Yahoo recently launched a new service called Yahoo Clues. Yahoo Clues is a free service that gives you keyword trends and demographics data on specific search queries. The service is still in beta but shows a ton of promise and features that others..Cough..Google..Cough..doesn’t have. Let’s dive into some examples of the service.
Growing up with three younger sisters I know that “American Girl Dolls” are big deal around the holidays. You can see the trend line spike right around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While this information is helpful it’s not nearly as powerful as the demographics data they give.
Demographics
You can break down searches by Age, Gender or Both. You can see here that a whopping 42% of the traffic is from the 35 to 44 year old range. Once you click on a specific data set Yahoo Clues will tell you some additional searches they made. This is very interesting because you can see that right after they search for the company they start to search for coupon codes and free shipping. If you were selling these you would want to make sure you coupon codes were getting spidered by Google and if you offer free shipping put that in your title tag.
Income
You can also click on income groups and see what additional searches they made. Notice the higher income group is no longer searching for coupons but they are still looking for free shipping.
Location
You also have the ability to search popular search locations. Yahoo mentioned that they take into account population size when weighting the results so that the same large states don’t show up first each time.
Clicking on a particular state will give you the breakdown of search traffic by city.
Search Flow
Search Flow is another really useful tool that allows you to see the search terms people are typing before and after their query. This is very valuable information that will allow you to search where your customer has been and where they going.
Yahoo Clues gives you information that will help develop a more complete picture of your customers. By finding out how specific age, gender and income groups search you can become a better marketer to each group. Yahoo Clues is still in beta but it holds tremendous promise.
Hmm is Yahoo testing a new layout? A colleague happened upon this page when he went to Yahoo. I’ve cleared my cache, but I’m still getting the old one. He lives in Chicago, so a test perhaps?
I’ve been having friends, fam and colleagues try and load it, but they keep getting the same old same old, so they’re probably still testing it.
I like the new layout – its nice, clean and about freaking time they updated?
Also here is a shot of the applications on the left. Yahoo reworked this area as you can see.
