Ophir Cohen

Behavioral Marketing Recap: Retargeting

After years of researching and executing Search Marketing campaigns on different stages and many types, we came to the understanding that while search is strong, growing, important and fruitful, while Search Marketing was considered the ultimate “pull marketing” vehicle to incorporate delivering the message not only when I , the marketer wanted to – but when the target audience wanted to… We can now take the next step forward.

Behavioral Marketing is here for more or less ~3 years already, at different forms and levels, and is basically offering us to deliver a message to a prospective customer based on their web browing patterns.

Today I’d like to focus on one method of behavioral marketing: Retargeting. Continue reading “Behavioral Marketing Recap: Retargeting”

Internet Usage in Israel Stats for 2007

A survey conducted on December 2007 by TNS Teleseker – “TIM Survey”, in Israel, shows 4 million Intenret users in Israel. This number shows a slight growth of 2% vs. the results from December 2006, and mainly reflects the growth of overall population in Israel.

A few interesting Internet usage statistics in Israel: Continue reading “Internet Usage in Israel Stats for 2007”

The Long Tail is getting Looooooonger!

I read a blog post today from HitWise about the long tail of search phrases used in the UK market.
Robin Goad wrote an excellent analysis on the evolvement of the long tail in the last three years, and detected the pattern where people use the search engine / search toolbar as a navigational application thus performing what Robin calls “navigational search”.

This type of search is used when someone types the direct URL or a brand name into the search box instead of typing the URL in the address bar. Lately, I’ve seen it happen quite a lot on meetings and presentations – but when I read Robin’s post and saw the charts – it all started to make more sense.

So let’s try and summarize the findings:

1. The loooong list of unique phrases and terms used (what we call “long tail”) is getting much longer

2. The small list of terms which produces the most traffic (what we call “short tail”) is getting shorter and consolidated

3. The segment of “navogational terms” in the short tail is getting shorter (i.e. bavigational searchers are looking for the domain name/brand name)

UK navigational search term volume.png

4. The segment of “non-navigational terms” is getting longer and longer

UK non navigational search term volume.png

Conclusions:

1. Long Tail Rules

2. Keyword Research Rules

3. Brand Name and domain name searches are important to rank for

e-Commerce: 2007 Online Holiday Sales

Well, it’s Friday, 4 days before Christmas and it seems as the rush for shopping is beginning to calm. This was a crazy month for us, especially for the online retailers, and even more for those who specialize in gifts (We have wuite a lot of those!

I wanted to share here some of the data that was pouring in from the sales centers, the web analytics tools and market research – as this may be a very good lesson for next year.I’ll start with the market research and I want to quote comScore’s published data:

“holiday season e-commerce spending for the first 48 days of the November – December 2007 holiday season (November 1 – December 18). Nearly $25 billion has been spent online during the season-to-date, marking a 19-percent gain versus the corresponding days last year”

2007 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days* in 2006
Non-Travel (Retail) Spending
Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore, Inc.

Billions ($)
Holiday Season to Date 2006 2007 Pct Change
November 1 – December 18 $20.85 $24.85 19%
Thanksgiving Day (November 22) $0.21 $0.27 29%
“Black Friday” (November 23) $0.43 $0.53 22%
“Cyber Monday” (November 26) $0.61 $0.73 21%
“Green Monday” (December 10) $0.66 $0.88 33%
* Corresponding Shopping Days, Not Calendar Days

“It’s also clear that many consumers are willing to delay their holiday shopping later in the season this year in an effort to take advantage of any late season price discounts being offered by retailers.”

Google and Microsoft are Manipulating your Log Files

During the last few months, we came across a weird phenomenon. We would analyze our web site traffic, and fond that we received some great amounts of traffic referred from Google and Live.com (MSN), for generic expressions, which had a good fit to our website, however we had no positions for these terms – Not organic nor paid.

So, after reading and searching for a while – we found out we are not alone, and we also found the explanation. It appears that these so called “visits” came from IP addresses owned by Microsoft and Google and they are some type of crawl/user emulation performed by the search engines.

So apart from the fact that our data was to be re-analyzed, we had to get rid of this data.
What we did in our web analytics software (We use and recommend ClickTracks), was to exclude the IP addresses and blocks – as follows:

How to know if you are hit?

1. Check your referral data and see if you get very genere (short tail) search phrases you don’t rank for from Google / Live.com

2. Check the log and see if the string includes the url parameter of FORM=LVSP or, now, FORM=LIVSOP

3. Check the IP Address – agains the details below.

Microsoft (Live.com):
65.55.165.*
131.107.0.*

Google:
209.85.63.133
72.52.140.4
72.232.16.50

Important note:
Both engines has stated that blocking their IP will not be “welcome” (How arrogant…) So in order not to be hurt I definitely do not recommend to Block their IP’s on your server – but rather to exclude them from your analysis.