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How 300% increases in mobile web traffic spell failure

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300% increases in mobile web traffic spelled disaster for CouponMint.com.

Year over year mobile traffic to CouponMint.com spelled complete failure. In assessing analytics over a period of months, it was determined that mobile traffic to CouponMint.com was up 308% from August 2010 to August 2011. Initially this was viewed as https://samoletplus.ru/zelenograd/flats/ an extremely positive development and observation.
Cisco published a report in February 2011 with these highlights. From its Executive Summary – The Mobile Network in 2010 and 2011
Global mobile data traffic grew 2.6-fold in 2010, nearly tripling for the third year in a row.

The 2010 mobile data traffic growth rate was higher than anticipated. Last year’s forecast projected that the growth rate would be 149 percent. This year’s estimate is that global mobile data traffic grew 159 percent in 2010.

Last year’s mobile data traffic was three times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000.

Global mobile data traffic in 2010 (237 petabytes per month) was over three times greater than the total global Internet traffic in 2000 (75 petabytes per month).

Mobile video traffic will exceed 50 percent for the first time in 2011.

Mobile video traffic was 49.8 percent of total mobile data traffic at the end of 2010, and will account for 52.8 percent of traffic by the end of 2011.

Mobile network connection speeds doubled in 2010.

Globally, the average mobile network downstream speed in 2010 was 215 kilobits per second (kbps), up from 101 kbps in 2009. The average mobile network connection speed for smartphones in 2010 was 1040 kbps, up from 625 kbps in 2009.

Average smartphone usage doubled in 2010.

The average amount of traffic per smartphone in 2010 was 79 MB per month, up from 35 MB per month in 2009.
Smartphones represent only 13 percent of total global handsets in use today, but they represent over 78 percent of total global handset traffic.

In 2010, the typical smartphone generated 24 times more mobile data traffic (79 MB per month) than the typical basic-feature cell phone (which generated only 3.3 MB per month of mobile data traffic).

Android approaches iPhone levels of data use.

At the beginning of the year, iPhone consumption was at least 4 times higher than that of any other smartphone platform. Toward the end of the year, iPhone consumption was only 1.75 times higher than that of the second-highest platform, Android.

Nonsmartphone usage increased 2.2-fold to 3.3 MB per month in 2010, compared to 1.5 MB per month in 2009.

Basic handsets still make up the vast majority of devices on the network (87 percent).

There are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones, even though they do not have electricity at home.

The mobile network has extended beyond the boundaries of the power grid.

Year in Review: Mobile Data Traffic Nearly Tripled in 2010

Global mobile data traffic nearly tripled (2.6-fold growth) in 2010, for the third year in a row. It is a testament to the momentum of the mobile industry that this growth persisted despite the continued economic downturn, the introduction of tiered mobile data packages, and an increase in the amount of mobile traffic offloaded to the fixed network.
All of this serves to confirm what most of you know. Mobile traffic to the web is exploding. Mobile traffic to your site is on the rise. If you haven’t optimized your site for those visitors, let me explain what will happen. You will lose customers. You will lose sales. You will lose long term visitors and relationships for your business. It’s a guarantee. I promise.
As visitors continued to muscle their way into the previous CouponMint.com web site, they were confronted with every conceivable barrier to having a worthwhile mobile experience. As traffic to the site increased via mobile every month, every measurement of engagement was trending down.

What are those key measurements?

Time on site – CouponMint.com’s visitors continued to spend less time on site as they struggled and fought to navigate a site that wasn’t optimized for their visit.
Page views – Page views, that raw count of the number of pages that each visitor visits through the course of their time on site, were trending down in the face of increasing traffic. NOT good.
Bounce rates – Bounce rates describing how quickly someone bails on your site upon their finding it. This number was trending up. This tells us that the experience mobile we visitors were having prompted them to exit the site at increasingly higher speeds, a higher percentage were leaving immediately upon finding the site.

With a 300% increase in mobile traffic and a 60% increase in Unique Visitors we saw every reason to be positive about the brand, the mission, the presence, and the trends associated with CouponMint.com. What was needed was a new web platform that was optimized for mobile. Coupon Mint needed a site that was built specifically for mobile, rendering the site quickly, with the ability to perform a significant number of the site functions. In addition, the site had to be customized for its core business, the aggregation and distribution of coupons from its current list of 500 advertisers.

Coupon Mint wanted some additional features on its mobile ready platform. Those included the ability for users to store their coupons in an online wallet so to speak. They wanted the user to be able to search areas, industries, and categories within that industry easily and quickly. They wanted to also afford participating advertisers a value proposition that included a place to include their deals, showcase their branding, provide for social sharing, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc, and also to gather their own email opt-ins and text subscribers.

