Archive for June, 2007
In an ongoing effort to provide more transparency to advertisers, Google announced today the availability of a new AdWords report, called a Placement Performance report, which enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites. With these reports, advertisers have much more insight into their contextually targeted advertising spend and are able to leverage the information to more effectively optimize their campaigns and meet their objectives. Designed in response to advertisers’ requests, Placement Performance reports offer advertisers both increased transparency and greater control over their contextual advertising, which ultimately lead to more relevant ads for users.
With a network of large and small publishers, the Google content network provides unmatched reach and customizable targeting for advertisers online. Now, advertisers who are opted in to the content network can clearly identify high and low-value sites for their particular business, and react accordingly based on their performance to meet their marketing objectives on the content network. With Placement Performance reports, Google makes site-by-site data easily available and actionable to help advertisers get the best possible ROI on the Google content network. Sites that perform particularly well can be targeted more aggressively by implementing complementary features such as site targeting. Conversely, specific sites that convert poorly can be excluded or optimized by refining keywords and ads in campaigns.
The reports can also be coupled with conversion tracking tools, such as the Google AdWords conversion tracking feature or Google Analytics, to give advertisers a better understanding of their holistic online advertising performance. Placement Performance reports are now available to all U.S. advertisers, and are launching globally in all countries in the coming weeks.
June 11th, 2007
DoubleClick Inc. today announced that Pepperjam, an Inc. 500 company and industry leading full service Internet marketing agency, has selected DoubleClick’s integrated DART® platform to meet the digital marketing needs of Pepperjam and its clients. Pepperjam is a rapidly growing agency that specializes in search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing management and online media buying and planning. The agency serves clients in the fashion, entertainment, education, retail and consumer packaged goods industries, such as The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, 1-800-PetMeds, and Sesame Street.DoubleClick’s integrated DART platform enables Pepperjam to serve display and rich media ads and conduct effective search marketing campaigns while also providing deep analysis and reporting across all digital channels to ensure Pepperjam has a holistic view of campaign results. Through the use of DoubleClick’s DART platform, including DART for Advertisers (DFA), DART Search and DoubleClick Rich Media, Pepperjam collaborates with its clients to seamlessly integrate digital advertising into overall marketing efforts. The integrated solution gives Pepperjam clients the ability to manage all their digital marketing with greater efficiency and flexibility.
“We made the switch to DoubleClick because they offer a fully-integrated ad management platform to seamlessly manage all digital marketing channels,” said Kristopher B. Jones, president and CEO of Pepperjam. “It became a burden to manage multiple products for each marketing channel. DoubleClick instead provides cutting-edge technology and in-depth analysis enabling us to focus on serving our clients.”
“Pepperjam is growing tremendously, adding new clients each week and we are thrilled that they have decided to streamline their ad management with DoubleClick,” said Jason Bigler, vice president of product management at DoubleClick. “The combination of DFA, Search and Rich Media gives Pepperjam a single platform to create world-class advertising campaigns that produce great results and allow Pepperjam to achieve operational excellence.”
DFA provides Pepperjam with a hosted, enterprise-class advertising management and serving solution to help their clients reach their online goals efficiently and effectively. DFA offers sophisticated targeting capabilities, ad serving technology, robust reporting and rich media capabilities. As a highly advanced ad management platform on the market today, DFA allows marketers to centrally manage creative assets, traffic more compelling ads, track results beyond impressions and clicks to understand conversion, improve ROI and branding and automatically optimize creative to improve results.
Pepperjam’s powerful search-engine marketing management solution will rely on the Web-based DART Search, a solution for all aspects of creating and managing search advertising. It is integrated with DFA, so Pepperjam clients get a clear view of results across both display and search advertising, enabling them to boost efficiency, effectiveness and ROI. The Web-based DART Search system is integrated with leading engines so Pepperjam clients have insight into what’s happening from first bid to final report, across multiple search engines. Additionally, DART Search is synchronized with DFA, so Pepperjam clients can gain a clear view of their results.
With DoubleClick Rich Media, Pepperjam can easily collaborate with their agency partners, publishers and advertisers to produce campaigns that garner great results. DoubleClick Rich Media integrates the best of interactive design, ad serving and reporting into a sophisticated integrated rich media offering.
DoubleClick’s world-class service model provides unparalleled support for Pepperjam by giving them direct access to technical account managers and specialists to help ensure campaigns are up and running seamlessly.
