For this reason, a recent digital marketing insight from Adobe reveals an interesting piece of information regarding how the mobile revolution will shape future online purchases.

Adobe analyzed the 2011 online transactions of more than 140 U.S. retailers which when tallied up amounted to over 16.2 billion transactions.

If you have heard of the term Big Data – this is it!   Once their engineers had done the number crunching it emerged that Tablet Visitors were the pearls worth fighting for.

In one calendar month of 2011, the Christmas period, Tablet Visitors spent over 50% more per purchase and were nearly three times more likely to purchase than Smartphone visitors.

From all accounts, it appears that Tablet Visitors are the big spenders in the mobile sector pushing up Black Friday and Cyber Monday averages by as much as 16% over 2010 levels.

Quite obviously, product research is easier, more streamlined and attractive to Tablet users than those using phones.  In retrospect, this finding seems obvious, but still, these numbers back it up!

There are a few reasons for this development, said Adobe.

“Tablet Visitors are more affluent than other online shoppers and tend to be males.

12% of the U.S. Internet population, or 28 million consumers, own a tablet. Tablet owners skew toward 18- to 34-year-old males and come from households with above average incomes: 29% have an annual household income greater than $75,000.”

The second reason playing into the rise of the Tablet Buyer, is the environment in which the Tablet is used, often less stressful than its Smartphone counterpart.

“Adobe’s analysis shows that 34% of Tablet Visitors shopped on the weekends, compared with 24% and 27% for Traditional and Smartphone Visitors, respectively.

So, what should you do about this?

According to Adobe, these are the key takeaways:

• Don’t develop your website for a general Smartphone market. You will need to cascade your presentation and store displays for separate devices. Oh boy does this not remind one of the browser wars and separate coding for IE and Netscape?

• Tablet Visitors, said Adobe, respond favorably to promotions and deals.   Thus, any online incentive should have a Tablet-specific feel to it, to bait Tablet Visitors.

If you are currently coding your site separately for Tablet specific users let us know!

According to Vanessa Fox, author of Google in the Age of Marketing, her research indicates that when a brand appears in both the organic and paid results, web searchers clicked on the brand 92% of the time, compared to 60% of clicks when the brand appeared in only location. Thus, if you were to shutdown your Google Ad campaign you would most likely see a reduction in SEO leads from natural rankings, too.

Many misinterpret the lead drop-off  (from natural results) to conclude that running Google Ads improves your SEO keyword ranking.  This is definitely not the case.

But, never mind that: What happens AFTER they land on your home page and decide to inquire. Are you connecting the lead to the Ad that spawned it?

This is often one area of weakness for small business owners who run their Ad campaigns on autopilot. There is of course an easy way to solve this issue: It’s called conversion tracking.

“This free tool in AdWords can show you what happens after a customer clicks on your ad (whether they purchased your product or signed up for your newsletter, for example),” said Google.

By doing this you turn data into information and dare we say it: ROI! If you already have a Google Adwords account the steps are relatively straightforward and listed here.  However, it’s worth pointing out one very neat piece of functionality, which dovetails with one of the biggest IT developments, EVER!: The Smartphone revolution.

According to research firms, by 2013 the dominant form of web browsing will take place via a Smartphone. Armed with this fact, don’t’ you think it would be awesome if you could track people who called your company directly from a Google Ad?

Well, you can if you have a mobile website that displays a company phone number.

“Customers with mobile devices can click and call that number. You can track those calls in AdWords and assign a monetary value to them,” said Google.

This is especially useful to a small business who does a lot of business over the phone, or conversely if you do not take orders through your website.

Google provides a concrete example:

You sell car insurance on your website. But many customers who search for “car insurance” want to talk to an insurance agent before they purchase. So, they visit your website on their mobile phone, see a phone number, and call. With Conversion Tracking, this call could be tracked and measured in AdWords. Without it, this important customer segment isn’t counted.

This super-cool feature is outlined in the final step of setting up conversion tracking.

Please let us know if anybody reading this blog has used this feature, we would welcome your comments!

And, if you are heavily reliant on paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) leads from Google Adwords, the odds are high you’re reluctant to reduce your ad spend or shut it down entirely.

That’s why a recent Small Business Experiment by Paul Downs in the New York Times may be very interesting to you.  Mr. Downs is small business owner who contributes regularly for the NYT You’re the Boss series.

He bravely decided to test the impact on current lead generation (and sales) by shutting down his $500 per day Ad campaign for a period of 11 days, which on average, had generated about 3 leads per day (and arguably contributed to $1.8 million in sales over several years.)

While his broad analysis and findings are interesting, including the fact that visitor rates dropped 97% and leads fell off dramatically, there is one particular outcome that is even more illuminating and one he does not appear to fully understand.

“What is surprising to me is the steep drop in organic visits, the clicks from free links. They have fallen 47 percent, from 328 to 173. Stopping the AdWords payments seems to have affected unpaid traffic as well,” said Mr. Downs.

Quite understandably he suspects an algorithmic connection between SEO and SEM, which is something Google has always categorically and unequivocally denied.

