Search engine marketing (SEM)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion. Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.

Market structure

In 2006, North American advertisers spent US$9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 62% increase over the prior year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising.

History

As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text in 1996 and then Goto.com in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007 pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers for search engines.

Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunites offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001 to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals. In 2007 Search Engine Marketing is stronger than ever with SEM Budgets up 750% as shown with stats dating back to 2002 vs 2006.[citation needed]

Ethical questions

Paid search advertising hasn't been without controversy, and issues around how many search engines present advertising on their pages of search result sets have been the target of a series of studies and reports by Consumer Reports WebWatch, from Consumers Union. The FTC also issued a letter in 2002 about the importance of disclosure of paid advertising on search engines, in response to a complaint from Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group with ties to Ralph Nader.

Statistics Store Humor

Statistics on 4-3-2008

Smile about Statistics

Statistics are for most students and researchers not very pleasible and even they hate it. For them we give on this page some food for thought (quotations) and smiling material (jokes and cartoons) on statistics. Enjoy yourself and know that statistics is not so bad as it seems.
Do you know of good quotes, jokes or cartoons on Statistics? Please don't hesitate, and send it to us. Thanks in advance.

Quotations

There are lies, darned lies, and statistical outliers.

Statistics means never having to say you're certain.

Statistics is the art of never having to say you're wrong. Variance is what any two statisticians are at. - C.J.Bradfield

A statistician is a person who draws a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.

A statistician is a person who stands in a bucket of ice water, sticks their head in an oven and says "on average, I feel fine!" - K.Dunnigan

A statistician drowned while crossing a stream that was, on average, 6 inches deep.

Most people use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than enlightenment.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure. - Samuel Clemens (alias Mark Twain)

Are statisticians normal?

An engineer, a physicist, and a statistician were moose hunting in northern Canada. After a short walk through the marshes they spotted a HUGE moose 150 metres away. The engineer raised his gun and fired at the moose. A puff of dust showed that the bullet landed 3 metres to the right of the moose. The physicist, realizing that there was a substantial breeze that the engineer did not account for, aimed to the left of the moose and fired. The bullet landed 3 metres to the left of the moose. The statistician jumped up and down and screamed "We got him! We got him!"

The weather man is never wrong. Suppose he says that there's an 80% chance of rain. If it rains, the 80% chance came up; if it doesn't, the 20% chance came up! - Saul Barron

All measurements are subject to variation.

The minute a statistician steps into the position of the executive who must make decisions and defend them, the statistician ceases to be a statistician. - W.E.Deming

I feel that the kind of examples of statistical analysis that tend to be considered in professional discussions ... are so grossly over-simplified as to make a pretentious mockery of real-life situations and statistical consultancy. - A.Ehrenberg

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics! - B.Disraeli

It has long recognized by public men of all kinds ... that statistics come under the head of lying, and that no lie is so false or inconclusive as that which is based on statistics. - H.Belloc

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment. - J.Baudrillard

Where is the knowledge that is lost in information? Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge? - T.S.Eliot

One picture is worth more than ten thousand words.

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action. - W.E.Deming

The most powerful mathematical tools are sometimes less important to the engineer than some of the simpler or less powerful tools. But often, for lack of information about either, neither is used. - C.M.Ryerson

A knowledge of statistics is like a knowledge of foreign languages or of algebra; it may prove of use at any time under any circumstances. - A.L.Bowley

The long-range contribution of statistics depends not so much upon getting a lot of highly trained statisticians into industry as it does in creating a statistically minded generation of physicists, chemists, engineers, and others who will in any way have a hand in developing and directing the production processes of tomorrow. - W.A.Shewhart & W.E.Deming

The fundamental difference between engineering with and without statistics boils down to the difference between the use of a scientific method based upon the concept of laws of nature that do not allow for chance or uncertainty and a scientific method based upon the concept of laws of probability as an attribute of nature. - W.A.Shewhart

When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of the meager and unsatisfactory kind. - Lord Kelvin (British physicist)

1. If quality and productivity are to improve from current levels, changes must be made in the way things are presently being done.

2. We should like to have good data to serve as a rational basis on which to make these changes.

3. The twin question must then be addressed: what data should be collected, and, once collected, how should they be analyzed?

4. Statistics is the science that addresses this twin question. - W.G.Hunter

The Kartoo Search Engine

On http://www.kartoo.com/ there is a wonderfull search engine that works visual. The words you look for are investigated and a visual presentation of the results is given. You can easily deepen you search and visualize the sites that are offered.

Free Counter on 19-1-2008

Technorati update 19-1-2008

Looking at a new update from Technorati shows that the Authority of some blogs doesn't increase that much. An exception is the Mail-Art Projects blog that has now Authority 31. Reasons: There are 60+ contributors to this blog and also lots of these contributors link to the blog. This aspect has raised the Autority to a double level in only a single month.

