د. عبد المنعم أبو الفتوح فى مقدمة الجولة الأولى للأنتخبات الرئاسية المصرية يليه الفريق أحمد شفيق لينزلا معاً فى الأعادة حيث لم يحصل أى منهما على أكثر من 50% من أصوات الناخبين فى مصر. وبفارق كبير عن شفيق يأتى د. محمد مرسى يليه كل من عمرو موسى و حمدين صباحى.

المركز الأول:

د. عبد المنعم أبو الفتوح

المركز الثانى:

الفريق أحمد شفيق

المركز الثالث

د. محمد مرسى

المركز الرابع:

عمرو موسى

المركز الخامس:

حامدين صباحى

كل ذلك ليس من التكهنات ولا مبنى على نتائج أستطلاعات الرأى ولكن هذا ما توضحه أدوات جوجل للبحث Google Trends و Google Insights for Search الذى يعكس أهتمام الناس بالبحث و متابعة أخبار المرشحين الرئاسيين.

Google Insights ُfor Search: Egyptian Presidential Elections

منذ منتصف أبريل 2012 و حتى اليوم (منتصف مايو) نستطيع أن نرى حفاظ أبو الفتوح على التقدم معظم الأوقات ألا أن شفيق يداعبه فى بعض الأوقات و خاصة بعد قرار القضاء بالسماح له بالمشاركة فى الأنتخابات. كانت المفاجأة هى تقدم شفيق على مرسى فى معظم الأوقات بالرغم من المسيرات و الأغاتى الخاصة بمرسى ولكن يبدوا أن حزب الكنبة لا يستهان بقوته.

يبدو لوهلة بأن الجميع كان قد نسى تماماً وجود عمرو موسى و حمدين صباحى حتى بداية شهر مايو والذى شهد ثباتاً لأبو الفتوح مع أرتفاع سريع لصباحى و أرتفاع طفيف لموسى.

ثم كانت المناظرة التلفزيونية بين أبو الفتوح و موسى و التى قلبت الموازين حيث زاد الأهتمام بكلاهما للقفز فى المقدمة و لكنه كان أيضاً سبباً فى زيادة أسهم صباحى بشكل ملحوظ معهما لمن لم يقتنع بأى من المرشحين بعد المناظرة.

Google Trends: Egypt Presidential Elections

لم تختلف النوقعات كثيراً فى Google Trends… حيث أصبح بعد المناظرة أبو الفتوح و موسى فى القمة يلاحقهما شفيق وثم الحصان الأسود صباحى يحاول صنع مفاجأة و بقى مرسى فى القاع.

Google Trends: Presidential Elections Demographics

المثير للأهتمام هى تأييد المرشحين حسب التوزيع الجغرافى، حيث يفضل المصريين فى السعودية  المرشح الأسلامى بين أبو الفتوح و مرسى قبل شفيق و موسى بينما لا يوجد أهتمام بصباحى.

أما فى الكويت فيفضل المرشحين كل من أبو الفتوح و شفيق.

أما فى مصر فالترتيب متسق مع النتائج المتوقعة ألا أنه فى بعض مدن الوجه البحرى و الدلتا فيزيد الأهتمام بصباحى على حساب موسى و لكن يبقى أبو الفتوح فى المقدمة ويليه شفيق.

ماذا تعتقد؟ هل تعتقد أن تلك الأحصائيات و التحاليل هى مؤشر يمثل الواقع أم أن هناك مفاجأت لا يعلمها أحد؟

Arabic Search on the rise

Arabic continues to grow to reach 59% of the total searches done in 2011, not as fast as you might expect it to happen, that’s only a 4% increase over 2010. See 2010 Zeitgeist>>

Arabic is dominating the search phrases with 59%

One interesting fact is that many people were looking for Tahrir Square after the #Jan25 revolution! Although sounds to me like a Google search rather than a Yellow Pages search, you never know!

Searches for Tahrir Square on Egypt Yellow Pages after #Jan25 revolution

Top Categories For 2011

The following are the most searched keywords for 2011

1. Restaurant
2. Pharmacy
3. Hotel
4. Advertising
5. Bank
6. Nursery
7. Furniture
8. School
9. Hospital
10. Real Estate

You can see that advertising is going up the list while real estate is at the bottom of the top 10 list. This shows how advertising is so important to businesses in Egypt at these tough days. Real estate industry is not living its best days though.

