Interactive marketers never like coming across studies that correlate feeble e-business efforts with their country of origin, so you can imagine how I felt when I received an e-mail from research company “eMarketer”:http://www.emarketer.com titled *”Is Canada Losing Its Edge?”*
In short, “the summary”:http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1003559 from the company’s “new report”:http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?ebus_canada_sep05 (which includes additional third-party research) suggests that Canadian small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are “falling behind international competitors when it comes to the adoption of e-business solutions.” Given that “Statistics Canada”:http://www.statscan.ca says 99 percent of all Canadian businesses fall into the category of SMBs, this is bad news for the Great White North.
Author: One Degree
If you’re a fan of AdWords, Google’s popular paid search system, you’d probably love to get a behind-the-scenes view of how your competitors (or your clients’ competitors) are using it. Before you hire a rogue operative to infiltrate the competition’s headquarters, spend some time surfing GoogSpy. But be warned, it can be addictive!
GoogSpy is one of my favourite (albeit arcane) research tools, and I still can’t believe it is both legal and free. GoogSpy has analyzed (and archived) millions of Google search results and allows you to do research into how other companies are using the AdWords system.
If you take a close look at the screen capture above you’ll notice that beneath these results for Statistics Canada there are four links to “English – Français – Important Notices – Avis importants”.
It seems that Google is now offering direct links to key areas of some sites from within the search results.
Very cool.