New Content = Visitors

It is a basic rule in websites. You can attract visitors to a website when you place new content on a regular basis. I have tested it with this blog. A silence of a few eeeks means that the amount of visitors drops. Just a single new posting means that indexing machines place you on a higher scale and that results in a better visibility of your website.

Data Mining - Theory

Data Mining

`We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.'
John Naisbitt

What is data mining?

Data mining sits at the interface between statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, machine learning, database management and data visualisation (to name some of the fields).

Data mining is the non-trivial process of identifying valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately comprehensible patterns or models in data to make crucial decisions. Data mining is not a product that can be bought. Data mining is a discipline and process that must be mastered - a whole problem solving cycle.

The main part of data mining is concerned with the analysis of data and the use of software techniques for finding patterns and regularities in sets of data. The idea is that it is possible to strike gold in unexpected places as the data mining software extracts patterns not previously discernible or so obvious that no-one has noticed them before. The analysis process starts with a set of data, uses a methodology to develop an optimal representation of the structure of the data during which time knowledge is acquired. Once knowledge has been acquired this can be extended to larger sets of data working on the assumption that the larger data set has a structure similar to the sample data. This is analogous to a mining operation where large amounts of low grade materials are sifted through in order to find something of value.

Is data mining `statistical déjà vu'?

Whereas statistical analysis traditionally concerns itself with analysing primary data that has been collected to check specific research hypotheses (`primary data analysis'), data mining can also concern itself with secondary data collected for other reasons (`secondary data analysis'). Furthermore, data can be experimental data (perhaps the result of an experiment which randomly allocates all the statistical units to different kinds of treatment), but in data mining the data is typically observational data.

Data warehousing provides the enterprise with a memory

Companies are collecting data on seemingly everything. For example, a customer-focused enterprise regards every record of an interaction with a client or prospect (e.g. each call to customer support, each point-of-sale transaction, each catalogue order, each visit to a company web site) as a learning opportunity. But, learning requires more than simply gathering data. In fact, many companies gather hundreds of gigabytes of data without learning anything. For example, data are gathered because they are needed for some operational purpose, such as inventory control or billing. Once data served that purpose, data languish on tape or get discarded. The data's hidden value has largely gone untapped. For learning to take place, data from many sources (e.g. billing records, scanner data, registration forms, applications, call records, coupon redemption, surveys, manufacturing data) must first be gathered together and organised in a consistent and useful way - in a way that facilitates the retrieval of information for analytic purposes. This is called data warehousing. Data warehousing allows the enterprise to remember what it has noticed about its customers. Data warehousing provides the enterprise with a memory.

Data mining provides the enterprise with intelligence

Memory is of little use without intelligence. That is where data mining comes in. Intelligence allows us to comb through our memories noticing patterns, devising rules, coming up with new ideas to try, and making predictions about the future. The data must be analysed, understood and turned into actionable information. Using several data mining tools and techniques that add intelligence to the data warehouse, you will be able to exploit the vast mountains of data, for example, generated by interactions with your customers and prospects in order to get to know them better. Typical customer-focused business questions are:
What customers are most likely to respond to a mailing?
Are there groups (or segments) of customers with similar characteristics or behavior?
Are there interesting relationships between customer characteristics?
Who is likely to remain a loyal customer and who is likely to jump ship?
Where should the next branch be located?
What is the next product or service this customer will want?
Answers to questions like these lie buried in your corporate data, but it takes powerful data mining tools to get at them, i.e. to dig user info for gold. Data mining provides the enterprise with intelligence. Companies can use data mining findings for more profitable, proactive decision making and competitive advantage.

With data mining, companies can, for example, analyze customers' past behaviors in order to make strategic decisions for the future. Keep in mind, however, that the data mining techniques and tools are equally applicable in fields ranging from law enforcement to radio astronomy, medicine, and industrial process control.

Please contact us today in order to discuss how data mining can be applied to your field or work. Get Statooed.

Data mining myths versus realities

A great deal of what is said about data mining is incomplete, exaggerated, or wrong. Data mining has taken the business world by storm, but as with many new technologies, there seems to be a direct relationship between its potential benefits and the quantity of (often) contradictory claims, or myths, about its capabilities and weaknesses. When you undertake a data mining project, avoid a cycle of unrealistic expectations followed by disappointment. Understand the facts instead and your data mining efforts will be (hopefully) successful. A list of the most common data mining myths versus realities you will find here.

