COMPANY NEWS

How LOBSTER.COM Has Used HITSLINK Before, During and After the Re-launch of a Trusted, Old Website

Part 3:  “Dear Santa, Send Claws.”   Evaluating LOBSTER.COM Holiday Traffic and Email Campaigns

Update:    The new LOBSTER.COM website launched at the beginning of the 2009 holiday shopping season and into a very busy marketplace, indeed.    The team at LOBSTER.COM watched the proverbial lobster pot come to a boil, using HITSLINK’s real-time reporting capabilities to monitor results, identify tweaks that could help conversions and to measure the impact of email, paid search and other marketing initiatives. 

In this 3rd part of our 4-part case study, we take an early look at how the team at LOBSTER.COM studied and put to use its HITSLINK data during this intense selling season.   More data and insights will be available in a few weeks and will be presented in our 4th and final installment later this month....

How LOBSTER.COM Has Used HITSLINK Before, During and After the Re-launch of a Trusted, Old Website

PART 2 :   Catch it While It’s Fresh!!!    LOBSTER.COM Re-launches onto the Web

Update:  

The new LOBSTER.COM is now live and open for business selling lobsters, clambakes, and lobster dinner gift certificates online - just in time for the 2009 holiday season.   Launching a new site into a holiday season that started off with the hottest Cyber-Monday in history with a new shopping cart hosted on new servers is not for the faint of heart.   However, with Hitslink’s real-time reports, the team at LOBSTER.COM was able to accelerate the pre-launch testing process and watch the minute-by-minute progress as the new site went live and propagated across the internet.  

In this second part of the case study, we will look at some of the ways Lobster.com used HITSLINK in the launch process and how users are now interacting with the new, more extensive site.   If you missed the first part of this HITSLINK case study,  you can find it here:  LOBSTER.COM Prepares to Shed Its Old Shell

Part 2:  Catch it While It’s Fresh!!!    LOBSTER.COM Re-launches onto the Web
As everyone who has ever designed or redesigned a website knows, the weeks and days leading up to a new site launch become a real pressure cooker – or boiling lobster pot if you prefer, since we are talking about LOBSTER.COM.   The sales and marketing department goes nuts about interminable delays and the IT department pushes back vigorously explaining that it is the marketing department’s constant change requests that are pushing the launch date back.  There’s truth on both sides, of course, but at some point there comes a factor, like the CEO demanding it or the holiday shopping season starting that forces the issue.  

How LOBSTER.COM Used HITSLINK Before, During and After the Re-launch of a Trusted, Old Website

PART 1:  LOBSTER.COM Prepares to Shed Its Old Shell

Background:  

With a name like LOBSTER.COM, it is not too hard to guess what this company does online.   That’s right: They sell lobsters.  Fresh, live Maine lobsters.    Since the late-nineties this simple site has become a favorite destination for people who want to send the gift of a delicious lobster dinner to friends and loved ones far and near.

Recently, the owners of LOBSTER.COM decided it was high time for this humble site take its rightful place in the e-commerce world, with a new site, new logo, and an updated image that reflected the company’s values, and expanded product offerings.

This case study in four parts will chronicle how LOBSTER.COM used HITSLINK at each step of the process of re-launching a major e-commerce site.    It will start with this first part – how to use HitsLink to understand what is happening on the site now and how that information can be used to influence the new design.

"What an exciting milestone for Mozilla, particularly as we are celebrating five years of Firefox this week," said Mitchell Baker, Chair, Mozilla.  "The momentum around Firefox adoption has been truly astounding."

Operating System Usage Market Share for August 2009

With Windows 7 due to go on sale October 22, 2009, NetMarketShare.com is tracking its usage market share at  1.18% with the release candidate made available by Microsoft.

How Effective are the Search Engines?

The landscape of search is becoming more and more fluid of late:

• Baidu is surging in China
• Microsoft Bing will soon power Yahoo search
• Mobile and localized results are becoming increasingly important
• Google's stranglehold on market share is being challenged

FREE New Tool from Net Applications

Bookmark and Share Content Internationally with: www.sharepost.com 

Linux usage share on client devices has surpassed 1% for the first time in our tracking.  Linux has been successful primarily as a server operating system, but client usage share has not kept pace with server share  Linux has reached this important milestone on the client as Linux-based systems have become more functional, easier to use, and pre-installed on computers from vendors like Dell.

Although the iPhone has a commanding lead in mobile browsing share, Android and BlackBerry are rapidly gaining market share.  This does not mean that iPhone web browsing is shrinking, because the overall market is growing rapidly.

Android has garnered over 6% of mobile web browsing since its release in October.

For these and other Net Market Share Statistics, go to netmarketshare.com.

Net Market Share from Net Applications has a new major report group separating mobile internet usage market share from desktop.

We are now reporting on all major smart device platforms, browsers and search engines.  For the first 2 weeks in March 2009, these reports will be available free of charge.

The Windows 7 beta releases in January have led to a spike in usage share.  Similar to Windows Vista, Windows 7 usage share is showing a pattern of being much higher on weekends than on weekdays.  In contrast, Windows XP has an inverse trend line.  XP's share is higher on weekdays due to Microsoft's relatively high business vs. residential share of Windows XP.

Net Applications Operating Systems Usage Market Share shows Mac market share trends in swing states may well predict the coming election.

There is a correlation between Mac usage and party affiliation. Mac users are more likely to be democrats, as we showed in January.

Today marks the beginning of the HitsLink Platinum. We are very excited to be releasing this new level of service to our Partners and clients. HitsLink Platinum development has led to HitsLink features such as:

Firefox from Mozilla turns 5 today, and celebrates by having achieved 25% of the global browser usage market share.  NetMarketShare.com from Net Applications tracks global and local usage market share for browsers, operating systems, search engines and mobile systems.

"What an exciting milestone for Mozilla, particularly as we are celebrating five years of Firefox this week," said Mitchell Baker, Chair, Mozilla.  "The momentum around Firefox adoption has been truly astounding."

There's a new contender in the browser wars, and this is no lightweight. Google has entered the fray with Chrome, its concept of an open-source browser. At first, many will think Google’s Chrome is targeting Microsoft Internet Explorer, along with Firefox from Mozilla, Apple’s Safari and Opera. But, if you probe into Google’s own story behind Chrome, they seem to be positioning it to transform the very way we use a computer.  And, the real target is the very core of Microsoft – Windows and Office:

Net Applications is updating our branding. We call it our "Back in Black" campaign, representing our desire to help our Partners and Customers improve profitability.

Net Applications Global Internet Usage Market Share shows Cuil (pronounced cool) making an early impact versus Google in a key relevancy metric. Cuil is a new search engine created by former Google engineers (http://www.cuil.com). It was released to the public on 7/28. Net Applications has usage share numbers starting the next day. Cuil was able to reach .26% share on the first day we started tracking. However, there have been widespread reports of outages and problems with its search results.

Are they kidding?

Yahoo is reportedly going to try running Google AdSense ads alongside their own natural search results. Let me say that again - Yahoo is going to use Google to try to better monetize their own search engine.

Net Applications has released several updates to our Internet Usage MarketShare site effective today. The updates include: