Kerstin Baker-Ash

Mothercare's Not-So-Subtle Upsell

It's that time of the year again when shoppers, tired of the crowds at malls and showering before they go out, turn to the internet for some holiday relief. I'm one of these shoppers (not the un-showered, I like to be clean), and most of my holiday shopping this year will be done in my house with a cup of tea and a credit card. There are lots of little people in our world now, and we're delighted to be doing some gift acquiring for our expanding family in the UK. Mothercare has a great 3 for 2 deal on, and I'm a big fan. 

No surprise that the "interstitial" page takes me to related items for an upsell pitch. As an internet marketer, I think that using upselling pages before checkout are a fantastic idea - it's logical and it's a great way to achieve incremental sales goals. What I don't like is that companies treat consumers like they're idiots online when they're actually pretty savvy. My upsell page from Mothercare was just that:

Okay, so it's not the biggest deal in the world, but I wish that IT people or even search consultants who are the architects of the site taxonomy would use something just a bit less obvious. The subtle play goes down a lot smoother.

The UK Needs Thanksgiving

I live with a mince pie addict, but even he thinks it's a bit gauche to have a Christmas food section up and running at the end of September. You'd get sick of the holly and the ivy, the fruitcake and the stollen well before the leaves started falling off the trees, right?

The UK needs a Thanksgiving. Obviously not the American kind - celebrating freedom from English persecution would be rather silly - but a nice, harvest festival like the Canucks will be celebrating this weekend. Why? The poor Brits have nothing to raise their spirits or keep them going between the August bank holiday (booze, food and rain) and Christmas (booze, food and rain). They wither from the first week of school to the end of December, when a gluttonous week of glory awaits, only to be followed by another four months of food and family binge abstinence.

Thanksgiving doesn't need to have religious connotations, either. It's a multi-faith celebration of food, family and a day off. It doesn't fall during any fasting periods for Muslims or Jews, so gorging on turkey (both halal and kosher) would be okay.

I miss Thanksgiving, living over here. Finding canned pumpkin in the supermarket is beyond impossible, and even if I got my hands on a tin of orange gold I probably couldn't make a pumpkin pie as nice as my grandmother's. And turkeys? The only time we can get them in a store here is in mid-December, and then you can expect to pay upwards of £50 for the sucker (yeah, who's the sucker?).

So, give those poor Limeys a break. Don't let them wallow in misery between August and December. Don't we all deserve a little pumpkin pie in our lives?

Happy Thanksgiving.

I'm Back - And My First Google Streetview "Find"

Not so much with a vengeance this time, but a quiet, September-like whimper. With the holidays upon us (not the Jingle Bell kind), I'll share some of my favorite new year recipes (I cooked up a storm this weekend), some new things going on in my world and also a couple of SEM tips and tricks (I'm trying to keep the blog somewhat SEM-y, you know).

First, I thought I'd kick off the month with "the man that Google didn't erase" - a lovely photo of a man on Streetview whose hands, rather than his face, are blurred to mask identity (perhaps he's a famous hand model?). The unfortunate gentleman appears opposite 42 Eversholt Street (near Euston Station) in what looks akin to an early morning hangover nap:

Curiously, he's photographed across the road from a table dancing venue - perhaps the reason for his early morning stupor?

Misinformation and Idiocy Online

In looking at where my traffic came from yesterday, I was really surprised to see a rather definitive spike in referrals from LSE.co.uk. No, it's not the London School of Economics (that would be cool), but London South East - a trading/speculation site (as far as I can make out) for the stock market. It amazes me the misinformation and idiocy that exists online, and I feel I can be a bit more cutting because the stupidity is well outside of the search engine marketing industry this time.

Flubugg, a member of the site since March of this year who only posts on the Yell boards (that's Yell as in Yell.com, not shouting), picked up my Mysterious Yellow Dot post from last Friday. According to Mr Bugg, that ominous yellow dot spells signals of doom and Google's purchase or domination of the information superstar:

Come on, buddy. Are you for real? In days gone by, Mr Bugg and his friends would be the wiry old witches in the village, divining rainfall and quantities of spring onions using a putrid goose egg and a lock of hair from a firstborn male. Checking the comments just a tad further down, Mr Bugg would have read that Dan suggested it was a bug from take a tour of the new interface - nothing to suggest that Yell and Google were entering into matrimonial bliss. It doesn't mean anything more than someone forgot to re-code a pixel or two.

To be fair, Yell is an AdWords reseller in the UK (as they have been in the US for yonks), but this has been going on for much longer than the yellow dot. In fact, since that little yellow dot has shown up outside of the UK and the US, the theory that it's Yell's presence in Google AdWords (which they do have, but you don't need a dinky little dot to tell you that, just a computer with internet access and knowledge of how a search engine/news site works) is pretty much bunk. But you probably guessed that already...

To clarify, there's no doom and gloom, Mr Bugg and associates. Just a coding error from a lowly engineer. Try not to take that bunny-shaped cloud as a sign of General Motors shares going up. Just sayin'...

Are Vodafone Targeting Cannabis Users?

A bit of an interesting target market there.

I haven't used personalized search on Safari, so it's highly unlikely that this is one of those odd combinations. Perhaps Vodafone should rethink their keyword inventory, or employ some negative match optimization to their keywords? Just a thought...

Holy E-Mails, Incisive!

To the folks at SES and Incisive, thanks for the e-mail list. :) Whoops.