The Web Week in Review
Few things are certain in today's crazy world but the weekend is one of them. So without further ado, here's this week's The Web Week in Review.
Ben Edelman on affiliate marketing fraud
Ben Edelman is an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who has for years published insightful research into the affiliate marketing sector.
I interviewed Ben to find out more about the various forms of fraud that affect e-commerce companies.
Where's the best place to launch your product?
According to a study published recently by Marketing Science, the country where you launch your product has a measurable impact on its uptake.
As AdAge reports, the study, entitled "Global Takeoff of New Products: Culture, Wealth or Vanishing Differences," analyzed data from 31 countries, including developing countries and ranked the countries based on how long it usually took for 16 consumer products to "take off" over the past 50 years.
Is your e-commerce channel performing as well as it could?
Despite the growth in the e-commerce channel, many retailers are still unable to make truly informed decisions regarding the strategic development of e-commerce in their business, as they are unable to effectively benchmark the performance of the channel.
This is the case for both retailers who think they're performing well and those who don't.
The problem with the 'top-down' approach to revenue estimation
AdAge published an interesting article this week with a subtitle that caught my eye:
"Entrepreneurs Discover Digital Spending Isn't an Infinite Quantity" .
Consumers say etailers are sending too many emails
According to Forrester Research, over 150bn emails will be sent to consumers by retailers and wholesalers this year.
And many will be received by recipients who don't really want them.
Opera - most HTML code isn't standards compliant
Last week, Opera released the results of a survey conducted using its MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) search engine.
The engine, which currently indexes 3.5m web pages, is designed to track "how web pages are structured."
E-consultancy seeks amazing US editor (NYC)
E-consultancy is opening up an office in New York and we’re on the lookout for an amazing editor, to help produce some brilliant US-flavoured content.
SEOmoz indexes 30 billion web pages for search marketers
Kudos to Rand Fishkin and the team at SEOmoz following the announcement that they have spent a year building an index of some 30 billion web pages.
The ambitious year-long experiment should help the team provide more insight into how search engines make sense of the web. It looks pretty interesting from where we’re sitting, and we’re looking forward to playing with it.
High street retailers: menus make a big difference
Home pages for high street retailers may initially come across as similar, but their actual performance differs strongly due to the design of the navigation menus.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
