The study was conducted by cross-channel analytics provider, RevTrax, over a period of two years between August 2009 and August 2011 across hundreds of merchant outlets and covered millions of transactions.

The process followed was quite simple. When a paid search ad was displayed to a consumer, it led to a printable or mobile landing page that had a coupon with a unique barcode. The consumer could redeem this coupon by going to a physical store. The barcode on the coupon could be used to track the search activity that led to the engagement of the consumer, finally leading to redemption of the coupon. This system made use of direct marketing to record and analyse the effect of variables on the sale of goods.

It was found that for every $1 generated online by the ad, the retailer recorded a sale of about $6 offline (in store purchases). This indicates that retailers would be wise to concentrate on paid search ads as they also increase offline sales.

On average, a click on a paid search ad generated approximately $15 of in-store revenue, with some
merchants seeing as much as $28 of in-store revenue. Approximately 9% of clicks on a paid search ad generated an in-store sale.

While these findings were true for large businesses with several physical stores, smaller businesses would have to test the effectiveness of this system further.

It is also true that large retailers can afford to lose margins as a marketing expense and then make up for the losses through increased market share.

Online retailers who do not come up with interesting coupons are likely to lose out on market share, as coupons become more popular among online customers.

This is a great opportunity for marketers of various offline services such as restaurants and theaters to concentrate on online ads to improve their market share.

Google highlights three important aspects that currently characterise the Web scenario:

1. The number of online users are growing
2. The number of mobile phone subscribers will double in a few years
3. The amount of digital information exchanged worldwide is destined to see a huge growth too.

During the event, Google representatives spoke in detail about these 3 aspects, and how developing countries are reacting to changes.

The UK is believed to benefit from this growth. The Internet contributes to 7% of the UK’s GDP, with a growth of over 10% each year (this, of course pales in comparison to Chinese growth levels, which are massive!)

The Internet levels the playing field, representing a great benefit for SMEs, which can now effectively compete with big players.

Google+ In The Ad Ecosystem

Presenters at the even went to pains to point out that Google+ is not just a platform. It is a project. Their mission is to organise information and make it more accessible. Google+’s 40 million users help make this mission more personal.

Google+ is also aimed at engaging people with brands, through the set up of a Google+ profile. Once people add your business to their circle, you can also add them to any circle and segment your audience.

Intel directly asks which circle you belong to, so as to target the right campaign to the right consumers.

The 1+ button was confirmed to affect ranking. The extent of the effect remains unknown as Google employees continue to dodge direct questions about it.

AdWords Express

Made for businesses that are not yet ready for Adwords – 40% of small businesses do not have a website – AdWords Express is simple to set-up and easy to manage.

Google are keen to drive adoption of the new system. They even offered to reward a credit of ₤250 to all agencies that bring in five new clients to AdWords Express by the end of the year.

The benefits of AdWords Express are as follows:

• Targeted – specific to the area where the business operates
• Simple – no need to create /manage campaigns
• Measurable
• Eligibility – no need to have a website

Tips and tricks for Insights:

Let’s assume that faster is better – Google Instant saves a lot of time in the long term.

In Google Images you can drop images into the search box to give similar related results on search.

Google Insights for Search – You can find the most searched terms in a certain period in a specific location. Also you can analyse the evolution of a specific KW during a concrete period.

Ad Planner gives you insights about the audience that uses a specific website, so you can target your audience accurately.

Mobile On the Rise

The Smartphone and mobile markets are growing fast. Mobile is transforming the retail market. This is because user reviews have a huge impact on customer decisions and behaviour.

• It’s a good practice to set a mobile-only campaign, as it provides better click-through rates and easier tracking.
• Ads with phone numbers included get an average 6% to 8% higher CTR!
• Mobile is local – More than 1 in 3 searches in mobile are local.
• It is advisable that for mobile campaigns keywords should be shorter.
• Top spots matter more on mobiles than they do on desktops
• Another good practice is to set location extensions. One should also be mindful of the huge power of CTC and site links.
• The audience spends only 5% of their online time on Search. Display is growing a lot and will be growing even faster.

4 top tips for mobile advertising:

1. Prioritise re-marketing and keyword contextual advertising
2. Run both display and text format
3. Use exclusions to control efficiency
4. Frequency cap & ad scheduling

Tips and tricks for measurement:

The 3 Be’s

1. Be found
2. Be engaging
3. Be accountable

You definitely need to have goals to measure against.

Mobile sites / apps are a huge opportunity that most small businesses are losing.

