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Consumers are buying smartphones at an accelerating pace and using them for more diverse activities, such as consuming media, doing their taxes and shopping. Mobile is revolutionizing the way consumers learn about, choose, and buy products of all types. But with this burgeoning popularity, firms are struggling to keep up, as small screens and limited input options inhibit the design and delivery of excellent mobile experiences.

So what’s the secret to creating and delivering excellent mobile products that consumers will embrace? The answer is consumer convenience. Consumers will embrace new products and services if they are fundamentally more convenient that is to say, if the benefits outweigh the inhibitors to adoption and usage.

In mobile, convenience will come in the form of services that off er immediacy and simplicity through a highly contextual experience.  is means delivering mobile services or content when consumers need it the most, ensuring services are easy to use, and making sure the content is relevant to the individual.

Shoppers’ Mobile Context in Mobile Commerce: context is defined as the sum total of everything your consumer has shared with you to date as well as what he or she is experiencing at the moment of engagement. Context primarily involves the use of information about the consumer, such as location, time of day, or past behavior, to personalize or tailor experiences to minimize steps and manual entries.

Companies will need to anticipate what their customers want to happen when they launch an app or mobile web site, and, to do so, they must consider their consumers’:

Situation: the current location, altitude, environmental conditions, and speed the customer is experiencing. As navigation is three-dimensional and involves direction, these specifics will help create a truly tailored experience. For instance, knowing a customer’s altitude can help identify what floor he’s on in a hotel or mall.

Preferences: the history and personal decisions the customer has shared with you or with his social networks.

Attitudes: the feelings or emotions implied by the customer’s actions and logistics.

For many, the use of context in the delivery of mobile services is not yet in play. Beyond using GPS for location-based  context to help consumers find the nearest “x” (ATM, gas station, store), most simply lack the staff expertise or do not view mobile context strategy as a top priority.

But by integrating location into the research purchase processes, some e-business professionals are making sophisticated use of context. For instance, in retail, companies are pushing alerts and offers based on location through geofencing technologies (that is, to within a specific geographic area). However, few leverage location beyond guiding consumers to their bricks and mortar stores, and even this still poses a challenge.

Richer Information: But over the next several years, contextual information is going to get a lot richer as mobile devices grow in popularity.  is combination means organizations must develop a mobile context strategy if they expect to build consumer loyalty and remain competitive. Building highly contextual experiences will be a journey, as organizations evolve their expertise. This development can be mastered throughout four phases of contextual evolution:

Basics: using location, time of day, and past behavior or preferences when delivering mobile services. But access to this
type of information is straightforward on smartphones (with the user’s permission) and should be the first tool to leverage when moving toward the use of context for improved experiences.

Layering in intelligence: the most sophisticated firms already can determine if a customer is in their store, in a competitor’s store, or at the customer’s home. But reaching this phase requires creating new back-end data and logic, without encroaching on a consumer’s sense of privacy. For example, if a firm offers variable or regional pricing, as a number of retail and grocery chains do, what price does it present to a customer in the store versus a web shopper who may just be considering a purchase?

Breaking PC context: The smartphone is not just a mini-PC; it’s a personal and intimate device that knows unique attributes of its user. And the merger of the physical and information worlds will take one giant step forward here when new sensor technologies are combined with sophisticated display and video elements. In this phase, the phone becomes an opportunity to deliver entirely new innovative services and products that have the potential to generate revenue. For example, sensors and other advancements will detect smells, enabling a grocery store to demonstrate to mobile shoppers that its produce is ripe. While the mobile device can act like a PC, it has the potential to do much more.

Motion as control mechanism:Phones today can already be controlled with motion, like Sony Ericsson’s motion
sensor that lets a user shake the phone to change a music track, or the phone’s screen orientation. So what will be different in three to five years? First, the motion-detecting  sensors will be on a single chip with a common programming layer that will make them easier to use in applications.

Second, digital experiences will move well beyond the current paradigms of web browsing. Online tasks today are broken down into steps laid out in page sequences, menus, and navigation bars. Consumers will still buy airplane tickets or make payments on their phones, but they’ll do so more simply—with tools like voice-based control and authentication. While companies will move at different paces through these phases, depending on business strategy, mobile objectives, industry sector and mobile philosophy, for all e-business professionals it’s time to be proactive. For each of these four phases, there are three highlevel steps to consider: information architecture, designing new services that take advantage of context, and testing the impact of those experiences to improve the customer experience.

