Internet Retailer summarizes two recent reports: State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010 by consulting firm Econsultancy.com Ltd in conjunction with the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, and Q1, 2010 Search Advertising Results: Analysis, Interpretation and Forecasts” by search engine marketing services firm NetEiixir.

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Jonathan: “The banner is the grandfather of online advertising. It has spawned different sizes, formats, and targeting over the years, but like many grandfathers, it still has an old-fashioned way of behaving, especially in regards to trading.”

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Nathan Safran, senior research analyst and Seth Dotterer, senior director of marketing, both from Conductor, inc. studied 88,758 keywords, on which the retailers spent more than $2.4 million per day for paid search ads. They evaluated those keywords in natural search. This piece details the results and chronicles how to use the results from a ppc campaign to tailor natural search.

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Wayne Wall, CEO of Hopkinton, Mass.-based on-demand video software provider Flimp Media, discusses video and its impact on the marketing, especially mobile devices and email marketing to those devices. I found it telling that visitors to pages with video spent approximately 1.5 minutes on page compared to 8 to 10 seconds on pages without. This begs the question, ‘Is it time to start embedding video in marketing email?’

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Jeremy Goldkorn founded the popular China media website Danwei.org, and acts as editor and publisher. The site has tracked the changes in China’s media and Internet on a daily basis since 2003 and also produces video interviews with people in culture and the media in China. Here, in this piece in fastcompany.com magazine, he outlines the copykat sites that have sprung up in China.
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Larry Kavanagh, founder of D.M.insite discusses what to test with the goal in mind of pushing up online sales and profits. He has a 7-step program that touches on all the important keys to success.

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57% of online retailers plan to spend more on e-commerce technology in 2010, including 49% whose investment priorities cover new or upgraded e-commerce technology platforms, Forrester Research Inc. says in the study, “2010 U.S. Online Retail Technology Investment Outlook.” The report is based on a survey of 291 online retailers in the fourth quarter of 2009. Other popular areas of technology investment this year include content management tools, multichannel order management integration, system security and mobile commerce. Among the goals underlying many investment plans this year are improved marketing capabilities, including a strong focus on social marketing as well as search and other forms of online marketing, the study says. See the summary report here.

Dixon Jones, founding director of Receptional Internet Marketing, writes in SES magazine that the most successful companies…”use web architectures that do not make themselves inadvertently blind to the search engines. They build sites that can develop over time to feed a search engine rather than starve it of the thing it craves most – data, information, and knowledge.” He talks about shifting resources to influencing non-monetized traffic to your site. Read the print article here.

As online retail sales perked up in the fourth quarter of 2009, many leading e-retailers did a better job of making their web sites easy to shop and responding promptly to consumer inquiries, retail consultancy The E-tailing Group Inc. found in its 12th Annual Mystery Shopping Study. “Throughout our review we observed merchants being attentive to efficiencies for ease of use, differentiators to drive conversion and involvers to engage customers,” the firm says in the study. The report notes, for example, that retailers such as Blue Nile and REI responded to customer e-mails in less than 30 minutes, and that most of the retailers in its E-tailing Group 100 study group let shoppers sort site search results by price, category and brand. Most also link to social networking sites. Other features are still less common, such as sorting site search results by top sellers and product style and fit. See the results here.

Judith Lewis, search director at i-level, Europe’s largest digital communications agency, discusses SEM in this article for SES Magazine. She notes that “Search engine marketing, while a complex discipline, is part math, part psychology, part marketing, and part creativity” It really isn’t a black art, although some would say that it is an occult science.

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