[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry, join us here. -Ed.] When you don’t have to sacrifice your love of the outdoors for your career or vice versa, it’s something special. In fact, my love of both skiing and marketing has grown dramatically since I took my job at Backcountry . Getting to work with Google, specifically managing our AdWords account, is an online marketing geek’s dream come true. Combine that with every skier’s dream of Utah powder, and life is good. Day traders wake up every morning to check their portfolio — I get up and check my AdWords accounts. Backcountry sells gear and equipment for the outdoor enthusiast from ski boots to tents, and we sell all of it online. My job is to drive valuable, qualified traffic 365 days a year to Backcountry using AdWords. The AdWords platform lets me manage hundreds of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of keywords with relative ease. I have access to huge amounts of data that are revealed as daily ebbs and flows in impressions, clicks and bids. If you do a Google search for [ telemark ski gear ], you’ll see our ad: Backcountry was founded in 1996 by two self-proclaimed ski bums, John Bresee and Jim Holland. Since then, the company has grown to hundreds of employees. I’ve been working here for over two years. Ultimately, our goal is to “crush it,” as some ski town folk say: work hard, play hard. A typical powder day for me is like this one last Friday when Park City got 12 inches of new snow overnight. Here’s how AdWords helps me manage both work and fun. 7 – 7:45am Roll out of bed. Get the coffee going. Fry eggs and bacon. Check snow totals. If it looks like a good ski morning, I first check my email and glance over our AdWords campaigns. All I need to do is my daily reporting to see that I’m on target for my revenue and cost goals. As long as things are okay, I email my boss to say I’ll be out slaying the white dragon. Just as I have the ideal tools to maximize our online campaign performance, I have the tools avid skiers covet for deep days: fat, rockered skis, stiff ski boots, Gore-Tex jacket and pants, helmet, goggles, merino wool layers, etc. After I grab my gear, I’m off. 7:45am – 12noon My commute to The Canyons Ski Resort takes 10 minutes. My friends and I know how to get the most out of our time on the mountain, balancing chair lift time, snow quality and vertical. Does that sound a bit like cost-per-click , conversion rate and top-line revenue? Take this lift to that lift, ski the trees while we wait for that chair to open, get after our favorite steep lines. Next thing you know: Photo by Jim Harris Face shots are invigorating. Hard to explain, best to experience! After a few glances at the time and collecting my thoughts, I make my way off the mountain. 12pm – 5pm I head a few miles down the road to the office. As the afternoon goes by, co-workers will emerge from their cubicles; sometimes because legs are cramping up but also to share stories about how the morning was. Where did you ski? How was the snow? Smiles all around. I settle into work knowing what I need to succeed at my job is at my fingertips. AdWords gives me visibility into my programs to prioritize and understand trends. It also makes it easy to add and edit my account without getting bogged down in manual work. I regularly use Keyword Performance Reports to monitor both head terms and tail terms to stay on top of revenue opportunities. I’ll take into account the average order value and also the percentage of clicks that turn into sales (rate of conversion) in order to manage our keyword bids . As I do bid updates, I also check the AdWords Preview Tool to see how our ads are ranked and what is going on with our competition. We don’t really focus on “cost-per-click” but instead on “cost as percentage of revenue,” which means the more people purchase, the more ads we can run. So the higher the return on advertising spend, the more room we have to grow our paid search presence. 5 pm – 8 pm I like this afternoon time in particular because it’s quiet and I can really focus on data-crunching. Uninterrupted time and a strong cup of coffee are essential for doing long-term analysis. Campaign Performance Reports are great for identifying long- and short-term trends as seasons shift or for changes in demand by brand. We just wrapped up our winter sale, so this is a great time for me to run an Ad Performance Report to analyze which versions of ad copy had the strongest clickthrough rates for future reference. Finally, Google Insights for Search is a fun tool. It’s a great way to connect with our buyers by discussing big-picture trends with the brands we carry. We can look at AdWords Campaign performance and try to tie it back to general search volume in the marketplace and identify product searches on the rise. In short, given our metrics focus, AdWords gives me the information I need to make decisions about specific keywords, bids, and our overall spend. There are typically the same few folks hanging out at the office this late. We’ll exchange some pleasantries, and as the lights get turned off I’ll shut down my computer. When I earned an undergraduate degree in marketing and cultural anthropology, I had only a vague idea how I was going to create a career with behavioral and analytical activities. It turns out online marketing is an exciting mix of real-time data and customer service. AdWords lets me manage campaigns very efficiently, so I have time to dig deeper and do the strategic analysis that makes this job about much more than just meeting revenue goals. Finally, I picked Park City because it’s more than a ski town. Here fanatical skiers, trail runners, bikers, snowboarders and climbers can live year round and still have a meaningful career. I’ll always be grateful to companies like Backcountry and Google for making this possible: Backcountry for fostering the passions of the outdoor enthusiast, and Google for innovation in creating the forums and tools that really work for us. Posted by Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry

