Ashley Friedlein's Blog

I recently attended an event in Amsterdam which gathered together senior etailers from across Europe (kindly sponsored by Fredhopper – I owe them at least that plug…).

For me the most fascinating talk was by the VP Merchandising & Buying at a major European multi-channel retailer. It reminded me just how much we still have to learn about how online selling works, and how much we can apply from offline.

Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

The genius of this statement is that it sounds quite innocuous, indeed philanthropic, despite its obvious grand ambition, but actually allows pretty much anything within its scope.

It is interesting to see just how much of the online customer journey (from search, to research, to purchase) Google is taking hold of. Will we all end up as "wholesalers" to Google's customers?

I was one of the speakers and attendees at the inaugural eTail UK conference this year in the UK. I scribbled down lots of notes intending to do a series of blog posts based on what I heard and learned.

That was over 2 months ago now… But I thought I’d at least capture a few snippets of interest that I still remember.

Quite rightly there is increasing amounts of talk about 'social media' online. The jury is still out on the real value of some areas of social media and networks, but one area where the value is currently most apparent is using network analysis to help optimise your natural search engine rankings (SEO), largely by identifying suitable sites to get inbound links from.

But what with the internet being so big, and growing so fast, it has been hard to make any practical sense of all the network data available. Recently I came across a tool which showed me the potential power of visualising these relationships...

Have you seen the new Google Checkout icons which are displayed with paid search ads where the merchant is using Google Checkout? The evidence we’ve heard so far is that those icons lead to a higher click through rate.

What will that do for your paid search rankings?

We're seeing growing interest from site owners in doing A/B split testing and multivariate / multivariable testing - for landing pages, for product pages, for buying processes, for e-mails and so on.

But who are the service providers out there specialising in offering such solutions?

For years now the debate has rumbled on – should brands be choosing the ‘traditional’ ad networks to handle all their media planning and buying, with digital integrated in that, or do they need to go the digital specialists for their digital needs?

Again the debate has raged in the trade press recently. What are my thoughts…?

With the rise of “Web 2.0” and “UGC” (User Generated Content) many brands are attempting to harness the power of UGC. But how well are they doing it? Which ones are getting right and which embarrassingly wrong?

Here are a few of my own thoughts on the winners and losers, but do suggest your own…