Category — Search Marketing

Thanks to Darren for bringing my attention to this great new tool. Woopra is the latest analytical tool I’ve seen. And its wicked cool.

It has a really nice interface that allows you to see, in real time, who is on your website, how they got there, what they are looking at and where they go from here. On top of this exceptionally interesting data, compiled live and as it happens, it has an exciting feature - chat. You are able to have a conversation with the person who is visiting your website, in real time.

This really got me fired up. I was done with “work” and home with my girlfriend, and I got the invite from Woopra, set it up and as soon as I was up and running I was “wowing” every few seconds. Watching visitors come to our site, how they got there, what they were looking at and for how long, and where they went from there. It’s very interesting data, and very exciting to see happening live!

The implications from this (at least to me) are nothing new, but the fact that this is live for FREE is a great. I’m not sure what their revenue model is going to be (assuming s Freemium model of some sort), but I can see alot of value in the site. Imagine if advertisers were able to monitor this data in real time, and engage in a conversation with my visitor (yes the big guys have similar chat features…), or if I was a smaller site who could see a potential customer on our site, be able to track where they came from and what they looked at and most importantly what call to action was most, or least, effective.

Its a very fun interface to use, and its exciting to see how visitors interact with the web, in real time. It makes typical analytics look like SportsCenter compared to a live game.

My take on the Yahoo/Microsoft deal remains the same. It was a very good deal for Microsoft, and I believe ultimately would have been a good thing for consumers. Microsoft needs to come up with some new technologies to keep their brand relevant in the long term, and purchasing all of Yahoo’s was an easy way to do that.

What I am afraid of now is a Google/Yahoo relationship. If Yahoo hands Google the reins to the second largest search engine, then what happens? Microsoft online becomes irrelevant (live.com might as well be now), and as a marketer I know have little choice where to spend my search marketing dollars. If Google is controlling Yahoo’s search budget, that essentially makes them irrelevant as well. So now Google essentially controls the entire search market and they can do whatever they want.

I don’t really know what this means, but it doesn’t sound good to me. Now Jerry Yang says Yahoo wants to focus on display ads. Did he forget that Google just completed its integration with DoubleClick and Tim Armstrong wants “to have advertisers load their entire ad budgets into Google’s system, which would allocate spending across media whether online or offline.” Judging by how well Google has dominated the search market and stolen millions of users from yahoo.com to gmail.com, I would be concerned if I was Yahoo.

Google already controls enough of the internet, and if they control Yahoo’s search advertising they will essentially be drinking Yahoo’s milkshake.