Google Says: Americans More Patriotic Since 9/11

America is a patriotic nation. Notwithstanding the definite upsurge in the period following 9/11/2001 ten years ago, overall the level of American patriotism tends to remain remarkably consistent. Polls support this statement, as reported in a Forbes article last year:

Patriotic attitudes are generally very stable. In a question Gallup asked in January 2001, 87% said they were "extremely" or "very" proud to be American. When Pew repeated the identical question last year, 86% gave that response. In 2001 and 2009, only 1% said they were "not at all proud." The 9/11 tragedy produced more overt displays of patriotism and heightened sentiment, but responses soon returned to the norm.

So how did 9/11 impact American patriotism? Back in 2005, an MSNBC article reported the results of a poll conducted by the Roper Reports unit of NOP World. NOP’s vice president of consumer trends was quoted as saying:

“We tracked patriotism, spirituality and religion, and giving to charities and volunteerism right after 9/11,” Silvers said. “All three popped up. Within about nine months, volunteering was down and so was religion, but what has stayed with us is patriotism, and it’s obviously fueled by a couple of things. The shift point was 9/11.”

As are most of the folks working at my BI software development company (SiSense), I could be called obsessed when it comes to applying business intelligence methodologies to anything. In this spirit, I automatically started thinking about how I might be able to uncover some trends showing if and how actual data might support the articles and surveys I saw about American patriotism and 9/11, as the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 tragedies approached.

I decided to take a look at Google search data and see if and how online searches reflect the “patriotism effects” of 9/11 in America. After looking around and reading some more, I came up with two searches to check out: flag sales and volunteering.

What led me to check out flag sales? I saw a recent article that says that, “One response to the catastrophic events of Sept. 11, 2001, came quickly in a traditionally American way -- flag sales soared.” The article quotes the president of Gettysburg Flag Works in New York State as saying, “‘On 9/11, 12, 13, 14, we sold out everything that was red, white and blue. We had lines out the door,’ recalled Mike Cronin, president of Gettysburg Flag Works. “I was in flag shock for a couple of weeks.’”

Not surprisingly, a sharp increase in searches related to flag sales can be seen in Google search data in the month of September 2001. For the years following 2001, however, searches for flag sales were relatively flat.

 Flags Sales 2001

 Flags Sales 2007

Interestingly, though, this year’s tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks seems to be resonating more with Americans than on previous anniversaries: flag sale searches increased significantly over the past few weeks.

 Flags Sales 2011

When I went looking for articles which might discuss the increase in community service and volunteering among Americans, I didn’t find much. However, a look at Google search data for “volunteer USA” shows an interesting consistency with what I saw for flag sales searches: significant spikes in searches after the original 9/11 and then again this year.

US Volunteers 2001

US Volunteers 2009 

US Volunteers 2011

From the graphs above it is quite clear that the 10th anniversary of 9/11 has a great impact on patriotism, even more so than years before.

In any case, it’s hard to believe that ten years have passed since thousands of Americans died on 9/11. Hopefully, America is stronger as a country for it and its people are stronger as a nation. In case you feel like reading more about how patriotism has increased in the US since 9/11/01, I leave you with the following article, published this week in a Florida newspaper, which talks about American patriotism (and the difficulty in measuring it with surveys): Since 9/11: Patriotism - Ten years after the deadliest terrorist attack inside the United States, love of country remains as strong as ever, if not a little stronger.

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By: Roi Hildesheimer | The ElastiCube Chronicles - Business Intelligence Blog

Web Marketing Analytics: Hosted or In-House?

When we first began marketing and selling our software over the Internet, we used Google Analytics extensively. SiSense was a young and small company then, with a tiny marketing budget relying on cost-effective online marketing to acquire customers, and therefore any free tool that gave us more information than we already had on how our marketing dollars were being spent was a crucial weapon for surviving this tough economic climate.

Using paid services, such as Omniture, wasn't an option strictly for pricing reasons. We used what we could afford, and at that point we couldn't afford anything commercial (expensive!). So we ended up using Google Analytics for simple traffic reporting and in-house applications built over our own Prism software for everything else.

Not long after, we started acquiring customers at a better rate than we had hoped and the marketing budget started growing. It still wasn't huge, but it was enough to generate quite a lot of marketing data to work with for optimization of existing campaigns and developing new marketing initiatives.

We had a lot of ideas, but we didn't know where to start. So we decided to do what every marketing person should do: we analyzed the marketing data. At least this way, we would be betting our budget on educated guesses instead of clueless luck. Sounds easy enough, but life is never that easy. An innocent desire to make informed marketing decisions turned out to be an R&D nightmare.

I'll give you an example.

The first thing we wanted to determine was which traffic sources generated the quickest ROI. We wanted to understand where customers who take the least time from registration to payment come from. Do they come from particular search keywords? From particular referring sites? Do they even come from the website? This way we could at least have a better risk assessment of our marketing channels.

Well, we knew we have a lot of data in Google Analytics. We could tell which keywords and sites were driving traffic to our website and we also knew how many of them were registering or purchasing online (each defined as separate Google Analytics 'conversions').

But one thing we quickly noticed was that Google Analytics reports were showing us visitor counts, but not the visitors themselves. If we had 3 'registration' conversions on one day and 2 'purchase online' conversions on another, we had no way of telling whether these two groups contained the same people. Stuck.

A quick brainstorming session revealed that we have the customer sales data we need in our billing system's database. But this would turn this marketing initiative to a cooperative effort by both marketing and R&D.

After getting shouted at by the DBA on the mere suggestion of touching the operational billing system, we compromised that the DBA would put a few days into creating an automated process to get the data for us every day in the form of a flat file. Not a great solution, but better than nothing.

A few days later we got the customer data we needed which was basically the customers' personal information and first acquisition date (the billing system did not store the date of registration). All we needed to do now is match this information to the traffic sources data in Google Analytics.

Since Google Analytics was only providing us access to visitor counts and not individual visitors, our only other option of cross-referencing between Google and the in-house billing data was by purchase date. The problem was that multiple customers purchase on the same date making this data link not very usable. We also couldn't calculate the time span from registration to purchase, because the billing data didn't have it. Stuck again.

This experience, and similar heartbreaking attempted marketing initiatives which never got off the ground due to data integration fiascoes, are the main reason why we do not use Google Analytics anymore. But the interesting thing is, that the scenario I described is not limited to Google. It's the same with all the big hosted analytics vendors. It's expensive to store the required amount of data for as many users as Google or Omniture have. Since Google is free, they just don't store it. For some paid services like Omniture, you have to pay extra to access this information.

It's important to understand that if you use any type of commercial hosted analytics solution, you will either have no access to user-level data or you will pay a hefty sum to get it on-demand. Most of the companies I encountered, including my own, moved away from these types of services to internal data collection because of this reason, as well as to have the traffic data physically closer to the rest of the company's data, making it easier to use and access.

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By: Elad Israeli | The ElastiCube Chronicles - Business Intelligence Blog