Your phone buzzes just after lunch.

Your boss is shouting. “Some new website appeared today out of nowhere and they’re advertising heavily against us! Who are they? Find out everything you can on them and report back by day’s end!”

Today’s web provides easy tools for competitive research. This column provides a roadmap for sleuthing a competitor in a few of hours, at no cost, using just a web browser.

First, ready your browser. If you aren’t already using it, install Firefox (www.download-firefox.org), because you’ll need plug-ins which aren’t available in IE. Next, get these plugins: Google Notepad (http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/), SEO For Firefox (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html) and Quirk’s Search Status (http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/).

For help installing plug-ins, check out Mozilla’s FAQ at http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/faq.

Turn on Google Notebook by clicking its icon on the bottom right of the browser. This handy plug-in lets you rapidly clip and annotate the URLs you visiting. Notebook is a convenient way to document your findings.

Begin by visiting our competitor’s site. Surf around, clipping interesting URLs. Pay particular attention to their press releases, which often provide valuable information on financials and financing. Scope out their jobs page to determine how actively they are hiring, at what level, and with what skills. A site’s IT job openings typically provide a clear roadmap of a firm’s technology choices. Visit their executive bios page, and record the names of their management team.

Read their company blog. Recent posts are most important, but also study their earliest blogging efforts, as these can be revealing. See if any of their execs have personal blogs.

View the HTML source of key pages (Control-U in Firefox), as sometimes webmasters leave redacted text in the source, just commented out. I once stumbled upon key pricing information from a competitor this way.

In the source, check out their META “keyword” tags to see what search terms they deem important.

Browse their site’s robots.txt file to see what content they’d prefer to keep off of the engines. For example, check out the current administration’s lengthy exclude file at http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt.

The WayBack Machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) lets you visit historic versions of a site. Using WayBack, watch how your competitor’s branding, management team, and mission statement have evolved over time. (Hint: to remove your own site from WayBack, disallow “ia_archiver” in your own robots.txt).

Next, head over to the social networks. Search for your competitor’s brand name on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/), LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/), Flickr (http://www.flickr.com), YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/), Delicious (http://del.icio.us), and Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/). And search each of these sites for the names of your competitor’s management team. The social networks often turn up interesting history, gossip, relationships, pictures, and videos. You may also discover relevant usernames – for example, a user posting pictures from your competitor’s social events — which can then be cross-searched on the other sites. Remember to log your findings with Google Notebook.

The news outlets provide great information. If your competitor is publicly traded, study their financials at Yahoo Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/). Read their annual reports, and don’t overlook the comments to their financials. Next, search for your competitor using the free area of Hoovers (http://www.hoovers.com); sometimes Hoovers reveals associated entities, even for privately held firms.

Search for your competitor and their key execs across the news wires using Google News (http://www.google.com/news) and across the blogosphere using Technorati (http://www.technorati.com).

If your online competitor mails a catalog, determine their list manager and pull their data card from the manager’s website. From their data card, you get a rough sense of a firm’s size, growth, and customer demographics. It is now time for some technical digging.

Use WhoIs (http://whois.domaintools.com) to determine the technical and administrative contacts for your competitor’s domain name. It is often revealing to do a general Google search on WhoIs contact addresses. You can also learn when the domain name was registered, and when it is due to expire. DomainTools shows what web server your competitor is running, which provides a small clue into their tech strategy. And DomainTools provides your competitor’s IP address. Note this number as we’ll use it subsequent steps.

With the SEO For FireFox enabled, run Google searches for your competitor’s brand and for your competitor’s URL. On the search results page, the SEO plug-in provides counts and links to much SEO-relevant info, including your competitor’s back links.

The Quirks Plugin (the small “Q” on the bottom right of the browser) also provides interesting information your competitor’s indexation and inbound links.

Run a Google search on your competitor’s IP address as well, as sometimes this dredges up interesting entries in forums and server logs.

