Adsense vs Adbrite

http://blog.isnoop.net/2006/04/07/adbrite-vs-adsense/

This is a good blog on the comparison of Adsense and Adbrite.

Google dominates ad server market, study shows

Cited from (CNET.com) Natalie Weinstein

It will surprise no one that Google accounts for a lion’s share of the ad server market. However, it may come as a shock that Microsoft holds only the equivalent of a lion’s paw.

Attributor, a content-tracking company, analyzed ad server calls across 75 million domains in October. According to the data Attributor released this week, Google–through DoubleClick and AdSense–accounts for 56.5 percent market share.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s equivalent figure hovers at 3.8 percent. Yahoo came in behind Google with 9.7 percent. If Microsoft and Yahoo ever end up combining forces, they still wouldn’t touch Google.

A server call, by the way, is the “moment when a Web site requests an ad to serve up to a user. The study examined whose ad code was on that page,” according to AdAge.com.

Here is Attributor’s breakdown of the ad server market, as of October.

(Credit: Attributor)

DoubleClick and AdSense are definitely playing to different markets, according to Attributor’s figures. DoubleClick dominated with larger sites, while AdSense did so for smaller sites.

It’s not all good news for Google, though. Back in Janary, when Attributor last took a look at ad server calls, Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick accounted for 69.7 percent share. That’s a drop of more than 13 points.

Google didn’t lose out to Microsoft or Yahoo, though. They also lost share. Instead, Google lost little bits to a lot of other players, including AOL and Revenue Science. The latter shot into the top five with 6.7 percent market share in October.

Google Adsense (review)

I have been using Adsense products for about 10 days now.

What is Adsense? When advertisers buy ads from Google Adwords they are given an option to also broadcast their ads on *The content network. The content network are other websites that are willing to post Adwords ads on their websites for a proffit. A portion of the Adwords CPC is shared with The content network website when someone clicks on an ad. This is what mine looks like… http://www.beautydepot.com/  Scroll to the bottom left to see the ads. You will also notice that I have installed a free Youtube.com video screen that will also display Adsense ads.

My first week I made an extra $128.00, with 16,050 visitors generating 325 clicks. This will reduce my Adwords cost by 7.5%. You can even make the ads more prominant than I did and probably make more.

Objections

Customers might not buy from me and buy from my competitor.

Price Shoppers will always shop other stores. You can’t win them all.

Remember that you are only converting 3% of visitors to orders. That means 97% of your visitors are leaving you anyway.

I have not seen a decrease in sales yet, using Adsense.

Also, there is a filter that allows you to block any ads that you don’t want to appear. Like that dirt cheap competitor.

I think that adding the videos and ads have made my website more interesting. I have seen my visitors avg. time on site increase from 2:36 to 2:50.

I recommend Adsense as a winner.

SSL Security Certificates

I am changing from Thawte.com SSL security to GoDaddy.com SSL security. It is time for my renewal and Thawte/Verisign wanted $350.00, I checked with GoDaddy and got an advanced security cert for $89.00. I don’t believe Thawte offered anything more than brand recognition as an advantage.

Sitemaps and Google Webmaster Tools

Hi Linda,

 

We missed you but you didn’t miss much. The service at Kon Tiki was terrible today, it took 2 hours to get our lunches.

 

To answer your question. Sitemaps do help make sure that all of your pages are indexed by google. If you are not adding new pages to your site everyday then a sitemap is probably not necessary.

 

But, a sitemap is something to know about. I suggest going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/ and using all of googles free webmaster tools, which includes doing a free sitemap.

 

Pat Burch
www.BeautyDepot.com
www.GuysAcademy.com
318-572-1116

—– Original Message —–

From: Linda McCollum

To: PBURCH@beautydepot.com

Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 4:54 PM

Subject: Google Site Map File

Pat:

Sorry I missed the meeting today, but I was too swamped to leave my desk!

I just got a fax about this:

http://www.mseo.com/sitemap_file_service.html

Do you know anything about this?  Is it anything we might want to  do?  Most of this stuff isn’t, so I’m pretty leery of them.