1 second delay in page load causes a 7% loss of conversions, 11% fewer page views and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

Improving Ad Campaign Performance

Page Speed Online – pagespeed.googlelabs.com – check there for audit & suggestions.

Real-time (Beta) – New on Analytics

Flow visualization – user path graph – New on Analytics

Tips and tricks for driving conversions:

• Enhanced CPC
• Conversions Optimizer
• Focus on optimising conversions
• Use automated rules

Back in 2004, when Google and online shopping started growing, the trend started becoming visible. Since then, the volume of searches for ‘costumes’ around the Halloween period have spiked higher and higher, year upon year.

Comparative volume of searches for ‘Costume’ in 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011

A walk down the English High Street today reflects the growing popularity of what was once considered to be a solely American “festival”. Similarly, the number of children and adults dressing up on Halloween day is also growing steadily.

If the numbers to date are anything to go by, 2011 seems on its way to become the biggest ever day for online fancy dress retailers in the UK. Considering the corresponding search volume in October 2010, this means that over11 million searches for ‘costumes’ will be carried out in the UK during the month of October 2011 alone.

Spikes in search volumes around this period aren’t limited to regular Web search. Image searches spike even more sharply in the 2nd and 3rd weeks of October and product searches also get bumped up a good bit from the last week of September till the 3rd week of October.

As more retailers rush to capitalise on the opportunity, costs per click also spike during the same time. Recognised brands, retailers with guaranteed delivery and those with popular costumes in stock are the most likely winners in such a situation.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and most other online advertising platforms have very strict editorial policies that prohibit the advertising of narcotics. AdWords’ editorial policy prohibits the promotion of drugs, drug paraphernalia and aids to pass drug tests. This includes drug accessories, drugs, and herbal drugs.

The medical marijuana industry is a multi-billion dollar industry in itself, and now, the Medical Cannabis Network, (MCN) is launching an online advertising opportunity in the form of a site called Cheeba.com.

“MCN was created to fill the gaps in the marijuana industry, and what we’ve been seeing over the years is that cannabis-based businesses are continually denied services from online ad networks,” said Jason Draizin, Chairman and CEO of MCN.

Cheeba.com will be the first search engine to allow users to search the entire database of medical marijuana related products. It will function as an advertising platform for all legal marijuana-based products and companies. It will also introduce a keyword-based advertising platform similar to Google AdWords.

Medical marijuana is legal in California and several other states in the USA. The new search engine will provide an opportunity for dispensaries and marijuana doctors as well as ancillary businesses such as law firms, consumer goods providers and educational institutions that want to target Americans who favour the legalisation of marijuana.

A blog post on the RKGBlog contained a screenshot of ads being displayed within the organic search results.

The ads have been placed along with the organic (unpaid) listing results. The word “Ad” is placed on the right hand side of the sponsored result. However, it is not very prominent and can easily be missed.

Image courtesy RKG: Bing displaying ads within organic search engine results

In the past, Yahoo! and a handful of second-tier search engines had tried a service called “paid inclusion”, whereby ads were included in the search results, but there were no ranking factors. Yahoo! withdrew the service in 2009, due to its controversial nature.

Popular blogger Danny Sullivan had also voiced disapproval of Google using paid inclusion in their search results.

Currently, Google does include ads within their organic search results, but they are highlighted in a different colour above the organic results, differentiating them from the organic results and making the fact that they’re ads more obvious than the marking that Bing is using.

This format is currently in the testing stage and is shown only to a few users. A Microsoft spokesperson has said, “We’re constantly testing and experimenting on Bing, and with that, we carefully measure user engagement and reaction to these changes. We have nothing further to share at this time.”

If Microsoft does choose to go forward and roll this format out worldwide, it could have serious ramifications. For one, click-through rates on Bing ads are likely to rise. If Google feels the pressure and chooses to do something similar, AdWords advertisers could benefit greatly while the value of SEO could fall.

schema.org

This initiative will make it possible for publishers to put in structured markup on their web pages in order to help the search engines index their sites better and hence deliver better search results to users.

Schemas are essentially common sets of tags used to denote detailed data to be used to describe the publisher’s product.

Since Bing, Google and Yahoo! have initiated this protocol jointly, it will make it easier for the publisher to provide this data to the main search engines. In other words, Schema.org works as a one stop shop for webmasters to add in the most search engine friendly markup for data contained on their web pages.

Google had already introduced a similar service, called rich snippets, a couple of years ago. This service allowed users to receive non-textual information such as reviews, personal profiles, local business information or details about the product they were searching, in addition to the regular plain text snippet that accompanies each organic search listing.

Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo! have made a combined effort to improve their users’ search experience, it should pay rich dividends to all concerned – the user, the publisher and the search engine as well.

In the past, the major search engines had come together in 2006 to provide a common standard to webmasters for sitemaps.

Until now, ad targeting was done by adding specific target sites to a list of Managed Placements or with the help of keywords. Whenever a keyword appeared on a webpage, ads from advertisers targeting that keyword or related keywords were displayed. But now, it will be possible to target ads not only in relation to particular sites or  keyword themes, but also in relation to a much broader topic or category.

The new AdWords targeting option will look at all the words on the web page in order to decide what the topic is about, rather than depending on a single keyword. Ads will now be displayed more often and will reach a wider audience.

Google already provides a list of 1,750 topics and sub-topics for advertisers to choose from.

Google AdWords choice of topics for ad targeting

Even if ads displayed in relation to a broad topic do not result in a direct sale, they can build awareness of the product being advertised, which is the first step towards making a sale. This display advertising option makes it a lot easier for advertisers to target wide audiences for branding, rather than having to list thousands of placements or rely on contextual keyword targeting.

Advertisers can use both the keyword and topic-based targeting methods. They can also specifically exclude certain topics or sub-topics from their campaigns.

This method of targeting is available for all ad formats including text ads, banner ads and video ads. Advertisers will also be able to decide, whether they wants to pay on a cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis.

The accusations have come from a researcher, Ben Edelman, who is an associate professor with the Harvard Business School. He carried out a study titled ‘Measuring Bias In Organic Web Search’. The study was conducted last August along with another Harvard professor, Benjamin Lockwood. A report on the study can be viewed at:

www.benedelman.org/searchbias/

Edelman claims that Google gives much more weight to its own sites and products than is deserved. He also found that Bing search results were more fair and reliable.

For instance, when the term ‘email’ was searched, the results gave Gmail as the top-ranked email site, and similarly, YouTube was the highest ranked site for the search term ‘video’.

Google is already facing enquiries by the European Commission and the Attorney General of Texas, regarding claims of manipulation of search results.

Google has strongly refuted the claims made by Edelman, and said, “Mr. Edelman is a longtime paid consultant for Microsoft, so it’s no surprise that he would construct a highly biased test that his sponsor would pass and that Google would fail,”

A spokesperson for the search engine has added, “Google never artificially favours our own services in our organic web search results, and we perform extensive user testing to ensure that search results are ranked in a way that provides users with the most useful answer.”

A number of other websites and bloggers have also spoken in favour of the authenticity of Google results.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has said, “Statistics can easily be turned to whatever you want them to be. I feel like Edelman is turning his study into the most negative view possible.”

The Huffington Post has also defended Google saying that the study size (32 search terms) is too small a sample. They also add that while favouritism should remain a concern, Google runs on an algorithm, which favours relevant results over irrelevant ones.

One needs to keep in mind the fact that since Google is the market leader with a huge majority, its own sites and products are bound to be more popular than most others and hence deemed more relevant and ranked higher.

While promoting one’s own product is not necessarily a crime, anti-trust commissions in Europe and the U.S.A.  might consider this fair grounds for an investigation if someone complain that Google was abusing its dominant position in search to push its own products.

Microsoft had to separate Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player sufficiently from the Windows operating system, as a result of a similar anti-trust investigation. Could Google face a similar fate?

During a recent presentation held in New York, she has stated that she considers Facebook to be an even bigger competitor of Yahoo! than Google.

During the presentation she said, “Our greatest competitor probably is Facebook, more so than Google. They’re a hot site, but there’s room for more than one of anything.”

So far there has been no comment on the subject from Google or Facebook.

Bartz had been brought in as CEO of Yahoo! to help salvage the company, which had been going through a particularly bad phase. Since then she has made several changes and undertaken cost cutting measures such as cutting out of non-performing products, to help cut costs.

Yahoo! has also recently started a search deal with Microsoft which allows Microsoft to handle the search results, while Yahoo! focuses on advertising, thus bringing in more revenue.

She has also laid stress on sectors like news and sports which always attract a lot of users. She has also focused on acquiring companies which can bring along users, content and engineering technology to help Yahoo! compete with popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

In fact Bartz has also said that Yahoo! had considered buying over Facebook for a sum of $1 billion. While no such take over took place, the tables seem to have turned now.

While Yahoo! currently has a market capitalization of $22.1 billion, Facebook, which now has over 500 million users, is valued at $40 billion according to SharePost Inc. a private share-trading company. Bartz has said that as of now, Yahoo! has no plans of going private.

