Making friends with Google’s micro-moments

The latest marketing buzz word flying around is the “micro-moment.” The term micro-moment has been coined by Google and is described by them as “critical touch points within today’s consumer journey when added together, ultimately determine how that journey ends.”

So, what exactly are micro-moments?

I won’t go into huge detail about what defines a micro-moment as there is already a great introduction piece on Search Engine Watch and Google also has a wealth of content on the subject which is well worth reading.

Essentially, the consumers buying journey is made up of a number of critical moments. Due to the nature of the modern consumers’ behaviour, lifestyle and access to multiple devices, an immediate relevant response from brands to any query across any device at any point of the buying journey is now critical.

The advent of mobile devices has created the need for immediacy in the response required from brands. In the past a consumer may have done their shopping research in a long session at a desktop computer, now the consumer journey is likely to be made up of bite-size engagements and moments that are fit in around the consumers lifestyle.

  • On the train home
  • In a queue at the bank
  • On a bench in the park
  • In bed at night

Brands now need to recognise what are likely to be the micro-moments that will form part of the customer journey and identify how to deliver the right experience at that time.

Many successful retailers will already have thought long and hard about the search terms that may be used at each stage of the buying journey, from generic research terms right through to long tail terms with specific intent. They will have also thought about the right content to create to have a presence for each of those terms and deliver a relevant experience.

So this isn’t a new “thing”? No, it isn’t BUT the difference in this is thinking about how “intent,” “content,” and “immediacy” combine together to form a moment in time.

If you understand the intent when someone is using those terms – how do you ensure the right content is delivered quickly to create a useful moment for that person at that moment in time?

Our advice for retailers

Our advice for retailers would be to revisit the work they have already done around their customers’ buying journey and keyword research and make sure it is aligned with their multi-device content strategies both on and off-site.

  1. Start by listing all of the moments you absolutely need to own and win within your customers’ journey. If you don’t know what they are – use the data and analytics you have available and speak to your customers!
  2. Define what the customer needs from you at that specific moment. Is it inspiration, education, information or is it a quick easy purchase, direction to their nearest shop, customer reviews
  3. Create time and location relevant content that delivers what the customer needs at that moment to move them to the next critical micro-moment

Once you have those key moments nailed and converting, use a deeper level of customer data and insight to widen the number of moments you are aware of and need to own seamlessly across multiple channels.

If you want any further advice on how you can weave micro-moments into your existing digital strategy or develop your levels of customer insight don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Facebook tests immersive mobile ads with the launch of Canvas

This week, we’ve been getting excited about the launch of Canvas – Facebook’s immersive ad feature that allows brands to tell “more compelling stories” and improve engagement with consumers.

Canvas allows marketers to create immersive, full-screen adverts in users’ timelines which combine images, video, text and call-to-action buttons in a single mobile ad experience. Although the ads display in full screen on desktop platforms, the new ad product launch shows Facebook’s commitment to enhancing their mobile experience. According to Marketing Week, “figures released by the company show that mobile advertising represented approximately 80% of its total advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2015, up from 69% a year previously. Meanwhile, mobile daily active users were 934 million on average for December 2015, an increase of 25% year-on-year.”

Burberry ad using Canvas on Facebook from Digital Team on Vimeo.

Monika, our Paid Search Consultant, thinks this is a particularly interesting opportunity for premium and luxury brands and said “Facebook has been investing heavily in its ad products. The latest is Canvas, a full-screen ad experience that’s optimised for mobile. From a technical point of view, this is a welcome development. From load speed to user experience, mobile presents a variety of challenges to marketers – to some extent Canvas solves these problems by giving them a ready-made framework.

Canvas allows brands to tell stories as well as showcasing their products and it can be used for any objective – whether you want to promote certain products, or drive customer acquisition or brand awareness. It’s great to see brands such as Burberry roll out ads and we can’t wait to take this exciting innovation to our clients!”

This new platform opens up a wealth of new opportunities for marketers, but to really utilise them to their potential, they will need to display interactive, innovative ads that integrate consumer insights.

Leapfrogg’s Senior Social Media & Content Consultant, Hannah, said “At Leapfrogg, we’re very much looking forward to seeing what creative ideas brands come up with for Canvas. Content that tells a story performs very well on the platform – Canvas supports this type of content as it takes users on a journey. However, we predict that the most successful adverts will be the ones by brands that really understand their customers.

