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Keywords Revisited: Paid Research Tools
By Kevin Lee
March 19, 2004

Continued From Page 1

Hitwise
Nothing gets marketers more excited than knowing what the competition is doing. Wouldn't it be great to know what keywords your competitors are using in paid search, and what keywords searchers use to find them in organic search results? Some services go beyond keyword research and into competitive intelligence (CI). These include Hitwise and comScore's qSearch.

Though Hitwise is not exclusively a keyword research service, keyword reports can be run that include interesting and potentially useful keyword data, particularly for CI. Want to know what keywords searchers use to find your top five competitors? It's in the report. For any Web site (by domain), Hitwise can run a keyword report that lists the top 20 ways searchers found the site and clicked.

Hitwise reports are boilerplate yet useful. The data sources are router logs from major ISPs. These can, of course, track behavior of all subscribers or any traffic routed through the ISP. Any time you visit a Web site, your behavior is cataloged in every router log between your ISP and the one hosting the visited site. Hitwise looks at the behavior of 10 million U.S. users and 25 million worldwide surfers.

If all you want is keyword research, the option is available. A self-serve interface may have the information you need.

Serious marketers who want to understand a diverse mix of search behaviors, including keywords for their own sites and those of major competitors, should consider qSearch. As with most custom research on large data sets, it's best if you know ahead of time what questions you want answered.

An area where qSearch excels is its ability to tie purchase behavior on competitive sites to keywords. It's amazing. Some marketers don't even know the conversion rate for their own sites, yet qSearch can provide data based on a statistical sample for many high-traffic sites. Wouldn't it be valuable to know as much about your competition's search marketing campaign as they do, if not more?

This is available now and will soon be broken down between algorithmic and paid-placement search.

Article courtesy of Clickz.

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