I’m a little perplexed at the speed in which the SEO industry is adopting new technologies, especially for a constantly evolving industry that’s based on being as nimble as Google.

Having worked in SEO for many years, I’ve used almost every tool under the sun for various elements of research, including site analysis, link analysis, and keyword tracking. The problem with most of these solutions is that they’re still developed with an old-school mentality, where you’re effectively anchoring the software to a single computer. Today I’ll highlight some of the problems this can cause and present some alternative web applications. I’ll be taking up the challenge to make the lives of fellow SEO professionals a little easier, as well as providing clients with greater transparency. I’ll also review several SEO web applications, looking at the positive effect they can have on your campaigns and workflow management.

Here’s how the old process, based on desktop apps, used to work:

purchase the software outright and download it
install the software on the computers where it will be used
perform the SEO-related task
export reports and share via email

Any time you wanted to run a ranking report, the software has to complete this task locally.

To be fair, most of these desktop applications automate the process of running and emailing reports; however, they still rely on the computer being switched on to connect to the Internet.

The Best Desktop Applications and Why They Still Fail to Stack Up

There are some well-designed desktop applications that make the life of an SEO professional easier. Before these came about, I can’t begin to describe the pain or guesswork that was involved in starting and managing an SEO campaign; so, kudos to the likes of SEO Elite, LinkAssistant, and other heavy-hitting pieces of software—you really have changed the industry.

A couple of the desktop applications I currently use on a daily basis are:

Keyword Elite 2.0—A reliable keyword research and competitive data collection program. Version 1 was great but this went to the next level. Yet, here are some reasons why I think it’s falling short of its potential:

It’s locked to a predefined computer after being downloaded and installed.
Sharing reports or any data is quite cumbersome, and generally requires third-party manipulation in Excel for proper presentation.
There’s no direct client access to the data via a web interface, so they’re unable to log in at their leisure.

LinkAssistant PowerSuite—A powerful set of tools that allow you to manage and track SEO campaigns. It comprises four separate applications, with each focusing on a specific element of your SEO campaign and having a robust reporting tool that produces client-friendly data. Here are some of the reasons why it doesn’t quite satisfy my needs:

Single computer installation, which means I always have to carry my laptop around or pay to install the program on separate machines.
Large and complex reports can take weeks to produce when running locally, due to processor speed and internet connection restrictions.
There’s no ability to give clients direct access to run their own reports, so transparency is a real issue.

Is there a better way?

What most of these solutions lack is a proper web application, so that wherever you are or whichever computer you’re using, you always have access to the latest statistical information to make educated decisions involving optimization. For example, if I want to show a client a report, I want to avoid having to export it to an Excel file, editing the data, and then sending it through as an excel graph; I simply want the ability to log in (and give clients access to log in) and show the latest results in an easy-to-understand manner.

It’s Time the SEO Community Boarded the Web Apps Bandwagon

Think about how frustrating email was before services like Gmail and Hotmail appeared on the scene. How about the time before Google docs existed or before online services such as box.net were around? Did you share files via email, or upload by FTP? Annoying! The world is increasingly moving towards web apps and for good reason: it makes accessing and sharing your data much easier. It also takes the reliance on a single internet connection or point of failure away from the desktop application.

What SEO web applications are worth trying?

SheerSEO—One of the best examples I’ve come across of a service that fills a specific niche well is SheerSEO. It does a great job performing on a relatively simple yet niggling set of tasks. Such tasks are essential to your initial SEO analysis and ongoing optimization, including:

keeping customers and stakeholders up to date with site rankings automatically and storing this data online
suggesting keywords and URLs to track during the setup process
defining the regularity of polling and the frequency of emailed reports
giving access to stakeholders and clients so that they can always check the latest data or compare it to historical trends
tracking inbound and social links that point to every part of your website and establishing their effect on rankings
the ability to pull data captured through SheerSEO’s web application into your own dashboards and reports via their XML output stream

Because SheerSEO automates basic but essential tasks for you, it’s much easier to just set and forget, unlike other SEO software that runs as a desktop application; you can then use that time to focus on improving rankings, rather than the hassle of tracking them! SheerSEO accounts have a 90-day free trial; however, if you wish to upgrade it starts from as little as $9.95 per month.

