Google Insights for Search is another great tool that can help marketers plan and refine their campaigns. It lets you compare search volume patterns by category and geography over time. You can explore seasonality, geographic, and product trends. As an example, by analyzing geographic trends over time of search patterns for your brand and your category, you might identify a high ROI metropolitan area to focus a concerted marketing effort.

I would be surprised if any brand manager who spent a half hour or so with this tool didn’t find at least one useful insight – about yourself or your competition. Or, at a minimum, it should raise some interesting questions.

Domus is a full-service marketing consulting agency based in Philadelphia. For more information, please visit our web site at http://www.domusinc.com.

There have been a number of studies that show that online display advertising has a multiplicative effect on conversion rates of sponsored search listings – as high as 22% improvement. (See Microsoft Advertising Institute.) But it’s still hard to tell exactly how much impact your specific display ads have on your specific search campaigns.

That should be changing soon, though. As Advertising Age is reporting, Google is beta-testing their Campaign Insights tool, which will give you an indication of how effective your campaign is. As they explain:

With Campaign Insights, Google takes data from the advertiser’s server logs to determine who was shown an ad and when. Then compares that to web searches and site visits culled from data from the millions of Google toolbars on computer desktops. Those results are compared to a comparable group that didn’t see the ad.

Then Google measures the difference between the number of brand searches and site visits between the two groups. To filter out the impact of other media or influences, such as a TV campaign, Google compares the data to the two groups’ behavior before the campaign began. The incremental difference is attributable to the display-ad campaign.

This should be a win-win for both Google and marketers. Marketers will be able to refine display advertising campaigns for better effectiveness and Google will gain more of the display advertising business (because they will be able to objectively show the ROI of campaigns).

Domus is a full-service advertising, PR, and social media marketing agency based in Philadelphia. Please visit us at http://www.domusinc.com.