ComScore announced that 2010′s Cyber Monday grew 16% from a year ago, tallying record-breaking online sales of over $1 billion.

While Black Friday is still the shopping event of the bricks-and-mortar world, Cyber Monday — the first Monday after Thanksgiving — has increasingly become a major event for online retailers, who prime the pump with major promotions, sales, email campaigns and advertising blitzes.

“Cyber Monday was a historic day for e-commerce as we saw daily spending surpass $1 billion for the first time,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “The online holiday shopping season has clearly gotten off to a very strong start, which is welcome news. At the same time, it’s important to note that some of the early strength in consumer spending is almost certainly the result of retailers’ heavier-than-normal promotional and discounting activity at this early point in the season. So, while we anticipate that there will be more billion-dollar spending days ahead as we get deeper into the season, only time will tell if overall consumer online spending remains at the elevated levels we’ve seen thus far.”

Of the total 16% gain, comScore attributed most of the lift — 12% — to an increase in average order size. The remaining 4% sales growth was due to an increase in total online shoppers. Source: comScore

Okay, time for Tom Funk to take a deep breath. I’ve spent the better part of each day since September 8′s introduction of Google Instant, panicking, gnashing my teeth, tearing my hair, rending my garments and dodging chunks of falling sky.

Search is an important source of lifeblood to any commercial website. Until now, I’ve always felt Google did an exemplary job in letting relevant results, from little guys and big guys alike, bubble up to the surface of search.

Now, Google Instant and its predictions bias search against the long-tail, against the little guy. We now have less a web of discovery, and more a web of trend-following, big-name brands, and some repetition of your personal user history. Google Instant is the tyranny of the majority, where nobody finds anything without seeing a little eBay, Facebook, or Lady Gaga first.

But it’s time for me to look beyond Google Instant for a moment, and recognize what matters most to ecommerce marketers and site owners. There’s plenty of stuff we can control. Let’s stop fretting about what we can’t.

1. Brand positioning. Visitors coming to your site from whatever source must immediately “get” — both through the look-and-feel and from a clear “positioning statement” or slogan — who you are, what you do, and why that’s a benefit to them.

2. Guarantee. Offer a strong, unconditional guarantee, be conspicuous about it. Stand behind it. It’s a selling point, not some hidden legalese boilerplate.

3. Checkout optimization. Shop your own site with an eye toward removing roadblocks, eliminating unnecessary forms and fields, cleaning up the look, adding confidence-building logos of your security, shipping and credit card partners. And enable a friendly, low-key abandoned cart email program.

4. Testing. Use Google Website Optimizer to test any significant offer, merchandise selection, navigational or design element. You’ll not only prove that your ideas were awesome, you’ll quantify just how awesome they were. Or, as is often the case, you’ll prove some ideas just don’t move the needle. No worries. That’s valuable too. Imagine you find that a $10-off deal doesn’t lift conversion any better than a pitch that emphasizes five-star customer ratings, which doesn’t cost you a nickel. Cha-ching!

5. Customer retention. Far more important that how much search-engine traffic you can capture, is what do you do to convert visitors to customers — and to build a long-term relationship with those customers so they come back to buy again and again. Today’s best tool for retention is still a generous, creative, and smartly segmented email program. That’s been the case since the dawn of ecommerce, and some 89% of merchants still say email is their highest-ROI channel. But social media is fast becoming the new customer relationship channel. If you’re not active now on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, and wherever else your customers are spending their online time, your customer retention efforts are behind the curve.

Full disclosure: I’m a Google shareholder. Yup, I have 10 bright, shiny Google shares. So I’ll totally be at the annual meeting in Mountain View, doing the secret handshake with Larry, Sergey, Eric, Matt, Marissa, and the rest of the gang.

But even with that massive financial conflict-of-interest, you can always count on me to be 100% objective in my assessment of Google.

My friend and colleague Andy Dunn was struck yesterday by the extreme personalization being done by Zappo’s, the now Amazon-owned shoe retailer. Andy had been checking out sneakers at Zappo’s and then left without buying.

Later, thanks to Zappo’s remarketing campaigns across a broad swath of third-party websites, Andy began seeing Zappo’s display ads everywhere — and the ads cycled dynamically through images of the very same products he’d been browsing at the Zappo’s site.

Dotomi, an ad platform, claims personalized remarketing campaigns like these can lift response 34% when compared to ordinary ads not customized to individual users. Dotomi and others have rolled out a slew of personalized products including direct text messaging, ads that address the shopper by name, and other tactics that might make George Orwell roll in his grave, but which many online merchants just love.

