Briefly Noted…
Online Retailers Set to Break New Records this Holiday Season…
Bookseller’s Blog Posting Finds the Right Reader (see comments too)…
NY Times 100 Notable Books of the Year…
EBay Sees Success on Black Friday…
Biblio Response to Previous Article
I generally post the verbatim responses from the various marketing chiefs who take the time to read and respond to this blog, which I appreciate. Here is Kevin Donaldson, of Biblio, in response to: Biblio Witnesses a Decrease in Traffic.
Your statement is correct but I believe that there is more information buried there that must be taken into consideration when reviewing the issue. Your comments are definitely one side of the coin, but when you look at traffic to websites the infrastructure issues regarding the Internet can be analyzed from a different perspective. Here is what I mean by that in two simple points:
- If a large portion of your website traffic lands on your index page and they don’t like what they see, aren’t interested, don’t like the landing page design, or a number of other issues, the initial impression of the site may very well be ruined. (see the article below for an extension of this example) If you refer to the “halo effect” concept the researchers found, you will see that your comments about branding may not always be correct. Say a user comes to our home page several times through affiliates and direct links. They dislike your site and leave each time. The user then searches for an exact title, comes to the site again and says, “oh no, not these guys again…” Focusing less on generic traffic that just tromps through our index page building bad impressions, we at Biblio are focusing on traffic that buys books…
- And this leads to the second issue that companies of our size deal with and that is infrastructure requirements. If we continually grew our gross traffic we have to buy more and more equipment to deal with serving up pages on the web. Innumerable page requests again and again for people who aren’t interested in what we are selling, or just don’t like the site. If we were like a big competitor in our industry that sold you staplers and chainsaws…oh yeah, and books, then sure we would love every Tom, Dick, and Harry coming to the site because they would find something they don’t need that they would buy anyway…but again, this is not who we are. We are trying to build customer relationships, provide them with a quality resource from quality suppliers, and make sure that out of the 40 million books we are now listing, that they are finding what they are looking for, and making that purchase.
Briefly Noted…
Google Improves Book Search Service…
Cyber Monday, Black Friday More of a Myth than a Reality…
Start-up Success: The Phenomenal Force of Focus… -Link removed-