Basecamp—This is one of the original and most reliable web applications. It’s always stuck to its principles and kept it simple. Built with a highly flexible API system, it can be integrated in numerous ways into your own applications, which I personally find very handy. Although this is not an SEO-specific web application, it lends itself extremely well to the SEO workflow. Some benefits of using Basecamp to manage SEO projects are:

it’s an extremely reliable provider that has a very long history of uptime, so no clients will be hassling you about a server going down
it’s flexible enough to allow you to define specific sets of actions, load them for each new client, and then assign tasks to the right departments—all with a few clicks, allowing you to track the entire lifecycle of each SEO client
it offers complete transparency for clients, allowing them to log in to the system and see milestones, to-do lists, reports, and messages relating to their project, centralizing communication and delivery
the ability to integrate directly with services such as SheerSEO or your own web applications via API calls and automated reporting, giving your clients a single dashboard

Basecamp is a great base from which to build your SEO business, allowing you the freedom to integrate your own applications while delivering a stable platform and intuitive interface. This comes with a free 30-day trial on all levels of accounts.

Conclusion: Where SEO Software is Heading

There is still no single killer application around to simplify the life of an SEO professional; however, pieces of the puzzle seem to be coming together and there are promising signs that the bigger issues are being tackled. In the short term, it appears users will be stuck utilizing various, individually powerful desktop applications which when used together, give amazing insights and a competitive advantage. The downside is the data-sharing and portability nightmare it produces. Let’s hope that one day soon some of these players move to web-based applications, like those featured in this post, and make all of our lives that little bit easier. Until then, happy multi-tasking, and make sure that your Excel skills are up to date!

Full disclosure:

Eyal from SheerSEO.com has been good enough to provide the SitePoint team with a free SheerSEO account. However, I’ve been a paid customer of this tool for many years, and have no hesitation recommending it based on my experience over this time.

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The new year is such a wonderful time. Wonderful smells in the air. The world is full of hope. Unachievable things seem achievable and are being polished into shiny resolutions. World peace seems within grasp.
As we spring to action full of passion I wanted to share with you all a short list of things that will expand your little world of online marketing & web analytics.
We all have a tendency of getting caught in a rut, using the same tool to do the same things and spew forth the same data. Change is hard, even if we know that we should be executing a multiplicity strategy to win in the web analytics 2.0 world.
Before all the excitement of the new year wears out, here are five simple things I would love for you to try so that your company will have a glorious truly data driven 2010!
#1: Don't suck.
Seems obvious. And yet in our quest for ever more hard problems to solve we forget that the number one goal of every website is not to suck. Especially at the really simple and basic things.
At a recent conference there were three keynotes.
One was extolling the wonderfulness of their multi channel campaign tracking. When I went to their website it was a 100% flash website with a constrained small size where it took too much looking to click on anything and then too much scrolling to read anything and unclear calls to actions (if any). That's sucking. No amount of great multi channel tracking will save this company, they suck at the basics.
The second was about predictive analytics and how using massive integrations between online and offline databases they had accomplished some really cool reporting of data (and make no doubt the IT work done over 18 months to accomplish this was cool). Their home page is a mess. 24% of the content covers what any visitor might want, rest is the company shouting at you (in many annoying ways). That's sucking.

