Wild Streak

If you’re running a subscription service, do you send out credit card expiry email reminders? If not, maybe you should. I used to work with a subscription based service and one of the thorns in our side were customers who forgot to update their credit card details after their current card had expired. Considering the service [...]

A no.1 ranking on a popular keyword or phrase in search engine results not only brings a ton of traffic, but instant credibility it seems. A Northwestern University study found participants trust Google so much, many just click on top ranked sites. While Google doesn’t rank on credibility per se, the study found that a site’s layout [...]

A recent survey designed to determine shoppers’ retail promotion preferences found consumers prefer receiving promotions via email. CrossView surveyed 160 shoppers in 4 states in April, of which 35% said they were shopping due exposure to a retailer’s promotion. Among those respondents, 32% received the promotion via a mailer, 29% from in-store promotions, 27% through email marketing, [...]

On Wednesday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced 500 million people are actively using his social networking service. It’s a remarkable achievement and works out to one in 14 people in the world using Facebook. Even more remarkable is the fact it’s only been around for the last 6 years. Facebook was launched in February 2004 and [...]

Noticed any change in your Yahoo traffic over the last couple of days? Bing’s moving in. Yahoo has announced it has started testing Bing supplied organic and paid search results for up to a quarter of Yahoo’s U.S. search traffic. Yahoo says it will also be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid search listings over the next [...]

An integrated study of shopping behaviors has identified a new breed of consumer; the “XTreme shopper”. They don’t just buy a lot online, they are smart about it. According to GfK Consumer’s Future Buy study, 31% of Americans are in this category of consumers, signaling what the company says is a new “shopping culture.” The [...]

New research has found nearly half of email related transactions and three-quarters of opens and clicks occur within one day of the message having hit a consumer’s inbox. Conducted in March 2010 by Experian CheetahMail’s Strategic Services group, email performance was analyzed for just over 44,000 mailings from 404 merchants from different sectors. Results of [...]

Google recently released some statistics about the size, number of resources and other web page metrics based on a study of 4.2 billion pages. Google found that the average page size; including images, scripts, HTTP headers etc was a whopping 320 kilobytes. Back in the days of 28.8k modems, which really wasn’t all that long ago, [...]

The Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry has experienced solid growth in the second quarter of this year compared to Q2 2009 according to Efficient Frontier’s U.S. Search Engine Performance Report. In Q2 2010, year over year investment was up 24%, with a 9.7% increase in spend quarter over quarter, partly due to an increase in click [...]

Women are responsible for 85% of all brand purchases, 92% of vacation purchases, 93% of food purchases and control $7 billion in annual spending. If you’re an online merchant, ignore them at your peril. According to Unicast’s “What Women Want From The Web” report, the most popular online pursuits for women this summer are connecting with [...]

comScore, Inc. recently launched its Ad Metrix Creative Summary report, providing statistics on size, formats, and types of display ads being used by advertisers on publisher sites. The first report shows JPEG ads have the lion’s share of impressions in the USA, at 42%. Medium rectangles (300 x 250 pixels) and 728 x 90 banners, known [...]

A lot of merchants in the online scene maintain a LinkedIn profile; but don’t seem to get what “networking” means. I’m not a great networker these days, I prefer to be a bit of a “ghost” and do my own thing. I started up a LinkedIn profile years ago out of curiosity and have hardly used [...]

An interesting and (in my opinion) useful feature I came across the other day was a form with an audio help feature. As I scrolled through a form, it offered tool-tips type help which is a useful feature in itself, but also a play button that triggered a sound file with instructions associated with that particular [...]

I had no idea how many soccer fans there were out there until this darned 2010 FIFA World Cup. Apologies in advance to any soccer fans out there – but enough already :). On some sites I work with, I’ve been seeing some strange traffic patterns over the last few weeks and while some of it [...]

I remember my first computer teacher relaying this very important piece of wisdom. “There are two types of computer users – those who have lost their data and those about to.” Disaster can strike at any minute – a web server getting fried or even a power surge in your own system. In one second, [...]

It seems the old KISS principle certainly applies when aiming to get articles shared via Facebook. Dan Zarella has been capturing links posted to social media sites from popular news outlets since February 2010 and has well over 12,000 links and counting with full information stored. He’s been finding out all sorts of interesting information in his [...]

Are you including links to your social network profiles in your email newsletters and marketing campaigns? If not, perhaps you should be. The GetResponse “Email Marketing and Social Media Integration Report” study examined almost half a billion messages sent by 19,149 GetResponse users. It seems that small-medium businesses (SMB’s) are a bit lax on including social media [...]

There is no love lost between Google and some newspapers. Rupert Murdoch’s decision to ban Google from indexing content shows the level of contempt some in the industry have towards the Mighty G. But Google might have a solution to keep everyone (well some) happy. Italian newspaper laRepubblica.it is reporting Google has approached some local newspapers [...]

If you had a killer tactic that generated bundles of search engine traffic, would you sell it to others? Maybe, but only if it satisfied one of two criteria. 1) You had already milked it for all it was worth 2) You felt you could make more from selling it than applying it yourself. Let’s say you had [...]

According to a recent presentation relating to the Microsoft and Yahoo! Search Alliance, August/September may see the full rollout of Bing powered Yahoo! search results. If you’re not up to speed on the deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft, the presentation covers the history to date, plus where things are at now. For some merchants, this is incredibly [...]