interested to see how the home page looked in May 1996. Happy birthday Yahoo!

PS: Overture is about to be renamed to Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions.

PPS: Yahoo! Search Developer Network has been launched. It provides web developers with access to Web service application programming interfaces (APIs) for Yahoo Search and Overture

Related - What happened to the World Wide Web?

Autoresponder software  & mailing list managers Get more from your email marketing - tips, reviews  & free trial software/services.

Marketers missing the US Hispanic market?

According to research from Forrester and reported by Adage, over 80% of Fortune 100 organizations don't provide Spanish-language sites, and the other 19% are somewhat lacking in navigation and content.

According to some old census figures I found, The Hispanic population of the USA numbered 22.8 million in 1993. As to the percentage of that number who are more comfortable with reading in Spanish, I wasn't able to locate.

If you're looking to research more on the Hispanic market, check out  Marketing y Medios. There's also some resources available at Adage, but you'll need to register (which is free).

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