With the massive amount of search activity taking place across the web, the highest traffic search terms can provide a glimpse into the issues currently important to internet users, and consumers as a whole. With our online search tools, you can start to get at this data on a site level, but what we find even more interesting is how this plays out for the web as a whole, and how these terms change over time.

Taking a look at the most popular search terms from December 2007 through the better half of February 2008, some interesting trends develop. For this analysis we stripped out all branded, navigational and adult terms, to get at the meaty center of search behavior. The chart below shows the most popular search terms for January 2008, ranked by search referrals. The spark charts to the right of each term represent how referral volume has changed over time. We used referrals (as opposed to queries) in order to strip out terms that don’t result in fulfilled searches.

• Pop culture related spikes: Heath Ledger’s tragic death caused an explosion in searches on his name in January, resulting in nearly 2 million referrals from this term. Because of the timing of his untimely passing, some of this traffic spilled over into February. Search referrals from “Britney Spears” show a similar story.
• Seasonal trends: With tax season upon us, and students renewing their financial aid, search referrals from government terms “IRS” and “FAFSA” grew dramatically in January and then stabilize in February.
• Political Momentum: Just as Barack Obama’s campaign has gained increasing momentum, more online consumers are searching on his name. There was a dramatic increase from December to January (last month searches for his name drove over 500,000 referrals), and it appears that this term will nearly double again in February. Search volume for “Hillary Clinton” and “John McCain” grew substantially in the same time period, but with considerably less traffic.
• Technically branded, but too cool to leave out: Trailers and advertising for Cloverfield avoided showing the movie’s underlying monster. This ambiguity encouraged over 900,000 referrals for the term “Cloverfield.” The term “cloverfield monster” just barely missed making the top twenty-five list as well.

All terms listed above are exact match terms. For instance, for the term “dictionary” searches for a term like “online dictionary” would not be counted.

Formula. Diapers. Clothing. Nursery Items. Car Seats. Strollers.

When I think of a high value market segments, one that comes to mind is young and expecting mothers. Making new purchase decisions on these items and more, young and expecting mothers are the target consumers of many baby product companies. If I were an online brand marketer for Johnson and Johnson (makers of the always popular Johnson’s Baby Shampoo), I would be interested in knowing where I can advertise to most effectively reach this target group.

The current industry standard approach is a contextual ad campaign. A typical contextual ad campaign matches site content with target group interests. Under this approach, known sites with baby- or mom-focused content would be the appropriate ad placement location. Examples of these locations could be momstoday.com or singlemom.com. Unfortunately, this is speculative and offers a limited scope. After all, young and expecting mothers don’t spend ALL of their online time at these very segmented sites. Behavior Match is Compete’s new approach to this challenge of matching target consumers with effective online media buys among all sites they visit. Using Compete’s Behavior Match product suite, we can drill down to online properties that have a greater than average saturation of young and expecting mothers, not just the contextually relevant sites.

A Behavior Match Buyer report highlights all websites that are visited by young and expecting mothers, indexed against the chance of finding this behavioral segment on the average site across the internet. To run this report, Compete has identified 1,000,000 online consumers in the month of January, 2008 as young and expecting mothers.

*Read as “In the month of January, 809,835 young and expecting mothers visited the Yahoo! Domain. Yahoo! Scores a 98, indexed against the average composition of young and expecting mothers, or just under the internet average (100).”

Top 10 Domain Findings:

• The largest internet properties have the highest reach among young and expecting mothers.
• These domains index very close to average; this is oftentimes true because of their sheer size. i.e. Who doesn’t use Yahoo!?
• Among this list, aol.com is the best advertising opportunity for Johnson and Johnson to reach young and expecting mothers (wikipedia.org does not accept advertising).

The focus of this report is the torso sites on the internet (50,000 to 500,000 monthly unique visitors) that have a high concentration of young and expecting mothers.

*Read as “In the month of January, 31,000 young and expecting mothers visited kidprintables.com. Kidprintables scores a 8,895, indexed against the average composition of young and expecting mothers.”

Torso Domain Findings:

• While these internet properties have lower scope, on a per impression basis they much more effectively reach the target segment.
• A campaign focused across many torso domains has the same reach opportunity as a larger internet property.
• A trend among these sites is that they are focused on work from home / internet jobs.

Compete offers another product in the Behavior Match product suite focused on large site segmentation. Behavior Match In-Site segments the larger internet properites to take advantage of their large scope while still effectively targeting young and expecting mothers.

This table takes a comparitive look at the performance of top subdomains on yahoo.com and msn.com during the month of January 2008 at reaching young and expecting mothers.

In-Site Findings (yahoo.com and msn.com):

• On a per impression basis, many MSN channels more effectively reach young and expecting mothers than similar Yahoo! channels.
• Top performing channels for Johnson and Johnson to focus on with their ad campaign include Real Estate, Health, and TV.
• Channels that less effectively reach the young and expecting mother segment are Help, Astrology, and Autos.

Takeaways:

• Contextual placement alone is outdated. Similar properties across two top portals don’t even show the same reach among the target segment.
• Targeted advertising space doesn’t have to be expensive. Matching highly effective advertising opportunities from Behavior Match with those offering low CPM saves $$!
• Bargaining with top portals is possible. Fight for the placement on the health channel.
• This product is EASY. No more wrapping your head around fancy targeting schema.

Apple has a long history of releasing critically acclaimed ads starting back in 1984 with “The Greatest Commercial of All Time.” More recently, one of the coolest aspects of Apple advertising has been the use of relatively unknown musicians, with their music as the (seemingly) most important element of the commercial. Through multi-million dollar ad campaigns, Apple helps bring these lesser-known artists mainstream. With the recent launch of the iPod Nano, iPod Touch and Macbook Air, Compete took a look at how consumers exposure to offline commercials influenced online behavior, and also how artists (and Apple) benefit from a partnership.

