Salmat Pre-Shop® News | November 2008

Welcome to the November issue of Salmat Digital's Pre-Shop® News.

There has been much debate over how the current global economic slump will affect the Australian retail sector this Christmas. While the final outcome remains to be seen, what we do know is that more and more consumers are flocking to pre-shopping sites like Lasoo prior to going into store or buying online.

October was an outstanding month for Lasoo.com.au, with over 800,000 Australians searching for retail offers at shops near them throughout the month. We welcome 15 new retailers to Lasoo, who will enjoy the extra reach this Christmas. And the site was recently announced as a Hitwise Top 10 Award winner for the July to September quarter of this year, ranking number two in the Shopping and Classified – Rewards and Directories category.

In other news, we have recently made some significant technical changes to the Lasoo.com.au website, including the ability to create and share Pre-Shop lists, as well as improvements to many areas of the site. Our Christmas marketing campaign has kicked off so keep an eye out for us on buses and trams, radio stations and of course in the letterbox.

Enjoy the newsletter.

Kind regards

Paul Marshall
Executive Director
Salmat Digital

Why relevance is the new black

In 2008, it is no longer the only priority of marketers to attract the greatest possible number of visitors – also known as hits. Of course, the total number of visitors to your site is still a key metric, but the true measure of site health is in the type of traffic you are attracting.

For your website to be a truly cost-effective way of marketing your brand, you need to attract “qualified traffic”. Qualified traffic consists of those visitors who engage with your site’s content, whether that be making a transaction, an enquiry or otherwise. Obviously, these visitors are worth more to your brand than those visitors who don’t engage with your content – for example, those who land on the homepage then click (bounce) off it immediately (usually because the site’s content doesn’t match up to what they are looking for).

The vast majority of qualified traffic consists of visitors who have found your site by searching on a relevant keyword in a search engine such as Google. Identifying relevant keywords and terms is a process in itself – first you need to understand your brand and its target market.

The more targeted your advertising is, the less it is perceived as advertising, and more as information. The more this line is blurred, the higher the return on investment from your marketing will be.

Through tracking and segmentation, you can begin to build a picture of which advertising activities are delivering the traffic that engages the most with your site – particularly if this engagement event is purchasing. Relevance then becomes measured by conversion, time, engagement and response.


Tools of the trade for tracking

In the past when looking for decent free tools to track your performance against your competitors you had to look all over the place for decent tools – inevitably, most of us found ourselves using tools such as Alexa and Compete.

Now, amazingly, most of the great free tracking tools are offered by Google, including:

    * Google Alerts: receive email alerts on a competitor or industry
    * Google Analytics: track all your referrals, ads, search engines, email promotions and even offline analytics
    * Google Keyword Tool: suggestions for keywords
    * Google Trends: enter up to five topics and see how they’ve been searched on Google over time
    * Google Trends for Websites): explore the audiences of individual websites
    * Google Insights for Search: compare search volume patterns across regions, categories and time frames.

The exception to the Google rule is in the area of SEO, where other providers seem to offer better tools (see below). However, the Google webmaster tools are an important staple in managing any SEO.

    * Demographics Prediction
    * SEO for Firefox extension
    * Amazon Movers & Shakers
    * SEO Tools
    * You can track particular terms in Twitter conversation on your mobile device using Twitter by entering the term “track” before the term.

There is a lot of power in these tools, and it can take time to get the hang of them. Thankfully, Lasoo.com.au can do most of this work for you.

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Sound bites…


Social network ad spending will reach US$1.4 billion in 2008.


- eMarketer.com


58.4% of adult Internet users worldwide research potential consumer electronics purchases online.


- Universal McCann