SEM Punch

I have finally finished working on the AOL search data tool that I hinted at in a previous post. I didn’t just want to throw out something that queries the AOL user searches and returns a flat list of results, although it is available.

The main goal for me to build this tool was to give marketers a tool that lets them research keywords or industry segments on a more aggregate level. I think it is very useful to do keyword research, understand user search behavior as well as doing industry research.

What’s the tool doing?

For a given search query, the tool queries against 36+ million records and retrieves the searches performed by AOL users. It then gives you the option of aggregating the result set a little bit. It’s nothing fancy, but you stumble over some interesting stuff when rolling up data.

Key Features

1. Keywords are aggregated and the total number of queries & clicks are counted; along with it, the tool calculates the click though rate for every unique keyword.
2. Click through rate by rank: this is an aggregation view by broken down by rank. Basically, for every position the tool counts the number of keywords and calculates a click through rate by position.
3. Click through rate by page: similar to the CTR by rank aggregation/calculation, just that it is broken down by the page number. So you can compare what the aggregate click through rate was for keywords on the first page, versus keywords that appeared on the second or third page.

Please let me know if you would like to have additional functionality and I am happy to build it in.

Tip: You can exclude words from appearing in the result set by using a “-”. For example, if you wanted to look at all keywords that contain the term mortgage, but not calculator, you could search for “mortgage -calculator”

What’s next?

Admittedly, the tool is not lightning fast as it should be, depending on how broad your initial query is. I will start working on speeding it up, so stay tuned! If you are a DB guru and can help, please drop me a note.

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eBay & Google announced a partnership in which Google is the exclusive provider of text-based ads to eBay’s international properties. Yahoo has struck a similar deal with eBay in the US, but with the difference that Yahoo will be able to provide image based advertising as well and will support PayPal as a payment platform, according to the Financial Times.

This seems to be yet another big deal for Google, especially after reaching an agreement with MySpace. After Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook, it’s clear that search engines are grabbing for traffic to support their advertiser base with web properties. One big difference between the eBay & Google partnership however is, that displaying advertising to eBay users is probably of much higher value than displayong it to a roaming MySpace crowd. Ebay customers are willing to spend money and clearly searching for products, so the value to Google advertisers of having their ads thrown up infront of those users is high.

To be honest, though, I think this is rather bad news for the search marketing space - competition is healthy for bringing out innovative products. And when checking Google’s product offering, specifically AdWords & their API, it has been a follower rather than an innovator. The incentive to innovate is likely to decrease as market share of Google increases, so in the long-run that might leaves marketers with relatively poor products they have to deal with.

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In a previous post I mentioned the launch of a black hat seo forum. Back then, I didn’t give away too much information about the forum itself, because it was new and there wasn’t much going on in it. Now that it had some time to attract not only links, but also registered users, I would like to quickly talk a bit about what you will get at $100/month.

The forum has 4 broad sections of which only 2 are worth mentioning:

Create sites

A lot of blackhat’s “SEO” efforts seems to evolve around pumping out tons of websites; the art appears to get them indexed by Google, keep them in the index for as long as possible and then start the whole process all over again. Of course, the traffic that is generated in this process is monetaized, presumably with Adsense.

When generating thousands of websites and filling them up with content, the blackhat community is looking for content sources and automated tools to produce the websites. Tools that are used range from simple screenscrapers, data dumps from wikipedia or language mutation software that makes use of Markov chains and Bayesain filters. I would have liked to find out a bit more about language mutation, but the posts in this particular section were rather thin. Discussions about site builders focused around content generators such as RSSGM (Realy Simple Site Generator Modified) or competing products.

Get Traffic

This section was a real disappointment. Discussions mainly focused around link bait strategies and sites that can be used for link dumping. Example sites, among others, include newsvine.com or slashdot.com - what a tip! The $100 were worth it just for these two tips alone…yaaaaaaawn.

Other strategies of traffic acquisition include hoax news stories - these are really just made up, sensational stories to get a lot of dig or reddit clicks. The effort put into thesde fake stories os quite extensive; it includes building a fake news site (with some scraped content from real news sites), writing press releases and building up MySpace profiles.

Conclusion

The forum is not particularly active - perhaps it is too early to judge and the community grows a bit. However, having people pay $100/month isn’t really a great growth driver. But that was probably the intention of the founder.

In any case, I find the forum rather boring and not very insightful. To be fair, the reason why I was so bored was because of personal preference - I just wouldn’t enjoy throwing out a gazillion junk sites, making a few pennies or dollars on each, shutting them down and starting all over. Sure, some people make a lot of money with this. I personally cannot think of many jobs that are more unfulfilling.

My recommendation is to save your dough and focus on more viable business ideas, unless you are deeply entrenched in the blackhat seo stuff already. However, if you are just hoping to find a few quick tips on how to rank #1 on Google for your widget site, this is clearly the wrong space.

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As the folks on TechCrunch already mentioned, Salesforce is integrating AdWords into their product at $300/month. This is a natural step towards integrating CRM products with a growing and very measurable distribution channel such as search.

So far it seems that Salesforce integrates with AdWords mainly for reporting purposes, with some basic functionality such as deploying keywords and ad text. But the tool seems to lack actual management features. There is a lot more to search marketing than just looking at the metrics, although it is a very important part. My guess is that there is more to come in the features, but for now it is a first step to linking online traffic with offline sales resources that can pick customers up in parts of the conversion funnel where customers would usually be lost to a business.

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