What’s incredible is how high quality TV commercials can foster online research. From August 2007 to January 2008, US consumers conducted nearly 1 million queries for iPod related commercials or the underlying music. The table below shows the top 20 search phrases (in terms of query volume), and how these queries were conducted over the period.

Its interesting to note that 15 of the top 20 searches contained the word “song” or “music” and also helps to explain search behavior. With almost no information being given about the music used in Apple commercials, consumers unfamiliar with the artist (and apparently enjoyed the song) naturally search for the song in the commercial.

Additionally, the fact that September was such a huge month in terms of Apple commercial search activity indicates the degree to which consumers enjoyed Feist’s “1-2-3-4,” a song that appeared in Apple iPod Nano commercials. Over 425,000 people were actively searching for the song in this commercial in September.

Apple TV ads are all about branding, but they apparently do a great job at getting people to revisit the advertisements online. They also are an amazing opportunity for an undiscovered musician. For all three artists in recent commercials (Feist, CSS, and Yael Naim), Apple ads resulted in exponentially greater exposure to consumers, even excluding the offline component.

• For Fiest’s “1-2-3-4” YouTube video, traffic grew 1200% from the month prior to the Nano commercial’s launch, and over 45X when views of the actual commercial (on YouTube, or Apple) was included.
• Growth for CSS’s “Music is my hot hot sex,” which was created by an fan, and then used by Apple, showed substantial growth as well.
• It appears that being exposed through Apple commercials also results in loyalty. In fact, 3 months after the Nano commercial launched, traffic to Feist “1-2-3-4” videos on YouTube was receiving 5 times the monthly views it was getting prior to its feature in the Nano commercial.
• It’s not surprising, but people seem to have confused the iPhone with the iPod Touch. Traffic to iPhone commercial videos on YouTube and Apple.com spiked around the same time as the iPod Touch ad was released. (not shown)

What is so significant about Apple’s advertising is that it not only helps to define the company and generate demand for talented musicians, but also helps encourage the music discovery process, which ties directly back to iTunes. By exposing consumers to great music from new (or unknown) artists, they get people interested in the music search. With an artist the company exposed nominated for a Grammy, and millions of people seeking out commercials instead of avoiding them, Apple is doing a few things right.

Unless you were sleeping under a rock you probably heard the big search news last week and I’m not talking about Google posting record search numbers again in January. It’s hard to look at the potentially merger of Yahoo! and Microsoft in the vacuum of search. The impact on the display advertising space is far more substantial but I would definitely be remiss not to mention a few points of interest on the search side. The combined search market share of Yahoo! and MSN/Live would come in roughly around the 25% mark among the US online population. You have to put this in perspective though. A year ago this merger would have meant a combined market share of nearly 32% vs. Google’s January 2006 share of 62%. With all the rumors about this merger being in the works for over a year, if not longer, you have to wonder who’s taking it on the chin by sitting on this one. It certainly isn’t Google. MSN/Live has definitely been gaining some ground in recent months but Yahoo! has yet to stem the receding tide. I don’t see the combined forces of these two reversing the current trend. Of course with the amount of buzz surrounding the potential merger and the coincident news regarding Google’s slide in the markets we may see some interesting numbers for February.

Oh yeah … by the way … Google’s market share reached a record level again in January.

Remember January 2006? It was a tough month for almost everyone other than the big dog. Well the good news about bad months in history is that the bar is lower for the future. January 2007 was much kinder to almost all of the major search engines. Relative to year ago market share levels everyone except Yahoo! was either above or at par in January 2007. Month-over-month there was actually very little movement in market share. Almost everyone moved with the market as overall search query volume increased 5% from December. Google was biggest gainer on market share, but Yahoo!, Ask, and AOL all posted volume gains in January. MSN/ Live volume essentially remained flat month-over-month. It will be interesting to see if the buzz drives any curiosity to Yahoo! or Live search in February.

The overview…

• Google gained volume and share posting a new record of nearly 69% market share
• Despite volume growth Yahoo! market share decreased slightly from December
• MSN/Live market share declined slightly with volume essentially remaining flat
• Ask market share ticked up once more on strong query volume growth
• AOL market share held steady despite strong volume growth
• The volume of RSS feeds in my feed reader with the word Microhoo! in the title has declined 5,000% since last Friday

* Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

The end of the Super Bowl brought broken hearts to New England and elation to New York (and many other places). But it also brings the competition for some of the world’s biggest brands to capitalize on the record-setting price they paid for Super Bowl commercials. With prices reaching up to $3 million for a 30-second spot, which advertisers got the most for their money by connecting their ads to their online presence in search and social media? Check out Reprise Media’s Super Bowl scorecard to see which companies scored and which ones choked.

Compete and Reprise have been able to see past the Boston-New York rivalry and come together for a partnership to analyze data on user behavior and online traffic trends surrounding the Super Bowl. Compete will be collaborating with reprise on study later this month to understand the best and worst of online/offline advertising coordination. Check back towards the end of February to download the study.

A few weeks ago Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz posted an interview in which Jeremy talks about Compete’s technology, the results, what’s coming up, etc. Read on!

Compete.com Metrics - An Interview with Jeremy Crane
by Rand Fishkin

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been chatting over email with the folks at Compete.com about their web popularity reporting & analytics tools. Luckily enough, Jeremy Crane, the Director of Search & Online Media for Compete, agreed to an interview. Below, you can learn a lot more about how Compete gathers data, where they struggle, where they succeed and what the future of third party visitor analysis may hold.

Read the entire article