Our friends at Infectious Media have done some digging on the new Google AdPlanner and Google Trends for Websites that were announced this week.
The Google Trends for Web Sites acts as a more stripped down version of Alexa, but like Alexa, will only work for high traffic web sites, and even then, only some have a full range of data available. Google AdPlanner, while not available yet for public use, goes much more in-depth with a full range of data on competitor sites, search terms, traffic rankings, and other juicy tidbits.
These new toolkits join the ranks for free and paid tools that make it easier for brands to learn more about their Social Media Footprint and in particular, what issues and topics drive their online activity.
As we’ve been discussing, it is becoming increasingly important to monitor one’s effect on the online landscape, and we’ve been exploring both paid and free options to help define these footprints.
These two from Google specifically can deliver insights in how a brand (and its users’ activity) is affected by other web sites and other topics of interest. In other words, they help answer the questions : Who is my audience? What topics and issues trigger their online activity (visiting a web site)? What other topics are competing for their time and attention?
By looking at the “also searched for” portion of the trends, you can get an idea of what topics (in the form of search terms) triggered users to visit the site, and how they compare to other search terms.
You can also get a general idea about the web site’s audience by looking at the “regions” portion of Trends, which shows where site visitors are coming from; you can pinpoint your search to only look at specific countries or regions. You can also see a list of the top 10 other sites visitors have visited, which gives a snapshot of their other interests and competing web sites.
All in all, the Trends for web sites is best used as a starting point — it gives the best overall snapshot about a web site, and you can take the information and plug it into more specific tools, like Alexa or perhaps AdPlanner
Thanks for the heads up folks. It’s interesting to think about how far one can or should stretch the Social Media Footprint idea.
These tools work well for monitoring on line activity – how ever how does one measure the off line Social Media Footprint – such as word or mouth. Is wom Social Media – I think it is.
When we create an event around a brand, we are trying to create wom, opportunity to see and often drive interaction back on line into a social media enviroment.
I dont have answers for how all this fits together however its interesting watching and listning to the conversation as we try to work it out.
Keep up the great work.