Cyber Monday: Is Your Business Ready For The Rush?

Cyber Monday is quickly approaching, and that means businesses offering deals online are gearing up for massive amounts of traffic, and hopefully massive amounts of money.
Are you running Cyber Monday deals this year? Let us know in the comments.
comScore put out a report looking at why Cyber Monday is becoming more important to holiday season e-commerce.
“Since its inception, we have witnessed an extremely strong growth in Cyber Monday spending with sales more than doubling from 2005-2010, with a compound annual growth rate of 16% during that timeframe. 2010 was an especially important year in the history of Cyber Monday as online spending reached $1.028 billion, the first time on record that a single day had eclipsed the $1 billion spending threshold,” says comScore’s Andrew Lipsman. “ It also achieved another landmark by finishing as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the first time in history!”

“We at comScore have spent a lot of time in past holiday seasons dispelling the notion that Cyber Monday was the heaviest online spending day of the year, and just when it seemed that message finally began to sink in, Cyber Monday has a banner year and jumps to the top of the ranking,” says Lipsman. “Interestingly, from 2005-2007 Cyber Monday wasn’t even close to the top of the ranking, going from the 8th heaviest spending day to 12th to 9th. But in 2008, Cyber Monday’s overall importance in the context of the holiday shopping season began to change as it surged up the ranking to #3. The following year it ranked as the second heaviest spending day, and finally culminated in 2010 assuming the top position for the year.”

BIA/Kelsey and ConStat put out a report about how local businesses are expected to use digital tools gto lure shoppers on Cyber Monday (in addition to Black Friday and Small Business Saturday). According to that, SMBs have allocated 37% of their total ad and promotional budget to digital/online media in the last 12 months. On average, they intend to increase their digital/online spending in the next 12 months to 40 percent of their total ad budget.
“The data indicate SMBs are getting smarter in their use of digital and online media,” said Steve Marshall, director of research, BIA/Kelsey. “They’re focused on strengthening and enhancing their digital presence, engaging customers with social media and empirically measuring the performance of their online advertising initiatives.”
Of SMBs with an online presence (website, landing page, Facebook page, Google Places page, etc.):

• 69 percent report they update their online presence at least once a month
• 27 percent pay for regular assistance in updating their online presence
• 25 percent report using an Internet service or program to help monitor or manage customer ratings, reviews or comments about their businesses

Tips
Lisa Barone provides some Cyber Monday tips at Small Business Trends. While she elaborates on each one, they essentially boil down to: promote site wide sales, reward fans, throw a Twitter party, and go viral with email marketing.
Heather Clancy in ZDNet’s Small Business Matters column suggests: planning for traffic to double year-over-year, testing throughput and considering hosting static content elsewhere for the peak traffic period, keeping tabs on visitor stats, keeping mobile in mind, and finding a flexible cloud infrastructure provider.
Sounds like good advice to me.
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237 StumbleUpon: Crum Google: +Chris Crum 
resource:http://www.webpronews.com/cyber-monday-is-your-business-ready-for-the-rush-2011-11

Top Searches of 2011 (According to Bing)

Bing has revealed its top searched terms for 2011, and believe it or not, Justin Bieber takes top prize. Then, in the number two position, it’s Kim Kardashian of course. You know, the stuff people need information about.
Bing is the “decision engine,” and clearly people had a lot of decisions to make about Bieber and Kardashian.
“From rising stars and weddings to intense trials and natural disasters, Bing has captured history through the searches that mark the year’s most important people, places and moments in time,” a spokesperson for Bing tells WebProNews.
So here’s that list of most searched people:
1. Justin Bieber
2. Kim Kardashian
3. Jennifer Aniston
4. Lindsay Loahan
5. Jennifer Lopez
6. Britney Spears
7. Katy Perry
8. Megan Fox
9. Lady Gaga
10. Miley Cyrus
The most searched consumer electronics were:
1. Xbox and Kinect
2. Kindle
3. Playstation
4. iPhone 5
5. iPad
6. Wii
7. iPad 2
8. Nook
9. Windows Phone 7
10. Macbook Pro
No Android devices. I wonder if the results were different for Google searches.
The top three news stories were:
1. Casey Anthongy Trial
2. Osama bin Laden Death
3. Hurricane Irene
Top Celebrity Events:
1. Royal Wedding
2. Final “Harry Potter”
3. Kim Kardashian Wedding
Top Finance Quotes:
1. Real estate agents
2. Cheap
3. Coupons
Bing also shared this year-end video:
Bing looks at a few more vertical trends in this blog post.
We’re looking forward to seeing how Google’s year-end list stacks up to Bing’s, given its much larger market share, as it would represent a better picture of what people are truly searching for. I’m guessing Bieber and Kardashian are still pretty high up on the list.
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237 StumbleUpon: Crum Google: +Chris Crum

resource:http://www.webpronews.com/top-searches-of-2011-according-to-bing-2011-11

