Internet

What’s the value of a consumer’s time spent online?

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The value of a consumer's time onlineIf you’ve ever wondered what the “value” is of a consumer spending time online, we have some answers courtesy of SumAll, a data visualization company.

SumAll has tapped into Google Analytics data to study patterns across ~10,000 customers and nearly $1 billion worth of transactions. What it finds is that a minute of time spent by a consumer “e-window shopping” is worth an average of 43 cents.

SumAll also calculates that one full visit to an e-commerce site is worth ~$1.30.

The company has been tracking this sort of information for a number of years, so we have some comparative statistics we can observe. In 2012, SumAll finds that the average amount of time spent per site declined by approximately 14% — from 3 minutes, 16 seconds in 2011 to 2 minutes, 49 seconds today.

Despite that decrease in time spent per online visit, the revenue generated per visit actually grew by ~24%.

What’s the reason? “Buyers are more accustomed to buying online, so the hesitation is dropping,” Dane Atkinson, SumAll’s CEO claims.

The SumAll data also suggest that an average consumer spending 1 minute, 54 seconds on a site is the amount of time needed in order for the e-retailer to make a dollar in sales.

The SumAll report concludes that a balance needs to be struck on e-commerce sites between having enough depth to be interesting … but not so much as to be overwhelming, with too many products offered and/or undue difficulty in illuminating the payment path for buyers.

According to Atkinson, aiming for an average e-commerce visit of three to four minutes is a good goal for engaging customers without confusing them with too many options.

Finally, we see from the trend data that there has been a dramatic decrease in the amount of minutes spent on a site to result in a dollar sale: it was charted at over 5 minutes back in 2009, more than three times 2012’s findings.

I guess we’ve become more nimble than ever buying online.

Password Pandemonium

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Too many user names and passwords to remember ...It seems that many people have been heeding admonitions from seemingly everywhere that they should refrain from using the same user name and password for their various online accounts.

“Password creep” has been the result. Just how much so is revealed in a recently published research studied from social web SaaS provider Janrain, in concert with Harris Interactive.

The 2012 Online Registration & Password Study found that nearly 60% of online adults have five or more unique passwords associated with their online logins.

One-third of the respondents report that they maintain 10 or more passwords. And ~10% report having more than 20 individual passwords.

These figures are up significantly from the first Janrain study, which was conducted back in 2006.

Of course, when one considers the myriad of online activities many people engage in, it’s not hard to fathom how the number of passwords per user has become so large.  Consider all of these possibilities just for starters:

  • Retail sites and loyalty programs
  • TripAdvisor, Angie’s List, Yelp! and other review sites
  • Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites
  • LinkedIn, Career Builder and other career-oriented sites
  • Google, Yahoo and other e-mail/search portals
  • PayPal and other payment, banking and financial sites
  • Hobby sites and discussion boards
  • Personal blogs

And the list goes on …

The Janrain/Harris study also uncovered several interesting findings based on age and gender demographics:

  • Older people (age 55+) are more likely to have a higher number of unique passwords than younger adults.
  • Men age 45-54 report having the highest average number of unique password (~10).

There’s no question that people have heeded the warnings about using passwords that are too easy to “game” … and thus are creating passwords that incorporate a combination of letters, numbers and other symbols.

But the downside is a considerable percentage of people forgetting their passwords frequently. 

In fact, more than one-third of the respondents reporte that they have had to ask for assistance on their user name or password at least once in the past month.

And another thing: The vast majority of people (~85%) dislike being asked to register to access information on a new website.

What did they dislike in particular? Half of the respondents complained about having to create and remember yet another user name and password. And ~45% believe that online registration forms are too long and time-consuming to complete.

Despite the irritations of “password pandemonium,” it’s doubtful many online consumers are going to be changing their behaviors very soon.

One alternative would be to create a few strong, secure passwords that are used across multiple sites but changed regularly.  But to many, that “cure” is no better than the “disease” they have already.