It will be important for e-business teams to take a leadership role when enabling these steps, as context will open up new opportunities to influence purchase decisions and increase conversions and drive sales—but only if realtime data is available, content and information are properly tagged, and the proper relationships and road maps are in place with key partners. For example, a retailer must not only know where a competitor’s store is, to identify when a shopper is in the rival’s store, but must designate that retailer as a competitor.

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When you’re tracking the performance of online ad campaigns, what data should you be looking at? Let’s examine the most important metrics for both PPC and display advertisers.

Impressions: How many times was your ad displayed? That’s the impressions metric, which is key for CPM display advertising; the more impressions, the more people who were exposed to your ad.

Impressions are also important for PPC advertising. You need your ad to be displayed before it can be clicked; the more impressions you get for your ads, the more clicks you’ll theoretically generate.

Obviously, when it comes to impressions, more is better. If your ad or campaign is generating a low number of impressions, you won’t get your message across—or generate a lot of clicks.

There are a number of ways to increase the number of impressions an ad receives. This may be as simple as increasing your ad budget or raising your bids on selected keywords; higher bidders get more and better ad placements. You can also increase your impressions by selecting higher-traffic or more appropriate websites for your ads. Improving the performance of the keywords you select will increase your impressions. That might mean changing from inexact to exact
matching or even selecting a different set of keywords for a particular ad.

Clicks: How many times was your ad clicked? That’s the clicks metric, key to PPC advertising; the more clicks, the more traffic you have to your landing page. Of course, you can’t get a lot of clicks if you don’t start with a lot of impressions, so that’s always job one. But a large number of impressions doesn’t always result in a large number of clicks; if your ad isn’t interesting or compelling, people won’t be inspired to click it.

For text ads, you should include more powerful words in your copy, make sure you talk about your unique selling proposition, and include a compelling call to action. For display ads, consider changing your image, including animation,
and adding other rich media content.

Click-through rate: A better measurement of ad effectiveness, is the click-through rate (CTR). This metric measures the number of clicks as a percentage of the number of impressions. A high CTR indicates that your ad is doing its job; a low CTR indicates that you need to retool your ad copy. CTR is totally independent of the number of impressions your ad receives. This enables advertisers on a budget to compare the effectiveness of their ads against big-budget competitors.

Percent of clicks served: When looking at the performance of individual ads within an online ad campaign, take a gander at the percent of clicks served metric. This data point tells you which ads in an ad group are getting the most displays. It divides the number of impressions for a given ad by the total number of impressions for all the ads in the ad group.

An ad with a higher percent of clicks served number is outperforming the other ads in the campaign; an ad with a lower number is underperforming the other ads.

Average position: In what position was your ad displayed on a search engine’s results pages? That’s the average position for an ad, and higher is always better. The higher an ad’s position, the more clicks the ad will get and the more traffic that ad will drive to your landing page. Advertisers are always striving for higher positions—to a point. You don’t
want to outspend your campaign by bidding to achieve one of the top two positions.

Cost: How much have you paid in total for a given keyword, ad, or campaign? That’s the cost metric—as in, this item cost you this much money over a specific time frame. Note that your cost for an ad campaign will never exceed your specified budget. In fact, it most often will come in under your budget, as you won’t always be the high bidder on all the keywords you choose.

Conversions: Next, we come to the topic of conversions. A conversion occurs when someone clicks your ad and then proceeds to purchase what you’re selling, or otherwise do what you want them to do.

Conversions—The total number of actions taken by people who clicked your ad. Conversions can never exceed clicks.
■ Cost per conversion—How much each conversion cost you.
■ Conversion rate—The number of conversions divided by the number of clicks.
■ View-through conversions—Tracks the number of conversions that happen within 30 days of a customer clicking your ad.  The assumption here is that just viewing your ad can lead to a sale some time later; the sale doesn’t have to happen immediately after the ad is served.

Customer engagement: Customer engagement revolves around the concept that the more you can engage the customer with your product or brand, through your advertising or other online activities, the more you enhance your brand identity and ultimately the more products you sell. Customer engagement is particularly important when you’re doing rich media advertising—especially ads with an interactive component. That is, you want consumers to listen to your audio pitch, watch your video, click your buttons or other interactive components, and so on.

