Google is 10 years old this week, starting as a search engine company with superior results it has grown to encompass classified ads (adwords.google.com/) and a free email system called Gmail with practically limitless storage (http://mail.google.com)
Google itself can be thought of as the operating system for the web (not just chrome!) and it collects a lot of data which it makes publicly available. If you understand how Google works and how to query it’s data you can get insights into 80% of the mainstream internet.
Here are my top tips for getting quick marketing insight.
1) Get a google email account
This gives you a login for all of google’s services and means that you can access more detail within search insights. It’s also a good tool to have for signing up to client and competitor emails anonymously.
2) Google Blog search
Blogs and forums are indexed differently from normal websites, you can use blog search to listen to conversations on the web. Try adding different queries and skim through the spam and noise. You should end up with a few nuggets on each query. You can get updates by email or add them to your igoogle page (see below)
3) Google Insights for search
Google insights for search lets you see how many people are searching for specific terms across different regions, categories (industries such as automotive). You’ll need to be logged in to get actual search volumes
4) igoogle – your web dashboard
igoogle gives you a personalised google webpage where you can add “gadgets” (small panels which are updated with information being pushed into them). A classic gadget would be a window onto your googlemail, newspaper headlines or weather, however I use this to read RSS feeds. Set up a new tab for each client, click on the “add new stuff” button and look at the bottom left of the page for the “add feed or gadget” button with the orange RSS logo. You can now take the google blog searches that you have set up and paste the URL into this box. This will display your search queries in individual gadgets and is a good way of keeping an eye on the web
5) Google Analytics
Analytics is a free tool for analysing website information, it’s aimed at marketers rather than webmasters and provides good information on referrers (adwords, natural search, email marketing etc). It allows you to setup goals to track journeys and conversions. This is ideal for campaign websites when you want to understand how people got there and what they did afterwards. You will need to talk to your web developers to set up tags on the website pages at the start of the period you want to report on.
