The knee-jerk answer to this is, “Yes, people are looking for everything online.” To an extent this is a pretty fair answer; active consumers are connected to the internet with phones, tablets, computers… and have internet access just about all the time – from their phone, at McDonalds, with portable devices, etc.

Marketing has changed, and is continuing to do so, as more devices gain access to the Internet and more locations become practical places from which to connect. These days, people have a vast amount of information at their fingertips, a number of convenient ways to access it, and search engines act as gateways for finding what they need.

This move has caused a shift in advertising as companies scramble to get to where the people are – the yellow pages has moved online (and to a large extent is integrated into search engines); television shows, music, social activity has moved online.

All of this alters the format of display advertising and creates a struggle for companies to monetize from advertising because traditional methods are not suitable; magazines and newspapers have moved online (to the consternation of publishers because of the general “free-ness” of content on the internet).

Google continues to benefit from all of this, as it fuels the transition and answers people’s queries. If you check Google’s stock, you’ll probably see that a lot of the transition has already happened, as almost all of their revenue comes from advertisements that people click on (online).

But Are People Really Searching for My Business Online?

The easiest way to check whether people are searching for your particular business services or products is to use the Google Keyword Tool. From this tool you can see “Local Monthly Searches” which is how many times people search for a business like yours from the location you have selected (probably the United States if you left the default setting).

If you are logged into a Google account you can even change the columns to see the average cost per click advertisers pay when they bid on the term. Unless your product is very new, or if your product is not particularly well-defined in the market, you will probably see search volume for terms that are specifically for your product.

Search advertising is good at answering existing demand. Even if you have a particular niche that can be covered by a group of salespeople, you might supplement those efforts with search advertising. Answering inquiries for your products when they occur is probably going to work better than an unsolicited contact. Search advertising might also reveal unexpected or peripheral markets where you wouldn’t have a sales team assigned.

Probably a better question than “Are people searching for my business” would be “is it cost effective and practical for me to target search engine users?”

Is It Cost Effective and Practical for Me to Target Search Engine Users?

If you are just now asking whether people are searching for your business online, you might already be late to the game. But asking whether it makes sense to get involved with paid search/search advertising/AdWords/SEO/social media, is different than asking if people actually search online for your products.

I think I established that they most likely do, and it takes about five minutes to find out. But whether it is cost effective and practical to make an online marketing effort is a completely different topic. Obviously the answer varies by the type of business you have.

Are you a local business that wouldn’t typically advertise? Are you a franchise? Are you thinking of starting an e-commerce site? Is your business international? Is your business a branded household name? Is your business so large that it is more concerned with reputation management than acquiring customers through marketing?

For any business, here are a couple of easier questions to start with:

• Are your competitors advertising on search engines?
• Based on search query data, what kind of market share are you losing by not actively marketing with search engines?

Hopefully you’ve gained a little insight here on how to start thinking about your online marketing efforts.

At the end of July, Microsoft Research held its 2008 Faculty Summit to survey the state of computing R & D, which this year included a social media summit. A major topic of conversation included the transition of the internet from a network of documents to a network of people.

As participant (host) and Microsoft Scientist Matthew Hurst explains on his blog, “The PageRank era is marked by a very simple link with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption (a positive endorsement).” But this assumption of positive endorsement is becoming unnecessary as more and more direct evidence of people’s opinions and categorizations of content are available online. Research repeatedly reveals that others take notice of human-generated tags and reviews: “consumers report being willing to pay from 20% to 99% more for a 5-star-rated item than a 4-star-rated item (with variance depending on type of item/service)”, is just one example.

Many are excited by how much less processing-intensive the online content tagging process becomes with this trend – clusters of pages and facts seem to grow organically as a result of human tagging. This helps overcome previous problems related to content indexing within info retrieval, such as the gap between the language that the businesses or organizations use to label their content and the terminology preferred by their customers/users.

But there are challenges that arise as well in this transition that are less discussed. Says one scientist, aptly describing the phenomena, “fragmenting media and changing consumer behavior have crippled traditional [media] monitoring methods. Technorati estimates that 75,000 new blogs are created daily, along with 1.2 million new posts each day, many discussing consumer opinions on products and services. Tactics [of the traditional sort] such as clipping services, field agents, and ad hoc research simply can’t keep pace.” Call it what you will: Brand Monitoring, Online Image Tracking, Buzz Monitoring, Online Anthropology, Conversation Mining, Online Consumer Intelligence, Market Influence Analytics … The challenges remain the same. As an example, I think of a project I did here at Pure Visibility last year, which involved analyzing online review content related to a client’s company. After gathering the reviews (in the hundreds), I was faced with the daunting task of mining them for basic information like the overall majority sentiment expressed, and how this correlated with the source. My ultimate method was mostly manual and more than a little tedious.

