Mobile Commerce, Twitter to Save E-Comm Sales? - Page 2

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Fulgoni also cautioned e-tailers and online marketers on putting too much emphasis on clicks versus branding.

"I'm going to get on my soap box here, we've done a lot of work on understanding the right metrics to use to evaluate campaigns, whether branding or direct, and you have to be careful about using the click. If you're doing anything in a branding sense, the click is irrelevant.

"You need to look at view through, the number of impressions, how they're driving site visitors, the latency impact, the degree to which its driving trademark search queries, incremental sales. If you're not taking into account latency and incremental sales, you're understating your ROI by a factor of four or five," he said.

Twitter as hockey stick

On the social commerce front, the comScore chief advised using sites such as Twitter for branding purposes, as the demographic is appealing.

"It's a classic hockey stick. Twitter grew from April of last year to this year by 3,000 percent in terms of unique visitors, and visitors to Twitter are 76 times more likely to also visit an online coupon site compared to the general Internet population. Dell has had some success using Twitter for branding, though maybe not as much as Ashton Kutcher," he said.

He also pointed to viewers of online video as a coveted segment for e-commerce. "It's exploding. If you advertise on sites that reach online video viewers, you're reaching people with 20 times higher spending rates online than the average online population," he said.

In regard to mobile advertising, Fulgoni said while people may not be buying on their smartphones now in huge numbers, mobile commerce is poised to take off, likening it to the broadband phenomenon.

"The smartphone is to mobile advertising what broadband was to the PC. Pre- and post-broadband, it's night and day, and mobile commerce will go through the same type of transition. Mobile purchasing is small today, but we do believe the technology is aligning to make it much more prevalent. As smartphones become a bigger part of the market, and users become more confident, mobile e-commerce will gain traction," he said.

He also said the burgeoning smartphone application market will drive mobile commerce. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has a wildly successful app store for its iPhone, which just saw its billionth iPhone app download. That success is spurring others to follow suit -- most notably Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) recently opened the BlackBerry App Store for its devices and Google has an app store for its open-source mobile platform Android.

Fulgoni added: "There's a whole new economy of mobile applications that are making buying transactions easier. As consumers become more aware of them and they reach critical mass, the market will move."