Many Body Problem + Search Marketing

Think back to high school physics. Do you remember the two-body problem? It is when two masses interact with each other through some mediating force (such as gravity). This is easy to solve. Now, what about three separate entities interacting with each other? Now that scratch paper might not be enough to solve our problem!

The many-body problem is the study of the effects between a closed system of a large number of entities. With the addition of more and more objects interacting with each other the problem becomes more complex, sometimes making solutions seem chaotic.

The many-body problem requires multiple objects that all obey some sort of set of laws and rules (in physics, the law of motion must be observed… thus the example of gravitation earlier). The same applies to search.

The following we know are laws of search:

  • People are using a medium (Google, eBay, Yahoo, …) to find information
  • People are using a combination of words that they feel will best deliver the result they want
  • People are given choices by the medium to what information they want to view

For pay-per-click marketing we have various objects interacting with each other:

  • Variations of combinations of words and phrases that your potential visitor will type into the medium
  • Varying competitors who may also decide to appear for the same keywords that you have in your portfolio
  • A maximum dollar amount that you are willing to spend for your keywords
  • The actually amount spent on your individual keywords
  • The relationship between the keywords contained within your portfolio
  • The position within the medium that your ad appears on and its relation to your competition
  • The likelihood your visitor will find your website as useful and not decide to leave
  • Your return on investment and lifetime value of your newly acquired visitor

The above mentioned laws and interacting objects are just a sample of the full list of what is involved in search marketing. Through this blog, I hope to provide insight through mathematical analysis on pay-per-click marketing (for search marketers), algorithm design (for search engines) in addition to code and tools that you can add to your arsenal.

This entry was posted by Nicholas Abramovic on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 12:02 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a thought provoking comment, or trackback from your own site.


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One Response to “Many Body Problem + Search Marketing”

  1. Tom Says:
    July 8th, 2009 at 10:53 am

    Question: Do you think that people who aren’t excellent at math have any chance at succeeding at affiliate marketing? Or do they have a shot (if assisted by tools like Excel, the 202 programs, etc.)?

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