The third was about how to create data driven cultures and how this person had created a impressively big cross functional team across multiple countries and standardized on Omniture after a lot of work over two and half years. I did a search on some of their products and they did not have page one search listings (on Google or Bing) for what should be their head terms. (That's sucking.) They did have PPC ads, which I click on the ad for specific product they land me on generic nonsense pages. That's sucking.
I share these stories to illustrate vividly how we in the web analytics world get lost in our data and Omniture and Google Analytics and reporting and lose sight of the the basics and the customer experience.
It is important to realize that if you suck nothing else matters. Not your api driven integrated massively multi channel attribution analyzed campaign lifetime databases. That is not going to save you or your company.
Before you attempt the hard make sure that you do all the standard stuff to ensure your company has a fighting chance to win.
Here are some tips to inspire you:
I LOVE looking at the bounce rates for the top 20 landing / entry pages to the site. Find the losers, fix 'em. These guys are so bad they could not even get one click from the visitors.
Sit down with the owner of the top ten pages to the site and look at them. I mean really look at them and ask this question: "What the heck are we trying to do with each page?" Make sure there is a clear answer (and a match between Customer Intent and Webpage Purpose).
Check the load time of your important pages. Use something simple like: www.WebSiteOptimization.com Or whatever complicated tool you have.
Sign up for your websites campaigns using your personal email address. See how the emails look. Relevant? Personal? Click on the links, what to you see on the landing pages? Fix!
Create a funnel for your cart / checkout / lead submission process. Find the biggest abandonment page. Fix it.
Ask your Finance department where most money is being spent on the web. PPC? Affiliate? Display? What? Take a week to segment that data and find out how to save 10% of the cost.
Count the number of links on your main pages. I mean count them. There are 98 links on a travel site I am looking at right now, on the page for a hotel in Chicago. 98! This is a top site.
What are the analytics people doing if they are not helping the product page owner figure out how to kill atleast 50% of those links on a product specific page. There should be one link: Search for Hotel or Make Reservation! Do this for your site.
Fix the 25 things Dr. Pete lists in this delightful checklist: 25-point Website Usability Checklist.
There are so many ideas. I hope that before you go for massive web analytics glory that your use your wonderful powers first to make sure your site and customer acquisition strategy does not suck.
PS: Bonus tip: Make sure you visit your website once a week, atleast.
#2 Learn basic statistics.
The days of tools and reports simply puking data out are rapidly reducing. No longer can tools or "analysts" just puke 15 metrics on a report and hope to survive.
Web Analytics tools are starting to become smart (see: Analytics Becomes Intelligent). Data is starting to truly get numerous.
For all of the above reasons it is becoming ever more important that you are know atleast Statistics 101. You don't have to be armed with the knowledge of how to create various models or be able to jump into SAS and get naked with it. But you are going to have to know what a mean and a median and r squared and standard deviations and Z scores and confidence intervals and all that lovely stuff is.
If you have not been exposed to statistics perhaps you can take a class at a local community college or university. Many employers will pay for ongoing job relevant education.
Alternatively get one of the simpler books on the topic and immerse yourself in self education. Regardless of if you are a novice or an expert I think one of the best books to start with is The Cartoon Guide To Statistics ($13). A cartoon book? Yes. It is quite good.

Once you know statistics 101 you'll find that you'll think of data analysis differently and you'll get better at finding that proverbial needle of insight in the haystack of data. Knowledge of statistics is a key arrow to add to your analytical skills quiver.
Hello statistical significance!
#3 Try one (or two) new usability / VOC tool/'s.
My passion for the customer is, as they say, legendary!
Part of it is the humility I have developed at the powerlessness of clickstream data to answer all the needed questions. Part of it is that there are just so many darn good options out there to listen to our customers.
So this year why not try one of the newer more powerful and yet cheap usability analysis tools?

 
Here are some tools that are pretty cool and unique:
Five Second Test. I absolutely love the idea of collecting "first impressions" from current customers, employees or just randomly selected people. Within thirty seconds you can take a screenshot of your lovely home page or landing page, upload it and for free get feedback from real people.
4Q / Kampyle / UserVoice. Each of these tools does something completely different, and yet each allows people to type things that you can read and be wow'ed or saddened by. Why not try one of these tools this year and truly get in touch with your customers and a real and meaningful way?
UserTesting.com. You are not a small enough company, or a big enough one for that matter, to do usability testing. This is usability testing for ultra cheap, $29 per person. Set out the tasks, identify your audience, test happens, you watch the video and read comments, you cry, you fix things, you become rich.
Also checkout Feedback Army.
WebSort / OptimalSort. The information architecture on most website is terrible and the reason is that company employees create it for themselves. A great option to hear from the customers was to do card sorting studies. Problem? Expense! Not any more baby. Both these tools are quite affordable, all online and in a fraction of the time it would take to do a offline card sorting study you can get the key data you need. Sweet.
You don't have to do all of the above. But you do have to listen to your customers.
In 2010 Consider trying just two tools listed above that you have not used so far. I promise you that you'll want to give me a big hug the next time you see me.
#4 Try one new competitive intelligence tool.
I practically have a illicit love affair with competitive intelligence. And I am not embarrassed!
If I ever come to see your company, or you see me presenting publicly, then you have seen me present data about your company / industry and then proceed to say nice / not nice things. There is just so much gold out there to be discovered.
Here are some tools for you to try, ideas for analysis you could do:
Compete.com / Trends for Websites. I love the depth of data now available in both tools for free (even if you use just the free part of Compete). Index your overall performance against your competitors.
Where do people go after they leave your site? What are the top five referrers for your competitor? What are the top sites that get traffic for the word love? All free from Compete.
People who visit my site, what other sites do they visit? What are the things they search for? What's the difference between US traffic and India? All free from Trends for Websites.
Google's Search-based Keyword Tool. If you have never explored the long tail for your website (if you are a medium to large site) using SbKT you might be committing a crime. If you have never taken a list of keywords AND the landing pages recommended by SbKT where you have zero impression share and given it to your SEO team then you should feel bad. There is so much here.
[Learn how to use SbKT here: Monetize The Long Tail of Search.]
Google Ad Planner. Some display / banner ads stink because they are just terribly produced and blink and annoy you with sound and do insane things when you mov[…]

