Web Analytics
Search News: Google’s Move Left Leads to Double-Digit Rise in Clicks
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Written By Alex Staunton | August 27, 2009 | Share This
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Take this and let’s move it over an inch. It doesn’t sound like much of a change, but for Google, it’s huge. Google recently moved their ads over to the left a skosh, snuggling them closer to the organic results like Nick Cannon and Mariah Carey after a long day of shopping. While the average user probably noticed nothing, we in the search marketing industry have obsessed over what this change might mean for campaigns.
Search Metrics: For Every Query, There is a Season
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 19, 2009 | Share This
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Seasonality is not a new phenomenon in search marketing - every marketer worth their salt knows that queries for terms like “ski” go up in winter and “suntan” peaks in the summertime. However sometimes seasonal trends are less obvious to the naked eye which is why Google’s Insights For Search (among other tools) can be helpful, allowing users to trace back search volume for particular keywords and to compare the volumes over time for multiple keywords.
Paid Search: CARS Lifts Boats, but Not the Ones with Holes
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Written By Sean McDonald | August 13, 2009 | Share This
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I have always been fond of truisms - particularly the one that goes “a rising tide lifts all boats.” According to the elves at Wikipedia, this concept “is associated with the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy.” Search marketing is affected by macro-economic shifts just like most other sectors of the economy, and sometimes we are foresighted enough to anticipate the tide coming in.
Search News: Yahoo and Microsoft Deal Begs The Question: Nature or Nurture?
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 30, 2009 | Share This
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By now I’m assuming you know that Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a groundbreaking 10 year deal that sees Microsoft’s Bing search technology replacing Yahoo’s search engine and Yahoo’s sales team taking the lead on high-end search sales for both channels. This is just the kind of news that sends us into our search geek clubhouse here at Reprise Media, where beers are opened, feet are kicked up, and opinions start flying around the room like mosquitoes in a swamp (apologies to Dan Rather.)
One of the most interesting takes was an offhand comment from Vice President of Media John Chan. While sipping on his 40 he pointed out that for many of our paid search campaigns, campaign performance was noticeably better on Bing than on Yahoo. There are three reasons this might be:
Search How-To: Marketers Need to Understand Google’s Share Of Voice (SOV) Reports
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Written By Stephen DeAngelis | June 9, 2009 | Share This
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Last year Google introduced Impression Share reports to their list of reporting options, giving AdWords users greater insight into the performance of their Search campaigns. Fully understood, these reports can be invaluable in calculating projections, measuring the impact of offline advertising on online campaigns, as well as in day to day optimizations.
Currently, Google offers four types of Impression Share reports: Impression Share, Lost IS (Budget), Lost IS (Rank), and Exact Match IS. Here’s a breakdown of each report:
Social Media: 5 Questions with Seraj Bharwani of Visible Measures
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 18, 2009 | Share This
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There continues to be a myth propagated about social media, namely that outreach efforts aren’t measurable and accountable. Visible Measures has been at the forefront of measuring the success of Internet videos since 2005, providing metrics that include syndicated, social, and paid video placements.
Today, Reprise Media announced a partnership with Visible Measures that will help to deepen the ability to track and measure the success of video content. To add some context to this exciting partnership, we asked Seraj Bharwani, SVP of Business Development at Visible Measures, to answer our patented 5 Questions:
Advertising in a Recession: Help, My Marketing Budget Was Cut!
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 14, 2009 | Share This
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This recession-oriented post comes out of a discussion I had with some colleagues earlier in the week. The talk was prompted by the story that as part of their government backed bankruptcy the Obama administration has cut Chrysler’s marketing budget in half. For marketers like us, that’s like watching a limb get severed. Still, whether government mandated or not, it’s a reality that many businesses are scaling back on advertising and marketing just when they need it the most.
Social Media: Twitter, bit.ly and Whoopi Start to Channel the Data Flow
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 6, 2009 | Share This
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Twitter is like a series of tubes…no, wait, that’s the Internets. Ok, try this, Twitter is a river of information, a veritable data flow that can be strained and redirected in all sorts of ways. That being said, the wide-open nature of the platform has opened the door to data that is (to some folks at least) the equivalent of a power plant dumping PCB’s into the river. For instance, Twitter founders @ev and @biz were on The View today and got an earful from Whoopi Goldberg who doesn’t use their service, but who is represented on Twitter by an impostor.
Search News: Marketers Love Data Too
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 4, 2009 | Share This
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One of the big selling points of search marketing and increasingly, social media, is the rich data available from tracking relatively precise measurements such as the number of people who visit a website after it’s been optimized and how they get there, or the clickthrough rate on a paid search ad.
The frustrating part for search marketers is that sometimes clients are loathe to share their own internal data - information that can sometimes hold the potential for more effective and creative search and social media campaigns. This can range from bedrock data such as website traffic to information such as a regional breakdown of top selling products or the age and gender mix of certain customers.
Why is this sometimes so difficult to get from some clients? There are a few reasons:
Web 2.0 Expo: Real Time Comes to Analytics with Chartbeat
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Written By Noah Mallin | April 2, 2009 | Share This
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We’ve been beating the drum for a while now about the concept of real time search, especially as Search 3.0 ushers in more real time interactions like twittering which find their way into traditional search engine results and drive traffic to non-social media sites. The one place that continues to lag woefully behind this movement is web analytics.Using typical analytics tools to determine what’s happening on your website or blog in real time is like driving down the street while only using your rear-view mirrors to see. 9 out of 10 times you’ll hit that neighbor kid on a skateboard. And they’re usually on the sidewalk. I know - I’ve tried it. (more…)