Data mining can not be ignored - the data is there, the methods are numerous, and the advantages that knowledge discovery brings are tremendous. Companies whose data mining efforts are guided by `mythology' will find themselves at a serious competitive disadvantage to those organizations taking a measured, rational approach based on facts.

source: http://www.statoo.com/en/datamining/

ClustrMaps - December 11th 2007

The results on ClustrMaps show that visitors to this blog come from all directions. The blog still isn't that active, but it seems to attract visitors from all continents. Probably because the information is specific but not country-related.

Google Page Rank Update

Posted by David Peralty as Blogging News, General

Don’t get too excited it will take a while for everything to settle, but it looks like it is Google Page Rank update time again. This means your blog could shift around in search results leading to more or less traffic. For those of you getting higher page ranks you might be able to leverage it for some more money, for those of you dropping in page rank, you will probably not be able to make as much money through things like banner and text link advertising.
Good luck to everyone, and may your page ranks be high.

Source: Problogger.net

Developments in Blogs

by David Peralty as Blog Statistics

There is a great post up on Read/WriteWeb about bloggers, the types that are currently out there, and where the blogosphere may be heading. It is a bit long, but very enjoyable, especially if you are interested in blogging for a variety of reasons.

Here is a snippet from the article:

It was a good conference and we had several interesting conversations, but I walked away with a strange feeling. Somehow it seemed that blogging just isn’t that hot anymore. The feeling has been exacerbated by the latest slow down in news. My feeds just do not update that often these days. Can it be that the digestion phase applies to blogs just as it applies to startups? In this post we’ll investigate whether the blogosphere is going through a digestion phase.
Definitely worth a read though I hope we are not in a digestion phase. I still like the crazy unbridled growth we’ve seen over the past two or three years.

Nedstats - search engines

The Search engine Google has picked up on this blog quite well. It has brought visitors from the different countries as you can see,.

Search Engines - Theory

Search engines provide an interface to a group of items that enables users to specify criteria about an item of interest and have the engine find the matching items. The criteria are referred to as a search query. In the case of text search engines, the search query is typically expressed as a set of words that identify the desired concept that one or more documents may contain.[1]

There are several styles of search query syntax that vary in strictness. Where as some text search engines require users to enter two or three words separated by white space, other search engines may enable users to specify entire documents, pictures, sounds, and various forms of natural language. Some search engines apply improvements to search queries to increase the likelihood of providing a quality set of items through a process known as query expansion.

index-based search engineThe list of items that meet the criteria specified by the query is typically sorted, or ranked, in some regard so as to place the most relevant items first. Ranking items by relevance (from highest to lowest) reduces the time required to find the desired information. Probabilistic search engines rank items based on measures of similarity and sometimes popularity or authority. Boolean search engines typically only return items which match exactly without regard to order.

To provide a set of matching items quickly, a search engine will typically collect metadata about the group of items under consideration beforehand through a process referred to as indexing. The index typically requires a smaller amount of computer storage, and provides a basis for the search engine to calculate item relevance. The search engine may store of copy of each item in a cache so that users can see the state of the item at the time it was indexed or for archive purposes or to make repetitive processes work more efficiently and quickly.

Notably, some search engines do not store an index. Crawler, or spider type search engines may collect and assess items at the time of the search query. Meta search engines simply reuse the index or results of one or more other search engines.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engines

Technorati Blog Info update 4-11-2007

It is always interesting to see the Authorities of Blogs. This one has now Authority 4. Two more blogs have a much higher Authority. They are much longer active of have several members that publish on the blog. I have 11 blogs lister at technorati. That way I can see how the interact and how things work....

Motigo - Overview visitors 31-10-2007

While Statcounter only registers the last 500 hits, the Motigo counter saves all hits and therefore becomes interesting when one is searchibf for historical information. The longer a site is in the air, the more interesting the statistical data gets because one can make prognoses. Here is an overview of the countries visitors come from. Seems like they come also from abroad now. Even some dozens of hits from www.google.com themselves (in California, USA), so they are reading this too.....

FEEDJIT - Trafic Map

The FEEDJIT Traffic Map shows the locations of the last 100 visitors to your website. Hover your mouse over any point on the map to see a detailed place name.

FEEDJIT - Live Traffic Feed

FeeJit has a nice result besides the wesite that shows how visitors came here and where to they leave. The overview is visible for everybody so they can see what kind of 'traffic' this site genereates. This is also for the owner of a site very interesting information because when he checks the site he sees what is going on.

About FEEDJIT

"Our mission is to provide high performance real-time widgets for the blogging community that are free and easy to use. FEEDJIT is founded by two serial entrepreneurs whose previous businesses include a search engine and a blogging platform. If you'd like to contact us, please email"

<support@feedjit.com> with any questions, feedback or bug reports.

FEEDJIT

FEEDJIT gives you real-time traffic data on your blog or website. No registration required and it's completely free. See where your visitors are located in the world, which websites they're arriving from and what they're clicking when they leave your site.

