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Feeds for Marketing/Ecommerce Research [Ecommerce, web marketing and development news and research by Michael Bloch of Taming the Beast.net ]

1. Google Analytics to release opt out plugin
It appears that the Google Analytics team will soon be releasing a browser plug-in that will allow people to opt-out of being tracked by the web analytics application. According to a post on the official Google Analytics blog, it’s being done to allay privacy concerns of some. “We concluded that the best approach would be to develop [...]

2. Are you being watched?
Reading this from work or at home on a company computer? Here’s something to keep in mind. All the studies that have been churned out over the last few years about worker productivity and the distraction of the Internet have taken their toll and it has becoming increasingly common for companies to monitor their staff’s computer [...]

3. Online fraud biting ecommerce merchants
Merchants are continuing to lose a considerable amount of their overall revenue to online fraud according a recent survey. The Merchant Risk Council (MRC), an organization focused on electronic commerce risk and payment strategies, recently announced the results of its Annual Merchant Fraud Survey. This year’s survey shows an overall average of 1.2% of total [...]

4. Survey - fans and followers buy
A survey of 1,504 online US adults has found social media users are more likely to buy from merchants after they become fans or followers. The Chadwick Martin Baile and iModerate survey results show 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower. [...]

5. 301 redirects and Google PageRank loss
A rumor in the SEO world circulating for many years is that 301 redirects cause a loss of PageRank on Google. Here’s the official word on that from Google Engineer, Matt Cutts… well, sort of. In an interview with Matt Cutts by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting; the following comments were made about the 301 [...]

6. Pay on time incentive
Do you have trouble getting paid by some of your clients? You may want to consider an idea in use by Australia’s postal service. It can be rather demeaning to have to go cap in hand to a client to ask to be paid for work you have already done and where the payment is overdue. [...]

7. Images in email marketing campaigns
If you use images as the focal point of your email marketing campaigns and no accompanying non-image based text, here’s how a recipient might be seeing it. I still see a few instances of where a marketing email consists of an image and little or nothing else, so I thought it worth mentioning again. I can’t remember [...]

8. Ebay going green-er
A few days back, eBay took some steps to further boost its green street-cred; a move that all online businesses should take note of. eBay announced its Green Team Challenge, which the company says is a program that translates green shopping into tangible environmental impact. For the first 250,000 people that pledge to reuse on eBay, [...]

9. Email click tracking troubles
Many merchants turn on click tracking in their newsletters and email marketing campaigns. It’s a great idea as it can provide valuable information, but it’s also another step where something can go wrong. How this feature works is to basically rewrite links you have included in an email to run through a script that counts the [...]

10. Blocking ad blocker users
Ad blocking software robs content sites of revenue. What if you could block those folks using ad blockers? Would you? Should you? Here’s a site that tried recently. By ad blocking, I don’t mean the popup killers. These are easily gotten around by using hover ads and popovers. I’m referring to applications that block just about [...]

11. Searching Twitter…via Google
I rarely search Twitter from Twitter for anything as the signal to noise ratio is just too low - but there is a better way to search. Who would have guessed it was via Google.. or perhaps it should have been a given. First up, kudos to John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing for his article [...]

12. Press release tip - brevity is bad
I write for a few sites and have come across a common problem I believe really guts the power of a press release. I start my day off scanning headlines related to specific topics, looking for a couple of stories to write on. Some days it’s easy and I pick up the stories within the first [...]

13. Choosing web site images
I’m graphically challenged. That’s abundantly apparent. I prefer to focus on text. However, I do believe images play an incredibly important role on a web site. If you’re like me, how do you go about choosing images? For image-challenged folks like me, we may know exactly what we want to convey through images, but have no [...]

14. Many fingers in the ad revenue pie
Most publishers sell display ad space via ad networks for a reason - it seems more simple and saves time. But perhaps that approach is coming at a huge cost. According to an article on AdAge, there’s sometimes too many middlemen between the advertiser’s bucks and the publisher’s check; all grabbing their piece of the pie [...]

15. Facebook routes email to wrong users
Imagine intending to send an email to someone and it winds up going to someone different. Misdirected communications have brought down many a celebrity, politician and company. I’ve had this happen a few times through errors of my own doing; i.e. sending an email to the wrong address. While the contents of the emails didn’t give [...]