Thanks

Linda
–
Linda McCollum
Internet Sales
Construction Safety Products
359 Mt. Zion Rd.
Shreveport, LA 71106
800-592-6940
318-688-6487 Fax

Gem of an Idea

Hello everyone,
This is a great success story using an email campaign. It really got my mind going on how I can customize this technique to my business. I hope that it inspires you as much as it did me.  

Bella of Cape Cod moves the Tupperware house party to the web
By Don Davis

Megan Murphy and Catherine Bean like to describe themselves as two stay-at-home moms from Cape Cod who started a jewelry retailing business. But now, they admit, they’re not home all that much.

That’s because of the sudden success of their business, Bella of Cape Cod, which melds the traditional home Tupperware party with the Internet. Instead of a woman inviting her friends over to her house to shop, a consumer invites her friends via e-mail to shop at BellaOfCapeCod.com on a certain day. Shipping is free for the friends, and the hostess receives a credit equal to 20% of the sales.

Murphy and Bean only started selling online in fall 2005, after tiring of organizing house parties to sell their inexpensive jewelry, all items under $25. They had accumulated 1,500 e-mail addresses from house parties and their stalls at flea markets, many of them of consumers from other parts of the country who vacationed in Cape Cod. Their initial e-mail newsletters generated a lot of traffic to the site, and that led them to the idea of organizing virtual house parties online.

Tripling visits

The concept has taken off. Largely as a result of the online parties, there were nearly 883,000 visits to Bella’s site in November, more than triple the 260,000 visits in November 2006. In fact, the heavy traffic over the Thanksgiving weekend crashed Bella’s server, putting the site out of action for five days.

It wasn’t the first time that Bella’s founders learned the hard way lessons about online retailing.

In their first attempt at e-mail marketing in December 2005, they tried to send a newsletter to their 1,500 e-mail addresses from Bean’s personal e-mail account. The mailing looked like spam to her Internet service provider, Verizon, which shut down her service. “It was a real mess,” Bean says.

That led the neophyte e-retailers to look around for a company that could handle its e-mail promotions, and they came up with e-mail service provider Constant Contact. “Once we did our first e-mail blast we got a great response,” Murphy says. “We heard back from customers, and people placed orders.”

Constant Contact charges a monthly fee based on the size of the e-mail marketing list. For 500 to 2,500 addresses, the fee is $30 per month. By December, Bella’s list had grown to over 7,600 names, which would raise the monthly fee to $75.

They also learned about the rules of payment processing in December 2006 when they far exceeded their monthly limit of $10,000 in credit card orders, causing their payment processor to shut them down four days before Christmas. Bella is a privately held company and does not report its sales.

Building trust

Once they began organizing online parties, Murphy and Bean quickly realized that customers would be reluctant to share their friends’ e-mail addresses if they thought Bella was going to bombard those friends with e-mail. Murphy and Bean made clear that anyone can opt out from receiving their e-mails, and emphasized that they didn’t even want the friends’ names, just their e-mail addresses.

“This builds trust with people who are hosting the e-party,” Murphy says. “That makes them feel okay to give up their friends’ e-mail addresses.”

This approach may work for consumers who have attended a Bella party and thus gained confidence in the organizers, but would be trickier for larger merchants, says Patti Freeman Evans, an e-commerce analyst with JupiterResearch. “A lot of major retailers try to get customers to refer friends, but that’s a tough scenario because people don’t want to give major corporations their address books so their friends can get spammed,” Evans says. “The personal approach these guys are taking gives them a different opportunity.”

Once a consumer agrees to host a party, she sends Bella her address book with friends’ e-mails. Bella sends out an invitation three days before the event, and a reminder that morning. Friends who shop that day at the site receive free shipping and a surprise gift if they buy at least $50 worth of merchandise. The hostess receives a pair of earrings as well as a credit equal to 20% of the day’s sales.

Bella extended the concept to fundraisers last March, inspired by the plight of a local family with a son with cancer, and by fall was doing more fundraisers for schools, churches, and other causes than private parties. The only difference is that, instead of giving the hostess a credit for use on the site, Bella writes a check for 20% of the proceeds to the sponsoring organization. By December, Bella had sent out $6,000 in checks from those fundraisers.