Tablet Computer Adoption: Fast and Furious

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Tablets are growing faster than smartphone adoptionThe tablet computer hasn’t been around long at all.  But it’s making a huge splash in the digital arena … and giving not only laptops but also smartphones a run for their money in the bargain.

Consider these data points as reported on recently by Mark Donovan, a senior vice president at comScore, a leading Internet cyber-analytics firm:

  • Tablet adoption is happening significantly faster than what was experienced with smartphones.
  • The majority of iPad users don’t own an iPhone or some other type of smartphone.
  • Tablet “early adopters” are equally male and female – a departure from the norm which typically finds early adopters of new digital technology being primarily young men.
  • There is very high usage of tablets for shopping, watching video, and other media consumption. That’s also a departure from what was experienced with smartphones, where it took much longer for consumers to become comfortable shopping from their smartphone devices.
  • People use tablets and smartphones differently – and at different times. For example, smartphone usage peaks during the day whereas tablets are used more in the evening.

That tablets are making big gains on laptop computers is no surprise at all, considering their lighter weight, nearly effortless portability, brighter screens, and the ease of using them in environments not conducive to a keyboard-and-mouse (like in bed).

But of the trends noted above, I think the most intriguing one pertains to tablet computer usage versus smartphones – specifically, how tablets are becoming an alternative to smartphones rather than an adjunct.

Indeed, it seems as if some people aren’t making the transition from feature phones to smartphones that everyone expected; they’re opting for tablets instead. We may see the adoption rates for smartphonesbegin to flatten out as a result.

Indeed, Adobe Systems reported in May 2012 that tablet traffic is growing at a rate ten times faster than smartphone traffic.

But if you really think about it, maybe these latest developments aren’t so surprising: Many folks have long complained about the “miniaturization” of display screens that are a necessary evil of mobile phones. Now that the tablet has come along, there’s finally an effective solution to that dilemma – and the market has responded accordingly, blowing away even the most optimistic sales forecasts for tablets.

Coming Attractions: A Newly Sanitized YouTube

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YouTube Cleaning up its ActThe YouTube phenomenon has been one of the biggest success stories of all in cyberspace.

Over the years, YouTube has gone from being a weird corner of the web made up of curious, strange and often forgettable video clips, to a site that attracts millions of viewers every day – some of whom have essentially ditched all other forms of video viewing in favor of mining the vast trove of material YouTube carries on its platform.

In the years since Google acquired YouTube, traffic and usage have exploded, even as the video fare has become more varied (and also more professional).

But there’s one holdover from the early years that continues to bedevil Google: YouTube is a repository of some of the most inflammatory, puerile and downright disgusting commentary that passes for “discourse,” posted by all manner of rabble.

But now, Google is signaling a strategy that has the potential to clean up the crude comments on YouTube – and in a big way.

YouTube is now strongly encouraging users to post their YouTube comments using the name identity associated with their Google+ account.

In fact, if you decline to do so after being prompted, you’ll be asked to state a reason why, underscoring the nudge away from “screen name anonymity” and towards “real-name identity.”

The notion is that people will be less likely to post flaming comments when their “true” web identity is known – that people will exude good behavior in “polite cyber-company,” as it were.

Of course, one needs to possess a Google+ account in order to link his or her identity on YouTube. But that’s for today only; some observers see YouTube’s move as just the first step toward hiding – and eventually eliminating – all comments coming from anonymous accounts.

So the new bargain will be something closer to this: “Open a Google+ account and link your YouTube account to your Google+ account … or else forfeit your ability to post any comments at all on YouTube.”

The likely result will be a much more “sanitized” YouTube – less edgy, but also less red-faced embarrassing. And that’s just what many brands, businesses and advertisers would like to see happen.

Of course, YouTube’s moves may well spur the launch of an alternative site that seeks to preserve the (nearly) anything-goes environment of the YouTube of yore.