He thus concludes: “Why shouldn’t Google boost the free listings of its paying customers — and degrade the results when they stop paying? ”

However, despite his astute research and conclusions, he is largely wrong on this point and may not understand a key metric with regards to how people scan and act upon a search result, paid or organic.

The answer to this vexing question, can be found in the 2010 book, Marketing in the Age of Google, by Vanessa Fox, a former employee at Google renowned for her work in developing Google Webmaster Tools.

“Numerous studies have found that when a site is visible in both paid and organic search results, both results receive more clicks than if either appeared alone,” said Vanessa Fox.   “Studies have found that click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue are all higher when both organic and paid listings appear in the results.”

Therein lies the missing piece of the puzzle for Mr. Sands who did such a sterling job sharing his quantitative findings with us!

If you are  web developer you will undoubtedly recognize the data-model syntax below that is typical to Django:

Source: Django Documentation

Django, an open-source web app framework, written in Python, was first developed inside The World Company Newsroom and was named after guitarist  Django Reinhardt, considered one of the all-time greats.

The original development team wanted to write apps with the least amount of code possible. They basically re-built Python from scratch rather than use existing Python libraries.

“The point of a Web framework in the 21st century is to make the tedious aspects of Web development fast. Django should allow for incredibly quick Web development,” said the Django Team.

One of the most interesting things about Django is its reliance on the PostgreSQL database system to power its backend.

Django pursues a number of general Database API goals within its framework including “execute SQL statements as few times as possible and optimize statements internally.”

It further states:

• The database API should allow rich, expressive statements in as little syntax as possible. It should not rely on importing other modules or helper objects.

• Joins should be performed automatically, behind the scenes, when necessary.

• Every object should be able to access every related object, system-wide. This access should work both ways.

The New York Times built their Interactive geo-app called Represent with Django.

“Using your address as a starting point, Represent figures out which political districts you live in and who represents you at different levels of government,” said The New York Times.

“It draws maps that show how where you live fits into the political geography of the city. And using information collected from around the Web, it presents a customized activity stream that tracks what the people who represent you are doing.”

The NYT said they had chosen Django — despite most of their historical work being done in, Ruby on Rails — because they wanted to use GeoDjango, an add-on that supports geometry fields and extends the ORM to allow spatial queries.

When examining worldwide broadband metrics, broadband penetration is followed by speed or sometimes “capacity”.  In this respect, namely speed, Japan ranks number 1. It must be mentioned that different countries advertise different download speeds when highlighting their broadband pedigree.

“Despite its limitations, speed, usually stated in terms of theoretical or advertised download speed, sometimes upload, has been the basis of measurement in the past decade and it is, in some countries, currently used by governments to define their own national goals—Australia (100Mbps), Austria (25Mbps), Finland, (1 Mbps by 2010, 100 Mbps by 2015), Germany (50 Mbps), Spain (30Mbps), and UK (2Mbps as universal service to 90% of population, 40-50Mbps in broad use),” said Harvard University.

When examining country rankings based on various speed measures the United States hovers at the 11^th position with the UK lagging at 18^th.

The Harvard report also examines some specific peculiarities to the UK, stating that:

… New competitors, increased penetration, and decreased prices. It is also clear that cable offered a competitive alternative as well, although the UK firms have been late, by comparison to other countries, to introduce very high-speed services. Whether the application of a similar open access regime to the cable infrastructure would have encouraged to expand earlier, or whether it would have deterred investments, remains a matter of speculation.

According to the report, the United States was initially about a decade ahead of most OECD countries (including UK) in terms of deregulation, or what Europeans call liberalization, of broadband. This lead has largely been eroded although many studies suggest the U.S. does perform well in terms of e-commerce and online content, which is situated higher up the Infrastructure stack.

For instance, South Korea is considered a leader in broadband infrastructure, mainly because it seems to be freer from regulation and because housing patterns over there favor broadband adoption.

The report also confirms that in 2001 the UK’s per inhabitant penetration was 1/7^th the level of penetration in the United States at the time. In 2006, Britain overtook the United States.

“On the negative side, while BT is planning investments in new, next generation fiber Infrastructure, currently the UK does not have significant fiber to the home or very high speed DSL service. Its sole source of very high speed service is its sole major cable provider, Virgin Media, at 50Mbps,” said Harvard University.

While the U.S. and U.K. governments are moving ahead with stimulus investments in broadband, they are by no means at the top of the list.

This honor falls to Australia, Austria and Canada who form the top three.   Even tiny Luxembourg is ahead of Great Britain and the U.S.

“Observing both longer term and stimulus investments, it appears that the United States has spent more in the stimulus mode than most other nations, but less than the most publicly-funded nations, in particular Sweden, as well as South Korea and Japan,” said Harvard University.

The final analysis

While the UK seems to have the edge over the US in terms of broadband, they both lag the rest of the world in many respects. It would also be dangerous perhaps to suggest that America is a second-rate broadband nation.

The 2011 World Economic Forum global survey ranks the United States first in Internet competition. Through 2010 the number of American subscribers to fiber-based services was more than double that of Europe,” said the New York Times.

