Posts tagged Monday
Search Engine Land’s SMX West Starts Monday; Learn SEO, SEM & Social … – Search Engine Land
Mar 9th
|
Search Engine Land's SMX West Starts Monday; Learn SEO, SEM & Social …
Search Engine Land SEO. Social media marketing. With nearly 60 sessions and keynotes, you'll get the tactics and solutions needed to exceed your marketing and sales goals. Three day All Access passes are available for just $1595, an outstanding value. Have only a day to … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Search Engine Land’s SMX West Starts Monday; Learn SEO, SEM & Social Media – Register Now
Mar 8th
SMX West kicks off this Monday in the San Jose. Don’t miss out! Register today for the pass option that meets your needs, budget and schedule. Get It All with an All Access Pass – March 11-13 Paid search. SEO. Social media marketing. With nearly 60 sessions and keynotes, you’ll get the…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
SMX West Starts Monday; Learn SEO, SEM & Social Media – Register Now – Marketing Land
Mar 7th
|
SMX West Starts Monday; Learn SEO, SEM & Social Media – Register Now
Marketing Land SEO. Social media marketing. With nearly 60 sessions and keynotes, you'll get the tactics and solutions needed to exceed your marketing and sales goals. Three day All Access passes are available for just $1595, an outstanding value. Have only a day to … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Search Engine Land’s SMX West Starts Monday – Be There, March 11-13 in San Jose!
Mar 7th
Join the editorial team of Search Engine Land and over 120 search marketing experts at SMX West! With over 50 sessions and keynotes, multiple networking activities, and access to leading solution providers like Covario, DoubleClick Search, Google and Marin Software, you’ll get the tactics and tools…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
SMX West Starts Next Monday in San Jose; Register by March 10 and Save
Mar 4th
The clock is ticking! Search Engine Land’s – SMX West begins next Monday in San Jose, CA. Register now to reserve your spot! The search and social marketing landscape changes daily. At SMX West you’ll learn: how to take advantage of Google’s new Enhanced AdWords; the potential of…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Black Friday & Cyber Monday PPC: How Did Retailers Prepare?
Dec 10th
An analysis of the holiday spending of various retailers in their efforts to cope with the madness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shows some interesting and perhaps unexpected results regarding how they adjusted their expenditure and advertising.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Cyber Monday Traffic, Mobile & Ad Spend All Up on $1.46 Billion Shopping Day
Nov 28th
Overall, Cyber Monday has proven the greatest online retail day in history, with paid search spend, site traffic, mobile traffic and total revenue all showing healthy growth. Learn more from comScore, Marin Software, IBM, Kenshoo and others.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Cyber Monday Scorecard: Web Users Win, Mobile Users Wait
Nov 28th
Shoppers flocked to the Web’s e-commerce sites over the long Holiday weekend, and Web retailers welcomed them with open arms and fast response times while ringing up record sales. But customers hoping to shop via their smartphones met the equivalent of long lines.
According to Akamai Technologies, traffic to online retail sites topped 8.5 million page views per minute on what has become known as “Cyber Monday,” just before 9pm Eastern Time. That peak was the largest retail traffic spike in history, Lelah Manz, the chief strategist of commerce at Akamai, wrote in a blog post.
All the traffic seems to have paid off in dollar sales, too: According to IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark, online sales jumped 30.3% over 2011, which would break comScore’s forecast of a 20% increase in online sales, or $1.5 billion on that one day alone.
Online, Amazon was the big winner on Cyber Monday, enjoying a 36% increase to almost 35 million visits, as measured by Experian; Walmart and Best Buy were close behind.
A Big Online Shopping Win
“I think the only way to describe the Thanksgiving openings was a huge win,” the president and chief executive of the National Retail Federation (NRF), Matthew Shay told reporters in a Sunday briefing. “And in that regard lots of people won this weekend, and it wasn’t just Notre Dame and Ohio State.”