Type your competitor’s IP into the handy tool at SEO Logs (http://www.seologs.com/ip-domains.html). This tool reveals other domains hosted on the same box, which can reveal affiliated companies or projects not generally known to be linked to your competitor. If your competitor is using shared hosting, other domains on the same server could be entirely unrelated. However, the very fact a firm entrusts their web site to a cheap shared hosting provider provides clear indication they are very small.

Moving from white-hat research towards gray, you can scan your competitor’s IP address to see what ports are open.

If you don’t have access to nmap (http://insecure.org/nmap/), there’s a limited web-based port scanning tool at T1 Shopper (http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/port-scanner/). It is unlikely anyone is running open or anonymous FTP these days, but you can certainly check if so inclined. Of course, only access data which a site provides openly to everyone.

You’ve now amassed a great deal of information. Write a short summary of what you learned, along with supporting URLs, and put that into your Google Notebook. You can then choose to whom you give access to your findings.

With a few hours of web digging, you can obtain deep insight into a competitor’s branding, business strategy, reputation, history, financials, and key employees.

All these data are public. It is your aggregation and analysis which weave these scattered facts into a cohesive business story. The result can be comprehensive, often scarily so.

Consider running the same process on your own firm. The results can be sobering.

The web annihilates privacy. May this realization encourage us all to conduct ourselves with the utmost integrity. And good luck in your sleuthing!

Are you ready for Web Analytics 2.0? It’s okay to wince at yet another 2.0 buzzword, but open your eyes just wide enough to scope the opportunity. Like many retailers, your Web analytics past may have left you drowning in data, buried in reports and puzzling over generic key performance indicators that have limited application to your own unique business problems.

Take another look. The next generation of Web analytics is less about reports and more about actions and outcomes. It’s about what happens on your Website, but also about why. It’s less about waiting for an elusive “big win” to justify expensive software and more about investing in people and a series of changes that can make a real difference to your Web business’ bottom line.

But what exactly is Web analytics, anyway? According to the Web Analytics Association, it is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.

Before you hand this article to your engineer or data cruncher, hang on: Programmers and analysts play a vital role here, but so do the marketer, merchant, or owner. Remember, Web Analytics 2.0 is about people — all kinds of people.

Another definition: People are the intelligent, irrational, distracted, and determined folks your site needs to serve for your business to succeed. Some of them are clicking through your Website, others are sitting in the cube near you. Sadly, this special interest group — people — has been historically underserved by Web analytics.

For years, Web analytics software vendors chased marketshare by offering increasingly complex tools with more and more features — these were the reports that eventually buried their customers. To be fair, it was often the customer who asked for the latest report, hoping that one more fix might finally lead to insight rather than to the frustration of plenty of data but no clear course of action.

A related challenge, and one that remains, was the lack of trained analysts needed to extract value from the tools that companies purchased.

The past two years have seen notable changes. Google rocked the competitive landscape with its free Google Analytics software. While large multichannel retailers often still have sound justification for purchasing a premium tool, there’s no question that “free” commands attention. (Google has now introduced a multivariate testing tool, too. Like Google Analytics, it’s free with an Adwords account.)

Also significant, Web 2.0 technologies have diminished the primacy of the page view and other key metrics in first-generation Web analytics. With rich Internet applications, entire visitor sessions can occur on a single page, and with RSS feeds, your customers may read pages of your content without ever visiting your site. Cookie deletion and Javascript breakage have always been challenges to metrics accuracy — and they haven’t gone away.

These three factors — too many reports and too few analysts, a credible free tool, and disruptive technologies — drew the curtain on the first generation of Web analytics. Now let’s meet three people who can shape the outcome of the next generation of Web analytics — in your business.

Introducing the decision maker. The first person we’ll meet in Web Analytics 2.0 is you. You might be the owner, site manager, or the vice president of e-commerce who signed the check, but let’s assume you’re the person who decided to launch (or fix) a Web analytics program in your firm and that you’re interested in extracting maximum value.

