Darby Sieben -

The following data points relate only to my personal blog, Darby Sieben, but I find it interesting that Google Chrome is increasing in terms of usage but more fascinating is the growth related to Google Adsense Revenues from Chrome users. This comparison is from Q2 to Q3 of 2009.

Here are the stats from Q2 to Q3:

Some observations:

Internet Explorer continues to lose market share. Firefox also lost market share while Safari and Chrome have increased. From a revenue perspective, IE users are over producing in revenue compared to usage, while we see a massive drop from Firefox users and a drop from Safari users. Chrome users are over producing in revenue relative to market share.

So what does this mean?

Perhaps FF users are getting more savvy in ad blocking. If so, should websites tailor their sites specifically to Firefox users who use ad blocking? Based on this small subset of data, are Chrome users more engaged with Adwords and is this the main driver behind Google investing in the browser wars? If you are a website owner, should you encourage people to stay with IE – they seem to be the ones generating the revenues?

Of course this sample size is way to small to make any broad conclusions, but I found them interesting and wanted to share. Also, if you monetize your site using Google Adsense, what do your stats tell you? Are you seeing a similar trend or something completely different?

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As I was planning my trip in the valley this week, I was printing of Google Maps to take me from my hotel to meetings and to the SES San Jose. I am staying at the Sheraton San Jose in Milpitas. The exact address is 1801 Barber Lane, Milpitas, CA, 95035, USA. When I was printing my iternary on Friday I did not really notice the placement of the icon on the map for the location of the hotel. Driving from the SFO on Sunday night to the hotel, I noticed the mistake.

Here is the screenshot from Google Maps for this exact query “1801 Barber Ln, Milpitas, CA, 95035, USA” notice where Google plots the location, the yellow circle is where the location actually is. Click the images below to load the maps.

I tried the same map search using Bing Maps, they hit the location:

I am sure that Google will be correcting the geo-code for this location once they see the image listed above. All in all, the inconvenience was not that bad, took me a few extra minutes, a few scratches on the forehead and my iPhone to get to the right location on Sunday night.

Morale of the story : double-check your printed maps before leaving and verify using Satellite view (I would have noticed the mistake if I looked at Satellite view) – sometimes they may be a little off.

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Twitter has been all the rage lately getting lots of coverage by bloggers and traditional media outlets. I too have been active on Twitter @darbysieben as well as contributing to @yellowpages_ca.

What I wanted to know is whether tweeting can actually drive Google search volume in the same way that traditional media campaigns can increase search volumes. My experiment is very limited in time and scope, so not scientific at all, however, I wanted to share my early results.

What I did was set-up a Google Adwords campaign specifically for the exact match keyword “darby sieben”. On a side note, I encourage everybody I meet to do the following; a) register your own name as a domain name, and b) set-up a google alert on your name. I believe that personal reputation management will be a big trend in the next few years.

Second, I added no new blog posts for the first 20-days of May, my online communication was limited to Twitter only. I have actually run my Google Adwords campaign on my name for some time and see a correlation between blog posts and the increase in ad impressions. So for my experiment, I did not want to introduce the variable of a blog post into the equation.

Third, I tracked my posts on Twitter and the ad impression count through Google Adwords. Here is the chart for the first 20-days of May.

It would appear that there is a correlation between Tweeting and increasing search volumes. That said, this experiment is too limited to make any concrete conclusions, but directionally would seem to make sense if I view Twitter in the same way as traditional media. What I believe this does demonstrate is that viewing search volumes alone is not sufficient in and of itself for measuring ROI, rather a more holistic view of what causes search volumes may be more of an indicator of what actually drives usage.

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