Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Google Trends Improves Results” plus 4 more

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• Google Trends Improves Results
• Google Looks for More of Your Company With Cloud Services
• NJ Added to List of States Where Job Applicants Protected from Password Demands
• 2013 Cyber Monday Sales Soar Beating 2012 By How Much. . . ?
• What Showrooming Giveth, Webrooming Taketh Away

Google Trends Improves Results Posted: 04 Dec 2013 04:30 AM PST Google Trends has always been interesting and fun but it can be easy to question the results and their accuracy. Google has taken steps to make the product better and more discerning. A post on the Inside Search blog from Google explains You may have noticed it’s easy to get tripped up measuring the wrong thing using Google Trends. When you look up “rice,” are you measuring search interest in Rice University or the rice you eat? When you look up “Gwyneth Paltrow” how can you be sure you’re counting all the common misspellings? Starting today, you’ll find new topic reports to help you more easily measure search interest in the people, places and things you care about. The example Google shows is interesting as they compare the terms Harvard and rice. As you might guess most people are not searching for rice the food if they are looking at comparing colleges. Rice University is a great school academically but it doesn’t get the same attention as Harvard. Rice the food however gets plenty of attention and an old result may look like this in Trends What? More folks search for Rice University than Harvard? Not really. The post continues Now when you start typing into the search box you’ll see new topic predictions. Type “rice” and you’ll see predictions for “Rice University (University)” and “Rice (Cereal).” This makes it easy to do a fairer comparison. The resulting comparison looks like one might expect There are many instances where you might imagine this capability will make Trends results much more useful and accurate. Misspellings and more will ultimately be covered in this offering. Right now the service is in beta Topic reports are a beta feature and we want to get your feedback. To start, you’ll find data for more than 700,000 unique topics from Barack Obama to football (soccer) to Hayao Miyazaki, and you can slice the data to measure search interest worldwide or in any of the following seven countries: Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, UK, and US. We’ll continue to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data, and as we do we’ll add topics and expand to support new regions. What do you think? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Google Looks for More of Your Company With Cloud Services Posted: 04 Dec 2013 04:00 AM PST While Google’s IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offering going ‘live’ may not look like much of a marketing story it actually is. First, understanding exactly what Google is doing with this new cloud offering might help with the context of this move. PCWorld reports After running the service in preview mode for over a year, Google is making its IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) Google Compute Engine (GCE) available as a full-fledged commercial service. The company has established a service level agreement (SLA) where it guarantees GCE to be available 99.95 percent of the time. It has also cut prices and increased the number of options the service offers. GCE "is a long-term strategic bet for the company," said Brian Goldfarb, Google's head of cloud platform marketing, adding that "we have an incredibly high bar for what general availability means." The marketing angle is that Google is finding yet another way to get their advertisers even more intertwined with the company so that there will soon be few, if any, places where companies of all sizes can’t get what they need to run, market and grow their company through Google. This will create more and more cries of Google being some form of a monopoly or something. You can count on that. The question is what is Google really trying to do here. A lot of this effort is a response to Amazon’s success in the cloud business. It must rankle the folks at Google that a mere online retailer kicked Google’s tail for quite some time by offering hard core IT infrastructure services that make Amazon a trusted IT partner as well as the primary place to sell just about everything. That capability keeps people away from Google. Google no likey. The PCWorld article continues Prices have been cut as well. The price of a basic GCE service has been cut by 10 percent. The price of a standard one core instance, a n1-standard-1, has been reduced from $0.115 per hour to $0.104 per hour. Persistent disk storage has been reduced from $0.10 per month to $0.04 a month.. In addition, all charges to I/O traffic to disk have been eliminated. Google wants in and they will make it happen. It’s what they do. As marketers we should all be on the lookout for services that tie into the ability to best utilize the giant Google advertising opportunity. You know it’s going to happen. Are you paying attention to the technical side of your business as much as you demand that the technical side of your company pay attention to marketing? the lines are blurring more and more every day. Are you prepared to move forward?

NJ Added to List of States Where Job Applicants Protected from Password Demands Posted: 04 Dec 2013 03:32 AM PST In the world of social media there is nothing if there is not at least the illusion that one has some level of privacy. It’s an illusion because we all know that that our data is available to marketers in many shapes and sizes. Heck, most of you reading this post are the ones who are looking to acquire as much information about your potential customers that you possibly can. There is nothing wrong with that and no apologies are necessary. It’s the way of the world. What is not cool though is the idea of someone or something, in this case a potential employer, demanding that you turn over your social media passwords to do some ‘digging’ into your activities so they deem whether you are worthy of being part of the team. Honestly, I would have to be pretty desperate to hand over that information because I would like to think that I would never work for an employer that would make that demand. I have over these many years learned to never say never though so forget I even mentioned it. So my home state of NJ (of which I am very proud so take your shots if you must in order to make yourself feel better about something or other that’s amiss for you) has added itself to the list of states that won’t allow employers to cross this line even if they wanted to. We read in The Record New Jersey workers will be able to protect their personal Facebook accounts from their bosses’ eyes under a state law that went into effect Sunday. Under the law, employers are banned from requiring employees and job applicants to turn over their passwords for their personal Facebook and other online accounts. “The employer can’t coerce or require an employee to give up a password for a privacy-protected personal website,” said John Sarno, head of the Employers Association of New Jersey in Livingston. So is this really a story? Yes only in that it reminds us all that there is nothing that is truly protected in this online existence of ours so any additional barriers that can be placed between ourselves and the prying eyes of others is at least helpful. Even if it just extends the illusion. We’ll take what we can get, right? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

