A lot of excitement these last 2 days as Google Webmaster Tools got supercharged with the long wished-for Organic Search impression numbers.

Google Webmaster Tools - Organic Search Impressions/volume and CTR

What it means is that you can gain insights on:

• The clickthrough rate difference for different organic search rankings on the keyword you are targeting. This may be very different for each keyword types: brand, generic, product-specific as well as different product types.
  

  CTR distribution by organic search rankings

• Analyse why your #1 ranked listing does not get the CTR that you are hoping for (i.e., unattractive Meta description and Title?)
• Search volume spikes around certain events and/or marketing (TV ads, print ads, campaigns, etc)
• Confidently analyse the real search volume for different keywords (if you are ranked within the top 10) and concentrate your SEO on the best-searched keywords.

However, further use of the tools revealed the following weaknesses (but since the tool is provided for free, I could not complain):

• Data only available back to 15 March (a month ago). Further backdating could not be done. Is it because the data recording on Google only started on that date, or is it because GWT only retains data for the last 30 days?
• No CTR graph available.
• No data-by-day export is available. I was hoping that I could export the search volume and clicks on a by-day basis and plot my CTR graph manually, but unfortunately this could not be done.
• Data is aggregated across any Google search. It does not separate searches on Google.com, local Google (e.g., Google.co.nz) and local search (e.g., Google.co.nz NZ-sites-only). As a result, you would most-likely get a variety of rankings for each keyword. However, the CTR is marked independently for each rankings as well as an average value provided. But it would be nice if you are able to just focus your investigation on certain Google domain.

OK, it’s not a cheat. But for now, it feels almost like it :)

Long Tail Keywords

Long tail is a term first coined by Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine, 2004). Typically long tail keywords may account for a large portion of the organic search visits, and can exhibit higher conversion rate by up to 200%. But how large is this ‘portion‘?

Interestingly, it has been proven a number of times that search does not exactly follow the Pareto principle 80:20 distribution (i.e., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers) – (Chris Anderson, Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Duncan Simester).

Instead, in a long tail distribution, typically the most frequently-occurring 20% of items represent only less than 50% of occurrences. In other words, the least-frequently-occurring 80% of items are more important as a proportion of the total population. In the graph below, the tail becomes bigger and longer in new markets (depicted in red) such as Internet retail. In other words, whereas traditional retailers have focused on the area to the left of the chart, online bookstores derive more sales from the area to the right.

Traditional vs. Long Tail

An interesting insight by Alan Mitchell on PPC long tail:

The Performance of Search Phrase by Number of Word

Due to the volume of keywords, targeting long tail keywords require a hollistic sitewide approach. Rather than manually targeting different search phrases on different pages, an example of smarter and cost-effective long tail keyword SEO on a template level is shown by WordPress by serving server-generated virtual pages via permalinks for every important phrase (e.g., tags, article titles, etc). Recording the performed site searches by your users also provide you with intelligence on what content/phrases are deemed important without you having to perform a manual keyword research.

There are other variations of targeting the long tail keywords. But the principles are the same:

1. knowing what your users want.
2. actively generating content on that topic/phrase using the easiest way possible, be it automated and/or manual.
3. ensuring such contents get indexed.
4. SEO on the content template.

As the search technology evolves, I personally expect targeting long tail keywords will get even easier. In fact, long tail keywords are probably the real future of search.

Further to my post before:News Ltd John Hartigan lashes out at bloggers

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has told a group of editors that he is confident that newspapers will find new ways to make money online by harnessing the vast reach of the internet.

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Recently I noticed that my last 3 post was suddenly attributed to an unknown user (El****less77). I know this was abnormal since I am the only one currently posting on this blog.

I checked my user list and Administrator list, and could not find anything relating to that user ID.

After a long search in the Internet, I found a crude way to solve it thanks to http://www.journeyetc.com/uncategorized/wordpress-permalink-rss-problems/

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Inserting Google AdSense into the Wordpress post content area, as opposed to the sidebar, gives it a more contextual appearance.

This is good because it allows the readers to see any relevant offers that may benefit them.

This website has the instruction needed to insert the Google AdSense ad unit into the Wordpress Post Content page.

Tripartite Skills

The success of a consultancy depends on three skills:

1. Smart = identify opportunity, recommendations; The dream
2. Passion/Aggression = push through, suggest, seek approval; The Drive
3. Discipline = action; The Reality

(continue reading…)

First Rate announces exclusive New Zealand and Australian partnership with SearchIgnite.

New Zealand Online Marketing scene just about to get a bit busier.

NZ Herald article: Yahoo backs Google’s response to China hacks

What I read:

Spotted today in the NZ Herald: Kiwi Data Warehousing Soars.

What does  mean to us?

If anything, recession taught us something by looking at the trends faced by the advertising industry. Most pronounced in the offline advertising, companies are rushing to cut their marketing budget by a large amount. They chose to hunker down in the bunker waiting for the artillery barrage of credit crunch to pass away before poking their heads again.

Interestingly, some went exactly the other way around into panic buying mode. They base the sales on percentage concept, where if the conversion rate goes down then in order to maintain the sales volume the base audience number must go up. This “panic sales defense” move lead to massive increases in marketing spend that returns no sales increases.

Why exactly these things happened?

The primary cause is that a lot of businesses, especially in the “calm New Zealand where time forgets”, neglect the importance of information. In particular, a lot of them do not bother to try to know their customers. For most conservative businesses, any sales is as good as the other. For instance, a lot of businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars on their websites without bothering to spend a few hundred dollars to get good analytics software such as Google Analytics.

But knowing your customers is paramount to your marketing efficiency. Google Analytics, for example, can be configured to attribute your sales to where the customers are coming from. With this you can recognise which source is valuable and which is not so that when it comes the time to cut down some marketing budget you can be sure you are cutting the right one.

Other useful analysis include customer behavior, such as what do they buy, what are the most favourite products (= promotion opportunities), what are they searching for that made them leave your shop (= product gaps), etc. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook also allow you to engage your customers to gain their trust, and most importantly, feedbacks. Not only that, they also form a free 3rd party data warehousing, where you can conduct data mining to see what people are talking about in relation to your, or your competitors’, products.

With free tools such as these and storage data space becoming cheaper every day, data warehousing and data mining should become a common business practice. It should even be a crime to run a business without thinking about who your customers are.

If you can snipe your enemy from a distance, why blindfold yourself and charge with a short rate inefficient scatter gun?

Facebook Demographics 2009 Age Distribution from Google Ad Planner data – notice the red rectangle.

Notice the red rectangle

Facebook Demographics 2009 from Checkfacebook.com, showing purportedly 60% of Facebook global population from 8 different countries – notice how 18-24 age group is mostly higher than the other age groups.

By Checkfacebook.com

Facebook 2009 US Demographics shown by Facebook Ad demographic targeting tool roughly confirms the data given by Checkfacebook.com, lending strong credibility to it.

Facebook 2009 Demographic for United States

Good food for though. Google Ad Planner data is highly inaccurate? Anyone has any information on how Google Ad Planner data is compiled?