Many epic battles have been fought on soil, but far fewer in cyberspace.  Leave it to Walmart and Amazon to break that barrier.  Walmart and Amazon (and newcomer Target) are currently locked in an all out price war over online book sales that has culminated into the American Booksellers Association asking the Department of Justice to launch an antitrust investigation.

Continue reading “Walmart and Amazon declare war : Online Retailers Fight for Book Sales” »

I think Macgyver is the ultimate handyman.  The way he is able to fix, create, or build whatever it is he needs  under nearly any circumstances is amazing.

Most Americans don’t have Macgyver’s knowledge, capabilities, or writers- but what many of us do have is access to the Internet.  And when it comes to fixing, creating, or building, people are using it in record numbers.

Continue reading “Clicking Their Way to Home Improvement: How Consumers are using the web in home improvement projects” »

Hopes were high when Microsoft introduced the Zune in 2006. As the first MP3 player to feature Wifi and an FM radio, the Zune stood out by allowing owners to share music wirelessly with other Zuners. The concept never took off; Zune adoption was limited, while Apple’s iPod line continued to dominate the media player space.

In late September Microsoft launched its new Zune HD media player.  Rather than simply upgrade and refine the original Zune concept, Microsoft seemingly followed the lead of the iPod Touch, building the device around a 3.3 inch touchscreen, internet browsing capability and games/application downloads via the Zune Marketplace. 

Continue reading “Can Microsoft’s Zune HD challenge the iPod?” »

According to the Google Keyword Tool,there were 7.5 million broad match searches on the term ‘soap’ in September.  Granted that some of the searches are related to “soap operas” rather than cleansing soaps, there are still quite a few people searching for the term.  CPG companies are fueling this growth in search with increased investment in online advertising.  In fact, according to TNS, one of the leading soap brands Dove spent nearly $5MM on online display advertising during the first half of this year.  This investment is significantly greater than that of rival brands Softsoap and Olay.  Due in part to their investment in online advertising, Compete’s data shows that site traffic to Dove.com are multiples greater than its competitors.

Over one million consumers visited Dove’s website in August.  This volume is comparable to the number of consumers visiting sites like Bravo TV, The New Yorker and Morningstar.  So how does Dove maintain its online visitor volume using display advertising?  Many of you have probably seen a Dove ad online recently.  We went back a few months and examined two campaigns that Dove ran on both Yahoo! and AOL in late July.  We isolated exposed consumers who saw the Dove ad and compared their behavior to a group of control consumers who did not see the ad but were otherwise similar in behavior and composition.  Take a look at the search results below.

On Yahoo!, exposed consumers were nearly twice as likely to search for the Dove brand as control consumers who did not see the ad up to a week after the campaign ended.  The ad on AOL resulted in an even greater shift in consumer behavior prompting exposed consumers to search at nearly twice the rate than those on Yahoo.  The incremental search activity for Dove is not just a sign of online success, it is also a sign of brand strength and consumer recollection. So it is no wonder that according to the Google Keyword Tool, there were 2.2 MM searches for Dove in September compared to 823K searches for Olay and 60K searches for Softsoap.  The ads did drive direct traffic to Dove’s site, but Dove got even greater value from the incremental searches and the resulting “indirect” traffic.  Here is another great example that shows that online advertising indeed works!

2009 is BIG for Back to School: Staples and Office Depot See YOY Growth in Q3

September marked the beginning of the school year and the end of the Back to School Season for office supply retailers. Q3 sales figures have yet to be released, but if site volume is any indicator, online office supply retailers saw a year over year boom. Industry leaders, staples.com and officedepot.com, each saw huge gains – staples.com up 59% YOY to 23.7MM unique visitors (UVs) and officedepot.com up 21% YOY to 13.3MM UVs in Q3.

Traffic from the search engines contributed greatly to these gains – staples.com up 45% YOY and officedepot.com up 22% YOY in total search referrals.

Continue reading “Sept Data is Live: 2009 is BIG for Back to School” »

Last week we looked at how retail king Walmart has used online display advertising to drive growth in site visitors at a faster rate than its rivals. So far this year, Walmart has run several prominent display campaigns on high reach placements like the homepages of AOL and Yahoo!. Of course the marketing team at Walmart is savvy enough to test and vary the creative, messaging and the format of these expensive ad placements.

We took a look at two executions that Walmart used for two different one-day homepage takeovers on AOL. The first one pictured below is a non-interactive ad unit that ran in late May. A few months later in early August, Walmart ran an interactive ad also on the AOL homepage (pictured on the right below). We define an interactive ad as an ad that shows more information within the unit when a consumer clicks on it rather than immediately directing the consumer to a landing page or a website. Note that in the case of the Walmart interactive ad, it is essentially a mini circular within the ad unit. Shoppers can click on a section (i.e. Girls’ Apparel) which takes you to a different department and they can then scroll through the products. What better way to really engage shoppers in the shopping process as well as accommodate a broader spectrum of audience? So what were the results of these two campaigns?

Using the Compete Ad Impact product, we measured the online behavior of consumers exposed to the Walmart ads compared to a control group of consumers who were not exposed but were otherwise similar in behavior and composition. The comparison of the exposed behavior against a control group allows us to measure the true lift of the campaign on online behavior. For site visitation, both campaigns saw a significant increase in visits to Walmart by the exposed group compared to the control group. For the non-interactive campaign, exposed consumers were 54% more likely to visit Walmart.com compared to the control. However, the interactive unit saw a larger lift of 69%. How about the quality of traffic that these campaigns drove?

We went deeper and looked at consumers who started the online checkout process on Walmart.com. Both campaigns saw double-digit lifts for this behavior as well. However, the interactive unit resulted in 3.5x greater lift for the checkout process. It drove 82% more consumers to start the checkout process than the 24% lift for the standard non-interactive ad.

So what can we learn from this? Like Walmart, advertisers can make calculated marketing investments to drive their revenue. The interactive unit which is almost comparable to an entire circular within the space of a 300×250 ad unit was probably more expensive for Walmart than the standard ad. However, we can see that it delivered better results because it also drove a significantly greater volume of quality traffic that engaged in the checkout process. Depending on how good Walmart is at negotiating with their interactive agency, perhaps they even got an attractive return on their investment.