Monthly Archives: February 2009

Online retailers sending birthday e-mails to customers

It was my birthday recently and this year I received greetings from 3 retailers – ASOS, Ebuyer, and Next (see below).
Last year I complained that I had been forced to provide my date of birth to a lot of online retailers but only 2 had sent me a birthday e-mail. The date of birth field [...]

Google Makes Major Change To Display URL Policy

Google has made an important change to its AdWords policy. From today, all ads within the same ad group must display the same top-level domain.
As an example: the following group of display URLs comply with the new policy, because all of them contain the same top-level domain “example.com”:
• www.example.com• www.widgets.example.com• www.example.com/widgets/redwidgets/• www.example.com/index.html
On the other hand, you would not be allowed to batch the following [...]

Yahoo! Analytics Beats Google’s Enterprise Level Analytics

Yahoo! Analytics is better than Google, according to a comprehensive report released by CMS Watch last week. This comes as no surprise to me – Snow Valley has been an IndexTools partner for years. When Yahoo! bought the product last year, renamed it, and made it available for free, I knew it was only a [...]

ASOS – new site design

I’m back from holiday to find that the newly designed ASOS website is live.
I love ASOS, so I’m a bit biased, but it’s a real triumph. This is down to five things that their team have done really well in my opinion:

Each category has its own homepage – so in essence there are 6 homepages. Each looks [...]

Google releases tool for building display ads

Google has released a new Display Ad Builder tool, allowing AdWords users to create their own animated display ads.
You can choose from a number of templates that will fit your business – they have special ones for different industries, eg travel, or you can chose a general purpose one. I’ve just had a go at creating a [...]

Google Provides a Solution to Duplicate Content

If you are a user of faceted search (or not!!), you will have come across these problems: hundreds of URL formations all leading to the same page content, or issues with long, un-friendly URLs. Well now Google has assisted in helping you ‘de-dupe’ your search listings, by specifying which URL formations should be followed and [...]

Online retailers look elsewhere for e-commerce talent

If you are a retailer looking for e-commerce staff, you need to start looking outside of retail – that’s the conclusion of an article in yesterday’s Times. It says that retailers who have traditionally stuck to homegrown talent are finding that there aren’t enough retail e-commerce directors or retail e-mail marketers to go round – [...]

Best retail online marketing idea for Valentine’s Day (so far)

I was thinking that I hadn’t seen many retailers doing exciting online marketing for Valentines Day – and then I came across this from JC Penney in the US.
JC Penney has set up a website called The Doghouse. Users can submit their husbands/boyfriends, explain why he’s there (see poor Don below), and choose a piece of diamond jewellery. The man gets [...]

Barnes & Noble – good example of community building

I really like what Barnes & Noble in the US is doing to allow customers to engage, both with each other and with the book retailer itself.
My B&N allows the customer to set up an account, make it public or private, choose a pen name, and then manage their profile. They can:

Create EssentialLists of good [...]

The White Company online sales up 32%

The White Company says that online sales grew by 32% in their last full year. The web now accounts for half of their direct sales. Overall sales grew by 14% up to £69.9m.