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Ode to AdWords

by Mike Moran Image by luc legay via Flickr Social media is free, but what’s the catch? Time. We only have so much time to spend putting our message out there, but we don’t want to limit how many people can hear what we have to say. This problem comes up in many ways, but the simplest is the dichotomy between Facebook and Twitter. Many folks decide to spend the bulk of their social time on one or the other, with relatively few people using both. If Google Buzz catches fire, this fragmentation might only increase. What’s a marketer to do? Let’s face it. There’s no real difference between “friends” and “followers,” nor between “”status updates” and “tweets.” And why would you decide to spend all your precious social media time updating one venue and not the other, if your customers use both of them? But how can you double the amount of time you spend in social media updating both? You don’t have to. I decided that I prefer Twitter to Facebook so I have every tweet I send out mirrored as my Facebook status. And I do the same thing on LinkedIn. I haven’t taken the plunge on Google Buzz yet, but I’ll probably do the same thing there, also. If someone wants to see what I am up to, they can use their favorite method to keep up and I only have to update once. I know people using FriendFeed to accomplish the same thing. In each of your social media lives, you can set up these mirrors to make sure that your customers can keep up no matter what network they are in, while you only need to update once. Now, I find even though I update in only one place, that I still have trouble making time for more than a few tweets a day, but there isn’t anything I can do to help with that. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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"I don’t have time for Facebook and Twitter"

The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the hot searches list on Google Trends. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention. Here’s a snapshot: Fashion Everyone knows the red carpet is all about the gowns. So which actresses made the best (or worst!) dressed list in search? Zoe Saldana ’s purple Givenchy haute couture gown won the day in searches, with just a few more queries than runner up Miley Cyrus , who walked down the carpet in one of Jenny Packham’s finest. Both beat searches for Sandra Bullock ’s dress (Marchesa) by large margins. Sarah Jessica Parker , always the fashionista, ranked a distant fourth in Chanel. Certain designers were also popular in search, thanks to the stars who wore (and name-dropped) them. Elie Saab (worn by Anna Kendrick), Armani Prive (Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lopez) and Marchesa (Sandra Bullock, Vera Farmiga) were all rising trends. Winners Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of “Avatar” during the ceremony: The awards for best actor, best actress and best director are some of the most-anticipated in the program. There was a considerable amount of buzz about Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kathryn Bigelow before last night, and considerable spikes in search volume when they each won. Here’s a look at a few of the star searches last night: Finally, the evening wasn’t all about big wins. The awards help expose more obscure films — shorts, documentaries and foreign-language — to a much larger audience. Searches for these titles typically went up tenfold during the evening, and if they took home a gold statue, search volume spiked as much as 100 times higher. Music by Prudence , Logorama , Food, Inc. , The Cove and The Secrets in their Eyes all experienced an exponential explosion of queries. Gossip and memorable moments People are always eager for more information about the Hollywood stars — personal stats like age, height, family and dating status. During this year’s Oscar® ceremonies, Kathryn Bigelow’s height and Miley Cyrus’s mother’s tattoos were hot topics. Whose girlfriend was most searched for? Easy. George Clooney’s (Elisabetta Canalis). So what were the most memorable moments of the broadcast? When George Clooney wandered off the red carpet to greet the crowd, queries on [clooney] shot through the roof. Ben Stiller ’s appearance as a Na’vi was another draw, and queries on him were high during his spoof. Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick ’s John Hughes tribute triggered a flood of nostalgia; Sixteen Candles , The Breakfast Club , Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Home Alone all saw huge query spikes as well. During the memorial portion of the show, queries surged for those in the industry who passed away in the last year, including Ron Silver , Natasha Richardson , Patrick Swayze and Brittany Murphy . On a lighter note, Sandra Bullock set off a frenetic amount of searches when she mentioned a Meryl Streep kiss in her acceptance speech. As we’ve seen in presidential debates , unusual words also generate great interest. The Oscars led to spikes in searches for [ catharsis ] (from Robert Downey Jr.’s presentation with Tina Fey) and [ spooning ] (Colin Farrell talking about Jeremy Renner). We hope you enjoyed the evening, and want to thank everyone for turning to Google search to see the latest. And our parents deserve huge thanks, and our agent… oh, they’re telling me to wrap it up…! Posted by Qing Wu, Senior Economics Analyst

