Last minute PPC tips for Cyber Monday


The most important shopping time of the year is here - The Thanksgiving Weekend. Retailers of all shapes and sizes pull out all their offers to attract shoppers. Now that the Black Friday has already began and has started pouring out all different new data and statistics, its now time to analyze and secure your paid search advertisement success through the weekend. For online retailers its still not too late to ensure that your paid search campaigns are ready for holiday traffic on Cyber Monday and beyond.

This time the Black Friday offers failed to draw big crowds to brick-and-mortar stores and shopping malls. We have seen in 2015 retailers had spread their offers throughout the year, that could be one reason that the sense of urgency for shopper on Black Friday was lost. In 2015 as we are having both Black Friday and Cyber Monday on November itself, this slow start can leads to a shopping rush during final ten days of December. 

To maximize your paid search revenue, remember the following tips:

1) Do not ignore Mobile! Mobile traffic can set a new record
As per IBM Watson Trend Report in Black Friday 2015 the average Mobile Traffic has reached 60 percent of all online traffic, a double digit increase of 15 percent over 2014. 40 percent of all online sale came from Mobile device on Thanksgiving 2015.

2) Be relevant! Customer attention is shrinking
The number of page views per session has dropped from 10 in Black Friday 2014 to 8 in Black Friday 2015 as reported in IBM Benchmark. The website Bounce rate in Black Friday this year is more than 31 percent. The most possible reason for this is the change in consumer behavior. Consumers are now hopping on their smart phone for very short moments though out the day to browse products and make purchases. This requires your ad copies to be well crafted and highly relevant.

3) Customer's attention shrinkage continues! Retarget.
On Black Friday 2015 the cart abandonment rate has reached over 74% reported in IBM Benchmark. This is again possibly due to multi-device micro-moments. If you already have a Re-marketing list ready, never forget to reach out to these abandoned shoppers over the weekend.

4) Automated Item Update. Save money from 'lost' clicks
The Adobe Digital Index reported that one out of every 9 products viewed during Thanksgiving sale this year was out-of-stock. If your website has micro-data implemented, turn-on Google Merchant Center's Automatic Item Update Feature. Alternatively update your shopping feeds as frequently as possible to save cost from unproductive 'lost' clicks.

5) Are you delivering it today? Trending in 2015
This year same-day-delivery is a key differentiator. If you are delivering on same day, be bold and advertise in your ad copy. Amazon Prime has a same-day-delivery option. Etsy and Apple working with Postmates to deliver on same day in many cities. Even many brick-and-mortar stores like Macy's, Kohl's, Williams-Sonoma working with delivery startup like Deliv  this holiday season to get their products delivered on same day. 

Now that you have all the ideas, line up your PPC accounts and wait to win the Cyber Monday traffic. Let us know in comments what is the Cyber Monday strategy you are going to use for your business.
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Bitcoins is it right time to buy?


