Archive for July, 2007
Google today announced the expansion of the size and the scope of its Google Print Adsâ„¢ advertising initiative. The program started in November 2006 with a test that included 50 newspapers and a small group of advertisers. Since then the program has grown to more than 225 newspapers representing 32 of the top 35 DMAs and a combined circulation of almost 30 million. Participating newspaper publishers include E.W. Scripps, Freedom Communications, Hearst Newspapers, GateHouse Media, Gannett, MediaNews Group, The New York Times, The Seattle Times Company, Tribune Publishing, and Washington Post among others. In addition, Google Print Ads is now available to hundreds of thousands of United States-based advertisers who currently have a Google AdWordsâ„¢ account.
Google Print Ads enables agencies and advertisers of all sizes to easily plan and buy traditional newspaper media in both national and local newspapers within a single, web-enabled interface. The platform enables marketers to reach new audiences in ways that are relevant for newspaper readers and cost-efficient for advertisers and publishers. And newspaper publishers can increase their bottom line by adding new customers from Google’s network of advertisers, many of whom are new to newspaper advertising. Newspaper publishers will continue to work directly with their loyal base of advertising customers.
Google Print Ads (http://www.google.com/adwords/printads) is an extension of AdWords that is designed to bring new efficiency and accountability to the buying and selling of print media. Advertisers and agencies access Google Print Ads through the AdWords interface and interactively plan a targeted media buy-in up to hundreds of newspapers across the United States. Once they have identified target newspapers, they enter a bid for the available ad space and upload a creative. Newspaper publishers then view the bids, and either approve or reject them, with an option to provide direct feedback to the advertisers. Detailed reports and electronic tear-sheets provide accountability, and Google automates billing and payments for further transactional efficiency. By creating this dynamic and transparent two-way buying and selling process, Google Print Ads gives flexibility and control to both the publisher and the advertiser.
Google also announced today that it has renewed its agreement with Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive to deliver search results, search and contextually targeted advertising to Washingtonpost.com readers. Google’s AdSense™ service (http://www.google.com/adsense) allows newspaper publishers to easily and effectively monetize their websites by connecting them to Google’s network of hundreds of thousands of advertisers. With text, display and video formats, advertisers can communicate with potential customers in rich and dynamic ways and specifically target newspaper websites through the AdSense site targeting feature.
July 18th, 2007
Google today announced Google Custom Searchâ„¢ Business Edition, a simple and inexpensive way for small businesses to add Google search to their websites. In three simple steps, businesses can sign up online for the hosted service, and in less than 10 minutes customers and visitors are able to search their site using the power of Google’s search technology, for more relevant results.
“Millions of businesses have a web presence but offer users no ability to search their site,” said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager, Google Enterprise. “While many of these businesses invest in search advertising and search engine optimization to help customers find their business, customers are left on their own to navigate content once they land on a site. As Google continues to make search technology more accessible to businesses of all sizes — first with our appliances and now with hosted search services — we are reducing the hurdles of cost, complexity and time so that small businesses can help customers find what they need every step of the way.”
To set up the Custom Search Business Edition, businesses simply:
- Identify the site(s) to search, and select either all or selective searching of content
- Add the search box and customize the appearance by adding logo and matching the site’s look and feel
- Further customize search results with refinements that reflect site content (such as sectional groupings)
“The number of referrals generated to our homeowner base has increased by approximately 30 percent, and at the same time, the number of customer service requests has also significantly decreased,” said Andy Steggles, president of Holiday Home Rental, an online directory of 25,000 holiday rental homes with more than 150,000 pages of content. “The results have been overwhelming. The newly implemented Google search tool truly enriches the user experience by giving them the power to simply think and type their search parameters, which propels them to a more accurate and meaningful result set.”
With the Custom Search Business Edition, small businesses get:
- Site search hosted by Google, eliminating the need to install and maintain their own technology
- Power and reliability of Google’s infrastructure
- Relevant results and sub-second query response times characteristic of Google.com
- Ability to easily set up, purchase, and manage results online
- Full customization of search results available through an XML API
- Reporting features that give insight into visitor behaviors
- Options for email and phone support available through the Google Enterprise group
- Choice about whether to include ads or not
Custom Search Business Edition starts at $100 a year for searching up to 5,000 pages, and extends to $500/year for up to 50,000 pages. Larger volumes of pages are supported through Google’s enterprise sales group. The Custom Search Business Edition builds on the Google Custom Search Engine (a hosted search solution introduced in October 2006) by adding business integration features through an XML API, the option to turn off ads, a more customized look and feel, as well as email and phone support.