Top Search Keywords on EYP for 2011

Most popular sectors and industries in Egypt in 2011

Banks

1. National Bank Of Egypt
2. HSBC
3. NSGB
4. CIB

Top Egyptian banks for 2011

Restaurants and Cafes:

1. Spectra
2. burger king
3. KFC
4. cilantro
5. Cook door
6. hardees
7. pizza hut
8. la poire
9. Mo’men
10. Roastery
11. gad

Top restaurants in Egypt for 2011

Telco:

1. Vodafone
2. Mobinil
3. Etisalat

Most searched mobile network operators in Egypt for 2011

Brands and stores:

1. Samsung
2. Xerox
3. Sony
4. Appliance
5. Raya
6. Toshiba
7. Egypt Air
8. Mobile Shop
9. Panasonic
10. Jotun
11. Habitat
12. Nokia

Top searched brands in Egypt for 2011

Goodbye 2011, enough is enough… Hopefully 2012 will be a glorious year and won’t see the end of the world according to Mayan calendar time prophecy

Karen Plumb, Commercial Director Business Listings EMEA, TripAdvisor

Travel review web sites and hotel reviews on online travel agencies are among the most influential forces most frequently cited by travelers when shopping. User generated content is so important and it is here to stay, it helps people to make their decisions,  TripAdvisor definitely takes the lead with more than 50 million unique monthly visitors, 20 million members, and over 50 million reviews and opinions. The sites operate in 30 countries worldwide containing 1 million+ hotel, restaurants and attractions in 90,000 destinations.

In this interview Karen Plumb shares with us in the power of TripAdvisor and the value it can bring  to businesses. Also Karen gives us insights about the new partnerships TripAdvisor is having with local search sites and directories to empower businesses.

Mohamed: Tell us a little bit about yourself?

Karen: I have a background in hotel marketing, having worked at both InterContinental and Thistle Hotels, where I held a variety of international eMarketing and International Marketing roles. I have also worked before in an online company at CheapFlights running the consumer email product and the hotel website, CheapAccommodation.com. I love working in the online travel environment and TripAdvisor is a great place to be.

Mohamed: How do you encourage users to post reviews? Do you run any sort of incentive programs that strengthen customer loyalty?

Karen: TripAdvisor has added badging to the site to recognize and acknowledge the contributions of our active community of reviewers. These badges serve as just one more way users can determine which reviews are most relevant to their trip-planning experience.

The first badge is given after three reviews and users that have contributed over 50 reviews receive a gold badge and a Top Contributor designation.

In our management centre, we provide owners with tools and widgets to encourage guests to write reviews following their stay.

Mohamed: Independent travelers value TripAdvisor as a research tool to find the best hotels that fit their needs and meet their budgets. Are you thinking about building a tool that would allow users to compare hotels to help them in the decision making?

 Karen: TripAdvisor is constantly searching for new ways to improve its websites to continue to help travellers plan and have the perfect trip. Users can search for hotels by relevant categories and read reviews by like-minded travellers to find the right hotel to suit their needs. Each review is also broken down into detail with travellers rating hospitality businesses on a number of factors, allowing users to make an informed decision during their holiday planning.

Mohamed: What’s your value proposition for the hotel owners? What types of hotels would benefit most by having a commercial business listing on TripAdvisor?

Karen: Whilst being listed on TripAdvisor is free for properties we offer the  Business Listings product to enables accommodation providers to add direct contact details on all TripAdvisor website domains as well as TripAdvisor’s mobile website to convert our highly qualified traffic into direct bookings.  . Accommodation providers can add their phone number, email address and website homepage to their listing as well as posting a special offer to gain additional attention

The benefit of a TripAdvisor Business Listing is that it is on a page where viewers come to look at guest ratings, reviews and photos of a specific property. According to a Forrester survey in 2007, 87% of consumers looking for hotels are influenced by reviews and want to read them before they book. If a hotel has put in the hard work to earn good reviews from their guests, a Business Listing will allow the hotel to capitalise on them.

