Sales in eCommerce is rising continuously and mobile devices have become an important sales channel, as the 4th Annual eTail Asia affirms. The event for eCommerce and multichannel retailers takes place in Singapore, from March 1-3, 2016 at Marina Bay Sands with around 350 participants who get inspired by 80 speakers with speeches and discussions focused on mCommerce, digital transformation and personalizing the customer experience during the three days.

At the opening of the event, there have been talks and meetings by retailers for retailers on the acceleration of omnichannel growth strategies, real-time personalization, user experience, and inspiring online portals. The second day deals mainly with the opportunities the mobile growth brings, such as optimized pages, apps and revolutionary distribution channels.

Sandhya Devanathan, Facebooks Group Head, Ecommerce, Travel, and Financial Services, Southeast Asia for instance, presented on how to win in a mobile-first world: “How to drive people through the path to purchase with personalized marketing at scale”.

To round off the 4th Annual eTail Asia, the organizers today take a light-hearted look at how the Asian e-commerce space is progressing compared to European and American counterparts, by discussing casually how the e-commerce universe is expected to evolve in Asia, which is still an impressive half-trillion dollar e-commerce market.

One sponsor and exhibitor got our special attention, due to an interesting study unveiled during the event. LeadMedia Group, an online marketing integrated services provider and developer of data marketing platforms and solutions, got granular on Google’s recent advertisement shift.

“With Google’s latest decision to remove right-hand side ads from desktop to mirror the same results in mobile, marketers in Southeast Asia can expect a 40% drop in paid visibility, if we look at what happened in the North American market”, LeadMedia Group predicts.

Indeed, the leading search engine provider has decided to leave the right sidebar of the search results in future free of ads. Until now, there were up to six ads placed there. Google bows out on a promotional item, which had already been used when the company began to monetize its search results through advertising years ago, while the placement of advertising directly above and partly below the search results remains.

The loosening of the rule to interrupt the chronological vertical listing of results by up to three advertisements is accompanying this measure. In future, more than three banners can be displayed in "high commercial inquiries", such as for travel and insurance.

Since the space at the right-hand side makes in addition space for links and brief descriptions or pictures, this means quite a limitation for advertisers, which Google wants to compensate with more precise targeting.

The advertising displays to the right-hand side of the search results listing was previously often pushed aside by the ‘Knowledge Graph', and often couldn’t be seen on mobile devices. Interestingly, the "Product Listing Ads" of Google Shopping seem to make an exception, since they still find space on the right sidebar.

Well, in the past Google has made very few major changes to their actual search engine results. However, with Google’s latest decision to remove right-hand side ads from desktop to mirror the same results in mobile, it made headlines worldwide.

According to Leadmedia Group, marketers in Southeast Asia are starting to ask themselves how this will affect their online presence and many are turning their attention to North American brands to see how they cope with this rollout.
“After a careful analysis on twenty key players in the North American market using search metrics, the performance of paid visibility has weakened in the retail sector by a significant average drop of 41% since the official change in ad placements. By removing ads on the right-hand side, this means decreasing the maximum amount of ads that you can bid for from eleven to seven. Knowing that only the top 3-4 ads are placed on the top of the page, the rest is out of view from the average user placed all the way at the bottom. Some advertisers say this is only the beginning to a major shift in extreme competitive auctions, where there’s no doubt some advertisers will be weeded out”, Leadmedia Group states.

The provider of digital marketing integrated services as well as data marketing software developer, presents Shopbot at eTail Asia, a leading global shopping platform and pioneer in the price comparison market, as well as LiveTarget,  which enables the real-time generation of personalized email messages as well as retargeting customers who do not complete their purchase. That way, Leadmedia Group manages to help increase both the ROI and the customer conversion rate that result from the digital marketing initiatives of online stores.

Xavier LATIL, CEO of Leadmedia Group, said: “Our presence at eTail Asia trade show as sponsor demonstrates our commitment to bring Leadmedia Group solutions to brands and e-retailers on a global scale. We are convinced our technology and team can definitely help these actors connecting to their audience by sending the right message at the right time.”

By Daniela La Marca