According to the NRF, which includes both brick-and-mortar as well as online retailers, shoppers are beginning to treat Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday as a five-day holiday, with both brick-and-mortar and online shoppers benefiting. “It’s becoming more and more of a tradition,” Shay said.
Thanksgiving was a “blow-out traffic day,” wrote Akamai’s Manz, with an early peak of 4,910,674 page views per minute at Noon Eastern Time, then an even bigger peak of 7,411,734 page views per minute at 10pm. Just as in 2011, Thanksgiving drove higher shopping spikes, but Black Friday produced consistently more page views overall – 25% more, according to Akamai. Unexpectedly, though, Cyber Monday topped them both, generating a 13% higher spike than Thanksgiving, and 16% more traffic volume than Black Friday. Cyber Monday online sales were up more than 36% compared to Black Friday, IBM reported.
“Cyber Monday was not only the pinnacle of the Thanksgiving shopping weekend but when the cash register closed it officially became the biggest online shopping day ever,” said Jay Henderson, strategy director of IBM Smarter Commerce, in a statement. “Retailers that adopted a smarter marketing approach to commerce were able to adjust to the shifting shopping habits of their customers, whether in-store, online or via their mobile device of choice, and fully benefit from this day and the entire holiday weekend.”
Most Web Retailers Were Prepared
While most sites planned for a surge of traffic via PCs, some notable retailers apparently did not, with mobile sites being even worse. According to Panopta, Kmart, Sears and CDW fared the worst, with outages that topped a total of ten hours in Kmart and Sears’ case. Although those outages were spread out going back to November 10, a total of 41 sites failed to meet the goal of 99.9% uptime, the lowester threshold for an acceptable online presence. The top five worst-performing sites also included TigerDirect and Victoria’s Secret; other notables that failed to meet the 99.9% threshold included Gamefly, Gamestop, Office Depot, Blockbuster and Shutterfly.
Other e-tailers excelled. Compuware’s Application Performance Management (APM) system named Apple, Costco, JCPenney, Dell and Overstock (O.co) the fastest Web sites. Panopta credited a number of major online retailers, including Amazon, Apple, Buy.com, Costco, eBay, Kohls, Lowes, REI, Staples and Target, among others, with suffering no downtime whatsoever. That’s a significant change from past years, when even the largest retailers sometimes staggered under the load.
“Even with record numbers of visitors coming to online retailers, it is clear that most of them were prepared for the traffic this year,” Compuware said in a statement. “Throughout the holiday weekend and into Cyber Monday, no major retailer suffered a significant online outage. And when issues were detected with sites, in most cases it resulted from third-party content having performance issues, not the host site. This is a problem retailers need to attend to.”
What About Mobile?
The problem, if there was one, was that most e-tailers still prioritize shoppers coming from desktop and laptop PCs. They either forgot about or didn’t have the resources to properly service mobile consumers trying buy something on the go or compare online prices to what they saw in brick-and-mortar stores.
This last practice, dubbed “showrooming,” has been exploited by Amazon with apps that allowed mobile shoppers to take pictures of items and scan barcodes, then find the same product online. But retailers like Macy’s have begun to fight back, with apps that offer “unpublished” deals to shoppers who are physically within their stores. Shopkick, another third-party app, published a “black book” of deals for retailers like Old Navy, offering in-store deals as well.
Mobile performance issues could also impact showrooming. Accessing mobile sites and apps can take a relatively long time even on the best of days, and during the extraordinarily busy holiday period few sites managed to offer anything close to a speedy mobile shopping experience.
Compuware said the five fastest mobile sites were Office Depot, Barnes and Noble, Williams-Sonoma, Buy.com and HSN, and that mobile traffic grew more than 250% for Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Cyber Monday saw mobile traffic volumes that were slightly lower than Black Friday, the company said, but the volume of mobile visitors was substantially higher than these same retailer sites saw during the previous week. That makes sense, as the whole point of Cyber Monday is that shoppers are back at their work computers. Overall, of the sites Compuware tracked, only 10% of site visits were accessed via a smartphone.