When users look up data on words like ‘gay’ and ‘sex’ they do not receive any results. There is no data available for these search terms. However, they do show data for the word ‘lesbian’ and ‘homosexual’.

Yahoo! Search Clues for “Gay” and “Lesbian”

It is, of course, possible that users may assume that these terms have been avoided deliberately with a view to maintaining a family atmosphere, where people need not be embarrassed by the availability of certain search words that have a sexual connotation.

While this attitude itself is quite surprising in this day and age, what is even more surprising is the fact that words such as ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’ are very much present.

It is not known whether this act on the part of Yahoo! was accidental or intentional. However, once this fact becomes known to certain sections of users, it may lead to some protests regarding discrimination.

Not The Only Prude

Yahoo! Clues is certainly not the first to avoid the use of certain words that may suggest adult content. In the past, Google Instant, Google Trends and Apple have also disallowed the use of words indicating sexual context without an express confirmation from the user that they wish to view non-family-safe content.

When a correspondent from ZDNet contacted Yahoo! about these omissions, they received a reply to the effect that Yahoo! Clues was still in the beta testing stage and their data is not yet comprehensive. New search terms and data are likely to be added in due course. Yahoo! officials refused to confirm or deny whether terms such as ‘gay’ and ‘sex’ would eventually be included.

Until now, Google provided most AdWords specialist agencies, with a dedicated contact person or account manager, who would provide support to the agency and act as a single point of contact to answer questions regarding Google AdWords campaigns that may arise from time to time.

Some of the most commonly asked questions are about payment options, quality score, the reason why an ad did not show up and AdWords advertising policy. Whenever a supported agency faced any problem with the AdWords accounts they managed, they could contact their account manager and the account manager would personally attend to these queries and help solve them.

The number of agencies using Google AdWords is increasing rapidly. While this is a good thing for Google, it also means that they have to improve their infrastructure in order to provide support to all of these agencies.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for Google’s current agency management team in Dublin to provide each agency with a specific contact person. So, instead of investing money into recruiting more account managers, Google has decided to take a giant step backwards and return to their previous model of poor support.

Making Cuts Without Making A Big Deal Of It

As with any negative development, Google has not made a big announcement about this change to their agency support structure. Instead, they’ve sent an email and when questioned about the change, have provided scripted answers about “striving to improve the way agencies are supported” and having “invested heavily in improving” the agency online support resources.

Effective 1st January 2011, the AdWords Support System will work in a call centre like manner, where the caller from any agency will be assigned to any one of many agents. The agent should be able to answer most of the questions raised by callers but will not have any history or prior understanding of the agency’s client accounts.

Low Level Support

An Agency Help Center has also been created to provide agency-specific self-service. Educational materials to help agencies manage their client accounts have also been devised. A Google Agencies programme will also be launched soon. Those who sign up for it will receive educational information and newsletters in this context.

From January onwards, most agencies will have to visit the Contact Us page in the AdWords Help Center. The technical support team will provide responses in due course. As in the past, this could mean waiting for days before getting any sort of response back from Google. The support numbers will also remain active, except that instead of dialling an account manager’s extension, the caller will only have the option to enter their MCC (My Client Centre) account number.

Display ad on Image Search

Google Image Search was redesigned a few months ago. At that time, they introduced a new ad format called Image Search Ads. This format included a thumbnail image accompanying a basic text ad. The feature has performed well and advertisers have reported satisfactory results. Users of the feature also have reason to be happy as the search results to their queries are accompanied by relevant commercial content.

In order to extend this service further, Google has now expanded the image ads format. Advertisers will now be able to reach a larger audience with engaging ads that would help to create both brand awareness as well as improve sales.

Display ads on Google Image Search will work in the same manner as they do elsewhere on the Google Display Network. Depending on the search being conducted, “relevant” display ads will be shown to users.

To start using this facility, advertisers have to use the AdWords Placement Targeting Tool to target Google Images and then select the category of searches on which they would like to advertise. Advertisers can either upload their own leaderboard ads (sized 728 x 90 pixels) or create new ones with the help of Google’s ad builder.

According to comScore, the average Internet user in the U.S. has seen about 6,000 display ads in the third quarter of 2010 alone. This new feature will add a significant volume of ad impressions to that number. Advertisers won’t mind, though, as it will help them reach a new potential audience.

At present, display ads on Google Images are shown only on a few queries in the U.S. and U.K. but the service will be expanded in due course.

Microsoft adCenter provides paid search results for Yahoo! Search and Bing, and their premium partners in the U.S. and Canada. Bing supplies the organic search results for Yahoo! Search.

The combined offering allows advertisers to reach a far greater audience with a single ad buy than they could before the alliance took place.

