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For many retailers, Christmas begins in July with preparations for major site traffic events like Cyber Monday. Will your company's site be ready? The time to find out is now, not when your web servers are overloaded, incoming orders have stopped, and frustrated visitors are abandoning their filled shopping carts and rushing to a competitor's site to buy their gifts.

Attribution management, the science of calculating the contribution of a marketing touchpoint on conversion, brings science and reason together to answer the age-old question: What caused a customer to make a purchase? The answer to that question plays a significant role in enhancing the quality and effectiveness of interactions that retailers have with customers and prospects, which translates into increased return on investment. Attribution is even more important these days, as corner offices are closely watching marketing teams, which are operating with tighter budgets, to see if spending is being accurately assigned.

Happy Friday everyone! As our multiscreen world grows and evolves, retailers are learning they need to adapt - and quickly. A recent Google Insights blog post shared five ways retail has changed over the years. One of the most significant differences is mobile. "As the lines blur between online and offline, innovative retailers are integrating…

Google's BigQuery service allows users to run near-instantaneous queries in massive data sets with billions of entries. The service, which is similar to Hadoop, is often partnered with commercial software packages for deep analytics used in business plans. One of these partners, Tableau, just gave details on a project that helped retailers adjust their business models for huge snowstorms. Tableau and marketing firm Interactions discovered something interesting at the study's end: Store profits were impacted by the threat of a storm just as much as an actual snowstorm.

Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners are what Google calls "smartphone shoppers," meaning that they use their smartphones at least once a month in stores. That's a lot of people. If there are 130 million smartphone users in the U.S., then about 111 million Americans use their smartphones to prepare for shopping or to look things up while there. It's not surprising that Google wants to get in all those heads and see what's going on. There's money there!

Marketers know not to underestimate the importance of a strong SEO strategy, but creating a strategy can be frustraing and overwhelming, especially after the recent Google Search Updates. Fourtunately, the team at MarketingProfs has put together a step-by-step guide to help create a successful keyword strategy. How have you improved your SEO strategy since the…

In my previous post, I shared the first four of eight best practices that online retailers can use to power up their Product Listing Ads (PLAs). PLAs are getting to be as competitive as standard paid search, so it's important to manage them closely in order to get the best results. The following are my second set of four best practices that retailers use to improve their PLA campaigns:

Tweet of the Day! Hi everyone! Welcome to our first Tweet of the Day, sponsored by our social media partner of the month, UPS! In 2012, 144.8 billion emails were sent. A Radicati Group study states that by 2016, that number is expected to increase to 192.2 billion. Of the 145 billion-plus emails being sent…

Consumers often turn to search engines when they begin their shopping research. Search engine results pages now include not only the organic and paid text ads, but also Product Listing Ads (PLAs) that can be a powerful way to engage consumers with pictures and prices of the products you sell. Smart retailers jumped on the PLA wagon early and they're already making tweaks — large and small — that help these ads work better for them. In the next two posts, I'll be sharing eight best practices that successful online retailers are using to power up their PLA results.

Mobile commerce is a driving force behind the dramatic and accelerating pace of change in the retail industry. More than ever before, consumers are relying on mobile devices to interact with brands and retailers. This has been the trend for the past several years, and so far 2013 has been no different. Four notable trends are leading the way this year