June 9th, 2007
Google today announced the new Google Calendar gallery, with free listings from sources like Atlantic Records, Cordless Recordings, Disney, Eventful, JamBase, Orbitz, the NBA, Netflix, The New York Times, TLC, Wcities, and Zvents.
You can browse detailed sports, music, and TV schedules and add either individual events or complete schedules to your Google Calendar in one click. Think of Google Calendar gallery as an incredibly plugged-in friend who helps you remember all the hottest events, or that personal concierge you always dreamed of hiring. Here are some highlights:
- TV listings for your zip code, with extra details on TLC shows
- Presidential candidates’ 2008 schedules from The New York Times
- Sports schedules provided by Eventful and the NBA
- Theme park events and schedules from Disney
- Updates on travel deals and the ability to search on Orbitz within your calendar
- Concert dates from Atlantic Records, Cordless Recordings, Eventful and JamBase
- Festival schedules from Wcities and Zvents
- Movie and DVD release dates from Netflix
- “Music Horoscopes” and celeb birthdays from artists on Atlantic Records
Anyone can view Google Calendar gallery listings for free - you don’t have to have a Google Calendar. You can browse different categories of calendars to see which ones are the most popular, or you can search in the search box for the topics that most interest you. You’ll see video, images, and detailed descriptions right in the listings so you can preview the events or shows with one click. If you also use Google Calendar, you can add events to your personal calendar with one click and receive email or mobile phone alerts so you never miss your favorite basketball team or band again. It’s also easy to share these events with friends and family.
You can try it out for free by visiting: http://www.google.com/calendar/gallery.
June 8th, 2007
The number of libraries participating in the Google Book Search Library Project just got a whole lot bigger with today’s addition of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is a national consortium of 12 research universities, including University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Google will work with the CIC to digitize select collections across all its libraries, up to 10 million volumes.
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Readers will have access to many distinctive and unique collections held by the consortium. Users will be able to explore collections that are global in scope, like Northwestern’s Africana collection or dive deep into the universities’ unique Midwest heritage, including the University of Minnesota’s Scandinavian and forestry collections, Michigan State’s extensive holding in agriculture, Indiana University’s folklore collection, and the history and culture of Chicago collection at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
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Google will provide the CIC with a digital copy of the public domain materials digitized for this project. With these files, the consortium will create a first-of-its-kind shared digital repository of these works held across the CIC libraries. Both readers and libraries will benefit from this group effort:
- The shared repository of public domain books will give faculty and students convenient access to a large and diverse online library before housed in separate locations.
- This new collaboration will enable librarians to collectively archive materials over time, and allow researchers to access a vast array of material with searches customized for scholarly activity.
For books in the public domain, readers will be able to view, browse, and read the full texts online. For books protected by copyright, users will get basic background (such as the book’s title and the author’s name), at most a few lines of text related to their search, and information about where they can buy or borrow a book.
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“This library digitization agreement is one of the largest cooperative actions of its kind in higher education,” said CIC chairman Lawrence Dumas, provost of Northwestern University. “We have a collective ambition to share resources and work together to preserve the world’s printed treasures.”
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Two CIC member universities are already working with Google Book Search, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and this new agreement will complement the digitization work already taking place.
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The CIC becomes the latest partner in the Google Books Library Project, which in addition to the University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin-Madison, also includes Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, University of California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, Princeton Library, the Complutense University of Madrid, the Bavarian State Library, the Library of Catalonia, the University Library of Lausanne and Ghent University Library. Google is also conducting a pilot project with the Library of Congress.
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The Google Books Library Project digitizes books from major libraries around the world and makes their collections searchable on Google Book Search. More information can be found at: http://books.google.com.
June 6th, 2007
Yahoo! today completed the migration of their search crawler, Yahoo! Slurp, over to the new domain at crawl.yahoo.net.
As of today, all machines crawling as Slurp are now in crawl.yahoo.net. You can see this change in your web server logs, where the page accesses from inktomisearch.com are being fully replaced by crawl.yahoo.net contacts. This does not cover other Yahoo! crawlers, such Yahoo! China, and other verticals, like Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Travel, etc., which have their own user-agent.
June 5th, 2007
Salesforce.com and Google have formed a strategic global alliance to mutually use their product, packaging, and promotional resources to enable companies of all sizes to realize unprecedented levels of success. As part of the alliance, salesforce.com will be the first on-demand company to resell the Google AdWords platform, acting as an official distribution channel for the Google AdWords product. The alliance is across 43 countries and encompasses distribution, technology and co-marketing efforts.
Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords provides an integrated and effective solution that gives companies of all sizes all the tools they need to acquire new customers and grow their business. By encapsulating every element of the customer lifecycle - advertising, creating leads, closing business and retaining customers - in one solution, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables any company to jump start their business by creating an online marketing and sales presence.
Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables users to:
- Advertise Online – With Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, companies can immediately connect to Google AdWords, and create an ad that is displayed with the relevant search results on Google.com or across the Google AdSense™ content network of partner websites. Users can create an ad in as quickly as five minutes and with as little as $5.
- Attract Prospects – When people search the Web for the products and services that your company sells, your ad appears with the relevant search results. When they click on your ad, visitors are taken to your website.
- Capture Leads – Once you have potential customers on your website, you can entice visitors to fill out a name capture form on your site with an offer for a Webinar or white paper. The information collected on the form flows directly into Salesforce as a new lead.
- Acquire Customers – As soon as a lead is added into Salesforce, it is distributed to the sales team. Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables businesses to effectively manage and share leads, track opportunities through the sales cycle and close deals faster. Sales teams can manage all customer interactions in Salesforce and turn qualified leads into new customers.
- Analyze Growth – Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords features dashboards that gives companies a bird’s eye view into lead generation, sales metrics, and company growth. Dashboards and reports are quick and easy to access with real-time information and allow companies to make decisions quickly and alter advertising strategies appropriately.
- Mash-up Other Business Applications – Through the power of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange directory, customers have the opportunity to mash-up any of 600 business applications including technologies for mapping and productivity.
In addition to these features, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords also includes a custom designed user experience starting with an exclusive login page. Joint customers can go to the Google site at http://www.google.com/adwords/salesforce to login to their AdWords account and can access Salesforce directly at http://www.salesforce.com/google.
Another common thread that brought salesforce.com and Google together in their global alliance is their commitment to corporate philanthropy. In July of 2000, salesforce.com launched the Salesforce.com Foundation, which operates under the company’s innovative 1/1/1 Model — a commitment to deliver 1% Time, 1% Equity and 1% Product to nonprofit organizations and, most recently, to be “one” with the earth.
Since its launch, the Salesforce.com Foundation has donated their product to more than 2,000 nonprofits. Similarly, Google has also given free online advertising to selected nonprofits through its Google Grants program, supporting more than 2,500 nonprofit organizations in 16 countries to date. The Salesforce.com Foundation and Google are now teaming up to donate the new Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords to each other’s nonprofit grantees. These selected nonprofits will be able to gain access to the same integrated sales and marketing success that is available to the private sector at no cost. Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords will also be made available to additional nonprofits within the next quarter.
June 5th, 2007
Ask.com today unveiled Ask3D, a completely re-engineered and redesigned version of Ask.com. Ask3D includes powerful new search technology, an innovative three-panel design, and unique new features that give people what they need, faster.
With the new version of Ask.com, people get the most relevant and customized information they need from the best range of content available, including videos and music clips, and makes it all immediately accessible on one page. Ask3D replaces the previous version of Ask.com and is now available at www.ask.com.
“The new Ask.com is a complete redefinition of the search experience,†said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. “On average, it takes people four queries to find what they are searching for online. This is because search engines have forced people to wade through endless lists of links, and refine query after query, to find the right information.â€
“Ask3D reduces the amount of hunting and pecking it takes for people to find what they need. We do this by delivering the right information, from the deepest range of content, all on one clean and simple page. With Ask3D, we are taking a leap towards the future of search.â€
Customized Results
Ask3D understands that no two searches are ever the same, therefore no two search result pages should be exactly alike. “Morph,†Ask3D’s new algorithmic content-matching and ranking technology, is the underlying technology that delivers the most relevant content for each search query, and places that content onto one single page. Morph chooses from content of all types, including Web pages, images, video, music clips and news, and transforms the page to each individual query.
Morph technology works in tandem with Ask.com’s unique ExpertRank algorithm, which determines the most relevant search results by identifying expert communities on the Web instead of simply displaying links by popularity. The combination of Morph and ExpertRank enables Ask.com to understand each person’s needs and provide them with what they want, faster.