A new incentive

Bean and Murphy initially recruited hostesses from customers who inquired about house parties. They later printed up business cards promoting their online parties and handed them out at their flea market stalls and at the store in Hyannis, Mass., they opened last summer—mainly because their operation had gotten too large to operate out of their homes. They also include a card in every order they send out.

But a major way they recruit hostesses is from people who attend an online party. They say they usually book at least one new event from each e-party or fundraiser.

In fact, one of their plans for the new year is to encourage hostesses to talk up how easy it was to host a party by offering them a 50% discount on a piece of jewelry if one of their invited guests agrees to host her own online event.

tools for our websites

 UPS OnLine Tools. 

http://www.ups.com/e_comm_access/gettools_index?loc=en_US

drop ship recomment by Pat www.Doba.com

Just a reminder to get set up with Google Analytics, click below,

 

http://64.233.179.110/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html

Pat Burch

If you have some tools to share please add them here.

Harvey

Website Imagery

Just a few pointers for imagery used on e-commerce sites, There’s alwasy room fro improvement…

The Quality:
The quality of a website and its products can be obtained by the quality of the images displayed on the site. Users of a website have no other visual cues to help them when making purchases, therefore product shots are very important.

The more professional the images on a website, the more professional the website looks. The investment in high quality professional photographs and product shots is definitely worth the investment, with sales conversions having been known to double with the addition of better imagery.

The Quantity:
There is one thing that is clear. Users like seeing more than one image of a product. Unfortunately, many ecommerce websites only show one view of the product. This takes away the user’s ability to fully grasp the scope of the product.

The best thing to do by rule of thumb is to have roughly 2-3 images of a product. This will help give the impression and control the user may have of a product in a physical store, whilst helping them decide whether or not the product is suitable for them.

The Size:
To give the users the best possible shopping experience, images need to be available in a larger version, so the product can be examined in detail. The most common practice of this is having a “Thumbnail” (or small version) and an “Full View” (Enlarged high-resolution version).

It is also most common practice to have the image shots appear in a pop-up window, although with technology today there are many alternatives such as “Lightbox” which will backout the screen and focus the user’s attention on the large preview of the image in the centre of the screen.

The Speed:
Unfortunately, the larger the images and previews get, the longer the time it takes to download the images on a users internet connection. The best solution to this is to have a high quality web server. This will provide optimal speeds to the customers of your website, enabling them to download the images quickly, enhancing their online shopping experience.

If you have a large quantity of users viewing your website, you may also consider having additional media servers to serve the images from multiple locations around the world; this can help ensure all users have a pleasant shopping experience. Speak to your Rival Professionals for more information on web hosting services.

The Detail:
Depending on the products you are selling, they may have smaller or more complex areas that may require more detail.
For example, if you were photographing a laptop computer, customers would most likely want to see the connections on the front, rear and sides of the computer to make sure it meets their needs. The solution? Include close up shots of all the complex areas of the product.

A good method to use is to take 1 full view of the product, then smaller close up views of areas of importance. Having these detailed photos could be the difference in an online sale or not.

The Package:
Some products may include one or more smaller packages. For example a digital camera. It is one thing to include a photo of the camera itself, but what about all the extras? It is good to answer all the customers’ questions before they even think of them! The best way to accomplish this is to take a “Full Package Shot” of the contents of the package.

It is also a good idea to include the product box in these photographs if possible, jus in case the product has multiple versions which may be similar in one way or another.

The Relevance:
One of the most important things to remember when dealing with ecommerce imagery is relevance of the images. Irrelevant pictures detract from the message trying to be portrayed by the store owner. It is best to keep the image precise and clear, don’t include images that could confuse the user or make them doubt the products quality.

Summary
Professional, high quality website images help sell products online. Fact.

The internet sometimes gets a negative spin put on it because of users not getting the products they “thought” they were getting. It is best to keep your ecommerce site professional and remain loyal to your customers by providing precise and detailed images.

Increase payment methods, increase sales

More and more Americans are opting to use alternative payment methods online, according to a recent survey by Forrester Research, and retailers should be aware that implementing multiple payment methods could increase sales.

by Helen Leggatt

A major reason for many online shopping carts to be abandoned at the checkout is that the shopper is not offered a suitable method of payment.

