When it comes to data utility, search has other digital marketing channels beat hands down. Contributor Alistair Dent explains how to use this and other bits of customer data without spending big bucks.
Rich answers are now displaying for targeted queries at a rate of 19.45% for targeted queries, according to a new study by Stone Temple Consulting.
Company is sticking with figure it gave in 2012 but stresses it's "over" that amount. How much over, Google's not saying.
Advertisers can segment metrics at the campaign and ad group levels.
What are people searching for and when are people searching on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday?
Seen some abnormal activity in your Bing Ads account lately? Instead of having to get out your detective’s cap, corn-cob pipe, magnifying glass and sleuthing through handfuls of reports, Bing’s new Top Movers Report may offer a faster solution. Launched today, the Top Movers report was created to quickly identify account changes while also providing […]
Yelp is ten years old this year. Since 2004 the company says that it has collected 57 million reviews from users in nearly 100 cities in more than 20 countries. Yelp is now making that data accessible through a new Yelp Trends tool. Similar to Google Trends but more narrowly focused, the Yelp tool allows […]
Figuring out when and why Google indexes a specific Tweet has long been a conundrum and point of angst for many SEOs. Of course Google does index Tweets, but the methodology has seemed like a total crapshoot — until now. The good folks over at Stone Temple Consulting have attempted to crack the Twitter indexation […]
Last updated May 2023 Feel free to use our simple inventory forecaster, which tells you the most likely amount of impressions or page views you will receive next month, and what likely scenarios look like. (It also works with revenue). If your results are increasing, expect them to keep going up. If they are decreasing, […]
How can publishers receive a greater percentage of search traffic from Google than the market share Google has in the U.S.? It’s likely due to what I call “The Recirculation Gap” and how Google probably “recirculates” searches back into itself less than Yahoo and Bing. Every month for ages, it seems the same. comScore releases a “U.S. […]
Last year, David Mihm’s GetListed service was acquired by then SEO Moz (now Moz). Today, it relaunched as Moz Local. It’s a similar service with a number of enhanced capabilities, the most important of which is local listings submission. Agencies and business owners can use the tool to research where their listings appear online, manage […]
Formerly dubbed the Search Query Report, Bing Ads has updated what’s now called the Search Term Report, which houses the data on the terms users actually typed before clicking on an ad. Included in the new release are results on zero-click search queries. These terms had been excluded from the report, but advertisers had been […]
Is there a long tail in PLAs? Does it pay off for retailers to advertise all of their products in their Google product listing ad (PLA) campaigns? Or should they stay focused on top sellers and high margin items? Sitting on a trove of data from large scale Google Shopping campaigns, a team at PLA […]
Today we have more handy Excel tricks from Bing Ads Evangelist John Gagnon. This second installment of PPC Excel tips focuses on intermediate level techniques for speeding up campaign analysis. Paid search managers will benefit, but really anyone using Excel for data analysis will find good information or a helpful refresher here. Intermediate Tip: Get more […]
Excel is that must-have tool for managing, analyzing and reporting on paid search campaigns that is impossible to know too well. Many of us are self-taught — picking up tips and tricks here and there — which makes it even harder to know what shortcuts and secret powers we’re missing out on. Yesterday, I spoke […]
Google Trends is rolling out new topic reports designed to deliver more accurate results, as well as offer topic predictions within the reports. Using Google’s example, now when a user searches for “rice” in a trends report, they will see topic predictions like “Rice University” and “Rice Cereal” to better qualify the search topic. To […]
At the start of August, David Mihm published the findings of the latest installment of the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey. This year, the breakdown & presentation of survey results has been taken to a new level. Ranking factors are grouped by signal type (e.g., Place Page Signals), then further broken down by result type […]
When Google rolled-out “compare dates” functionality in AdWords, it was welcomed, but limited to showing changes on the graph view only. Yes, you could get comparison data out of AdWords, but it was cumbersome. Good news: Over the next few days, Google is officially rolling out an expansion of the compare dates tool that shows […]
The new Top Movers report in Google AdWords shows you which campaigns and ad groups had the largest changes in clicks and cost between two timeframes. Located under the “Dimensions” tab (View: Top Movers), the report compares performance for two consecutive time periods of equal length, and finds the campaigns and ad groups that experienced […]
Philosopher kings. Warrior poets. Scholar athletes. These compound nouns embody the grand ideal of the “hybrid” — those rare individuals who fuse multiple disciplines and talents into an epic combination. They’re larger-than-life heroes of history and literature. Modern marketing deserves its own mythical hybrid: the marketer scientist. The marketer scientist is not a reincarnation of […]
I was pleased to be part of a great panel at SMX London on prioritizing your search marketing efforts. It included SEO veterans Mikkel deMib Svendsen of deMib.com, Julia Longdon of ContentMango and Dave Davies of Beanstalk. For me, this was an extremely useful session with a huge hidden ROI benefit for search marketers not […]
If you’re considering using an analytics platform other than, or in addition to, Google Analytics, it can be a bit difficult to determine what the best alternative will be. Search Engine Land compiled a great buyers guide to enterprise web analytics tools, but what if you’re in the market for a free to mid-level tool, […]
