Internet Marketing Blog

Christmas Season Search Engine Use

I did a bit of keyword research on Christmas-related searches just to see if I could glean any particular trends for these types of searches.

Christmas Eve Search Behavior

On Christmas Eve, the top Christmas searches were for the Norad Santa Tracker tool to track Santa's progress on Christmas Eve. These searches imply family search activity as kids and their parents follow Kris Kringle's gift deposits.

Additional family activity type searches include queries for Christmas carol lyrics and popular holiday entertainment such as "It's A Wonderful Life," and searches for Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart.

Cooking-related searches are also very popular, so grocery stores and other recipe providers would do well to optimize their sites for these queries.

Other types of searches include queries for store hours for those last-second shoppers--demonstrating the importance of including your store hours on your web site and within your local online listings.

Christmas Day Search Behavior

Christmas Day searches, not surprisingly, are heavily populated with post-Christmas sale-related searches as well as store-, and especially restaurant-hours searches.

Cooking-related searches are also popular.

Christmas Day searches also give an early glimpse into the gifts that were popular. This year Zune and iTunes searches were popular, as were Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band searches.

Christmas Searches Start Early, Real Early

When looking a historical search trends for Christmas-related queries, the one thing that stands out is that people appear to start thinking about and, presumably, then, researching Christmas gifts as early as August. That's when Christmas-related searches begin to spike upward.

This behavior is quite consistent from year to year, as this Google Trends chart of Christmas-related searches from 2004 to 2007 demonstrates:

This can be seen most clearly looking at at single year, as the following Google Trends charts shows:

And as the following Christmas searches chart from KeywordDiscovery.com confirms:

There is an obvious opportunity for online retailers in particular to engage customers long before the Christmas season even begins by examining and optimizing search campaigns targeted at these summer searches.

Black Friday Search Queries

I posted a piece yesterday examining people's Thanksgiving-related search behavior so I figure today is an appropriate time to examine people's Black Friday search behavior.

As you can see from the Google Trends chart below, a day after the 100 most popular searches are dominated by Thanksgiving-related queries, Black Friday is all about shopping; and about shopping for specific products in particular. Six of the top ten search queries are for specific products. Two of the top ten searches are for sales or coupons and only two queries are unrelated to shopping:

The obvious search engine marketing conclusion here, is that online store owners should do their keyword research and ensure that their individual product pages are search optimized and traditional retailers should ensure their sites are optimized for such words as "deals," "coupons," "sales," "shipping," "directions," etc.

Google Analytics Video Tutorial

I preach the virtues of robust traffic measurement all the time. I have been using Google Analytics since it was rolled out as a service and I absolutely love it, especially since they've adopted the new interface.  Conversation Marketing has uploaded an excellent series of video tutorials for Google Analytics web site statistics services. If you aren't already using Google Analytics, I highly recommend looking into it. The following superb tutorials will take you through the ins and outs:

Google Analytics Tutorial 1: Setup

Google Analytics Tutorial 2: Essential Stats

Google Analytics Tutorial 3: Digging Deeper

Google Analytics Tutorial 4: Goal Tracking

Google Analytics Tutorial 5: SEO Analytics

Google Analytics Video Tutorial 6: Visitor Segmentation

The Google Hiccup

After several days, Yahoo! will finish updating their index today.

I haven't noticed any major changes in Yahoo's search results so far. I can't say as much for the Google Shuffle that occurred earlier this month. The method by which the search engines rank sites is constantly changing as they strive to improve the accuracy of their results and to prevent search engine spam. So such fluctuations in search results are fairly common but they aren't always drastic.

One of our clients had top three- to five- (and many first-) place rankings for targeted keywords for which we'd optimized their web site. Literally overnight, those rankings disappeared in Google's search results.

My first reaction that this was a Google update and that the results would return to normal in a few days. That, of course, is no consolation for a frantic client, especially when there is a direct relationship between Google rankings and sales. The client still ranked well with Yahoo! and MSN/Live and Ask and AOL but the fact is, most traffic from search engines comes via Google. A drop in Google rankings equals a drop in traffic volume to your site.