Revenue: All of this brings us to our final advertising-related metric: revenue. If you’rein the business of selling products or services online, what really matters is how many sales result from your advertising campaign. Impressions and clicks and even customer engagement are fine, but dollars pay the bills.

Now, your ad network probably doesn’t directly track the sales resulting from your ads. That’s okay. You can do that yourself because you know what you sell and who you sell it to. Your job is to tie each sale to the ad that generated it. You want to know which ads generated the most sale revenue. That’s how you tell which ads are truly successful.

even if all you do is image-oriented display advertising, you still want to track revenue over the course of a campaign. Ultimately, you’re advertising to build your brand and increase your sales.

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Mobile email came about at the same time WAP did, because the first mobile email clients used WAP to render emails. Mobile email was a luxury many people didn’t use on smaller phones, because of the difficulty viewing the email on the
small screen and the lack of a complete keyboard to respond with. As PDAs and smart phones came out with full QWERTY keyboards, more people began taking advantage of mobile email. Mobile email marketing hasn’t really changed much in
all the years it has been around.

Many mobile email clients have difficulty rendering full-HTML emails.You can do a couple things to improve how your email looks on mobile phones. The first mobile emails were simply text renderings of whatever came into your email box. This meant that if you received a text email from someone you knew, it rendered well, but if you received a marketing email from a company, the phone simply rendered the HTML as text, making the mobile version of the email almost totally useless. Many phones still are limited to the simplified text rendering of HTML that was present in the first mobile emails.

The most recent evolution of mobile email marketing came with the iPhone, truly offering a flexible rendering that looks exactly as it would on a traditional computer when displayed on the iPhone. This meant that recipients finally could get the full impact (almost) of the email marketing message when they were on the mobile phone, with the exception of having to zoom. The email marketing industry has not yet put significant effort into making emails more readable and compelling to mobile viewers on other types of phones.

When sending mobile marketing emails, keep these points in mind:

-Include a link at the top of the email to a Web version of the email, in case people are having trouble viewing the email on their mobile phones. From this landing page, you can use browser detection and redirection to automatically send viewers to a version of the email that is optimized for their device.Also, if you include phone numbers in the text of your email, they will automatically become clickable when they are displayed on a mobile phone. If your campaign relies heavily on people calling in, it is important to include the phone number at the top of the email.

-Including your main navigation can cause problems in mobile rendering, because the buttons could be stacked vertically instead of horizontally, pushing all the promotional information lower, usually “below the fold” that the user can see when first opening the email. In the worst case, the link to each button and the path to each image will be displayed as HTML, pushing all the readable (non-HTML) content far down in the email. It is always a good idea to avoid including your main navigation in your email messages. Even in traditional email campaigns, many experts believe that it can take away from the main messaging of the email and distract the recipient from the main call to action.

-Even if you have not gotten your email campaign to render perfectly on all devices, you should loop email in to help promote your integrated efforts and your mobile offerings.Make sure your email campaign imagery and messaging reinforce the look and feel of the rest of the campaign. Then include links and screen shots of any mobile offerings, such as mobile applications,mobile coupons, or your mobile website. This will catch the viewer’s eye and help her understand the value you bring to the mobile interaction. Once your email recipients request mobile downloads or coupons, you will have the opportunity to add them to your list of people who are opted in for mobile communication.

-Many people have email addresses that are specific to their phone, but in the rest of the world,mobile phones usually just pull in copies of messages that were sent to a traditional email address. When an email address is set up on an Exchange Server, users can automatically sync any activity that takes place on the email address, such as deleting or saving emails. If the email account is not set up on an Exchange Server, recipients are forced to delete and save emails twice, to maintain consistency of the account between devices.As phones improve, many email recipients are switching to Web-based email services, to avoid this burden.

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Twitter metrics, fairly simple to keep track of some top-line data of your Twitter users

-Number of followers: How many people are following you, and how is that growing over time? Your goal should be 1,000 Twitter followers, and your Twitter following should be growing at about 9 percent per month.

-Speed of growth: Track when the followers started following you. Twitter should send you an email detailing this information. Steady growth can mean a brand with strong, consistent awareness. Growth spurts can mean that people started following you based on their interest in one specific post that may or may not be characteristic of your other tweets.

