November 13, 2008

Looking for Holiday PPC Tips?

There were lowered expectations for the 2008 Holiday shopping season before the bottom dropped out of the economy, but now it's even worse. But you and your clients still have to make the best of things, so we're here to help.

Search Engine Watch is offering a one-hour webcast, "How to Survive the Economic Meltdown & Succeed this Holiday Season," taking place on Wednesday, November 19 at 1 p.m. EDT.

You'll get some Holiday PPC campaign tips from Keith Hong, senior director of Clickable's Assist and Customer Experience group (and former head of Ask.com customer management group). He'll explain what you should already have done to prepare for success, and what you must do throughout the holiday season to adapt to volatile market and demand spikes. He'll also offer some advice on how to stay calm and ensure success amidst this economic meltdown.

When times are tough, it's even more important that you spend your marketing dollars efficiently. This SEW Webcast can help you learn how to do that.

Please sign up today.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 29, 2008

SEW Experts: Online Retail SEO: Holiday Shopping Seasonality

The Q4 holiday season makes or breaks the success of online retail. Yet many companies don't realize how important the holidays are for SEO. In today's Big Biz column, "Online Retail SEO: Holiday Shopping Seasonality," Aaron Shear outlines a variety of factors revolving around seasonality that retailers must take into account for SEO to be successful.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 9, 2007

SEW Experts: How to Avoid Seasonal Search Ranking Wreckage

Search engine traffic is always unpredictable. From algo updates playing havoc with organic rankings to quality score changes flummoxing your paid listings. The impact of these changes are especially critical around the holidays. In today's Big Biz column, "How to Avoid Seasonal Search Ranking Wreckage," Aaron Shear shares what to do when holiday dips in traffic threaten to dampen profits.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

September 4, 2007

SEW Experts: Say "Bah Humbug" to Holiday Marketing Stress

In today's Little Biz column, "Say 'Bah Humbug' to Holiday Marketing Stress," Carrie Hill tells you how to avoid holiday stress by getting a jump start on your holiday marketing campaigns.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches

Now live via Google Labs is a new Google Trends service, announced today as part of Google Press Day. The service allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. For example, do a trends query on cars, and you can see the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on.

Let's take a single search first and go through the motions. A query on ipod gives a chart going back through January 2004, which is as far back as Google Trends data goes. You can see spikes in searches, and these are often labeled with letters that lead to related news items. Google says it is using similar technology to do this as it does with company price charts in Google Finance.

Below the chart, you get some geographical and regional data. For example, you'll see most iPod searches are happening in New York, then in Irvine, then San Francisco, London and so on. That's the city data. Next is a Regional option, which gives you a breakdown by country (iPod searches are big in the UK then the US and Australia). Finally, you can narrow by language (Most searches for iPod are done in English, then Japanese).

Want to narrow in? You can do a variety of things. Using the drop down boxes, you can pick a particular month, such as last month. You can also pick a particular region, like last month just in the United States.

You aren't limited to single words. Enter multiple words by commas to do comparisons, such as google,yahoo,microsoft. That query shows you each term in a different color, and you can then see all the breakdowns for each word, as well. You can do up to five words in total. Want to do multiword queries? There's ways to do that -- check out the help page for more.

Sometimes when you do a search, you'll get something like this message:

Your terms - larry page - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

What's happening here is that Google's working to help protect search privacy. There's a slight chance someone might enter something like their own name along with something embarrassing or private. Potentially, Google Trends could reveal this information.

My Private Searches Versus Personally Identifiable Searches article explains this issue more, and it's something Google used successfully to argue against handing over query data to the US Department Of Justice. Given this, it needed to put some protections into place. That mechanism is to only show data about queries that happen often.

"Something has to be in the hundreds of times per week for you to see trends," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products & user experience, about the service. This is also touched on in the help page on the Google Trends site.

Some things to keep in mind. For example, Mayer cited to me a yankees,red socks comparison. Searches for Yankees are well above the Red Socks, so they must be more popular! Well, it's also a case that there are more people in New York than Boston, so there are more people potentially searching for the Yankees.

(Postscript: So I'm an idiot -- it's Red Sox, of course. And yankees,red sox for 2006 shows Red Sox actually much closer to Yankees. So cop-out time, the point in general remains valid. There are things that can skew the stats in ways you might not expect. For example, if you search for a particular company and you see growth in their name, are they more popular? In 2005, you might think so for Kryptonite. But go broader, you'll see a spike in 2004 associated with the Kryptonite locks-can-be-picked-by-ballpoint-pin-fiasco. That incident might have helped fuel some of the rise in following year -- searches that aren't necessarily reflecting a popular view of the company).