It’s easy for marketers to assume that most of their online sales will be made using a credit card. However, when you consider that 40% of offline sales are done using cash or checks it’s easy to see how this could also apply online.

Jim Hunt, enterprise merchant relationship team leader for PayPal, said that websites offering only credit cards at checkout stand to lose around 5% to 10% of buyers.

The reasons Americans are shunning plastic in favor of alternative payment methods such as BillMeLater and PayPal are varied. Over a quarter (28%) have security concerns when using their credit cards and others simply prefer the alternative payment methods because they are quicker and easier to use.

According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, 74% of online shoppers in America have recently used an alternative payment method online, and 53% of etailers said that providing alternative payment methods is a priority for the coming year.

Online Power Selling

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Online Power Selling Current mood: blessed (Who are you selling to?) Online retailing sites are prime destinations for women 18-34 years old who are Internet users. While women 18-34 are 15.7% of all Internet users, they are 24% of shoppers at fragrance/cosmetic sites, 22.3% of shoppers at jewelry/accessories/luxury goods sites and 20.8% of shoppers at apparel sites. (2003) U.S. online retail sales this year will close at $95.7 billion, climbing to $229.9 billion in 2008. Next year’s sales are projected at $122.6 billion, with $149.2 billion, $176.8 billion and $204.3 billion forecast for 2005, 2006 and 2007, respectively.  (Appearance is EVERYTHING) 65 percent of Internet users won’t patronize a poorly designed site ? even that of a favorite brand ? and 30 percent reported that Web site design is more important than a great product. Even rock-bottom prices only persuaded 4 percent to shop on a poorly designed Web site. What’s worse is that nearly 30 percent stop buying from their favorite offline store if their online experience is poor. ( An 11% conversion rate is the best you can hope for.) Nearly half (45 percent) of respondents indicated that they were researching product information, rather than making an immediate buy. Of the remaining 55 percent that had purchasing intentions, 11 percent immediately bought online, and 6 percent immediately bought offline. The locale was more difficult to determine for the 21 percent who indicated they would buy within 48 hours, and the 17 percent who intended to buy within the week. 14% of online merchants cannot identify their conversion rates and 43% don?t know how many customers abandon their shopping carts. (Really) The location of a search box can have a big impact on sales at an e-commerce site, too. Home furnishings retailer Black Forest Décor relocated its search box from the upper right corner to the center of the page just under the top navigation bar and increased the size of the search box by 72%. The result? A 34% increase in its conversion rate. (Why did they not buy?) Thirty-five percent of consumers surveyed said added costs, such as shipping and handling, or lengthy delivery times resulted in their abandoning an online purchase. Sites requesting too much information is another annoyance that drives away 35 percent of buyers surveyed. Shipping charges for online orders continue to be a thorn in the side of consumers, 20% of whom cited shipping costs as their biggest frustration related to online shopping. 19% said spam is most annoying, followed by the inability to try on clothes, 15%, and the risk of entering a credit card number online, 13%. (Do you have Customer Reviews?) Customer reviews appeared to have the most impact on customer satisfaction and web site engagement, according to the study. 58% of merchants said customer reviews had “significant” impact on customer satisfaction and 37% said it had “somewhat of an impact.” 53% of merchants said it had a “significant” impact on web site engagement while 32% said it had “somewhat” of an impact. 11% of retailers reported a 20% or more overall increase in conversions as a result of adding reviews to their sites, 21% reported an 11% to 20% increase and 5% reported a 1% to 10% increase. 63% said they didn’t know. Looking for more from its online customer reviews, multi-channel retailer Petco Animal Supplies Inc. recently conducted an experiment. Petco since 2005 has used technology from vendor Bazaarvoice Inc. to support online customer reviews. It discovered that shoppers who navigate to pages with top-rated products convert at a 50% higher rate than others. Petco also found the influence of online customer reviews wasn’t limited to shopping the site. When the retailer conducted its experiment to test the effects of including customer-generated star ratings in marketing e-mail, the test campaign had a click-through rate five times the usual rate.