IBM Coremetrics has just added Cyber Monday 2011 data to their benchmark report I blogged about yesterday.

Here are the things that have caught my eye:

Cyber Monday 2011 — 5 Noteworthy Facts

1. Overall spending increase — Online sales were up 33% over 2010, 29.3% up over Black Friday 2011, and AOV (avergage order value) also went up from $193.24 to $198.26
2. Conversion rate — Overall conversion rate went up from 5.6% in 2010 to 5.71%, mobile seeing the best improvement (from 2.24% to 2.99%)
3. Mobile sales growth — Nearly 11% of people used a mobile device to visit e-tailers’ websites (up from some 4% last year), resulting in a nearly threefold growth in mobile sales (6.6% in 2011 vs 2.3% in 2010)
4. Social media part — While “discussions leading up to Cyber Monday increased in volume by 115% compared to 2010″, resuling in 0.93% of site traffic, only 0.56% of Cyber Monday shoppers were referred directly from social networks.
5. Facebook vs Twitter — Facebook referral traffic accounted for 0.8% of all e-tailers’ Cyber Monday traffic (up from 0.73% in 2010), while Twitter referred only 0.02% (down from 0.07% in 2010)

Important: All of the above reflects U.S. data.

To see what people have been buying (good data both for affiliates, and for merchants to review), especially in electronics — a niche that registered the highest growth – 26% over 2010 — see these lists by Larry Magid.

Make sure you also download IBM’s full 10-page Cyber Monday Report 2011 here [PDF file], which among other things also contains detailed information and 2011-vs-2010 comparisons of sales data in such categories as Apparel (one of the best in one-page bounce rates – 25.5%), Department Stores (champion in average session length – 8:18), Health and Beauty (best in conversion – 5.4%), and Home Goods (best 2011-over-2010 improvement – 68.4%, and largest AOV – $290.11).

Every year we see multiple surveys being conducted around various areas of digital marketing, but sometimes when looking at the number of respondents, we think: “Nah… This is just too small of an audience to be indicative of the overall trend!” or “350 people they’ve surveyed can’t be sufficient enough of a number to make the conclusions they’re making for the whole industry!”

In some cases, the above reactions may be right, while in others a statistically significant sample size may actually be very different from what we may imagine it should be.

Definition first:

Statistical significance — put simply, this is the likelihood that a finding or a result is caused by something other than just chance. Usually, this is set at less than 5% probability (p< 0.05), meaning that the result is at least 95% likely to be accurate (or that this result would be produced by chance no more than 5% of the time). [source]

Now let’s turn to our statistically significant sample size. How do we determine how large it has to be (to ensure our survey findings are most likely to be accurate than not)?

The following table from a paper by Bartlett, Kotrlik & Higgins answers the question:

Read about the differences between continuous and categorical data here and here. Also, see the original Organizational Research: Determining Appropriate Sample Size in Survey Research manuscript (PDF file).

A recently published report based on a research by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers has registered a 4.2% growth of the UK Internet advertising spending, which reached £3.5 billion in 2009. IAB has also reported that between 2000 and 2009, the Internet marketing expenditure has grown by 2,200% going from from £153 million to £3.54 billion.

The three areas that have experienced the strongest growth in 2009 were (i) paid search, (ii) online video, and (iii) affiliate marketing. Here are the highlights in brief:

Paid Search – Grew by 9.5% reaching £2.15 billion, which represented 60.7% of all online ad spend in the UK.

Online Video – Represented “the real success story as spend saw a 140% increase year on year… generating £28.3 million.”

Affiliate Marketing – Spending on it rose by 38.2% (very good to see such a strong growth), reaching £72.6 million by the end of 2009.

Read more in this announcement on IAB’s website.

I love statistics, and I was certainly happy to find the below “The State of the Internet” video by JESS3 (Jesse Thomas) on Vimeo today:

Only one criticism: being so jam-packed with numbers, a video that’s close to 4 minutes long is frankly a bit hard to digest.

I am sure everyone will find something for (him)/(her)self in the above video; but here are the facts that have given me personally some new marketing ideas already:

• 90 Trillion emails were sent in 2009, but over 80% of them were spam
• By the end of 2009, there were 234 Million websites online, 126 Million of which are blogs
• Women love social networking (84% of social network sites have more women than men)
• Twitter: 27.3 Million tweets a day
• Facebook: over 6 Million pageviews per minute, which is supported by 30,000 servers; 350 Million members
• Flickr hosts 4 Billion photos, while Facebook members upload to it as many as 30 Billion photos per year
• YouTube serves 1 Billion videos a day, over 40% of which are viewed in the US
• Average US Internet user watches 182 videos a month, and 82% of US Internet users are doing it

Thanks again for an excellent compilation of data, neighbor.