For merchants interested in learning more, the DMA is sponsoring a November 3 webinar entitled “The Future of Media Is Personal”, in which Dotomi COO and CMO Ken Treske will talk about the power of personalized remarketing ads and other media tailored to specific web users.

Here’s a long overdue dose of good news: 2010 online Holiday sales are forecast to climb a healthy 15% compared to last year.

Research and consulting firm Deloitte expects ecommerce, along with direct-mail catalog sales and TV shopping channels, to notch the big gains. Overall retail sales, which are still dominated by bricks-and-mortar stores, are expected to rise a mere 2%.

Deloitte’s Alison Paul told Internet Retailer that the strongest results will be delivered by retailers that coordinate their online efforts with mobile, social-media and bricks-and-mortar.

“We believe that the retailers that have integrated marketing messages where their apps, Facebook pages, web site and in-store presences share a common campaign or theme will be the big winners this holiday season,” she said.

I recently read an article about leveraging minor holidays by Chad White that was very inspiring called Standing Out Among All the National Pecan Pie Day Messaging. In the article he says:

“It’s a major strategic and creative challenge to stand out during the holiday season — as well as during other major holiday seasons like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day. It’s significantly less challenging to stand out during the April Fool’s Day or Cinco de Mayo season. Show up and the battle is half-won.

“But in addition to having little to no competition around messaging for such minor holidays — and therefore injecting instant uniqueness into your email campaigns — the focused nature of many of these holidays means that messaging is tighter as well.”

I think this is a fun and creative idea to bring a unique twist to your email messages. Interesting and engaging content is a big part of a successful email campaign and will likely render more clicks from your subscribers. There are quite a few emails he highlights in his article that are good examples of leveraging minor holidays.

Here’s a minor holidays write up for August and the first bit of September that Chad White referred to in the above mentioned article:  http://returnonsubscriber.com/2010/08/10/email-marketing-calendar-ideas-for-august-and-september

I don’t see another write up for September, October, etc on that blog but below are some holiday ideas that I put together for further inspiration.

September – December Holidays

Back to School – September

Grandparents Day – September 12th

Autumn begins – September 22nd

National Good Neighbor Day – September 28th

Breast Cancer Awareness Month – October

http://www.retailemailblog.com/2009/11/season-finale-breast-cancer-awareness.html

Columbus Day – October 11th

National Bosses Day – Oct 16th

National Chocolate Day – Oct 26th

Halloween – Oct 31st

Election Day – Nov 2nd

Veterans Day – Nov 11th

Thanksgiving – Nov 25th

Black Friday – Nov 26th

Cyber Sunday – Nov 28th

Cyber Monday – Nov 29th

Winter begins – December 21st

And of course, the December Holidays…

Gap’s 50%-discount offered on the collective-buying site Groupon last week rang up a reported $11 million in sales, says ClickZ, and in the process demonstrated some best practices for ecommerce in this new, more social Web 2.0 era.

According to Groupon spokesperson Julie Mossler, the Gap offer was the most successful Groupon promotion to date, ringing up as many as 532 transactions per minute during its busiest periods Thursday morning. Traffic was so intense that Groupon had to manage the load by directing visitors to alternate landing pages in order to avert a server crash.

What I find impressive about the Gap campaign is the sheer number of coordinated moving parts cross-promoting a single offer:

• 15 million Gap and Groupon email subscribers receive the offer, starting at midnight and in staggered fashion throughout the day
• The offer is tweeted to the 180,000+ followers of Twitter’s @earlybird promoted tweet stream
• Gap tweets the offer to its 30,000+ followers
• Groupon manually tweets and Facebook posts on its pages dedicated to each of the 85 geographical markets where Gap’s offer is valid
• Gap posts the offer to its 606,000 fans on Facebook
• Groupon’s 1,500 affiliate partners post Gap’s offer on their websites
• A sponsored post appears above the fold on Digg

All in all, it sounds like a big win for Gap, and impressive evidence of how online promotion and social shopping, courtesy of Groupon, can drive sales to brick and mortar stores.

“Our customers had been asking us to feature a national retailer, and the Gap deal was a perfect fit for Back-To-School and even pre-holiday shopping,” Mossler explained. “Gap even has stores where Groupon hasn’t launched yet; so, it’s a perfect way to reach new and existing Groupon fans with a deal they won’t find anywhere else.”

We’ve been doing a lot of Google Analytics audits, debugging and configuration. It’s a crucial time for ecommerce merchants to be thinking about the state of their web analytics, and the correctness of the data. Weak though the ecomony may be, the dog days are summer are quickly giving way to fall/holiday (or should we say “Fall-iday?”).

