How rates differed between US, UK, Spain and Australia over the holiday sales period
With over 100 million shoppers and over $40bn in revenue from the top 100 US retailers alone, could retailers have earned more revenue during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday frenzy weekend? Well, according to the new statistics just released by Barilliance, on line shoppers were abandoning their shopping carts at surprisingly high rates:
Average shopping cart abandonments were at 65%, and this was higher in the USA at 75%. Interesting, that conversion rates were 1.5 higher of those buying via desktop, compared to mobile phone users.
Do we think that consumers are still not feeling reassured that mobile phones are secure, or ecommerce sites not geared up for mobile consumers and retailers have not foreseen the risk of optimising their shopping carts.
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6 reasons you should consider a tag management tool
With the increasing number and variety of tools now available to the online marketer, it’s possible to learn more than ever before about how visitors to a desktop site, mobile site or app are interacting with the content they find.
There are also an increasing number of tools to target these users through personalisation. However, many of these tools need their own tag adding to the site pages to record and target users. Tag management systems have been developed to make the process of adding and modifying tags easier and less error-prone for site managers.
The release of Google's Tag Manager has highlighted the value of these tools although this is a free tool while many of the others are paid for.
In the new Smart Insights guide to Tag Management Systems we show the…
7 metrics to calculate web store effectiveness
Lots of marketing techniques can be used to drive traffic to an online store. Marketers for webstores should define the right KPIs to understand which of them bring the most benefit and the highest ROI for the store and which should be reduced or optimised? Here are 7 measures you should consider, many of which are available in Google Analytics.
7 metrics to evaluate marketing channels and online store profitabilty
In this article we have gathered 7 key metrics which will help you evaluate effectiveness of different marketing channels and online store profitability.
1. Website conversion
Conversion (from Latin conversiō) is the traffic (visits) to the website which ends with some kind of action beneficial for the website – for example, product purchase or subscription.
Conversion Rate is calculated as the number of visitors who have made a target action (purchase, registration, a phone call) divided by the total number…
An example of using Google's Multichannel funnels reports to prove the value of digital media
There have been quite a few recent stories detailing how big brands such as Interflora have fallen foul of Google or announcing they have ‘stopped using’ digital marketing as it ‘doesn’t work’. For example, a piece of research conducted by Ebay, led to reports in the trade press claiming that ‘PPC doesn’t work’.
These stories led me to dig a little deeper into the research conducted by eBay to identify what the real story was and not what the press would lead us to believe. The test conducted by eBay in essence stopped paid search on non-brand keywords for 60 days and results indicated that on average ‘consumers do not shop more on eBay when they are exposed to paid search ads on Google’. They found therefore that Google ads did not play a role in…
Merchants Double Google Shopping Traffic between Q4 2012 and Q1 2013
May 2013 Update - continued growth in Google Shopping Traffic in the US
Each quarter, CPC Strategy rates the top comparison shopping engines including Google Shopping, based on seller metrics such as traffic and revenue.
Contrary to the traditional seasonal trend of increased volume on Google Shopping during Q4, followed by a decrease in volume for Q1, Google Shopping traffic has not slowed into Q1 2013. Instead...
Google Product Listing Ads flipped the typical seasonal trend on its head for Q1 2013, with an increase in traffic which nearly doubled from Q4 to Q1.
Merchants double up on Google Shopping Traffic Between Q4 2012 And Q1 2013
This continues a trend from Q3 to Q4 where we saw an 87% increase in traffic which was to be expected given the progression of the new program in conjunction…
Showing why online retailers must have an effective mobile experience in place
Jill Robb showed in her post on Ecommerce trends for 2013 how online UK retailers are experiencing rapid growth in mobile use of their sites. This new infographic from Kissmetrics shows the growing importance of creating mobile platforms for US online retailers.
Source: Kissmetrics Blog - full links to source on this page.
Note that the chart showing that mobile due to overtake desktop access by 2013 is based on a 2010 prediction and is worldwide, so skewed by emerging market trends.
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The big data opportunity - 4 key parts towards creating a strategy
Today’s growth in interest in "big data" represents a phenomenal opportunity for creative and forward-thinking marketers. On the one hand big data is arguably nothing new, relative to any moment in time we've had too much data to be able to make effective use of, at least from my personal, marketing perspective. The data warehousing and statistical analysis that drove direct marketing forward through the nineties and early years of this millennium felt like pretty big data back then - lot's of disparate, 'unclean' sources, usually lacking in structure let alone a common location. Relatively speaking, nothing's really changed - really it hasn't. Today we have more channels, management software, disparate databases, automation, computer processing power, skilled people and yes - data - to deal with. As marketers, I believe that this in turn means we need…
An interview on best practice Ecommerce analytics techniques with Dan Barker
Much of what's written about successful Ecommerce sites focuses on the big brands we all know like Amazon, Argos and Asos. But within each sector of retail, there are many Ecommerce outfits outside of the spotlight - some very successful, some looking to improve practice. With this in mind, I have been looking for a while to hook-up with an Ecommerce specialist who understands the ingredients for success.
In this interview, I'm pleased to introduce Dan Barker who manages Ecommerce for two companies (B2B and B2C) operating in the Children's products sector.
Some of you may know Dan for his willingness to offer detailed advice via Twitter and digital marketing blogs - he's also a regular contributor on Smart Insights and also writes his own blog. We're republishing this post from March 2010 as a refresher for Jan 2012 as part…
The latest conversion, mobile and referrals benchmarks
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: IBM Coremetrics 2011 Benchmarks
We’ve featured the Coremetrics benchmarks in our average conversion rate roundup for some time. Today, it’s much more useful than what’s provided by Google since it looks at conversion rates and referrers together. It’s based on Coremetric’s (now IBM) clients who tend to be larger organisations, so can be used for larger organisations to benchmark against and give smaller companies and idea of the conversion rates you can achieve if you’re a large trusted brand.
In the past, we’ve featured UK and US data, but the latest data is just for the US - it’s around the Black Friday - Thanksgiving - Cybermonday weekend. Thanks to my friend Geno Prussakov to alerting us to it - Geno’s post features some of the time-related sales volumes.
Here are the three…
