Last week Shop.org held their annual
conference in Las Vegas. This week it\’s the Electronic Retailing
Association, same place. If you haven\’t been to an internet conference
recently, it\’s amazing how big things are getting and how fast things
are moving.
I visited every exhibitor at the Shop.org event last and met at least a
dozen companies that I hadn\’t heard of before that are doing
interesting things in online marketing, comparison shopping, search,
and web analytics.
Here are a few impressions:
- Omniture Site Catalyst version 12 is awesome. You can
import cost of sales and call center data so you can get more complete
ROI reporting. The new client software features an OLAP engine which
enables unprecedented data mining. - I asked Yahoo\’s search people if they allowed XML data feeds to
be uploaded to Yahoo like Google\’s Froogle. They told me about their
Product Listings feature that allows you to upload your product catalog
to Yahoo Shopping and pay per click when visitors search for your
products and click on your ads. This isn\’t as good as Froogle\’s free
upload, but Yahoo Shopping gets far more traffic than Froogle, so any
good merchant will include this in their online marketing strategy. - RSS can be a great way to get your information to consumers
(since most online merchants say their biggest concern is whether their
emails are getting delivered) but only 2% of adults use RSS today,
while 5% of consumers age 12-21 use it. - According
to eMarketer, 56.3% of US households will have broadband by 2008 - Broadband
users spend 40-50% more money online than dial-up users - 3/4ths
of consumers browse online, then shop offline - Pay-per-call
will grow from $162 million in 2004 to $3.38 billion in 2009. Even local
businesses without web sites can use pay-per-call. - 70% of consumers use the internet to
search for local stores and merchants, while 62% of consumers use the yellow
pages. (BIG WOW)
Gotta run. I\’ll update this post later with at least a dozen more thoughts/impressions.