In September 2009 digital advertising overtook all other channels (including TV) in the United Kingdom [more here]. In October 2009 McKinsey stressed the importance of online retailing in the U.S., forecasting that by the year 2011 online sales will account for over 45% of all US retail sales [more here]. In December of the same year eMarketer forecasted a 5.5% U.S. online advertising spending increase (after a -4.6% drop in 2009).

A recent study conducted jointly by Bloomberg BusinessWeek Research Services and Coremetrics confirmed the online advertising industry growth in the U.S., but also made an interesting (and worrying) observation. The company’s Chief Strategy Officer, John Squire, pointed out that while being “aware of the value online marketing provides,” and spending more on their online marketing, “many [business leaders] are not sure they are utilizing it effectively.” Coremetrics writes:

While spending on online marketing efforts has increased, most marketers lack confidence that they are using the right metrics to gauge marketing success and value. When asked how they would evaluate marketing success at the end of 2009, nearly half (47%) said “meeting our key performance indicators.” However, well over half of marketers (62%) claim they are not confident they are tracking the right metrics for online marketing performance — a significant discrepancy.

This is an alarming observation; an the study also points out that in addition to the 62% of online marketers that are not sure they are using the right measurement tools and techniques, 41% of marketers have problems interpreting marketing data.

Per this particular research, in 2010 the online ad spending will increase by close to 70%, but can we really afford to fly blind?

Affiliate marketing spending is also increasing, and per Forrester Research we are going to see an increase both this year, and beyond:

What metrics are you using to judge of your affiliate program’s performance, and do you know how to read all of the affiliate marketing metrics that speak to the effectiveness of your efforts?

Not too long ago I suggested 5 KPIs to use: (i) affiliate recruited, (ii) activity index, (iii) activation, (iv) traffic, (v) sales volume. Of course, there are also such key metrics as (vi) conversion rate, (vii) EPC, (viii) fraud-based reversals, (ix) impressions, and hits, (x) average order value, and net profit after affiliate (and other) marketing expenses are subtracted. What else are you (or should we be) tracking and measuring?

Yesterday I have illustrated how popular and fruitful a marriage of social networking with comparison shopping can be. Today I’d like us to turn our eyes to some staggering stats.

We’ve heard that this decade will be the decade of the mobile Internet, which per Morgan Stanley is expected eventually grow to “at least 2x size of Desktop Internet” [more here and here].

We also know the exact demographics: 81% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 are already actively using wireless Internet, compared to 63% of 30-49 year-olds and 34% of those 50+ years old. Additionally, it is being reported that the “adult use of social networking sites has risen significantly” since 2007, and today “47% of online adults use social networking sites, up from 37% in November 2008″ [see today's post with the detailed Pew Research Center report here].

But here’s the part that I find to be most fascinating: close to two-thirds of all mobile pageviews are to social networking websites! This data was published by GroundTruth, a mobile analytics startup with offices in Seattle and New York. Here are the exact numbers:

Apparently the marriage of Mobile with Social is another area that marketers cannot afford to overlook. eMarketer wrote back in November 2008 that “the number of mobile users accessing social networks from their mobile devices will reach 607.5 million worldwide by 2013, representing 43% of global mobile Internet users” [source]. Wow… There are definitely some great affiliate marketing opportunities in there too.

Having analyzed the growth of the global search market in the month of December 2009 compared to the search landscape in December 2008, comScore has registered a 46% increase in online search demand globally. The U.S. “represented the largest individual search market in the world” accounting for some 17% (or 22.7 billion searches total) of all global searches. China came second, followed by Japan, while the U.K. came forth. Encouragingly for me (needless to elaborate why I’m following this particular geographic market with great interest), Russia has registered “the highest gains in 2009″ in the world growing almost two-fold. France and Brazil followed Russia in the “highest gains” race.

