ARMONK, N.Y. – 04 Nov 2011: During this year’s November holiday season an unprecedented 15 percent of people in the U.S. logging onto a retailer’s Web site are expected to do so through a mobile device, according to cloud analytics-based findings by IBM (NYSE: IBM).
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20111104/NY00549-a )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20111104/NY00549-b )
Based on data from the IBM Coremetrics Benchmark, all online holiday shopping in November is also expected to grow as much as 15 percent versus November 2010, with the growing influence of mobile devices such as iPads and Android phones being among the key factors.
The IBM Coremetrics Benchmark analysis gathers data directly from the web sites of more than 500 leading U.S. retailers. Using sophisticated analytics technology, the benchmark measures real-time sales data and online marketing results to uncover shopping trends across a wide-variety of channels including social media, mobile devices and other online sources where consumers interact with their brands.
This latest installment serves as the commencement of IBM’s fourth-annual Benchmark Campaign and reveals the following 2011 online retail predictions for the November holiday season:
- Online Shopping Growth: Total online sales in November will experience impressive growth of 12-15 percent over the same period in 2010.
- Mobile Traffic and Sales: Record numbers of consumers will shift their shopping from the PC to their mobile device this holiday season. In October nearly 11 percent of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 4.2 percent in October 2010. Additionally, mobile sales continue to increase, reaching a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent in October 2010.
- iPhone & Android: For the first time, Android users will demonstrate similar levels of mobile shopping as iPhone users. These October 2011 numbers show iPhone accounting for 4.0 percent of mobile traffic and Android 3.5 percent.
- The iPad Factor: Shoppers using an iPad will lead to more retail purchases more often per visit than other mobile devices. This trend is based on October 2011 figures where iPad conversion rates reached 6.8 percent as compared to the overall mobile device conversion rate of 3.6 percent.
- Surgical Shopping Goes Mobile: Mobile shoppers will display a laser focus on buying this season that surpasses that of other online shoppers with a 44.2 percent bounce rate on mobile devices versus online shopping rates of 37.3 percent.
- The Social Influence: While the industry will see modest increases in direct social buying, the influence of these sites and services will eclipse that of other channels. According to October conversion rates, 9.2 percent of consumers that visited a retail site from a social media site made a purchase. This compares to 5.5 percent of all direct online shopping last year. Also in 2010, the vast majority of social shopping will continue to come from Facebook, which in October accounted for 77 percent of all traffic from social networks.
“This November holiday season will mark the true advent of the post-PC era with consumers demonstrating a heightened interest in adding mobile devices to their holiday shopping arsenal,” said John Squire, Director, Product Management, Enterprise Marketing Management Group, IBM Industry Solutions. “In response, savvy retailers must invest in delivering hyper-personalized, smarter commerce shopping experiences that are capable of building loyalty through multiple channels with exceptionally relevant promotions, free shipping and more.”
About IBM Smarter Commerce
The growth of mobile, social and online commerce are key trends within Smarter Commerce, an evolving market defined by rapid shifts in digital buying patterns and the adaptations businesses are making to capitalize on them.
More information on Smarter Commerce can be found at www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_commerce/overview/
Source
These early holiday season findings are based on data from IBM Coremetrics Benchmark, the only analytics-based, peer-level benchmarking solution that measures online marketing results, including real-time sales data. All of the data is aggregated and anonymous.
Coremetrics Benchmark uses IBM’s cloud-based digital analytics platform to rapidly collect and analyze intelligence on how consumers are responding to the products and services being offered to them, enabling clients to make accurate decisions on marketing expenditures. As a result, marketing teams can gain deeper insight about their consumers and present personalized recommendations, promotions and other sales incentives across the wide variety of channels—including social networks and mobile devices—where consumers interact with their brands.
Contact(s) information
Doug Fraim
IBM Media Relations
617-501-6376
dfraim@us.ibm.com
Today, Google announced that marketers will no longer be able to analyze Google clicked natural search terms for any user who is logged into one of their many solutions; mail, photos, blogs, documents, etc. The search term of these authenticated user clicks will be encrypted. To enable the encryption, Google will redirect users to a secure (HTTPS) version of their site.