-Number of questions and comments: Track the number of times people directly contact you with a question or comment.

-Are you listed: Twitter users can organize the people they follow into lists. These offer a way to group together the people one follows on Twitter so the user can get an overview of what they’re up to: one list might be for a user’s family members, another for work colleagues, another for businesses or an industry they follow. While lists do not necessarily suggest that you are being closely followed, they do show that someone is interested enough in you to segment your tweets into a group with like-minded tweeters. To see how many lists you are part of, click the “lists” link in the upper right-hand corner of your Twitter home page. While there is no simple way to increase the likelihood that someone will add you to a list, providing consistent and interesting tweets may help that to happen.

-Re-tweets: On average, a business tweets about 4.5 times per day. Measure how often and what types of messages that you post on Twitter are re-tweeted. People retweet messages that interest them, and that they think will interest others. To measure this, look at the right-hand side of your Twitter home page and click on the “Re-tweet” link. Click on the tab that says “your tweets, re-tweeted” and you can get an idea of your most popular tweets.

For some businesses, having every third tweet re-tweeted is the norm. You and use this metric to track  re-tweets, and
watch for the types of tweets that are re-tweeted. For other businesses, followers will not re-tweet messages often, but , what is most important to notice is what types of topics get the most re-tweets. These are the types of messages that are likely to be resonating with many customers, and they give you an idea of what topics to focus on in future tweets.

-Business  mentions: While on your Twitter home page, click on the link with your username preceded by the “@” symbol; on our page, it would be @smlbizsmarts. This shows you all the times people tweet about your brand.

-Response to special offers: Send out “special offers” via Twitter, and count the number of people mentioning Twitter. Can use coupons to attract visitors to the marketplace, and these coupons are offered primarily via Twitter. Use coupon-tracking codes so that you can see how quickly the customer redeemed the coupon and where they used it. Additionally,  you will  find that people re-tweet these offers, so the coupon spreads virally, which should be the goal of any promotion.

Leads: Track sales from people who mention they follow you on Twitter.

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There are many ways a seller can be scammed online and online fraud for merchants is just as big a problem as the various forms of online fraud that plague consumers. The most obvious effect is that you have paid out money for a transaction that is not legitimate. In addition, some credit card processors charge penalties to merchants that are the victim of credit card fraud per fraudulent transaction.

Type of Online Fraud: There are, unfortunately, several different ways that dishonest users can scam you online. Here are a few of the possible situations that an online merchant might encounter:

The buyer claims not to receive an item. A customer purchases an item from you. You ship it to the customer. The customer then claims that he never received the item and asks for a refund. If you refund the money, you’re out the cost of the item plus the purchase price—and the scammer has a brand new item obtained at no cost.

The buyer claims an item is not as described. This is a similar scam to the “item not received” scam. The customer purchases an item from you, you ship the item, and then the customer claims that the item isn’t what was described. It’s used instead of new, the wrong size, doesn’t have the features promised, or otherwise not what she ordered. To pacify the customer you issue a full or partial refund, which puts you out the cost of the original item plus the cost of the refund. The scammer, of course, has a nice new product at no cost or at a reduced price.

The buyer claims an item was damaged in shipment. This is a variation of the “not as described” scam. You ship to the customer the item purchased, and then the customer claims that the item was damaged in transit. Rather than dealing with the shipping service, you issue a full or partial refund. (Or maybe you issue a refund in advance, anticipating
settlement from the shipping service.) The scammer gets an undamaged item at a substantial discount.

The buyer pays with a stolen credit card or a hijacked bank account. The previous scams are all pretty much one-time affairs.  A much more damaging form of fraud comes from professional identity theft, where a criminal steals a customer’s credit card or debit card, or somehow hijacks the customer’s bank account. The criminal then uses the stolen data or information to make one or more purchases, typically large ones, from you (and presumably other merchants). It looks like a standard transaction from your end and you ship the merchandise—typically to a fake address (known as a freight forwarder) set up just for the purpose of receiving illegally obtained merchandise. (The merchandise is then typically fenced or resold by other criminal rings.) When the original consumer—the one who was ripped off—notices the fraudulent account activity and makes a formal complaint, the consumer’s credit card company or bank initiates a chargeback against you to recover the consumer’s funds. This activity typically results in you being out the cost of the fraudulently obtained merchandise, and having the sales price for said items deducted from your credit account.

