As an aggressive Internet marketer, you need to use every tool at your disposal that might give you an edge on your competition. One such set of tools that my brother and I (this is Jerry) have been looking into is Microsoft AdCenter Labs. Here is the URL:
http://adlab.msn.com/demo.aspx
The tools are divided into four categories:
- Paid Search
- Contextual Advertising
- Behavioral Targeting
- Emerging Markets
We’re going to start by looking at the Paid Search tools. Some of the tools are fairly conventional in nature, such as the Keyword Group Detection tool, which is basically just a keyword tool (although a good one), and the Keyword Mutation Detection tool, which helps you discover alternate or misspellings of keywords from search logs.
But one tool that’s really interesting is the Search Funnel tool, which helps you visualize and analyze search behaviors. You type in a search phrase related to your product or service, and the tool will show you a funnell representing either the search phrases that had been used before arriving at your search phrase, or search phrases that were used after using your search phrase.
For example, I typed in the search phrase”Gibson Guitars”, and it showed me a funnel with the following 5 search phrases (because I had set it to a filter of only showing the top 5):
- guitars
- www.gibsonguitars.com
- ebay
- fender guitars
- gibson
So those are the top 5 search phrases that were used before conducting a search for “Gibson Guitars” (based on the data that MSN has compiled – I would assume based on on MSN.com searches). You can do the same thing to find searches conducted after our test phrase. That results in the following list:
- fender guitars
- ebay
- martin guitars
- epiphone guitars
- guitars
This is very interesting data. If you have a really good idea of the searches people are conducting to arrive at your or your competitors’ web sites, then that should give you all kinds of ideas for search phrases to target for SEO, PPC, articles to write, etc. etc. etc. Think about it.
If you need help with your search marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.