14 free tools that reveal why people abandon your website

Although US consumers are pessimistic about the health of the economy, they expressed a marked interest in the ability of the Web to save them money. Forty-eight percent of consumers surveyed, compared with 41 percent in 2007, said that they can find the best values and deals online. Additionally, 36 percent of consumers said that they would be more likely to shop online due to high gas prices, compared with 22 percent who expressed the same sentiment last year. Forrester expects that the majority of holiday online sales will be driven by shoppers who have previously purchased online, rather than first time online buyers.

“While eCommerce has traditionally been resistant to negative offline trends, growing concerns about the stability of the economy are finally affecting consumers’ online shopping decisions,” said Forrester Research Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “This is going to be a very competitive online shopping season, so retailers should take immediate steps to bolster their customer retention strategies in order to ensure repeat purchases.”

More than two-thirds of consumers surveyed said that they are planning to spend more or about the same online as they did last year. Core holiday product categories such as clothing will remain top choices for online buyers, as well as books, DVDs/videos, music, gift certificates, and toys. Respondents also indicated that they will be seeking free shipping offers more often this year than last.

“A main attraction of the online shopping environment is the breadth of information that it offers,” said Patti Freeman Evans, Forrester Research Vice President and Research Director. “Retailers should expand their use of online marketing tactics on search engines and comparison-shopping sites since shoppers are likely to be researching the Web more thoroughly when deciding on this year’s holiday gifts.”

This year’s annual holiday forecast was a collaboration between Forrester Research and JupiterResearch, now a Forrester Research company. Two surveys were conducted to measure the attitudes and expectations of online consumers during the upcoming holiday shopping season, which was defined as the months of November and December. The first survey was fielded in September 2008 and received 2,153 individual responses. The second survey was fielded in early October 2008 and received 1,042 individual responses.

MySpace MyAds

“With MySpace MyAds, we’re blowing the lid off display advertising solutions for small and medium businesses,” said Jeff Berman, President of Sales and Marketing for MySpace. “MySpace MyAds is a direct marketer’s dream – providing entrepreneurs with the most accessible, personalized, and targeted advertising toolkit in the market. We’re giving businesses better ROI ASAP and in today’s economy, that’s a must-have.”

MySpace MyAds empowers any advertiser to build a customized, targeted, and measurable campaign in a few easy steps:

• STEP 1: Visit https://advertise.myspace.com or click the “Advertise” link located at the bottom of any MySpace page
• STEP 2: Create a display ad using the MySpace MyAds Builder Tool
• STEP 3: Select a variable ad spend anywhere from $25 to $10,000
• STEP 4: HyperTarget to customers
• STEP 5: Measure ad performance with MySpace MyAds analytics reporting

MySpace’s HyperTargeting ad technology is a key component in the functionality of the MySpace MyAds platform enabling advertisers to serve their ad campaign to the right customers. HyperTargeting enables marketers to connect with specific user groups on a massive scale based on self-expressed interests available on MySpace profiles. The technology allows any MySpace MyAds user access to targeting parameters such as age, sex, and geographical location, all in combination with thousands of user interest categories including specific keywords within each category. For example, within the ‘videogame’ enthusiast category, a further targeting keyword or phrase might include ‘Call of Duty 5’ if relevant to an advertiser’s campaign.

“After spending $100 on MySpace MyAds to advertise, I got a roofing assignment valued at $30,000 all in a matter of eight days,” said Dan Davis, owner of D&D Installation, a Chicago roofing company.

Once the creative, audience and campaign length have been determined by the advertiser, the newly created ad is reviewed through MySpace’s dedicated customer support, safeguarding that the ad does not violate MySpace’s terms of service. Once approved, and depending on the timing the advertiser has chosen, the campaign can go live across the MySpace ecosystem to the audience segments that the campaign creator has chosen. Campaign set-up and results can be completed and tracked in as little as a few hours.

MySpace MyAds provides all advertisers with a suite of analytic tools and key performance indicators that accompany every campaign including the number of times their ad was shown (impressions), the number of click-throughs, and a running cost on active campaigns. Using the analytics provided by MySpace MyAds, advertisers are able to renew successful campaigns, tweak under-performing campaigns, and edit existing creative. The campaign is charged only when a user clicks on the ad (rather than when the ad is served) and is able to run an unlimited number of campaigns at any time.

MySpace recently hit an all-time high with domestic unique users and engagement in August according to comScore; seeing approximately 76 million users domestically—each averaging more than 4 hours on the site every month—and 122 million worldwide unique users. comScore also reported MySpace surpassed Yahoo! to become the top publisher of online display advertising in the U.S., accounting for 15.9% of all display ads viewed in June.

We’re always working on innovative ways to make your experience on Facebook more useful. Toward that goal, today we’ve added Microsoft Live Search to your Facebook search experience (for people in the US). This is the first step in giving you the ability to find content from across the web while using Facebook.

It is also the first step in expanding Microsoft’s search reach. This move should have been expected to some extend. Now Facebook offers both display/banner and search ads, gets to keep visitors within the Facebook environment a little longer, and adds a revenue stream from the text ads displayed when someone performs a Web search.

Sounds like a win-win here.

Consumer Spending Plans for the 2008 Holiday Season

Nielsen’s survey of 21,000 U.S. households shows that economic concerns are also putting a damper on holiday spending among high income ($100,000 plus) consumers, with nearly one-third (32 percent) of affluent shoppers planning on spending less this holiday season. Only five percent expect to spend more.