The most creative advert in the world is useless if served to people who have no interest in the brand or its products. By understanding customers, their interests, buying habits and how they like brands to interact with them, retailers can create adverts that not only look good but get the desired result.

 

Insight Edit: What do consumers really think about mobile payments?

Here at Leapfrogg, we have a panel of over 1000 retail consumers that we engage with on a regular basis to help us understand customer needs and expectations from the brands and retailers they buy from.

Every month, we question them on a range of areas from buying behaviours and brand opinion, to emotional purchase triggers and their recent shopping experiences.

The Insight Edit is our weekly bite size edit of the insight we gain from our panel in our search to truly understand the mind of the premium customer.

Mobile payments

The movement towards mobile payments has been touted as the next big thing for some time now. There are now a range of services now widely available that allow the consumer to purchase items in-store directly from their mobile phone.

Apple Pay is one such example, and allows anyone with an iPhone 6, Apple Watch and later edition iPads to make payments on any touchless payment point from a number of different credit card accounts.

Although there are already millions of UK consumers who have registered with mobile payment technology, we wanted to find out just how many were using it, or intended to in the future. We therefore asked our Premium Panel how they were currently using mobile payments.

Only 6.72 % of respondents said made purchases using their mobiles, with a further 7.48% stating that although they had the technology set up on their phones, they had never used it.

This means a total of only 14.2% consumers have taken any action to move towards making purchases on their mobile phones.

A further 14.35% plan to get mobile payment set up in the near future.

Mobile payments statistics

We then asked our panel why they weren’t keen to utilise mobile payments. 46% of our panel stated that they did not trust the technology, highlighting the fact that they were worried about fraud and the security risk.  45% stated that they didn’t need to use their mobile as they had a card they could easily use.

A further 26% were worried that a mobile is too easy to steal and 12.24% felt it was just a gimmick.

These stats show that whilst mobile technology is making huge advancements, consumers’ opinion is currently still rather behind. This is not to say that opinion will change over time. Many people were had worries about fraud and stolen cards when contactless payment was introduced, but now are more than happy to ‘tap’ for their purchases.

We will be interested to see how consumers adopt these new technologies in the future.

The Hype – Digital innovations at London Fashion Week

In this edition of The Hype, we look at the retailers and designers that have showcased fashion and digital at London Fashion Week (LFW).

Every season, the role of digital becomes more prevalent at Fashion Week as more and more brands harness the power of online. Now you don’t even have to be in the Frow in order to interact and engage with the shows, as more and more designers bring their collections to consumers via technology.

Burberry’s Snapchat story

Burberry on Snapchat

The digital pioneer that is Burberry inevitably stood out this year due to their innovative use of Snapchat.
 
In a first for a luxury brand, Burberry created a Snapchat story which revealed its spring 16 collection the night before its Fashion Week show to Snapchat’s 100 million users. The preview remained on Burberry’s story for 24 hours and was then followed up by a ‘Burberry Live Story’ that combined crowd-sourced Burberry show-related video and images into a single stream on Snapchat. The content then of course disappeared after 24 hours giving it a real feel of exclusivity. I’ve seen many brands use Snapchat, but it has often felt like the brand has been thinking ‘platform-first, content-second’, but in Burberry’s case, its use of the platform felt polished and really added value to their show.
 
Prior to Fashion Week, Burberry also launched another first for a fashion brand – a music channel on Apple Music. You can find the channel in the ‘curators’ section and it showcases collaborations with British artists in the form of songs, playlists, films and performances that are all in keeping with the Burberry brand.
 
The campaign was clearly a success as data from Brandwatch showed that Burberry was the most talked about designer on social this season – pulling in over 40,000 tweets – over 10% of the total tweets about London Fashion Week.
 
Former CEO Angela Ahrendts (now retail boss at Apple) was responsible for putting digital at the heart of Burberry’s business strategy, which has included launching live catwalk streaming and the ‘Art of the Trench’ mini-site. Last year during LFW, Burberry also partnered with Twitter to launch a click-to-buy button for Burberry products as they were modeled on the runway. 

Topshop’s Pinterest Palettes

Topshop Pinterest Palettes screenshot Topshop is the only high-street brand on the fashion-week schedule, and their Unique Show which is now in its 23rd season, has become one of the most highly anticipated shows.
 
In order to engage their entire customer base in the London Fashion Week excitement, Topshop teamed up with Pinterest to launch ‘Pinterest Palettes.’ Their online tool scans and identifies colour trends based on either a user’s individual Pinterest boards or those curated by Topshop on the trends they spotted in New York, London, Milan and Paris. Based on the colour palette selected, Topshop then provides shoppable recommendations from their online store. According to the team, a potential 16.8m colour combinations will be possible, providing unique results for every user.
 