Since this arrangement has been successful – as successful as it could get in the presence of Google – in the U.S. and Canada, Microsoft and Yahoo! are now contemplating a similar formula in other regions. They intend to start this facility early next year in certain markets within Europe, such as the U.K., France and Ireland. They hope to be able to extend this service to all of Europe by the end of 2012.

Advertisers have been advised to continue to manage their Microsoft adCenter accounts with their existing support contacts as the holiday season approaches.

Once Microsoft and Yahoo! are ready to roll out their new facility in Europe next year, they will inform advertisers about the changes 3 months before the transition actually takes place.

While the combined market share of Yahoo! and Bing in the USA is more than 25%, the two search engines account for almost nothing in most of Europe. Most advertisers do not even consider advertising on either platform, and even when they do, impressions and click volumes are found to be dismal. The search alliance might get some interest, mostly out of curiosity and the hope for a serious Google replacement, but it is unlikely to make any significant impact.

Nevertheless, advertisers who do use the service have been advised to keep their contact preferences in ‘My Settings’ up to date, in order to receive regular updates and avoid inconvenience of any kind.

The new feature, called AdWords Call Metrics, is a combination of Google Voice and AdWords. At its core, the service is an integrated call tracking facility for AdWords campaigns.

With this feature, a unique telephone number is assigned to each online ad campaign targeting desktop computers as well as on smartphone devices. Ads will be displayed along with this telephone number.

AdWords ad with Call Metrics number

When users calls on that telephone number, they are automatically transferred to the advertiser’s business and the call is recorded by AdWords.

During the initial beta testing of this feature, advertisers found that they could track a significant percentage of calls that translated into a purchase, which would otherwise not have been attributed to sales originating through AdWords ads.

At present, the AdWords records of these calls will only provide the number of calls received and the duration of these calls. The caller’s area code will also start being reporting in due course of time. These details will help advertisers further optimise their ad campaigns with a more accurate measure of ROI.

AdWords- reporting Call Metrics for campaigns

At present this call metrics feature will be free, but in future, it will be chargeable. The exact extent of benefit of this feature to the advertiser can be judged only after the charges for this feature have been finalised.

Although this call tracking service has only just been introduced by Google, similar facilities are already available through a number of other companies.

AdWords Call Metrics is currently available only to a few advertisers in the U.S. and it will be some months before it is available to all advertisers.

The study, conducted by Mari-Carmen Marcos a professor and Cristina González-Caro a PhD student at the university, classifies search queries into 4 categories:

1. Informational – where the user looks for information such as an address or definition of a term
2. Navigational – where the user searches for a website or brand instead of typing its URL in the browser
3. Transactional – when the user wants to conduct a transaction such as booking a ticket
4. Multimedia – where the user searches for a photo or video

58 participants were studied. The subjects were between 18 to 55 years of age. 25 were male and 33 were female.

Heat maps showing user fixations on Google results for Informational v Transactional queries

When searching for information, the users spent 53% of the time on a page looking at snippets, 34% of the time looking at the title and 13% of the time on the URL. These users were found not to be distracted by the presence of images on the search results page.

For navigational search queries, the fixation times were similar to informational queries, with 48% of the time on the page devoted to snippets, 33% to titles and a slightly higher, 15% to the URLs. About 5% of the time was spent on images in these search results.

Most of the attention was centred on the image itself on search results for a multimedia query. 71% of the time on an image search results page was spent looking at the images themselves.

Participants of the study were found to spend much more time looking at sponsored links when the query was of a transactional nature. Nevertheless, the number of looks or fixations on sponsored links was still found to be just 17% versus 82% on the organic results.

Percentage fixations (number and time) on organic v sponsored results

56% of the time on the transactional query’s search results page on the whole was spent looking at snippets, 28% on titles and a surprisingly high 20% on the URL. However, when considering just the sponsored links, the amount of time spent on the title was disproportionately much higher, commanding 43% of the time as against 28% for the snippet and 29% for the URL.

For search marketing professionals this means that a lot more attention should be paid to their ad headlines and display URLs.

Interestingly, that the number of actual fixations was found to be much higher for transactional queries (9.8%) than for informational (2.8% ) or navigational (5%) queries.

Sponsored results placed above the organic search results got a lot more attention (79%) than those in the right hand column (21%), which is not surprising.

Read the full eye-tracking study (Spanish PDF 2.28 MB)

Yahoo! started transitioning some of the back-end functions of Yahoo! Search to Microsoft last week and the transition is now complete. As a result of this, all English Web, image and video searches conducted on Yahoo! in the U.S.A. and Canada will now be powered by Microsoft Bing.

The search transition will take place in other countries in due course.

In the U.S. and Canada, searches conducted on Yahoo! now have a “Powered by Bing” indicator at the bottom of the search results page.

“Powered by Bing” written at the bottom of Yahoo! search results

However, Yahoo! features such as Search Assist and site filters will continue to be available. Yahoo! will also continue to support SearchMonkey, Site Explorer – the counter part of which has long been disabled by Microsoft since the days of Live Search – and the Yahoo! Developer Network.

Yahoo! is still working towards finalising the revenue model for Yahoo! Search BOSS and they will continue to offer new tools in future.

The transition between Yahoo! And Microsoft has gone very smoothly and it is hoped that the joint service could compete significantly with Google.

Enhanced CPC is an automated bidding feature that will make use of the keywords’ historical conversion rates to adjust the Max CPC bids on various keywords within a campaign. The Max CPC bids will thus be based on the likelihood of an ad actually converting into a sale.

It is expected that this new feature will help clients to lower their overall CPA, while at the same time increasing the number of conversions they receive.

When a client uses several different keywords within an ad campaign, as most advertisers do, the Enhanced CPC tool will consider which of these keywords have converted well in the past. The CPC for these keywords will be hiked by a maximum of 30% over the set Max CPC. On the other hand, keywords that have not performed too well will have their CPC lowered accordingly.

Unlike CPA bidding, where the advertiser sets a target cost per acquisition and AdWords then adjusts Max CPC bids without any CPC restrictions, the average CPC that the advertisers will pay for various keywords through Enhanced CPC will remain more or less the same as before, but the likelihood of conversions will increase, thus improving the ROI and also making it easier for the client to manage Max CPC bids more easily.

The Enhanced CPC feature will take into account various factors while deciding the new CPC. In addition to adjusting the CPC based on past performance of a keyword, the tool will also recognise variations or modifications to the keywords. Factors such as the user’s location, language settings, browser and operating system will also be taken into consideration while deciding the possibility of an ad converting into a sale.

Enhanced CPC bidding will be available to all advertisers without any restrictions such as the minimum number of conversions required per month to qualify for CPA bidding.

Bid management software providers face yet another threat from this new tool. The Enhanced CPC tool has the advantage of knowing a lot more information about the searcher than any bid management system could possibly know. However, as with all Google AdWords tools, this one too will eventually be aimed at driving more business for Google AdWords – albeit by making advertising on their system more profitable for the advertisers.

According, to the Business Insider, inside sources reveal that AOL is actually looking for a buyer in Microsoft. Even if these rumours prove to be false, anyone who gets the search deal would have an edge for an eventual takeover of the company.

The rumours could be based on the fact that Microsoft has for long been on the lookout for a company that can help boost their share in the search market.

Microsoft can certainly afford to buy over AOL. They would be able to merge several of their features, such as mail, search and maps. They would also acquire a lot of man power, which would help in future projects and ideas. Most importantly, though, they would manage to cut off a major source of revenue for Google and secure another small chunk of the search market.

Google currently has a search deal with AOL. The search giant is not likely to be interested in a buy out of the company. Their interest would only be in renewing the search deal. However, if push came to shove, they might buy AOL just to prevent Microsoft from getting it.

According to experts, Microsoft may wait for AOL’s quarterly results before finalising such a deal.

Users can share shopping search results in order to ask for a friend’s opinion while shopping online. The sharing options are visible only on the product reviews page, which can be reached by clicking on the “User Reviews” link on the Shopping search results.

Social sharing links on Bing Shopping

Sharing is enabled through Facebook and Twitter. Users can share the shopping search results by clicking on the Facebook, Twitter or email link and then typing any questions about the product.

Some question the utility of such a feature. Twitter users might not want all their followers to see their shopping-related queries. They might also not appreciate receiving advice and opinions from several of those followers or other advertisers with automated tweets set to respond to such shopping tweets.

Proponents of social search have always used the argument that the ability to get a friend or trusted person’s opinion before buying something would be invaluable. This new feature by Bing makes that argument a reality.

Neither Google nor Yahoo! currently offer users the option to share shopping search results. Microsoft might have yet another winner on their hands… if only more people would actually use Bing’s shopping search!

Data from the Yahoo! Toolbar across 50 million page views generated in March 2009 was analysed. Rsearchers, Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins found that users now spend only 21.4% of their online time on search activities.

The total time spent searching included 6.2% time spent on Web searches, 1.4% on multimedia searches, 1.4% on databases of items such as those found on eBay and Amazon.

