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Google Insight for Search – What the World is Searching For

August 5, 2008 By 2 Comments

Yesterday evening, the Adwords blog posted an entry mentioning that Google has just launched a new product in beta which takes Google Trends a step further called: Google Insight for Search.

Today, we’re launching Google Insights for Search, a new product designed with the advertiser in mind. It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.


Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.
Google Insights for Search uses IP address information from our server logs to make an educated guess about where queries originated.
Filed Under: Google

SES San Jose 2008 Interview: Peter Hutto of Local.com

August 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this year features a special session focused on Local 2.0, the evolution of Local Search 2.0. Local Search comprises a significant chunk of online visitor engagement which includes online mapping, shopping engines, and directories. I had a chance to catch up with Peter Hutto, Vice President, Business Development and Sales at Local.com to get some insight on his session regarding Local 2.0 at SES San Jose. Read our chat below:

[Manoj]: How important is it for marketers to include local search as a part of their total online strategy?

[Peter Hutto]: There is a local market component for almost all business to business or business to consumer products or services. Today, the vast majority of products or services can be sourced locally – in fact approximately 80% of all goods and services are purchased locally. There is no question that it is extremely important for all marketers to incorporate a local online marketing strategy.

[Manoj]: What percentage of online searches are local?

[Peter Hutto]: This statistic is often debated. When actually trying to determine the percentage of local searches you need to consider both explicit and implicit searches. The explicit searches are when someone actually specifies the “where” in their search. For example, “used cars in Palo Alto” or “shoe repair in Irvine.” However, there are many searches that are implicitly local, when local intent is implied. For example when looking for “plumbers”, “carpet cleaners”, “marriage counseling” and many other products and services, a geography does not need to be specified since these services are implicitly tied to a local geography. Almost all local search platforms will geo-target the IP address and append that to the search query. Therefore when considering the percentage of online searches that are local, you should look at the combined number of both explicit and implicit searches. It is estimated that overall local search accounts for about 20-25 percent of online searches.

[Manoj]: How does a local search engine such as Local.com provide a unique search experience compared to Google/Yahoo Local?

[Peter Hutto]: Google and Yahoo are both broad in their focus and are not entirely focused on local search. Local.com offers a streamlined user interface and provides users with targeted, highly relevant local search results. These results include special offers, user ratings and reviews, local businesses’ website links, maps, driving directions, photos and more. Consumers can find all of the information they need on local businesses, products and services in one place.

[Manoj]: What is required to implement a local search strategy at Local.com?

[Peter Hutto]: Just give us a call (888-857-6722) or go to http://www.local.com/ to get started. Our sales team can work directly with local business owners and provide them with search targeting metrics- by geography, keyword and category. Ads on Local.com can be up in one day, often within hours. We also have a client services team who specializes in campaign optimization and keyword build out. Advertising on Local.com is cost effective for local businesses and doesn’t require extensive resources.

[Manoj]: What businesses flourish the most in local search?


[Peter Hutto]: There are 3 interesting segments that are starting to take off. We are seeing solid growth with search in traditional “trade services” categories, which have typically been the domain of the Yellow Page publishers like plumbers, auto repair, etc. We are also seeing an increase in the “professional services” categories like attorneys, accountants, financial consultants, etc. The bigger and typically consumer focused (vs. corporate) firms in these categories have been doing search for a while but there is a strong influx of newer and smaller firms who in the past did very little marketing. Finally almost all new companies are now considering search right out of the gate. The new business owner is very concerned about getting new customers and the majority are seriously considering local search because it is much more effective AND affordable than their traditional advertising channels like the Yellow Pages. The ROI and targeting capabilities of local search are nearly unmatched.

For more local search resources check out Web Analytics World’s Ultimate Local Search Resources Guide
Filed Under: Local Search, Search Engine Strategies, SES

Relevancy with Google Adsense Ads

August 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Last week, Kent Sugarman of the Google Adsense team helped users understand how to get higher quality and more relevant Google Adsense ads to display within your content:

  1. Use text in addition to images when possible. Please note that the crawler can’t read text contained within images.
  2. If you use images, be sure to title them appropriately and provide descriptive ALT tags.
  3. Try imagining your site without pictures or dynamic content. This will give you a good idea of what our crawler reads. If you lack imagination, you can try turning the images off in your web browser.

If your site uses a lot of these features, make sure you provide enough text-based content in one of our supported languages to effectively convey the topic of your site. If our crawler doesn’t find enough text, you may get poorly targeted ads

Filed Under: Google

Read this now…or miss the deadline

August 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment
We’ll get to the deadline at the end of the post.
In the meantime, let me explain why Manoj was kind enough to invite me to write a bit about the latest edition of Semphonic’s Implementation Toolkit for SiteCatalyst. Specifically, Manoj wanted to know how the toolkit goes beyond documentation provided by Omniture. It is a good question.
To begin with, I think there is a philosophical difference between our take on this subject and that of Omniture because we are a vendor neutral web analytics consultancy. As such, we look at implementation issues from a practitioner’s point of view. Some of you may be familiar with some of our white papers about Omniture, as well as my work with CMSWatch to know that this independence strongly influences how we view web analytics practice. So we tend to “call ‘em , like we see ‘em. ” For instance, that you’ll need to use Omniture’s cross tabulation functions to achieve the type of management reporting you were used to having through HBX Active Segments; or we carefully describe the syntax for each function you’ll need for capturing Flash, Ajax and DHTML and provide instruction on how to set up variables.

We concentrate on other practitioner concerns, such as walking through the items you’ll need to have Omniture enable. We find that folks sometime forget about this until the last minute… for instance enabling visits and visitor metrics for Commerce variables, enabling pathing on prop variables other than Pages, specifying the traffic and conversion variables you would like to see sub-related or co-related.

