Data has always been at the center of marketing decisions, but today it enjoys a constant, glaring spotlight! Results based marketing is here to stay, so it’s time to get the tracking machinery in place and get in front of the dashboard for some action. At a very basic level, you need to know which […]
SearchReviews has just launched a search engine with more than 40 million reviews in its system, and plans to hit 100 million reviews by the end of 2011. Those 40 million reviews cover about four million products and come from more than a thousand sites such as TripAdvisor, Amazon, Zappos and others. Those are impressive […]
There are plenty of social analytics tools, but the most full-featured ones are often too expensive (i.e., geared towards enterprise-level users) and the inexpensive ones usually offer limited functionality. And then there’s Topsy Social Analytics, which was just launched this morning and immediately becomes one of the best free Twitter analytics tools I’ve seen. There […]
We know that measurement is essential for marketers to get the most out of their campaigns today, Fortunately, attribution technology allows us to measure ROI across online channels in great detail. But what about offline efforts? Can marketers measure the success of an offline program with a similar level of granularity? Absolutely. And search can […]
You’ve made the case for advanced optimization, implemented loads of slick technology and deployed across some or all of your paid search programs. Did you do the right thing? Did you make more money? If so, how much more? To answer the question “did I make more money” implies a baseline. Trouble is, you don’t […]
Actionable Metrics and Diagnostics Presentations from SMX East, October 2010 We have hundreds of data points to track how the search engines and visitors are accessing our sites, but what’s really actionable and what’s not worth spending time on? How can you best use data to diagnose issues and make improvements to your site? In […]
Google has joined forces with a handful of political web sites to track forecasts for the upcoming U.S. mid-term elections. Those forecasts are available now at maps.google.com/elections2010. By default, the map begins by showing the outlook for nationwide Senatorial races. You can filter to see a specific state, data from a specific source, or you […]
Cookie cutters are a great idea… for making cookies. But when it comes to marketing, a cookie cutter approach can do more damage than good. Unfortunately, many search marketers do exactly that when they treat their keywords, ad copy, landing pages and customers all the same.
Google recently announced a Location History dashboard that allows users to see where they’ve been, based on their Latitude activity: Today we’re launching an experimental new view in Beta for Google Location History to visualize your location history in a different — and hopefully more interesting — way than just a string of locations. If […]
Are a significant number of people canceling their Facebook accounts because of privacy concerns? The easy answer would be for Facebook to publish cancellation stats. I asked; they declined and gave me growth figures instead. Those growth figures suggest that yes, the privacy issues might be hurting.
comScore’s out with new search market share figures. Yahoo’s up, but did it “game” its growth with new navigational changes? Gaming figures is nothing new. But even if Yahoo effectively did, it’s the search volume — the number of searches — that people should care more about in deciding who’s “winning” and “losing” when it […]
How many searches does Twitter handle per month? We’ve finally got a figure: 19 billion. That has Twitter doing over nearly five times the queries that Bing handles and about 20% of those that mega search star Google processes. But hang on. Even Twitter cofounder Ev Williams says the figures aren’t all apple to apples. […]
Google has launched a Twitter archive service, giving it a more comprehensive index of tweets over time than even Twitter itself. (See Danny’s Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?) Meanwhile, Twitter gets a logo presence in Google’s search results, the first time Google’s featured a partner like this.
Having just returned from SMX West, I found my brain teeming with topic snippets related to online search marketing. SEO, trademark usage, display and search ad combo campaigns, the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal, mobile ads, and so many more. While the range of topics was vast, all of them fell within the spectrum of online marketing. And […]
In my role as president at GetListed.org, I sometimes receive emails from users asking why one local search engine or another is displaying an old location for their business, or why the search engines still aren’t showing their new website address, or why the phone number listed for their retail location is actually the one […]
Avinash Kaushik is Google's well-known and widely respected analytics guru. In this wide-ranging interview, he talks about his passion for metrics, why they're critical for success, and how search marketers can use analytics to take their campaigns to the next level.
Data driven anticipatory bidding can turn an ordinary holiday bump into something extraordinary. Here are some tips for how to take apart and act on the data.
Google has just announced a number of new features for Google Analytics, including more powerful reporting capabilities, greater customization options and a new “intelligence engine” that Google says can help search marketers drive smarter data insights. Here’s a rundown of the new features, and why they’re important.