In contrast to this, users spent 50% of their online time browsing and one-third of the time on communication.

5.3% of all pageviews were found to have a referral from Web searches, 1.4% from multimedia searches, 0.6% from database item searches, and 1.5% from other search query types. Thus, each category of search pageviews tends to result in around one follow-on click on average.

Experts at Yahoo! surmise that in the future, search needs to focus on gathering and understanding, and when appropriate, serving structured information.

It was observed that users are now much more dependent on social networks, location-aware smartphone applications and voice or images to find the content that they are interested in.

Last month, Facebook had more site visits than Google in the U.S.A. Search ads, which are the main source of revenue for the search engines, could potentially lose user attention to an extent.

More importantly, search and display advertisers now have a greater choice and must decide on the best way to reach their target audience and the best channel to maximise the return on the money they spend advertising.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! already recognise this change in online user behaviour and have been forging partnerships with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook for over a year now, in addition to building social networks around their own products.

Click the link below to read the full white paper:

A characterisation of online search behavior (144kB PDF)

The current Google Advertising Professionals qualification, which was launched in 2004, will be discontinued. It will be replaced by the Google AdWords Certification programme.

Google Certification Programme

Google AdWords Qualified Companies will now be called Certified Partners. Individual qualifications will be offered to professionals, irrespective of their association with an agency, making it easier for employees to port their qualifications when they change employers. 

The single qualification exam will be replaced by an Advertising Fundamentals exam and three advanced-level exams – Search Advertising Advanced Exam, Reporting and Analysis Exam, and Display Exam. In order to qualify, each individual must pass the fundamentals exam and at least one of the advanced exams.

Agencies will need to have at least one qualified individual associated with their AdWords My Client Centre account and a minimum spend of U.S. $10,000/quarter. Previously, the minimum spend figure for Qualified Companies was $100,000/quarter. This lower number will make it easier for small businesses to qualify.

Agencies that fulfil the required criteria will be given a ‘Google AdWords Certified Partner‘ logo or badge that they can display on their site. This will include the words ”Click To Verify”, which will prompt visitors to click on the logo in order to verify the company’s actual qualified status, thereby reducing the number of false qualification claims.

Google has also made it easy for advertisers to decide which agency they would like to work with through the Google Partner Search platform. This platform will provide information about the agency’s experience, location, budget spend etc.

Lastly, Google has also introduced a Preferred AdWords API pricing model that will allow Certified Partners free access to the AdWords API, based on the client spend they manage. To avail of the free API credits in this pricing model, agencies must have an active agency profile page, their tool must satisfy the minimum functionality requirements for third-party bid management tools and they must, of course, agree to the terms and conditions required by the AdWords API.

In effect, people visiting a website with the intention to buy are more likely to do so from a sponsored link than from an organic link, and thus more conversions are expected from sponsored links.

This pattern may vary to some extent, depending on the type of search being conducted.

For instance, searches related to news, sports or entertainment, which are not very likely to end in a purchase transaction may originate from an organic link.

On the other hand, searchers looking to purchase specific items are more likely to be attracted to a paid links, and a conversion is more likely to occur when a price tag or model name are available. According to Nick Drew, a researcher who works for Microsoft Advertising, this is largely down to the searcher’s frame of mind.

Someone looking to buy a product is likely to be drawn towards selling phrases such as “buy now”, “sale”, “discount” and prices, which are usually found on sponsored links, as again general information that can be found on organic results. Such a person would not find an organic result from a site such as Wikipedia very helpful when buying.

Conversely, someone looking for information will most likely be turned off by the salesy language on sponsored links, and will instead focus on the organic search results.

Both comScore and Nielsen’s research has found that in any given category of searches, a paid link is more likely to end in a purchase than an organic link. Hence, it is of great importance for marketers to promote their brands through sponsored ad listings.

Former deputy PM and member of the U.K. Labour Party, John Prescott, has been urging and instigating his followers on Twitter and supporters to click on Google pay per click ads from their opponents.

Prescott isn’t actually encouraging users to click on ads posted by the Conservative Party rather than on links to his own party. Instead he wants users to click on these ads in order to cost the Conservative Party money and make them bleed through their search engine marketing budget faster.

The logic behind this is simply that the Conservative Party pays for every click their ad receives. They could end up wasting their entire daily budget paying for clicks from Labour supporters and their ads would then stop showing.

In other words, John Prescott is encouraging his supporters to commit Click Fraud.

