Thursday, April 20, 2006

Nielsen NetRatings Don't Know Search

ClickZ just posted an article about the latest Nielsen/NetRatings numbers for ad placements and top sponsored links.

The only problem is it looks like no-one look at the results before launching them to the world. They are so obviously wrong that it shows that Nielsen was not using anyone with any type of search knowledge.

They list the top three search terms by impression for the top 25 traffic getters - well those are the parameters outlined how accurate who is on the list has to be considered in light of the rest of the posted results.

Number one obviously EBay - biggest PPC advertiser out there. But does anyone really think the top three terms for them are Ebay, craigslist and gmail? I swung on this thinking that they do advertise for every word - so maybe those are the top searches for the period.... but then as you go deeper - Yahoo!'s top 3 sponsored search terms: 1)ups 2)ride,on,toys 3)zip+codes.

It gets better and more embarassing:
ShopZilla's number three is pictures+of+women+with+bruised+faces
Microsoft's number two is Google Earth - of all the things MSN advertises for in PPC
EWoss.com last on the list but is another company driving sponsored traffic for that pays for the term "pictures of women with bruised faces" - and if it was just pictures of women on broad match the specific would not have shown up. Or were there just that many people searching for that term to find the Duke woman?
But the capper is EWoss's third top search term - revolver grips.

ClickZ should have examined the report before running it - just to help an old pal out. Nielsen needs a search person to doublecheck that the data was collected properly to avoid this type of result.

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