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And the searches go to…

Webmaster Level: All Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler. Today, we’re happy to announce two additional Labs features: Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile Create your Sidewiki page owner entry Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi) After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML. Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro) Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension . Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry , that appears above all entries written by users. After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, “How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?” With the feature that we’re introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own. We’re really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think ! Written by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools

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Fetch as Googlebot Mobile and Claim your Sidewiki comment - added to Webmaster Tools Labs!

by Sage Lewis Search Engine Roundtable has reported on a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools. You can now update your Sidewiki profile in your tools section. Learn what Sidewiki is and how you can use it to your benefit. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Google Adds Sidewiki Control to Google Webmaster Tools

by Sage Lewis Marketing Pilgrim reports that B2B Marketers will see a 490% Increase in Social Media Spend by 2014. But there are other really interesting stats to be found in this report as well. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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B2B Marketers Making Huge Increases in Social Media Spend

(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog ) What do tracking flu, helping consumers monitor their home electricity use, slowing deforestation and perhaps most importantly in 2010, helping the people of Haiti have in common? While they are all part of the wide-ranging work of Google.org over the last year, they also show what our technical teams can accomplish in critical areas that don’t always get the attention they need and deserve. A year ago we outlined our goals for the next chapter for Google.org . We talked about our vision to use strengths of Google in information and technology to build products and advocate for critical policies that address global challenges. Ideas for projects continue to pour in from Googlers and partners around the globe, and we’re incubating several new projects in the areas of economic development, clean energy and access to technology. This past year, we: Ramped up Google PowerMeter to help consumers reduce their electricity use and save money, secured utility and device partners, and launched the API on code.google.com to help expand partner access globally. Introduced Earth Engine , a new computational platform we have begun building for global-scale analysis of satellite imagery to monitor changes in key environmental indicators like forest coverage, at COP15 in December. Quickly expanded Google Flu Trends to 20 countries and 38 languages as the H1N1 flu virus spread around the world. We also added city-level flu estimates to 121 U.S. cities and developed the Flu Shot Finder to help people find vaccine locations. Responded to earthquakes in Haiti and Chile , with maps, updated earth imagery, and networking projects, and built Person Finder to help people find information about their loved ones after a disaster. Advocated for policies to spur innovation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal ( RE

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An update on Google.org and philanthropy @ Google

by Sage Lewis Matt Cutts has recently put out a post calling for us all to turn in link spam . Learn what he and Google are up to. This has interesting implications for you to consider. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Matt Cutts Calling for Link Spam Reports

