One of the companies I’ve been following for a long time is Etsy.com.  Etsy.com is a website for folks selling craft items – or as they put it “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade.”  More broadly, they are referred to in the startup world as P2P commerce (person-to-person) – similar to eBay or any other site that enables person-to-person transactions with the website in the middle taking a small cut.

The press around the site has been amazing.  According to Techcrunch, “$100 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in 2008. The company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, Kalin told me.”

Continue reading “Startup-Watch: A Closer Look at Etsy.com” »

Apparently October brought a lot of costume searchers online.  After several months of declining search query volumes, October query volumes ticked up 4% m-o-m. Total web search activity peaked just shy of 13 billion queries in the US.  Among the major market players nearly every engine benefitted from the lift in activity.  However behind the rising tide only one engine managed to pull ahead of the pack.

Continue reading “October Search Market Share Update: Most gain in volume but only Google gains share” »

Casinos, like many travel industries, have struggled during the recession.  To help gauge the impact, Compete analyzed traffic to its “Casinos” industry category.  Category traffic represents unique traffic across all sites in the category (over 100 in this case), meaning a person that visits more than one category site in a month is counted only once in that month’s category total.

Continue reading “Casinos Need to Continue the Digital Evolution” »

When I look back on my education, I can fondly remember the hours spent reading through the classic novels for English classes.  However, I would be lying if I said my classmates and I didn’t turn to Cliffs Notes for more interpretation as we read.  We were always curious about the analysis of things like Piggy’s glasses in “Lord of the Flies”, and the depth of the available information for how much they represented science and intellect in society.  Now, students flock to both sparknotes.com and cliffsnotes.com for their “deep dive” into they novels they are reading.

Continue reading “The “Easy to Read” Secret of Students” »

If the Retail world sees the end of the year as the Triple Crown, Halloween would be the Kentucky Derby. It is the initial measure of shoppers’ purchasing power leading into the holidays, and companies are quick to be the first out of the gate with sales of costumes, candy, and decorations. Search behavior offers a unique perspective on how consumers use the online channel for Halloween shopping; being relevant one month out of the year, Halloween shoppers do not have an obvious go-to place to find the necessities, and thus they turn to search as a discovery tool.

Continue reading “Halloween: An Experiment in Retail Blitzing” »

It’s time to get a little bit tactical. On the Compete blog, we talk about data all the time, but very rarely do we actually “show” and not just “tell.” I get pretty fired up about Compete PRO, and the latest enhancements to Search Analytics provide a great excuse to devote an entire post to my favorite Compete PRO report: Keyword Destination.

Call it shameless self-promotion, but as far as I’m concerned, no online marketer can live without Keyword Destination, which sheds light on where people go downstream after searching for specific keywords.

Continue reading “Getting The Most Out Of Compete PRO : Keyword Destination Reports” »