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Protected: Can Google queries help predict economic activity?

Wiesner Vos — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:56:10 +0000

getstats – promoting the understanding of statistics

Wiesner Vos — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 06:41:52 +0000

Data is becoming more and more important in every sphere of society. This is underlined by companies like Google that have it as their mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Major consulting firms are acknowledging the emergence of data-driven decision making as an emerging global trend. This is a trend that is not only limited to business world. We are increasingly being exposed to statistics and data in our everyday lives.

The Royal Statistical Society is launching its 10 year campaign for statistical literacy on World Statistics Day: 20/10/2010. The vision for the campaign, known to its friends as getstats, is “a society in which our lives and choices are enriched by an understanding of statistics”. Please visit http://www.getstats.org.uk for more information and to show your support As a company operating in a data-driven industry, we are proud support this global initiative.

Quality score dynamics can vary between different advertisers and PPC markets

Wiesner Vos — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:17:35 +0000

In an earlier post, it shown that the relationship between CTR and position can vary for different advertisers, especially in the higher positions. These differences can potentially be explained by differences in brand traffic or are real differences in the click-through related to the dynamics of geographical PPC markets or the nature of the advertiser’s business. It is interesting to note that the CTR in the higher positions seem to be considerably better for advertisers in less mature online markets namely Australia and South Africa. We investigated this further by only focusing on non-brand specific keywords. To achieve this we included a factor indicating the brand or non-brand status of keywords in our model. Figure 1 compares the four advertisers on all non-brand keywords with a QS of 7. Even after non-brand differentiation we continue to observe substantially higher CTR in the top positions for Australian and South African advertisers compared to their UK & US counterparts used in the same model. This could be reflective of a lower level of competition relative to more developed markets resulting in a smaller number of competitive ads on a search results page, which in turn drives higher click-through in top positions. From this it is also clear that there are no fixed thresholds for determining quality score, rather it is determined on the relative CTR which varies across advertisers and potentially also geographical regions

Figure 1: CTR by position across four advertisers for all non-brand keywords with a quality score of 7.