We ended up running a Google AdWords campaign to drive sales until the Google results stabilized, as they subsequently did.

The last time I saw such dramatic disruption in Google's search results was during the 2003 Florida Update. At that time, we had a law firm client's top ranking results fall off the map as Google seemed to favor directory sites such as FindLaw over individual law firm sites.

Then, as now, the client had a small Internet marketing budget that was devoted to the fundamentals, search engine optimization.

But this should serve as a cautionary tale to not put all of your Internet marketing eggs in one basket. This issue dramatically illustrates the perils of depending upon one primary source for your web site traffic. When planning your Internet marketing budget, think about diversifying your traffic sources. Such sources can include such direct marketing tools as a regular email newsletter, a regularly updated blog, and creating outposts on online centers of gravity like YouTube and MySpace and Facebook in order to build followings among those audiences.

Establishing relationships within various online venues will help to inoculate your online presence when Google sneezes.

Of Online Forms & Frustration

Karl Long has a great post at ExperienceCurve about sign-up forms.

As a marketer, my natural inclination is to get as much demographic data as possible and forms are one way of doing that. But I learned early on that less is much more where forms are concerned.

As a general rule, the less information you ask for in an online form, the more likely you'll get someone to fill one out and submit it. If the minimum requirement of an online form is an email address, then you always have the ability to follow up with an email survey if you want to collect more demographic data on your visitors.

But the last thing you want to do is annoy your potential customers, so design your forms keeping that in mind. Always ask yourself what is the absolute minimum information you need to complete the purpose of the form. Keep it simple and easy for your visitors.

Online Search & Purchase Behavior

Last month, DoubleClick release the results of a survey called Search Before the Purchase. The study examined pre-purchase search activity across  the Apparel, Computer Hardware, Sports & Fitness and Travel categories.

The survey revealed that about half of all Internet shoppers conducted product research at a search engine before making a purchase online and that most people finish their purchase-related searches weeks prior to the transaction. The brand names of online retailers were a minority of all purchase-related searches made during shopping research.

The survey found product reseach on a search engine preceeds about one out of every two online purchases. Almost three-quarters of Travel consumers used search engines before their transaction. Buyers in the Fitness/Sports category conducted 2.5 relevant searches in the three months before a purchase; Apparel consumers made 4.7 relevant searches; Computer Hardware buyers performed 4.9 searches, and Travel consumers averaged 6 travel-related searches three months before their purchase.

Highlighting the importance of branding through search marketing, the survey revealed that most online shoppers complete their purchase-related search engine research two or more weeks before their online purchase. 54.7% of Travel buyers' final searches occurred at least two weeks before buying; 21.5% searched one week or more before their purchase, and only 23.8 % bought during the same session.

Searches including a brand name accounted for only 18.1% to 28.5% of all searches buyers conducted, depending on the category. Only 4% or less of the searches for each category used search phrases that included merchant's brands plus another term. Though the volume of these searches are low, they have a high proportion of clicks per search. For example, for Apparel sites, just 1% of searches were brand-specific but those searches got 3.7% of clicks.

Brand-specific searches and click-throughs rise in prominence closer to the purchase, peaking during the purchase session--searches and clicks conducted in the same session as the transaction. For apparel buyers, 10% of clicks-throughs occurred during the purchase session, and 89% of these click-throughs were brand-specific. The same behavior held true to a lesser degree across the other categories: 9% and 54% for Computer Hardware; 9% and 49% for Travel; and 11% and 57% for Sport & Fitness.

Technorati tags: online behavior | search engine behavior | online product research | online purchase research | search engine branding | ecommerce | online transactions | online purchases | internet shopping | online shopping

Online Research, Offline Purchase

The results of an iProspect survey of online consumers [PDF] during the 2005 holiday season released last month show that 47% of respondents who researched a product online then bought that product offline. This a strong argument for bricks and mortor merchants to include a store-finding feature on their web site.

Conversely, 53% of respondents who researched a product online did not follow through by buying online. It would've been nice to know why.

These results obviously  suggest that merchants should think of ways they can track feet on the floor to determine ROI on their online marketing efforts. It's a tricky problem because there are no elegant solutions to address it.