Identity theft. Identity (ID) theft isn’t just for individuals. Many businesses find that criminals somehow obtain usernames, passwords, and other information that lets them either hack into their accounts or systems or make purchases while pretending to be someone authorized by your business. In the best-case scenario (and it’s not so good),
the thieves order various items and you pay for them. In the worst-case scenario, the criminals hack into your internal systems and wreak havoc, up to and including stealing your customers’ personal data and shutting down your systems and servers. It’s not something you want to happen.

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Launch big google adwords campaigns with ad groups. It’s Google’s way of dividing your Adwords campaigns into discrete, manageable chunks. With ad groups, you can deploy a single ad for any number of keywords, including dozens or hundreds at a time. Separating your keywords into sets is the only reasonable way to make sense of your campaign’s results as a whole while keeping an eye on how individual keywords are performing.

With the Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool has noticed that keywords tend to divide themselves into natural cliques, as it were. If you sell shaving supplies, a keyword list could include the terms shaving supplies, find shaving supplies, buy shaving supplies, and where to get shaving supplies. Further down the list you might see another set of keywords that share a different theme, such as learn to shave, shaving tips, and how to shave. These groups of keywords belong together and do not warrant separate marketing strategies within each group. That is where ad groups come into play. An ad group page on the Google AdWords website, displaying all the individual keywords within the ad group.

Ad groups let you focus on the intent of users, or the reason they are typing in the search. Grouping keywords by the intent of the searcher allows you to focus on ads that make the most sense for each group. Using the shaving keywords mentioned earlier as an example, you could create one ad group campaign for the people who are just looking for supplies by emphasizing your wide variety and sterling inventory. For the people who want to learn how to shave, you could make an entirely different ad group campaign that emphasizes your shaving manuals and vast array of handsome starter kits. Ad groups let you create a customized ad for every common intention for your product or service and to create landing pages that cater specifically to those needs.

When you throw a lot of keywords into a single group, it might not be immediately clear which ones are really driving the traffic and which ones are dead weight. More importantly, if you have too many keywords in one group, Google lowers your Quality Score, penalizing you for the extremely highimpression volume of your campaigns. Google loves specificity, and the same holds true in the design and deployment of ad groups. This is why most people recommend capping each group at a couple dozen keywords. Too many terms, and your group will lose its focus, and with it, its Quality Score.

Conducting split tests is one way to refine your ad groups and make sure they perform well. A split test is basically an experiment in which you isolate different factors in an ad group—such as keywords, match types, landing pages, or ad
language—and see what performs best. For instance, you could split one ad group into two smaller ad groups and see which performs better, or you could make separate landing pages for two identical ad groups and see which page results in more conversions.

Instead of having one big list of keywords and making custom ads for each one, ad groups let you take all the similar search terms and treat them as a single keyword with one unifying landing page.

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If you do not want to use PayPal’s hosted checkout, then you must make use of their PayPal API integration features into your website. These APIs link data from your website to the PayPal system in real time, thus providing a constant connection between your site and PayPal. Unless you’re using a third-party shopping cart, this adds another level of complexity.

API-based solutions keep customers on your website throughout the checkout process. PayPal does the payment processing, and then sends the resulting information back to your site or to a third-party checkout system, if that’s what you’re using for completion and display.

If you’ve developed and are hosting your own shopping cart and checkout pages, the API programming is more involved than simply inserting a few lines of HTML code into a web page. The API functions must be incorporated within the code or script that retrieves information from the customer, sends that information to PayPal, calls the appropriate PayPal function, and then returns the processing information back to your website for display and further use. As such, API programming is not for the technically inexperienced; you’ll need a qualified developer to do the appropriate programming on your website.

With any of PayPal’s API-based options, you must do a bit more programming, as you have to build your own checkout
pages and integrate a custom or third-party shopping cart solution. But using PayPal’s APIs lets you keep the customer on your site, with only the customer’s payment and shipping information flying back and forth to PayPal for processing. The customer stays on the branded checkout page you designed and is still on your site in case he wants to buy anything else.