To guide your program to success, start by looking away from the screen — and all those reports. You need to answer a vital question, and then ask a few more.

Answer this question, in 15 words or less: Why does our company have a Website? Your answers may look something like this:

• 1. To sell product
• 2. To generate catalog requests
• 3. To collect e-mail addresses
• 4. To answer customer questions

Of course, your answers may vary — for instance, you may be a lead generation site, or a customer service site. The point is to isolate the critical few business outcomes that spell success for your site. As a leader, your responsibility is to keep your Web analytics program laser-focused on attaining these outcomes.

Focus your team by asking the right questions. What are the key business questions you need your Web analytics program to answer? (Hint: They must have true potential to influence your desired outcomes.) Sample questions:

• How does our Website affect sales in our call center?
• Which of the articles in our help center are really helping conversion?
• Which of our online marketing channels are most efficient?
• Would a Flash demo help us sell more of this new product?

To answer questions like these — and the ones that keep you awake at night — you need more than clickstream reports. Let’s meet your go-to people for the answers.

Meet your customer. Listening to the voice of your customer is the secret to shaping a Web analytics program that tells you not just what people do (or don’t do ) on your site, but also why. Without the why, it’s easy to reach the wrong conclusions and make unproductive changes.

Avinash Kaushik is Google’s official “Web Analytics Evangelist,” author of Web Analytics: One Hour a Day, and a true leader in the field. He advocates using simple online surveys to ask site visitors three critical, “primary purpose” questions.

• 1 What is the main task you’re trying to complete on this Website today?
• 2. Were you able to complete it?
  
• 3. If no, why not?

With insight into what people are really trying to accomplish, and how the site helps or hinders, you can help your visitors meet their goals. You can look at customer’s desired outcomes and understand how they align with the outcomes your business seeks.

When you hear your customer’s voice, you may find opportunities to remove obstacles to purchase, but you’ll also learn that not every customer shows up to buy. You gain a more realistic look at the true size of your conversion rate opportunity. And you get the chance to help more customers complete their current tasks and leave satisfied, increasing the likelihood that they’ll come to you when they are ready to buy.

Qualitative, voice-of the-customer tools to include in your Web Analytics 2.0 arsenal are surveys, usability tests, follow-the-customer home studies, and heuristic site assessments. Each has strengths and limitations; evaluate and try more than one.

Enter the Web analyst — The third person we’ll meet in Web Analytics 2.0 is your Web analyst. How will you recognize this person when you meet him? He’ll be expert with your chosen Web analytics software, of course, and able to work with data from offline channels as well. Excellent quantitative analytic skills are mandatory, but they’re also just a starting point.

Here are a few of the key questions to consider as you recruit or grow the right Web analyst for your team. (Depending on your organization, these questions can apply to a Web analytics manager, as well.)

Does he know the difference between reporting and analysis? A true analyst presents findings that spell out an actionable insight, and points to clear next steps that can be tested for impact on your business.

Does she embrace qualitative, voice-of-the-customer data as a vital and valid complement to quantitative/clickstream data?

Does he see the big picture? A great analyst pays attention to detail without getting lost in it. He never loses sight of that crucial handful of desired business outcomes. He doesn’t start from reports; he starts by seeking answers to specific questions, with an eye that zooms in and out to the appropriate level of detail.

Can she tolerate ambiguity? Like people, data are often imperfect. A top analyst is not paralyzed by imperfect data. She knows when directional data is enough to warrant a decision, as well as when more data is needed.

Is he a great communicator? Can he tell a story with data and let it persuade stakeholders who disagree with him and may outrank him?

Does she partner with the internal customer? An effective Web analyst synchs up with all the teams that shape a company’s Web business. She goes beyond traditional numbers departments like marketing and merchandising and helps IT, creative and customer service articulate their Web business questions.

