jon pape dot com

With the 2008 holiday shopping season behind us, it  is important to take a look at key revenue driver’s to focus on growth next year. CyberMonday, the first Monday following Black Friday, has become one of the most influential shopping days of the year for online week retailers. By looking back at how specific affiliates and publishers performed, retailers can better allocate funds to reach a wider range of consumers. by adding and modifying ad spend and commission rates, retailers can position themselves better on publishers websites and incrementally increase sales.

The following publishers are divided into two groups based on visitor site traffic from compete.com.

FatWallet, Mahalo, & RetailMeNot

FatWallet.com, Mahalo.com, & RetailMeNot.com make up the first group of publishers analyzed. These publishers on average had between 1 million visitors per month. FatWallet had the least number of visitors last year finishing with an average of 2.3 million visitors in November 2008 and year-over-year growth of 14.2%. Mahalo.com finish the year with an average 3.2 million visitors in November 2008 and year-over-year growth of 168%. The big surprise was RetailMeNot.com, which started the year with just over 1 million visitors and finished with over five million visitors per month.  RetailMeNot’s year-over-year growth was 302% in 2008.

CouponChief, CyberMonday, Dealio, DealTaker, & GottaDeal

Out of the last five sites analyzed, CouponChief.com, CyberMonday.com, Dealio.com, DealTaker.com, & GottaDeal.com, two of the sites, CyberMonday.com & GottaDeal.com, increased visitor traffic exponentially during the holiday season.  CyberMonday.com, Shop.org’s specialty shopping site, at 1.2 million visitors in November 2007 is only 750,000 visitors in November 2008 a decrease of 38%.  GottaDeal.com, which has less than half a million visitors most of the year, spiked in November 2007 to 1.5 million visitors and again in November 2008 to 1.8 million visitors, an increased of 18.4%.  CouponChief.com, Dealio.com, and DealTaker.com increased sales in November 2007 but growth remain linear.

CouponChief.com ended the year with approximately 270,000 visitors in November 2008 and a year-over-year decline of 33.6%. Dealio.com had half a million visitors in November 2008 a year-over-year  increase of about 20%. DealTaker.com finished November 2008 with over 1 million visitors and a year-over-year growth 17%.

In article in the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com once again touted its best year ever.  Amazon attributed there high holiday sales to increase in orders.  Orders rose 17% to 6.3 million items, while shipments rose to 5.6 million units, up 44%.  What is missing from Amazons carefully crafted press release is a corresponding revenue amount or average order value. Without these metrics it is difficult to tell how profitable the holiday shopping season was for Amazon.

In a May 2008, Fortune magazine article, How Jeff Bezos Rules the Retail Space, there’s an interesting graph entitled Building a Retail Powerhouse. The graph shows Amazon’s growth and success throughout their history. It took Amazon six years to finally turn a profit. In 2000 alone, Amazon recorded sales of $2.762 billion and total losses of $1.411 billion. in 2007, sales were $14.815 billion and profit was $476 million.  Any backward slide for Amazon.com’s profitability would be disasterious for a company whose total stock valuation is double Wal-Marts.

Fortune Article

The basics for conveying a viral Idea from the book, Small is the New Big, by Seth Godin.

1. 1) The first impression (of the idea) demands further investigation.
2. 2) They (the audience) already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea.
3. 3) They (the audience) trust or respect the sender must invest the time

For a more detailed analysis of conveying viral ideas, I recommend the book, Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath.

madetostick.com

Most brand managers and merchants recognize the importance of targeting mothers for consumer household purchases. Web developers have been taking a similar interest in moms and consumer household spending and a wide variety of social networks for moms have begun to appear. Researching social networking sites for moms, I developed a tiered system that divided the social networks based on visitor traffic compiled from compete.com.

Top Tier: CafeMom.com & BabyCenter.com

CafeMom & BabyCenter

CafeMom.com & BabyCenter.com are by far the largest social networking sites for mothers. BabyCenter.com has on average 4 million viewers a month. Additionally, BabyCenter.com has seen year-over-year growth 12.7%.  CafeMom.com has an estimated 2 million visitors per month. CafeMom.com has declined in the number of visitors year-over-year by 4.2%.

Mid Tier: ParentsConnect.com, CircleofMoms.com, & MomJunction.com

ParentsConnect CircleofMoms MomJunction

The mid tier is comprised of sites with less than 1 million visitors per month. The largest of these websites, ParentConnect.com, is owned by MTV and sought significant boost in traffic in May 2008. ParentConnect.com had on average 300,000 visitors prior to May and approximately 800,000 visitors after May. ParentConnect.com year-over-year growth is an astonishing 280%.  CircleofMoms.com was launched in September 2008 and has grown 322% month over month with visitors in November 2008 to approximately 561,000 visitors per month.  MomJunction.com had a large spike in traffic in December 2007 to approximately 500,000 visitors but has on average monthly visitors of about 50,000.  MomJunction.com month over month number of visitors is down 23.1% and averages only 34,000.

Low Tier: Minti.com, MothersClick.com, & Moxie-Moms.com

Minti, MothersClick, & Moxie-Moms

Low tier social networking sites for moms are characterized as having under 100,000 visitors per month. The largest of the sites, Minti.com, has on average 55,000 visitors per month with year-over-year growth of 31.5%. Mothersclick.com is another relatively new social networking site for mothers with average monthly visitors under 20,000 and year-over-year growth of 93.9%. Moxie-Moms.com averages about 1000 people a month with year-over-year growth of 95.1%. Moxie-Moms.com is the only subscription-based website on the list.

While they are very similar to the sites on this list, we did not include mommy blogger sites such as MommyBlogger.com and MomForce.com. I will cover mommy blogger sites in a different post.

Amazon’s Alexa is a web ranking score determined by users who have downloaded the Alexa Toolbar.  The lower the Alexa ranking, the more traffic a web site receives.  Below is a list of fifteen web merchants and there corresponding Alexa score.  The Alexa score was received using the SEOQuake extension in Firefox.

Google SERP page for the query “Grand Rapids Internet Marketing” featuring my URL and my Naymz.com profile as the top links.

Google Search Engine Result Page