Of course, back-to-school merchandising has been in full swing for a couple months. This weekend when I popped into the supermarket for some milk, I was blown away to see full displays of Halloween candy. Consumers may not have to fall and winter months in mind yet, but hopeful merchants are all over it.

If your analytics are configured incorrectly, you’ll be without a proper roadmap for assessing what your current baseline looks like, and what aspects of your Holiday season campaigns and merchandising are successful and which are not. Even worse, bad data may make you draw completely wrong conclusions — taking credit for internally-placed test orders, say, or classifying paid search traffic and sales as organic. If you can’t properly tie online revenues to their source, you’re bound to terminate some successful campaigns and perpetuate some dogs.

So here’s our list of the most frequently seen Google Analytics configuration errors — and how to fix them:

1.) Failing to tag paid search campaigns. Google can let you employ “autotagging” to effortlessly track whether your Google search traffic (and sales) is paid or organic. But paid campaigns at Bing, Yahoo, and third-tier search engines will look like free, organic traffic unless you use campaign tracking links to tell GA otherwise.

2.) Failing to track email. The house email is the biggest-yielding channel for most ecommerce merchants. If you don’t use campaign-tracking codes, you’ll have no easy way to track the total revenue contribution of your house email, or its effect on your total conversion rate. It’s also imperative to track your Abandoned Cart email and other transactional emails as a separate class of email campaign. We use utm_medium = email to tag all emails, and utm_source to discriminate which list is being sent, and whether it is from our transactional or promotional email programs.

3.) Failing to filter internal traffic and test orders. Everything from conversion rate to raw revenue numbers can be rendered meaningless if your web team or IT department places a lot of test orders without setting up an exclude filter. You can still maintain an “all traffic” profile — so that you can SEE the results of tests you need to place, for instance! — but set up at least one profile filtering out internal IP addresses. That way you’ll know what the REAL top and bottom lines are.

4.) Failing to track on-site search. Not all web platforms are engineered to display the search term in the URL of the results page, but most are. GA provides a basic reporting of top search terms, and the overall share of users who use on-site search, and how much business they do (almost always well above your site average). There’s no native reporting of no-results-found, but it’s a start — and a vital insight into one of the most important merchandising tools on your site. Plus, without baselining your site’s current on-site search metrics, you’ll have no way to gauge whether an advanced third-party search like SLI is worth the money.

5.) Overreporting on-site search. Some website owners like to configure internal links on their site, or landing pages from paid search or email, as search results pages, rather than having to build special category pages or static landing pages. That can be smart merchandising, but if you do it, also set up an additional profile or “advanced segment” to exclude visitors by medium. Otherwise you’ll be overstating your on-site search usage, and probably understating conversion rate.

6.) Overusing profiles. Now, virtually all of the functions of separate analytics profiles can be played by Advanced Segments. Setting up advanced segments is pretty easy, they’re convenient to apply or unapply to any report you’re working with, and they save you the hassle of setting up the same goals and other settings across a ton of different profiles.

7.) Setting up the shopping cart funnel one page too late. The shopping cart should be the first page of your conversion funnel, NOT the check-out page. When we say a 50% cart abandonment rate is about the industry average, we’re talking about the opposite of funnel conversion rate, if you start at the shopping cart. The later you start your funnel, the more falsely inflated your numbers will be. The cart is a critical page to track in the funnel, because it also tells you your engagement rate (or the percent of site visitors who add anything to the cart). And it tracks the performance of the first page of the checkout — which, along with the final step, when consumers have to actually part with their moolah — is one of the hardest transitions in ecommerce.

8.) Failing to test. Web analytics are not just stale numbers — they’re calls to action to solve shoppers’ problems, make the online experience easier, more compelling, faster, better. Anybody who has been doing ecommerce awhile knows that their best hunches and marketing instincts should be tested and quantified to see what (if any) lift they provide. So using analytics to baseline your performance, and then the Google Website Optimizer testing tool (or the A/B testing features in Adwords) enables you to prove your instincts right or wrong. We never stop learning at this game!

9.) The “Site Overlay” report. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Google Analytics’ Site Overlay report just sucks. It doesn’t work. I’ve never seen it work. It combines the stats of any duplicate links on the page, and the data is always screwy. If you want a better view of how web shoppers are actually responding to your navigational and merchandise offerings, you need to use a good, inexpensive third-party tool loke CrazyEgg or ClickTale.