Keynote provided more granular numbers, but tracked just six sites that it claimed delivered the full mobile page in less than 7 seconds: Toolfetch (which loaded in a sparkling 2.96 seconds), Office Depot (3.15 seconds), Barnes & Noble (4.95 seconds), Buy.com (6.40 seconds), Amazon.com (6.56 seconds), Best Buy (6.63 seconds), Grainger (4.66 seconds), HSN (6.74 seconds) and Sears (6.95 seconds).
For its part, online payment service PayPal reported 196% more mobile payment volume on Cyber Monday 2012 than Cyber Monday 2011. That indicates that many shoppers were buying using their smartphones even while at work.
So what were all those people actually buying? Well, Microsoft claimed it sold more than 750,000 Xbox 360 consoles in the U.S. alone.
Image source: Flickr/Wesley Fryer
View full post on ReadWrite
It’s Cyber Monday – Time for a Monday Meme
Nov 26th
Black Friday seems to have brought its fair share of shopping glee, according to Comscore online retail spending jumped 26% to something over $1.04 Billion this year, and for the fist time. To put that into perspective, online sales now represent about one tenth of all sales. So today we are wondering how Cyber Monday will [...]
The post It’s Cyber Monday – Time for a Monday Meme appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Black Friday Vs. Cyber Monday: Toward A New Shopping Calendar
Nov 23rd
Are Black Friday and Cyber Monday fighting a battle neither of them can win? It certainly looks that way as shopping landscape shifst both online and offline. A few holiday seasons down the road, both big-deal days may seem as quaint and dated as Sears Catalogs and keeping stores closed on Sundays.
Enter Cyber Monday
The term “Cyber Monday” was born during the holiday season of 2005, when the U.S. Trade Association’s National Retail Federation began to notice that shoppers who had just spent the entire Thanksgiving weekend barreling through crowded stores, were cyber-shopping when they sat down at their work computers on the following Monday. The federation’s site Shop.org officially coined the term in 2005 and set up an eponymous site in 2006.
Obviously, post-Thanksgiving online shopping at work had been going on long before the NRF put a name on it. But it’s grown into something bigger and more influential, not only changing the way Black Friday works, but also the way retail stores handle the holiday shopping season.
Cyber Monday revealed the biggest weakness in the Black Friday concept: brick-and-mortar. What used to be an asset is now hurting this once powerful shopping day as harried workers rebel against early hours and ornery customers fighting over flat screens. Add on the fact that retailers are now expanding Black Friday into Thanksgiving evening, and you’ve got one messed up system.
That’s why Black Friday is now projected to be only the second busiest shopping day of the year, behind Cyber Monday. Research from Compuware APM pegs total spending on Cyber Monday at $1.44 billion.
But what about Cyber Monday? Does it even make sense?
In the modern world, it doesn’t matter what day it is, wherever you are, you can shop the holiday sales from anywhere as long as you’re connected. Most shoppers now have decent Internet connections from home, and as Dan Rowinski pointed out last week, mobile shopping now accounts for about 12% of the purchases made on Cyber Monday. Obviously, you don’t need to be back at work to use your smartphone.
Et Tu, Target?
So what’s the future of Cyber Monday in a world where office computers are not required to buy online? Retailers are recognizing this and beating Cyber Monday to the punch by starting sales earlier – both online and in store. The sales calendars don’t matter any more, but that doesn’t mean retailers won’t try to leverage the ideas with sales and deals tied to no-longer-relevant concepts.
Online-only sites like Amazon are morphing Cyber Monday into Cyber Week. They’re posting new deals every day leading up to Black Friday or during the week following Cyber Monday to help keep the shopping excitement going longer. Brent Shelton, a spokesman for FatWallet, told the Daily Finance Blog that we should be expecting events like “Cyber Monday II” on December 5.
Whether it’s longer sales online or in store, the retail calendar we follow today won’t stand the test of time. And that’s probably a good thing compared to getting up at 4am to stand in line at Wal-Mart – or spending your work day on eBay.
Image courtesy of Shuttershock.
View full post on ReadWrite