The Custom Search Business Edition joins other search offerings from the Google enterprise group including the Google Search Appliance and Google Mini, both of which offer additional control over crawl depth and timing, as well as secure access to internal documents.
July 17th, 2007
comScore today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In June 2007, Google Sites maintained its spot atop the rankings with 49.5 percent of the U.S. search market. Yahoo! Sites captured second place with 25.1 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (13.2 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.2 percent).
- Americans conducted 8.0 billion searches online in June, up 6 percent versus May and up 26 percent versus June 2006.
- Google Sites led the pack with 4.0 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), Ask Network (403 million), and Time Warner Network (341 million). Despite declining in search market share in June, both Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites enjoyed increases in search query volume.
- Microsoft Sites experienced a significant increase in search query volume (up 36 percent) and search market share (up 2.9 share points) in June, due in large part to Live Search Club, a program launched by Microsoft in late May to engage and reward users of Live Search.
July 17th, 2007
Microsoft® Office Live today announced that it is adding Ask Sponsored Listings to its adManager Beta search advertising service. adManager enables small businesses to purchase and manage search-based keyword advertising easily and affordably directly from the Microsoft Office Live platform. Ask Sponsored Listings joins the MSN® network and Live Search as distribution sources for Microsoft Office Live customers’ search ads.
Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) is an automated, open-auction system that allows search marketers to purchase, manage and optimize pay-per-click and contextual advertising campaigns on the ASL publisher network, including Ask.com.
As more consumers are making purchase decisions online, search marketing has emerged as a $15.8 billion global industry, and experts expect it to grow to $44.5 billion over the next five years. Search is also the second most commonly used application on the Web, with 550 million searches daily in the United States, according to Piper Jaffray & Co.* Local search is also catching on as more businesses want to be able to target their ads to a specific region; in 2006, local search accounted for approximately 15 percent of total online ad spending.** adManager is heeding these trends by offering small businesses a solution to develop a national or locally targeted search-engine advertising campaign in no time that can be managed across multiple search engines.
“We are very excited about the integration of Ask Sponsored Listings, as this provides more options for our small businesses to market their companies and attract new customers,†said Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft Office Live. “Adding Ask Sponsored Listings to our adManager service gets us one step closer to our goal of providing small businesses with an all-inclusive search engine marketing service.â€
Cetinok continued, “Many small businesses feel that search engine marketing is a complicated and expensive process, and we want to demonstrate to our customers, especially those without a lot of time or budget, that pay-per-click advertising on adManager can be simple and affordable. adManager will help our small businesses promote their companies to the millions out there using the Internet to search for products and services.â€
James Speer, general manager of search marketing at IAC Advertising Solutions, said, “The Ask Sponsored Listings search advertising network reaches over 59 million monthly unique users. The integration of Ask Sponsored Listings with Microsoft Office Live makes it easy for marketers to extend their pay-per-click ad campaigns to our publisher network.â€
Search ads are text-based ads displayed on a search results page. They look very similar to search results displayed in the main body of the page; however, they are labeled as advertisements. To start the search engine marketing process, businesses can bid on keywords related to their services and products; their ad then has the potential of appearing when customers submit keyword searches on the Internet. Advertisers are charged only when their ad is clicked, which makes search advertising highly efficient.
adManager facilitates the pay-per-click advertising process for small businesses. Once a small business sets up an account with adManager, it can immediately select keywords to create its ads and set its bid amounts. adManager will work within the company’s budget, as well as target the campaign at the local or national level. In addition, the service will show results through detailed reports that describe which keywords are driving customers to the advertiser’s Web site.
July 17th, 2007
Google announced some new additions to their Webmaster Tools:
“Given helpful suggestions from our discussion group, we’ve improved feedback for sitemaps in Webmaster Tools. Now, minor problems in a sitemap will be reported as “warnings,” and will appear instead of, or in addition to, more serious “errors.” (Previously all problems were listed as errors.) Warnings allow us to provide feedback on portions of your sitemap that may be confusing or inaccurate, while saving the real “error” alarm for problems that make your sitemap completely unreadable. We hope the additional information makes it even easier to share your sitemaps with Google.