Here are the details from comScore:

    ------------------------------------------------------
    Top 10 Countries by Number of Searches Conducted Dec 2009 vs. Dec 2008
    ------------------------------------------------------
    Total Worldwide, Age 15+ - Home & Work Locations
    -------------------------------------------
    Source: comScore qSearch
    ----------------------
                                   Searches (MM)
                                   ------------

                                      12/08    12/09     Percent Change
                                      -----    -----     -------
    Worldwide                        89,708  131,354        46%
    -------------------------       -------  -------        ---
    United States                    18,688   22,741        22%
    --------------------------         ----     ----        ---
    China                            11,778   13,278        13%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Japan                             6,213    9,170        48%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    United Kingdom                    4,623    6,245        35%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Germany                           4,079    5,609        38%
    ----------------                   ----     ----        ---
    France                            3,362    5,425        61%
    --------------------------         ----     ----        ---
    South Korea                       2,796    4,039        44%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Brazil                            2,454    3,763        53%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Canada                            2,900    3,710        28%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Russian Federation                1,735    3,333        92%
    ----------------                   ----     ----        ---

While Japan has also seen a substantial increase in search inquiries, it is a significantly more saturated market for affiliates to get into. This cannot be said about Russia, Brazil and France (the sequence of affiliate marketing development in these three countries would probably be backwards: France – more savvy, Russia – most underdeveloped). The above data definitely opens interesting horizons to specific geo-markets for affiliates.

Speaking of individual search platforms, Google was naturally leading the way, followed by Yahoo! sites. “Microsoft Sites saw the greatest gains among the top five properties, growing 70%”, but it was the Russian Yandex.ru that has registered the highest gains here too, having grown by 91% in 2009.

Here are the top 5 players worldwide:

    ------------------------------------------------------
    Top 10 Search Properties by Searches Conducted Dec 2009 vs. Dec 2008
    ------------------------------------------------------
    Total Worldwide, Age 15+ - Home & Work Locations
    -------------------------------------------
    Source: comScore qSearch
    ----------------------
                                   Searches (MM)
                                   ------------

                                      12/08    12/09     Percent Change
                                      -----    -----     -------
    Worldwide                        89,708  131,354        46%
    -------------------------       -------  -------        ---
    Google                           55,638   87,809        58%
    --------------------------         ----     ----        ---
    Yahoo                             8,389    9,444        13%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Baidu (China)                     7,963    8,534         7%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Microsoft                         2,403    4,094        70%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    eBay                              1,327    2,102        58%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---

Bringing Bing to life has certainly helped Microsoft conquer more of the search market’s grounds, but they still have a long way to go to even come close to Google’s share of the pie. Microsoft and Yahoo! sites’ searches combined made up only a bit over 15% of Google’s total searches. Nevertheless, it would be irrational for search-oriented affiliates to ignore this part of the market altogether, and diversification should definitely be present in their strategies.

Once again, the findings from the comScore’s report may be found here. I wish we had more data than just the December 2008 to December 2009 comparison, but taking the holiday traffic increase into account, these are certainly important (and interesting) numbers to review.

Have you ever wondered how popular affiliate marketing is among bloggers. It turns out to be quite popular among those that do monetize their blogging efforts. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009 report, in popularity it beats paid postings, rich media ads, and is third only to display ads and search ads.

Technorati reports that out of the 28% of people who monetize their blogging, 54% are doing it part-time, 32% are self-employed, and 14% are “corporates”. Among professional and self-employed bloggers, 17% “derive their primary income from blogging”. A number of monetization methods is being employed by the 28% of bloggers that do monetize. Here are the Technorati’s stats:

Note also the annual income figures reported:

Niche blogs that cater to extremely focused and loyal audiences make especially effective affiliate partners (regardless of whether they are already monetizing their blogging efforts or not). Affiliate program managers should seek to recruit them as affiliates. Time invested in educating them about affiliate marketing certainly pays off when the sales start being referred.

Upon surveying “4,600 US consumers about their interactions with a variety of companies gauging the usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyability of those experiences”, Forrester has arrived at its 2010 Customer Experience Index (not to be confused with the Customer Satisfaction index recently published by ForeSee Results). It is being reported that out of 133 companies in 14 different industries only 13 firms were rated “excellent” (highlighted in yellow below), 35 received a “good” ranking, 40 – the median “okay”, and 45 (highlighted in red below) were rated between “poor” and “very poor”:

It is good to see retailers (including those with strong online operations) scoring highest in the index; hotels are following closely:

Thank you for another interesting research, Forrester.

In the course of the past week I have come across a Pew Research Center study that examined the current decade in light of people’s opinion on various subjects, technological advances and new Internet and mobile developments included.

Speaking of “the major technological and communications advances” Pew stressed that the overwhelming number of their respondents view these in a “positive light”. More concretely:

Clear majorities see cell phones, the internet and e-mail as changes for the better, and most also view specific changes such as handheld internet devices and online shopping as beneficial trends. There is greater division of opinion, however, over whether social networking sites or internet blogs have been changes for the better or changes for the worse.

Speaking even more concretely, here’s an interesting summarizing graph (highlighting mine):

You may find the full report at People-Press.org. There’s a lot of useful information we as marketers should take note of.