We applaud Google for wanting to make the user experience safer.
The IBM Enterprise Marketing Management team, comprised of the Coremetrics and Unica teams, is taking a proactive approach and is working with Google to clarify the implications of such a change. In the meantime, the current web analytics solutions from IBM will continue to work without any modification or update required. That said, you will likely see a substantial increase in no search results or “None.” Unfortunately, no work around has been provided by Google; therefore, this is a matter that will impact all vendors that leverage this traditionally vital information. Any Google paid search or display ad clicks tagged with Coremetrics or Unica target URL parameters will not be impacted.
Lee Isensee
Product Marketing Manager
IBM Enterprise Marketing Management
Google Dictionary is no longer available as a standalone service at google.com/dictionary. You can still find it in Google Web Search and Google Translate. For example, you can search for [define keyword] and click “more” or search for [keyword] and click “Dictionary” in the search options sidebar.
{ Thanks, Arpit. }
Dave
Monk is the CEO of the IT consulting firm
ArcSource. His
company's CRM system has evolved over time. First being completely in his head,
to a homegrown system for tracking clients' technical needs, to a full-blown
CRM solution for current and prospective clients.
Business:
ArcSource is a 12-year-old IT support and consulting business. They act as the IT
department for a couple of hundred companies that are too small to have their
own IT department.
The
challenge:
For five years Monk's firm failed at managing new
project opportunities or tracking customers throughout their life cycle. All
they had done was build some homegrown stuff to track certain client
information, such as technical specs, that were necessary for doing their job.
After that, they had nothing.
“When we started everything was being tracked in my
head. Which soon proved to be a non-scalable system,” Monk admitted.
How
discovered Zoho:
Prior to 2007, Monk didn't even know there
were tools to track sales prospects or there was a term CRM – Customer
Relationship Management.
He initially implemented Salesforce in 2008, but
switched to Zoho at the beginning of 2011. Monk did an exhaustive comparison of
the features between Salesforce and Zoho, and came to the conclusion that the
two were matched in terms of features. What they didn't match on was cost. It
was the reason Monk left Salesforce. The super high costs were far too
prohibitive for him to get his whole staff to use it. Zoho CRM was about 1/5th
to 1/6th the cost of Salesforce.
Monk wishes he had gone to Zoho sooner because now he's
getting more people using the CRM system in an intimate way. Because of the
high price of Salesforce, he simply couldn't afford to get everyone in his
company using the product.
It wasn't too hard to exit Salesforce and bring data
over thanks to some templates provided by Zoho. Ultimately, Monk thought Zoho's
performance was much faster than Salesforce especially in the ability to edit
records. With Zoho you don't actually go into the edit mode for the whole
record if you just want to make a simple change.
Unique
use case of Zoho CRM:
Monk takes full advantage of Zoho's Marketing
Campaigns feature which gives him the ability to track results from a specific
marketing effort, such as direct mail pieces and email campaigns. For example,
in one case he saw that he brought in more than 0,000 from a specific ,000
direct mail campaign. Prior to using the Marketing Campaigns feature, he had no
way to determine ROI.
Advice
for others:
An analysis of your current sales and
marketing process or lack thereof will make it very clear as to what’s missing,
said Monk. Putting into place a CRM solution like Zoho has made our business
more productive in terms of tracking information, opportunities, and learning,
in every possible way.
It's a learning process though. Take it a day at a
time, or a chunk at a time. It’s very easy to use from the get go and to
continually use it, Monk explained.
“Don’t let the end goal of a mature product be the
barrier to get in the door. Cause you’ll reap benefits from day one,” Monk
advises, “Every small business can benefit from a CRM solution no matter
what. We’re seeing new opportunities to use the software every week.”
Listen to David Monk talk about his experience with Zoho CRM by zoho
Zoho Blogs
The time comes in the life of a gadget where it gets old and in turn, it will be given EOL (end-of-life) status with its respective carrier and/or manufacturer. And well, while we have yet to receive confirmation from Verizon Wireless, it looks like they have recently added several devices to the EOL list.
