An amazing website traffic estimation tool which name speaks for itself – AttentionMeter - has been found by us recently.

This site popularity metric tool gives its users a platform to estimate the traffic and popularity data from 3 sources: Alexa, Compete & Quancast. For even greater comfort a possibility to compare up to 5 domains is provided.

Read the rest of this entry »

When planning an online marketing company a good thing to know is what do users mainly look for on the site – product or information. What are the distinguishing behavioral features of 2 types of users (buyers and information seekers)? How can their decision be influenced?

A user behavior research performed by De Vos & Jansen Market Research and Checkit explores the manner of performing a search, the reasons that make a user click the result as well as the difference between of ways of searching.

What main reasons motivate people to click on a search result:

1. The familiarity with and reliability of the website or organization. Keywords which refer to a brand are therefore very important2. A high position in the search results also creates trust and suggests to the respondents that the information is recent

3. A third important reason for clicking is the presence of the keyword in the search results

4. Consumers are also looking for certain website services such as the opportunity to read user experiences or to compare different products

5. (Indirect) price information is important: especially keywords which refer to “low costs”

6. The announcement that there is a large variety of products can also be a reason for respondents to click on the search result

7. Finally, consumers seem to avoid results with aggressive advertising

Now it’s time to determine why did a user click the result – is he going to buy anything or looking for information? The summarized signs of user behavior that could help distinguish his goals are the following:

• Buyers view more search results (10) and take more time to view the results (11,4 seconds).
• Information searchers view less search results (8) and spend less time on a result (9,4 seconds).
• Buyers pay more attention to brand names relative to information seekers.

Only 50 searchers were tested and they were between the age of 17 and 24. But this information seems to be very helpful.

To determine the transaction potential of your site or to find out what are thekeywords that are more likely to convert you could want to use Microsoft Detecting Online Commercial Intention Tool. While it doesn’t give the exact estimations of conversion rates for URLs/queries its estimations can serve a criteria for choosing most effective keywords for you SEO or PPC campaign. The tool reflects “your customers’ intention to purchase products or acquire information”:

The Online Commercial Intent (OCI) demo calculates commercial intent on a scale of 0 to 1. Any site whose core is greater than 0.5 is considered to have commercial intent.

On this bright day covered with love, SimpleSEM would like to say all it’s customers, readers, visitors and friends:

And don’t forget to send your SEO’s the special Valentine Greeting Cards!!!

Why? Just because a world gets a bit more kind with every smile you bring to it (at least I still believe in it, don’t you?)

Google AdWords Operations team announced that they would like to decorate the new office they are moving into soon with the photos of their advertisers.

The AdWords Operations team will soon be moving, and we want to decorate our new building with photos of our advertisers as a way of recognizing that we owe our success to you. We’ll be showing the photos in the new building because seeing your faces inspires us and reminds us that we’re here to help make our advertisers more successful.

Sounds nice! Really why not sharing your photo and your pleasure of work captured on a photo? The guidelines to photo submitting are listed here.

I wanted to add my photo also, but my natural shyness stopped me from that

The results from SEMPO’s annual “State of Search Engine Marketing 2006″ report were released recently. The survey, having been conducted since 2004, track all the trends in search marketing and from year to year reveals some unexpected peculiarities.

Here are the aggregated and summarized results of the survey:

I assume you are familiar with Google Base already so we couldn’t ignore the update of this effective merchants’ resource. Online merchants are promoted to submit more attributes along with basic product description to give users more parameters to compare when searching for a particular item. Besides, Google reminds that “including as many attributes as possible will increase your items’ exposure in search results”. The required for each product attributes include:

• brand
• condition
• description
• expiration_date
• id
• image_link
• link
• price
• product_type
• Title

Google also “strongly recommend” the use of some additional elements which “will increase your items’ exposure in search results”:

• payment_accepted
• payment_notes
• pickup
• price_type
• quantity
• shipping
• tax_percent
• tax_region

While more sophisticated users can take an advantage of uploading additional information for their goods such as color, film type, focus type, megapixels, model number, resolution, size, tech spec link, upc, zoom for cameras or artist, department, material, occasion, style for jewelry.

The complete list of attributes defined by Google could be found here.

The survey published lately by MarketingSherpa reveals the advertisers budget shares spent on different kinds of online promotion for the previous year along with their plans on online spends for year 2007. Observing the charts and comparing the data we could get to know the latest “fashion” trends of online advertising. And this should be really exciting as the 332 world’s biggest advertisers report the increase of their online spends up to 49%. So what their major efforts were focused on the previous 2 years and what are their plans for 2007?

A huge growth in ROI (12%) is mentioned in 2006 compared to 2005 for advertising dollars spent on search engine optimization (SEO). No wonder advertisers are planning a 25% raise of budget spent on SEO in 2007. Reach media ads are reported as the least effective tactics of online advertising with a 10% decrease in ROI compared to 2005. However, it doesn’t affect the plans to raise the budget with 25% this year.

Among the most popular online advertising “fashion” trends of 2007 the following are reported:

· Adding RSS feeds

· In-house blogs

· Ads on the 3^rd party blogs networks

· Video ads

· SEO

Investing money to ads in RSS feeds, in-house podcasts, product placement in video ads and sponsoring podcasts will be considered if not mauvais ton then a waste of advertising money.

Though, the charts above and the results of survey conducted are rather precisely adjusted marketing techniques then some fashion laws or trends!