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]

Technorati Tags: comparison+shopping+engine , retail+clickstream

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 6:43 PM | Permalink:Comparison Shopping Engines now Essential for Ecommerce Marketing | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

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.

Googlebot activity reports

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.

Crawl Rate Control

Number of URLs submitted

[Via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Learn more about Googlebot's crawl of your site and more!]

Technorati Tags: google+sitemap

Posted by Paul Salber at 9:13 AM | Permalink:Controlling the Googlebots with New Google Sitemap Functions | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

There Can be Only One

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.

Public Licence Standards

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.

Technorati Tags: data+standards , retail+association , shopping+standards

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 4:40 PM | Permalink:Shopping Feeds Standards Fight is On | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spamhaus provides a spammer blacklist which is widely used in anti-spam filters by ISPs and webmail companies, including hotmail.com. Spamhaus is non-profit organization set up by Steve Linford in 1998 whose mission is to track the worst of organized spam operators. It provides anti-spam intelligence to internet services, Law Enforcement Agencies, and government anti-spam legislation. The organization is staffed by the world's foremost anti-spam specialists who provide best their endevours to assist in anti-spam.

In an astonishingly misguided ruling, e360 Insight LLC a Chicago bulk-emailer won damages against spamhaus for being included in the Spamhaus blacklist. Spamhaus disagree on the facts of the case and on the jurisdiction, but did not appear at the US district court of Illinois; non-profit organizations of limited means cannot defend against disputes in all worldwide jurisdictions.

The bulk mailer won the $11.7m compensation, and Spamhaus was found to be in contempt of court after it failed to pay or remove the company's name from its blacklist.

read more...

Technorati Tags: anti+spam

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 11:19 PM | Permalink:Bulk Mailer Wins Ridiculous Case Against Anti-Spam Organization | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Internet advertising nears £1 billion (€1500m) for the first six months of 2006. Though the figure is lower than the US $7900m for the equivalent period, UK spend is higher on a per capita basis than the US. The figure below shows online advertising revenue growth for the US

On a per capita basis, the UK leads the way with €50 per capita, followed by the US and France with around €40 per capita. Scandinavia follows with high €30 values. But online advertising has yet to reach the tipping point in southern Europe; Italy, Portugal and Spain have single digit per capita online spend values, typically €5 per capita. But growth is 30-50 percent in all countries.

The 40 percent year on year growth takes online advertising to 10.5 percent of the UK's advertising market, almost equal to the National Press' market share. UK advertising is now shared among the different medium as follows

1. TV 22.7% market share
2. National Press 11.4 %
3. Online 10.5 %
4. Outdoor 5.1%
5. Consumer magazines 4.6%
6. radio advertising 3.4%

The study by IAB and Price WaterHouse shows online advertising is split as follows

1. Paid-for search takes 57.9%
2. Online display (banners and skyscrapers) 23.5%
3. online classified advertising 17.7%
4. Interruptive formats, including 'pop ups', declined to 0.7%
5. Email marketing and others taking the remaining 0.8%

The US IAB study shows that performance based advertising, the Cost-per-Action (CPA) model is rising over the Cost-per-Click (CPC) models, as shown in the table left.

The sector ranking in online advertsing spend is as follows:

1. Recruitment and finance account for over half the spend
2. Automotive 13.8%
3. Entertainment and Media 8.9%
4. Consumer Goods, which includes FMCG, rose to 4.6%,
5. Retail increases to 3%

The trend is for adspend to even out across categories, retail increasing its share by 30% as ecommerce takes off.

Technorati Tags: iab , online+advertising

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 9:12 AM | Permalink:Online Advertising Tsunami has Arrived in the UK | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The announcement comes just in time, as Google hurtles forward in the development of its competing GData standard for Google Base and Google Checkout. Google Base is to power comparison shopping on Google's main search, with Google Checkout providing clients and merchants with bank clearing of transactions.

[Google Data API have opened a blog here]

Technorati Tags: comparison+shopping , gdata , google+base , online+retail , shopping+data+feed+standard

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 9:11 AM | Permalink:Developments on the Standard Universal Data Feeds Front | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The number one online supermarket has announced 28.7% growth for the first half of 2006. Having topped £1000m in turnover in 2005, growth is down slightly from 32% for the year ending 2005, but profits are up to 43.1% in 2006 as economies of scale rise further. Likely sales for 2006 are £1300m (topping €2000m), only behind Amazon for the UK.

Online sales are only 6% of total sales though, compared with Littlewoods 30% revenue from its ecommerce group.

Tesco has piloted specialized order fulfillment centers, which use state of the art Operational Research Software to optimize a order filler's pick up route along specialized pallets and shelfs. In addition to advanced automation to manage shelf stock. Order filler staff follow instructions on a wrist worn PDA, to fill several orders at the same time, with a minimum of movement along ailes.

Tesco is rivalling shops like Argos and Ikea by offering home delivery in two-hour slots, instead of half-day ones, and also the option to collect directly from stores.

Tesco has increased the number of CDs and DVDs it offers online to 280,000. With an additional 8,000 products in the lucrative electronics and household appliances sectors. In fact, Tesco is the highest selling household appliances retailer on the Enclick price comparator site. With close to 300,000 products, Tesco has one of the most comprehensive product data feeds on offer among online merchants.

[Via Guardian Online]

Technorati Tags: tesco

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 7:44 PM | Permalink:Tesco.com Sales Increase by 30% | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The social tagging site del.icio.us has implemented the "nofollow" tag on its home page. Following the example of blog search engine technorati, del.icio.us implements the anti-spam measure proposed by Google.

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.

Technorati Tags: nofollow

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:53 AM | Permalink:del.icio.us implements the "nofollow" tag | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)