For those in London, Topshop hosted a pop-up on the lower ground floor of its Oxford Circus flagship that offers shoppers the ability to explore their Pinterest boards on iPads, and print out their our Pinterest Palettes colour inspiration cards. Their personal shopping team is also offering colour advice tailored to customers’ individual colour spectrums.
 
According Brandwatch’s analysis of Fashion Week, Topshop secured largest number of sponsor mentions.

House of Holland NFC-enabled wearables

Eclectic English Fashion Designer, Henry Holland teamed up with Visa Europe to combine fashion, wearable technology and payments in another Fashion Week first. At his London Fashion Week show, front-row guests were given a Henry Holland-designed ring – created just for the event which featured integrated NFC technology, which linked up to a number of pieces containing a payment receiver tag. This was then linked via Bluetooth Smart technology to a virtualised terminal and Visa’s payment network. Guests could then purchase items directly from the runway which could then be picked up after the show. On speaking of the wearables, Holland said he designed the “connected jewelry” with fashion in mind and it was important to him that the technology was completely invisible.  

Hunter goes live on Periscope


British heritage brand Hunter Originals utilised live-streaming app, Periscope, at their London Show to extend the reach of their brand to a broader audience with a series of live mobile gigs in the build up to its show.

Hunter launched #BeaHeadliner Mobile Sessions on the app to showcase music and interviews from up and coming musicians which were filmed as the musicians travel to see the show in Hunter-branded 4×4 vehicles. The #Beaheadliner campaign tied in nicely to the brand’s association with music festivals as the label’s Wellingtons have long been the staple footwear at festivals. Hunter will continue to use the hashtag post Fashion Week to promote upcoming musicians during festival season.

According to DigiDay, Hunter Originals was the fourth most tweeted about show, fifth most tweeted about brand, and received over 40,000 Instagram interactions.

That’s it for our round-up. Which brands and designers stood out for you at Fashion Week this year?

The Weekly Shop (5th – 9th January)

Welcome to the first Weekly Shop of 2015! This week we have predictions for 2015 across ecommerce and mobile, how this year’s Black Friday spending compared to last year and how men and women shop differently at Christmas following a survey from our Premium Panel.

Black Friday spending up 18% in 2014

New figures this week have revealed that consumers spent 18% more on Black Friday 2014 than they did on the same day in the previous year as they looked to get the best deals in the run-up to Christmas. According to data from Barclaycard, Black Friday 2014 was the highest spending day on record as UK consumers spent £810 million in one day.

Five ways technology could shape UK retail in 2015

Developments in retail technology are enabling retailers to offer a more bespoke and personalised service to customers andthis next article takes a look at five ways technology could help shape UK retail in 2015.

20 ecommerce trends and predictions for 2015

In our next article this week, Econsultancy have asked an expert panel of ecommerce professionals to predict the trends that are likely to shape ecommerce in 2015.

Six mobile retail predictions for 2015

Continuing the theme of predictions for 2015, this next article explores six big things retailers can expect to see from mobile this coming year including payments, personalisation and wearables.

Do men and women shop differently at Christmas?

Just before Christmas, we asked our Premium Panel – which is made up of over 700 UK consumers – how they were intending to organise their gift-buying this Christmas. We asked our Premium Panel two key questions which produced some interesting insights around the difference in the way that men and women shop. Head over to the Froggblog to read more.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading. We’ll be making a few changes to The Weekly Shop newsletter this year, so watch this space!

The Weekly Shop (10th – 14th Nov)

In our Weekly Shop this week, we look at Christmas planning, retail tech trends, how Google judges quality content and two case studies from Selfridges and Liberty.

Small and medium-sized retailers to start Christmas promotions earlier this year

A study by Royal Mail has found that the UK’s small and medium sized online retailers are planning to start Christmas promotions this week – which is one week later than last year. The study also found that price promotion was the most common tactic set to be deployed in the battle to win sales this Christmas followed by free delivery and returns.

Retail tech trends for the 2014 holiday season

While on the topic of Christmas,  Econsultancy have rounded up a selection of retail tech trends for the 2014 holiday season to help you end 2014 strong.