The real estate bubble popped. Will the link bubble be next?

The real estate bubble was the product of greed, low interest rates, loose lending policies and derivatives. Nearly anyone could get a house and people bought into the idea that real estate would always be a good investment. The result of this irrational exuberance? Homes were valued far more then they were worth.

The Link Bubble

Are links that different than real estate?

Links have traditionally been a reliable sign of trust and authority because they were given out judiciously, a lot like mortgages. For a long time link policies were tight. You needed references and documentation before you earned that link.

In addition, links weren’t looked upon as an investment tool. The concept that links influenced SEO hadn’t taken hold. The motivation behind links was relatively pure and that meant Google and others could rely on them as an accurate signal of quality.

Links or Content?

Many have recently bemoaned the death of hand crafted content and the rise of content farms as a threat to search quality. But is content really the problem?

Content has little innate value from a search perspective. Yes, search engines glean the content topic based on the text. It’s like knowing the street address of a house. You know where it is and, probably, a bit about the neighborhood. But it doesn’t tell you about the size, style or quality of the home.

Long tail searches are akin to searching for a house by street address. So, content without links may sometimes produce results. But the vast majority of searches will require more information. That’s where links come in.

McDonald’s Content

Lets switch analogies for a moment. Some have called Demand Media the McDonald’s of content. There’s a bit of brilliance in that comparison, but not in the way most think.

Both McDonald’s and Demand Media crank out product that many would argue is mediocre. Offline, McDonald’s buys the best real estate and uses low prices, brand equity and marketing to ensure diners select them over competitors.

Online, Google holds the prime real estate. But that real estate can’t be outright purchased. And in the absence of price, we’re left with brand equity and marketing. Online, brand equity translates into trust and authority. And links are the marketing that help build and maintain that brand equity.

Demand Media has brands (their words) that give it automatic trust and authority. Publish something on eHow and it automatically inherits the domain’s trust and authority, built on over 11 million backlinks.

Writers for Demand Media are provided revenue share opportunities on their articles. Here’s one of the tips they give to writers to boost traffic to their articles.

2) Link to your article from other websites.

Link from your own website or blog, from a message board or forum, from your social networking profile on MySpace or Facebook and more. The more high quality links to your article there are on the web, the more highly a search engine will rank it.

Demand Media combines the installed brand equity of multiple sites (which happen to be cross-linked) with an incentive to contributors to generate additional links. The content doesn’t have to be great when links secure premium online real estate.

There might be something better down the road, but McDonald’s is always right there at the corner.

Link Inflation

The last few years have produced major changes surrounding links. Linkbuilding is now a common term and strategy. A number of notable SEO firms tout links as the way to achieve success.

Linkbuilding firms sprung up. Linkbulding software of various shades of gray were launched. Paid links of various flavors flourished. Social bookmarking and networking accelerated link inflation. And new business models like Demand Media sprung up to take advantage of the link economy, creating a collection of sites and implementing incentives that result in something that resembles derivatives.

Link policies went from tight to loose and people got greedy. Anyone can get links these days. So what’s the natural result of this link activity?

Link Recession

The value of links is inflated and at some point the system will correct. The algorithm will change to address the abuse of links. Unlike The Federal Reserve, Google probably isn’t looking for a soft landing, nor are they going to extend a bailout.

Some links will continue to matter. Links that are in the right neighborhood. The ones with tree lined streets, good schools and low crime. But will links from cookie cutter planned communities still be valuable? Strong links will mean more because they’ll hold their value, while many more links will be neutralized.

