A year ago, so-called F-commerce was considered the next big thing in ecommerce. Gamestop, JC Penney, Nordstrom and The Gap are just a few big names that created Facebook stores and closed them down over the past year.
“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”
Read more here Gamestop to J.C. Penney Shut Facebook Stores

Avinash Kaushik, the leading voice in the field of Web Analytics and the Analytics Evangelist for Google wrote a great post for any web analytics beginner. A solid outline for success that even the most advanced web analysis people in the industry should read to shake the rust and dust off.
Here are this steps, according to Avinash:
Step #1: Visit the website. Note objectives, customer experience, suckiness.
Step #2: How good is the acquisition strategy? Traffic Sources Report.
Step #3: How strongly do Visitors orbit the website? Visitor Loyalty & Recency.
Step #4: What …

Internal site search is when a visitor of your website is using the search box on your website to find information. Tracking this information is very useful because every time your visitors are searching for something, they literally tell you in their words what they are looking for. You can see their initial searches, the refined searches when they didn’t find what they were expecting and which pages they searched from.
Google Analytics is offering this feature and all you have to do is to activate it. Here is how to …

If you are using (and you should!) a service to track visitors to your website, it is very important to exclude your own visits from the statistics, in order to keep the relevant data.  Google Analytics offers the option to stop tracking visits from a distinct IP. If your connection has static IP, this option will work very well. But if you have a dinamic IP, you need a different approach.
The idea is to set a cookie on our browser and then use Analytics’ filter to ignore visits from all …

Email was the No.1 tactic that marketers targeted for increases in the run-up to the 2009 holiday season, followed by SEM & SEO, online banners and coupons. Also, according to MarketingSherpa, emails to house lists or rented lists generates approximately 10 to 20%  of website visitors to eCommerce sites.
“Email marketing remains the underfunded, underappreciated bulwark of online marketing.  Although it routinely gets good reviews from all types of online marketers, email is less likely than other tactics to get its own line in the budget, or to be routinely upgraded …

Google announced yesterday that it has finished combining DoubleClick’s DART system with its own Ad Manager product into one entity now known as DoubleClick for Publishers.
As a result, Google is offering two versions of its new product: one for large online publishers that takes most advantage of existing DART architecture and DFP Small Business, which is a more basic, free option for smaller publishers.
Over the next few weeks, they will upgrade all Google Ad Manager accounts to DFP Small Business automatically:
“This is the next generation of Google Ad Manager, bringing …

Google Analytics represents a must-have tool for every eCommerce website. For online shops it is highly recommended to implement also the eCommerce tracking module, which is not activated by default in the basic version of Google Analytics.
What will bring this module for you? It will record the online transactions and will link revenues to visitors, content and traffic sources, helping you making decisions related to the marketing campaigns and the website in order to reduce the abandon rate and increase conversions.
Check this short clip to get familiar with the GA …

“By 2011, Enterprise Microblogging Will Be a Standard Feature on 80 Percent of Social Software Platforms” – STAMFORD, Conn., March 26, 2009
In a recent study, Gartner has identified four different ways in which companies are making use of the Twitter:

Direct – The company uses Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel
Indirect – The company’s employees use Twitter to enhance and extend their personal reputations, thereby enhancing the company’s reputation
Internal – Employees use the platform to communicate about what they are doing, projects they are working on and ideas that …

“Email Marketing Metrics Report” – 2009 from MailerMailer represents a must-read publication for people interested in email marketing.  The 38-page report is filled with charts, tips and data that provides businesses with relevant information to help them adjust their email marketing strategy to cater to their audience’s changing needs. Here are the main findings for this report:

Email marketing open rates by industry and list size

I was searching for a while for this simple question:  How to move an Analytics account from one user to another?”. Google says you can’t, but you can change the Adminstrator(s) of an account…
So, if you want to move the X account from user A to user B, here is what you have to do:

log in as user A and add user B as Administrator on X account (”Users with Access to Profile”).
log in as user B and delete user A from the Administrators list for X account.

Ta-daa, account moved! …