You probably have heard about BitCoin. BitCoin is recently in news due to the heavy crash and BitCoin baby. World first BitCoin baby born in California, Dr C. Terence Lee was paid in full with BitCoins. There are news and articles you may come across those are claiming that BitCoin is going to be the next currency in the paperless one world. There will be no price difference if paid in BitCoin across countries. BitCoin is actually available since 2009, that was once worthless now gaining traction. The question is, will it be a good choice for investment or just prove as a fool’s gold in future?
BitCoin aim for a free society where anyone virtually can create ‘money’. No bank, no traces of transaction, no fee. Also BitCoin can be divisible down to 8 decimal places. BitCoins operate more like a commodity than currency.
In 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous person or group first publish a paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System along with working model and source code. That time the innovation didn’t interest anyone. But soon BitCoin concept was adopted by SilkRoad, an online marketplace for illegal drug to continue online transaction sans any traces of payment or receive. That time SilkRoad update the version of BitCoin with a transaction feedback system, to avoid dishonest sellers. This add value to the actual innovation, but the association with silkRoad stigmatized BitCoin for long time and hinder its popularity.
BitCoins gradually gain the popularity. Even during the beginning of 2013, BitCoins was treading only around USD 13, in April it reached as high as USD 266 and then the BitCoin bubble burst. Today it is recovered at USD 74.35 at the time of writing this article. You can find the current BTC treading rate here. There are generally three ways to have BitCoin, 1. Buy BitCoin from exchange 2. Trade BitCoin with others for service 3. BitCoin mining. Anyone can mine BitCoin by running specific algorithm in their high end processor. However the process is so complex that on average mining a single coin may take more than three years. The reality is the power consumption and equipment depreciation will cost more than the BitCoins worth. Therefore mining of BitCoins normally done in pool system.
Lets return to our basic question, is it right time to buy Bitcon? Here I found four basic points why you should not buy BitCoins (published in Forbes Magazine). Firstly The Loses, BitCoins has no customer protection as traditional banks. The BitCoin data may got deleted from your system or operator’s server, and you may lost all your savings. Secondly, Regulation, one can think BitCoin as big money laundering machine. BitCoin is more popular among the people who are involve dubious activities. So many country try not to support the growth of Bitcoin. Third, Scaling, at the end there will be only 21 million BitCoins ever exist. The algorithm is developed such a way that the more number of BitCoins are revealing the more harder the solving of the algorithm is becoming. It has became so much harder now that if the person is not exceptionally lucky, there is hardly a chance to mine a single BitCoin. Fourth, Lack of application, till now BitCoin’s usability is very much restricted in the business of drug and gambling. There are only a handful of legitimate organizations and persons that use BitCoin as currency.
Therefore, BitCoin economy may grow rapidly in coming few years but there will be only a limited appreciation, once it reaches 21 million point.
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How to separate email username and domain in a excel spreadsheet

These formulas can also be used to separate First name and Last name in excel spreadsheet. I actually face this problem of separating thousands of emails domain name early morning today at work. I was suppose to do a study on popular mailer domains of our email subscriber base. Extracting mailer domains from more than 40,000 emails addresses was simply inhuman so I tried to develop excel formula, finally come out with this. Here find the formula to separate email username and domain in a excel.
=RIGHT(A1,((LEN(A1)-FIND(“@”,A1))))    //this will give you mailer domain
=LEFT(A1,FIND(“@”,A1)-1)     //this will give you username

Explanation, How it works:

First we will understand FIND(“@”,A1). This can be use as =FIND(“@”,A1) standalone way. We are asking to count the position of “@” in cell A1. This formula always work/ count from left to right. For example if an email address is abc@gmail.com then, the position of “@” is 4 from left.
Now LEN(A1), this part of formula actually count the total character in cell A1.
Therefore, (LEN(A1)-FIND(“@”,A1)) is giving us the number of character the mailer-domain made of. Now the final step. The expression can be read as =RIGHT(A1,(number of character the mailer-domain made of)). In this formula we are asking spreadsheet to read the characters for mailer-domain, from right in cell A1. So we successfully separated mailer-domain.
Now a similar formula can be written for username. We have understand =FIND(“@”,A1) count the position of “@” in cell A1. Therefore we can make a formula =LEFT(A1,FIND(“@”,A1)) it actually reads from left the number of character till “@” in cell A1. But this also include the character “@” itself. To remove “@” we need to count 1 character less. Finally the formula to get username is =LEFT(A1,FIND(“@”,A1)-1).
These same sets of formulas can be use to separate any other couple of words, for example First name and last name. We just need to change the operator “@” as required. For name those formated as ARIJIT DUTTA, i.e. separate first name and last name by a “space”, we need a “space” as operator. The modified formulas will be.
=LEFT(A1,FIND(” “,A1)-1)    //this will give you the first name
=RIGHT(A1,((LEN(A1)-FIND(” “,A1))))    //this will give you the last name
Tell us, if you have any other ideas to use this formulas.
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