Another caveat. The geographic data is based on IP targeting, which isn't perfect. In particular, people who use AOL are often seen as if they are in Virginia, regardless of their true location.

How about query spam? Google's got a system designed to help filter for this, either if intentionally done or accidentally. For example, if it sees many queries all coming from the same IP address, that might be caught. Similarly, if it sees many queries coming from different cookies, it could be caused by the same person who rejects standing cookies. Each search would generate a new cookie, so potentially the same single person might be seen as different individuals.

"We are savvy to that case and make sure we saw queries from 100 different unique cookies that aren't fresh," she said.

Also, the data isn't filtered or consolidated in the way things happen in Google Zeitgeist or other search data mining tools. In other words, car brings back different results than cars. And if you want to see the dark underbelly of search, you can see in sex,ipod that if Apple sold a sexPod, it would leave iPod in the dust. You can also search for explicit adult terms, should you have the hankering.

Finally, Google rightly warns that this is more a play thing that something you can use for definitive predictions of popularity.

For a different spin on Google Trends, check out Barry's post, Fun With Google Trends. Now that we've warned you not to take the data too seriously, time for some comparisons anyway :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:26 PM | Permalink

April 10, 2006

Keyword Research Tools And Keyword Data Figures

Aaron Wall has a nice write up on many of the keyword research tools available today. He runs down some of the pros and cons with each, as well as gives you a list of items you should be aware with for any of these tools. Aaron explains that you always need to be concerned with "the biases of the providers" because they might have a ventured interest in you purchasing a specific keyword or two. He also explains that all the figures are "estimates" and to "consider how spread out the search terms likely are in your industry." Aaron also posted at ThreadWatch that WordTracker is selling top 500,000 keywords it has collected over the years.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:28 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2006

Google Enhances Keyword Tool; Adds Global Trend Graphs

Google AdWords announced that they have added "global trends" to the Keyword Tool. Global trends shows the search volume of a particular keyword phrase, charted over a 12 month historical period. To access this data, you can go here and then enter your keyword phrases. Then click the "Get More Keywords", after the page loads, on the right side, select from the "Show columns" drop down menu, the "Global search volume trends" option. You will then see this data charted for you.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:58 AM | Permalink

January 20, 2006

The Yahoo Search Marketing List of Valentines Day Terms

If you're in need of help thinking of Valentines Day terms, Yahoo Search Marketing might be able to help. Over on SEOmoz Blog, Rand Fishkin points to a new list from YSM that categorizes related to Valentines Day. Categories include, Flowers, Chocolate and Candy, Jewelry, Gifts - General, Travel and several others.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:27 PM | Permalink

September 25, 2005

Avoiding Holiday SEM Blunders

The holiday season will soon be upon us, and it can be a fantastic time for search marketers, provided you make all of the right moves, says Kevin Lee.

Though many marketers are doing a lot of things right, they're also setting themselves up to make some serious blunders this holiday season. Some best practices could easily replace those blunders.

Kevin offers a checklist of these potential blunders along with "power tips" to turn each into a best practice for search marketing in his latest ClickZ column, Turn Holiday SEM Blunders Into Best Practices.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 3:35 PM | Permalink

September 15, 2005

Getting Ready For The Holidays

Search & the Holiday Season from Kevin Ryan at iMedia Connection has him looking at tips to help you get ready for the holiday shopping period, in terms of a paid search campaign. As for SEO/free search, start gearing up now!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:01 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2005

Search Trends & Seasonality

With proms in the US happening in May, those looking for dresses clearly get going the month before, right? That's what Hitwise's Bill Tancer thought. But interest actually starts as far back as November. Search Timing: The Next Competitive Edge from Bill at MediaPost shares a few other charts showing things like how dieting queries DO mesh with New Year's Resolutions and how LCD TVs are growing in popularity as the technology matures.

What to do if you can't tap into the great but expensive historical data that Hitwise can provide? Priority Submit's Keyword Research tool can also give you some glimpse into seasonal changes. But don't forget that you can test seasonality at any time. Consider keeping a seasonal campaign running at a low budget level. See a spike? You may have stumbled onto a seasonal spike you didn't expect.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:20 PM | Permalink

April 5, 2005

Surfing Seasonality With Search Marketing

In Seasonality and SEM Campaigns from ClickZ, Fredrick Marckini looks at how search marketers need to react to seasonal and season-like events, in order to catch a growing wave of interest, rather than see other marketers surf past you on it.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:55 AM | Permalink

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