Finally! Google has recomputed its panda index correction, and one of our websites, openweather.com, has just been allowed out of the panda penalty box. The graph below shows what this looks like in unique users a day

The start of the panda penalty was on the 12th of April, end of the penalty for openweather is the night of the 17th of June (GMT+0).

We had a major overhaul of the openweather content. Worked and payed for better weather and forecast information. Made the website as informative as most of the website's other competitors.

After 67 days and 2 hours with a Google Panda Update penalty, we are allowed out into the full index again. Thanks Mr. Panda at Google's Algorithmic Index Department; our faith in the world is restored.

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:08 AM | Google Panda Update Penalty Lifted (permalink)

After a year of extensive development, we have launched the following information services for social networks, blogs and individual web sites.

• openweather.com - weather widget
• fx-rate.net - foreign exchange rate widget
• localtimes.org - World Timezone, and local times widget
• mycountdown.org - Countdown widget
• mycalendar.org - Calendar widget
• dialcode.org - Telephone Dial Code widget
• lavori.com - Italian job and salary widgets
• openjobs.co.uk - UK job and salary widgets
• openjobs.fr - French job and salary widgets
• openjobs.de - German job and salary widgets
• openjob.com - US job and salary widgets
• openjob.es - Spanish job and salary widgets

Keeping with the current vogue for the free price policy, all the web sites have free widget services. Needless to say the services have quickly found social traction with 100,000 webmasters taking a widget

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 11:55 AM | Widget Media (permalink)

Enclick has moved into plush new offices in trendy Camden. Not a stone's throw away from most of our clients!

Studio One,
7 Chalcot Road,
London NW1 8LH

And, we have new projects coming to fruition. I will post news as soon as we place the services online.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 6:53 AM | New Enclick Offices in Central London (permalink)

• €63billion will be spent online by UK shoppers
• 860 million parcels will be shipped to the UK's 26 million internet shoppers, 33 each on average
• Online shoppers will each spend €2400 on average
• 10% of all retail now online, rising to 20% in three years time

Online retail will grow in quality too, becoming an integral part of mainstream consumer's habits

1. Inclusivity people of all abilities will use online shopping
2. Normalisation online shopping will become integral to normal everyday life
3. Diversification online shopping will extend to a wider range of products and services
4. Shophistication online shopping services to become easier, quicker, safer and more valuable
5. Exclusivity a rise in specialist boutiques, offering more niche and exclusive products

Cross-border Shopping

Cross border retail is gaining traction, as shoppers look for and find better deals across borders. Shoppers in Europe have forever shopped across borders, specially when located in towns near frontiers. With online shopping and international postal delivery, cross border shopping for better deals is about to take off.

Already, Spanish book purchasing relies heavily on Amazon UK deliveries, as no strong contender exists in Spain. Amazon UK has in the passed purchased advertising from hispavista.com, our parent company. Bargain hunting is about to extend across borders; and the bargains are considerable, even in spite of delivery cost across Europe.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 6:57 AM | Online Shopping set to Reach 20% of All Retail (permalink)

Similarly, Google will impact the shopping sector with its increasing use of the one-box-result to integrate its other services like Froogle or Google Base ecommerce items.

So far, the services being promoted with the onebox are

• Music
• Movies
• News
• Stock Quotes
• Weather
• Travel
• Maps
• Local Businesses
• Images
• Shopping
• Books
• News Archives
• Google Groups
• Blog Search
• Search History
• Desktop Search
• Definitions
• Questions
• Patents
• Local Time
• Patents

Google's shadow lengthens

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:07 PM | Google's One Box for Weather (permalink)

Google has finally unveiled its Cost Per Action tariff model for its Adsense network. What was the exclusive domain of affiliate marketing networks is disrupted by Google's huge publisher and merchant base, and its superior system. In one move, Google becomes the biggest affiliate network in the sector.

The impact on the online advertising ecosystem will be considerable. Not only to affiliate networks, but also to the community of market makers - affiliates, which have thrived on arbitrage opportunities around CPM, CPC and CPA advertising. CPM (Costs per Thousand banner impressions), CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per action). The different tariff models provided enough market inefficiency for price imbalances to arise.

