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.
Online retail will grow in quality too, becoming an integral part of mainstream consumer's habits
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.
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
Google's shadow lengthens
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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 ?
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]
The Google sitemap has just released three additional functionalities to control the Googlebot. The feedback cycle is now complete, you submit a sitemap to tell the Googlebot what pages are on your site, and the googlebot now tells you what it does and finds on your site.
The google sitemap pages now include graphs of Googlebots activity on your site. Number of pages crawled a day, speed of the pages found, kbytes downloaded per day.
[Via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Learn more about Googlebot's crawl of your site and more!]
The Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has issued its first proposal for a data feeds standards. The standard is aimed squarely at Comparison Shopping Engines, like shopping.com, kelkoo.com and enclick.com. The goal of the standard is to allow ecommerce merchants to generate a single data feed valid for all affiliate networks and shopping sites, instead of the dozen odd data feeds which are necessary at present.
Jay Heavilon of MARS, who chairs the committee for the standard states
"The current situation is a digital tower-of-Babel, where different online shopping search and shopping engines take SKU data in different formats. These specs allow advertisers, engines, and agencies to exchange product data more efficiently,”
[National Retail Federation Press Release]
Google, W3C and ARTs have competing standards for ecommece data feeds. Google has published the GData API which is a simple focused standard, concentrating exclusively on getting merchant's products into Google Base. With Google Checkout interface adding the transaction backend interface.
The ARTS standards is a more comprehensive definition of vocabulary which ties into ART's other standards for the communication along entire retail value chain. The W3C's RDF schema is also comprehensive, but the retail category XML schema is still not complete.
The three data feed standards clearly overlap in scope. Which ones attains critical mass first is still very much an open question. Each standard has pros and cons.
ARTS has buy-in from Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, and other major players in the online retail sector.
Google Data is now the way for merchants to get their products into Google Search Results. Since Google dominates the retail clickthrough market; its search is typically the origin of 25% of all ecommerce related clickthrough. If Google keeps this lock on retail related traffic, Google Data will be an obligatory data feed for all online shops.
The W3C's XML standards have the advantage of having public domain licences. W3C waives the right to demand fees for the use of its schemas. ARTS and Google reserve all rights on the use of their standard; either organization has a right to demand fees and royalties on the use of their standard in the future. All W3C's standards use forms of creative commons licences, and are therefore truely for the benefit of the retail community.
The public licence issue over the standard is central here. Viral marketing tenets for mass adoption recommend zero fees and minimum friction on use of the schemas. But Already Google has attracted strong criticism from internet leaders over their commercial lock-in tactics of the Google Data standard. Similarly, ARTS already levies fees for use of some of their standard; a disaster in viral marketing terms.
Meanwhile retail merchants observe in hope, as they are forced to produce half a dozen feeds for submitting their product list to price comparison engines.
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