traffic

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/xZHNT92BICw/bing-could-catch-yahoo-by-the-end-of-the-year

Since Microsoft’s Bing search engine launched last summer, it has gained market share at the expense of Yahoo. If the trends stay consistent, Bing could pass Yahoo in the U.S. by the end of November.

To be sure, some (most?) of Microsoft’s gains have come with an expense: The company is buying up toolbar deals to become the default search engine for more users — less-valuable, paid traffic that Yahoo seems happy to give up. And Microsoft has spent a lot of money advertising Bing.

But there’s no doubt that Yahoo’s declining search business, long term, is bad news for the company. Especially because its deal to farm out its search technology to Bing will only generate revenue for searches conducted through Yahoo, not through Bing, even though Yahoo is selling the ads on Bing.


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, January 15th, 2010 search No Comments

The numbers vary depending on who you ask or whose data you use

Bing search volume continues to drop despite tons of ads and cheating — redirecting traffic from live.com, msn.com, microsoft.com, and windows search (see also – http://bit.ly/7qDBEz) .

January 13, 2010

The Nielsen Company today reported December 2009 data for the top U.S. Search Providers.

MegaView Search data – including total searches, unique searchers, search share, and all other search figures – cannot be trended with search results prior to October 2009 due to recent methodology changes.

search-volumes-comparison

Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider. Example:  An estimated 6.7 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 67.3 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.

versus Oct 2009 numbers from hitwise

experian-hitwise-percentage-us-searches-leading-search-engine-provider-september-2009

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 analytics, search No Comments

Even Major Sites are Not Yet Benefiting From the Full Power of Search

@glenngabe’s post on  FaceYahoogle – The Impact of Facebook, Yahoo, and Google on Website Traffic inspired me to also look at the search terms driving traffic.  Most sites, even major ones have their own brand terms driving traffic. This is OK, but it is taking significantly less advantage of the full power of search.A more ideal scenario for sites is that they have a large number of non-brand terms driving traffic — i.e. the keywords they want to be known for are driving traffic to them.  The premise is that if the user already knew the brand or brand name, it would be redundant for the advertiser to spend awareness ad dollars on them. The advertiser wants to get users to their site who do not already know their brand name.  This is especially true for pharma drug websites, as you will see in the following examples.

GENERAL SITES

These sites have such a diverse set of products, services, or topics, we don’t expect the top search terms driving traffic to be anything other than their brand terms.  But they should have a long tail of thousands of keywords driving traffic (and they are, in the following examples).

NYTimes.com

nytimes

LinkedIn.com

linkedin

Weather.com

weather

CATEGORY SPECIFIC SITES

These sites focus on specific product categories, so one would expect that they should have keywords around their product category driving traffic — e.g. clothing, chocolate, wine, etc.  But as you can see, most don’t and the total number of keywords driving traffic could be larger than it is now (implying more long tail keywords).

JCrew.com – clothing

jcrew

Apple.com – computers, consumer electronics, iPod, music

apple

Godiva.com – chocolate

godiva

AnnTaylor.com – clothing, women’s

anntaylor

SINGLE NICHE SITES

Such sites should be all over search terms that surround the topic areas that they want to be known for. But as you see from the analytics, most don’t. Instead, the top terms driving traffic are their own brand name. Again, if the user already knew the brand, additional advertising would be wasted on them. The sites need to make efforts to “own” additional keywords (or at least “show up at the party”) so people who don’t know the brand name might still have a chance finding them when they type in other keywords surrounding the specific niche.

Sutent (Pfizer) – cancer drug

sutent

Nucynta (J0hnson & Johnson) – pain drug

nucynta

Spiriva (Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer) – COPD drug

NOTE: This is the best of the bunch of drug sites.  COPD, the disease area they want to be known for, does actually show up in the first 5 search terms driving traffic, along with emphysema and their product name handihaler. Also, notice they have nearly 10 times the number of keywords driving traffic compared to the other 2 drugs cited (65 vs 7 or 8 )

spiriva

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, December 6th, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/IMPiDaoQJ4M/wikipedias-brain-drain

The decay of time, bitter infighting, and the increasing scope and strength of regulations slowly strangle the life out of Wikipedia, with editors—its braintrust—fleeing in droves, even as traffic at the world’s fifth most-popular website keeps growing. [WSJ]


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, November 23rd, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

#whentwitterwasdown – Twitter crippled by massive #ddos (distributed denial of service) attack

As many of you may have noticed, Twitter was down for many hours starting Thursday morning August 6 and remained intermittent even when it was brought back up. The theory is that this was caused by a massive DDOS attack on their servers including the services that other web applications depended on — that means that outside services (twitter applications) were also taken down.

For an explanation of denial-of-service attack or distributed-denial-of-service, this is the wikipedia entry. It basically is an attacker using a large number of “zombie” computers to “hit” the victim’s site at the same time, thus overloading it, and causing it to not be able to respond to legitimate traffic.

ddos-diagram

Full Coverage of the Social Media DDoS (Source: Mashable)


Is Cyber Warfare to Blame for Twitter Meltdown?

Denial of Service Attacks Being Investigated by Google, Twitter, Facebook

Facebook Problems Also the Result of DDoS Attack

Twitter Outage Explained: What’s a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)?

Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)

Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown.

Twitter Down: Twitter Doesn’t Know Why

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday, August 7th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

The hardest thing to do in web 2.0 …

is keep your audience, keep them interested, or provide enough value to them to get them to switch or get them to come back.

Case in point, Wolfram Alpha.  In many ways it is superior (in a different way) than Google because it is a computational search engine — its results are focused on things that can be calculated — e.g. distance between NY and San Fran, etc.

Interest has waned (see search volume chart) and traffic has dropped (see Compete chart).

wolfram-alpha-search-volume-chart

wolfram-alpha-visitor-chart

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, July 9th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Bing is bigger than CNN, Digg, Twitter? Not so fast!

Compete shows that Bing’s unique users in June 09 is bigger than Twitter, CNN, and Digg.

This is not because people are voluntarily going to Bing.com.  It is because Microsoft redirected all traffic from live.com and search traffic (results pages) from msn.com to bing.com.

bing-twitter-cnn-digg-unique-visitors

This is what it looks like when a site changes domain names and redirects all rtraffic from the old site.  By next month Compete will show the same “X” for Live.com vs Bing.com

dailymakeover-makeoversolutions-unique-visitors

Already starting to see the decline of traffic from live.com which is entirely redirected to bing.com

live-search-vs-bing-unique-visitors

bing-compete

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, July 9th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Twitter hit a ceiling?

after a meteoritc rise, is reality (actually being useful – or not) catching up to Twitter?

twitter-ceiliing

Tags: , , , , ,

Monday, June 15th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Did you Google Bing too?

seems like 40% of bing’s traffic comes from Google…   old habits die hard.

bing1

Tags: , , , , , ,

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

trends – coupon sites, network TV sites

coupon sites: definitely headed upward with a spike in Dec 08.

coupon-sites

network TV sites are seeing healthy increases, likely due to “view full episodes” on their websites – but even this increase in traffic will not replace the advertising revenues lost on network television

tv-network-sites

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, April 27th, 2009 integrated marketing, marketing, metrics No Comments