The study also found that price comparison sites such as Froogle have yet to really take off. The web sites American Internet users used for researching products they bought, online or off, were:

• The merchant's site, 63%
• A search engine, 62%
• The manufacturer's site, 30%
• A shopping search engine or comparison site, 26%
• Other, 14%

This data makes clear that it is crucial that a merchant's web site have high visibility in the general search engines through either online advertising or through natural search engine marketing so consumers can find the merchant site for their research needs.

Technorati tags: online product research | internet product research | search engine marketing |  sem | search engine advertising | online advertising | froogle | price comparison engine

Online Classifieds - Craigslist

Riffing off the new documentary 24 Hours On Craigslist, Nightline did an excellent segement last night on the online classifieds site Craigslist. The piece is done by Jake Tapper, who was one of my favorite reporters when he was with Salon.

Watch the Craigslist segment.

Technorati tags: 24 hours on craigslist | craigslist | online classifieds | nightline | jake tapper | salon | video

Valentine's Day Consumer Attitudes

Gender Differences On Valentine's Day

Yeah, I know, Valentine's Day is over, get on with it, already! Indulge me one last time and file this away for next year's Valentine's Day sales season.

The comparison shopping engine Shopzilla released the results of a survey conducted on their behalf by Bizrate Research of 981 online buyers that shows, not surprisingly, that lonely women get more depressed than married women on Valentine's Day. Big surprise, huh?  The only thing here is that I don't believe anyone every tried to measure it before.

Thirty-five precent of widowed women get depressed on Valentine's Day; 25% of single women and 25% of divorced or separated women do; and only 13% of married women get depressed on Valentine's Day.

The survey explains that Valentine's Day depresses many women because they consider themselves more romantic than men (73% versus 64%), and that the holiday is more important to them (85%) than it is to men (73%). Nealry all women (90%) think that romance is at least moderately important on Valentine's Day and 71% say that their expectations have been let down on the holiday. Twenty-five percent of  women have been dissatisfied with their significant other's Valentine's Day gift.

Seventy-eight percent of women would feel comfortable buying themselves a Valentine's Day gift if there were single compared to only 57% of men who would do so; forty percent of women say they have bought themselves a Valentine's Day gift while only 12% of men have.

Purchasing Behavior & Gift Preferences

A Discovery Card Valentine's Day Shopping Survey finds that men will outspend (averaging $127) women (averaging $74) on Valentine's Day gifts. Women's lower spending is partly explained by the fact that 40% said that coupons/rebates would play a role in their Valentine's Day shopping decisions, compared to only 35% of men who would take bargains into consideration.

Most men (71%) planned on giving their significant other a night out on Valentine's Day while 66% planned to give flowers. Conversely, most women (53%) planned on buying entertainment products for their men.

Sixty-two percent of both men and women hoped to receive a night out on the town from their significant other. That's where they part ways in preferred gifts. Men want entertainment products (45%) and candy (26%) while women want flowers (55%) and jewelry (44%).

The Discovery Card survey also found:

• Most people (65%) will make their purchase a week in advance of Valentine's Day but one in ten men will wait until February 14.
• More than a third of women (39%) planned on spending nothing on their significant others for the holiday.
• 22% of men and 15% of women planned to buy their Valentine's Day gift online.
• 53% of both men and women said they'd use a debit or credit card to buy their Valentine's Day gifts.

Technorati tags: valentine's day | valentine | gifts | ecommerce | consumer behavior | consumer insights | surveys

College Students Shopping Online

Late last month, Experience, Inc., a career services provider, released the results of a survey of college-educated 18 to 34 year-olds' online shopping behavior. Experience claims that 18 to 34 year-olds are responsible for $175 billion in annual consumer spending.

The survey found that 98% of college students have bought a product or service online.

They conduct online research before buying:

• Less than one hour of research: 27%
• 1-2 hours of research: 53%
• 3-5 hours of research: 17%
• Six or more hours of research: 3%

The report states that "Because college students spend a significant amount of time online researching products and services before purchasing, when they do purchase, they do it online."