PayPal products that utilize API integration include

• Website Payments Pro, an all-in-one payment solution that functions as both a merchant account and a payment gateway.
• Payflow Pro, which uses PayPal APIs to provide a payment gateway between your existing merchant credit card account and PayPal, so you can process credit card transactions online.
• Express Checkout, which is typically used with another PayPal service (such as Website Payments Pro and Payflow Pro) and gives users with PayPal accounts a streamlined experience.

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How  Geographic Information Systems Work? GIS tools offer a way for analysts to work with enormous amounts of data in a very logical and structured way. These decision tools are designed to work with spatial data, which is data that pertains to latitude and longitude as well as elevations and road networks. The tools are typically used to present information back to the business as thematic maps, as compared to reports or spreadsheets. These spatial data sets vary in size but are typically very large, and include information from many varied sources. GIS tools provide a way of visualizing the data you are working with.

There are many different types of mapping tools, from those found on Internet sites to more advanced types like Google Maps and MapQuest, which can give road networks. The top GIS toolsets used globally are MapInfo and ESRI Arc GIS. General Electric, for one, has selected the tools from ESRI, which include ArcInfo and Arc GIS, among others. ESRI is one of the most advanced GIS solutions available on a global basis. There are ranges of complexity within each product, from simple mapping to topographical layered dissections and everything in between. GIS is an advanced tool, which requires special training, especially in how to present the best map to the business. When using these tools, it is very easy to overcomplicate the maps with too much information.

GIS Layers of Information: Building a Map, Layer by Layer: There is a set process to building a map in a GIS tool, which involves developing layers. Each layer has similar information, such as zip codes, road networks, boundary files, parks, rivers, and lakes. For example, layer 1 may have an outline of a state, layer 2 might be the zip codes in that state, layer 3 might be the roads, and finally layer 4 might be an overlay of the national parks. You may have experienced this while looking for a hotel online: The sites display maps and points that represent hotels and restaurants, as well as roads. As the layers are placed one on top of the other, the picture takes shape, with each layer representing a different level of data.

Retail and Location: For GIS tools to function, the locations and addresses are converted into latitudes and longitudes that represent precise points on a map. Using latitudes and longitudes, it is possible to calculate exact distances between two points on a map. With some advanced software, the actual drive time can also be defined. Before retailers can use many of the functions in GIS tools, they have to convert store addresses into mapping coordinates. This process is called geocoding, or batch geocoding if you are converting a large set of data. This simply means the GIS software converts addresses into geographic codes that can be read by the software. I provide a few examples of how GIS tools have been used as well as the types of data that is bought into GIS tools.

Many retailers do not have the resources to develop all the data points required to produce detailed maps, data such as road networks, competitive locations, rivers, and bridges. These points make a map more of a strategic tool, rather than just a nice graphic.

Retailers typically buy competitive location data from companies that sell retail location data. A retailer could buy data showing the locations of all of its competitor’s stores, including store size and the number of employees. With this information, the retailer could produce a map of all of its stores in relation to the competitor’s locations. This would be considered one layer.

Next, the retailer would buy population data, which is available in many forms from various sources. Most third-party sources for population data will group the data to some aggregate level such as block group, zip code, postal code, or carrier route before selling it. Population by postal code would be another layer.

Among the most sought after are household income levels and competitor sales. Sales estimates for retailers in mass merchandise, supercenter, and grocery stores are critical in estimating share of wallet and market share at the mapping location. Depending on the classification of trade (SIC code), other sources of data are available, such as National Purchase Diary for apparel retailers. Each of these would be a subsequent layer.

A varied level of road network data (including major roads like freeways and urban neighborhood roads) is available, depending on your country or region. Again, more layers.

Each of these data sources would be considered a separate layer that would be presented on a map produced by a GIS tool. As you can see, the level of complexity is compounded with each new layer added to the map.

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Various sites send traffic to our website. The referring site is part of the default data an analytics tool collects. To add more context to a visit, we need to embed meaning in the page that the analytics system can later extract. This is called page tagging or tagging content for web monitoring.

1.The browser requests a page from the web server.
2. The web server returns the page, which contains a reference to a piece of JavaScript provided by the analytics service.
3. The JavaScript is retrieved from the service. In some cases, it may already be cached on the browser or built into the page itself.
4. The analytics service returns the JavaScript to the browser.
5. The browser executes the JavaScript, which collects information about the page request.
6. The JavaScript puts this information into an HTTP request, often for a tiny image. All of these attributes are sent to the analytics service.
7. The service responds with a small object (which can be ignored).