I’m no Nouriel Roubini, but I do believe that a major link correction is coming in 2010. Google must address the link bubble to make search results better.

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Next Big Sound is online music analytics & insights

by Stoney deGeyter

In today's business environment, a website is absolutely necessary. It provides an avenue for people to find you and find out more about you as they sit in the comfort of their homes, while waiting in line at the grocery store, sit on the commuter train, or wherever. Unfortunately too many business take the wrong approach to how they build and market their websites.

Most companies stop their website development once the site is developed, and then move into marketing mode. The website becomes another product they have to market, rather than building a website that is the marketing vehicle for their products and services. We talk about website promotion quite a bit, which we understand is the process of getting the site visibility on the search engines. But getting people to the website is not the end goal.

The website is just another something the business must have in order to do business, but it never fully succeeds in being a tool that works for them to generate business.

Online marketing is different from off-line marketing, primarily in that you have to promote the very tool you use as a promotion for your business. With radio and TV you don't have to go out of your way to get people to listen. You run the ads and people do or don't. Websites must first be optimized in order to help improve traffic and visibility before they can be used as a business generating tool.

No wonder businesses pour thousands of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (phone book, magazines, radio, etc.,) which often produces significantly less return on the investment dollar. When it comes to properly planning and executing the development and promotion of their website, well, it's a bit more complicated.

Make Your Website Promote YOU.

With some exceptions, every website has its own unique characteristics. When building your site there really is no one-size-fits-all pattern to follow. Your site should be built to fulfill your informational and sales needs, while being effective for your target audience. With that said, there are specific components that almost every website needs in order to be an effective marketing tool.

Home Page

The home page is the online "face" of your company. It may not be the entry door for every visitor, but it is your front door and you need to make sure that you have it right. The home page should provide an all-encompassing view of what you do or offer while helping to establish trust with the new and repeat visitor.

To be effective, your home page must accomplish several things:

Establish your brand: Your home page sets the tone of the visitor's expectation. Everything from brand identity to confirmation that you can provide what they need must be established here.

Display your offerings: Visitors need to be provided a quick overview of the products, services and information they can expect to find as they dig deeper into the site.

Generate interest: The home page must do more than just provide information of what you offer; it must generate interest in those offerings. It must create a desire within your visitors to click further into the site to find out more and see how they will be benefited by your products or services.

Convey trust: Your home page can often be the first impression you give your visitors, therefore it must be able to establish an element of trust. If you come across as a slick used-car salesman, or a less-than-professional hobby site, your visitors will bolt.

About Us Page

Why do visitors go to the About Us page? Its a good question that is often ignored when web developers fill the content of these pages. Too many sites simply do not provide enough--or the right--information on this page.

The About Us page should be used to provide reassuring company information such as how long you've been in business, organizations you belongs to (chamber of commerce, BBB, etc.,) mission statement, bios of the executive staff. The information you provide on the About Us page is designed to help your visitors feel comfortable doing business with your business.

Contact Us Page

Even if you have your phone number, email address, fax number and snail mail address on every page of your website, it's still important to have a full page dedicated to this exact same information. It may seem odd, but many people looking for your contact info will ignore the information on whatever page they are viewing, looking instead for the link that reads "Contact Us."

Your Contact Us page should provide several different ways of contacting you including email, phone, and a web form. You should also include a physical address and possibly even a map. This is also a good place to display hours of operation.

Product & Service Pages

If you sell a product or a service you need pages dedicated to providing details about what you offer. Many small sites can put all their product information on the home page. This is great, but you still need to provide a page with additional details. If you have more than one product, then it's likely you need a page for each and every product or service you sell.

Product pages need to provide your visitors with everything they need to know to make an informed purchase decision. Price, style, expectations, specifications, size, benefits are all required information, depending on what you're selling. Your product page can never have too much information, provided it's laid out in a user friendly format that sells the product.

Site Navigation

Construction of your site navigation can make or break your website's performance. Shoddy and haphazard navigation schemes can easily confuse visitors causing them to make that dreaded click out of your site and onto a competitor. A properly constructed navigation can help visitors easily move from page to page finding everything that they are looking for quickly and easily.

Be consistent: Don't confuse your visitors by changing how the navigation looks or by moving its on-page location to a different area. Be consistent in it's look and placement. There are many different forms of navigational elements: main menus, sub-menus, breadcrumbs, etc. All of them should work together to create a consistent and recognizable flow as the visitor navigates through the site.