16. Google adds Facebook to real-time search
Google recently announced it is now incorporating Facebook Pages status updates in its real-time search feature. The announcement wasn’t exactly detailed - it consisted of a brief message on Twitter (go figure), so not much is known about the ins and outs of the arrangement at this stage. Google’s real-time search feature is something I have never [...]

17. Communicating during downtime
As a web site owner, there’s nothing worse than your site or an essential service like a shopping cart or email application being down and the service provider isn’t communicating. It’s an awful feeling of disempowerment and frustration soon sets in. You email the support desk.. nothing. You call the support line and you’re left on [...]

18. “Easy pay” web publishing model
Monetizing online content is never easy if you’re looking for big bucks. Many big name newspapers are considering paid access models and now the IAB board of directors chairman is suggesting a broader implementation of paid content. David Moore suggests thinks the online publishing industry, well the big players anyway, need to set up a toll [...]

19. Over 50 million tweets served - a day
Kevin Weil, the Analytics Lead at Twitter, has revealed some interesting stats about Twitter activity. Kevin has released figures of how Twitter has grown over the past three years in relation to the number of tweets created each day. Back in 2007, people were posting 5,000 tweets a day. In 2008, that number grew to 300,000. By [...]

20. Facebook eclipses Yahoo traffic
Facebook has blasted past Yahoo as the number two most popular site in the USA. The news comes from Compete.com’s January data that shows Facebook attracted nearly 134 million unique visitors during last month. The unique visitors metric only counts a person once no matter how many times they visit a site in a given month. Compete [...]

21. Boosting online survey response rates
In a world where folks are getting suspect of clicking on links in emails; merchants sending out survey requests can have a bit of an uphill battle; particularly when they utilize third party survey services. Here’s an example request I received today, butchered a bit to mask the parties involved: — Dear Valued Customer, We recently sent you [...]

22. Trust, marketing & the rule of 5
When it comes to product recommendations, people don’t trust their friends and peers so much any more as in this day and age, a friend is very different to even just a decade ago and our network of peers is bigger than ever. I rue the day that social networks started to term anyone added to [...]

23. World’s worst phishing attempt?
I have a love/hate relationship with spam and phishing emails. It’s usually the latter but sometimes an attempt by a phisher is so pathetic, it makes me laugh. Like this one I received today. Firstly the following message had about a hundred other folks’ email addresses in the cc line. Then there’s the message itself. –Pathetic phishing [...]

24. Email - getting the message right
A pre-sales conversation via email can be particularly challenging as there’s so many additional threats relating to mixing up the message and confusing a potential target. Here’s an example: “And if you decide to purchase a purple flomble from us today, we’ll take an additional 20 off” 20 what? 20 bucks, 20%, 20 armadillos? For the sake of perhaps [...]

25. Facebook, Twitter, Blogging & Youth
Blogging isn’t such a popular activity with teenagers and young adults nowadays and Twitter even less so according to a recent survey. A report released by the Pew Research Center has found blogging has fallen among teens and young adults while rising among older adults. The culprit affecting the young ‘uns blogging? Social networking sites, mainly [...]

26. Neuromarketing research continues
Back in 2008, I wrote about an emerging technique called neurologically optimal advertising. 2 years later, it’s still being developed and is now more widely known as neuromarketing. If you are paranoid, read no further :). In 2008, researchers were tinkering with a combination of eye-tracking, galvanic skin response (GSR) and electro-encephalograms to gauge response to ads. [...]

27. The power of brands
I have a policy - to never participate in unsolicited telephone surveys. Usually all they have to do is say “survey” and I politely say “no thanks” and hang up before they can respond. I broke this rule recently without even realizing it; purely because of the company involved. Or was it that company? The phone call [...]

28. Touchy spam filters
It’s quite amazing what will trigger some spam filters and send your communication to email hell. I received a notification the other day stating my email didn’t make it to its destination - and this was the reason: – Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server has matched a filter. Filter name: “KEYWORD= Blocked: jerk” State: Purged – Either Forefront Security is a [...]

29. Company news web pages
Many online merchants have company news pages, but sometimes they can work against a business rather than for it. The biggest problem can be keeping it current. With so much going on in a business, it’s these little things that can be easily overlooked. But put yourself in a prospective customer’s shoes for a moment. They are [...]

30. Apple iPad - no Flash support
I thought my last post somewhat relating to the Apple iPad would be the only one for the week as new gadgets aren’t my core interest, but this issue is pretty important. It seems that Apple have left out support for Flash for the iPad. It’s a pretty odd move given the device is very [...]