Spam/Spyware/Intrusive

Mobile phone owners are reluctant to share data over privacy fears, and a majority wouldn't even lend their phone to a work colleague, according to research from McAfee. But despite these privacy concerns, many smartphone owners are not employing a range of security measures to safeguard themselves against privacy breaches. A new study from Consumer Reports finds that only 22% of smartphone users have installed an application to locate a missing phone, just 15% have installed antivirus apps, and less than 1 in 10 have an app that can delete the contents of their phone remotely. Read more »

Bot traffic is up again in Q1, even after a spike in Q4, says Solve Media in its latest Bot Traffic Market Advisory update. In Q1, 29% of web traffic was the result of bot traffic, up from 25% in Q4 and 10% in Q3. Activity deemed "suspicious" grew to 43% of all web traffic, from 40% in Q4 and 26% in Q3. That means that more "suspicious" activity is being confirmed as bots with each passing quarter. The researchers reveal that mobile bot traffic, while not quite on the same level as the web, is also on the rise, and could waste close to $1 billion dollars of advertising budgets this year. Read more »

A poll of Americans' attitudes to bad ads by InsightsOne finds that more Americans are annoyed by irrelevant pop-up ads (70%) than by male (66%) or female (54%) enhancement ads, and even emails from deceased African leaders who have left them money (64%). Clearly, the light-hearted survey had a fairly loose definition of the term "advertising." Nevertheless, the results do suggest that relevance matters: 58% said they are annoyed by ads for products and services they do not need. Read more »

A survey of 123 marketers and 1,002 consumers on marketing practices and how they relate to permission has revealed a significant gap in perceptions regarding implicit permission (purchases, contents, product demos, registrations). The study, by RegReady, found that 77% of marketers believe that a consumer purchase does constitute marketing permission. But three-quarters of the consumers polled felt very strongly that making a purchase does not constitute permission to market to them on their mobile device, and 80% shared that sentiment about marketing via email. Read more »

Commercial emailers account for 70% of spam complaints, according to [download page] Return Path’s Email Intelligence Report for Q3 2012, released November 2012. 22% of spam complaints stem from other internet service providers (ISPs), 5% from internal email, and just 3% from bots and dynamic IP addresses. Despite sparking 7 in 10 spam complaints, marketing represents just 18% of email volume, and .03% of all unique domains seen by ISPs. Read more »

Email open rates continue to trend upwards, rising to 26.2% in Q1 2012, representing 5.6% growth from 24.8% in Q4 2011 and a 12.4% year-over-year increase, per an Epsilon report [download page] released in June 2012. Click rates, though, moved in the opposite direction, falling to a low of 4.7%, down 8.3% from last quarter, and 19.3% from Q1 2011. Read more »

Clothes (53%), books (46%), and DVDs and video games (42%) are the top 3 mobile purchases among American shoppers, reports WorldPay [download page] in an April 2012 study. Clothes (32%) and books (22%) also fared well when looking at overall online spending behavior, though department stores (42%) emerged as the top category within this broader sphere. Compared to the global respondent average of 2.5%, US respondents reported a higher average of online spending via a smartphone, saying they make 3% of their online purchases via the device. Read more »

It seems that online merchants may not know their customers as well as they think, finds WorldPay [download page] in an April 2012 report. The survey asked more than 19,000 global online shoppers what it takes to bring them back to a site for a repeat purchase, and compared the responses to those from 153 senior decision-makers who had responsibility for the online payment process of their retail organizations. The most common priorities listed by the global online shoppers were the security of their personal or financial information (75%), payment security checks (66%), and guarantees and warranties provided for products or services (57%). By contrast, merchants listed the top drivers as the design and layout of their website (67%), the quality of the website navigation (62%), and the overall speed of the buying experience (62%). Read more »

Globally, only 76.5% of commercial emails reached their intended inbox in the second half of 2011, down from 81% in H1 2011, details ReturnPath in a March 2012 study. The remaining roughly 1 in 4 emails that did not reach the inbox wound up either in a spam/junk folder (8.7%) or were blocked by ISP-level filtering (15.1%). Regionally, Europe had the highest rate of commercial emails reaching the inbox (85%), followed by North America (79%), Central and Latin America (72%), and Asia-Pacific (67%). Read more »

57% of smartphone owners anticipate a similar or decreased usage of their device as a payment method, citing concern about security or fraud (39%) as the leading reason for not increasing their use, according to a February 2012 report from Radius Global. Overall, 86% of Americans say that data security concerns have either a significant influence (49%) or some influence (37%) on their likelihood to make purchases through a smartphone. Read more »