iMedia's editor at large looks at the rise of pay-for-performance ad pricing, holiday traffic patterns and more.

While I qualify for most marketers’ dream female target audience in terms of faceless statistics, I differ from most women my age in that I hate to shop in stores. I hate crowds, the lack of oxygen, checkout lines, fitting rooms and just about all other aspects of shopping. I inherited this aversion from my father, who, after 15 minutes in any retail establishment, will buy whatever my mother wants, just to get out of said establishment. Even grocery shopping is a minor imposition on our mental well-being, which we grudgingly put up with because we love nothing more than cooking and entertaining. In that respect, I’m maniacally domestic -- food that comes from a can or a box isn’t food to me and is under no circumstances allowed in my house. That’s partially why I’ve been elected to cook Thanksgiving dinner for the last decade. It’s my favorite event of the year, so I start planning -- online, of course -- months in advance. Then I shop in 15-minute intervals for many weeks leading up to the event, always with a list in hand and a mental stopwatch.

This year, since Thanksgiving will be held at our new apartment for the first time, I tried something different. I realized that it’s about time I put the power of the internet to use and combine it with the fact that in New York City you can get everything, including your paper towels and kitchen twine, delivered to your door within 15 minutes. An online-only Thanksgiving, if you will.

Luckily, New York City is home to FreshDirect.com and UrbanOrganics.net, which easily took care of my entire grocery list. Everything I needed, from my 27 pound fresh turkey to the slivered almonds to the aforementioned kitchen twine, will be delivered to my door in time to start brining. All the new cooking tools I just couldn’t live without (including a kitchen torch and an avocado slicer) were bought online. And of course, there was wine.com. All in all, my Thanksgiving shopping was done in less than 45 minutes of online time, interrupted briefly by my dog, who insisted I add some MilkBones to the grocery order. No driving, no lines, no crowds, plenty of oxygen.

Why am I telling you all this? It’s not another ode to the web, although it deserves one for opening my eyes to the fact that I never have to brave the Thanksgiving grocery store madness again, but rather a segue into the online happenings of the week, which largely centered on food as well.

First of all, recipe traffic online was tremendous. According to HitWise, 48 percent of visits to "Food and Beverage -- Reference Websites" originated at search engines for the week ending Nov. 12, 2005, a high number compared to "Shopping & Classifieds - Grocery and Alcohol" sites, which received 30 percent of upstream visits from search engines in that period. This is good news for search and bad news for branded recipe sites, like epicurious.com (my personal favorite) or foodtv.com, because this indicates that searchers are more intent on finding the most appropriate recipe than getting it from any particular site.

Also, the share of searches for “recipes” was up 25 percent for the week ending November 12, 2005 versus the prior week, and visits to the top 10 recipe sites were up nine percent in the same period. It can be expected that recipe searches and visits to recipe sites will increase by upwards of 50 percent for Thanksgiving week. In 2004, searches on the term “recipes” increased by 84 percent Thanksgiving week compared to two weeks prior, and visits to the top 10 recipe sites increased by 59 percent in that same period.

Moreover, if search inquiries are any indication, there will be a lot of butternut squash and sweet potato casseroles and green beans eaten next week. Not surprisingly, women comprised 61 percent of visits to "Food & Beverage -- Reference" sites for the four weeks ending Nov. 5, 2005, and men comprised a significant 39 percent. In addition, visitors to "Food & Beverage -- Reference" sites were 41 percent more likely to be over age 55 in that same period.

Keep all this in mind for when you start planning next year’s campaigns.

Speaking of search, it’s put the entire advertising marketplace is in a state of flux, according to a just-released study from InfoCommerce Group entitled "Online Buying Guides: Making Sense of What's Happening Now."

According to the study, what really excites advertisers is not Pay for Performance (PFP) itself, but one of its key manifestations: shifting advertising risk from the advertiser to the publisher. Also, advertisers cite PFP as being "more fair," and this leveling of the playing field is what is driving the growth of PFP.

The researchers also found that a large majority of advertisers (71 percent) consider publisher- generated performance reporting to be important, while the exact same percentage of publishers (71 percent) deliver no advertiser reporting at all. And, rather than stress the quality of their audiences -- something that advertisers are increasingly willing to consider as part of their ad buying -- publishers continue to sell largely (62 percent) on the basis of their overall site traffic, generally a losing strategy since vertical B2B sites rarely generate impressive traffic. Only a tiny group of buying guide publishers (four percent) currently offer a PFP option

Note the disconnect between how publishers are selling themselves and what advertisers consider to be valuable. Discuss.

In any case, to bring this full circle, Yahoo! and Harris Interactive say that more than eight out of 10 holiday shoppers (83 percent) said they would shop for holiday gifts online, and a similar number, 80 percent, said they are likely to purchase gifts online from small businesses.

Nearly a third of holiday shoppers polled said they will do at least half of their holiday shopping online. In addition, nearly two thirds of holiday shoppers (63 percent) said online specialty or "niche" retailers are the "best places" to shop for unusual or hard-to-find gifts.

Finally, if you can think that far in advance, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Adweek Magazines announced that 2006 MIXX Conference & Awards will take place on September 25 & 26, 2006 in New York City. MIXX will help kick off Advertising Week 2006.

Happy Thanksgiving!

iMedia Connection Editor at Large Masha Geller is the founder of interactive marketing and corporate communications consultancy Geller Public Relations in New York. She has been covering the interactive advertising industry since 1999 as the former editor in chief of MediaPost.com, and is a widely-published thought leader in the interactive arena.