Whether it’s to drive traffic, increase conversions, or maximize revenue, bid optimization is the cornerstone of any effective paid search program. Across industries, publishers, devices, and geographies, bidding strategies vary tremendously as search marketers leverage a wide variety of proprietary, publisher, and third-party bidding tools and solutions. However, the success of these tools and solutions […]
Once you have set up your ad campaign, it’s time for the most important process in online advertising – judging your campaign. To ensure a continuing good return on investment, you have to keep checking on your campaign. This is to make sure it’s doing what you want it to do, and as well as […]
PPC Analytics: Crunching Your Own Data Presentations from SMX East, October 2012 In this session, we will explore new ways to analyze data from all available sources to improve your PPC campaign performance. We’ll tackle the challenges of both large and small data sets, managing through the fog of long-tail data, and making decisions from […]
Last week I wrote an article with the headline: Study: 43 Percent Of Total Google Search Queries Are Local. This was based on Chitika network data. The article was widely cited and linked to. Unfortunately it was wrong. Earlier today Chitika contacted me with the correction. The original methodology used to determine the percentage of local […]
Ad network Chitika has just released some new data — you’re seeing it here first — that compares local search volumes on Google, Yahoo and Bing. The study examined both PC and mobile traffic to determine an overall number. (Chitika has now informed us that these numbers are incorrect; see postscript II below.) Chitika looked […]
The time delay between marketing exposure and marketing success creates tremendous opportunity for consternation for all paid search managers, but particularly for enterprise programs. Let’s look at three ways that time can distort one’s perspective, and consider a solution that can be helpful. In most paid search reporting platforms, the default setting (often the only […]
Nearly 20 percent of the top search queries on Twitter at any given moment won’t be a popular search query just one hour later. That’s according to a new research paper that Twitter will present this week at a social media conference. Twitter researchers Jimmy Lin and Gilad Mishne analyzed all search queries on the […]
Today, Google has expanded the historical search query data to 90 days. The number of queries reported has increased as well: the report will now list the top 2,000 for each day of the selected date range (vs. the previous top 1,000). This is great news, as this is data not available anywhere else and […]
In the early days of ‘Mad Men’ marketing, half of all Marketing spend was famously wasted – the Marketer just didn’t know which half. Many a Marketer’s sleepless night was spent wondering what levers of their Marketing spend to push forward and which to dial back. Then, along came the Internet, and with it a […]
I wrote recently about the new era of display marketing, and how real time bidding and other advances are bringing the precision and performance of search advertising to display. Well…a new era of unstructured data is also upon us. A widely cited 2011 IDC study found that the amount of data in the world is […]
Wolfram|Alpha (W|A) is launching a new fee-based service named Wolfram|Alpha Pro. In today’s highly competitive environment, you may wonder why W|A would ask people to pay for what many think should be free. Read on: you may decide to willingly open your wallet when you see what’s available. Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often […]
The longest search queries are happening on Ask.com, where users average almost five words per search. That’s according to research from Chitika. The ad network analyzed search referrals on “hundreds of millions” of impressions across sites in its network between January 9th and 12th. And the longest search referrals — at an average of 4.81 […]
Now celebrating a decade of recapping annual search trends, earlier today, Yahoo! released the 2011 list of most popular searches in the US in 30 different categories, topping last year’s extensive list. This year marks the first full year Yahoo! used has used the Bing search engine to primarily power Yahoo! search results, with Americans […]
Google announced that Google+ has 40 million users today. Woo-hoo! That’s nearly half what Twitter claims, right? And while it’s below Facebook’s 800 million, Google’s getting there, right? Wrong. The number simply can’t be compared to Facebook and Twitter. Active Users Vs. Sign-Ups Let’s start with Facebook. At various points, Facebook has given out a […]
As with Google, Twitter saw a spike in activity related to the death of Steve Jobs. However, the company said that the number of tweets per second didn’t break new records. The Peak Records Twitter told us that at 5pm PT yesterday, it saw 6,049 tweets per second happening at peak, with tweets continuing throughout […]
Overlooked, Underloved & Unknown Analytics Presentations from SMX Advanced, June 2011 All analytics packages come with dozens, if not hundreds of reports that slice, dice and segment countless variables, all purporting to offer comprehensive metrics about the performance of your search marketing campaign. While many of these reports are great, you can often get much […]
I love search data. Being able to mine through millions of search queries to find out what people are really interested in is fascinating (and useful!). Google provides search data a number of ways, including Google Trends, Google Insights for Search, and via the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and Microsoft has some great stuff via […]
On Thursday, Google announced a major change to its search algorithm, designed to weed out shallow and low-quality content from its top search results. Content farms were seen by many as the target. Were they hit? Who was hit? Some figures are coming out.