She presents data in a way that makes sense to her audience and uses words and pictures to help numbers tell a story. She can also refocus her coworkers away from their pet analytics projects and back to the crucial business outcomes.

Does it sound like your searching for some kind of superhuman? Don’t worry, they’ll be partnering with you. Remember, to satisfy your customer and meet your business goals, your Web analytics program’s primary investment is in people.

——————————————————————————–

Larry Becker is vice president and principal, Website effectiveness at the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing agency offering Website consulting and paid search services.

Recommended Resources: Web Analytics 2.0

The Web Analytics Association

http://www.Webanalyticsassociation.org/
The central educational and professional development site for Web analytics practitioners.

Occams Razor

<http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
The blog of Avinash Kaushik, Google Web Analytics
Evangelist and author of Web Analytics an Hour a Day.

< Web Analytics Demystified

http://www.Webanalyticsdemystified.com/
The Website for the company led by Eric Peterson, author of Web Analytics Demystified. Look also for the related Yahoo! discussion group.

Google Analytics blog

http://www.analytics.blogspot.com/
The official blog for Google’s Website analytics tool.

As a cataloger/multichannel marketer, you’ve long understood the importance of double-checking all aspects of your marketing programs to make sure everything is in order. No doubt, you visit your printer when you’re on press to monitor print quality. You do bindery checks to inspect book assembly. You likely use mail decoys to confirm delivery. You also probably “mystery shop” your own company to monitor your call center and shipping teams. You surely double-check your printing and postal invoices for accuracy.

The same attention to detail applies to online marketing. As paid search marketing grows in importance and consumes a larger share of catalogers’ acquisition budgets, it’s prudent to scrutinize these programs regularly. You want to make sure your plans are being executed correctly, and that your precious marketing dollars are being used intelligently.

Here are my recommendations for auditing paid search marketing campaigns. I suggest performing these checks at least quarterly. It might take some calls and e-mails to assemble the data you’ll need, but once those data are in hand, this audit should take less than a full workday. For the time period, perform your audit on last month’s complete data.

Scrutinize Sales Data

1. Make sure your sales data are accurate. The goal of this step of the audit is to confirm that the sales reported by your search marketing reports are accurate and that you’re not overcounting, undercounting or double-counting orders. If you aren’t tracking sales from your paid search programs, you must — plain and simple. Buying clicks without watching corresponding conversions is like flying an airplane blindfolded: It’s not a matter of if you will crash, just a matter of when.

If you have several systems tracking sales, determine which of them you’ll consider as authoritative. The various systems will certainly differ — often significantly. For instance, say your authoritative paid search sales report indicates $1 million in paid search revenue for last month. Pull the corresponding order numbers. Make sure those orders actually total $1 million. Then check each order against your back-end accounting system and ask the following questions:

• Did these orders actually ship?
• Were these orders attributed to paid search correctly, or should some be assigned to another marketing source?

If you find anomalies, dig in deep and “pull the thread” until you understand the discrepancies.

2. Make sure your cost data are accurate. The goal of this step is to confirm that the costs in your search reports match reality. Follow these steps:

• Take the total costs you paid last month to the search engines (by engine) from your search marketing reports.
• Confirm that the amounts match the actual monthly invoices from the engines if you or your agency are invoiced for your clicks; or match the actual credit card charges if you pay by credit card.
• Finally, check both sets against the engine’s online accounting reports
• You should have log-ins to all your paid search accounts. Make sure that all three sets of costs — as reported in your search reports, in the engine’s online accounting applications and those costs actually paid by your accounting department — all match up.
• Scrutinize term-level performance for your most important terms to see if your term-level economics make sense.