The new set of warnings includes many problems that we had previously classified as errors, including the “incorrect namespace” and “invalid date” examples shown in the screenshot above. We also crawl a sample of the URLs listed in your sitemap and report warnings if the Googlebot runs into any trouble with them. These warnings might suggest a widespread problem with your site that warrants further investigation, such as a stale sitemap or a misconfigured robots.txt file.”
July 16th, 2007
Yahoo! and Right Media Inc., creator of the Right Media Exchange, today announced that Yahoo!’s acquisition of Right Media has been completed.
“We are pleased to have closed our Right Media acquisition so quickly and are excited to welcome Right Media’s talented employees to the Yahoo! family,” said Jerry Yang, CEO and co-founder, Yahoo! Inc. “We believe Right Media will be a perfect complement to our industry leading advertising tools and capabilities and help Yahoo! continue to transform how advertisers and publishers connect to their target audiences.”
The acquisition follows Yahoo!’s 20 percent strategic investment in Right Media in October 2006. Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! has acquired the remaining equity interest in Right Media for approximately $650 million.
“We couldn’t be happier than to have found a home with Yahoo!, and look forward to working with Yahoo! as we continue to build the industry’s most open, accessible and vibrant advertising ecosystem,” said Michael Walrath, CEO and founder of Right Media.
Michael Walrath will assume the role of senior vice president of Right Media Exchange, reporting to Yahoo!’s President, Susan Decker.
July 13th, 2007
It works like this: When you do a search on Yahoo!, you’ll automatically be given suggestions based on what you have typed – as you’re typing. So, not only does this limit the number of words you need to type into a query, it may also present similar queries to shorten your searching time and get to what you’re looking for quicker. Search Suggest isn’t new, just new to Yahoo.com. Google offers a similar search under the name Google Suggest too.
The ”Suggest feature” is very easy to use – let’s say you are watching TV and wonder what song is in the background of a commercial that just came on. Problem is that you only remember part of the company name, “journey diamond”. You type it into the new search box, and “journey diamond jewelry commercial song” is suggested right away – problem solved. Of course, the assistance it provides when you attempt to find some new bicycle tires, “mavic ksyrium” just after the first few letters, “mavic k” is much appreciated.
The nice thing about the suggestions is that they’re not obtrusive, so if you already know what you’re searching for, you can overlook the suggestions without them getting in your way. But, when you experience those brain dead moments like we all do, it’s the type of feature that just might get things moving again. If you don’t like change, you can turn it off altogether by simply selecting “disable” in the bottom right corner of the drop down menu. And, if you’re having regrets, you can reinstall it by selecting “more” above the search box.
July 12th, 2007
Today Google officially released a new feature of Google Maps that enables users to layer valuable third-party information directly on Google Maps with a single click and to save these customized maps to their personal library. These mini-applications, called Mapplets, make it possible for users to view and layer maps containing information such as real estate listings, jogging trails, events and photos.
For example, users who are planning a vacation can now view and layer maps of hotel availability, regional weather forecasts, gas prices and other useful information directly in Google Maps. Once they have created their custom map, they can create their own personalized itinerary by saving the results, adding their own notes, and putting it on a map to share with family and friends. Users looking for a new home can not only search real estate listings, but they can also layer their findings over transit maps and crime statistics to further refine their search.
These new tools can be found in the Google Maps Directory. The directory is accessed by clicking on the “Add content” link in the “My Maps” tab in Google Maps. Users simply click on the “Add it to Maps” buttons within the directory to bookmark relevant content.
Over 100 Mapplets are currently featured in the Google Maps Directory:
- Hotel pricing and availability from Orbitz and Booking.com
- Live, local weather conditions and traffic cameras from WeatherBug
- Worldwide webcams from Webcams.travel
- Things to do and local events from Zvents
- Gas prices from GasBuddy.com
Google has also developed several Mapplets:
- Google Real Estate Search — Find rentals and homes for sale in the US; this Mapplet draws from listings in Google Base
- YouTube Videos — Watch recently uploaded YouTube videos from around the globe
- Photos from Panoramio — See photos of locations from Panoramio.com while you browse Google Maps
These tools are built using the Google Mapplets platform, which enables any developer to create mini map applications that overlay their content on Google Maps and showcase their services to millions of Google users. Developers can find more information on authoring Mapplets here: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/
This new functionality is available for Google Maps users in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. It is available in the following languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian and Chinese (TW).
July 11th, 2007
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