With some considerable time spent in development, programming, and implementation, the first version of the newly launched mobile ready platform has been successfully launched. Within one full week, CouponMint.com has experience 22,000 plus impressions on the site. Coupons are being found, printed, and merchants are experiencing business.
Recognizing mobile trends isn’t rocket science. Strategically implementing the site and then building value for advertisers and visitors, well, that’s where the science comes into play. Coupon Mint Magazine’s new web presence may be found at http://couponmint.com. The platform allows for a web presence for all of Coupon Mint Magazine’s paid print customers. These publications are currently shipped to 370,000 Mid State residences four times a year. The site has also been opened up to all area and regional businesses for a nominal monthly fee. This package allows for marketing functionality not seen in traditional web sites in addition to allowing participating advertisers to piggy back off of the Coupon Mint brand and aggregate search engine traffic.

Sherman Mohr is CMO of GoLoco Media Group, Inc. He serves as part strategists, implementer, cheerleader for the team, and company brand ambassador. You may email him at sherman at golocomedia dot com.

Direct mail in 370,000 mail boxes for as little as .06 cents?

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GoLoco Media’s acquisition of Coupon Mint Magazine in April 2011 brought print and digital media into a new relationship. One of the highest value propositions in print was discovered to be the detached address label used to mail the 370,000 Coupon Mint Magazines that go out to specific addresses or zones every quarter. With the use of Detached Address Labels, Coupon Mint is able to leave the front cover of its publication, Coupon Mint Magazine completely free for use by cover advertisers.

The detached address label allows advertisers far more real estate for direct mail creative and half postcards sizes do literally cost about .06 cents a mail box delivered.

Check out the presentation below for a complete explanation. Also, note this, if you need a digitally integrated strategy into the postcard, i.e. a Facebook contest, Email promotion, QR code strategies, or anything else digital, we want to assist. The postcard from Coupon Mint may be the best directly targeted vehicle in the Middle TN market today.

Direct Mail in Middle TN and Southern KY for .06 Cents a Mail Box

More PowerPoint presentations from Coupon Mint Magazine

Why Coupon Deals Aren’t Dead

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Why Deals Aren’t Dead–And Why Facebook Will Be Back

By E.B. Boyd

Facebook [1]’s shuttering of its Deals business at the end of August led to a lot of chattering about whether the deals business, as a whole, was doomed. If Facebook couldn’t make a go of it, how could anyone else?

It didn’t help that, just a few days later, Yelp announced it was cutting in half the number of its sales people focused on its own deals product.

But new data from Yipit [2] shows that the deals business is actually growing at a healthy clip. Revenues from the North American market–as well as numbers of deals offered–grew nine percent from July to August. Groupon [3]‘s own revenue grew 13 percent, to $121 million. Annualized, that makes it a whopping $1.5 billion company.

And a series on conversations with experts in this space uncovered the more important lesson from Facebook’s about-face. Conventional wisdom has held that there are low barriers to entry to this business. But as it turns out, there are in fact many pieces to the puzzle of running a successful deals enterprise, and the key ones aren’t so easy to put together. That’s giving some companies–including Groupon, LivingSocial, and even Amazon [4]–a competitive advantage.

Here’s what we learned:

It’s not about the technology

Sure, the deals business emerged because of technology. It couldn’t have happened without the Internet and social commerce. But while technology was necessary for this space to emerge, it’s not the defining piece of the puzzle–especially since the technology portion has largely become commoditized. “I can buy a clone script for $200 from overseas and have my own deals site up and running by the end of the day,” Kris Petersen, founder and CEO of DealsGoRound, a site that lets you resell deals you can’t use [5], tells Fast Company.

So while Facebook might have been seen to have an advantage in this space because it’s the 800-pound gorilla in Silicon Valley these days, technical chops aren’t actually sufficient to guarantee success.

It is about the people

Success in the deals business means getting good deals–deals that are interesting to consumers and useful for merchants. And that means hitting the pavement. Deals might be a flashy new Web 2.0 industry, but it relies largely on a human sales staff knocking on doors, just as much as any old-school publishing business ever did, like alt weeklies or the Yellow Pages.

And it’s not just about charming merchants with a smile and a persuasive tongue. The best deals companies will be the ones that invest in serious analytics to figure out what kinds of deals work best for which kind of merchants. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, just-give-’em-all-50%-off kind of business. The kinds of deals that work best for salons are going to be different than the ones that work for hot air balloon operators. Which makes the sales staff all the more important: They need to sit down with merchants and walk them through how to structure their deals to get the best results.

Groupon gets that. It has a huge number of boots on the ground. According to its revised S-1 filing [6], 50% of the company’s 9,625 employees as of June 30, or approximately 4,800, were on the sales team. (For comparison, only 380 people were on the technology team.) LivingSocial’s staff numbers aren’t public, but it also has said in the past that it is hiring sales people by the boatload [7].

Even Yelp’s shift reflects that understanding. While it might look like Yelp retrenched, because it reduced the number of people working on deals, James Moran, cofounder and COO of Yipit, sees it differently. He tells Fast Company that the thing to pay attention to is the fact that Yelp took a team of 30 salespeople focused on both deals and local ads and assigned 15 people to focus on deals alone–as a way of ensuring that the deals Yelp gets are high-quality ones.

