David Moth

Mobile commerce calls-to-action: eight best practice tips

The terrible truth about smartphones is that although penetration in the UK is now above 50% and traffic is constantly rising, people don’t generally use their phone to buy things.

Conversions lag way behind both tablets and desktop, suggesting that smartphones are primarily used for research and price checking.

As such, brands should be doing all they can to direct mobile users to the checkout as quickly as possible in order to encourage window shoppers to actually make a purchase.

Making it into a one-click process, similar to Amazon, will also help capture impulse buyers.

by David Moth 16 July 2012 10:12am 4 comments

Facebook apps: top tips from PhotoBox's Lawrence Merritt

Facebook apps can be a great way of gaining extra exposure for your business and getting users to actually engage with your brand page.

The Guardian and Wall Street Journal are two obvious examples of brands that have taken advantage of the viral nature of Facebook apps to increase their social traffic.

Facebook calls this 'closing the viral loop', and sees it as an important part of its marketing platform.

Online photo service PhotoBox is hoping to emulate this success with its new app, Social Fab. It allows users to create personalised products using their Facebook photos.

To find out more about the challenges of creating a Facebook app, I spoke to PhotoBox managing director Lawrence Merritt...

by David Moth 13 July 2012 11:57am 0 comments

10 interesting digital stats we've seen this week

As it's Friday, I've once again rounded up some of the most interesting digital marketing stats I've seen this week.

Stats include Yahoo's latest blunder, our online shopping expectations, internet ad budgets, Google's dominance of paid search and the power of mobile search.

by David Moth 13 July 2012 11:05am 1 comment

This week's top six infographics

Once again, here are six of the finest infographics we've seen this week.

Topics include tablet e-commerce, how restaurants make use of mobile apps, a look at social engagement as a metric and data on the importance of hotel reviews.

by David Moth 13 July 2012 10:14am 0 comments

Mobile search accounts for 13% of spend but 20% of clicks

UK advertisers are responding to the consumer shift towards mobile and tablets by investing in mobile search.

Data from Marin Software’s Online Advertising Q2 2012 report show that mobile devices accounted for 13% of search spend in June 2012, yet took a 20% share of clicks.

This tallies with data from IgnitionOne which shows that mobile search made up 14% of total search advertising spend in Q2, up slightly from 12.3% in Q1.

Similarly, Q1 stats reported by Adobe show that mobile now accounts for 8% of US search spend compared to 11% in the UK.

by David Moth 12 July 2012 12:53pm 2 comments

Five best practice tips for optimising product pages

Nothing is more frustrating for e-commerce sites than seeing hundreds of customers abandon their basket for no apparent reason.

All the hard work has gone into improving search rankings, driving engagement through social and working out the best PPC strategy, only for potential customers to lose interest once they arrive on-site.

To combat abandonment, one of the key areas that retailers need to focus on is the product page. These need to include a huge amount of product information without appearing too cluttered.

Lingerie retailer Bravissimo was one such company. Using QuBit analytics, it found that 29% of people were exiting the site on product pages, and as many as 30% of users were not navigating below the fold. This meant customers were not seeing the cross-sell or matching items.

With this in mind, here are some best practice tips for product pages...

by David Moth 12 July 2012 12:20pm 6 comments

Mobile checkouts: top 10 US retailers reviewed

There are now more than 100m smartphone owners in the US according to comScore, which accounts for one in every three Americans.

Almost half (48%) of those smartphones use Android, so it’s important that retailers are able to offer a mobile checkout that caters to this market.

Above all else mobile shoppers want simplicity and speed, so checkout processes need to be a frictionless as possible.

I recently reviewed the top UK retailers’ mobile checkouts and found that in general most adhered to best practice, but how do the top 10 US retailers stack up?

by David Moth 12 July 2012 10:41am 2 comments

Paid search drives highest AOV for travel industry

Working out where your sales are coming from is a vital part of e-commerce, as understanding attribution allows you to effectively manage your marketing budgets.

The value of each touch point varies hugely between different industries, and even between competing brands.

A new report from IgnitionOne, due to be released next week, looks at the conversion paths and latency (the amount of time between the first exposure and when the conversion occurred) for the travel industry.

Digital is extremely important for the travel industry, as data included in the Econsultancy/Foviance Multichannel Customer Experience Report shows that three quarters of travel research takes place online.

IgnitionOne’s report found that paid search is the key driver for getting customers to spend more money. Outside of organic search, it drives a 71% higher average order value (AOV) than any other single channel.

by David Moth 10 July 2012 13:13pm 1 comment

73% of shoppers expect prices to be lower online than in-store

New research shows that retailers can no longer afford to silo their online and offline stores as digital consumers expect a seamless integration across all retail channels, including social and mobile.

Almost two-thirds of digital shoppers (60%) surveyed by Capgemini said they expect the convergence of retail channels to be the norm by 2014.

This is clearly not the case at present, as half of shoppers said that most retailers currently are not consistent in the way they present themselves across channels.

The Digital Shopper Relevancy report, which surveyed 16,000 digital shoppers across 16 markets, found that 73% of respondents expect online prices to be lower than those in physical stores.

by David Moth 10 July 2012 11:50am 0 comments

Pinterest: nine best practice tips for brands

Pinterest is essentially a site where users endorse and recommend images or products they have found, and also where they go to look for inspiration.

For this reason, it’s well suited to fashion, beauty, interior design and weddings, and some 90% of its 12m strong user base is female.

It also means that there is plenty of referral traffic to be had, and brands and businesses are now waking up to the potential of Pinterest for extending their online communities and driving conversions.

We’ve previously highlighted 11 ways that brands can make use of Pinterest and looked at how the top US and UK retailers use Pinterest.

by David Moth 10 July 2012 10:17am 5 comments