23 Musings

The IDC have announced that the market for U.S. internet advertising grew by a massive 27% in 2007.

Interestingly though, while Google grew by 40% year on year in Q4 that was down on their growth a year earlier. That made their market share slip by 0.5%, but they do still own over 23% of the market. Something to do with the coming saturation of search marketing perhaps?

IDC says a merged Microsoft-Yahoo would command 17% of the U.S. online ad market, so still not enough to topple Google from the top spot.

One wonders if the figures for Google include DoubleClick yet??

AJAX World Magazine, a decent site that looks into the newer web technology of AJAX has published an interesting list of questions on the subject. The questions come from various pioneers in the technology after they were asked to pose the conundrums that they think we should be answering next to take AJAX forward and 'fix the web'.

Would love to know the answers if anyone has them!

Just in case you haven't covered all the bases here's an excellent reference for all you online marketers! It's in the form of a mind map as well, so really useful!

Sometimes it's good to sit back and have a laugh at the industry you are in. This one made me chuckle!

A great presentation from Elliot Jay Stocks at the Future of Web Design the other day:

According to the Times online.

Thanks to Travolution I've been made aware of this list of travel websites that the Times say are the best 50 of 2007.

There are quite a few I've not seen before so it's worth a look.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers report is confirming what I had surmised many months ago. Online travel agencies (the likes of Expedia and Opodo) are beginning to lose business in favour of the customers booking direct with suppliers.

They say that online travel agencies are losing their competitive edge and now that suppliers of travel products are maturing in their use of the internet it's not all going their way anymore.

This has been coming for a while. The agencies have got so powerful that they've let their fingers off the pulse. Airlines and hotel chains are engaging online marketers themselves instead of purely relying on the distribution channels they used to use. They now control their own inventory and therefore their own destiny (and profits).

Loyalty schemes have a lot to do with this. Airline frequent flyer points are a massive draw and encourage direct booking, hotels now have similar schemes and the online travel agents can't replicate these.

This trend is only going to continue unless the aggregators work out new ways to add value for customers.

The other issue which the report doesn't mention is the impact tour operators may be having on the online travel agencies. Tour operators are getting more web savvy too, employing better quality people and better quality tactics to position their offering more effectively online. As tour operators websites improve and product offerings get more dynamic (through the introduction of new reservation systems, something that is going on at many tour ops) the online travel agencies are going to lose further ground.

Pingdom is a great little service which tests your website for uptime that I use on a number of sites and services. I was lucky enough to get a free account having beta tested it.

Anyway, they often have some quite good insight on their blog. The latest post is one that's really close to my heart, it's all about one of the most viewed pages on the web, the good old 404 error page.

In the post '23 percent of the top US websites have bad 404 pages' they discuss what a difference a well thought out and constructed 404 page can have on your websites usage.

404 pages are an inevitable problem for everyone. They can come about in a number of ways such as badly configured links, badly named files and links from search engines which point to old pages.

Of course, you can put some decent error handling in place if you want to to capture all 404 responses and redirect to the new version of a page or the best match for the page request. However there will always be occasions when you can't avoid a 404 and can't do anything to guess where to send the user so you need this generic page to present to users.

The biggest culprits are those which don't have custom error pages at all and purely present the standard browser error page.

The next worst are those with unintelligible error messages and no links to any useful sections of their websites.

The way to do this properly is to make it light hearted and useful. Admit the error, don't make the user think they've messed up. Offer a way out, provide useful links to the main starting points of your website, don't make it a dead end. And most of all, make it a valuable page, if you're selling something make sure users who find the 404 page know what you do, it can even be an opportunity to promote your products.

So online travel is motoring along as ever. Sales are rising and the number of participant websites is growing all the time. However, in the U.S. the word (courtesy the NY Times) is that 9 percent fewer people booked travel online this year than in 2005. This has come from a Forrester research survey of 60,000 U.S. web users. It is the first time since Forrester began tracking Internet spending a decade ago that a category (in this case online travel) has lost shoppers.

Another survey (results coming soon) from PhoCusWright shows that the percentage of travel shoppers booking online has dipped while the percentage booking offline has risen.

Is this something to be concerned about? Maybe. There's a few reasons this could be happening. Perhaps customers are looking to book more and more complex trips, and therefore aren't booking online as they feel the confidence instilled by a travel agent is necessary before parting with money for an adventurous trip. Or perhaps users are beginning to backlash against the standard online travel functionalities that haven't changed much in the last ten years.

Henry Harteveldt, Forrester’s online travel analyst says “Customers are tired of spending two or three hours trying to find the airline or hotel or vacation package that meets their needs.” He says (like I do) that sites need to step away from asking for specifics in order to complete a search. He says “Nowhere can you say, ‘I have this amount of money to spend on a trip. These are my interests. This is where I live. Show me my options,’” he said. “Whereas online retailers have done a much better job of improving the shopping experience in recent years, the travel industry has been standing still.”

