What happened so absolutely right on Wednesday, January 18th was that a large consensus opinion was conveyed broadly and effectively by the web’s most prominent players; information was disseminated, action was taken, an effect was made. These same tactics are used across the communicative spectrum from marketing and branding to propaganda to entertainment, but rarely does a tenuous and dynamic audience like “the Internet” rally to such a cause, or any cause for that matter, and make a real and immediate change. The difference this time from previous internet based legislation, such as the Communications Decency Act which attempted to regulate obscene images on the internet, is that this would disrupt more than just, ahem, obscene material. This would affect the very core of the internet’s piece de resistance – the uninhibited dissemination of information. It also helped that the some of the most popular sites on the internet came out very strongly against these proposed bills and made the message impossible to miss. Certainly some lessons to learn.

At WebLinc we love a free and open internet. We cut our teeth during the early days of the web, helping to create, evolving with and adapting to emerging technologies, getting through the boom and the bust stronger and more aware of the importance of the freedom to innovate. These ideas are no less important to us now than they were in the past, especially with the emergence of mobile devices and social media interaction as an intrinsic element of our everyday existence. Companies like ours thrive on an ever-changing diet of fresh ideas and new technology, so here’s to hoping we never have to go hungry. Now I think I’m going to get some sopa de fideo con pollo.

That being said, the Thanksgiving Day sales number is still a considerably lower number than Cyber Monday, which early results have as being up 20 percent from last year, and expected to exceed $1.5 billion.

How can eCommerce marketers benefit from these analytics next year? For starters, consider the timing of your sales and the marketing that goes with them. I know my inbox overflowed with offers from online retailers on Cyber Monday, but Thanksgiving was relatively quiet. Internet Retailer also suggests that traffic picked up markedly between the hours of 6pm and midnight. Think about enticing shoppers with limited, timed sales that occur after dinner. Don’t forget that many people are not shopping for themselves at this time of the year. Free shipping for purchasing from someone else’s wish list could drum up sales, especially since this is a time when many people are spending time with friends and family, and tablets and smart phones are making it easy to bring the online shopping conversation into the living room. Take a good look at your site’s analytics. Is there a spike in a spike in gift wrapped items? A spike in the type of items being gift wrapped, or the times those items are being purchased? Prioritize incentives using that knowledge to create meaningful promotions.

I think the study paints a broad stroke, and social media’s impact on eCommerce is vast in some respects and limited in others. Having a Facebook presence simply isn’t enough to impact sales; it’s too often just another channel for one-sided marketing. However, giving loyal customers rewards such as referral credits for sharing your site, or creating social media contests, such as ideeli’s Twitter-based Flash Friday giveaways, seem to have a bigger impact on sales because of the engagement factor, and because a friend who recommends a site or product generally carries more weight than a marketer who’s hocking their wares to the general public.

As it turns out, this trend was much bigger than my living room. According to this article in the New York Times, online sales on Thanksgiving Day increased 33 percent over last year to $407 million. That’s a dramatic increase no matter how you slice it, and it could signify a sea change in holiday shopping.

Today is Cyber Monday, the traditional start to the online holiday shopping season. Already today, I’ve received no less than 50 emails touting sales and one-day-only bargains – some of which are truly lackluster compared to the door busters found at brick-and-mortars. I’ve started deleting the emails now without reading them. It’s too much. While online shopping helps consumers avoid crowds, this proliferation of marketing is the online equivalent of a packed mall; it can over-stimulate consumers into complacency.

Learning from what’s already happened this year is the perfect way to prepare for next year. Savvy retailers will start early, and market directly to those shoppers who are taking time away from the turkey to shop online. After all, these are the same people who are spending time with family and friends who they will eventually be buying holiday gifts for. Get to them while the gift ideas are fresh in their minds, and give them an incentive for being a smart, early shopper.

According to a survey taken by ComScore Inc. shoppers are responding to customer submitted product reviews in much higher numbers than in years past. We have seen product reviews getting love here, but seeing it happen market-wide to retailers both large and small just makes it that much more apparent and important. People shopping on the web are becoming more savvy to the limitations of in-store shopping and using the resources offered to make more informed decisions before taking the bait.

A smaller but still significant amount of people are members of company Facebook pages or using their friend’s Facebook recommendations to shop (6% and 7% respectively) while others still are following Twitter for deals and gift ideas.

“I think we are getting our first real glimpse at the impact social media will play on commerce as we enter the next decade.” – comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

There is still a lot of ground to cover but with Twitter opening up the firehose for more 3rd party applications, Google search going real time and Facebook actually starting to generate revenue as ad spending in offline sources like print and television decline, this trend has nowhere to go but up.

