Google's Innovative Tools, Developed in Israel (Ariel Hachstadt's Presentation at the Jerusalem Meetup)

I went to a networking event last week at Nefesh B'Nefesh's offices in Givat Shaul to hear Ariel Hachstadt  from Google (Hachstadt is Google’s Regional Product Marketing Manager for Israel, Greece and South Africa) discuss various innovative tools from Google that can be used for internet marketing.

The average web-savvy professional is already familiar with most of the internet tools that Ariel presented, such as Google Trends. Google Trends allows you to see how many people visited a website over a specified amount of time, and what websites were visited after visitors' left that site.  

One Google tool that Ariel mentioned, however, is less known. It's Google Insight for Search, which can be used to measure the volume of a Google search term in any location over a specified amount of time. For example, you can see the volume of people in the United States that searched for "cheap hotels in the Jerusalem area" in the year 2010, broken down by month.

Insight for Search provides the Internet marketing professional with useful data to support ad campaign decisions. Let's say that every May from 2006-2010, there was a spike in the amount of people in the U.S. who searched on Google for a "cheap Jerusalem hotel."  If you are a hotel marketing professional in Jerusalem, it would make sense for you to a) increase your hotel's U.S. advertisements in May and b) angle those advertisements to focus on how your hotel has affordable rooms.

The best part of Ariel's presentation was when he mentioned that Insight for Search, as well as many of Google's other tools, were developed by Google's R & D office in Israel. In fact, among Google's various branches, Israel is known to contribute a disproportionate amount to Google's innovation.