Mohamed: Recently you have expanded in many new countries in the Middle East and have announced partnership with Yellow Medya in Turkey. How is this going to help both the hotel owners and the end users in Turkey?

Karen: Yellow Medya will be integrating TripAdvisor onto all of its platforms, including online and mobile. By doing so, users of Yellow Medya platforms will have access to TripAdvisor reviews and opinions for accommodations, restaurants, attractions and all hospitality businesses currently listed on TripAdvisor websites.   In addition in the coming months Yellow Medya are helping TripAdvisor populate our database to ensure that every tourism business in Turkey is represented and can benefit from the global coverage TripAdvisor can offer.

Yellow Medya will also be offering a TripAdvisor Business Listings Programme, encouraging accommodation businesses in Turkey to adopt the Business Listings product.

We believe adoption of Business Listings within the Turkish hospitality industry will help businesses gain more visibility in front of our large community of travellers.

Mohamed: What is the most requested feature by the users that is not ready yet on TripAdvisor? What are the new things that you are introducing to TripAdvisor in 2012?

Karen: Earlier this year, TripAdvisor launched a new integration with Facebook that instantly personalizes the site for each person who visits, surfacing trusted reviews from friends, most popular destinations among friends, and an interactive social map.

Now when travelers come to TripAdvisor websites, while logged into Facebook, they will see the activities their friends have shared first, helping them to make more informed decisions when planning their own trip.

In addition our award winning mobile site and apps are becoming increasingly popular enabling travelers to research their trip whilst on the move.

Want to learn more about this subject? Visit TripAdvisor for Business Blog where there are lots of information on how accommodation providers can get the most out of TripAdvisor.

About TripAdvisor:

TripAdvisor® is the world’s largest travel site, enabling travelers to plan and have the perfect trip. TripAdvisor offers trusted advice from real travelers and a wide variety of travel choices and planning features (including Flights search, TripAdvisor Mobile and TripAdvisor Trip Friends) with seamless links to booking tools.

Matthieu Houle: Director, Mobile & Platform, Yellow Pages Group in Canada (YPG)

Matthieu Houle, Director, Mobile & Platform at YPG gives us insights about the mobile local search industry in Canada, and expectations about where this industry is going and how the mobile usage of  YPG products will surpass web usage by 2014.

Mohamed Salah: Tell us a brief introduction about yourself

Matthieu Houle: I am Matthieu Houle, Director, Mobile & Platform at Yellow Pages Group^TM in Canada (YPG), responsible for its mobile properties, with more than 3 million downloads to date and representing 30% of our search traffic (www.yellowpages.ca/mobile). I am also responsible for YPG’s Developer Platform, YellowAPI.com which now has more than 1,000 developers signed-up.

With 15 years of experience in local search, media and advertising, I joined YPG in 2000 where I held various positions in Marketing, Business Development and Operations.

I began my career inCosta Rica where I lived for six years and co-founded a design agency and two quarterly publications: a local surf magazine and a golf magazine.

Mohamed: 30% of all YellowPages.ca online searches come from your mobile apps. How did you achieve these numbers and when do you think the mobile searches will surpass the web searches?

Matthieu: Part of our success was the early adoption of the mobile platform. Our executives saw the strategic fit and as of 2009, we’ve invested significantly in mobile development in terms of resources and created a director role dedicated to mobile – which I currently hold. We launched this initiative in 2010 with a mass media campaign, that really kick-started our presence on mobile.

Moreover, there is a natural fit between our service and the context of mobile users. I often say that Yellow Pages Group is “built for mobile”. For instance, Smartphones are the ultimate tool to discovering local merchants.

And finally, we have excelled at execution. Making the apps fast and simple to use was ultimately the key to our success and what drives our thinking moving forward. We have the right internal and external partners to achieve our strategy.

I refer to Mary Meeker’s forecast indicating that mobile usage will be equal to online usage by 2014. In my opinion, that forecast for local search is on the conservative side.

“Mobile usage will be equal to online usage by 2014. That forecast for local search is on the conservative side.”

Mohamed: How is the traffic usage divided between your mobile apps (iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, WP7, Mobile Web, SMS Search)? Did you think about developing a Nokia app?