More Information, Elegantly Displayed, All On One Page
Ask3D’s innovative three-panel design displays more customized results, taken from the best range of content available on the Web, all on one page. Representing the three dimensions of search, Ask3D’s panels include:
– “Query Expression†in the left panel. This panel serves as the search “control panel,†where people can quickly refine their search without ever having to leave the page by offering automatic suggestions to help narrow, expand or find related search terms. This service, called “Zoom Related Search,†is the number one most-used feature on Ask.com and relied on for more than 30 percent of all searches;
– “Results†within the center panel. Here, people can find their primary search results with links to Web pages and immediately preview sites directly from the results page by using an upgraded “Binoculars†feature, saving significant time and effort. Binoculars let people preview a Web page and are now 50 percent larger and faster than before. They also offer information such as the number of pop-ups on a given site, whether or not a site is Flash-based, and the amount of time it will take a site to load on a 56K connection. The top of this panel also shows the top Smart Answer, which provides quick snippets of information to help people get what they need, faster;
– “Content†within the right panel. This panel provides people with valuable information that goes beyond standard links to Web pages. The right panel offers a wide variety of content including images, news items, blogs, weather, time, videos and music clips. People can even preview videos and listen to music clips, right from the results page. Where most other major search engines serve ads in this area, Ask3D delivers even more content and continues to offer the fewest number of ads on a page.
Enhancing the Search Experience with New Innovations
Ask3D offers people additional new tools and features to make their search experience faster and easier:
– An All-New Homepage. Ask.com has a new homepage and offers customizable backgrounds that let people choose from a variety of designs to personalize their search experience. This summer, people will be able to upload their own images to customize their backgrounds even further. The new Ask.com also now features bold icons on the homepage to make it easier for people to search for specific content such as images, news and blogs. Additionally, Ask3D now offers search suggestions to help people more easily find what they need.
– See and Hear More, Right From the Results Page. People can now see video previews, listen to music clips, or even search through specific content such as images and news, all from the main results page. By simply hovering a mouse over video images, people can now preview video clips without having to navigate away from the page. People can listen to a music clip by simply clicking on the name of a song within the Ask3D results page. Also, Ask3D offers an image rollover feature, which enlarges an image so that people can see it in more detail.
– Location-Based Results. Ask3D now offers Smart Answer search results based on a person’s location. When people use Ask3D to search for “Starbucks,†they will see the locations nearest to them. When searching for “Gwen Stefani,†Ask3D lets people know when she is performing locally.
– Introducing Video Search. Now on Ask.com, people can find their favorite videos and preview clips right from the search results page. People can also filter results by video types, such as Flash, QuickTime and RealPlayer, or by length.
– Finding Images, Faster. With new filtering capabilities, people can now sort images by a wide range of categories including size, Buddy Icons, color, black and white and various media types.
For a complete list of features at Ask.com, please go to: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/site_features.shtml
June 5th, 2007
Yahoo! today announced the Yahoo! Search Marketing Commercial API Program, which provides businesses and developers of all sizes free, open access to the “Panama” search marketing application program interfaces (APIs). Through this program, advertisers, developers and commercial partners including ad agencies and technology providers can easily build upon Yahoo!’s core search marketing technologies to enhance their existing business offerings or create brand new search marketing tools and applications. In addition, the program provides a range of value-added services to help commercial partners gain greater insight into Yahoo!’s search marketing product roadmap and fully leverage Yahoo! Search Marketing’s APIs for their clients.
The program provides free access to Yahoo! Search Marketing’s robust and scalable APIs, and offers growing businesses optional fee-based services to accommodate their wide ranging needs. These services can be customized to include significant technical support, product roadmap visibility and co-marketing services to provide open, reliable partnership support to companies creating and selling commercial advertising applications.
The three levels of commercial partnership include:
Basic - Designed for small advertising agencies and early stage technology companies. Provides free access to the Panama platform and technical support, and leverages the Yahoo! commercial brand to develop and launch applications in the market.
Advanced - Designed for fast growing technology companies and mid-size advertising agencies. Provides access to the Panama platform, dedicated technical account management support, service level commitments and listing in partner application directory.
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Elite - Designed for leading technology companies and large advertising agencies. Enables these partners to leverage the Panama platform, resources and brand via regular business review, product council, roadmap coordination and joint marketing activities. Early participants in the Elite tier include Efficient Frontier, Omniture, SearchIgnite and The Search Agency.
Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Commercial API Program is immediately available to agencies, technology providers, search engine marketing firms and developers through the Yahoo! account management team or by visiting: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/api.
June 4th, 2007
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