Google Talks About Its Evolution and Future

Google is no stranger to putting out videos about search. They put out webmaster help videos all the time, but earlier this year, we got a rare look into the inside of how Google shapes its algorithms. There wasn’t a lot of groundbreaking information in that, but it was interesting to see nonetheless.
Here’s that video:
Similarly, while not a lot of new information is provided, Google has released a new video about the “evolution of search,” which is kind of a documentary-style six minute look at how Google has evolved over the years, as told by Googler like Amit Singhal, Marissa Mayer, Ben Gomes, Jack Menzel, and Johanna Wright.
Here’s the new one:
Google has also released an accompanying timeline:


Click to enlarge The last part of the video is about “the future of search,” and that’s always a hot topic, given that Google controls such a dominant portion of the search market. Webmasters would do well to listen to what Google has to say about where search is going.
“The truth is that our users need much more complex answers,” says Singhal in the video. “My dream has always been to build the Star Trek computer, and in my ideal world, I would be able to walk up to a computer, and say, ‘Hey, what is the best time for me to sow seeds in India, given that monsoon was early this year?’ And once we can answer that question (which we don’t today), people will be looking for answers to even more complex questions. These are all genuine information needs. Genuine questions that if we – Google – can answer, our users will become more knowledgable and they will be more satisfied in their quest for knowledge.”
“Our goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek,” says Gomes on the Inside Search blog. “That means you don’t generally need to know about the latest search feature in order to take advantage of it— simply type into the box as usual and find the answers you’re looking for.”
Perhaps not a lot of takeaways you can go out and apply to your site right now, but it does give you an idea of the kind of search engine Google is striving to build, and the better you can solve real problems with your content, the more Google is bound to like that content. You can go back and look at Google’s list of questions for assessing quality, and get that much.
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237 StumbleUpon: Crum Google: +Chris Crum 

resource:http://www.webpronews.com/google-talks-about-its-evolution-and-future-2011-11

Google’s “Not Provided” Referrals Growing In Percentage?

Last month, Google announced that it would begin encrypting search queries with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) as the default experience at Google.com for users who are logged in to their Google accounts.
As a result, there is a lot data that was once available in Google Analytics for webmasters is now hidden. “When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google ‘organic’ search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site,” said Amy Chang on the Google Analytics blog. “Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google ‘cpc’.”
“We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more,” she adds. “To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token ‘not provided)’ within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that ‘cpc’ paid search data is not affected.”
Naturally, SEOs were not thrilled with the move. WebProNews talked to a handful of well-known industry vets about the subject recently:
Conductor has put together some research (hat tip: Search Engine Watch) indicating that the percentage of sites’ natural search traffic that is being labeled “not provided” by Google has grown dramatically since the change was announced.
“The percentage of traffic (not provided) grew from less than 1% in the week immediately after the launch, to 8.875% of traffic from Nov. 18-Nov. 20th (although not a full week.),” says Conductor’s Nathan Safran.

As you can see, that’s a pretty significant jump, especially considering that Google downplayed the change’s impact as “affecting only a minority of your traffic.” Although technically, 49% would still be a “minority”.
It’s worth noting that Google is doing everything in its power to get people using actual Google accounts. Namely Google+. The more Google can grow the amount of people with accounts and profiles, the more likely people are going to be using Google signed in, so it would be no surprise whatsoever to see that percentage of “not provided” keep going up.
A second graph from Conductor shows that while the number has gone up significantly since the change was first made, that growth does seem to have slowed down a bit. This graph references what Safran calls “5 high traffic websites – 2 online retailers, 3 service providers”.

While the first graph shows that overall, the percentage is close to 9%, the second graph shows that it clearly varies from site to site. Safran points to a recent survey from SEOmoz, which had the number as high as 12% for the average.
Google’s Matt Cutts had estimated the effects to be in the “single-digit” percentages.
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237 StumbleUpon: Crum Google: +Chris Crum

resource:http://www.webpronews.com/googles-not-provided-referrals-growing-in-percentage-2011-11