Perhaps. It would be interesting to know what they were buying online. I'd be wiling to bet that college students are primarily small ticket buyers online: Books, music, web site subscriptions, etc., and that might explain why most spend little time doing online research. It doesn't take a lot of research to determine if you want to buy a book or some music.

I'd also be willing to bet that there's a strong correlation between the amount of time spent researching a product online and the price of the product. That is, people will conduct much more thorough and extensive research for a big-ticket item such as a car or an HDTV and that the larger the price, the less likely they will be to buy the item online.

The report also states that 18 to 34 year-olds respond to online advertising. More than 50% said they have bought a product or service based on an online ad and 34% said Internet ads were the most influential way to motivate them to learn more about a product or service.

What types of online ads will most appeal to this group?

1. Sponsored link related to the content they are reading, 41%
2. A contest or promotion offering value, 34%
3. Personalization based on their pofile or online behavior, 17%

Technorati tags: college students | online advertising | internet advertising | online shopping | ecommerce | online sales | online research | online behavior

Valentine's Day Sales

Constant Contact's survey of business owners, "2006 Small Business Valentine's Day Outlook," shows that most respondents feeling rosy about the Valentine's Day sales season:  55%  expected strong sales  leading up to February 14th, while 71% were expecting healthy online sales. Fifty-one percent said that Valentine's Day was an important holiday for their business.

Seventy percent planned on promoting Valentine's Day offers through the following methods:

1. Email markeing, 76%
2. Online marketing, 49%
3. Direct mail, 25%
4. Flyers, 25%
5. Advertising (TV/Radio/Newspaper), 16%

Thirty-two percent of small business owners expected customers to spend less than $25 on Valentine's Day gifts; 35% expected them to spend between $25 and $50; 14% expected customers to spend between $50 and $75; 9% expected them to spend between $75 and $100; and 10% expected customers to spend more than $100.

Small business owners believed that flowers would be by far the most popular gift bought by their customers:

1. Flowers, 59%
2. Jewelry, 21%
3. Chocolates, 16%
4. Clothing, 4%

Online Dating & Valentine Searches

Seasonal Marketing To The Lovelorn

The 15 most popular Valentine's Day-related search terms today (after filtering out the sex-related terms) are:

1. valentines day - 19th overall
2. hearts - 21st
3. flowers - 26th
4. valentines - 29th
5. valentine - 32nd
6. valentine cards - 36th
7. lingerie - 47th
8. love - 53rd
9. heart - 69th
10. love poems - 73rd
11. valentine's day - 94th
12. poems - 103rd
13. valentine poems - 187th
14. love quotes - 217th
15. cupid - 263rd

Over at Yahoo! Buzz, they provide their Top 20 Valentine Searches and a summary of their Valentine gift-related searches. They note that Valentine-related searches have doubled over the past week and that well over half of those searches are performed by those under 24 years of age. Thirty to fifty-four year-olds only account for 30% of their Valentine search traffic.

Online Dating

If you're looking to target desperately seeking singles, there are some things you should know.

According to February 2005 data from Jupiter Research, revenue growth for online dating sites, while robust in 2002 (73%) and 2003 (77%), has shrunk siginificantly in 2004 (19%) and 2005 (9%). Fees for such sites range from $10 to $50 per month.

According to a January 2006 report from Media Metrix, the top five online dating sites measured by unique at-home, at-work and university visitors for December 2005 were:

1. Yahoo! Personals, 24,041 visitors
2. Match.com sites, 3,604 visitors
3. Spark Networks, 2,832 visitors
4. True.com, 1,956 visitors
5. Mate1.com, 1,782

Online dating sites such as those mentioned above could be threatened by the rising popularity of free social networking sites. While not specifically online dating sites, places like MySpace.com and Friendster offer online dating as one of their social networking features. January 2006 data from Media Metrix ranks the most popular social networking sites measured by unique at-home, at-work and university visitors for December 2005:

1. MySpace.com, 32,309 visitors
2. Facebook.com, 12,414 visitors
3. Xanga.com, 8,716 visitors
4. Hi5.com, 3,073 visitors
5. Myyearbook.com, 2,422 visitors

Valentine's Day Online Consumer Behavior

A comScore report released today shows that "total online spending in the Flowers & Gifts, Health & Beauty and Jewelry & Watches categories rose 22 percent year-to-date, through February 9, 2006 versus the corresponding period in 2005." The Health & Beauty and Jewelry & Watches categories individually each rose 24% compared to the same period last year. Online sales in the Flowers and the Greetings & Gifts categories each rose 17% versus last year.