The NY Times article goes on to discuss the lack of innovation that is due to outdated reservation systems and mentions the Travelocity Road Trip Wizard I discussed earlier. Yes, lack of functionality in reservation systems is a major issue, also the technological complexity of querying multiple bed banks and GDS' makes user intuitive searching almost impossible to create.

So, who is going to be in a position to benefit from this trend of user/customer decline? It could be the tour operators. Many of them are in the process of upgrading their systems to new dynamic package capable ones which will interface much better with intelligent search functionality. Also, they don't need to query the bed banks as often as they have contracted bed stock so can cache availability and present it in a much more usability focussed manner than the likes of Expedia with their multi-connections to other suppliers. Of course the only problem is the lack of innovation generally at tour operators and also the desire they seem to have to become the next Expedia. That's not the way forwards anymore. Rather than trying to emulate the online travel agents, tour operators should be trying to become the next big thing.

If you've ever wondered that, here's your answer:

I've estimated the electricity consumption for the internet as follows:

US:    350 billion kWh per year

World: 868 billion kWh per year


These numbers represent 9.4% of total US electricity consumption, and 5.3%
of global electricity consumption.


===========================================================

The breakout of the data is as follows:


Annual Electricity Use for the Internet--US and World


Category..........................US Consumption.......World Consumption
.....................................Billion kWh........Billion kWh

(1) Data Centers (includes cooling)......45.................112.5


(2) PCs&Monitors........................235.................588


(3) Modems/routers/etc...................67.................167


(4) Phone network.......................0.4...................1.0


TOTAL ELECTRICITY DEMAND        ~350 billion kWh       ~868 billion
OF THE INTERNET ........................U.S.................World

Crikey! That's a lot of power! Time to look for better more sustainable power supplies for PC's? Perhaps we could all sit at our desks pedaling while we surf...

Online travel is growing exponentially, approx 40% of UK travel consumers are expected to book at least one part of their holiday next year online. All the players are expanding their online activities to try to meet this demand but the ones who are really innovating will (in my opinion) be the winners.

Currently, the innovation (and by that I mean really useful innovation) is coming from some of the price comparison / fare aggregator websites.

I'll start with Kayak; they've added a really nice and simple piece of functionality which adds a lot of value to the consumer. Their 'weekend search' allows users to compare air fares for the weekend periods across a month instead of having to specify exactly which dates they want. This is a real bonus for those of us who like to get away for weekend breaks quite often. Simple functions like this can dramatically improve conversion rates as users find websites more accommodating to their needs, and of course you can still get your results in a multitude of displays (list, matrix, map, price trend graph etc). See the image below showing the results from a search for November weekend availability, they quickly show users what is the cheapest weekend to travel.

Next comes Farecast; they've added functionality to their hotels search to enable users to pick out whats a good deal and whats not. Hotels are now colour coded depending on whether Farecast considers them a good deal. It's only available on certain destinations and hotels at the moment but they promise to expand their coverage quite quickly. It's a big step forward if you're a price sensitive online shopper (as most travellers are). Example of the map based results below:

Lastly comes SideStep; another aggregator of airfares and hotel availability. FareTracker is their latest offering which has just come out in Beta. It allows users to track a flight route to see how the fare has moved over time. It leverages the millions of searches that are happening on SideStep to find the lowest fares for any combination of flight plans with the greatest degree of date flexibility in the market today: +/- 7 days from a specified date. In addition to monitoring price, users can select to recieve weekly email updates or updates as the prices change, receive an email notification if the price reaches a specified price point (a trigger to buy) and track historical fare pricing for the route chosen. It all mounts up to a serious piece of functionality, although incredibly similar in premise to Travelemails.com. Again, here's a screenshot:

This kind of innovation knocks spots off the offerings from traditional travel operators such as tour operators. Even some of the other, sometimes better known, price comparison sites (Travel Supermarket, Kelkoo etc) struggle to offer anything innovative like this.

A time will come when tour operators and the likes either have to catch up quick or get their product included in these aggregators and start to pay commissions like an affiliate scheme.

All your favourite web 2.0 apps flashing before your eyes...

Really good insight as ever from usability expert Jakob Nielsen here. In this article he discusses whats known as banner blindness, the fact that users are often oblivious to the presence of banner adverts on the web. The study he's undertaken involved eyetracking and the results are pretty conclusive.

The findings show that designing banner ads which supposedly stand out as they are different colours and using borders is actually a false economy and you are better off integrating your advertising into a websites content. Users tend to avoid focusing on objects that look very different from the site design, often hardly glancing at them and rarely clicking. Google are an example of someone who's got this just right in their implementation of Adwords. As everyone knows, one of the main reasons Adwords works so well is that users rarely identify them as any different to a natural search result.

