Snake Oil anyone?
August 24th, 2006
Snakes on a Plane is a perfect example of not relying on good marketing and hype to sell a product. Sure, if you can build a huge amount of publicity for something before it’s even launched that’s great! But you still need to deliver a product that’s worth buying.Snakes on a Plane gained a huge amount of free internet hype from early this year - blogs and major commentary sites got people so interested in the concept of the film that fan sites, fan fiction, fake advertising posters and ‘Trailers’ popped up all over the internet. You just can’t buy the amount of promotion that this film got before it was even launched.
So.. Why did it only gross $15.25 million on opening weekend, rather than the forecast $20-30 million? It’s not really because the film is bad - Most reviews have given it middling to good reviews.. I think it’s more the fact that everyone expected it to be rubbish.
Snakes will probably go on to make a good return for New Line Cinema, after all word will get round that it’s actually pretty good - but in your business, can you hope for the same? If people expect your product to be poor, how do you convince them otherwise? Great marketing can get you a long way, but it’s a good product that will keep you in business.
Google Base multiple accounts
August 24th, 2006
After successfully traversing Google Base last week I quickly realised that you can only upload one client’s data per account. This is obviously a problem if you serve multiple clients. You don’t want to be setting up an account for each client!
After a bit of searching I found a link to how do i set up a multi-user account?. Ah ha I thought, this wont be that bad after all…Thats until I read what I had to do to obtain this account! Put simply you have to manually email google with the file name of the database, the company name and various other details for every new client you wish to add! Google will then email back (after about 3 days) with confirmation of the new multi account and then you upload as normal. Every subsequent client you wish to add has to be emailed in the same fashion.
This very clumsy method is hopefully only a stop gap for some unfinished part of the site. As I said in my previous article, Google clearly still have outstanding issues with their new Base system which will hopefully be rectified in the near future.
AOL search data leaked
August 24th, 2006
AOL publicly posted search terms from 650,000 AOL users last month. They posted the search log on a research site, and subsequently removed it due to a torrent of bloggers and forum posters linking to it. However by the time AOL realised what they had done there were already several mirror sites hosting the AOL search data.
AOL search Query sites have now emerged using the leaked AOL data for anyone to use. The actual usernames of the people whose searches were logged have been replaced by random id numbers to conceal their identity. This will come as a relief to this AOL user!
While the AOL data obviously raises privacy concerns, it can contain useful information for search engine marketers.
Which result page gets the most clicks?
The AOL data allows us to find out how many people visit more than one result page on AOL.
91.63% of the AOL users clicked on the results on the first result page. Only 4.49% clicked a result from the second result page, 2.19% clicked a result on the third result page and even less people looked beyond the first three result pages.
Which search result position gets the
most clicks?
The AOL data also allows us to find out which search result gets the most clicks. The following diagram shows the percentage of user clicks per search result position.
Being #1 on the search results is best by far. 47.16% of the users clicked on the first result. That means that the first position in the search results gets almost half of the traffic.
It this also true for Google and Yahoo?
The numbers are for AOL users. Google and Yahoo users might be from a different demographic group than AOL users and they might have different search behavior. AOL users are often less tech-savvy, when compared to Google users.
Google Base
August 15th, 2006
Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which Google will make searchable on their website. More info about Google Base here. It is a useful tool to use along side normal SERPs results as you can add products, services and other data which is searchable. This is also a good way to get some quality inbound links from a very highly ranked site.
Using Google Base is an easy, straight forward process as long as you have your products or whatever you want to upload pre stored in a database or tabbed document. Google provide some templates that can be used to structure your databases but certain fields are obligitory so some fiddling may have to be done to your databases. You can upload one item at a time or bulk items in tab-delimited format and RSS formats. Once uploaded google will then automatically produce a page for each item that includes all the data from your database and publish them. Here is an example of this generated page.
Although Google Base is very simple to use, there seems to be a bug in the site where you can not update an already uploaded file. For example if you upload a file with the wrong field names you will have to completely delete the file and upload it again under a different file name. Hopefully these errors will be ironed out with the next releases.
More Cutlets
August 11th, 2006
I’ll put them all in one big list when I get a chance, but for now here are the newest Matt Cutt’s videos on SEO and webmasters:
- Session 9: All about datacenters
- Session 10: Lighting Round!
- Session 11: Reinclusion requests
- Session 12: Tips for Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose 2006
- Session 13: Google Webmaster Tools
