Month: December 2022

Although the forecast of global economic recession directly affects the consumer’s behaviour on the Australian market and the tendency to save money over the festive season is observable, half of a million (570k) households on top of October’s results shopped online in November, achieving a record of more than 6 million households overall. eCommerce purchases in Queensland grew with the biggest lead of 11.2% YoY, whereas online shopping decreased by an anti-record 6.4% YoY in the Australian Capital Territory. Purchases being down by 3.8% in the last 12 months compared to the previous year is quite expected, considering that in 2021 lockdown-driven spending took place. 

Preceding the Cyber Weekend period, Click Frenzy’s sales run between the 6th and 19th of November gave a splash of 20% online purchases increase in comparison with the previous two weeks and 4.2 million households that shopped online over this period. General clothing and Beauty were the top categories, with 36% and 35%, respectively.

Despite increased foot traffic back into retail stores, Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales events were almost 7% higher than last year’s record Cyber Weekend period. To capture a larger share of wallets, in 2022, retailers started sales earlier, which explains an immediate increase that took place a few days before the official takeoff on November 25th. Overall, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022 events, between the 20th of November and the 3rd of December: online purchases surpassed last year’s by 6.6% and increased by an additional 42% compared to the Click Frenzy period; 4.9 million households shopped online which is 700k more households than during the Click Frenzy period. The most popular categories during the Cyber sales were Athleisure, Sporting & Outdoor Goods and Fashion Accessories. 

Here we share with you data from Australia Post. The results summarise the data and give insights into Australian Online Shopping trends for November 2022.

The market’s competitiveness directly affects the intensity of Online Retailers’ search for additional ways to acquire new customers and upgrade the service for existing ones to retain them. In a softening economy, it’s sensible for businesses to shop around for the best deals – better efficiency and results for the same price.

As consumers become more advanced in their eCommerce habits, they are looking for goods and services in whatever digital channel they’ve grown accustomed to. Moreover, depending on different aspects, the same potential customer could use more than one channel during their journey towards the actual purchase. When several parties with different approaches and levels of transparency are involved, managing these eCommerce marketing channels can become challenging.

360-degree observation

Once a reliable eCommerce marketing agency that manages all channels is found, the business will be able to observe the complete picture of business indicators throughout all marketing activities. Moreover, having a full view allows more appropriate budgeting for the most effective channels while keeping the rest on the minimum necessary activity level.

This is different from when several, not synchronised agencies manage the channels, and the risk of evaluating the global results wrongly and retrieving doubtful strategic insights based on fragmented information is high.

Scalability, flexibility and timely results

Data is the lifeblood of any organisation. Without data, decisions are based on guesswork, not objective analysis. When you can’t see the full picture, data is scattered and hard to access.

When the full picture is observable and accessible in one place, it’s much easier to make changes and scale in whatever direction with less loss in terms of always-scarce resources like time, money and effort.

Accumulate data and avoid ineffective overlaps

In marketing, the rule of 7 is a guideline that states you need seven interactions with a brand before a prospect decides to buy. However, this doesn’t mean that you must strictly limit the number of interactions to this specific “magic” number in all channels.

Marketing practitioners will tell you it’s preferable where it’s technically attainable, but they also raise an important issue: resources and efforts are sometimes wasted to keep impacting through an inappropriate channel or with an unattractive message.

Exclude cannibalisation

For instance, if you’re working with a performance-based partnership with a CPL (cost-per-lead) model — where the uniqueness of the attracted clients and transactions are your most significant indicator — data accumulated from different resources in one place and analysed using a uniform approach allows for more targeted exposure to your audience and avoids ineffective expenditures.

One of the biggest challenges that agencies face is channel cannibalisation. When two or more different parties separately manage channels, the appearance of the situation when these parties compete to achieve their own KPIs and eventually dilute the benefits for business is probable. For instance, SEO and SEM channels are very interconnected. The crucial part of agency work here is to ensure that paid traffic growth will not negatively affect the organic traffic through the cannibalisation of keywords and instead fill the gaps and increase the value of both channels through the Blended Search Marketing approach.

The new Google Ranking System guide defines the relevant systems Google uses and the old ones that are retired and no longer in use to rank search results.

What is the difference between systems and updates?

Systems are always running in the background. Updates, however, refer to one-time changes to the ranking systems. For example, helpful content systems run in the background whenever Google provides search results but may receive updates to improve performance. Other examples of one-time changes to ranking systems are core algorithm updates and spam updates.

Let’s look at the highlights from the Google Ranking System guide.

Current Google Ranking Systems

Here is a list of the Google ranking systems currently in operation.

• BERT
  Stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representation of Transformers and allows Google to understand how word combinations can express different meanings and intentions.
• Crisis information system
  Google has procedures to provide specific sets of information in times of crisis. For instance, SOS alerts when searching for natural disasters.
• Deduplication system
  The Google search engine tries to avoid duplicate or near-duplicate web pages.
• The exact match domain system
  This system prevents Google from overly trusting websites with domain names that match search queries.
• Freshness system
  Designed to display up-to-date content where it’s needed and where it’s expected.
• Helpful content system
  Makes it easy for people to see original, useful content rather than content created primarily to drive traffic from search engines.
• Link analysis systems and PageRank
  Determines which pages are the most useful in response to a query based on how the pages are linked.
• Local news systems
  Displays local news sources relevant to your search query.
• MUM or Multitask Unified Model
  An artificial intelligence system that can understand and generate speech. This powers the featured callout and is not used for the overall ranking.
• Neural matching
  Helps Google understand and match conceptual expressions for queries and pages.
• Original content systems
  Helps Google display original content, including actual reports, in search results.
• Removal-based demotion systems
  Downgrading websites based on mass content removal requests.
• Page experience system
  Evaluates various criteria to determine if a website provides a good user experience.
• Passage ranking system
  An artificial intelligence system that Google uses to identify individual sections or “snippets” of web pages to understand better how relevant the page is to searchers.
• Product reviews system
  Rewards quality product reviews by experienced writers with insightful analysis and original research.
• Rank Brain
  An artificial intelligence system that helps Google understand the relationship between words and concepts. Allows Google to return results that contain different terms than the exact words used in the query.
• Reliable information systems
  Google has several techniques for displaying reliable information. To promote authoritative pages, demote low-quality content, and reward high-quality journalism.
• Site diversity system
  Prevents Google from listing its web pages from the same website in the top search results on two or more listings.
• Spam detection system
  Processes content or activity that violates Google’s spam policy.

Outdated Google Ranking Systems

The following systems are marked for historical purposes. They are integrated into other systems or part of Google’s primary ranking system.

• Hummingbird
  A significant improvement from the Google ranking system was introduced in 2013.
• Mobile-friendly ranking system
  Prioritised content that plays better on mobile devices. It has been incorporated into the Google Pages interaction system.
• Page speed system
  Prioritised content that loads quickly on mobile devices, introduced in 2018. It has since been incorporated into the Google Pages interaction system.
• Panda system
  Prioritised quality and original content, introduced in 2011. In 2015, it became part of Google’s primary ranking system.
• Penguin system
  Downgraded websites that use spam link building, introduced in 2012.
• Secure site system
  Prioritised HTTPS-protected websites, introduced in 2014. It has since become part of the Google Pages experience.