Over the last few years entrepreneurial affiliates have been acquiring traffic from Google's adsense at the minimum 0.01 per click, and driving it directly to an affiliate network merchant's site under the CPA tariff model, and got paid when and if the customer converted. The arbitrage actually resulted in positive margins. And many other similar arbitrage moves.

Google's offer of the CPA tariff model to advertisers adds new price transparency, as clients can now work out the ROI of all three tariff models on one simple user interface. The arbitrage opportunities will invariably dissappear.

Clear winners are advertisers; CPA tariff model pushes the onus of conversion onto the publisher. The advertising merchant only pays if the clickthrough actually makes a purchase. CPA is the solution for advertisers with click-fraud problems.

[Official Inside AdWords: Pay-per-action beta test]

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 5:46 AM | Google Enters Affiliate Marketing (permalink)

None of the other presentations achieved a third of of Matt's attendance, which is not bad for a guy in jeans and running shoes. My panel, Exploiting shopping search in Europe got a tenth of Matt's attendance. Maybe next year.

The trends from Google are personalisation and localisation:

Chris Sherman: Crystal ball time, where do you see Google going in the next 3-5 years?

Matt: Fantastic question, in my own opinion – personalization, and localization. Also if you have your data, you can store it at Google. You can almost start your own business of 5-10 business for free. Google’s ambition to organize the worlds information, this is really where its going

Google desktop is also a huge benefit – no privacy issues. Helps to find old searches – makes things more accessible.

Yahoo's is progressing into User Generated Content with Y! Answers, giving them an edge over Google in certain markets. So, the next step in Search seems to be Social Search where community contribution to a knowledge base and community filtering complement algorithmic filtering of the index.

Overall attendance at this years London Search Engine Strategies was down because UK professionals preferred attending the London Technology for Marketing conference the week before.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 5:54 AM | Matt Cutts Keynotes London Search Engine Strategies (permalink) | Comments (1)

Google not only ignores the two fledgling industry standards for data feeds, but like a bull in a china shop, goes all futuristic by extending the attribute list for products. The base attributes of the a Google bulk submission file are

1. brand
2. condition
3. description
4. expiration_date
5. id
6. image_link
7. link
8. price
9. product_type
10. title

A standard list which complies with the basics of the ARTS data feed standard and the upcoming Oasis new data feed trading standard.

But a few weeks ago, Google extended the optional list of attributes, stating that

....If you are submitting one of the following item types, you can increase your items' exposure in search results by including additional attributes as well...

Most product category attributes have been extended to cover color, styling, and size. For instance, the clothing category the extra attributes for a product are

1. color
2. department
3. made_in
4. material
5. size
6. style

1. color
2. film_type
3. focus_type
4. megapixels
5. model_number
6. resolution
7. size
8. tech_spec_link
9. upc
10. zoom

1. color
2. department
3. heel_height
4. made_in
5. material
6. shoe_width
7. size
8. style

The intension is to provide a more sophisticated search. Rather than 3D virtual world display of garments, it is aiming at what Google does best, crunch and search data.

The question is whether online merchants can be equal partners in this futuristic vision. It is a heavy burden on a merchant's IT team to help Google "Access all the World's Data". The incentive for merchants is there though; as Google integrates its shopping search into its main search results, the amount of traffic directed to merchants will be huge.

The stakes in data feed marketing just got higher. At Enclick, we have been putting together a central database of products with attributes and data collated from various sources. We use the central database to complete the missing attributes on our customer data feeds. Google has just raised the level of data we need to collate for all products lines.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:29 PM | Google Data Feed Standard Goes Futuristic (permalink)

Great event for affiliate marketers organized yesterday by affiliates4u events team. Four hundred attendees, merchants, affiliates and affiliate networks.

Merchants are clearly courting affiliates and their ability to attract targeted user traffic. From Kevin Cornils buy.at presentation; affiliates sold in excess £ 2000m goods online for a fee of £140m. A year-on-year rise of 60%, taking an alleged 10% of total online advertising spend.

Clearly merchants are discovering the pay-on-acquisition model. My opinion is that CPA commissions will inevitably rise though, as merchant demand for the model exceeds the volume available through affiliate networks. In the end, buy through ad impressions (CPM), clickthroughs (CPC), and on-purchase-results (CPA) will balance out to give the same value-for-money (ROI).

