Thursday, January 14, 2016

Google Trends - Training and review by Omenao

Google Trends is the public tool available by Google Inc to determine how a search terms being searched relative to the total search volume across different regions in the world. It gives search volume vs time 2D charts display. Filters available are by regions and time duration. We can get a clear picture of people interest over time, along with numerous other data signals.  It also allow us to compare multiple keyword terms. Google trend data is being update on daily basis, while  hot terms is updated on hourly basis.  Data available is from 2004 to the present with wide range of time duration filters from past 12 month to past 1 hour. Data can be visualized in various categories to make the search term relevant to the context. Based upon the search term, it suggest categories too. Trend further allow to visualize the kind of search made in terms of web, image, news, youtube etc.

Take the example of search term policy in English and Politik in German and visualize the data graphs available one after another.
 
Interest over time: We get to have inferences that july month in each year , people are losing interests in politik term in german while policy in english has saw decrease in seach from 2004 to 2007 later consistent with july and dec month as lowest search spikes. More deeper looking the curve, we get to see April to July there is dip in curve while august to November is the rise in curve. Accordingly, we can adjust our media spend in AdWords Media Plan to have cost effective campaign that deliver supply based upon the seasonal demand of people.

Regional interest: This is the search volume distribution by regions or city across the globe. Clicking on the map or the region, city name will further give more granular search term distribution across states & cities. At the bottom of the chart, there is useful option “View change over time”. Click on the play button, you can see the video play back of the search volume fluctuation across the regions.  Eg: For new brand keyword, you can get to see the people awareness over time from one city to another city or one country to another country, an interesting story to build on, isn’t it. Limitations: 10 regions or city can be maximum displayed in the chart at one time. Another example is searching cricket and view the cricket search volume over time, you can visualize, not only people interests but also understand how the cricket tournament are being organized over time in different part of the world, another useful info. Researchers argued that Google Trends this feature can be used to track influenza-like illness in a population.  Another study suggest that, company name as search term shows correlation with respect to stock transaction done by people over time. Another finding, published in the journal Scientific, suggest there may be a link between online people behavior and country economic indicators. They examine the search volume of users in 45 countries, and predicted the future search volumes in key sectors and hence investment opportunity in economies. It is also used by research organization to predict the forthcoming elections initial polls. Click on the </> icon the right bottom of each chart and embed the JavaScript in your website, increase the width and height to visualize the trend more closely.

 
Related searches: Based upon your current search term, it suggests how related top 10 keyword queries are being searched and related topics(news) as well.  Top searches are terms that are most frequently searched along with the your term in the same search session, within the chosen category, country, or region. Google Trends removes explicitly sexual and offensive search terms. At the bottom of any Google Trends page, click Send Feedback to report offensive content.
 
 
Search Quote: Google limits the number of search attempts available per user/IP/device. Crossing quota will display warning as Users have reported reaching this limit after a single attempt.. Details of quota limits is set confidential.
 
Download in .CSV. At the top right of the google trend screen there is triple vertical dot icon, click on it will give option to download all data in CSV format. Note that this data will contain more data that usually displayed over charts. On the left there are subscribe option in plus icon, enter the term and you will receive updated data on it once a week or once a month as per selection. 

Compare feature. This is search box and comes with three options. 
  • Compare search terms: Upto five different terms can be compared with respect to visual chart/table available.
  • Compare Locations: For a given search term, five different location can be compared with respect to visual chart/table available.
  • Compare time ranges: For a given search term, five different time ranges can be compared. See the snap below,

Forecasts: Above the interest over time chart there is check box of Forecast,  You'll see a prediction of how the term will be searched in the near future. The forecast is based on a mathematical estimate. You'll only see the clickable Forecast box if the time range is wide enough for the prediction to happen.

SPECIAL TIPS: Adding punctuation to refine your search,. Some of them are as below,
Bunny Cap: Result will contain both terms irrespective of order. It will include related top search terms pink bunny cap, bunny cap for kids etc.
Bunny+Caps: Results will contain searches containing the words bunny OR caps.
“Bunny Caps”: Result will contain the exact phrase along with words before and after the phrase. Eg. Red bunny caps, bunny caps kids 
Bunny-Caps: Results will contain searches containing the words bunny excluding caps.
 