All of which means that, unless Facebook was willing to build a Groupon-sized deals sales team (which it probably was not), deals on the social network were not a sure thing (a miscalculation we, like others, made earlier this year [8]).

Size matters

Much was made of the irregular accounting metric Groupon included in its initial S-1 filing: ACSOI, or “adjusted consolidated segment operating income.” The metric was attacked for leaving out marketing costs. Groupon, for its part, argued that those were initial outlays in acquiring customers–and would not be ongoing costs (and so should not be used to evaluate the company’s prospects).

As it turns out, those initial outlays are now indeed generating returns. In July, Groupon launched a new travel vertical, Groupon Getaways, in partnership with Expedia. In August, the vertical’s first full month of operation, Groupon Getaways made almost $10 million, according to Yipit. Ten million dollars. In its first full month of operation. Instant revenues of that size, says Moran, were only possible because of the massive subscriber base the company had previously built up.

“They didn’t have to run a campaign to grow subscribers,” Moran says. If you were a new company getting into the travel deals space, “you would have difficulty” pulling off a 0-to-60 of that size.

Google and Amazon also have competitive advantages

Big sales staffs and bulging subscriber lists aren’t the only keys to this business. Google and Amazon also have competitive advantages, Moran says.

Google’s big advantage is its insight into your “purchase intent.” It knows what you might be in the market for based on what you search for. Google has long used that insight to power its AdWords business and serve up highly relevant ads. Now Google Offers can leverage that same capability to serve up highly relevant deals.

And relevance is going to become increasingly important. There’s a lot of talk of “deal fatigue” among consumers in this space. But consumers aren’t exhausted by saving money. They’re exhausted from having to sift through too many offers they have no interest in. Companies that can fine-tune the decision matrix that determines which deals you see versus which ones I see will have an advantage over the ones that just dump a ream of offers in your inbox, like so much junk mail.

As for Amazon, people are used to buying stuff from it, so it doesn’t have to overcome the trust hurdle that a newcomer does. Add to that the fact that Amazon already has everyone and their grandmother’s credit cards on file and the fact that it’s an expert in making buying things drop-dead simple. Both of those will enable it to reduce friction at checkout time and thereby increase the number of consumers who go through with a deal.

So it’s probably no surprise that, even though Amazon is new to this space (its AmazonLocal product only launched this summer), it’s showing promising signs. Active in only three markets for the full month of August, the business made $1.4 million that month, making it one of the top performing sites on a market-by-market basis, according to Yipit.

Eventually Facebook will come back

Even Facebook has a natural competitive advantage in the deals space: The social graph. Facebook has already shown the power of friends’ word-of-mouth when it comes to advertising [9]. So it’s natural to assume that friends’ recommendations will have the same influence in getting Facebook users to snap up deals.

The problem though, explains Moran, is that, right now, there isn’t yet the necessary critical mass in usage of deals for Facebook to take advantage of the power of the social graph.

“The average subscriber to Groupon only buys two deals a year,” Moran says. “You probably have a few hundred friends on Facebook. A portion of those are in [the city where you live]. A portion of those are buying deals. So you’re probably only infrequently seeing a friend buying a deal.”

“But it can be a powerful thing,” he continues. “That will happen when [at least] 50 percent of your friends buy deals [in general] and at least some of those people are buying deals every day.”

All of which means Facebook might have taken its Deals program off the shelf. But it hasn’t necessarily tossed it into the trash. (Facebook wouldn’t comment.)

The upshot

All of which is to say, there’s one major lesson to take away from Facebook’s (potentially temporary) exit from this space. Says Petersen: “Deals is not just something you can put in your sidebar and expect to have returns like Groupon or LivingSocial.”

“It’s too soon to conclude that we can all go home,” Moran says. Deals are “going to be transformative to how we buy and sell things locally.”

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com’s Silicon Valley reporter. Twitter [11] | Google+ [12] | Email [13]

Links:
[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/profile/facebook.php
[2] http://blog.yipit.com/2011/09/12/groupon-and-industry-resume-growth-post-record-revenue-in-august/
[3] http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/profile/groupon.php
[4] http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/profile/groupon.php
[5] http://www.fastcompany.com/1738958/the-dealsgoround-app-helps-you-profit-from-groupon-remorse
[6] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/000104746911007178/a2204399zs-1a.htm#dm79801_selected_consolidated_financial_and_other_data
[7] http://sales-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SB130090099092197185/Salespeople-Fuel-Growth-at-Groupon-Living-Social
[8] http://www.fastcompany.com/1749849/why-facebook-deals-marks-a-turning-point-for-the-deals-business
[9] http://www.fastcompany.com/1767275/facebooks-sponsored-performing-twice-as-well-as-standard-ads
[10] http://www.flickr.com/photos/thespis377/3930246596/
[11] http://twitter.com/ebboyd
[12] https://plus.google.com/106082235483426226462/posts?rel=author
[13] mailto:ebboyd@fastcompany.com
[14] http://www.williamkeever.com
[15] http://www.golocomedia.com
[14] http://www.entrepreneurgroup.com