Web

Business Critical: Mobile Conversions, Search & Retail, Google’s Nest

By Ryan Parlee

Business Critical is our weekly collection of what’s new, exciting, and insightful for business leaders from the world of the web, marketing, social media, and more.

Open, Click, Convert on the Go

As we’ve already seen, mobile web usage on phones and tablets is beginning to eclipse desktop surfing. With that, businesses are presented with a whole new set of challenges in optimizing their website not just for mobile browsing, but also for mobile conversions.

So, it begs the question: which traffic sources are best at driving actual customer conversions from mobile devices? Turns out, there’s a new study on this. And, the results are clear: Email drove move than 60% of all mobile conversions as part of the study. So, is email still important? Yep. Is optimizing your email and your website UX to handle mobile traffic a do-or-die proposition? Absolutely.

See the study from MarketingCharts.com.

Search = Sales

New data released this week revealed that search engines drove approximately 40% of traffic to Hitwise 500 Retailer websites over this holiday season.

The 2013 search share was down a bit from 2012, but still came out as the leader in driving holiday retail traffic by quite a large margin.

Target Takes the Defensive

The latest news in the Target hacking scandal that saw more than 70 million credit cards compromised leading up to the 2013 holiday season, the big-box retailer has announced that it is proactively offering a full year of credit monitoring services to all of its customers free of charge.

Target is clearly hoping to quell some fears of both previous customers and future shoppers, but the move seems to be resonating as an authentic righting of a wrong. I’m no PR expert, but I would imagine that this will buy the retailer quite a bit of good will as they try to move past this major slip up.

Google Gobbles Nest

This week, Google made their newest acquisition — and it’s a doozy. The search giant purchased automated intelligent home control product maker, Nest, of both Nest Thermostat and Nest Protect fame, for a whopping $3.2 billion.

It may not seem newsworthy for your average business owner, but the long-term implications are far-reaching. Google’s vested interested in intelligent, data-driven home appliances tells us a lot about the future of technology and how these advancements will shape our lives as people and as consumers.

CNN covered the Nest buyout.