Sometime last year, I received intelligence to suggest that the friendly folks at silverorange had rigged up a gizmo so that whenever anyone purchased something from one of their clients’ online stores, a cash register sound rang out throughout their spacious atrium.

Reasoning that this sort of positive reinforcement would be good for my clients too, I shamelessly stole the idea, and installed a tool that my friends at Yankee could pop-up on their desktops with a similar purpose. Much to my surprise and delight, the last time I visited, I saw the tool in use all over the company.

The success of this idea (thanks, silverorange) points out that simplicity often trumps complexity. Very detailed “who bought product X after clicking on link Y”-type sales reports are available to Yankee — and they certainly use them. But the visceral sound of a cash register ringing, and the pace at which it happens, has proved a better vehicle for communicating how well the store is doing.

In the same vein, I’m fascinated by the new Recent Google tool I installed last night (look over on the right). This is simply a bit of code that detects incoming traffic to this site as a result of Google searches, pulls out the keywords, and displays them, with links back to the same Google search.

While this same information is available from the nightly traffic report, somehow the “live” nature of the information right out here in public is more compelling. Somehow the notion that someone, somewhere, just used Google to end up here — perhaps just this second — is more interesting, more “real,” than a report of the same information prepared nightly.

Interesting to note: Wayne’s comment about BBC reporter Mishal Husain is currently on the front page of a Google search for bbc mishal husain, and that’s currently pulling in the most Google traffic.