Quality assurance is a big focus of ours in the Implementation Toolkit…again this is something we’ve seen from our time “in the trenches” that people tend to rush through; hence, we’ve made our 20 point Quality Assurance check list available…the same one we use ourselves .

The other thing we concentrated on in writing the Toolkit is to make the content as easy to understand as possible…even for non-implementers. In fact, we have gotten some great feedback from web analytics project managers who have said that the Toolkit has given them the background they need to manage their technical resources when doing an implementation.

So, that’s basically how I see the Toolkit as being different than Omniture documentation. Of course, you might go the route Stephane Hamel suggested in his review of the Toolkit, and use the Toolkit in tandem with Omniture’s Fusion Playbook.

Either way, take a look for yourself at: http://www.semphonic.com/analytics/impguides.asp

I should mention that we’re running a contest right now to give away a copy of the Implementation Toolkit. Here’s the deal:

You email us your most challenging Omniture implementation or HBX Migration question. We’ll select the toughest question and answer it at X Change <http://www.semphonic.com/conf/index.asp> , and send you a copy of the Toolkit as a reward for having the hardest, most difficult question. You don’t need to attend X Change to win, but it would be nice, right?

And for those of you who ask a question that isn’t the toughest…we’ll answer them too, and send you our response directly.
Don’t forget to provide your name and organization name with your email. Wewon’t use this information for any reason other than to contact you if you won and to answer the question you submit. Remember we can only answer one question per person, so make it a good one!
Send your entries to: analytics@semphonic.com

All entries are due by 11pm PST, Wednesday August 6.
And, if you’d like to purchase the Toolkit straightaway and receive a 10% discount, just go to http://www.semphonic.com/analytics/impguides.asp and use Manoj’s promo code: manoj1008
Filed Under: HBX, Omniture, SiteCatalyst, Web Analytics Implementation

Web Analytics Jobs: Intuit Looking for Sr. Analysts/Engineers

August 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Principal Scientist – Data Mining

The Principal Scientist – Data Mining will be part of the Advanced Data and Analytics team in the Business Intelligence and Optimization organization. He or she will apply data mining techniques to create actionable insights from a broad range of data, some of it on a large scale: behavior (clickstream, call center), transactions (sales), perceptions (surveys, usability), market research (including industry and competitive analysis), demographic (including financial and medical), SaaS product usage, customer support interactions, etc. This role is responsible for defining the overall data mining strategy for a portfolio of very different businesses that will enable Intuit to continue to accelerate revenue growth over the next several years. This will require solving some fundamental and highly challenging issues in terms of where and how we use data mining; what tools and technologies we should deploy; and much more. The successful candidate will act as an industry thought leader to continue to build up awareness of Intuit as a front-runner web company across the broader web business community. This will involve speaking at industry events, sharing best-practices with other companies, building working relationships with key analytic experts, firms, and consultants, and more.

Full description/application at www.intuit.apply2jobs.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=mExternal.showJob&RID=66220

Staff Web Data Analytics Strategist

The Staff Web Analytics Strategist will join the Customer Experience team within the corporate Business Intelligence and Optimization group. He/she will provide thought leadership in web analytics tools and their applications to create a delightful, personalized end-to-end customer experience and improve business outcomes. The responsibility will include selection, design, development, support, and technical evangelism of our web analytics tool infrastructure and metadata. This individual will be responsible for building a world-class capability in all of these areas over a multi-year horizon. The successful candidate will have a mastery of a wide range of web analytics tools as well as experience in data warehousing for web data with proven implementation skills. This individual will be implementing a web analytics infrastructure that includes web click-stream data, web commerce data, survey data and other data related to customers. We expect the ideal candidate to have 5 years of experience in web analytics and data warehousing.

See full description/application at www.intuit.apply2jobs.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=mExternal.showJob&RID=66381

Staff Analytics Engineer, New Business Innovation

Inuit’s New Business Innovation team is seeking a Senior Analytics Engineer to drive the success of new, strategic data-driven products. This individual will create value from Intuit’s data through predictive modeling, data mining, and analytics. Intuit’s New Business Innovation team sits in the Business Intelligence and Optimization organization and seeks to drive business growth through strategic data initiatives. Some of the key experiences or qualifications that we would ideally like to see in the candidate ideal are a Ph.D. (or M.S. with equivalent experience) in Statistics, Mathematics, Data Mining, Operations Research, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field, Demonstrated success in the design and delivery of new data-driven products and/or end-to-end development of predictive models and a strong background (including 5+ years of experience) in analytics, modeling, machine learning, or data mining.

See full description/application at
www.intuit.apply2jobs.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=mExternal.showJob&RID=66380

Staff Web Data Warehouse Analyst

The Staff Web Data Warehouse Business Analyst will be part of the Customer Experience team focused on the web and work with the various business units to elicit the business requirements for a web data warehouse for the company. The goal is to use web data as a strategic advantage to optimize our web businesses in terms of delighting our customers in their shop, buy, and use experiences and achieving financial goals. Major focus areas for web research and analytics include personalization and experimentation. The data includes quantitative data (clickstream, transactions, demographic, product usage), qualitative data (surveys and usability study results), and unstructured data (problem description in English for customer support). The responsibility will include guiding business leaders to realize the maximum value out of their clickstream, search, and survey data; create business metadata; capture business processes, business rules; and define the conceptual/logical data model.

See full description/application at www.intuit.apply2jobs.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=mExternal.showJob&RID=66219

Filed Under: Web Analytics Jobs