Fact: less than 10% of the web is mobile-ready today. In case you missed our brief summary about why mobile matters so much to you and your customers, here’s a small infographic to help you along.

via search engine land

Did you just choke on your coffee? You should have! It’s time to get your site not just mobile-friendly, but mobile-awesome. People are continuously searching and shopping from their phones.

Let me paint you this picture: Need a pair of blue ballet flats for this cocktail dress I just got but the store I’m in doesn’t have them. No worries. I’ll just do a quick Google search from my phone and click to their site. Oh no. This site doesn’t work on my phone. Guess someone else is getting that sale!

If you’re a restaurant or in the service industry, more often that not your business just needs a mobile page with locations, a menu or services provided and some contact information (also, reviews reviews reviews!).

If you’ve been living under that proverbial rock we so often refer to, Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. You can “organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web” (from Pinterest.com). Sounds great, doesn’t it? Great doesn’t even begin to cover it. According to Business Insider, Pinterest’s traffic has increased up to 40x in just six months. In the week of Dec. 17, 2011, Pinterest had over 11 million visitors. In fact, this amazing growth has been compared to Facebook in 2006.

So what makes Pinterest so addictive? When this question was posed on Quora, there were tons of musings including: emphasis on images over text, a “wish list” interest, fun and light brand/look, easy navigation and media coverage. Though interesting, I don’t think that question is as important as this one: how can I utilize Pinterest for my brand? Here are some ideas I’ve come up with just using their simple tools.

One: Create a pinterest account for your store/brand. I think now you have to have a friend send you an invite.

Two: Download and utilize the “Pin it!” button on your toolbar. Now add the same button to your site’s product pages.

Three: Pin images of products that you love from your site and sites that inspire you. Sky’s the limit. If it’s an image on the web, you can pin it.

Four: Upload pictures from your computer onto your boards. They can be of your store, your favorite icons, anything that inspires you and you feel will inspire others.

Five: Separate and properly categorize your boards. This will help people find your boards easily when they search.

Six: Add contributors to your boards. Encourage your blog readers to comment on your images or “repin.”

*Always link your site and others with the images. That way there is a direct link back to your site if the person is interested in finding out more.

According to a comScore report, online Christmas shopping is up 15% from last year–totaling over 35.3 billion dollars. Worthy of note is that Black Friday online sales were up 26% from last year and Cyber Monday sales were up 22%. I think it’s safe to say that Internet marketing is working, as more and more people are Googling brands and/or products, comparing prices and searching for deals.

With the ever-increasing popularity of social media branding, free mobile apps for deals, QR code usage, etc., it’s easy to see why consumers have turned to the Internet for much of their shopping needs.

If you missed out on this amazing surge in eCommerce, you need to assess where your advertising budget is going. Pay-per-click ads (paid ads in search engine search results) can be an amazing way to put your product in front of the consumer. There are tons of ways to increase your conversion rates and decrease cart abandonment. You just have to know who to turn to. The Visiture team is well-versed in preparing our eCommerce clients during the holidays and throughout the year. Let us help you make the most out of your eCommerce business and in 2012, you can be reaping the benefits of this tremendous increase in online sales.

We recently ran a geo-targeting test for one of our clients in Atlanta and thought it would make an excellent blog post for marketing tips. If you haven’t run a geo-targeting test before, here are some general guidelines on how to do it the right way.

• All tests are intended to be temporary, relatively short-term ‘changes’ designed to test a hypothesis.
• A parallel test procedure provides the most accurate and reliable results. (this entails running two completely identical items, e.g. campaigns, during the exact same time period with the only single controllable difference being the feature being tested)
• A test itself is rarely if ever intended to improve performance per se.
• The results of a test are intended to provide ‘learnings’ that can be applied to make changes that are likely to improve performance.
• The results of a test would then dictate the direction of a more long-term change (or no change at all depending on the results) that would provide a long-term benefit for the account, certain campaigns, ad groups and/or keywords.
• During a test, test campaigns may perform worse overall than the original in a parallel test for several reasons that would not affect the ultimate success of the test itself:
  • Newly created campaigns have no Google keyword/campaign quality history. (the geo-test was such a parallel test (as opposed to a less reliable before and after pseudo test))
  • Identical campaigns that contain the exact same keywords and have overlapping geo-targeting compete against each other in the AdWords auction (this is necessarily the case for a true parallel test).
• During a test, optimizations and/or changes to improve performance within test campaigns ought to be avoided so as to not introduce differences between the parallel campaigns and add ‘noise’ into the test.
• Ideally a test must be allowed to run for a minimum amount of time required to collect a sufficient volume of data so that a conclusion based on the analysis of the data can be established with statistical significance and confidence (this amount of time will vary widely depending on the rate of data collection)
• Finally a test itself is deemed successful when a clear difference is demonstrated between the two parallel campaigns, ad groups, etc. regardless of the actual conclusion or specifics of the ‘learnings.’

–This report was created by Visiture’s Director of Search, Ben Tan.

Alright, color me impressed. Walmart is using Facebook to help you choose gifts for people this holiday season. By using the application Shopycat, it takes your friend’s Facebook interests and applies them to Walmart gifts. The reviews, prices and like button all show in the results.

The only trouble you run into is when your Facebook friends like something general like “music” or “coffee.” The more specific the interests, however, the more tailored your results are. Here is a screen shot of gift ideas for my sister–they are all great ideas and a range of prices.

This is an awesome way to use Facebook to your eCommerce advantage. Though the algorithm could use some tweaking to find more innovative gifts, it’s a great start at social commerce!

This video is pretty cool, posted on the Inside Search Google blog. It details the evolution of Google search and how users’ demands dictated Google’s future plans. Highlights include: the birth of AdWords, image search, Google news and Google Instant.

Next up, Google wants to be able to answer the most complex questions that you have. Amit Singhal’s example of a goal question for Google to answer was,”What is the best time for me to sew seeds in India given that monsoon was early this year?” Once this type of information can be provided, Google users will be able to gain some serious knowledge about virtually anything they want.

Check out the rest below: