Yesterday, I came across this interesting study about whether or not search advertising adds or detracts clicks from organic listings. The study found that 89% of the traffic generated from search clicks weren’t replaced by organic clicks if they were paused. It was developed by Googlers so the study probably wouldn’t have been released if the results didn’t aid their bread-and-butter business model. I do like the fact that they used statistical modeling (very reminiscent of b-school) to derive their results. They do note limitations to their study including seasonality, differences in verticals, and lack of a true test group (they were looking at aggregate data from their advertisers). While I think that the focus of the study on clicks is interesting, I think a study devoted to conversions would be even more powerful and enlightening. It’s great that overall traffic rises and so should conversions but how much incremental conversions come from paid advertising would be a better question to answer. Pretty interesting stuff nonetheless.

I’ve been messing around with Google Realtime today and it’s definitely pretty interesting. It’s basically a constantly updated list of news updates from sources like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. In the screenshot above, I’m checking out the activity for my brother’s company, 3Par, which is right now in the middle of a bidding war between HP and Dell. I definitely like the timeline above the results as it shows the concentration of when there’s the most amount of chatter and buzz.I think each spike in the timeline is when a new offer to buy the company was made.

As Google starts to refine its listing and figure out what users want to see, you can bet that this feature is going to be more prominently featured within the main search engine. Three things come to mind to what would make this page more interesting:

1. Updates/tweets/feeds that have been shared or retweeted the most.

2. A listing of the top links that were being shared. Apparently that’s exactly what the top links are in the right hand nav. Cool!

3. Being able to filter the graph by Tweets, Facebook Posts, etc.