Last year, we released a public data search feature that enables people to quickly find useful statistics in search. More recently, we expanded this service to include information from the World Bank, such as population data for every region in the world. More and more public agencies, non-profits and other organizations are looking for ways to open up their data and expand global access to this kind of information. We want to help keep that momentum going, so today we’re sharing a snapshot of some of the most popular public data search topics on Google. We’re also launching the Google Public Data Explorer , an experimental visualization tool in Google Labs. Popular public data topics on Google We know people want to be able to find reliable data and statistics on a variety of subjects. But what kind of statistics are they looking for most? To help us better prioritize which data sets to include in our public data search feature, we’ve analyzed anonymous search logs to find patterns in the kinds of searches people are doing, similar to the patterns you can find on Google Trends and Insights for Search . Some public data providers have asked us to share what we’ve learned, so we decided to put together an approximate list of the 80 most popular data and statistics search topics. You can read the complete list at this link (PDF), but here’s the top 20 to get you started: 1. School comparisons 2. Unemployment 3. Population 4. Sales tax 5. Salaries 6. Exchange rates 7. Crime statistics 8. Health statistics (health conditions) 9. Disaster statistics 10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 11. Last names 12. Poverty 13. Oil price 14. Minimum wage 15. Consumer price index, inflation 16. Mortality 17. Cost of living 18. Election results 19. First names 20. Accidents, traffic violations You’ll notice some interesting entries in the list. For example, we were surprised by how many people search for data about popular first and last names. Perhaps people are trying to decide what to name a new baby boy or girl? As it turns out, people are interested in a wide range of statistical information. To build the list, we looked at the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search, using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools — similar to what we do for our annual Zeitgeist . We combined search terms into groups, filtering out spam and repeats, to prepare a list reflecting the most popular public data topics. As a statistician, it’s important for me to note that the data only covers one week’s worth of searches in the U.S., so there could be seasonal and other confounding factors (perhaps there was an election that week). In addition, preparing a study like this requires a fair amount of manual grouping of similar queries into topics, which is fairly subjective and prone to human error. While imperfect, we still think the list is helpful to consider. The Public Data Explorer As you can see, people are interested in a wide variety of data and statistics, but this information is only useful if it’s easy to access, understand and communicate. That’s why today we’re also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs , a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog. We’ve embedded the following chart using the new feature as an example: This chart compares life expectancy and the number of births per woman over the last 47 years for most economies of the world. The bubble sizes show population, and colors represent different geographic regions. Press the play button to see the dramatic changes over time. Click “explore data” to dig deeper. Animated charts can bring data to life. Click the play button in the chart to watch life expectancy increase while fertility rates fall around the world. The bubble colors make it quick and easy to see clusters of countries along these variables (e.g., in 1960 the European and Central Asian countries were in the lower right and Sub-Saharan Africa in the upper left). The bubble sizes help you follow the most populous countries, such as India and China. These charts are based on the Trendalyzer technology we acquired from the Gapminder Foundation , which we’ve previously made available in the Motion Chart in Google Spreadsheets and the Visualization API . With a handful of data providers, there are already billions of possible charts to explore. We currently provide data from the same three providers currently available in our search feature : the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, we’ve added five new data providers: the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. We’re excited that all around the world new data providers are deciding to make their information freely available on the Internet, enabling innovators to create interesting applications, mash up the data in new ways and discover profound meaning behind the numbers. We hope our list and new tool help demonstrate both the public demand for more data and the potential for new applications to enlighten it. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback in our discussion forum . If you’re a data provider interested in becoming a part of the Public Data Explorer, contact us . Posted by Jürgen Schwärzler, Statistician, Public Data team

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Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. This week’s enhancements include: Stars in search Every day, we work to improve the four key components of search: comprehensiveness, latency, user experience and relevance. Of these, relevance is dramatically enhanced by more personalized results. This week, we announced a new feature that makes it much easier to mark and rediscover your favorite content. Stars in search are just like the stars you see in Google Toolbar or in Maps — they act like bookmarks. When you star a search result, and it happens to appear again in future results, you’ll see that you already found that particular result. Starred items will appear at the top of your results. Stars in search has been rolling out this week, and will be available globally for all users who are signed in to their Google account. Auto-spell for images This week, we unveiled automatic spell correction for images. In cases where we’re highly confident you had intended to type something else, we’ll replace results from the typo query with those from the spell-corrected version — just like when you misspell a query in Google search. Ultimately, this change will reduce the time it takes to get you the result you’re looking for (and that’s a good thing). Example searches: [ butterflys ], [ roman architecture ] and [ apollo ohno ] Sidewiki page owner entry In September, we launched Sidewiki , which lets you contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension . Afterward, webmasters asked, “How can I quickly put Sidewiki on all pages of my site?” Now webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry , that appears above all entries written by users. Webmaster tool improvements ultimately create a better web experience for us all, so we’re pleased about this. Let us know what you think about our webmaster enhancements. Stay tuned for next week’s news on more search launches. Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

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This week in search 3/7/10