New study: this year’s Black Friday set to be the busiest yet

Another new study this week has suggested that this year’s Black Friday on 28 November could be the busiest and most successful yet. The study found that more retailers are looking to invest in the discount day than last year and shoppers are actively anticipating the day to start their Christmas shopping.

How Selfridges uses digital to create extraordinary multichannel experiences

According to Selfridges, a multichannel retailer dealing in the luxury end of the market, they have to offer customers’ connected and extraordinary experiences’ across its digital and physical properties. In light of this, our next article this week summarises some of the tactics Selfridges uses as part of its multichannel strategy.

Liberty launches Instagram-based loyalty app

Luxury London department store, Liberty, is the first retailer to trial an iPhone app that will reward customers in the store with the use of iBeacons. As customers enter Liberty, iBeacons will trigger the app – named Tapestry – to unlock vouchers to be used in store. The app will use the users Instagram data to curate the vouchers available to the a customer and create a bespoke reward system.

How does Google judge quality content?

In our last article this week, Econsultancy identify five key factors that you should focus on if you want to produce content that search engines will recognise as high quality.

Thanks for reading!

The Weekly Shop (13th – 17th October)

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Shop. In this week’s news – Amazon open their first physical store, Econsultancy defines a great customer experience and Google tests ‘not mobile friendly’ icons. Plus, the chance to win a £50 Selfridges when you join our Premium Panel. Read on for more…

If Amazon feels the need to open shops, what does the future hold for pureplays?

It was reported this week that Amazon is set to open its first physical store in New York ahead of the Christmas shopping season. This move from Amazon confirms the suspicion that far from being over, the high street and bricks and mortar stores are a necessary part of the kind of customer service that customers now expect.

What do we mean by a ‘great customer experience’?

This next article from Econsultancy highlights some of Jay Bear’s thoughts on what makes a great customer experience following his recent report on the topic.

Google Testing “Not Mobile-Friendly” Icons

Here’s another reason to make your website mobile-friendly – Google is trying to improve its user experience by displaying “not mobile-friendly” icons in its mobile search results. These icons are designed to quickly tell users if a website is responsive to mobile devices.

Join the Leapfrogg Premium Panel and win £50 to spend at Selfridges

Last month, we launched our Premium Panel over on Facebook. Since then, we’ve been busy gathering opinions about our panelists favourite premium brands, sharing the latest hype from the retail world and asking what makes the perfect customer experience. Now we want to grow our community of shoppers even further, so as a way to welcome all of our new members – we’re giving away a £50 Selfridges voucher to one lucky member of the Premium Panel at the end of the month. All you need to do to enter is join our Premium Panel Facebook group to be in for a chance of winning. Good luck!

Thanks for reading!

The Weekly Shop (1st – 5th September)

Hello and welcome to our Weekly Shop news digest. This week, we talk about the end of Google Authorship, mobile visits to retail websites topping PC for the first time and the world’s best ecommerce checkouts.

Half UK’s online shoppers buy from their beds, while 70% check their phones on waking: research

According to a new study, almost half (48%) of the UK’s online shoppers buy from their beds, while another study found that 70% of UK smartphone users check their phones as soon as they wake up. These two studies highlight how consumer habits have changed and how marketers need to provide engaging content outside of traditional time frames.

Mobile visits to retail websites top PC for the first time, retailer figures suggest

Another study from the IMRG this week, has found that 52% of traffic to retail websites now comes from mobile devices of one form or another, outstripping traditional desktop traffic for the first time. In 2010, this figure was just 3%.

11 of the world’s best ecommerce checkouts

What exactly makes an excellent checkout process on an ecommerce site? To answer this question, Econsultancy has compiled a list of 11 checkouts which constitute examples of best practice, which include examples from Wiggle, ASOS and Hunter Boots.

Twitch + Extra Data = One Potentially Powerful Amazon Ad Network

Amazon has recently acquired video platform and gaming community Twitch Interactive and it has been reported that the ecommerce giant is also reportedly developing an ad network that could leverage the data it already has on its roughly 250 million users, to challenge Google and Microsoft by delivering better targeted ads. More over on Clickz.

Google drops authorship markup from search results: reaction

Having removed author photos from the SERPs in June, Google has now removed authorship altogether from search results. Under the authorship scheme, writers could add the rel=author markup to their bylines, linking them to Google+ pages . Google has stated that they have removed author information because it wasn’t useful to users and actually distracted from search results. This article from Econsultancy explores various SEOs reaction to Google’s decision.

