According the Pew Research, search is now the second most common usage of the internet, falling behind email (60%). Other uses stated by participants were checking news (39%), checking weather (30%), researching hobbies (29%), surfing for fun (28%) and using social networking sites (29%). Participants were asked if they engaged in these activities yesterday, which is generally accepted as a true representation of a normal day. The survey, conducted by Pew Research’s Internet & American Life Project, took place in April and May 2008; over 2,000 individuals 18 and over were interviewed.

The research yielded other interesting results regarding demographics. Individuals that use search engines on a normal day typically have a higher education (strongly agree!) and higher income (mmm, that’s debatable). Additionally, younger internet users are more apt to search (makes sense, they’ve had more experience and been exposed to the internet for most of their lives) as well as males (I could launch into a long rant on why I believe this is, but I will spare you the feminist frenzy).

Pew Research cites a few reasons for the increase in search engine use: (1) site-specific search engines on nearly every website; (2) ubiquity of broadband internet connections at home; and (3) fine tuning of search engines and consumer confidence in results they deliver.

I am somewhat surprised at these findings; based on personal experience and the demand for our services, I would think the figures would be much higher. I realize that we may be the choir, but there’s rarely an hour, let alone day, that goes by that I don’t use a search engine, whether I am at work or at home. The verb google peppers my daily speech nearly as much as eat, drink and sleep. But it’s not just me and my search marketer cronies—nearly everyone I know (my mother excluded, but my 75 year-old grandfather included) uses search engines almost maniacally. And thanks to the iPhone, if I need to know the actor who played Harold in Harold and Maude or the meaning of the world gerund while at a restaurant, all I have to do is type in a few words and, lo and behold, I am able to smugly say “I told you so” (or humbly hang my head after being proven wrong, which is more likely the case). To me, learning that just half of internet users search comes as a bit of a shock.

While I sometimes think I may need to curb my searching habits—I fear a dependency that is bordering on addiction—I ultimately believe search is a blessing. The improvements made by both search engines and search engine marketing professionals have made it more relevant and easier to find information, products and services. All of which I am extremely thankful for and, I am inclined to wager, so are more than 49% of internet users. Although, one quick search delivering the Pew Research findings and my head would droop in humility.

To honor the beautiful day and ring in the much-anticipated weekend, we decided a company happy hour was in order. In LoDo, the area of Downtown Denver where our office is located, one can find a bar on every corner and usually halfway between. Finding a location was not hard, but choosing one that could accommodate a large group of rowdy internet marketers, and do so cheaply, was a challenge.

I’ll give you one guess as to what we did to find this ideal bar—grabbed a traditional phonebook and started leafing, of course! Just kidding, that’s ridiculous. No one uses phonebooks anymore, especially not online geeks like us. No, we did a Google Maps search. Although we know geo-modifying a phrase helps to deliver more relevant results, our zealous desire for refreshing beverages got the best of us and we simply searched for “happy hour.”

Among the handful of pinpoints dotting the U.S. map, two pierced Denver directly. A brief scan of the listed businesses and we found a local bar prominently listed in the sixth spot—Illegal Pete’s. We’re no stranger to Illegal Pete’s, their delicious burritos, bottomless chips and salsa, irresistible queso, affordable drinks and laidback atmosphere make it an establishment frequented by Location3 at all hours, whether for a rejuvenating breakfast burrito or late-night libation.

Pleased with the results from Google Maps, off to Pete’s we went. Pleased, but I must confess, not surprised. We’re actually familiar with Pete’s for another reason—Illegal Pete’s is a client of Local Search Traffic, using our local map listing service.

We enhanced local map listings for Pete’s to highlight their food, drink specials and rave customer reviews. And to reach all those stressed out politicians looking for a casual place to relax and get a sense of the local scene, we optimized their listings for the rapidly approaching DNC.

The downtown location of Pete’s comes up in the number one local position for “happy hour denver.” Awesome results for searchers that know to geo-modify. But even if they don’t, they can still learn of the great drink specials and toothsome fare at Illegal Pete’s thanks to our local map listing team.

Moral of this story: You don’t have to be a huge corporation with unlimited funds to get found online. In fact, local map listings are perfect for local restaurants, stores, etc.—the organic nature of local listings complements the spirit and atmosphere of independent businesses everywhere. If you are regionally-operated company with a community presence, local map listings are a great way to improve online visibility and increase business. Moral number two of the story: If you’re looking for some cheap drinks and a delicious burrito in Denver or Boulder, just do a quick local search to find your nearest Illegal Pete’s.

Now picture yourself as a very hungry person in or around downtown Denver, Colorado.  Your craving BBQ, and you remember walking past a place called Thunderbirds that claims to have great BBQ.  You go online and do a quick Google search to find out what’s on the menu and get the address before you go off to spend your hard-earned money at said restaurant. 

Upon seeing the results you check out the Thunderbirds site and maybe find the menu, then you hit the back button and see a review for the restaurant in question directly below.  Here you find not-so glowing remarks about the BBQ you were about to spend your money on.  You notice one of the commenters say that Yazoo’s has good BBQ and you decide this is your better option for dinner tonight.

Good for Yazoo’s, Bad of Thunderbirds.

No matter how large or small your business may be, it is always important to proactively protect your brand online.  If your business is having a similar problem with Online Brand Protection, I suggest you look into Online Reputation Management as soon as possible.  There are ways to solve these problems such as appeasing the reviewer or potentially even burying the negative results on the SERPs (to name a few).  Don’t let a good brand go bad!  Best of luck in your Online Brand Protecting endevors!

The SES Awards are being presented for the first time this year in conjunction with SES’s 10-year anniversary. SES shows are hosted by Search Engine Watch, a leading resource for search engine marketing information, pay per click management tips and other search engine news. Of the 43 finalists, 16 winners will be announced throughout the SES San Jose Conference and Expo held August 18-21.

We wish the other finalists the best of luck. Check back in a few weeks to see if we win!

From my own experience, we entertained a proposition from ValueClick about two years ago to deliver leads at a flat CPA.  Our only stipulation was that none of the traffic could be incentivized.  For those not familiar, incentivized traffic is something like “fill out this form, get a free iPod!”.  The problem is obvious, the user is not interested at all in your offering of life insurance, secondary education or nearly anything else, but rather doing what it takes to get a free iPod.

So after making it very clear that we weren’t interested in incentivized traffic, we were ready to go, and asked for a screenshot of how our ad process would be delivered to the end user.  The first page of their example was “Get a free surf and turf dinner, click here to start!”, which then lead to our page.

Needless to say, we cancelled the deal before it started.

What this tells me is that the tried and true lessons of business are the same anywhere you go.  If you aren’t straight with people, it will catch up to you in the end.  If you run an honorable and fair business, you will keep your nose clean and have fewer headaches in the long run.

At a quick glance of the “Table Of Contents,” there is an enhanced “Digital Media Usage” section, but most of the added data is related to mobile usage and some of last year’s info is left off entirely.

The “Internet Activities” section is significantly more detailed this year, including 31 categories of internet activities, compared to 2007’s 14 activities. In 2008, the HFP breaks out purchases for personal versus business use and at least ten different vertical-specific activities compared to last year. This is significantly more useful data relative to whether Hispanics online generally spent more time emailing or sending photos.

The Online Demographics data from last year was replaced with a chart on Hispanic mobile user demographics. Couldn’t AdAge have kept the Online Demographics chart and added the Mobile User chart? I was disappointed not to see an update to the Online Demo chart from 2007.

The Top 10 Web Properties Among Hispanic Users (by language) charts remained this year and, as expected, showed the increase in reach and numbers of unique visitors in both Spanish and English pretty much across the board.

The statistics in “Keeping Up With Technology” (this one is even detailed by various language preferences and age) and “Top Online Member Communities” are both nice additions.

So, a mixed review after much anticipation. The Hispanic Fact Pack contains little data regarding the Hispanic online market, replaced this year by mobile market data instead. If I didn’t know first-hand the substantial size of the Hispanic online population, I might think mobile was more popular. For a layperson, the Fact Pack could be somewhat misleading; for someone in the industry, it lacks the substance sometimes needed to convince clients. Exact numbers or not, I know that the Hispanic online market is huge and growing, and I’ll just have to bank on clients trusting my direct experience over detached data.

Over the past several months, the “R” word (recession) has been tossed around quite a bit. While many economists will argue that we are not truly in a recession, Joe Consumer would tend to disagree. The consumer is paying, on average, over $4 a gallon for gas. It currently costs more to buy groceries for dinner than it did as little as three months ago. This, my friends, spells R-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N to the average person, no matter what economists are telling them. So, the consumer is obviously feeling the recessionary crunch. What about Corporate America….

It’s fairly obvious if you read any sort of financial news or follow the stock market on a regular basis that certain business sectors are also feeling the effects of a down economy. You know things aren’t all hunky-dory when analysts get excited about a bank announcing a multi-billion dollar quarterly loss just because it’s not as big a loss as was expected. So while some business sectors are struggling, there are bound to be some that aren’t affected by this down economy.

All of this is what got me thinking about the “recessionary resistance” of the search engine marketing industry. Our company has seen revenue and profits increase during this down economy. I don’t have the data to back it up, but I’m confident that other companies in the same industry are seeing similar results. The question is: Why? The answer is fairly simple; companies are, and should be, allocating a larger portion of their marketing mix to search engine marketing.

The next question again is: Why? The answer to this question is fairly simple as well: they can more easily track ROI than with other marketing avenues. Where you spend your pay per click management dollars is 100% transparent. You can track how many ad dollars you spent on each keyword, on each engine, on each day and within each hour. You can easily control how many ad dollars are spent on a daily basis. The results of a search engine marketing campaign are extremely verifiable. You can easily identify which engine, which ads and which keywords are driving the conversions for your company. I can’t think of another marketing vehicle that is as efficient, accountable or cost controllable as search engine marketing.

So the real question becomes: Is search engine marketing recession proof? No, but I do think it is much more recession resistant than other industries. As companies’ marketing budgets start to shrink due to a down economy, I see them diverting more of that remaining budget to their search engine marketing efforts. They are able to better control how their budget is spent and see more verifiable results. Not to mention that as times get tougher for the consumer, they will be more apt to turn to the internet in search of better deals.

Bottom line, if you see your marketing budget shrink during this “recessionary period” and you are starting to worry, I would suggest a larger investment in your search engine marketing. You won’t be able to argue with the results.

1.  Here “coches” replaces “automóviles” in the dynamic keyword insertion

Both words mean cars, but the idea is to see exactly what you’re looking for in the title line.  In Spanish, the words have cultural significance as well since ‘coche’ is used in Spain, ‘carro’ is common in Mexico and ‘automóvil’ is more common in Argentina.  Getting that small detail right could help the ad better resonate with each Hispanic searcher.

2. Here “Financiación” replaces “financiar” in the keyword insert title:

A. Again, that’s not my keyword.
B. In the first example I imagined maybe Google was using a synonym to fit a similar phrase within the character limit. But here I think it’s just pulling another keyword. This one looks an awful lot like a misspelling I included in my keyword list - financiacion should have an accent.

I showed my colleague, the PPC Handyman, and he had never seen this before either. So I asked Google, “¿qué pasó with my dynamic keyword insertion title?” Not surprisingly, my Google rep was “not sure” what was going on. He’s looking into it. I may have discovered yet another new piece to the Hispanic search marketing puzzle. I will keep you posted.