It's something I've always suspected as users always respond better to cohesive designs where all the elements of a website hang together and complement each other. We recently redesigned our homepage and one of the elements was a promo banner displaying a 'book online and save' message. In the new design this is just a textual message on the screen as opposed to a bordered banner, and traffic to that page has doubled since the design changed!

So, Japan are planning on the next version of the internet already. Here's the details from New Launches:

Japanese communications minister Yoshihide Suga said Friday that Japan will start research and development on technology for a new generation of network that would replace the Internet, eyeing bringing the technology into commercial use in 2020. Speaking to reporters in Brazil, where he is visiting, Suga said an organization will be set up as early as this fall with cooperation from businesses, academia and government offices for promoting the technology when the Internet is seen to be faced with increasing constraints in achieving higher throughputs of data as well as ensuring data security. The envisaged network is expected to ensure faster and more reliable data transmission, and have more resilience against computer virus attacks and breakdowns. The ministry is hoping Japan will take a lead in development of post-Internet technology and setting global standards, a move that ministry officials believe would help make Japanese companies competitive in the global market for hardware and software using such technology.

In the world of online travel conversion rates are king! Turning those that are just looking at your website into people who want to book is the holy grail and what everyone in the industry is striving for.

Interestingly, someone has done some of the work for us (which is always nice)! A company called YPartnership have a publication that comes out annually looking at the travel industry. The latest issue has surveyed travel consumers to ask them what they look for on a travel website. Consumers are clearly most interested in the ability to check the lowest available fares and rates. That's not to suggest web site content is unimportant. Rather, it's just not as important as the ability to satisfy consumers' determination to get a good deal!

Here's the summary list below showing what percentage of consumers surveyed said was most important to them on an online travel website:

Desirability Of Travel Web Site Features	2007 %
Extremely/Very Desirable:
Being able to check the lowest available fares/rates	90
Having an easy-to-use booking feature	81
Photos of the hotel and resort facilities, rooms, etc.	71
Destination maps that illustrate area activities, dining, shops, attractions, etc.	69
The option of scheduling and confirming vacation activities in advance of arrival	66
The ability to preview room locations	63
The ability to check last minute air, hotel and car rental availability	63
Photos of the area	61
Virtual video tours of the hotel and resort facilities	55
Live counselors to handle questions over the phone who can instantly send information for me to look at on my computer	50
E-mail notifications of travel specials and discounts when they become available	50
Being able to download and print promotional literature and brochures from the site	44
A web site that remembers my personal preferences	43
Virtual video tours of the area	42
Bulletin boards for questions and advice from others who have traveled there	35
The ability to share photographs and personal accounts of travel experiences	16

Ever wondered how deep the internet is penetrating into countries around the world? CNN has a nice interactive map where you can roll over areas of the world and find out what percentage of people are using the web.

Well worth a look!

The Onion does it again. Pure genius!!

Now everyone in e-commerce knows that Tesco.com is one of the biggest UK internet retailers and therefore one of the biggest e-commerce sites in the land. Tesco have been hugely successful in their ventures online and it's easy to see why if you have ever used their home shopping website (great usability).

News has come out however that the DVLA (Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency) is actually a bigger online player now! They recently put the ability to renew your tax disc online and it's getting huge usage.

On the DVLA site 273,500 motorists buy their tax discs electronically every week with £4.2m generated every day, compared with 250,000 weekly online orders to Tesco generating £3.6m per day. On the busiest day in March 2007, £9.9m was generated in tax paid online, and to date, 12.5 million of 33 million UK vehicles have been taxed online.

Of course the main reason for this is convenience, not having to queue at the Post Office is the reason I use it and to have it delivered to your door is so easy.

Kudos to the DVLA for being a government department who've built a service that gets used and people understand!

In a token gesture to privacy advocates, Google have announced that they will auto-delete their cookies if a user doesn't visit a Google website within two years.

Google cookies were set to delete after the year 2039 previously.

I find this quite funny! This means users need to abstain from Googling or visiting Google websites for two whole years! I don't know anyone who could go two years without visiting a Google web property, or anyone who would want to.

Perhaps this should be set up as some kind of a challenge. Let's see who can manage two years without visiting a Google site and then we can see if their cookies really will delete or not! Otherwise, how will we ever know if this really is going to happen ;-)

First person to reply to his post in two years will win a prize (not sure what yet)...

This is brilliant! If, like me, you worked in the online world in the old days then you'll probably recall the days when websites looked like this and there were no decent search engines.

The rate of progress is astounding when you think it was like this 13 years ago!!