Adding videos to your eCommerce site is easy to do using the WebLinc Direct eCommerce platform. There’s no need to involve WebLinc from a technology perspective. Once the video is produced, users can add the video directly to their sites using the content administration area. One great example comes from WebLinc client Mighty Leaf, who recently began selling a Tea Top Brew Mug. You can find a video that demonstrates how the new mug works on the item’s product page, as well as through callouts throughout the Mighty Leaf site. Mighty Leaf also does a great job promoting the video through Facebook and Twitter, making sure the efforts that went into producing the video don’t go unrewarded.

Says Megan Koons, web marketing analyst at Free People:

“I have noticed that the reviews are a bit more creative. Customers seem to be excited at the thought of possibly becoming a ‘Top Featured Reviewer’ in the future.”

The blog post went on to say that Free People saw a staggering 93% increase in review volume in the first week of launch.

The WebLinc Direct eCommerce platform is flexible enough to allow clients like Free People to take advantage of marketing innovations with little or no ongoing technical assistance.  To learn how WebLinc can help your business capitalize on emerging trends, contact us here.

Anyway, I just wanted to post a quick aside about the 3 Wolf Tee meme that has made it off the internet and into the mainstream media (BBC, Washington Post) and some of the more interesting and applicable aspects of this phenomenon.

User reviews and creative content made this product a hit.

By all means, the 3 Wolf Tee seems an exception to the rule for most retail descriptions. Nobody is going to openly ridicule their products or allow reviewers to do so with such impunity, regardless of how funny it turns out. But this particular tee’s sales have put the t-shirt maker’s kids through college in a matter of months, and that’s nothing to scoff at.

It’s easy to write these sales off to the 4chan/collegehumor set and watch as the sales ebb and the meme recedes into the waters of the Rickroll and All Your Base Are Belong To Us, which it will inevitably do, but that is shortsighted and counterproductive. User reviews and creative content have made this product a hit. No matter how you look at it, when it comes down to it, people buy products when they like the presentation.

Whether you use informative product descriptions, social networking, creative reviews or capture attention with potent ads; you must engage your online customers. Use humor, be descriptive, use irony, talk directly to your audience, be human; these characteristics don’t only drive sales, they drive loyalty.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t the only reason for site content.

Although search engine optimization is obviously essential to any ecommerce business’s copy; creative and brand-aware content is equally important. Where would Woot be without their amazing descriptions? Why can American Apparel reference church burning humorously? Why does Haband use cliché slogans and sales lines? These sites owe their success to using creative language geared toward their demographic as an intrinsic element of their branding and site content, and do so very well.

Your content doesn’t have to be funny or hip, (Woot and American Apparel are kind of paragons in these categories) and it often won’t make sense to your business plan to be that way, but your content has to speak to your audience. Reading product specs is about as fun as reading the tag of a shirt and consequently makes shopping about that much fun. Make your products unique, differentiate yourself from the competition and I can guarantee that chicks will adore you, the god’s will smite your enemies and all that is righteous and holy will be yours for the taking.

This off-site, multi-channel discussion, the bed-rock of social media optimization, is just what Nielsen overlooks, and what Mashable over-emphasizes.

I know I like lolcats, but I seriously doubt that I would put “can I has a cheezburger” into a search engine no matter the amount of alcohol involved, well, maybe…But that’s beside the point. Without StumbleUpon, I would have never discovered the wonder that is a lolcat or, God forbid, known what white people like. I wouldn’t search for these topics, but based on my browsing history, vague interest categories and total lack of anything better to do; I discovered, found I liked and told others about all of these things and tons more. I even purchased this grill after stumbling upon it at A+R.

My example, whilst conjuring a bit of a rosy view of Stumble and its ilk (I bounce off of pages just as much as the next attention deficit disorder victim,) shows the beauty of social media. I was in the market for a grill, but not actively looking for one when this little guy popped up. I liked it, Googled it, read about it on a few design and cooking blogs, and eventually bought it. I am probably in the minority of users who’ve actually converted, but it goes to show that nobody should discount the collective mind of social traffic sources. Whether it is summer, the beginning of Spring semester or the holidays, Stumblers, Diggers and Reddit-ers(?) have the same thing on their minds as every other consumer out there, you just have to be in the mix to capitalize.