Did you catch the latest posts of the Froggblog this week? Our senior natural search consultant, Ben Adam, explores how online retailers can benefit from Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce and with only 110 days to go, the Leapfrogg team share their tips and tactics on how retailers can start planning for the festive season.

That’s it for this week. See you next week!

Tis the season to start planning for Christmas

So it seems summer may very sadly be on its way out as we enter September. For retailers, this can only mean one thing – Christmas is well and truly on its way. Earlier in the month, Selfridges even opened their Christmas shop – making it the first retailer in the world to do so. You might not want to be purchasing your baubles just yet, but with Christmas being the busiest and most important time of the year for online retailers – it’s never too early for retailers to start planning for the festive season. Being prepared and identifying a strategy now can make or break a successful year for retailers – in other words the difference between a lump of coal or the latest gadget from Apple in your stocking!

With only 115 days until the big day, we’re already hard at work planning for Christmas with our clients. In light of this, I thought it was worth sharing a couple of tips and tactics from the Leapfrogg team to help get you started.

What do your customers want?

Rosie, Leapfrogg’s Managing Director, recommends running a survey and asking your customers what they think they will want to buy from you at Christmas. You can ask them if they are likely to shop with you for Christmas gifts this year and if so, what categories, price points and people they will be shopping for.

It may well be too late for this insight to influence your product range for Christmas, but what this will do is give you a good steer on where to spend your marketing budget. If you know that your older customers are likely to buy a certain product from you in store, then make sure you remind them via email to pop in store as Christmas approaches. If you know that your younger customers are likely to buy a particular product from you online, then ensure you promote that product to them via all online channels in the run up to Christmas. A quick survey via email with an incentive for completion is an easy way to do this.

You could even go one step further and ask your customers to help you develop a new product for Christmas. If it isn’t too late and your products are applicable, then use social media to showcase a few product ideas or ask your customers to submit ideas for voting that you will be able to put into limited edition production. A loyal fan base will be very engaged with the process and will be likely to buy the product and others when it is released.

Can you offer free delivery?

If you can, offer free delivery – your investment really will pay off and may make the difference in a customer choosing to order with you rather than one of your competitors. A customer experience design project we ran for one of our clients revealed that a major barrier to conversion was a relatively high delivery charge on a low average order value. By offering free delivery, they increased online revenue by 20% within eight weeks.

Be clear and simple

Ensure all your delivery messaging is clearly displayed on your website across all pages, as well as your last online order dates for pre-Christmas delivery to ensure there are no nasty surprises for your customers and their expectations can be met at all times.

 

House of Fraser Christmas

Image source: Econsultancy

In addition, ensure that your returns policy is also clearly displayed across your website– especially if you are offering extended returns over this period.

 

asos Christmas Delivery

Image source: ASOS

Have a look at what questions you were asked last year and ensure your FAQs are up to date with the answers to those questions. Doing this will make life easier for your customers, and remove the need for them to contact you for questions that can be easily answered.

Also spend some time making sure that your product information is as detailed as possible. It’s worth bulking these out now, so your product pages contain as much information about the products as you can, again, making life easier for your customers.

Concentrate on improving your basket and checkout pages now to ensure you have a well converting process in time for Christmas. Maybe run some user-testing to check it’s as user-friendly as possible, and if you don’t already, offer guest checkout and consider a one page checkout.

 

Macy's one page checkout

Image source: Econsultancy

Be mobile responsive

We all know the importance of having a mobile-optimised website by now. If you don’t have one yet, definitely make this a priority as soon as possible as mobile searches increase over the festive period as more shoppers use their phones whilst on the high street to research products. According to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, last Christmas, mobile traffic grew to 58% of all online traffic, an increase of 42% over 2012 and we can only expect this figure to rise even more this Christmas.

 

John Lewis mobile website

If you do already have a mobile website, take some time to ensure it provides a seamless purchasing journey for your customers.

Content planning

Ben, our senior and social media content consultant suggests preparing a content schedule that includes relevant seasonal content such as tips, videos and blog posts. Rather than just pushing products, try and tap into your customers’ needs and help solve their stressful shopping problems. This type of content will help ramp up your audience in the run up Christmas and you can link in an association of how your products can fit into Christmas preparations. Ensure that this messaging is published in a steady flow throughout the Christmas period.

Generate Christmas discounts as a special reward for your social followers, which will make them feel special and like they are getting a bargain before the New Year’s sales. This can aid revenue flow and attract any buyers that usually wait until the sale period to purchase.