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Dashboards Resizing
A dashboard in Zoho Reports is created by dragging and dropping multiple reports on a single page. Till now, we had one/two column layout options with fixed width & height. We have brought in greater flexibility to the layout now. You can now resize each of the embedded reports within a dashboard. This makes your dashboard look prettier, allotting more space for longer/wider reports, avoiding unnecessary blank spaces where you need to have shorter/smaller reports etc.
Resizing the reports is easy. Go to the Edit Design mode, hover your mouse over the report’s borders that need to be resized and drag as needed
Charts – More Sorting Options
We have added two more sorting options in Charts, important ones at that. When your chart contains a String or Date column in one axis and Numeric column in the other, you can order the values in String/Date column based on the numeric data in either ascending or descending order.
New options that have been added are:
Options when Y-axis has numeric column and X-axis has String/Date column:
By Y-value – Ascending
: Sorts values in X-axis based on Y-values, ordered from smallest to largest
By Y-value – Descending
: Sorts values in X-axis based on Y-values, ordered from largest to smallest
Options when X-axis has numeric column and Y-axis has String/Date column:
By X-value – Ascending
: Sorts values in Y-axis based on X-values, ordered from smallest to largest
By X-value – Descending
: Sorts values in Y-axis based on X-values, ordered from largest to smallest
Try these new features in Zoho Reports and let us know how it goes.
Racing game enthusiasts everywhere should be excited about one of the best racing franchises of all time, Forza Motorsport. The fourth installment, set to release October 11th,…
DeviceMAG
Google has added a new section in the Dashboard, its called Me on the Web and seems to be saying that vanity searches are a good thing. Well, more accurately, if appears as if Google is trying to make it a bit easier for users to keep track of what people are saying about them online.
Further Related Reading on TFTS:
- Fox Begins Closed Beta Registration For Family Guy Online [Fox Unveils An MMO Set In The Family Guy Universe, Says It Will Be '100% Browser-Based']
- E3 2011: Wii U Does Away With Friend Codes [Ubisoft Says You Won't Be Exchanging Friend Codes On Wii U, Instead Creating Your Own Online Identity & Building A Friend List]
- E3 2011: Ubisoft Details Ghost Recon Future Soldier, Unveils Ghost Recon Online [Ghost Recon: Future Solider Gets Demoed At E3, New Free-To-Play Multiplayer Title Ghost Recon Online Announced]
- Apple Makes More On iPhone Than Google Makes As A Whole [Fortune Magazine Points Out That Google's Revenues Can't Compare To What The iPhone Makes Apple - Does This Settle Android vs. iPhone?]
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If you are waiting for E3 to kick off and happen to be sporting an Xperia Play smartphone, you may want to check out what Sony Ericsson will be announcing. And to offer a brief tease, the company has pre-announced more than twenty new Xperia Play game titles that will be coming available — of which ten will be exclusive offerings.
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Chrome 12, the upcoming version of Google’s browser which is likely to be released today, removes a useful feature: the built-in Gears plugin. While most Google services dropped support for Gears and removed offline access, Gears is still being used in Gmail. Google no longer maintains Gears, which is now legacy software, and focuses on implementing offline support using HTML5.
But why remove Gears support without implementing the features using HTML5 first? Google says that you’ll only need to wait for a few weeks or you can still older versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and mail client such as Thunderbird or Outlook.
“The new Gmail Offline capability is targeted for delivery as a Chrome browser web app this summer. As we move the Gmail Offline capability to a Chrome web app, we will deprecate the Google Gears-based Gmail Offline. This coincides with the version 12 release of the Google Chrome browser which no longer supports Gears. As a result, Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will no longer work with the Chrome browser as of Tuesday May 24, 2011. Google Gears-based Gmail Offline will continue to work in Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.6,” explains Google.
It’s not the best thing to do after convincing users to switch to Chrome and use Web apps, but it’s just a temporary issue. If the HTML5 offline Gmail wasn’t ready to be released, removing Gears from Chrome could have been delayed.
{ via François }
