5.12. THE SCIENCE OF ADVERTISING

Google continues to develop features that help advertisers analyze and understand their target audiences, such as Google Insight for Search. This gimmick allows anyone to search on a word, product, service, and so forth, modify the search by geography, seasons, and other features, and then study the search patterns and volume for that subject. If the advertiser searches the word chili, for instance, and asks for results for the state of New Mexico, a graph appears showing that searches for the word chili peak every year in the autumn, exactly during the new chili harvest. She also can see that searches are the highest in the city of Albuquerque, although they also high in Texas. A chili merchant may have suspected that result, but now she knows for sure. It's a somewhat primitive tool in that the results aren't very detailed, but nevertheless it can be helpful to marketers.

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