Yigber’s Online Adventures

The Reverse Ego Search

Ever curious to know if someone is searching your name on Google ?

The habit of searching people on the net has become very popular. If you are going to meet someone (blind date, job interview, …) one of the first thing to do is search their name on Google to get more information about them, right ? In fact, many people like to search their own name. They even have a name for it - Ego Search, Ego Surfing, Self Googling, Identity Googling, and on…
I guess that wanting to know about others who search you is sort of a Reverse Ego-Search

Assuming you don’t have access to the internal Google query databases, there’s not much you can do. Luckily, “Not much” is greater than nothing !

Here’s the Reverse Ego Search recipe:

1. Use your Google AdWords account (or ask a friend to use his).
2. Create a Campaign and add an Ad Group for each name string you want to track.
3. Use the “Phrase” match option on the strings you input, so that you won’t get ad impressions on close but different queries.
4. Use Regional Targeting mechanisms to even further fit an ad to a geographical region.
5. Point the ad to your site so that if your ad gets clicked you can obtain more information on searcher.
6. Track impressions through your AdWords account stats. Each impression means someone searched you.

Don’t forget to limit the daily spending to a few cents !

Now you can know exactly how many times your name was searched.
You can know when (date not hour) people were searching for you.
You can know where from (region not exact address) you were searched.
If the searcher clicks on your ad than now you can also know his IP = better pinpoint.

This, of course, can be applied in all the other SEM platforms (including Facebook, I guess).

Cool, a little.