AOL Keyword Analyser

This tool was created using the entire dataset for the recently released AOL search data. It opens up into the public arena whole new levels of analysis which have never been possible before. This tool aims to expose new insights into search behaviour.

Individual Keyword Reports

The keyword report shows what results people clicked on for a given term. This report is useful in working out which sites are attracting users to click the best. Very often lower ranking sites get more clicks than ones above them. Some use title and description more effectively than others. In other cases, brand recognition would drive users to prefer one SERP over another.

Concepts from the keyword report:

Avg Rank: The rank that this particular site achieved, averaged over the time period. The AOL data covers a few months, more than enough time for Google's algorithm to change (Google powers AOL Search). So here we provide the rank, averaged out across all clicks. If someone clicks on a result when it's ranked 4th and another clicks on it when it's ranked 5th, the average result will be reported as 4.5. Of course, when the number of referrals is very low, like 1, the site probably only momentarily appeared in the results.
Site: The site which got the traffic. The AOL data provides only the domain, not any directory or file underneath. Very often the user would have landed deeper in the site than http://www.site.com/
Referrals: The number users who clicked on this result. If a user clicked on the same result repeatedly, they are only counted once. But if they click on 3 different results, all three are counted.
% Of all referrals: The proportion of clicks/non-clicks that this result got.

Top Keyword Report

This lists the most commonly searched-for terms on AOL. This report is useful for working out AOL Search users are interested in, and whether there were any sites listed which satisfied that interest (or at least might satisfy it, because the user clicked on a result). Referral Rate refers to proportion of the time that users searched for a term and then clicked on a result. This tends to be high when the search engine has the results they seek - when it's specific and when the user knows what they're looking for. Accidental searches like "http" or "google.com" have very low referral rates.

Individual Site Reports

This shows what keywords gave the given site traffic from AOL. It lists incoming keywords according to the number of users who searched for it. It's like having access to a site's internal search engine report, except only for AOL Search of course.

Top Site Report

This lists which sites have received the most traffic from AOLSearch. This report is useful in working out which sites are effective in garnering search engine traffic and whether users are searching for just their name, or far more diverse content held within. Concepts:

Search referrals: The number of keywords each user has come to the site on, after searching for something in AOL Search. If the user searches for the same keyword twice and goes to the site twice, it's counted once. But every keyword that user finds the site with is counted.
Incoming keywords: The number of unique keywords that all users have searched for to find the site.
Diversity ratio:Calculated by dividing incoming keywords by search referrals. This is an indication of how diverse the search terms are for that particular site. Sites with a lot of content (like GeoCities and BizRate) can satisfy a wide variety of terms, if search engines give their broad content a lot of visibility. If a site has a lot of content but still has a low diversity ratio, that's a sign that their content isn't being indexed or given good exposure in Google's search (Google powers AOL Search). Sites with strong brands will have more people searching for them by name. And perhaps if searching isn't the best way of reaching the content they won't use it (for example social networking sites like MySpace.

Back to the tool