Build Spreadsheets

3. For each engine, pull a list of your top 100 phrases, ranked by cost and (separately) by sales. Create a 200-row spreadsheet for each engine with these columns:

• phrase
• impressions
• clicks
• ad cost
• resulting orders
• resulting sales
• average position

If you end up with fewer than 200 total rows, with some terms appearing on both lists, don’t worry. You should be able to access clicks, cost, sales, and position data trivially. If you can’t, you need better tracking or better analytics or a new search agency. Add these computed columns:

• CPC — “cost per click” — ad cost divided by clicks
• CPM — “cost per 1,000 impressions” — ad cost divided by impressions multiplied by 1,000
• CTR — “clickthrough rate” — clicks divided by impressions
• CONV — “conversion rate” — orders divided by clicks
• SPC — “sales per click” — sales divided by clicks
• A/S — “advertising-to-sales-ratio” — advertising divided by sales

Now sort this sheet by descending cost. Are your most costly terms appropriate for your business? Scrutinize generic terms closely. Generic words like “gift,” “coat” or “travel” make no sense for catalogers concerned with profits.

Next, are your most costly terms carrying their weight? Check their ad to sales (A/S) figures to ensure they’re selling enough to justify their costs.

Now, sort this sheet by ascending A/S, bringing your highly efficient terms to the top of the page. These should have low average positions. Low position means higher on the search results page, indicating more prominence and more traffic.

If you find low A/S terms with high position, you’ve been underbidding some winners and missing out on potential sales. If you find high A/S terms in low positions, you’ve been overbidding some loser terms.

Perform all of these spreadsheet analyses separately for each engine, as the engines differ in their performance. Separate “brand” from “nonbrand” results. The goal of this step is to understand your search economics beyond your brand halo.

Gauge Search Word Origins

4. If you’re an established cataloger with a well-known brand (think Lands’ End, L.L. Bean, Harry & David, J. Jill, etc.), a large portion of your pay-per-click sales will come in on your brand name, your brand name plus additional words (“Bean boot”), misspellings (“Hary & David”) and URLs.

These are great terms enjoying high sales at a low cost, but the sales likely aren’t incremental. When searchers type your brand into a search engine and then follow up by clicking on a paid search ad tied to your brand, they’re using the search engine like a White Pages lookup (“Get me to Lands’ End!”) vs. a Yellow Pages lookup (“Where should I buy a blue men’s oxford shirt?”). This traffic reflects your brand equity built up from years of catalog mailings — from positive word-of-mouth, magazine ads, returning customers and so on.

It’s important to segregate all these brand terms from your nonbrand results. Your portfolio of non-brand terms represents your acquisition efforts, bringing in customers who weren’t looking specifically for you.

The efficiency will be worse in your nonbrand portfolio. That’s normal and it’s OK to use the high-sales/low-cost branded portfolio to subsidize the nonbrand portfolio by a reasonable degree. What you don’t want to see is truly horrible nonbrand terms hiding behind the positive halo of your branded terms.

Hit the engines and check some searches. The goal here is to view your campaigns though a potential customer’s eyes.

5. Put aside your invoices and spreadsheets, and do some searching on Google and Yahoo! Do your ads show up for searches on your brand or your seasonal specials or your detailed SKUs, your manufacturer’s brands and item names? Note any “search holes.” Either your ad isn’t appearing for economic reasons (check those spreadsheets again) or you’ve found a gap in your term list.

For each ad, is the copy detailed, focused and compelling? Do any of the ads under- or overpromise? Following the click, do you reach a relevant deep page? Are the destination URLs as tightly matched to the search phrase as possible? For example, “men’s hiking boot” should reach a page of men’s hiking boots, not a page offering boots for men, women and kids.

The Big Picture

By the end of this day, you’ll have a good sense of the health of your paid search programs. Search is complex, so you’ll likely find some minor hiccups. That’s fine; just ask your team or agency to fix those.

Just hope you never find programs running on shaky cost or sales data, programs burning large amounts of ad costs without corresponding sales, or programs with sloppy copy or landing pages.