 

Enjoy the tool, excellent for working on projects and impress others.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

New series of digital research & diagnostic tools - training and review by Omenao

Dear Reader,

This is going to be interesting new series of digital research & diagnostic tools training and review by Omenao with the tag #Digital Research Tools. Always wondered content on quick and comprehensive information on useful tools, which can be learn and later implement instantly. I am planning to give my best on screening some of the useful tool in online marketing. Some of the quick name that come to my mind now are as below,

·         ·         Google Trends
·         ·         Google Keyword Planner
·         ·         Google Web developer
·         ·         Fiddler
·         ·         Araaxis Merge
·         ·         Renamer
·         ·         Digital Pulse Debugger
·         ·         Page Analytic
·         ·         Tag Assistant


I will increase the length of the list in future based upon your feedback to us. You are the inspiration to write down my experience with these posts. Thanks for your support.

Thanks
Yours Omenao


Foundation Adops hire to the building of world class AdOps division

This is my first post on adops hiring and setting adops as independent competent division. This is dedicated to start up companies who are looking for foundation hires and want to establish adops process division that cater to advertisement needs of client round the clocks with remarkable accuracy and least TAT.   


Discipline is utmost requirement for adops candidate. But how can we judge it, look at the school performance, whether the candidate is academically sound or good in sports, arts, music. All come with strict discipline and dedication. Extending to the knacks, Math and logical reasoning are another mandate requirement, while dealing with numbers in the reports. For bigger brands, the data is big and need analytic insights, a good hand in excel help to visualize the data. While hiring experience adops person is advantage, we can save training time and get ready on production at the moment.
Recruiting fresh hires with him gradually once the production picks up pace, certainly is your next steps towards building a adops division. Within a year, push adops in extended hours that has availability as per the global market. This step is your direction towards going global and opportunity to stand with the world class adops team. Frequent communication of adops with sales is the key to gain the attention of clients. I remember mails, over which client appreciating adops team for the life saver feedback given on creative, landing page and campaign set up that could have messed up the wholke point of advertising if not identified in the early phase of trafficking.

Introduce the Email etiquettes to adops timely, to avoid adops observation going too techy to read. Even the client servicing without understanding and editing email(not their fault), forward the mail directly to client, which might require another round of meeting or concall to understand the same thing written over mail. Short and simple mail on Issue and solution approach is appraised by client.

Organize adops process into smaller and clear steps and convert into QA checklist. Following the checklist would act like guardian and prevent adops from doing silly accidents.  Create different level of QC check depending upon the complexity and business requirements, although two level check is enough normally if trained and equipped with QA checklist properly. Ask adops team to suggest ideas on process innovation or automation opportunity at least 1 each month via out of the box approach. Feed the team with competitors adops strategies and market place knowledge to create global competitive environment.

Ad servers and advertisement ecosystem is complicated landscape in terms of technology and numbers of players involved. Document the ad server details is utmost importance, usually they are already documented and maintained on internal knowledge resource like JIRA etc by technical team. But it is bit hard for  adops person to understand the effect of various features and new releases (due to technical nature of description). Create internal documentation with laymen explanation and screenshots for adops separately and proof read it by your technical team to avoid any misinterpretation. Introduce this documentation to new hires and let me them ask questions,  and this will help to identify the information gap, errors etc and led to continuous growth of quality content in documentation and well moderated over time for outdated things.

Adops deals with technical stuffs more frequently but the nature of the job is purely semi technical in nature (adops don’t have to code anything). It is an added advantage for adops to have programming language skills atleast to basic(syntax correction, adding common built in function, understanding the input/output/logic of javascript), that reduces dependency on technical team and saves lot of time.

Queue management system is another promising investment to avoid missing out campaign/tasks and required where there are huge amount of daily campaign flow. Although, I have used outlook mostly for queue management and there happened 1 miss in 4 years (it was peak day of course), and unfortunately it was big miss that let us to the verge of losing client.

Additionally the adops tasks has to be divided among New campaign and Change in existing campaign on account of optimization or addition/deletion certain information. Need not to mention all changes has to be logged into adserver system, check with tech if it possible to log the changes that are exactly in mail/Queue management in anyway. Separate user login profile are required to track the changes made when needed.

All these tasks has to be defined on the level of priority with which it has to be done. We can have one person to manage the queue and route the priority campaign first. Adops manager can rotate the responsible persons to manage the queue on weekly or monthly basis.

There are lot of productivity & diagnostic tools that team has to be trained in order to the tasks efficiently which otherwise can left the resource stuck for hours unnecessarily. Knowledge of the adserver and productivity tools are the key to do the easiest to toughest tasks in adops.


Let us know your thoughts on this posts, so I can put them here to improve the quality of this content and that would inspiration us to write another post.

Thanks
Yours Omenao