2013 Cyber Monday Sales Soar Beating 2012 By How Much. . . ? Posted: 03 Dec 2013 02:20 PM PST This year’s holiday shopping season is extremely short, so maybe that’s why shoppers didn’t hesitate to pull out their credit cards on Cyber Monday. The final tally is in and it was a record year beating last year by. . . For the conservative: 16% according to Adobe Systems For those who prefer to go all in: 20.6% according to IBM. Either way, it’s a win! The numbers were consistent with the predictions – more shoppers spending less money. IBM says the average order value was $128.77, down 1% year-over-year. Mobile was a significant factor. 31.7% of all online traffic came from smartphones and tablets, that 45% growth over last year. Mobile also accounted for 17% of total online sales and that’s a 55.4% increase over last year. Here’s a funny thing. The majority of the mobile online traffic came from smartphones but looking at online sales alone, tablets beat smartphones 77.7% to 5.5%. Tablet users also spent more with an average order amount of $126.30 vs smartphone orders at $106.49. Facebook and Pinterest both drove traffic with an average order value ranging from $92.40 to $97.81. Facebook was on the higher end and it had a much higher referral rate than Pinterest. ChannelAdvisor has some interesting numbers for Amazon and eBay. The chart is a little tricky to read but I’ll help you out with the important points. Amazon had a 46% boost in sales on Cyber Monday giving them a 34.9% increase over last year for the 5 day shopping blitz. eBay also did well with a 32.% increase on Cyber Monday. (My eBay app was ka-chinging away!) They end up with a 29.7% increase over last year. ChannelAdvisor also noted a shift in shopping behavior this year: The most interesting thing we saw for Cyber Monday isn’t in the chart, but we saw it in our intra-day data.  Historically Cyber Monday has been a ‘work-day weighted’ day – meaning that the bulk of traffic/sales came in during the key 11-5pm timeframe.  This year, the same trend started (really ramped up at 11am when both East and West coast are online) , but the difference was the day sustained well into the evening hours (midnight ET!).  A couple of things we observed that played a role in this: – Many retailers released Cyber Monday deals in waves, effectively extending the promotional excitement. – Devices definitely played a role here (Couch Commerce or Bed Commerce) where we saw computer follow the old trend and tablet/smartphone fill in after – this supports the overall theory that these devices have some level of incrementality to desktop vs. cannibalization as some have feared/suggested. –  Anecdotal -> The NFL Monday Night game was one of the most significant of the year (Go Seahawks!), and I imagine many US households were up late watching that with a lot of folks using the commercials/downtime to complete their Cyber Monday shopping. I’m not a football fan, but if it led to additional sales, then I say “Go Seahawks,” too. How’d you do this holiday weekend? Good? Bad? Or somewhere in the middle?

What Showrooming Giveth, Webrooming Taketh Away Posted: 03 Dec 2013 01:38 PM PST Last Christmas, brick and mortar retailers were worried that showrooming would cut into their bottom line. This is when a customer visits a store but then uses their smartphone to find the same item for a lower price online. I swear this is why some of my favorite stores have the worst cell phone reception inside their walls. No problem, I’ll just step outside to search. This Christmas it’s the online retailers who need to worry thanks to a new trend called webrooming. (That’s web – rooming, not we-brooming.) According to a new Harris Poll, more customers will be doing their initial research online before running out to buy at the store. Let’s start with a clearer definition of terms. Here’s the way Harris phrased the question: Have you ever gone online to examine or research a product before purchasing it in person, at a brick and mortar store? Here’s the answer: Around 7 out of 10 Americans said they have engaged in webrooming. But I’d disagree – slightly. I don’t think that doing research online prior to buying is necessarily webrooming. For example, reading reviews of an HD TV online that I fully intend to purchase at Best Buy isn’t webrooming. What is webrooming is what I did earlier today. I wanted to buy some pop culture stocking stuffers for Christmas. I found some fun items online but I don’t want to pay shipping on these little items, so later today I’m going to the mall to buy the same toys I could have bought online. That’s webrooming. Normally, I’d rather buy from an online retailer but I’m not going to fill in forms and spend $7.00 to ship a $6.00 poster. Where’d They Go? The majority of webroomers headed to  Walmart (24%), Best Buy (21%) and Target (9%) after doing their online research. Going the other way around, 59% of showroomers ended up buying what they want from Amazon after scoping it out at a store. 48% of webroomers begin a Amazon before they drive to the store to make the final purchase. So I guess Amazon has nothing to worry about because it pretty much balances out in the end. Walmart is the biggest winner because 67% of people who webroom at Walmart.com end up buying at Walmart the store. What’s the bottom line? Showroomers say that the last time they purchased a product online after checking it out in-store they spent an average of $174.00. That’s a pretty penny, but it’s down in comparison to both the average showrooming expenditure from last holiday season ($211.80) and webroomers’ average spending this year ($203.90).

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