betonliamcasey

Category: SEO

  • Content creation in 2014: what’s next?

    Content creation in 2014: what’s next?

  • Google Correlate: Your own trend data is your friend?

    Quick post this – I just came across this last night, so I thought I’d put down some thoughts.

    Google’s newest lab rat, is Google Correlate and it complements Google Trends in the sense that it allows you to upload your own data series and look for corresponding data trends.

    Google’s mission statement for this is: “Google Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends.”

    What’s really interesting is that it works like Google Trends in reverse. With Google Trends, you type in a query and get back a series of its frequency over time. But what Google Correlate allows is to enter a data series (the target) and get back queries whose frequency follows a similar pattern.

    What does this mean in real world terms?

    My understanding of this, is that it allows you to upload a series of data, let’s say for example how may people visited your website (and you know that it’s during say a slower period of the year), and they came to your site looking for “widgets”.

    You could take the search term “widgets” and the data series (of visits), upload the info to Google Correlate – and it would spit out other related data streams that follow the same series. This means that (in search terms) you could possibly target online categories that follow a similar online cycle – and further optimise (or spread) your search budget.

    It effectively cuts out all the complicated data analysis required to try and find similar search patterns, but based on your own data. This is where it differs from Google Trends in that all the data is coming from Google in Google Trends – but with Google Correlate you can upload your own data to be queried against what’s already stored by Google. (It’s pretty chunky in that it goes back to 2003, too).

    The maths behind the algorithm etc is pretty complicated – the number wizards out there can check it out here.

    There’s a whitepaper on it here – and the Google FAQ’s are here.

    I haven’t played around with it enough to see of it’s much more than a number-crunching exercise in terms of Google showcasing their ability to generate relevant results, based on your data – but I’m guessing that if it proves to work that it’ll (no surprise) get online marketers spending more online dollars as they try and exploit other data (search) trends that mimic their own.

    In other news, the www.igamingsupershow.com was busy, and it was good to meet so many old faces that had made it to Dublin. I’ll wrap up some thoughts on that, and #bluemonday – when I get time to draw breath.

  • My crystal ball for Facebook advertising is working well.

    World domination is ongoing, law suits are pending and one of my Facebook predictions for marketers is coming true.

    I predicted that the cost of advertising on Facebook would rise (it’s up 40% in the last year) but that click through rates would drop. Ergo, it’s not a great destination for seriously bottom line focused marketers, companies and brands. See a few of my social media predictions – here.

    The anecdotal evidence that we’ve heard and seen from partners and competitors is that the return on investment for companies looking to use it as an aquisition tool for paying customers, is one word, crap.

    We do a lot of deals with portals, ad networks and other online destinations. Conversion rates can be anything from .5% to 5% depending on whether the site that our ad is appearing on is targeted (to our segment) or untargetd (maybe just sports, but no gambling). We’ve heard of 5 figure campaigns run with response and ultimate conversion rates of less than .001%. Ouch.

    Twitter’s growth is unabated, and it seems to have beaten Facebook to the punch on click through rate – but part of that is due to the nature of the medium (of the tweet). To have any engagement, you HAVE to click through a tweet to see more in-depth content – this is primarily due to the URL shorteners out there.

    Some of the feedback that we’ve had from customers is that when they are on Facebook, they are in friend-browsing mode and even less likely than usual to engage with random marketing, however targeted. It’s a little different when they are surfing outside of a social network. They are more open to suggestion.

    There’s a good piece on it here from last year, and that was before Facebook’s prices went up. Read it here.