Matthieu: Applications represent roughly 75% of our mobile searches while the remainder is mobile web. Out of the app traffic, 70% comes from the iOS platforms and in large majority from iPhones.

“Out of the app traffic, 70% comes from the iOS platforms and in large majority from iPhones”

InCanada, Nokia doesn’t have a strong penetration as it has in other parts of the world so we have not yet create an app for this platform. Moreover, SMS search numbers are negligible.

Mohamed: How do you interact with your mobile users? How did their feedback shape your applications the way they are today?

Matthieu: User feedback is a critical input when we plan our releases. We acquire feedback from many different channels, including social media, customer service calls and emails, and even from employees. In my opinion, the most valuable feedback is derived from reading the reviews section on the app stores which is an excellent source of feedback. You know that if someone takes the time to write a review, it’s very likely that at least 100 people are thinking the same thing.

Furthermore, we also follow a more formal user testing protocol when we launch major updates but I find that the value added through this process is a validation of ideas and our execution…

Mohamed: What is YellowAPI all about?

Matthieu: The essence of YellowAPI is to create more value for our advertisers by allowing virtually anyone to create amazing local experiences.  Developers are building new applications and experiences right now, in areas that we would not have imagined or we would not have taken the time to develop.

YellowAPI is all about contributing to the eco-system in a way that contributes to our business model. Overall, it is about enabling developers to tap into our curated data without having to pay for it. We believe it’s a win-win for everyone.

Mohamed: It is well known that the most valuable asset for Yellow Pages is its data. Have you faced any challenges about the idea of exposing the Yellow Pages data to third parties through the API?

Matthieu: Exposing our data is very different than giving it away. The key reasoning behind this is that each time a business profile is exposed through a partner’s app, we can report that value back to our advertisers.

Mohamed: How many partners are using YellowAPI today? What’s your monetization model for the API?

Matthieu: We have more than 1,000 developers that have signed-up on the API in less than a year, representing about 30 apps and websites.

The monetization model for the API is quite simple: by adding more value to our advertisers, we support our product value proposition. Although we don’t sell pay-per-performance, once you have a good understanding of the ROI-to-Revenue relationship, you can pay partners based on performance in a way that makes sense for both parties.

Mohamed: What are you working on right now? What’s in the pipeline?

Matthieu: We’re always improving our flagship apps. That’s a big part of the pipeline. Expect more social features and more content in the next few releases of 2011.We’re also working on a new app that will hit the iTunes app store in Q4… Which I think will have a tremendous success. Stay Tuned!

On the YellowAPI side, it’s all about adding more data and more tools to help developers come up with the best apps possible!

Mohamed: What is the most valuable thing you have learned so far being in the local search, media and advertising industry for the past 15 years?

Matthieu: I believe that if you focus on making things simpler and more useful, for consumers and advertisers, great things will happen. In the end, our role is to add value to both sides. Try to avoid PowerPoint Ivory Tower syndrome and recognize it when it happens and go back to the basics.

Mohamed: A few years ago, everyone said that going mobile is the next big thing. Today, what do you think is the next big thing?

Matthieu: I would say that the next big thing is still mobile. But not exclusively with “branded” applications. I see an explosion of hyper local, vertical, social mashups that will give consumers the best tools to make the best shopping decisions. Imagine a developer with the next big “local” idea, building the app with the content from Yellow Pages companies across the world…That’s where I want to be!

 “I see an explosion of hyper local, vertical, social mashups that will give consumers the best tools to make the best shopping decisions”

Twitter: @matthieuhoule

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthieuhoule

Learn more about Yellow Pages Group^TM in Canada (YPG)

Learn more about YellowAPI

6,393,080 people

How did i know these stats? There is a very simple trick to know this number yourself… Go to the advertising link at the bottom of the FB page, click on create ad button, then you will get a page at which you can specify your targeting options…

Make sure to select the date Any-to-Any and the country Egypt, which should be selected by default if you live there. Wait for a few seconds and then you will see on the right side of the page the up to date total number of Facebook users in Egypt. The total number of users is now:

comScore has announced that Android, the 2 years old platform, is now the most popular operating system on smart phones in the US, having just surpassed BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 (WP7),  having now a market share of 31.2%.

The irony here for Nokia  is not just the lost opportunity to catch up the leading mobile operating system but also the loss  of market shares of the new partner Microsoft which has down to only 8%. This must be very frustrating for Microsoft, they launched their new WP7 last October aiming at competing Android and iPhone, what you typically expect is that their market share would grow due to this new product or at least stabilize but not fall down.

Smart Phone Market Share, Jan 2011

A good question to ask here, was Stephen Elop’s choice of Microsoft as a partner influenced by being an ex Microsoft executive or by believing so much in Microsoft products? Somebody has to answer this.

Nokia must now share Microsoft’s frustration, apple must be happy that they didn’t loose any ground against Google’s Android but rather Android took from the market shares of the other market players especially BlackBerry…

I wonder if the same market dominance will be possessed by Android on other markets worldwide.

One very interesting trend to start with is that the number of Arabic search queries super passed the English search queries for the first time on Egypt Yellow Pages. Arabic is now taking the lead with 55% of the search queries while English queries presents 45% of the total search.

Here are the top 10 searches for 2010:

1. Restaurant
2. Hotel
3. Company
4. Pharmacy
5. Bank
6. Real Estate
7. Advertising
8. Furniture
9. School
10. Factory

Restaurants are in the lead this year after switching places with hotels which comes in the second place. You can notice how consumers are searching through the site by looking for pharmacies (4th), banks (5th), furniture (8th) and schools (9th). Also increases B2B searches are noticed like company(3rd), Factory(10th), Real Estate (6th) and advertising (7th).

Most popular by category

Top Banks:

National Bank of Egypt ( El Bank El Ahly) comes first followed by HSBC then Commerical International Bank (CIB)

Top Telco Companies:

and the first places goes to… Vodafone, followed by Mobinil, then Raya and finally Etisalat in the 4th place.

Top Shipping Companies:

4 shipping companies show in the list of the top 100 searches on Yellow.com.eg, with DHL taking the lead searches, followed by Western Union, Aramex and then Fedex.

Top Car Manufacturers:

Toyota and Hyundai came on the top most searches car brands in Egypt

Top Restaurants & Cafes:

With restaurants being number one category for 2010, the top 100 most popular searches list contained 9 restaurants and cafes.

Cilantro the most popular local cafe in Egypt, followed by the restaurants Spectra which is very well known in the neighborhoods of Maadi and Mohandeseen, but it seems that nothing else can stand in the face of Egyptian cravings for fast food, you will find among the top list KFC, Cook Door, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Mo’men.

Finally Roastery, maadi and heliopolis favorite hangout comes in the list and finally La Poire, the most popular Egyptian patesserie.

Top Brands:

Many brands from consumer electronic, computer hardware industry and mobile phones where included in the list. This includes:

1. Samsung
2. Xerox
3. Sony
4. Toshiba
5. Panasonic
6. Apple
7. Nokia

Happy New Year to all Egyptians!

]]> http://mohamed-salah.com/2011/01/09/egypt-yellow-pages-2010-zeitgeist/feed/ 3 mohsalah Arabic vs English search Egyptians Most Popular Searches top banks in Egypt top telco companies in Egypt top shipping companies in Egypt top cars in Egypt top restaurants top brands in Egypt http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/11/17/twitter-stats-in-egypt/ http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/11/17/twitter-stats-in-egypt/#comments Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:22:26 +0000 mohsalah http://mohamed-salah.com/?p=230 ]]> With some huge statistics ranging from 80 million visits per day (reported by ComScore) and 190 million visits (reported by twitter) and more than 110+ million users, there are no clear statistics if any about the activity, stats or number of twitter users from Egypt or even the number of Egyptian tweets.

A world of tweets is a a twitter heat map developed based on sampling from Twitter API, according to the geographical area. So i tried to monitor Egypt, at a time that is expected to be a high peak, it’s 8:45 PM, and Egypt has just beaten Australia 3:0, so i guess many people would like to tweet about the big win of Egyptian national team and the goals of Zidan and Gedo!

I kept the page open for 10 minutes and i was surprised that there was no activity on Egypt area, even though there is activity in some gulf and middle east countries (i wouldn’t say MENA region, since there is no activity in North Africa) like Saudi Arabia and UAE, some African countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Even Liberia!

