AFS-Inc (Advanced Formula Search) for PPC/Paid search and SEO/Natural search agency

Research

AFS’s clients say that this is one of the areas we excel in and so we offer it as a separate stand-alone service. To date we have undertaken more than 300 standalone research projects. These range from research into the nature of the market, trends and directions of a market or a segment of a market. Everything and anything connected with any aspect of you business whether on the internet or not.

Regardless of what your requirements are, paid search, natural search/SEO, social media... we will research your organization and gain an understanding about your business.

We are proud of our work and ability, and fully believe achieving the best results starts with a great foundation, and that foundation is your setup.

To start the process, we conduct several in-depth interviews with each new client to develop a personal and meaningful relationship from which to build. This is an interactive process as we build up our knowledge base. All your information will be kept confidential.

We start by learning about your business, goals, past experience, customers, competition, competitive advantages, and really anything at all related that can help us maximize your advertising investment.

This is the type of research we do which is careful and painstaking. No other agency come close.

Your business. We try and understand your business thoroughly. What are you trying to do? What do you want? In a retail context, what products or services are you trying to sell? What are their characteristics of these products? What is the size of the market (all channels including non-internet)? What is your current market share or planned market share. Who are your competitors in the total business space (internet and non-internet)? Who might enter this sector or segment? What are the barriers to entry? What are the economic and financial factors and structure of this market segment or sector? And so on…
Then there is the net. Narrowing down to just the internet, we examine everything above once again…. Te size of the market, your market share (and/or planned market share), the actual nature of current and planned competition. Growth and the tends in this sector of the internet market place.
Then we look at the specifics of what you have done are doing, what your current or possible internet competitors are doing. Natural and paid search and all other web based channels. We look at your website. Appraise strengths and weaknesses.
There may be specific areas you require research – from competitive intelligence, to the nature of an netie market, to specific segments of a market, to future trends and directions and so on.
Search research. We can spend time researching all aspects of search arena and search term areas. This has several aspects:

Data mining: Data mining is the process of extracting patterns and search terms that is relevant for people who may be looking to come to your site – potential, existing and new conquest customers/leads. We use a variety of different tools (none are foolproof) and common sense. But we also verify our findings as discussed below.

Data mining for search terms can be used to uncover patterns in search terms but it is an art (played interactively) to develop a full set of search terms that will actually trigger the display of a paid search advert. The mining process will be ineffective if the samples are not a good representation of the larger body of data. Data mining cannot discover patterns that may be present in the larger body of data if those patterns are not present in the sample being "mined". Inability to find patterns may become a cause for some disputes between customers and service providers. Therefore data mining is not foolproof but may be useful if sufficiently representative data samples are collected. AFS, so far, has never let a customer down. In fact we tend to find more relevant keywords and search terms than anyone else – by far.

The related terms data dredging, data fishing and data snooping refer to the use of data mining techniques to sample sizes that are (or may be) too small for statistical inferences to be made about the validity of any patterns discovered. Data dredging may, however, be used to develop new hypotheses, which must then be validated with sufficiently large sample sets. In certain circumstances this can become relevant.

Volume, cost-per-click/impression/action versus position within Google and likelihood of conversion.

AFS’s unique ‘wind-tunnel’ tests. Scale models and high search volume is exactly what this is about and provides important and valuable information. This is typified by a small number of keywords with high search volumes.

AFS’s unique ‘toe-in-the-water’ tests or rather suck it and see. Conducts small scale experiments alive in the search engines to verify volumes, cost-per-click at different quality levels, position and so on. This is typified by a larger et of keywords and search terms and a smaller search volumes (by restricting geographical area of time displayed).