Perhaps it could be called “YouCrude,”  But, as it happens, that handle’s already been nabbed — by a fellow WordPress blogger!

Tower of Babble: Four billion e-mail addresses and counting.

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Billions of e-mail addressesDavid Baker, a global vice president at marketing technologies firm Acxiom and e-mail expert extraordinaire, wrote recently that when speaking with an employee at one of the major online database aggregators, he was informed that this company had a grand total of 4 billion e-mail addresses on file.

And of these, ~2 billion had names and addresses associated with them.

These numbers are dramatically higher than the worldwide estimate of e-mail addresses published by the Pingdom blog in its Internet 2011 in Numbers report.

Think about this for a moment. Considering that the total population of the United States is a little over 310 million, how many e-mail addresses per person are floating around out there?

Strip away the very young … plus teens and ‘tweens who don’t engage nearly so much in e-mail … and we’re left with the realization that among the core adult audience of Boomers and GenXers, there’s really no such thing as a single e-mail address that can be tied to one individual.

Even if we ourselves don’t maintain multiple e-mail accounts for different purposes, surely we know people who do. One person I know is juggling no fewer than 20 separate e-mail addresses; he claims to be keeping them all straight.

This notion of multiplicity is at cross-purposes with how marketers have traditionally viewed prospecting. We’ve been conditioned to think about an individual as being tied to one physical address and one e-mail address – in the same manner as a discrete mobile phone number or a unique social security number.

In theory, all of these are vehicles of monetization, with e-mail being particularly attractive because of the low cost associated with reaching prospects in that manner.

But in actuality, there’s a great deal of complexity:

  • Which e-mails are associated with opt-in permission?
  • Which e-mail addresses are primary (highly active) versus secondary (relatively inactive)?
  • Which e-mails are valid, but lying dormant?

Because e-mail addresses are “cheap/free,” they’re ephemeral. They aren’t “linear” in the same sense as the data on a residence, a business address or even a mobile phone number can deliver.

Mr. Baker concludes that, far from becoming easier, “the ability to engage a customer through e-mail across a portfolio of communications is becoming more costly and complex.”

With 4 billion e-mail addresses sloshing around in the digital space, there’s no doubt e-mail marketing will continue to be a major force in marketing. Even if half of them are cyber-zombies, digital Potemkin villages or what-have-you.

The challenge is in sorting it all out.

I think the e-mail specialists are going to be at this for a good long time to come.

Facebook’s Interesting Week

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Facebook's_first_day_of_tradingBy now most people have heard all of the news reports about Facebook’s initial public offering, and how the world now has a new crop of instant millionaires and billionaires.

But the news last week wasn’t all roses for Facebook. For one thing, it became clear as Day 1 of trading ground on that Facebook shares weren’t going to increase in value. Indeed, it took the underwriters stepping in with institutional buying to keep the share price (barely) above the initial offering price of $38 per share.

And there was the news of GM dissing Facebook by announcing that it is dropping its paid advertising program with the social network … evidently due to Facebook’s failure to convince GM marketing execs of the effectiveness of its program.

But there was even more. Consider this news report: Facebook was hit with a $15 billion privacy lawsuit on the very first day of public trading. Filed on behalf of a number of Facebook’s users, the class action suit claims that Facebook invaded personal privacy by tracking users’ web usage.

The lawsuit cites a bevy of case law and regulations as part of the briefing documentation, including the Federal Wiretap Act, the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, and various California statutes.

Consider the implications if this suit is at all successful:  Now that it is a public company, Facebook is under increased pressure to increase its advertising revenues rapidly – which means collecting yet more user data to help it target paid advertising effectively and thus command premium pricing.

But if the lawsuit is successful, it could prevent Facebook from collecting the very data it uses to serve up advertising based on relevant audience targets.

On the other hand, similar cases brought against Facebook in recent years have been thrown out of court because browser cookies haven’t been viewed as “wiretaps.” Moreover, plaintiffs have had difficulty in proving any “harm” as a result.