Somewhat quietly, last week Kayak posted a new feature that opens up access to their search data using Kayak Trends. A key feature of Kayak Trend data is the KAYAK Travel Index™, an a statistical model that provides a measure of travel demand from analysis of searches on KAYAK sites, and aligns that with average […]
In a series of interviews and articles recently published online, BusinessWeek magazine tries to open up the curtains on Google’s search quality team — the ways team members evaluate Google’s search rankings and their decision-making process when changes are being made. Perhaps the place to start is with BusinessWeek’s interview of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, […]
It appears Google has pulled together a bunch of statistics throughout the web and created a small landing page named Google Internet Stats on the Google UK front. The page explains that this service “brings together the latest industry facts and insights together in one place.” Google collected this data from many third party vendors, […]
Who owns your business details – your phone number, address, company name? As the owner of a business, do you have the right to choose where your details are listed online in search engines, directory sites, blogs, forums, social networks, and, do you have the right to force such sites to remove your details? What […]
In a detailed report about the Canadian search landscape, Hitwise says Bing is the best search engine at producing “successful searches,” beating out both Google and Yahoo, as well as their Canada-specific search engines. The chart above, provided specifically to Search Engine Land, shows that Bing is the 6th most popular search engine in Canada, […]
One thing Microsoft and Yahoo were touting as a major advantage to them teaming up, is that their search scale will grow tremendously. The benefit of the search scale, or search volume query, growing is that Microsoft and Yahoo will have more data to analyze and use in order to compete against Google. News.com interviewed […]
Today, I received two click fraud reports from two different companies. The first was from Anchor Intelligence and the second was from Click Forensics. Anchor Intelligence reported a click fraud rate of 22.9% for the second quarter of 2009, up from 21.7% in the first quarter. While Click Forensics reports a click fraud rate of […]
Wouldn’t it be great if you could use a search engine without needing to touch your mouse? You know, type your query and then scan and even click through to results without actually clicking the mouse button? Or maybe you’re looking for an alternate source of search advertising data, like how many advertisers are bidding […]
Okay, so it’s not curing polio or splitting the atom, but winning my fantasy football league this year was a fairly rewarding experience. Week after week, I racked up the points and left my circle of friends in the dust. My secret? Search marketing training.
With less than a week to go until U.S. voters choose a new president, Yahoo is sharing what it knows about White House-related search activity. Here are some highlights from Yahoo’s blog post today, which taps into data from Yahoo Buzz:
Despite the black blindfold tightly cinched around my head, I desperately tried to see through it and giggled with anticipation. But then they began to spin me. Dizzy with excitement and determined to take my best shot, I lunged forward. Amid the howls of laughter erupting from my friends huddled around me, I anxiously tore […]
Here at Palore, we recently finished working on a large scale project in San Diego County, covering all businesses in all categories, from more than 10 leading local, vertical and IYP sites – a total of 168,466 businesses. The fact that the number of total businesses we reached exceeds the one published by some data […]
In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. Today: News from the search engines, today’s in-depth look, “Q&A With Google’s Insights for Search Senior Product Manager” and this week’s free tips and tools.
The latest search engine share stats for May 2008 from Compete show Google hitting yet again another high. Let’s do the numbers, including the debate on whether Microsoft Live Search Club searches should be counted plus how everyone might start generating queries in new ways.
When I did my Ratings Service Faceoff: Search Share Compared, June 2007 To March 2008 post last week, I noted that Microsoft had an odd increase according to Compete for March 2008. The company now says this was due to Live Search Club traffic that it shouldn’t have counted. Microsoft’s US share for March 2008 […]
I’ve now compiled the latest search popularity stats from Hitwise, Compete, comScore, and Nielsen Online. That means it’s time to put them all together once again, to see what a "panel" of ratings services agree on — and don’t agree on — in terms of search engine popularity.
More doom and gloom on the paid search side for Google. comScore is once again reporting a drop in sponsored clicks, something that also happened last month. After last month’s fallout, comScore did a lot of further analysis shared at the Searchscape panel at our SMX West conference and online to ease concerns that it […]
I’ve now compiled the latest search popularity stats from Nielsen, comScore, Hitwise, and Compete. That means it’s time to put them all together, to see what a "panel" of ratings services agree on — and don’t agree on — in terms of search engine popularity.
If you can believe it, the holidays are almost over. Turkey Day is now long gone, and in less than 2 weeks, the big man in the red suit will be making his way back to the North Pole. Wondering where the time went? Better yet, wondering how you’ll fare this holiday season? Well, you’re […]
Sex, Nazi, burrito and Viagra: Who Googles what? from Reuters reports on keywords released by Google by country. Reuters ordered the list by country that is most likely to search on certain words. Here is a brief rundown:
Gary Price at ResourceShelf points us to an intriguing article appearing in the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Magazine about mobile search at Google. In the piece, two researchers at Google dissect and mine mobile query logs from WAP-based searches coming through a single (unnamed) U.S. carrier. One million “page view requests” from one month earlier […]