Online spending in the Personals & Dating category rose 29% in 2005, totalling $351.9 million last year. The comScore study also found that 39% of visitors to Personals and Dating sites had visited more than one such site during the month and that 10% of new Personals site registrants, signed up for more than one site during the month. Among active registrants, 30% were registered users of more than one Personals site; 37% of active registrants were going to their Personals sites while at work.

In January, 2005, " more than 29 million Americans visited sites in the Flowers, Gifts & Greetings category." According to comScore, the top sites in this category last year were:

1. AmericanGreetings, 8.6 million visitors in January 2005
2. Hallmark, 6.6 million visitors
3. FTD.com, 1.9 million visitors
4. 1-800-FLOWERS.com, 1.7 million visitors
5. Martha Stewart sites, 1.5 million visitors
6. WeddingChannel.com, 1.4 million visitors
7. ProFlowers.com, 1.3 million visitors
8. LillianVernon.com, 1.2 million visitors
9. RedEnvelope.com, 1.1 million visitors
10. Celebrate Express, Inc., 970,000 visitors

Ecommerce With A Personal Touch

RomeoShops.com's tagline is "because guys can't shop," and  that pretty much sums up the value they offer: Helping guys shop for gifts for the women in their life.

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, they've added an advice section to their web site where visitors can ask the ladies of RomeoShops.com for advice. It's a great tool for building a relationship with their customers while offering a service as well.

Ecommerce Web Site Design

A new study by web development firm Questus using their online survey service BigLook, finds that web site design and usability are critical factors that influence online transactions. Though the findings are based on an Internet survey of a puny sample size of 425 employed American adults, the results corroborate an October 2002 Consumer Reports WebWatch survey of 2600 Americans. Because of that, I believe the Questus study has validity.

The Questus study found that good design leads to better sales. Specifically, though price was the most influential factor when making a decision to buy a product on a web site (68% said it was), other factors such as shipping options (44%), product descriptions (38%), site navigation (37%), and the checkout process (32%) were critical factors as well.

Fifty-one percent of the respondents said that they had purchased something from a web site this holiday season from whom they had never purchased before.

Sixty-eight percent of the respondents said that they would distrust a web site that did not have a professional appearance, compared to the 8% who said they'd trust a web site that did not look professional and the 24% who said it didn't matter either way.

A clean, easy-to-use site is important in closing the online sale. Jeff Rosenblum, co-founder and research and strategy director of Questus, says that customers want an uncluttered, obvious site design that doesn't overwhelm them with choices. Surfers were more likely to complain of a site having too many links rather than too few.

The study found that 29% left a site without buying something because they did not want to register with the site; 22% felt it too difficult to find products on the site; and 17% did not believe the site was trustworthy or secure.

The Questus survey is in line with the comprehensive 2002 WebWatch report, How do people evaluate a web site's credibility?

The WebWatch report found that "nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes."

Further, "consumer credibility-related comments about visual design issues occurred with more frequency with finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%), travel (50.5%), and e-commerce sites (46.2%), and with less frequency when assessing health (41.8%), news (39.6%), and nonprofit (39.4%) sites."

PayPal Market Share

Last week, eMarketer reported that survey results released in December 2005 by SG Cowen & Co. found that a whopping 91% of online Americans owne a PayPal account and another 4% planned to open one during the next year. Only 1% of the study's respondents said they didn't know what a PayPal account was; how's that for brand awareness?!?

But PayPal itself admits that of their 96.2 million accounts opened by the last quarter of 2005, they considered only 28.1 million active.

Americans are significantly more likely to use a credit card for their online transactions than they would use a PayPal account. An ACNeilson study from October 2005 showed that most online Americans (64%) used a credit card to buy stuff online, while 31% have used a debit card. By comparison, 26% have used PayPal.