Bringing previously hidden problems into the bright sunlight is never fun, but it does provide the starting point to get your programs into tip-top shape. May all your audits be unsurprising, and may all your clicks sell.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman is CEO of the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online agency helping catalogers manage paid search and improve site conversion. You can reach him at (434) 970-1010 or at www.rkgblog.com.

What you need to know about brand search, long-tail lists and social media

Search has revolutionized advertising. For many direct retailers, search has become the leading advertising channel for customer acquisition, and its importance still is growing. Here are three big ideas to help you get more from your paid search marketing (SEM) and your natural search marketing (SEO) going into the fourth quarter of 2007.

SEO & SEM: Your Good Name

Many retailers enjoy significant sales from visitors arriving from searches on their brand name. Monitoring and managing the distinction between brand and nonbrand searches is critical to smart online marketing.

Why does brand vs. nonbrand matter? Consider two different Google searches, one for “J. Crew jean jacket” and another for “women’s jean jacket.” In both cases, the searcher is looking for a jean jacket, but in the first case, the searcher has a particular retailer already in mind. In this case, the query is navigational, and Google’s role is analogous to a telephone White Pages. In the second case, the searcher wants a product but hasn’t yet decided from which online retailer to purchase it. In this case, the query is competitive, and Google’s role is analogous to a telephone Yellow Pages. Even if this searcher has bought from J. Crew previously, she’s shopping the Web to see where to buy the jean jacket. In the second case, the order is “in play,” and the retailer (in this case, J. Crew) must strive to win the click and turn it into an order.

You could argue that we should consider “clickstreams”, not individual searches, when assessing whether a brand search is incremental. For example, if a searcher made these three searches in succession—“fall jackets,” “women’s jean jacket,” then “J. Crew jean jacket”—then you might argue that since the brand search was the last link in a chain of competitive searches, this sequence of three searches is incremental. This argument sounds good, but it isn’t supported by data. In a 2006 study of a sample of 1 million paid clickstreams from a sample of 100 clients, my firm’s research team found that a branded search is preceded by a nonbrand search less than 8 percent of the time.

The chart shown on page 131 presents data from an Internet 100 multichannel retailer. This chart categorizes the retailer’s term list, clicks, cost, sales and profit into brand vs. nonbrand bins. This retailer runs about 20,000 active search phrases on each engine. Only about 1 percent of these terms involve the retailer’s brand name or its trademarked product names, yet this tiny portfolio of terms comprises 9 percent of its clicks. These terms have low cost and high sales, so this tiny portfolio comprises more than 40 percent of the retailer’s pay-per-click profits.

The wrong way to interpret this figure is to say, “If we can get 40 percent of the benefit with 1 percent of the effort, why don’t we just run brand terms?” These sales are largely nonincremental, reflecting the brand equity this firm has built up over years of catalog and print advertising. These are “White Page” sales that would have occurred anyway.

The right way for a search manager to interpret this figure is to focus on the green portfolio. Charge your paid search agency, or your in-house team, to grow your nonbrand search sales aggressively and efficiently. Continue to advertise on your brand, but evaluate your success by focusing on nonbrand results.

What about natural search? Even though you’re not paying for organic clicks, the brand vs. nonbrand distinction still is highly relevant. Your goal is to optimize your site to rank highly on long-tail, nonbrand terms. A 2006 study conducted by online marketing firm NetConcepts indicates that a typical retailer receives 95 percent of its organic traffic from searches on its brand name.

SEM: Comprehensive Term Lists

To grow your paid search program beyond your brand, there’s great value in the “long tail” of search terms. Comprehensive term lists are your ticket to capturing that value. As a rule of thumb, test four to six times the number of terms as your site has pages, expecting half to two times the number of terms to have sufficient traffic and performance to merit ongoing funding in your campaigns. For example, an online retailer with 4,500 SKUs and a 5,000 page Web site should test up to 20,000 to 30,000 terms, expecting about 5,000 of these terms to work long-term. Since keyword counts can be inflated artificially with no benefit (for example, by pre-pending “buy” or post-pending “online”), your objective is to choose unique phrases with traffic and marketing opportunity.

