Finally getting around to putting up some posts about Bizcamp. Bizcamp was a brilliant experience for me, theres nothing greater than hundreds of entrepreneurs in one place participating in a free exchange of ideas and experience for the benefit of everyone.
This post is for a session I went to hosted by Caelen King from Revahealth.com . He was giving a talk on online business revenue models and believe me if anybody has researched online revenue models it’s Caelen. Caelens company Revahealth.com which he founded, announced in January 2008 that they had secured a €1.25m investment through Mianach Venture Capital and supported by Enterprise Ireland, with EI backing RevaHealth.com as a High Performance Start Up in 2008.
These models can apply to numerous types of affiliate sites so I suggest you take note because even if you can take just one small bit of information that you hadn’t originally considered from his slides or the video below, it will have a beneficial impact on how you plan your affiliate sites in the future.
Irelands online community is quite small and it’s easy to spot the people of substance, Caelan definitely gives me this impression, he’s got his business accumen covered as you’ll see from above but is also very knowledgeable when it comes to SEO which is great to see in a Boardroom exec for any online company.
Ok as you can tell this post has nothing to do with Affiliate Marketing but it might demonstrate how powerful search data can be at predicting outcomes of an event. I’m not going to get into the Pros & Cons of the Lisbon treaty all I’m interested in is can we predict the outcome of the voting based on search trends? Now this isn’t going to be a perfect test as there are a lot of variables that we don’t have access to, so this is only based on search volumes and the ratio of anti or pro searchs related to the lisbon treaty.
The Data
First off lets look at the popular search terms related to the lisbon treaty:
Keywords
Advertiser Competition
Local Search
Global
lisbon treaty no
0.26
-1
1300
lisbon treaty no vote
0.2
-1
480
lisbon treaty yes
0
-1
390
no to lisbon treaty
0
-1
390
vote no to lisbon treaty
0
-1
91
yes to lisbon treaty
0
-1
91
no to the lisbon treaty
0
-1
73
pro lisbon treaty
0
-1
58
vote yes to lisbon treaty
0
-1
46
yes to the lisbon treaty
0
-1
16
vote no to the lisbon treaty
0.13
-1
-1
This isn’t the best way to make a judgement based on data analysis as this data set has been taken from Googles keyword suggestion tool which rely’s on last months search volume but its the best I’ve got available and this is a quick post so it’s what I’ll use as a rough indicator. I’ve trimed the list down to the searches that I could associate with either a yes or a no vote. Based on what I visually could see it leans more toward a “No” due to the slightly greater ratio of negative searches compared to pro but more importantly due to volume of negative searches compared to pro.
Can Search Trends accurately predict the vote?
This is what we are here to find out but lets look at the data we have available compared to the last vote. As we all know we had a No vote in the last round so if we analyse the data in Google Insights to see if it confirms this we get the following:
From the above graph it looks like it accurately predicted the outcome. So lets examine the graph more closely based on search trends during the past month to see if we can predict the next outcome:
From the above graph it looks like we’ll have a No vote again. Like I said this isn’t an accurate test but just a bit of fun inspired by a chapter in Bill Tancer’s book, Click. Whatever way you vote is entirely your choice. Will I be right in my prediction, only time will tell!
Currently I’m reading a brilliant book and am enjoying each chapter even more as I go along. The book is called Click by Bill Tancer. If you don’t know who Bill Tancer is, he is the general manager of global research at Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence services. This book is for anybody who loves Search, Trends and the influece of psychology or economic/socio economic influences on how we search online.
I definitley put this book up there as one of my favourites of this year, what can I say? I’m a geek for data analysis. If you want to be a successful affiliate you need to understand why people search for products and when they are searching for them . This book is great for getting you in the mood for some data analysis. I’m just trying to convince the girlfriend to go on that weekend spa trip with her girlfriends so I can finish reading this book and spend the weekend checking out some real interesting searchs.
If you want to find out more about Bill, check out his website, click or he also writes a weekly column for Time magazine (Time.com) entitled “The Science of Search”.
On Monday, myself and my girlfriend Zu got to go to U2 in Croke Park, Dublin. It was an awsome gig. They played a lot of there old stuff. The only thing that pissed me off was Bono going on about Amnesty International (nothing against AI, just sick of hearing it coming from Bono). Check out some of the photos.
Today I was doing some grocery shopping and they happened to have a book stand beside the till in Eurospar of all places, probably for those impulse buys! Guess what it worked! I saw they had a copy of The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. I remember reading about The Accidental Billionaires a couple of months ago on CNET.com, it’s the story about the founding of Facebook that they are turning into a film. Being the geek that I am, I had to pick myself up a copy.
Although some of the reviews on cnet.com stated that a lot of the story is ficticious and unsubstatiated, I’m looking forward to the read.
Sometimes its good to get away from the computer for a while and chill out. I’ll let you know how the book turns out!
