Facebook Stores Shutdown Within Months of Launching
Retailers including J.C. Penney, Nordstrom and GameStop closed their Facebook stores within months of launching them, throwing the future of Facebook commerce into doubt, says Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”
“It never did make sense”, said Shane Kinsch of Converg Media. “It was dead before it started. Many companies rightfully want to be where customers are but in this case, like many social media destinations, users just want to be left alone.” Read more at Bloomberg…
Yahoo! Search Traffic Plummets
The trend is clear: Yahoo!’s search traffic Free Falls.
The Search Engine wars have always been sketchy with each trying to reach more visitors and appealing to visitors to use them as their “homepage”. The search engine wars will forever continue, but for the time being, the results are clear. For the past 3 months, Yahoo! has been losing a lot of traffic.
Google is the recipient for most of the traffic loss from Yahoo! as seen in the numbers below. The agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo! hasn’t helped stop the big fish, Google and probably will never stop Google’s momentum. If you didn’t already know, Microsoft’s Bing search engine provides Yahoo!’s paid search. Microsoft retains all money made from Bing advertising, while Yahoo! only keeps about 90% of the ad revenue from Yahoo!
The results below are explicit “core” search queries where users enter a search term in the search box o none of the three sites. It doesn’t include other search features that may be part of the search engine. It does not contain mobile search traffic numbers nor searches performed outside of the United States — two more areas where Google is even that much more dominant.
The numbers for for the last year.. notice the RED section below of Yahoo!’s steep decline in traffic.
Domain Bias in Web Search
Research performed by Samuel Ieong, Nina Mishra, Eldar Sadikov, and Li Zhang of Microsoft and Stanford University provides an interesting fact for how human behaviors affect the choice of search results when it comes to domain names.
Is there really Domain Bias in Web Search?
This paper uncovers a new phenomenon in web search that we call domain bias — a user’s propensity to believe that a page is more relevant just because it comes from a particular domain. We provide evidence of the existence of domain bias in click activity as well as in human judgments via a comprehensive collection of experiments. We begin by studying the difference between domains that a search engine surfaces and that users click. Surprisingly, we find that despite changes in the overall distribution of surfaced domains, there has not been a comparable shift in the distribution of clicked domains. Users seem to have learned the landscape of the internet and their click behavior has thus become more predictable over time. Next, we run a blind domain test, akin to a Pepsi/Coke taste test, to determine whether domains can shift a user’s opinion of which page is more relevant. We find that domains can actually flip a user’s preference about 25% of the time. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of systematic domain preferences, even after factoring out confounding issues such as position bias and relevance, two factors that have been used extensively in past work to explain user behavior. The existence of domain bias has numerous consequences including, for example, the importance of discounting click activity from reputable domains.
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Another reason why inbound marketing is winning is because it costs less than traditional marketing. Why try to buy your way in when consumers aren’t even paying attention? Here are some stats from the infographic below.
- 44% of direct mail is never opened. That’s a waste of time, postage and paper.
- 86% of people skip through television commercials.
- 84% of 25 to 34 year olds have clicked out of a website because of an “irrelevant or intrusive ad.”
- The cost per lead in outbound marketing is more than for inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing focuses on earning, not buying, a person’s attention, which is done through social media and engaging content, such as blogs, podcasts and white papers. This content is interesting, informative and adds value, creating a positive connection in the eyes of the consumer, thus making him more likely to engage your brand and buy the product. So it costs less and has better a ROI.
This infographic from an infographic design agency,Voltier Digital highlights the differences between the two kinds of marketing
Why you should Ping your Sitemap
A sitemap is more than just a list of links on your website that makeup the “site” , it’s an easy way for the search engines to get a taste of what your site is about.
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First, Create your Sitemap
If you need help creating your initial sitemap, there’s a lot of free sitemap generators out there to get you started with your initial XML sitemap. After you create your sitemap, save it to your website. Keep in mind, you’ll want to keep your sitemap updated as often as you make changes to your website, then ping the search engines to tell them to look for the update.
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Tell the Search Engines When you Update your Sitemap
If your website, blog or content management system doesn’t already “ping” the search engines and update your sitemap automatically with your new updates and content, we offer this as a free service to our clients. We generate your website’s sitemap from the outside using our own website ‘crawler’ just like the search engines. We then save this in an open format where the search engines can interpret and process it. We then tell the search engines with a simple ping, that they should take a look at your sitemap and note any changes.
Keep in mind, like everything else you can do all this yourself but we’ve perfected it and it’s just a basic part of our service. If you want to do this yourself, the search engines have a special URL for you to go to.
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How to Ping Google
Google is definitely the dominant search engine, and you will want to tell the “big G” when you make any updates or changes to your website. Google also has a sitemap tool in their Google Webmaster tools area. If you haven’t already created your Google Webmaster account, you should. There’s a lot of valuable data out there and you can track when they crawl your site and how many of your links are in their index..
The ping url is:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
You should receive a message stating that your sitemap has been successfully added to their list of sitemaps to crawl.
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How to Ping Bing / MSN
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
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How to Ping Ask
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
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Where’s Yahoo!? Well, as of March 2011, they shutdown this service because they’re integrating with Bing, so use the Bing link.
Marketing Turns to the Web as .Com turns 25
March 15th, 1985 – Two and a half decades ago, when the first .com was awarded, there was no advertising on the Web.
Now it looks as if Internet advertising is set to take over take print advertising in the United States. According to a survey by research firm Outsell Inc. of more than 1,000 US advertisers, companies plan to spend nearly $120 billion on online and digital strategies, from search engine keywords to seminars on the web, while they plan to spend about $112 billion on print strategies such as newspaper and magazine ads. (http://www.outsellinc.com/press/press_releases/ad_study_2010)
“Advertisers are directing dollars toward the channels which generate the most qualified leads and most effective branding. As they emerge from the recession, they need more accountability, and they’re spreading their spending over a widening set of options,” said Chuck Richard, Vice President and Lead Analyst, Outsell.
If the forecast holds true, the U.S. will follow the UK, which became the first major economy where advertisers spent more on Internet advertising than on TV advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spent in the first six months of 2009, according to guardian.co.uk.
The .com world may only be 25, but as the shift in advertising dollars shows that it is growing up fast.