Hurst’s blog contains a reference to a new book by Pang and Lee that surveys the state of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis, (basically, data-mining and classification using human generated content). In addition to interesting facts on the power of opinions like those above, this book clearly outlines the process that such analysis requires, and the associated challenges. For example, incorporating user opinions into a search engine typically requires the following steps:

1. determining whether the user is looking for subjective information
2. accurately classifying docs into the opinionated and non-opinionated bins
3. identifying overall sentiments expressed and or/specific opinion regarding particular aspects
4. summarizing information, including aggregating votes via different rating scales, highlighting some opinions, representing disagreement/consensus points, id’ing opinion holders, etc

The challenges are numerous. To summarize some of the excellent points made by Pang and Lee, I sketched out the following table, which compares opinion mining to traditional text mining:

To clarify on this last point, the authors note that this fact alone does not make the task more difficult than traditional topic classification, since data-driven approaches can be applied to the latter to improve accuracy over classification using a human-picked keyword list. The problem is that the accuracy of a data-driven method for opinion analysis is only about 80%, which is still not comparable to the performance expected in traditional topic-based classification.

While these challenges may seem intimidating enough to remain on the horizon for years to come, the fact that this book was written by a Yahoo research scientist, and one of the country’s top CS schools suggests that the right people are thinking about these trends. Significant changes in how we use the web may not be far off.

Today’s SEO researcher enjoys the choice between numerous keyword generation tools, each of which offers their own relative strengths and weaknesses.

Take, for example, both Yahoo’s Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the Keyword Discovery Tool. I use these two interchangeably, often because what I expect to be fairly common search terms bring up no data in one or the other database. I’m hesitant to trust either tool completely, mostly because of some strange inconsistencies as well as the skewed nature of the data. Not to mention the irritating way both are prone to crashing, and require frequently reloading the page. Read More

This is an interesting adwords problem that has an impact for keyphrase matching for industries where terms are often hyphenated, something often found in the product titles of many industrial goods.

Here are three ways to spell the company name Allen Bradley:

Allen Bradley
AllenBradley
Allen-Bradley

We are the KeyWord matching algorithm in our copy.

What we’ve found is that if the capitalized keyword match function {KeyWord:foo} is set in our ad copy, the three entries look like this:

Allen Bradley. Okay, that looks about right.

Allenbradley. Well, this is understandable. What algorithm would know how to break this word up?
Allen-bradley. Oops. Lower-case “b” after the hyphen.
We’ve notified Google and it’s a known bug. If it gets fixed we’ll let you know.

UPDATE: We just received this from our Google Account Executive:

Google’s system doesn’t recognize commas, periods, hyphens, or non-letter characters when they appear in keywords, the hyphens in your keyword are stripped out of the search terms and treated as spaces. Thus, a search on either allen bradley or allen-bradley will match up to the same term, regardless of punctuation. So, if two search terms match equally, the one with the better calculated rank (Quality Score * Max CPC) will get the impression, regardless of punctuation.

For example, a search on the keyword ‘ALLEN BRADLEY distributor’ within this account is currently matching your keyword ‘Allen-bradley Distributor’ (with a hyphen), because that keyword has a higher calculated rank than ‘ALLEN BRADLEY distributor’ (without a hyphen). Since the hyphenated keyword is being matched, it is also being inserted into the ad with keyword insertion. And since, keyword insertion recognizes ‘allen-bradley’ as one word, due to the hyphen, the ad displayed contains a lowercase ‘b.’

To resolve this issue, I would suggest that you delete all of your keywords that contain the hyphenated version of the company name. This will prevent the hyphenated company name from being inserted into your ad text (and avoid the cheesy looking ad copy). Also, if a user searches for ‘allen-bradley distributor’ on Google.com, the keyword ‘allen bradley distributor’ will still be matched in the account. Therefore, you won’t be missing out on any traffic by removing the hyphenated versions of the keyword.