Most marketers are so obsessed with their own search rankings (i.e. where your site and ads show up on search engines), that they may not always think about search from the other side -- how what people are looking for is also constantly changing.

Mike Grover the Marketing Director over at CMP TechWeb's just sent me results from the past 90 days of hundreds of thousands of actual visitor searches on their sites. These are the top search terms that aren't company names:

Sept 2004 non-company-name terms
1. RFID
2. Outsourcing
3. VOIP
4. ERP
5. Web Services
6. Linux
7. Spam
8. sp2
9. Spyware
10. Wireless

August 2004 non-company-name terms
1. RFID
2. VOIP
3. Outsourcing
4. ERP
5. CRM
6. Linux
7. Salary Survey
8. Spam
9. Web Services
10. Wireless

July 2004 non-company-name terms
1. VOIP
2. SPAM
3. LINUX
4. Outsourcing
5. ERP
6. Wireless
7. Spyware
8. CRM
9. VPN

You can see that the concerns and interests that the mainly IT-pro population on CMP TechWeb's sites really changes over in short periods of time. It makes me think:

- You need to be able to create white paper and webinar offers on a super-speedy schedule to get the most results as the painpoints of the marketplace alters.

- Ditto for changing ad copy and landing pages. (Luckily this is easier online than in print/DM.)

- If you're budgeting for 2005 search ads based on 2004 key term traffic data, your numbers are gonna be off. This stuff is in flux. Mike also gave me a 90-day list of the company names most searched for, and you can see real differences here too. I bet it has more to do with who's running heavy ad campaigns and/or product launch announcements. So, yeah, non-search PR and ads do affect search traffic.

If you are planning a big non-search promo, you should budget for your name-related search traffic to rise accordingly too. (And then email me to tell me by how much -- I'm very interested in relations between campaigns.)

September top companies searched for
1. SAP
2. IBM
3. Cisco
4. Oracle
5. Peoplesoft

August top companies searched for
1. SAP
2. EDS
3. IBM
4. Peoplesoft
5. Cisco

July top companies searched for
1. Cisco
2. SAP
3. IBM
4. Oracle