To illustrate, consider the paid search program at CDW. (Disclosure: my firm manages its paid search program.) CDW is large reseller of IT products and services. Ranked 342 on the Fortune 500, CDW sold $6.8 billion in total 2006 revenue, with $2 billion of that occurring online. CDW.com is a huge site, with more than 100,000 SKUs. While your site is probably smaller, CDW’s success using large term lists to increase sales is instructive for any marketer.

In May 2006, CDW.com had about 175,000 selling pages on the site (product pages, category pages, etc.). We tested 466,044 distinct nontrivial phrases on Google. After culling terms for lack of traffic or lack of conversion, we obtained 85,664 terms with both traffic and favorable conversion. On average, we tested 2.6 terms for each URL, and 18 percent of total terms tested yielded effective terms. Term list creation isn’t static—we refresh and retest this list monthly to respond to product introductions and discontinuations. This focused and obsessively complete term list creation played an important role in CDW’s significant increase in sales and profits from paid search.

SEO: Social Media Drives Links, Links Drive Rankings

If you aren’t yet, familiarize yourself with Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape and reddit. These sites are the “big four” social media communities. Each can drive huge volumes of traffic to your site. More importantly, that traffic leads to numerous inbound links, which are rocket fuel powering your organic rankings. Not all of your content will be “digg-worthy,” but a few times a year you should try to release content so compelling it warrants attention from the social media tribes.

If these sites are new to you, spend some time visiting them and read the comments. Establish accounts and try submitting or voting on content. (Tip: Don’t submit your own pages.) Get a sense of what each community likes. For example, the Digg community is composed primarily of young males. To generalize, they like: girls, cars, explosions, challenging the system and Linux; they don’t like suits, Microsoft or corporate PR.

Even if your target customer does not fit the Digg demographic, there’s still a place for these social sites in your PR mix. Suppose you work for a mutual fund company marketing retirement plans. While the standard discussion of 401(k)s might not interest high-school guys, you can write articles to intrigue this audience. For example, consider these story angles: “The 6.2 Percent of Your Paycheck You Never See Again” or “Here’s a Quick Way to Retire a Millionaire.” (Tip: Titles and descriptions are as important or more important than the article itself.) Community-relevant articles with compelling titles and interesting descriptions, posed by power users and backed by good content, have a shot at broad exposure. This exposure generates blog links, powering improved Google rankings for your entire site.

For a fun experiment, my kids and I inflated latex surgical tubing to make “the world’s longest water balloon” (if you’re interested, see www.rimmkaufman.com/projects). We shot video and created a Web page documenting this stunt. With help from Digg power users, our link made the Digg homepage. In less than a day, our page received 33,000 visitors, multiple inbound links and generated a slight boost in our overall Google rankings. Note: My business goals do not involve water balloons; even though the stunt was off-topic, the Digg-generated inbound links help our Web site rank higher on searches on terms relevant to my business.

Spark New SEM Ideas

While I focused on the top three search trends that I’ve seen driving results, the point I’m trying to make is that you cannot afford to let your SEM program get stale or lazy. Use the data and tools at your disposal, and determine what could move the search needle for your business.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., heads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing agency offering paid search services and Web-effectiveness consulting. You can reach him via his blog at www.rkgblog.com or at (434) 970-1010.

Online Resources Related to This Article

1.) RKG Search Funnel Study: http://tinyurl.com/yw7kb7

2.) Avinash Kaushik on the long tail of natural search: http://tinyurl.com/2a28mc

3.) NetConcepts Long Tail study: www.netconcepts.com/long-tail-whitepaper/

4.) CDW example: www.rimmkaufman.com/content/accmrimmkaufmanvargob2bsearch.pdf

5.) The “Big Four” Social-networking Sites:

• www.digg.com

• www.stumbleupon.com

• www.reddit.com

• www.netscape.com