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Connecting the Dots

SMD-Figure-B

On-site search engines that index every word and phrase have access to a ton of data on consumers who visit Web sites they support. Some also index Twitter streams, Facebook pages and YouTube videos and Delicious bookmarks.

Lijit offers on-site search for about 12,400 publishers driving 1 billion monthly page views and 56 million monthly unique. Earlier this year, the engine began using the data to align ad campaigns for demand side platforms (DSPs), agencies, and other companies.

The data collected provides insight into when, where and how consumers make buying decisions. Some insights come from responses and comments or backlinks, those little hot links that connect one article on a blogger's or publisher's Web site to another article on another blogger's or publisher's Web site.

Lijit uses those links to build audience segments and draws invisible dotted lines from one Web site to another, giving that information to publishers to serve up ads or create additional content. The idea came after running descriptions of people and audience segment data through its platform looking for sites that align with specific demographics.

Having the ability to sift through data to find all the sites with a high frequency of specific terms gives Lijit access to insight on consumer behavior and social influence. Some of the available social metrics include the number of Twitter followers and views to YouTube videos posted, according to Walter Knapp, COO of Lijit Networks.

Aside from analyzing search, the test took into consideration the social influence in Twitter, Facebook, comments in blog and backlinks. Yes, the importance of spending the time to build links. The research reveals search traffic from Google, Bing or other engines only contributed 23%. Social networks only contributed about 1% to 1.5%.

So, if the traffic didn't come from search engines, directly typing in the URL, or through social sites, where did it come from? More than 60% of the traffic came from comments and backlink, one site pointing to another, which confirms the importance of link building and the power of SEO. Wouldn't you say?

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