Offering competitions and promotions around the 12 days of Christmas are always a winner as they encourage people to keep coming back to your website and making purchases throughout the Christmas period. The Whistles annual advent calendar is a great example of this.

Think in advance about tying in in-store services with ways to boost social following and brand loyalty. For example, offering a free gift wrapping service to customers could be tied in with a data capture exercise to capture customer email addresses and dates of birth in reward for the free gift wrap. This data can then be used to target customers through email marketing and also through custom audiences advertising on Facebook.
Create any new pages well in advance of Christmas

Our senior natural search consultant, Ben and website optimisation manager, Suze, both recommend keeping your Christmas landing pages/categories the same year to year. This ensures Google keeps them in its index and all trust associated with those pages remains. You can always hide the URLs from the customer visible sitemap, but maintain them in the XML sitemap.
If you need to create new pages or categories, ensure you create them well in advance of Christmas to allow Google to index and begin to assign trust to the new pages. Again, link in from the XML sitemap, and if you don’t have your Christmas range confirmed yet – create a holding page for them. You could always include an email signup form on this page, so keen customers can find the page and register interest before you have the range finalised.

Paid search recommendations

Our paid search analysts, Joe and Andy, have a number of recommendations for planning paid search campaigns for the festive season:

  • Have a solid marketing plan in place, so you know exactly what promotions will be running and how they will be promoted e.g. which channel, paid search feature, and site/ad language and also the budgets available for each period building up to Christmas and after Christmas.
  • Look back at which promotions have worked best in the past and test again e.g. a flash sale, free P&P or exclusive discounts.
  • Plan paid search budgets to anticipate shifts in search volume such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Take a look at your historical data for this to see which days last year were popular and plan accordingly.
  • Upload all new ad creatives well in advance of their launch to ensure they are reviewed and approved before your campaign starts – this includes text and image ads.
  • Migrate any changes made in Google across to Bing Ads to ensure consistency and more visibility for your ads.
  • Make sure product feeds are fully optimised for Google Shopping. New feed requirements are coming into effect by the 30th September, so ensure you’re ready for this change now so you don’t run into any problems in build up to Christmas. Google Shopping will be a key channel for retailers this Christmas.

So there you have it – a few tips from the Leapfrogg team on how you can start preparing for the festive season. With only 115 days to go, the time is definitely ripe to start getting into the Christmas spirit and planning ahead. By doing so now, you’ll definitely be in a better position this festive season.

 

The Weekly Shop (18th – 22nd Aug)

In the Weekly Shop this week, we explore how poor service is eroding consumer loyalty and confidence in retail brands, shop dummies coming to life, social loyalty and Google adds Website call conversions in Adwords.

New study: poor service is eroding loyalty to retail brands

A new study has found that poor service is eroding consumer loyalty and confidence in retail brands. A poll of 2,000 consumers found that poor service is eroding consumer loyalty and confidence in retail brands. Accordingly to the survey 30% of those surveyed had become less loyal to retail brands in the past five years. In addition, a quarter of those customers identified poor service as the main reason for their declining loyalty.

Mobile takes 38% of all paid search clicks in the UK, the highest on record

Another new study this week has found that in the UK, adverts shown on mobile devices accounted for more than a third (36%) of all paid search spend in Q2 2014, which is the highest on record. In turn, the UK also witnessed the highest proportion of clicks coming through mobile ads – 38% of all paid search clicks during the quarter. More over on Internet Retailing.

Shop dummies come to life to tell smartphones what they are wearing

Reminiscent of something out of Dr Who – shop mannequins may now be coming to life thanks to i-beacon technology. Beacon company Iconeme has installed Bluetooth beacons in shop mannequins, which allow Bluetooth enabled shoppers to receive information about the clothes being worn (by the mannequins) when they walk past whilst harvesting data about the consumers.

How to increase conversions by creating buyer urgency & fear of loss

This article from Econsultancy rounds up 11 examples from ecommerce sites that use stock levels to create buyer urgency. A sense of urgency and fear of loss are powerful sales drivers in ecommerce. Undecided shoppers can be encouraged to make an impulse purchase if they think they’re in direct competition with other people for a product that has limited availability.

Social loyalty: the new faces of customer relationships

This next article from The Retail Bulletin explores social marketing and how it can be used a powerful platform to spread word of mouth and opinions between and among customers.

Google Launches Ability To Track “Website Call Conversions” In AdWords

Earlier in the week, Google launched a new feature in Adwords which allows advertisers to track calls that occur after a user arrives on a web site from an ad click.