The magic of page tagging happens in step 5, in which the JavaScript collects information to send back to the analytics service. This information includes:

-Information about the technical environment, such as screen resolution, referring URL, or operating system.

-Information about the visitor, such as a cookie that uniquely identifies her and lets the analytics service stitch several pages together into a visit.

-Information within the page itself that provides business context. For example, a retailer might tag a page with “shoes” if it offers shoes for sale. Or it might indicate whether the ad the user saw was part of a specific campaign.

By recording not only technical data on the visit, but also business context, the analyst can then segment outcomes with this context. He can see whether one campaign works better than another, or whether users who buy shoes ultimately buy jackets.

It’s also a full-time job, with large organizations often having entire departments devoted to tagging, experimentation, and reporting. Analytics is still changing, particularly around the integration of other data sources and around the move away from page-centric websites.

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Mobile affiliate marketing helps the buyer find the brand or seller and helps the affiliate and brand or seller earn money.

Affiliate marketing is a unique form of marketing in which other companies agree to help you sell your product or drive traffic to your website, in return for a portion of the profits from each sale they send. Commissions can be paid based on clicks, sales, or leads or acquisitions. In some cases, affiliates are referred to as “partners” because they are acting in the best interest of both parties. If you are on a website and are interested to see if they have an affiliate marketing program, links to the programs are usually included in the footer at the bottom of the site.

All the traditional affiliate programs should work on true Webbrowsing phones that are capable of passing cookies, but since not all mobile phones are capable of passing cookies, it can be a risky proposition. If you believe that you may be passing a lot of affiliate traffic from visitors on mobile phones, it might be a good idea to set up an alternate form of tracking, such as passing a variable in the URL, to ensure that you are getting full credit for all of the mobile traffic. No major mobile-only retail affiliate programs have been developed or aggressively marketed yet but this will no doubt change as mobile tracking improves.

The most likely avenue for more mainstream affiliate marketing will be as a part of a mobile comparison-shopping or product engine such as Amazon or eBay.

In some cases, it might make sense for your company to start its own mobile affiliate program. An affiliate program is a good way to fill in the gaps in your existing marketing strategy and can be a boon for many companies. A mobile affiliate program creates the potential for an army of marketers working to promote your products, who are paid only when they successfully pass traffic or sales to your site (much like being paid on a 100% commission basis). The commissions you pay your affiliates will never cost as much as it might cost to hire employees to do the job that your affiliates have done for you.

An affiliate network can also help drive natural search traffic because it ensures that your competitors’ websites are pushed lower in the search results by your affiliate websites that rank for your key terms and point back to your site for the final sale. The one thing you have to be careful about here is to make sure your affiliates are not doing a better job of ranking for top key terms than you are. If they are, you will be paying out more commission than necessary. Similarly, if you are bidding on brand-related terms in PPC, it might be a good idea to create a list of keywords that your affiliates are not allowed to bid on, because the increased competition will only make all the PPC clicks more expensive.

The most important element of creating a successful mobile affiliate program to promote mobile content is ensuring that tracking codes are set up properly so that each affiliate gets credit for all the sales and traffic it produces. Affiliate sales are generally tracked though unique affiliate codes that are created for each affiliate and passed in the URL as a parameter rather than in a cookie, because some mobile browsers have trouble with cookies. In some cases (this is becoming much more rare), mobile browsers have trouble passing parameters, so the tracking is lost, but this is generally a more mobile friendly method of tracking than using JavaScript or cookies.

The next problem is that some phones are better equipped for mobile e-commerce  than others. If your affiliate program is paying out for click-throughs, but visitors are having trouble completing a transaction when they are on your website, the cost of the click-throughs will start to add up.When this happens, the return on investment (ROI) will be low or negative because no sales are being made.

The same is true of acquisition sites that are seeking only to collect email addresses or phone numbers so that people can be marketed to later (that is, the affiliate isn’t selling a product or service, per se; the affiliate is simply collecting information for your company to use later for marketing purposes). If people have problems filling out the form on their mobile phones, the acquisition and the commission are both lost. If these two hurdles are affecting your mobile affiliate program, consider paying only for effective and complete conversions and don’t include click-throughs as a commissioned conversion.