Of course, there was some additional very good news this past week for Facebook – at least for CEO Mark Zuckerberg: He got married.

… Which in the end may turn out to deliver far more happiness and fulfillment than all the money in the world ever could do.

Good marriages are like that … so let’s all hope for the very best for Mr. Zuckerberg.

More Interest in Pinterest …

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While it pales in comparison to the $1 billion+ Facebook public offering today, social bulletin board Pinterest, the topic of a recent blog post of mine, has snagged its own financial windfall this week.  It comes in the form of a $100 million investment led by Rakuten, Inc., a Japanese conglomerate of Internet-oriented businesses.

With this filing, Pinterest is now valued at approximately $1.5 billion.

Why is Rakuten making the investment?  Very likely because one of the key components of the conglomerat is e-Commerce Marketplace, which is Japan’s leading electronic commerce player. 

Michael Jaconi, an executive officer at Rakuten, is quoted as saying that “Pinterest recognizes Rakuten as a global Internet player and they want to leverage some of the skill set in the growing business world.”

With 77 million members in Japan already, Rakuten has ambitious plans to become “the top global internet service company,” according to Mr. Jaconi.

But why choose Pinterest instead of Facebook or Twitter for such a major financial investment? 

The answer to that question isn’t necessarily “either/or,” actually.  “We want to continue investing in technology that is as innovative as Pinterest,” Jaconi notes.  “If we need to buy and invest to bring us closer to that source of innovation, we will.”

Stay tuned, obviously.

Is our hyper-connected world changing us for the better, or the worse? Pew looks for answers.

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One of the great questions about the digital and interactive age is how it may be affecting the way people fundamentally think and behave.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has been studying this question, too. In late 2011, Pew queried a group of technology experts and stakeholders and asked them to prognosticate on the impact of hyper-connectivity on today’s younger generation.

It is the fifth in a series of surveys conducted by Pew on “The Future of the Internet.”

The question posed to these experts was: Looking out to the year 2020, will the younger generation’s “always-on” connection to people and information turn out to be a net positive or a net negative?

And the consensus response to this question is … no consensus at all. In fact, the experts broke down in roughly equal camps on either side of the issue.

The optimists believe that:

 The brains of teens and young adults will be “wired” differently from their older counterparts … but this will yield positive results.

 They will not suffer any notable shortcomings as they cycle quickly through work-related and personal tasks.

 They will be more adept at finding answers to questions, and will be learning more precisely because they can search effectively and access collective information in cyberspace.

An equal proportion of experts holds a decidedly less optimistic view of the future. Their opinion is closer to this:

 Even though teens and young adults will be “wired” differently than their older counterparts, they will not become more knowledgeable as a result.

 They will use cyberspace not to become better informed, but to be “faster” informed.

 Instead of becoming better educated and better informed, they will depend on the Internet and mobile devices to deliver quick results, with little retention, introspection or further study.

 They will spend most of their energy sharing short social messages, being entertained, and being distracted away from a deep engagement with knowledge and with people.

Here’s a link to the Pew report summary, and the results are well worth reviewing.

As for my own view, it seems to me that the environment we’ll see in 2020 is probably somewhere in between these two posts.

It’s true that many people will interact with digital technology in ways that have little to do with any sort of hard, intellectual labor. But is that so different from what we’ve seen in society in general over the past half-century?

There are thought leaders. There are thought consumers. And then there are the clueless. The digital tools and techniques people choose to use just make it easier to play in whatever league they wish.

It reminds me of that old adage about the three types of people found in the world: Those who make things happen … those who watch things happen … and those who wonder what happened. (And there are precious few people who fall into the first group.)

The fact is, no degree of Internet connectivity and social interactivity is going to change fundamental human nature. It doesn’t matter whether we’re hyper-connected or not.

… But let’s hear some different perspectives from others …

Internet advertising: Blue smoke and mirrors?

