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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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Free, Discount, Cheap and other Value Determinants

August 24, 2007

A couple of weeks ago Sandra, our analyst in Asia Pacific, wrote a post on what she terms "search value determinants" to consider the language people use when they enter search queries. To follow on her post, I thought I’d share some similar US data to look at what Americans search for in conjunction with popular modifiers.

Here are the top 10 variations on some typical modifiers for the four weeks to 18th August 2007. Note that the number of variations for each go into the tens of thousands.

Discount cheap free.png

The term "discount" is associated with consumer goods, "cheap" is associated with travel and free is associated with low price point items such as music and MySpace layouts.

Prices Deals .png

The term 'prices' appears to be associated with economic indicators such as gas, gold, oil, and stock. The term "deals" is associated with travel queries (similar to "cheap") and "used" is associated with books and cars.

Similar to Sandra’s finding, different product categories bring different language from consumers. As she points out, "the process of refining keyword lists for search engine marketing can become more of an exact science, by knowing the search 'modifiers' specific to each industry."

Posted by Bill Tancer at 06:18 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Linguistics