Yes, what a soup of acronyms.

The word branding came up in conversations increasingly. Paid-search and affiliate marketing have a secondary benefit in addition to the immediate sale; repeat sales. In fact, the repeat sales experts extraordinares, the email marketers, were very evident at the event. It is not just about the sale on clickthrough, it is about the repeat visit. The brand and the loyalty. In fact, one expert from UK Media Ltd, who arbitrages £ 12m in volume, says branding is the next natural step for affiliate web sites.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:06 AM | Affiliate Marketing on the Rise (permalink)

The presentation is derived from my whitepaper Are you Making The Most of Shopping Portals ? (PDF file). The message is

The "search tail" is often under-exploited by merchants. Most merchants own product data that can be turned into a "quick-win" in search marketing terms. My advice is get (1) "your data out" and (2) filter and push your data to the head of the search. Often the most popular and profitable keyword emerges from the tail; all a question of finding it and promoting it to the main page.

A large database of product information is worth its weight in gold in search marketing terms. Learn to exploit it and you will improve both search head and search tail. I have analytics for a shopping site (shopping.enclick.com) that started using dynamic top 10 list of products and categories based on measuring search traffic to the site.

Send me an email, (paul dot elosegui at enclick dot com) if you want to meet up.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 8:32 AM | London Search Engine Strategies Conference: Meet Up (permalink)

Wikipedia is the online public domain encyclopedia, which has recently surpassed all commercial Encyclopedia services, like Encyclopedia Brittanica. In an effort to combat spammers who edit encyclopedia entries with external links in order to gain Google´s PageRank favour, has implemented the "nofollow" tag on all external links.

Wikipedia has succumbed to this controversial measure, just like all blog services, the blog search engine technorati, and the social filtering site del.icio.us. The measure was originally proposed by Google to remove the incentive for spammers to add bogus comments to blogs in an effort to increase banklinks to their spam site.

The "nofollow" tag disables the link in question from Google's algorithm, basically announcing to search engines that "this-is-not-a-good-link"; the tag removes any PageRank assignment for that link. Google first proposed the "nofollow" for fighting spam on blog comments and trackbacks. Spammers cannot leach pagerank from high PR blogs with automated comment generators.

The measure is a double edged sword for Google though. Google relies on counting links to a website to judge its importance. If webmasters use "nofollow" links which do not count for pagerank, Google will have no links to count. The concept behind their algorithm looses power.

The "nofollow" tag also goes against the central principle of attribution, which plays a critical role, that of currency, for the creative commons and open source ecology. GIven that wikipedia is lives because of the open data and creative commons ecology, this could affect it critically.

Linking out of wikipedia provides attribution to other sources and providers of information; short changing on attribution could reduce the number of wikipedia content volunteers and inbound linking to it.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:32 AM | Wikipedia Renages on Attribution by Using the "nofollow" Tag in Outbound Links (permalink) | Comments (1)

Merchants with competitive prices benefit especially from supplying their product data feeds to price comparison engines. The quality of the data feed plays an important role in the share of traffic merchants get. Manufacturer´s product reference and model number information in the data feed gets the products inserted fully in the price comparison algorithms, and competing for qualified users which are at the price comparison stage of their buying cycle.

The resulting customer orders exceeded expectations and as a consequence multichannel sales grew over the 6 weeks by 204%. Releases. Woolworths online drive offsets middling high-street sales; overall results are down, like-for-like sales dropped by 4.6% in the six weeks to January 13. In Tesco's case, underlying sales (excluding fuel) grew by 5.9% in the six weeks to January 6, helped by its online store Tesco Direct, which lifted internet sales by 30% on 2005 figures, to a total of £150 million (€225 million). Online sales are estimated to have added as much as 1% to the like for like sales figures. After the successful Christmas period, Tesco is planning to increase its current 11,000 DVD, CDs with its full non-food online by April.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:00 PM | Woolworths Big Christmas Push in Online Sales (permalink)

Domino is also preparing its mobile ecommerce platform. It expects text message orders will also drive sales growth in the future, as the coming teenage demographic use always-on broadband and text rather than voice phones.

