Archive for June, 2010
We recently came back from the annual Internet Retailer Conference and Expo in Chicago. This is a conference created to bring together the Top 500 Internet Retailers and the brightest technology vendors in an attempt to provide a learning/networking event that everyone can benefit from. I walked away with oodles of PowerPoint slides all chock full of great data. This post discusses one of the hottest topics at this years show – mobile. Below are some data charts and graphs that illustrate the adoption of mobile marketing and commerce platforms amongst retailers and consumers.
Click on the images to enhance the size for a better view.
This chart illustrates the growth, in terms of dollars that online retail has experienced over the last 9 years. The growth is incremental year-over-year yet sustainable and not to mention this was in a poor economy.
This chart illustrates the percentage of growth that Internet Retailers have experienced year-over-year since 2001. Hard to believe it has only been 10 years for this industry.
There was a lot of focus placed on mobile marketing and commerce at this years event. Seems like mobile has been hot for a few years now. Back in 2005 I worked on the PayPal Text-to-Buy product launch and we thought that 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 would all be the year that mobile would take off. The reality was that the devices just were not there yet. Mobile browsing was cumbersome and slow at best. With modern smart phones like the iPhone, BlackBerry and the latest, KIN by Microsoft, it seems that this may be the year for mobile. So even with the expensive price tags, consumers continue to buy and use smart phones more than ever. In fact, a recent statistic from Forrester points out that “88% of US smart phone owners were satisfied with their most recent purchase via their phone”.
Mobile coupons were by far the hottest mobile topic as retailers lined-up to hear several technology vendors share tips for mobile marketing best practices. I look forward to seeing how retailers adopt mobile heading into the 3rd quarter of the year.
If you are a brand I am interested in getting your comments and thoughts regarding your interest in mobile. Is it something you have on the agenda to implement in 2010? 2011?
If you are a consumer do you see yourself using your mobile device more for retail purposes these days? How many of us have used our mobile phone to send a text to someone for purchasing advice or even to buy a product?
June 30th, 2010 by The Adcom Group Tags: ecommerce, internet retail, Mobile in Mobile | No Comments »
The big question on most marketers’ minds is “How do I measure social media performance?” For me, anytime you say the word measure, I immediately think of analytics. Since we have been implementing Google Analytics for the vast majority of our customers, I am going to focus on how to build a solution that will allow measurement in that tool.
There are two approaches to understanding the impact that social media is having on your website. The first thing to consider is what you want to measure. Are you putting effort into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as part of your effort? If that is the case, you might want to just track those tools to see the traction you are getting through advanced segments.
If you are active in multitudes of social networking tools that include sites like Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, friendfeed or others, you might want to take a different approach and create a filtered profile.
Advanced Segments
One of the simplest ways to see traction in your analytics is to create Advanced Segment. In the left-hand panel of the Google Analytics screen, there is a section called “My Customizations.” This section will contain a link for Advanced Segments. Once you are on the screen you will need to do the following to set up a segment:
- Click the Create new custom segment in the top right corner
- Under Dimensions, select Source from the Traffic Sources list.
- You can either select a specific source from the drop down list, or you can type in a series of sources for you to track like digg|wikipedia|linkedin|facebook| twitter|feedburner
- If you enter multiple sources, you will need to choose Matches regular expression from the drop down list
- Give the segment a name in the box below
- Click Create
The benefit of selecting an Advanced Segment is that you can compare the social media traffic to the other traffic on the website. This setup will allow you to see the behavioral differences that are happening between your direct, organic, paid and social traffic users. Where do you want to drop the social users? Is it in a different place than paid search? Do you need to create social media landing pages for your Facebook or Twitter programs?
Advanced segments will allow you to leverage all of your existing reports and show a comparison to the overall site and existing basic segments created by Google.
Filter Profile
I had written a blog post talking about filtering traffic for your profile. In order to create a social media profile, you would just need to create a filtered profile as described in the previous post. When creating the filter, just name it Social Networks and add the sources to track. It is done in the same way as the advanced segment “digg|wikipedia|linkedin|facebook| twitter|feedburner”- you can add other domains to track such as technorati, blogger, tinyurl and others as well.
By creating a filtered profile, every report you run will be specific to the social media outlets you are tracking. You can copy any custom reports you created and see all of your e commerce information in this profile.
Regardless of the way that you create the tracking, the ability to see the traction and behavior of social media users will give you greater insight into the value of these users to your website and business.
June 8th, 2010 by The Adcom Group Tags: advanced segment, filtered profiles, google analytics in Analytics, Social Media | No Comments »
