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Five Tips from Yahoo on seasonal holiday web traffic
September 26th, 2007
The Yahoo Search Marketing team has a post up this week reminding site owners that online holiday shopping increases pretty much every year. In fact, more than 80% of shoppers bought at least one thing online last holiday season. With the holiday sales cycle already gearing up, it's a good idea to start fine tuning your site and campaigns to drive more business. While most of the five tips Yahoo has to offer are a recap of the fundamentals of good online marketing, they're still worth reading and putting into action.
Their tips are as follows:
Getting Your Customers to Shop ‘Til They Drop (a Lot of Money on Your Site)
The holidays can be the make or break season for retailers, whether online, offline or a little of both. For obvious and quite unsentimental reasons, we prefer our advertisers to be on the “make” end of the scale.
And, naturally, we do a lot of research around here based on the huge volumes of data our search business generates. In the interest of helping you “put the make” on the holiday season, we’re offering up some of our findings, as well as a few pointers to help enhance your holiday marketing plans.
Holiday Highlights
If you were to ask the Magic Eight Ball if 2007 is likely to be a good year for online retail, the answer might well be: “All signs point to yes.” According to comScore, online consumer spending grew 26 percent in 2006 to $24.4 billion. More than 80 percent of consumers did at least some shopping online (BizRate and Shop.org Holiday Mood Study 2006), and 50 percent of shoppers bought more stuff online in 2006 than 2005 (NielsenNetRatings research). It’s a pretty telling trend. (For what it’s worth, last year I did all of my holiday shopping online for the first time.)
The Yahoo! Search Marketing team has prepared some tips for advertisers based on the holiday data we gathered:
Engage the bargain hunters—According to the BizRate and Shop.org Holiday Mood Study 2006, nearly half of the consumers polled named “free shipping” as a primary motivator to purchase. Other shoppers named “online only sales” and “repeat buyer discounts.”
Keywords count—According to our internal data, “Christmas” was, not surprisingly, the most holiday-related search term in 2006 with more than three million average monthly searches. Other popular terms included “Christmas decoration,” “Hanukkah,” “holiday gift” and “gift for dad.” Make sure that your keyword selection includes holiday-related keywords and seasonal products and promotions.
Titillate with titles—Titles and descriptions can drive relevance and clicks, so it’s a best practice when creating specific holiday ad groups to place the holiday term prominently in both the title and the description, and include any special seasonal promotions in the copy.
Clear for landing—Make sure that your landing pages are relevant to your keywords, ad copy and any promotions. Nothing’s more frustrating for a consumer to click on an ad that says, “Get 10% off” something and then land on a page where that information is either absent or buried. Prices and promotions should be consistent with ad copy.
Combine search with display and offline advertising—Regular readers of our blog know that search is just one important part of your marketing mix. Make sure you include your keywords and consistent copy in your display and offline marketing material. If you haven’t already read them, check out two recent posts, one on combining search and display advertising and the other on integrating your online and offline campaigns.
Microsoft is overhauling their Search Engine This week
9/26/07
Microsoft decided to take action to compete with industry giant Google. On 26th of September, a new version of Live Search will be launched.
The relaunch of MS Live Search has two main objectives: increase the numbers of users and build a stronger reputation in the search field.
What are the main changes?
Microsoft has made improvements to the search functionality of Live Search and added more personalized elements, focusing on social networks. New features have been added such as Windows Live translator . They also want to change the way results are brought to the consumers, also delivering multimedia results like its biggest competitor Google does .
Marc Bressel, regional sales director for EMEA at Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, said "We want to bring a totally different search results experience to what we have in the market".
These innovations are following the launch of AdCenter in the UK last summer. A paid search platform to compete with Google Adwords but Microsoft didn't achieve to be a serious thread to the market leader just yet. To be successful in this market Microsoft needs to win back its slice of the search engine market share in order to make the AdCenter platform work, one step to reach this goal is to bring more users to Live Search with their new version of Live Search .
But will it work? Time will tell .... so watch out for more news.
DMOZ Directory banned from Google?
09-26-07
DMOZ has been added to the long list of directories which have been removed from the Google SERPs. I find this removal to be very interesting because as far as it seemed Google was a supporter of DMOZ. This is just another wrench in the wheel of link building through directories.
Barry Schwartz reports that The Open Directory's Home Page Goes Missing In Google.
"a search on dmoz (the Open Directory's nickname) does not return the home page in the search results.
Similarly, searches for open directory or open directory project also don't list the site at the usual dmoz.org address. Yes, the screenshot shows a page at search.dmoz.org — but normally, the home page would be listed at www.dmoz.org or just dmoz.org
(as you can see at Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask, for example)."
The best part is that 'a search for www.dmoz.org' does not even show results of the Dmoz home page. To add more insult, the home page does is not even included in Google's cache.
DMOZ has been banned by Google
Google's 2nd round of directory bannings
Google receives 67 percent of all searches in Aug 2007.
Google Search Market Share Increased Seven Percent Year-Over-Year
NEW YORK, NY - September 19, 2007 - Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Google accounted for 63.98 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22.87, 7.98 and 3.41 percent respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.68 percent of U.S. searches.
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Percentage of US Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers |
| Domain |
Aug-07 |
Jul-07 |
Aug-06 |
| www.google.com |
63.98% |
64.35% |
59.99% |
| search.yahoo.com |
22.87% |
22.13% |
22.73% |
| search.msn.com |
7.98%* |
8.79%* |
11.86% |
| www.ask.com |
3.49% |
3.21% |
3.37% |
| Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 9/01/07; 8/26/07; 7/1/2006) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search. |
| Source: Hitwise |
Google an Increasing Source of Traffic to Key Industries
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing August 2007 to August 2006, the Travel, Entertainment and Business and Finance categories received double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.
|
Category |
Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, Aug-07 |
Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Search Engines, Aug-07 – Aug-06 |
Percent of Category Traffic from Google, Aug-07 |
Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, Aug-07 – Aug-06 |
| Health and Medical |
42.99% |
0.44% |
27.76% |
2.72% |
| Travel |
32.66% |
16.13% |
21.28% |
25.85% |
| Shopping and Classifieds |
24.96% |
1.08% |
15.47% |
5.26% |
| News and Media |
19.98% |
6.90% |
12.55% |
10.28% |
| Entertainment |
20.81% |
10.57% |
12.50% |
15.12% |
| Business and Finance |
16.64% |
17.11% |
10.03% |
29.81% |
| All figures are based on US data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users. Source: Hitwise |
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FOOD for thought...
"The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each
level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence
at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created
a platform for innovation."
- Quoted from Vinton Cerf.
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