“Clearly, consumers across all income levels have some trepidation about holiday spending,” said Todd Hale, senior vice president, Consumer & Shopper Insights. “The unstable economic environment is creating a high level of caution among consumers, leading us to conclude that this will be a tough holiday season.”

All I Want for Christmas is . . . Value

Of those consumers that report they’ll spend about the same, about half report they will spend the same amount this year in grocery stores, supercenters and mass merchandisers. The holiday season may prove to be a bigger challenge for department and electronic stores, with almost one-third (28 percent) of consumers expecting to spend less in these stores this year. Convenience and gas retailers may come out ahead this year with 12 percent of consumers expecting to spend more in these locations, likely related to a rise in pre-paid gas cards as gifts this holiday season.

“Retailers answering consumers’ call for value will capture shoppers’ attention this holiday season,” said Hale. “Whether it’s lower prices, instant rebates or free shipping offers, value messages will speak to bargain-seeking consumers in today’s tough economic climate.”

It’s My Party, And I’ll Spend Less if I Want To

Of those consumers surveyed who entertain at-home, almost one-third (29 percent) plan to spend less this holiday season — including 26 percent of high income consumers. For those entertaining away-from-home, 33 percent expect to spend less, including 31 percent of affluent consumers.

“The trend to entertain at-home continues as consumers grapple with high gas and food prices, and it bodes well for manufacturers and retailers promoting at-home options” said Hale. “At the same time, it points to a challenging holiday season for restaurants, hotels and banquet facilities catering to the holiday crowd.”

Holiday Forecast: Flat to Declining Sales

Nielsen forecasts 4.7 percent growth in dollar sales or $98 billion across grocery stores, drug stores, mass merchandisers¹ and convenience stores, for the holiday shopping season. The growth forecast, slightly higher than last year’s 4.5 percent gain, is in large part due to higher commodity prices. Nielsen projects unit sales, however, to be flat or down 0.8 percent versus a year ago.

“We project unit sales to be flat to declining as consumers reduce spending and modify their shopping activities to focus on necessity versus discretionary items,” said James Russo, vice president of marketing, The Nielsen Company. “The expanding credit crisis, housing malaise, commodity price pressures, an unstable labor market and plummeting consumer confidence all contribute to a weak holiday shopping season and quite possibly the worst holiday spending decline since the worldwide recession in the early ‘90s.”

Deck the Aisles with Shoppers

How can retailers and manufacturers survive this holiday season? Nielsen reinforces consumers’ desire for value and offers these suggestions:

• With a high level of planned reductions in spending among shoppers, manage inventory like never before to avoid extra inventory come January.
• Reach out to your best customers in stores, through direct mail and/or via advertisements and make them feel special about your brands and your stores by providing customers with special coupons or sale prices.
• Recognize that necessities, not the nice-to-haves, will drive strong sales this holiday season. Toiletries, baby care products, food items and gift cards for groceries, gas, telephone and car maintenance are expected to succeed.
• This holiday season, retailers are likely to see a big upside in consumer packaged goods (CPG) sales. Leverage these CPG products to drive basic gifts and stocking stuffers, such as toiletries, pet care, household cleaners and special holiday packs for food and beverage items.

About The Study

Nielsen surveyed more than 21,000 U.S. households about their holiday spending expectations in September 2008. For learn more about Nielsen’s Holiday Retail Forecast, visit the Nielsen Newswire

In a world used to the accountability of Search Marketing, where ROI can be tracked for every dollar spent, Social Marketing efforts seem to be this black whole where time and money is spent without knowing what is earned in return. As a result, forward looking marketing professionals are having a hard time convincing decision makers that Social Media Marketing deserves both time and money allocation (what’s that new line item in the marketing budget?).

aimClear gives good reasons why Social Media must be part of your marketing budget.

Yes, Google went ahead and posted a 4 part tutorial on linking. For the experienced SEOs there isn’t any new information there, just re-hashing Google’s party line, but nevertheless it will be useful for some, and clarify certain issues for others. Enjoy:

1. Overview: Types of Links
2. Link Architecture (Internal Linking)
3. Outbound Links
4. Inbound Links

(Updated with the latest links)

Chatting with webmasters often reveals widespread beliefs that might have been accurate in the past, but are not necessarily up-to-date any more.

The post goes on to say how webmasters have always re-written dynamic URLs as a result of the belief that search engines can read static URLs better. Then, it tells us that even though that might have been the case at some point, it has not been the case for the past two years or so.

You can read the post at Google Webmaster Central Blog but I’d like to make a couple of comments.

First, it appears that many, if not most, are interpreting this as Google recommending that webmasters stop re-writing URLs and start using dynamic URLs. I can’t see how one comes up with that conclusion from this post. The more reasonable conclusion to come to is this:

If you are going to re-write the URL, do it right so the bot can crawl it properly and so you can avoid creating other indexing issues for your site.

Secondly, I think it is safe to assume that everyone’s goal, including Google’s, is to make a site more user friendly. In this case, clearly, a re-written user friendly URL, such as www.example.com/your-product-name-here.html is much friendlier to the user than www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language/en/answer/3/sid/98971298178906/query

You can come to your own conclusions, but my conclusion is that if a URL is re-written properly, then it is a win-win for everyone.