Chart of the Day: Share of Smartphone vs desktop retail sales
As our regularly updated stats on mobile trends shows, we are now well past the tipping point where mobile visits to consumers exceed desktop visits, at least for consumer brands and e-commerce sites (B2B is quite different). Yet while smartphone usage has been climbing dramatically in all countries, the same can't be said for smartphone conversion rates which are typically only one quarter to one third of desktop conversion. Mobile conversion varies on many factors related to buyer behaviour and culture in different countries, but the effect has been the same in different countries with the mobile share of retail e-commerce transactions being less than 50%.
Yet this percentage mobile commerce transaction figure is climbing too and the latest research from Criteos' retail customers in different countries shows that in two, the UK and Japan it now exceeds 50% with Australia and…
How to optimize your online images for search engines
There's an old phrase that says, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. This may be true for the rest of world but not for Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. When their bots crawl an image, for example my picture, they actually can't see the image and but they only see the context of the image from its filename and the Alt Text. Google also pick up the context from any captions and links to the page containing the image so it's important to make web editors aware of these factors too.
The potential commercial importance of getting image optimization right is shown by this example where images are shown 'above the fold' and typically get good clickthrough rates.
This example shows how, for some queries, Google will trigger a "OneBox" featuring…
9 types of Email Marketing to engage B2B audiences
Email is the go-to form of customer and prospect communication for many businesses today, allowing clear, concise and detailed conversations. In fact, 73% of marketers agree that the email marketing is core to their business and 40x more effective than social media for lead generation.
Is your business capitalising on this B2B marketing opportunity?
The longer life-span of emails in comparison to social posts means there is more time for businesses to leverage on making a sale or closing a deal. With a current estimate of 100 billion business emails being sent every day, this number of business email accounts is expected to rise to 4.9 billion by 2017.
Overall, email marketing continues to be ranked as the best channel in terms of return on investment, with 68% of…
Chart of the Day: New research shows average Moz Domain Authority across industry
Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz (a provider of SEO tools), which logarithmically ranks websites ability to rank in search engines on a scale from 1 to 100. It's an extremely useful metric for SEOs, because they can judge the value of getting a link from a site based on its domain authority. To calculate domain authority Domain Authority, Moz use over 40 signals from the website and match it to the results of machine learning against Google's algorithm to best model how search engine results are generated.
It is therefore, important to pay attention to domain authority, as it is probably the most accurate metric out there for how likely your site is to be ranking in search engines and drawing in large volumes of organic traffic. Its value as a metric also extends to helping you see…
Creating a Bigger and Better Blog for 2017
It’s no secret that the most, if not all, profitable niches in online marketing are already highly saturated. If you think you have an idea for a new blog topic, there are probably a thousand blogs that already published the same post. And in time, there'll be more content than humans can consume – resulting in “Content Shock."
Remember that the fundamental law of supply and demand affects everything. The price for any commodity falls when supply exceeds demand. But when it comes to content marketing, you end up paying your audience to consume your content because there’s no price for them to begin with.
In addition to time, thriving bloggers now need to invest in tools and resources that help with content creation. It’s also common for bloggers to bribe their audience into subscribing with free eBooks, discount coupons, and free trial periods.
Whether…
Chart of the Day: DuckDuckGo searches increase tenfold in five years
For those of us busily involved in the thankless task of getting algorithms to like our content and display it in the SERPs, how we attempt to optimize our content to appear high on results pages depends in large part on which search engines our audience are using. For most of us, this will mean optimizing for Google, which handles the lion's share of search queries in the majority of countries. Some SEOs may also optimise for Bing/Yahoo (they are both powered by Bing's algorithm), AOL if they are American or Baidu if they're in China.
But there is a new player on the block, which although still tiny in comparison to Google, is increasingly eking out an ever larger share of the search market. With over 14 million searches a month and growing rapidly, DuckDuckGo could soon become more than just a bit…
Chart of the Day: What clickthrough rate can new Facebook advertisers expect?
With declining reach in organic Facebook posts, we are seeing competition on Facebook hot up. Last September Sheryl Sandberg announced that Facebook had passed the 4 million advertiser milestone and that was only 6 months after the 3 million milestone was passed...
If you're thinking about investing in Facebook advertising you will want to model the return on marketing investment to make the business case. Knowing average clickthrough rates can help you make the case. Facebook's own Ad Manager will enable you to estimate reach, but what clickthrough rate can you expect on Facebook?
This new research from WordStream's Facebook advertising customers shows that across sectors clickthrough rates (CTRs) vary from around 0.5% through to 1.6%.
More advertisers naturally means more competition, so you will need to model the average Cost…
Those using automated bid strategies should expect an increase in campaign spend and bids
We've spoken time and time again about how the shift to mobile is impacting ecommerce purchase behavior. Google has been banging the 'Mobile First' drum for some time now, but we still see the vast majority of conversions taking place on desktop despite the fact mobile now makes up a majority of ecommerce traffic.
What is happening is that consumers are browsing on mobile devices, making crucial decisions about their purchase, and then switching to desktop to convert. This makes perfect sense. Mobile browsing is great for getting ideas, but when you find something you want, you need something with a proper keyboard to input fiddly payment details rather than attempting to do it on a small screen.
Now that discovering and researching products on mobile and converting on desktop has become an extremely common purchase journey, cross-device journey…
10 reasons you can’t afford to ignore SMS marketing.
As marketers, we’re constantly thinking up creative ways to get our message out to existing and potential customers; whilst also ensuring we get good results from our efforts. One of the basic practical rules in marketing is to think like your audience, to keep up-to-date with their buying habits and where they are looking.
Whatever your product or service is, it’s important to ensure its visible wherever your customers go, with a ratio now of four mobile devices to every computer, it’s clear where our customers are. Mobile marketing is no longer something you can afford to put on the to-do-list for the future; you need to make sure you’re on a mobile device, now.
With smartphone users increasing daily, forward-thinking businesses are looking for ways to make their business mobile-friendly. SMS is a tried,…
New research explains opportunities and threats
Since social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter launched, social media has offered good organic opportunities for publishers and other brands to share their content and so gain awareness and new subscribers.
As social networks have sought to keep more visitors on their sites, tools like Facebook Instant articles and Google's AMP - offers new opportunities for marketers to share their content, but at the same time, a threat since visitors have less opportunities to interact with the publisher website or register. Given this, this new research from Napco Research and Publishing Executive has useful insight for online publishers.
This chart shows the publisher's view of the threat, which is substantial and can lead to a need to explore alternatives or avoid new techniques like Instant Articles.
Instant Articles is viewed as the biggest threat with LinkedIn not far behind for B2B…