Domino pizza media center.

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 8:09 AM | Online Pizza Orders Drive Growth at Domino Pizzas (permalink)

Hundreds of millions of shoppers using their paypal account to ensure security on their ebay purchases can now use their paypal accounts for all purchases. With the new debit card number associated ot their paypal accounts, shoppers can use this new "paypal credit card" to shop safely on all retailers accepting credit cards.

Paypal accounts are designed with online fraud protection, since they can only be used online. Paypal guarantees fraud protection and polices its account transaction proactively. Online security is heightened by technical encryption and authentication technologies, over and above the standard secure transaction page.

Paypal's new innitiative to improve consumer confidence online should have higher impact in countries where confidence is still low. The value is limited in the UK and US where credit card companies and major banks have dedicated online fraud units, and confidence is high.

PayPal Virtual Debit Card FAQs - PayPal

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:00 AM | Security Risk Reduced to Zero with PayPal Virtual Debit Card (permalink)

A quarter of all electrical goods sold over Christmas were bought online, according to Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG). IMRG also said that online now accounts for 10% of total retail sales in the UK, compared to just 0.5% in 2000. In 2006 as a whole, online sales were up 40% from the previous year.

On commodity products that have little differentiation, shoppers search for best prices using price comparison engines like Enclick best price search.

"From talking to our members, my guess is consumers will have spent £3.7bn (€5.55bn) online just in December", James Roper, chief executive for IMRG

"This has definitely been an online Christmas. We think 25 million people are now shopping online and the spike that we see at Christmas is huge. Everything combines to push people to internet shopping over the period - bad weather, bulk buying, the inconvenience of transport ..."

Wrapped gifts was another category of massive growth this year, up 150 percent year-on-year. Statistics released by online shoppers are impressive:

1. John Lewis saw its online sales soar 60% in December
2. Online sales at Tesco soared by more than 30%
3. 1.3 million shoppers ordered groceries and Christmas gifts through Tesco.com
4. Tesco Wine Club delivered 80,000 orders in time for Christmas, up 50% since last year
5. Amazon, the number one etailer in the UK, sold 4 million orders on its busiest day, December 11.
6. Next Directory's sales (50% of which are estimated to be online) rose by 9.3

Offline, high-street sales are loosing market share. HMV and Woolworths both issued profit warnings at the beginning of December, and Mr Ratner of the Retail Consortium, said their Christmas trading updates were likely to be bad. Next's retail division, saw underlying sales in the 308 stores slump by 6.9 per cent from 31 July to 24 December.

Marks & Spencers is making a concerted effort to increase its online sales. Stuart Rose, M&S's chief executive, wants to increase internet sales from £100m to £500m by overhauling its website. Marks & Spencers datafeed has improved in quantity and quality recently, as it distributes its products among shopping portals.

All retailers are embracing internet shopping portals as distribution partners. For the high-street retailers, our Enclick shopping compares prices on the following number of products:

• Woolworths: 273,000 products
• John Lewis: 19,000 products
• Marks & Spencers 9300 products
• Littlewoods: 10,500 products

The enclick data feed marketing team is in high demand, helping retailers market their inventories online.

Many bricks and mortars high-street retailers are all turning to Online Sales to save their businesses. Who would have said ?

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 4:59 PM | Online Shopping Rises to Record Levels over Christmas (permalink)

In spite of the recent controversy on the poor accuracy of online statistics, Hitwise still produces interesting insights on overall internet clickthrough.

Moneysupermarket.com, leading loans and insurance comparator, received 13.55% of total traffic from organic search, and 20% from paid search (PPC) campaigns. While 4.2% of traffic to retail sites are now being sent by comparison shopping engines, a 17% increase relative to last year. For certain products, 90% of online shoppers use comparison shopping engines to research a purchase.

One of the keys to successful use of comparison shopping engines is being able to submit your entire catalogue through a data feed. Enclick runs data feed service for merchants wishing to outsource data feed submission and maintenance to the top dozen comparison shopping engines.

[ Via Shopping sites critical to retailers: Hitwise?s Tancer]

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 6:43 PM | Comparison Shopping Engines now Essential for Ecommerce Marketing (permalink) | TrackBacks (1)