Now, I said that Mashable over-emphasizes the impact of social media, and I meant it; it’s just a little saccharine. If your name is mentioned in blogs or on the Digg boards, without you in the discussion, you run the risk of Google, the best and most-likely-to-convert-users traffic source, turning against you. We only need to look so far as Sen. Rick Santorum to see what the fickle nature of Google can do.

The reason to get in on what users are saying about you is to protect your Google-able ass (no pun intended, Senator) and make sure your SRP’s aren’t overrun with content from boards and blogs. Converting social network traffic is unlikely. You can, with most analytics programs, lengthen the time-to-die on your cookies to measure the effect of social network referrals, but for the most part, you’ll be lucky if you ever see them again. Then again, luck might be more fickle than the Digg crowd…but probably not.

Readers of this blog know that we recommend Google Analytics for all our clients. This is not to say that Google Analytics is the right solution for every client. Larger clients running complex campaigns can benefit from a top tier analytics program such as Omniture or Core Metrics while such programs would be cost prohibitive for smaller clients. However, given that Google Analytics is free, simple to install, and fairly powerful for the vast majority of e-commerce sites, we typically install Google Analytics for every client in addition to any other analytic programs they require. Google Analytics can quickly answer 90% or more of typical analytic queries with minimal effort or training. To illustrate that point, let’s look at a nifty report in Google Analytics that will help us answer the landing page effectiveness question very quickly. The report we want to look at is the Top Landing Page report within the CONTENT section of Google Analytics. When you first bring up the report, you will be looking at the default view.

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The first thing we need to do is to change the view. Note the 4 VIEWS icons at the top right of the report. We want to change the VIEW setting so that we look at the tree like icon that is the icon at the right end of the list of icons (These views can be referred to as Grid, Pie, Bar, Tree views respectively). The tree icon allows us to see how individual landing pages perform against the site average.

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Now we just need to set the parameters we want from the 2 drop-down menus that are now available within the report header. Each drop-down menu has the same 3 choices: Entrances, Bounces, Bounce Rate %. For the purpose of this report, we want to measure bounce rate % for each landing page against the site average bounce rate, and we wish to view this information from most entered page to least entered. To do this, simply set the first drop-down menu to ENTRANCES, & set the second drop-down menu to BOUNCE RATE % (note how the second menu has “compared to site average” next to the menu). Bounce Rate % will tell us what percentage of visitors hit the landing page and then immediately leave (bounce off) the site. The resultant report should look something like the image below.

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Now, you should have an easy time picking out under performing landing pages. By using the top landing page report and the tree view, under performing landing pages will appear with red bars, while well performing landing pages will appear with green bars. The bars simply represent how much better or worse than site average each page performs when it comes to visitors bouncing off the landing page. Google Analytics also lets you jump straight to the offending page in question by clicking on the “double box” link icon just to the left of the url page link (if you click on the url page link itself, you will be taken to a summary Google Analytics report page for that landing page, NOT to the landing page itself). If we look at the same info using the “BAR” view, we can see the actual bounce rates for each page, but the TREE view works best for the identification stage.

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Before heading off to redesign all your under performing landing pages, it is important to realize the limitations of Google Analytics, or any analytic program for that matter. Analytics programs are great at pointing out non conforming data. In other words, the value and purpose of an analytics program is to allow the analyst the ability to spot inconsistencies in data. The data point(s) can be positive or negative indicators, but in either case, the data point in question appears to be out of place or outside the realm of typical expectations. What an analytics program cannot do is determine the cause of the obscure data point. This is the role of the analyst. It is important to realize this distinction when working with analytics because many people are under the impression that analytic programs can fix websites. They can’t, people fix websites.

Why spend a paragraph explaining a seemingly obvious point of fact? Because, the first thing you should do when analyzing your underperforming landing pages is to ignore analytics for a moment and ask yourself whether there are any simple marketing, technical, or other simple reason a page is bouncing. For example, it is not uncommon for a page to have a high bounce rate do to the fact that it is image or data heavy (the size of the page in Kb, or Mb(let’s hope not Mbs!)). Google Analytics will never be able to tell you that your landing page is 500k and take forever to load. This is something a human must deduce. Another example would be a search results page with no search results or a page that cannot be found. Again Google Anaylitics cannot tell you that this is the issue, but it can point out to you that something is amiss with that page.

Hopefully the Top Landing Page report in Google Analytics can help you fine tune your site’s landing pages. Just remember, while Google Analytics can find the land mines on your site, it is up to you to disarm them. Most times, a simple explanation or small fix will be enough to guarantee safe landings for all your future visitors.