Be obvious: Make sure it is impossible for your visitors to get lost on your website. You want them to know where they are at all times and how to navigate back to the current and other main sections. Make good use of breadcrumb links as this provides your visitors a great visual indicator as well as easy navigation.

Be helpful: Large websites with many pages or products can easily create a navigational nightmare. It is essential that visitors don't have to "hunt" for what they want. This can be accomplished by providing clear section headings in your main navigation. You can also assist the visitors by including a site map that can be easily accessed and a properly function site search box.

Putting the Pieces Together

A website is far more than the sum of its parts. While all the components mentioned above are necessary to have a working site, when implemented properly each component compliments the others.

A website, like any ad made for radio, TV or newspaper, it must effectively do the job it was built for: selling. Building a website is necessary for online success, but you have to go beyond the build. Websites must be promoted effectively in order to get the visitors you need, but once there the site must then be able to do its job selling. Too often we promote the site but fail to get the site to promote the products and services we want people to buy. Before you promote your site, make sure your site promotes you.

Check out our small business news site.

With the importance of content in online marketing, many businesses are hard pressed to come up with original articles, blog posts, videos, images,

Using Search Engine Optimization To Get Your Music Discovered Most musicians want their band to be discovered. Not by a Universal Music talent scout maybe - that would be so 2005. Nowadays musicians need to be discovered by their fans...

awe.sm is an open sharing analytics platform for social media campaign tracking across sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

PPC management, search engine marketing (SEM), online advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and more from Wpromote, the #1 search marketing firm.

Junta42 is a search community dedicated to the content marketing, custom publishing / media, and branded content industries. Junta42 combines user-generated findings with computer search results to get users to valuable, relevant content fast and easy.

SEOmoz is a hub for the search marketing industry, providing an SEO Services Marketplace, a popular SEO Blog, SEO Tools and premium content.

Hot Banana is an award-winning Web Content Management System (Web CMS - SEO CMS) For Marketing that helps marketers build and manage SEO-friendly Web sites that can be automated and optimized for maximum lead generation and conversion performance - Available as a SaaS CMS or Licensed as a ColdFusion CMS.

Understand your fans, gauge the popularity of your music and manage your band's digital identity, as Band Metrics helps musicians and bands analyze and measure the success of their music.

The Echo Nest powers intelligent digital music applications. Through a series of web based solutions we enable better search, recommendation and interactivity on the music web.

It is such a cliché: Don’t just present data, tell a story.
Yet it is rarely followed.
We almost always present data.
Actually we don’t present data, we send out reports. With data. Lots of it. With 6 size font and some pies and stacked bar graphs thrown in.
Then we are frustrated that no one seems to pat us on the back, sing songs in our glory, give us more money.
We don’t truly tell stories because it seems like a lot of work. And it can be. But you’ll be surprised at how often it is simply a matter of framing things differently, letting your imagination roam free.
Last month I had to present to a group of executives in New York. One of the key things I wanted to communicate was the power of not doing random advertising but rather using freely available data to target the advertising on sites where relevant audiences exist.
Goals Summary:
1. Show the power of free tools available. [Google's Ad Planner specifically.] 2. Highlight the importance spending money on advertising to relevant audiences. 3. Tell a memorable story.

Below is how I did it. . . . hopefully it will inspire you to look for stories in your data, stories that will hold interest and might even get you some smiles (and you know that a raise is not far behind!).
My first step was to try and tap into current events / pop culture. That calls for some research. I use Google Insights for Search as the best way to get a pulse on what people find interesting.
Specifically what I often do is run this query: Who are the most popular celebrities in New York in the last 30 days?

