Internet Usage in Israel Stats for 2007

A survey conducted on December 2007 by TNS Teleseker – “TIM Survey”, in Israel, shows 4 million Intenret users in Israel. This number shows a slight growth of 2% vs. the results from December 2006, and mainly reflects the growth of overall population in Israel.

A few interesting Internet usage statistics in Israel: Continue reading “Internet Usage in Israel Stats for 2007”

The Long Tail is getting Looooooonger!

I read a blog post today from HitWise about the long tail of search phrases used in the UK market.
Robin Goad wrote an excellent analysis on the evolvement of the long tail in the last three years, and detected the pattern where people use the search engine / search toolbar as a navigational application thus performing what Robin calls “navigational search”.

This type of search is used when someone types the direct URL or a brand name into the search box instead of typing the URL in the address bar. Lately, I’ve seen it happen quite a lot on meetings and presentations – but when I read Robin’s post and saw the charts – it all started to make more sense.

Search term volume in the UK

So let’s try and summarize the findings:

1. The loooong list of unique phrases and terms used (what we call “long tail”) is getting much longer

2. The small list of terms which produces the most traffic (what we call “short tail”) is getting shorter and consolidated

3. The segment of “navogational terms” in the short tail is getting shorter (i.e. bavigational searchers are looking for the domain name/brand name)

UK navigational search term volume.png

4. The segment of “non-navigational terms” is getting longer and longer

UK non navigational search term volume.png

Conclusions:

1. Long Tail Rules

2. Keyword Research Rules

3. Brand Name and domain name searches are important to rank for

e-Commerce: 2007 Online Holiday Sales

Well, it’s Friday, 4 days before Christmas and it seems as the rush for shopping is beginning to calm. This was a crazy month for us, especially for the online retailers, and even more for those who specialize in gifts (We have wuite a lot of those!

I wanted to share here some of the data that was pouring in from the sales centers, the web analytics tools and market research – as this may be a very good lesson for next year.I’ll start with the market research and I want to quote comScore’s published data:

holiday season e-commerce spending for the first 48 days of the November – December 2007 holiday season (November 1 – December 18). Nearly $25 billion has been spent online during the season-to-date, marking a 19-percent gain versus the corresponding days last year”

2007 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days* in 2006
Non-Travel (Retail) Spending
Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore, Inc.

Billions ($)
Holiday Season to Date 2006 2007 Pct Change
November 1 – December 18 $20.85 $24.85 19%
Thanksgiving Day (November 22) $0.21 $0.27 29%
“Black Friday” (November 23) $0.43 $0.53 22%
“Cyber Monday” (November 26) $0.61 $0.73 21%
“Green Monday” (December 10) $0.66 $0.88 33%

* Corresponding Shopping Days, Not Calendar Days

“It’s also clear that many consumers are willing to delay their holiday shopping later in the season this year in an effort to take advantage of any late season price discounts being offered by retailers.”

Web Marketing – How it All Begun for me

Hi there, welcome to my Blog.

My name is Ophir Cohen, and I am doing web marketing since 1998. It all started out with this weird project which included e-commerce – I had to sell some products online.
Until then, I had only been involved in corporate web sites, all statis HTML (the odea of dynamic web sites ws there, butwas mostly out of reach.

To cut this long story short – After I built an amazing website with its own e-commerce capability, I was very surprised how hard it was to get people to come to the site and to purchase 🙂

So I read, engaged in free and paid seminars, web sites, subscriptions, researched, trial an error and basically went through everything that was known at the time. (Google, BTW, was a phd document with a working model – but it was not known back then).

Compucall Web Marketing was established in 1999, when I realized the need and the added value I could give organization in the same stage I passed through before. My main specialty was SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and during the years, with the development of new technologies, channels, the arrival of Google and other to the scene – the company grew and we are now 18 Professionals with the capability and ca[acity to run a turn-key Web Marketing Projects.

In this blog, I will share my insights, tips, stories and recommendations – for those of you who are interested in the subject.

Enjoy reading, and feel free to write me at: oc (at) ophircohen (dot) com

*Cheers*
OC