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June 27, 2008

Exactly How Accurate IS Google Trends for Websites?

Much has been made of the week-old announcement that Google is in the traffic trending game. I weighed in earlier this week at ClickZ, focusing mostly on ways you can benefit from the information and largely sidestepping the already-trodden issues of Google being the only company able to opt out of the reporting, etc.

One question that hasn't been discussed to death, however, is the actual accuracy of the traffic numbers that Google is reporting. I ran some numbers on some sample sites and laid the Google Trends lines over the actual traffic numbers:

Example 1:

Example 2:

The verdict? In general, Google doesn't do too awfully bad, especially considering that neither of the sites above use Google Analytics or Urchin to measure their traffic.

The peaks and valleys are roughly similar. Roughly. Yet the scale is off pretty dramatically, with Google underreporting the traffic on one of the sites by a factor of two.

So my recommendation is that to gauge large trends (seasonality, results of large offline campaigns, etc.), Google Trends is a decent first look. It's probably a safe bet that when you plot two sites within the same vertical, that their relative lines will be more or less accurate when contrasted. But don't trust it for raw numbers.

Just to be fair, Google never said it was 100% accurate, stating in the post that "because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information."

Posted by erik at 02:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 20, 2008

DMOZ, Meet Wikipedia

I must say, I find DMOZ and Wikipedia incredibly interesting. Both can be incredibly helpful resources, as manifested by Google's love affair with each, a love affair that makes DMOZ and Wikipedia necessarily difficult to crack. Yet, as just a Friday afternoon observation, how they defend themselves from the onslaught of those attempting to crack them places them on opposite ends of the spectrum. Whereas Wikipedia will respond instantly and error on the side of speedy deletion, DMOZ seems to reserve any type of judgement until full consideration can be placed.

While both defense strategies have their philosophical and practical pros and cons, DMOZ often seems paralyzed by its due process. Perhaps that's why, every once in a while in a matter of concession, you find most of a DMOZ category consisting of Wiki links, or more precisely, 30 out of 53 total links pointing to Wiki pages.

Posted by tom at 03:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google Offers Monthly Campaign Budget Beta

Daily Budget -Standard

A daily budget is the amount you're willing to spend per day. When the limit is reached, your ads will typically stop showing for that day.

Monthly Budget – Beta

Monthly budget can be a good option for companies that see a large fluctuation in search volume and do not want to miss opportunities by being capped by a daily campaign budget limit. On the other side of the fence if you do not have the proper monthly PPC budget allocated for the month you can burn through your budget prematurely and end up going down mid month or be forced to add more monthly budget.

More Monthly Budget Info -

A monthly budget is the amount you're willing to spend per month. The main difference from the daily budget setting is that you can review your performance and campaign spending based on a monthly goal rather than a daily goal.
Monthly budgets are an expansion upon what already happens for your campaign spending with the daily budget option.

The same options are available for monthly budgets. This means that with standard delivery your ads will be shown evenly throughout each day during the month, and with accelerated delivery your ads will be shown as often as possible immediately, meaning that you could completely spend your entire monthly budget in a very short time (minutes, days, or hours, depending on your campaign settings).

Posted by charles at 02:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 13, 2008

Yahoo to Become Adsense Clearinghouse?

Sean saw it coming yesterday, and little more than a Month ago I thought it a Yang Threat to balance the Microsoft yin of bluster.

Yet here we have it, and have you ever read anything that made Yahoo suddenly seem more insignificant?:

If the Google partnership passes what's likely to be a rigorous review by U.S. antitrust regulators and lawmakers, Yahoo! intends to use its rival's superior search technology to display ads on its own Web site as well as those of its partners' in the United States and Canada.

Let us all give a collective search way of goodbye to the once great king.

Posted by john at 09:47 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 12, 2008

Yahoo! in with Google?

As many of our readers already know, the potential deal between MSN & Yahoo! has already reached room temperature.

But what is this I see on the home page of MSNBC.com? It's an article that not only reiterates MSN losing the deal with Yahoo!, but now Yahoo! is in talks with Google on an advertising partnership agreement!!

Keep an eye on this y'all as I'm sure something will transpire sooner than later.

Posted by sean at 02:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 09, 2008

Monitoring Viral Videos Across Multiple Platforms Online

Over the past few months there have been many video submission sites popping up like weeds across the Web. One of the major challenges as a social media marketer is to keep track of where viral videos are appearing online. No longer does this have to be a major pain in the neck. A site called VideoFetcher is making it easy to search for videos across 100 video submission sites. Go here to download their tool bar to search for videos from your browser at anytime. Hopefully this new search tool will help some of you video junkies out there. Happy hunting!

Posted by brett at 05:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 04, 2008

A Guide to Robots Exclusion Protocol

Google's Prashanth Koppula wrote a ready-to-bookmark post over at the official Webmaster Tools blog, showing tons of different robots-exclusion protocol (REP) directives that can be implemented in various ways. Following is a listing of directives discussed and the methods of implementation:

Directives for the robots.txt file:

• Disallow
  
• Allow
  
• $ Wildcard
  
• * Wildcard
  
• Sitemaps location

Meta tags for insertion into HTML:

• NOINDEX
  
• NOFOLLOW
  
• NOSNIPPET
  
• NOARCHIVE
  
• NOODP

Of special note are the two different wildcard uses; the post links to usage models for each. One additional funny bit is in the explanation of NOARCHIVE, in which the post describes the tag's usage as "Do not make available to users a copy of the page from the Search Engine cache." Contrast this with "Do not cache the page," which I believe is most people's idea of the tag's effect. I love little semantic hooks like that.

The post notes that the directives above are observed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live, which is a nice bonus. In addition, the post discusses some directives that only Google honors, such as UNAVAILABLE_AFTER (which I discussed about a year ago), NOIMAGEINDEX, and NOTRANSLATE.

I appreciate what engines are doing with the REP advancements. It's the equivalent of the basic Robotstxt.org protocol being the vehicle, but the engines have become after-market accessory specialists, showing you how to get additional mileage, power, and stunts out of your car.

Posted by erik at 08:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack