Advertising Demand Vs Query Demand
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As you can see from the log scaled plot to the left, advertising demand on search terms grows exponentially with popularity. You can see for yourself in “Figure 1″ of this paper from Yahoo! Research Labs.
Using Wordze [aff] as a keyword data source, I plotted 800,000+ search keywords from 760 seed keywords and their corresponding demand to roughly determine if this advertiser demand is warranted. The log scaled plot is below with the horizontal axis as seed keywords ranked by descending popularity, and the vertical scale as the amount of queries that include the seed keyword.
[The reason for the large drop off in the plot is most likely because of my limited data.]
Searchers do appear to follow an exponential model where popular queries are exponentially more frequent than unpopular queries.
This so far does not say anything about the correlation between queries and advertiser demand. Specifically I would be interested to determine if the market efficiently demands popular keywords proportional to query frequency. As a guess, any deviation from a strong correlation would suggest either:
- A relatively good value keyword.
- A poor converting keyword where the market has already factored human behavior in to the model.
I suspect some markets will be more mature and so may already factor human behavior in to the model. This maturity would probably be proportional to the size of the market.
Speculation is fun but almost useless. I have some data laying around where I can test some of these ideas in the future. Stay tuned :)