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Online advertising spurious claimsIn today’s online world, marketers can’t afford to do advertising the old fashioned way. They need to rely on automated programs that serve ads to the right audiences in cyberspace.

One question I hear often from business leaders is to what degree of confidence should they place in these automated programs to actually deliver what is promised. There’s a nagging concern that some of the promises might be a bit more like “blue smoke and mirrors.”

As it turns out, some of that concern may be well-placed. Here’s one recent example of problems along these lines. And Trust Metrics, an online media rating firm, has studied more than 500,000 unique web domains – in effect, “taking inventory of the ad inventory.” And what it’s found is pretty sobering.

For starters, the online ad inventory supply is marked by dynamic change and constant evolution. Approximately 20% of the domains studied by Trust Metrics in late 2010 don’t even exist anymore as of the end of 2011. Tens of thousands of sites that may have once been vetted by agencies or networks are gone. There is no content at these domains … or they’re simply “ad farms.”

Trust Metrics claims that never have so many marketers purchased so much online ad inventory in an environment that is so degraded, a significant portion of the domains might not even be around a few months from now.

Moreover, approximately 10% of the domains Trust Metric evaluated that sell ad impressions in scaled buying environments (e.g., exchanges and networks) are actually non-English language sites – hardly valuable places to advertise. Plus, that represents more domain names than those identified as pornographic, or containing significant profanity or hate speech.

Trust Metrics’ evaluation also found that well over half of the sites available in large ad networks are what it classifies as “substandard environments which don’t adhere to even the barest minimum in publishing or editorial principles.

The bottom line on this is that of for 1 million domains that sell ads … most advertisers wouldn’t want to be on ~600,00 of them!

Of course, the flip side of this is that there are thousands of sites that do perform for advertisers – and those “good” sites drive valuable clickthroughs, sales and brand building.

But clearly, advertisers would be well advised to adopt a “buyer beware” stance in the current online advertising environment.

The Google+ Social Network: Net Plus or Net Minus?

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Google Plus, Google+What’s the latest with Google+? The big splash predicted when the new social platform hit the web has been more of a ripple instead.

Underscoring this, recent news reports have suggested that Google basically missed the boat on social media … and that rival Facebook is far too well-established to face anything more than just token competition going forward.

It’s true that many people find the prospects of building and engaging in yet another social media channel a wearying thought, to say the least. There are, after all, only so many hours in the day.

But Google doesn’t want to cede the social media marketplace to Facebook without a fight. That’s understandable, considering the billions of dollars in potential advertising revenues that come from being able to serve ad messages to people who are connected to others who “like” a product or service.

The results charted to date on Facebook confirm that displaying friend “likes” adds an extra measure of credibility to advertising. That’s manifested in a clickthrough rate that’s three times what’s typical for other advertisements on the social platform.

The launch of Google+ this past summer hasn’t resulted in huge user adoption, that much is clear. The Google+ social platform has managed to nab ~40 million users, which isn’t a shabby number in and of itself. But it pales in comparison to the more than 800 million active users on Facebook.

But despite this less-than-stellar performance, we see clues as to where Google is going with its social platform. That’s because Google’s equivalent of the “like” button – the “+1” notation that shows up on Google’s search engine results pages – goes further than simply communicating the news to those in someone’s own Google+ network. Google is also mapping that information through to its Gmail account base.

Google’s Gmail service has hundreds of millions of users, and those who use the site regularly have accumulated dozens or hundreds of contacts. So when a user clicks +1, Google can show that result not just to the user’s social friends on Google+, but also to his or her contacts in Gmail.

[For those who cry “foul” on privacy grounds, Google maintains that clicking the “+1” button is a public action and therefore not subject to privacy considerations.]

The jury’s still out on what the social map will look like in a couple years. There’s little doubt Facebook will still be the biggest guy on the block. The question is, to what extent will Google have taken the 600 pound gorilla down a notch? Stay tuned …