Turns out it is someone called Kim Kardashian. It also turns out I have no idea who this person is, an unfortunate side effect of not have time to watch television.
Quick Google search and I am caught up on why Ms. Kardashian is “famous”. She has some overlap with Paris Hilton in terms of the path to fame.
The key ingredient for any story is to have interesting protagonists. For this story due to their popularity it will be Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian.
The plot: Your business has a need to market something related to Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian, a perfume or a clothing line or a cd/dvd. Amongst other things you’ll want to make use of display advertising (banners / widgets etc).
How do you figure out who the right audience is, and where you’ll find them? As opposed to of course buying the main banner spot on www.yahoo.com were your ad might be a hit or a miss.
Tools for doing audience segmentation were quite expensive until recently. Google’s Ad Planner is free and makes this valuable data democratic. You can segment by demographic (age, education, income, gender etc) and psychographic (Extreme Sports Fan, Film Buffs, Fantasy/Comic Book Readers etc) data.
Perhaps its most cool feature is the marriage between all the above data with Google’s search data.
That’s where the analysis starts.
Question: What are the websites that are visited by people who have searched for the keywords “paris hilton” and “kim kardashian”?
Here’s the answer:

[Click on the image for a higher resolution version.]
Notice the I have typed the keywords on the bottom left. In the right frame are the sites that are visited by those who searched for those two terms. Some obvious sites, many surprises (good thing, now we know!).
I have a habit of sorting by Comp Index, just to check out concentration of the audience. For example a comp index of 990 means that you are approximately nine time as likely to find the same audience (paris, kim searchers) on wallpaperbase.com.
If you look at the higher resolution version (click on the image) you’ll easily find out how many page views are on the target site, what kind of advertising they accept, ad impressions/day and other data you need to create a media plan.
So far so good.
I have always believed that Men are more interested in the kinds of stories and “entertainment” value that Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian generate.
The nice thing is I can validate that hypothesis. I simply open the Gender option in the left panel and choose Male.

You are looking at the top part of the segmentation panel. Notice the delta between UV (users) between the overall segment and just the Males.
Turns out I was not totally right. Males make up a bit less than half of the audience.
No worries. They are still a lot bigger than what many people think (and it is wrong to think it is overwhelmingly female).
My next believe, perhaps controversial, is that older males are more interested in Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian than younger males. Now this seems odd because Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian seem to be more cool and hip and more of a young generation cup of tea.
Well we can test my hypothesis, in addition to Gender I can also choose Age. . .

This data is still just for people, in this case Males, who searched for the key words paris hilton and kim kardashian.
It might have been a odd thing to say but it seems that 45 and older males are a lot more interested in Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian. By almost two to one.
Surprised?
: )
Let’s prep for the punch line of this story.
I have identified a audience that is of value to my goal, marketing Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian (or things connected to them).
I want to target the top end of this audience, Males 55 and older, how many of them are there and where can I find them (to ensure my advertising will be relevant for this audience and my ad dollars are spent wisely)?
Here you go. . .

[Please click on the image for a higher resolution version.]
How about now… surprised?
I was.
The top sites listed for this audience (older Males interested in Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian) turns out to be bedrock sites, typically, for Republicans and the Conservative movement! Starting with a Comp Index of 1700 for impactguns.com. Other sites: weeklystandard.com, rushlimbaugh.com, nationalreview.com, worldnetdaily.com, and townhall.com.
Not in my wildest dreams would have I have expected that this audience would be so highly correlated with actual searches done for Ms. Hilton and Ms. Kardashian. It seems odd with the conservative moral values espoused.
Very Important: I am not judging them. To each unto his / her own.
For my marketing campaign one more valuable nugget of insight is in th above data (click above for higher resolution). Turns out they are also very rich. Note the prominent appearance of morningstar.com, pgatour.com, seekingalpha.com and ft.com.
So a bumper crop: right audience, lots of money to spend. That’s hot!
Now I have to go execute the campaign and I know where to target my ads, how many impressions/day I can expect and how many people I can hope to target.
Relevant audiences change with seasons, hot trends, shifting preferences. Repeat the analysis to ensure you have the most current data.
End of story.
Closing Thoughts:
Turns out this was a very effective story to tell, most people in the room were media buyers (especially offline).
They were impressed with the kind of data we have online, and how easily accessible it was.
They will never forget how wrong one can be about who the relevant audience might be (it would be impossible to guess the Weekly Standard, Rush Limbaugh audience might have any interest in Ms. Hilton or Ms. Kardashian).
Data Wins.
Ok its your turn now.
When you present data how do you tell your stories? How easy or hard is it? Got a favorite story to share with us?
What did you think of the above story? Methodology or conclusions? What did you link? What did I miss?
I would love to hear from you. Thanks much.
PS: Couple other related posts you might find interesting:
Make Your Web Analysis / Reports “Connectable”Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Ad PlannerCompetitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Insights for SearchParis Hilton, Kim Kardashian & Telling Stories With Data is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

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