Twitter heat map just after Egypt Match – No activity in Egypt

3 minutes later i was able to barely spot Egypt, with very little traffic apparently.

Twitter Activity 3 minutes later – Egypt can be seen

Twitter in Egypt is not yet a big thing, i am not saying it is not magnificent, it is indeed a mean of communication used by the blogger and activists, some politician and some major companies and brands in Egypt. However, it has not reached the point where you would find3 or 4 of your 300 or 400 Facebook friends have an account on twitter.

Well, that make my estimate, twitter has 1/100 or less of the number of users Facebook has, Facebook has in Egypt about 4 million users, that makes roughly 40,000 twitter users, …. wonder how of them are active and how much created a twitter account and said: “This is my first tweet” or said something like “I am having Pizza for lunch” and then never used their account again because they didn’t get the idea of it.

Let’s wait and see how things go, but i don’t think twitter in Egypt is taking off any soon. Though i am very proud of the 1,250 twitter follower that Egypt Yellow Pages have today. Putting in mind that our activity is relatively low on twitter, sending tweets a couple of times a week.

Egypt Yellow Pages Twitter Followers

That said, all respects goes to the the active twitter user base who where able to do positive changes, like the pressure that was done on Vodafone Egypt to remove their Abbas Ibn Fernas Ad, which was removed from Vodafone Egypt Official YouTube channel recently. If you want to read more about this topic just login to twitter and search for #VodaFly.

Do you think my estimates are accurate? More or less than the reality? Do you have the real numbers for twitter number of users in Egypt? if you do please share your opinion here.

Update:

One more argument that supports my estimate, is that Vodafone Egypt has about 467,000 fans on Facebook opposed to 6,139 on Twitter (who remained after the #VodaFly incident of course), 1/76, close to my estimate. probably the number of twitter users in Egypt is  50,000 users after all.

Also found a very interesting related article, they assumed that the number of twitter users in Egypt is 2,000 which is wrong,  Vodafone Egypt has more than 6,139 followers!… Here is the part i liked:

However, in Egypt Twitter seems not to have caught on, something that can be explained by an understanding of the special nature of network markets, as discussed in Economics by MIT and Yale professors Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus. In their book, the authors argue that “consumers derive benefits not simply from their own use of a good in a network market, but also from the number of other consumers who adopt the good,” known in economics as “adoption externality”.

Read this article from Al Ahram Weekly

This has almost been confirmed in the latest report that Nielsen announced today. A phone call is becoming less popular, texting is becoming more wanted by everyone specially the teens. Can you believe it is primary reason people buy the cellphone is to send SMS’s?

Source: Nielsen

I think it’s time now to start finding a new terminology for the device once called mobile phone.

1. The Inspiring: Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent

Anything in life is possible if you just try hard enough and never give up your dreams

2. The funny innocent: David After Dentist

This boy is high, he thinks he has 2 fingers!!

3. Pure Happiness: Wedding Dance

Fun People

Saying goodbye to 2009 and welcome to 2010, this is what people are interested in

Top 10 searches in www.yellow.com.eg during 2009

Hotels remain in number 1 like 2008, Restaurants jump from 4th position to second position, Schools comes in the third place while Banks drop 2 places to be in the 4th place.

Cars move out from the top 10 and Pharmacies enter in the 10th position.

Most popular businesses in www.yellow.com.eg during 2009

As for the businesses, HP retains its first place for the second year, DHL and Western Union comes in second and third places. Followed by Telco companies Vodafone and Raya, as for banks CIB jumps this year above HSBC, and finally cafes and fast food restaurants appear for the first time in the top 10 list: Cilantro, KFC followed by Pizza Hut in the 10th place.

Prefered visitor language for www.yellow.com.eg in 2009

One more interesting fact is that Arabic version of www.yellow.com.eg is getting more attention, usage has increased from 40% in 2008 to 45.8% in 2009 almost reaching the English. This is a direct result of enhancing the arabic search logic which now produces better and much more relevant results.

2009 was just a great year for Egypt Yellow Pages. 2010 will hopefully be even better, we will keep doing our best to serve our visitors and enhance their experience.