The above textcomes from their own site.

Details on: http://feedjit.com/

I am testing this new application now on this statistical blog as well. It is a Widget that shows the visitors how others get on your site. Other statistical programms have this information as well but mostly it isn't accesible for the visitors. Visitors can follow the same links as previous visitors.

Theory

Statistical analysis of website usage

Analysing data from your website is important. Perception is often vastly different to reality. Website statistics can be misleading if not interpreted properly. A basic analysis can be done using statistics programs provided by your hosting company. Using these statistics, you should be able to evaluate;

Return on investment in SEO. Search engine optimisation companies who charge thousands of dollars for their services often base their claim on getting a handful of top search terms but it may be that only a handful of visitors actually find your website by typing in those search terms. Are you spending hundreds of dollars on hosting, management, search engine optimisation and copywriting a month for a website that no-one visits?

Are your premium google listings, google adwords, adverting costs from other search engines and websites providing a return on investment, or are you spending thousands of dollars for a handful of visitors?

Where are your visitors coming from?

What are the popular search terms and phrases used to find your website?

Are marketing campaigns like letter box drops, competitions, raffles, etc bringing more visitors to your website?

Limitations

Website data like all data collection has limitations. Currently all website statistical programs and web services on the internet assume that a unique user is equal to a unique I.P. Users may choose to access your website from different locations and/or may not have a static IP. Users of dial up internet will not have a static IP and so the website data will count them as a different visitor. Understanding the limitations, is important when interpreting data.

Many people believe that a popular website gets lots of hits. The number of hits is the equal to the number of file requests on a webpage, so if you have lots of images on your website, you will have lots of hits. The number of hits tells you nothing about the popularity of your website or whether your website is working for your business.

All the log analyzers and statistics programs available use simple mathematics. The problem is averages can lie if the proper mathematical model is not used. A statistician knows that averages, medians are meaningless without discussing variance, standard deviations, testing hypothesis, choosing the correct distribution, removing outliners.

Finding meaning in statistics

Statistics is not flawless but it will paint a picture and a good analysis of website usage will benchmark website performance against your desired outcomes and provide options for better website design.

Some questions statistical analysis may provide answers to include -

How many visitors are coming to the website?
Where do visitors come from? If they come from search engines, what key words and phrases are they using to find your website?
How long do visitors stay on your website?
What are the click paths of various type of visitors to your website?
What linking sites do your visitors come from?
Do the statistics give an indication of demographics?
What is the main reason people come to the website to do, read or buy?
However if you want to measure improvement, you need to do a proper analysis and calculate standard deviation. Otherwise, you could prematurely come to a conclusion that there had been an improvement when perhaps it was only variance or seasonal factor that influenced the result.

Using raw logs

Proper statistical analysis can only be done using raw data and by importing data into mathematical programs or log analysing software and eliminating outliners.eg. eliminating the ip addresses of staff members from website usage data. Obviously this is more expensive and the scope and purpose of website statistical analysis must be determined. It is also necessary to compare various tools, as the way that each program manipulates the data will vary and some log analyzers may be programmed incorrectly. Just because it spits out an answer or pie graph does not mean that the answer is correct.

source: http://www.passioncomputing.com.au/Website_Redesign/Statistical_analysis.aspx

GeoVisite

The firm http://www.geovisite.com/ has three options for you to have interactive java-scripts that you can run on your website. I have added then all three now so you can have a look at what they do and what kind of information they give. Each has its specific information so it depends on what you want to share with your visitors. The site sure gets lively with the videos that it brings. I had to place them seperately on the blog so it wouldn't disturb the site too much. have a look at:

1. GeoGlobe
2. GeoCounter
3. Geomap

GeoVisite

A new addition to this Statistical Data blog is the application that GeoVisite offers. Go to http://www.geovisite.com/ to find out the details. It brings a turning world with the hits mentioned and also an overview of the countries they come from. Just have a look at the icon that is in the sidebar.

StatCounter - Returning Visits

This overview is always interesting. Do visitors come back after a first visit. Seems that is the case here, judging these graphical presented results by www.statcounter.com

StatCounter - Returning Visits

How does the 'Returning Visit' work?

From your project log of the last x number of pageloads, we extract the total number of unique visitors present in it. Each unique visitor has a cookie, which is incremented each time they return to visit your website (a couple of hours is needed between visits depending on your settings). From this info we can show you how often visitors return to see your website again and again.

The best and most successful websites are the ones with a very high return frequency. If you have a low or non-existant return frequency you may want to change your website to encourage your visitors to come again and again.

Statcounter - Popular Pages

This overview of www.statcounter.com gives you a perfect overview of what the popular pages on your website are. These subjects are interesting to your visitors!