However, it must be stated that the above statistic is largely aimed fixed landlines; not the emerging nomadic, wireless revolution, which is sweeping the world.

The NYT also reports  “in Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month. “

“The large European countries have average download speeds ranging from 3.2 Mbps in Italy to 6.4 Mbps in Germany, according to a study by the Saïd Business School at Oxford. The United States has an average speed of 5.2 Mbps. The study looked at speeds in May 2008, as measured by consumers checking their connections on a Web site called Speedtest.net.”

In conclusion, there can be no doubt that over the last decade or so US broadband performance has declined while the opposite is true for the UK.  However, the US is very aware of this gap and intends closing it through its National Broadband Plan and by adopting similar monitoring activities to the UK’s Ofcom, with respects a national broadband map.  Unfortunately, these efforts may not be nearly enough.

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Guest Blogger: Jason Stevens from jason-stevens.com / Freelance web developer, tech writer and follower of cloud computing trends. Follow him on Twitter @_jason_stevens_

*UK2.net reserve the right to agree or disagree with our guest bloggers. Call it freedom of speech, but our guest bloggers are entitled to have an opinion. If you wish to agree or  disagree, then feel free to leave a comment. Thanks for visiting our blog! If you wish to become a Guest Blogger for UK2, please contact our marketing department.

“The most widely noted critique of the OECD per 100 rankings is that they penalize the United States, which has larger households than other countries,” said the Harvard Report.

“These critiques, whether well founded or not in theory, make little difference for assessing U.S. performance in the medium term given the fact that the U.S. occupies the same position if measured in terms of household penetration.”

With research firm Gartner Inc. predicting that web access from a Smartphone phone will surpass both laptops and desktops by 2013 it’s also worth considering where the UK and the US stand in terms of mobile broadband.

In terms of 3G the United States ranks 19^th with the UK well ahead in 10^th place. Japan, South Korea and Australia hold the top three positions.

“South Korea is a leading performer across all measures: leading household penetration, second on 3G, in the top quintile for per 100 inhabitants, and 7th for Wi-Fi Hotspots. Japan leads in 3G and is a top quintile performer for household penetration, but has lower results on per 100 inhabitants, and very low results on hotspot,” said Harvard University.

The table below puts the above into perspective, taking into account Wi-Fi hotspots and 3G rankings.

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Guest Blogger: Jason Stevens from jason-stevens.com / Freelance web developer, tech writer and follower of cloud computing trends. Follow him on Twitter @_jason_stevens_

*UK2.net reserve the right to agree or disagree with our guest bloggers. Call it freedom of speech, but our guest bloggers are entitled to have an opinion. If you wish to agree or  disagree, then feel free to leave a comment. Thanks for visiting our blog! If you wish to become a Guest Blogger for UK2, please contact our marketing department.

Last month, I hopped on a plane from Houston to London to attend Cloud Expo Europe. Because I was more or less “in the neighborhood” of our newest data center in Amsterdam, I was able to take a short flight to The Netherlands to do some investigatory journalism … err … “to visit the AMS01 team.”

Is AMS01 worthy of the SoftLayer name? … How does it differ from our US facilities? … Why is everything written in Dutch at the Amsterdam airport?

The answers to my hard-hitting questions were pretty clear: SoftLayer’s Amsterdam facility is absolutely deserving of the SoftLayer name … The only noticeable differences between AMS01 and DAL05 are the cities they’re located in … Everything’s written in Dutch because the airport happens to be in The Netherlands, and people speak Dutch in The Netherlands (that last question didn’t get incorporated into the video, but I thought you might be curious).

Nearly every aspect of the data center mirrors what you see in WDC, SEA, HOU, SJC and DAL. The only differences I really noticed were what the PDUs looked like, what kind of power adapter was used on the crash carts, and what language was used on the AMS facility’s floor map. One of the most interesting observations: All of the servers and power strips on the racks used US power plugs … This characteristic was particularly impressive to me because every gadget I brought with me seemed to need its own power converter to recharge.

When you see us talking about the facilities being “the same,” that’s not a loosely used general term … We could pull a server from its rack in DAL05, buckle it into an airplane seat for a 10-hour flight, bring it to AMS01 (via any of the unique modes of Amsterdam transportation you saw at the beginning of the video), and slide it into a rack in Amsterdam where we could simply plug it in. It’d be back online and accessible over the public and private networks as though nothing changed … Though with Flex Images making it so easy to replicate cloud and dedicated instances in any facility, you’ll just have to take our word for it when it comes to the whole “send a server over to another data center on a plane” thing.

While I was visiting AMS01, Jonathan Wisler took a few minutes out of his day to give a full tour of the data center’s server room, and we’ve got video and pictures to share with more shots of our beautiful servers in their European home. If there’s anything in particular you want to see from AMS01, let us know, and we’ll do our best to share it!

-@khazard

P.S. Shout out to the SLayers in the Amsterdam office who offered their linguistic expertise to add a little flair to the start of the video … From the four employees who happened to be in the office when I was asking for help, we had six fluent-language contributions: English, Italian, French, Dutch, Polish and German!