Merry Xmas and Happy new year to everyone

I created a campaign for the Egyptian stock market section that we launched at Yellow Pages, i thought it could use some more traffic. I followed the guidelines and chosen my words and the minimum bidding CPC that google recommends for each word to appear in a good place in the search results page and in the Google partner network websites that are relevant to that topic. After this i specified the daily budget that i want which was 2$ per day that i reduce later to 1$ when i was about to run out of credit later

Here are some words i have chosen that were approved by google as good traffic words: Egyptian stock market, Egyptian stock market news, Egyptian Bursa, EGX30 prices, Talaat Mostafa Stocks, Mobinil Stocks, ….

CPC was pretty cheap, $0.05 for Egyptain Stock Market, some words were cheaper other words were more expensive…. I’m just gonna focus here on this word…

So everything was set and i got around 80 hits on the first day of campaign July 16th 2009.. The larger portion was coming from Google network website not from Google search results page but it doesn’t matter… very nice, i though i just put this to bed… but i was wrong.. look at the below:

On 17 July, hits dropped to 25, so i opened the control panel to see what was wrong, if found that google suggest me to change the CPC bid amount to $0.07 for Egyptain Stock Market instead of $0.05. I did that and here we go again, hits reached 80′s again.

On 21 July and 27 July, I had to re-adjust the CPC again and again until it reached $0.21 which seemed after this that it was not enough… I just started to give up, i can’t keep monitoring this way on aday to day basis… I have other more important stuff to do than adjusting some keywords CPC… I took a look after a while and i found that the CPC recommeneded by google Passed the $1.10 margin!!

I was paying 5 cents for a keyword and getting good traffic. Now i am paying 21 cents and hardly getting any traffic.. Then i was expected to pay one dollar for each click!! All the credit i have (60$) and was planning to use for one month would now evaporate in one day.

I don’t really understand the pattern, what happened during these 2 weeks that raised the bid amount for Egyptain Stock Market from 5 cents to 1 dollar?? is it really people paying more in that word suddenly, does it make any sense that no one was interested in this word at all and all in a sudden everyone wants it?? or was this some way Google AdWords drag their customers to invest more and more by offering words for a little price at the begining and then gradually increasing the value until it reaches the market amount? i don’t really know but i know 2 things for sure:

1.  I don’t like PPC model, too much complicated.
2. Normal end users and SME would find it extremely difficult to manage this on their own unless provided to them by an advertising agency that manages their account. Putting in mind also the special needs of customers in the middle east and that they would rather have someone do these things for them instead of doing it themselves because it is too “technical”. Self provisioning and PPC model might not be the best advertising solution for MEA region.

The Yellow Pages time-based contractual model is simple, efficient and easy. If you compare it to PPC model it is also much more cost-effective.

Today i will explain this more, we should be actually looking at the smartphone traffic share rather than the sales share. According to October statistics published by AdMob, iPhone smart traffic share represents about 50% of all the smartphone devices including Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile, Android, Palm, …

So how did we reach this situation? It was just a step by step… Traffic share for iPhone:

• Feb 09: 33% share
• Aug 09: 40% share
• Oct 09: 50% share

Traffic share for Symbian:

• Feb 09: 43%
• Aug 09: 34%
• Oct 09: 25%

Android looks also promising, from 2% in February to 11% in October

In the past 90 days, mobile portal pages views reached 100k whereas iPhone hits exceeded 160k. These reports are generated by admob, the mobile ad platform that has been especially popular on the iPhone, which was acquired by google this month for $750 million in stock.

If you look at the global smart phone market share you will know why i am surprised, apple is no more than 14% of the global market share with probably even less percentage in Egypt, as opposed to Symbian OS market share (Nokia and Others), which is more than half the market share.

Mobile Handsets Market Share

I believe that the reason behind this mystery is that almost all iPhone users connect to the internet, download and use new applications each day. The iPhone is pretty much useless device if you are disconnected. Moreover, since its launch, Egypt Yellow Pages iPhone application has been a great success, one of the top free apps in Apple AppStore.

Download Egypt Yellow Pages iPhone application

Learn more about Mobile Yellow Pages