Click fraud was a major cause for concern for PPC advertisers in 2006, when a number of unscrupulous businesses hired rings of click fraudsters to keep clicking on their competitors’ ads till the competitors’ campaigns ran out of their daily budget, which would then mean that the competitors’ ads would stop showing for the given search term.

The Labour MP’s advice to his followers, may just boomerang on him, as the ultimate aim of any political party is to pass on their message and ideology to voters, which is precisely what is likely to happen when supporters of any party click on ads of the Conservative party and visit their site.

Moreover, voters would most likely tend not to look favourably upon a politician who encourages them to commit fraud, albeit online.

Brand advertisers want to know whether they are getting their money’s worth, in terms of quality and quantity, where digital media is concerned.

It is a well established fact that the more time a user spends seeing an ad, the more he or she is likely to be influenced by it and if this user is actively engaged with that ad the perception of the brand concerned is usually found to be higher.

The time spent on an ad, multiplied by the rate at which it is actively engaged with is known as the dwell score. The dwell score thus provides a tangible source to measure the effectiveness of a brand and its online ad campaign.

Dwell Score = Time spent on ad x Rate of engagement

Research from other sources such as comScore corroborate the fact that a high dwell score indicates a higher number of branded search queries, more visits to the brand website and more engaged visitors.

Data also shows that click-through-rates are not very effective in measuring brand performance as consumers are likely to spend more meaningful time on an ad then to actually click on it. To better understand this subject, new systems are required to measure the time spent and engagement with an ad.

According to the findings of the MIA Project, 96% of marketers surveyed felt that these digital ad measurements and calculations should be clear and transparent, but only 29% felt that they were so at present. 96% of them also felt that there should be consistency in the terms of measurement, but again, only 23% of them were satisfied with the present state of affairs.

Read the full white paper: Being Greater With Data (PDF 627 KB)

www.searchalliance.com

According to the official press release from Yahoo! and Microsoft, this alliance will enable their business users to connect with a larger audience of potential customers, thus saving them valuable time and money.

Users will now be able to search ad inventory from both the sites simultaneously, by using the Microsoft search engine, Bing, which presently has a combined audience of about 577 million users worldwide.

Advertisers will be able to use Microsoft adCenter to advertise to the combined client base of Yahoo! and Microsoft.

The alliance will obviously help both the companies concerned to improve monetisation for their partners, eventually helping the companies to generate more revenue for themselves.

Though both companies will continue to have different consumer search experiences, Microsoft will manage the technology for both of them through Bing. Yahoo! will support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies and resellers and their clients. Microsoft on the other hand will support self service advertisers. All ads will go through the Microsoft ad-Center.

This alliance will be implemented across the U.S. Canada, U.K. and France. Elsewhere in Europe, Latin America and Asia, Microsoft is already a partner of Yahoo!

At present, ads will continue to show up on Bing search results, just as before, and advertisers will be informed about the alliance once it actually begins. They aim to be able to implement the new setup before the 2010 holiday season, but may delay it to early 2011 if needed.

Google has now launched a beta search platform that provides a list of these certified professionals.

Google Professionals Search

Individuals or agencies that have been certified by Google can help businesses to better manage their AdWords campaigns and thus advertise their products or services more effectively.

An interested business owner or marketing person can go through Google’s list of certified professionals and select any one of them according to the location and weekly budget that their campaign runs on.

These certified professionals offer various services such as online display advertising, search engine optimisation, web design, web analytics, affiliate programs, advertising on traditional media such as print and TV, as well as on new media like mobiles and social networks.

Professionals who are certified by Google have to keep appearing for periodic tests, which Google conducts, and they also have to pay a fee of $50 every 18 months.

In the past, many people who have been certified have neglected to renew their certification. With the introduction of this new list, agencies and individuals who want to to be featured by the programme will have to renew their membership by taking the exam and paying the fees regularly.

While big agencies are automatically listed in multiple cities, individuals and small shops will have to register separately for each location.

To be fair to Google, their Learning Center does provide very thorough information on the subject, and certified professionals are definitely able to make up the money they spend.

Google base their claim to openness on the fact that they have opened up the source code for the Android mobile operating system, Chrome Web browser and Chrome operating system and a few other products so that the larger developer community can improve on them.

Rosenberg says, “at Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant profitable and competitive ecosystem for businesses.”

While all this discussion about openness is fine, one cannot help but notice the fact that Google’s largest source of income is their search engine, which ranks web pages to create relevant search results for user queries. And nobody really knows how the algorithm for this ranking system works, apart from the few people at Google who are in charge of the algorithm.

Google’s argument against making this algorithm public is, of course, that spammers would misuse this information if it were easily available to all.

This argument seems weak, however, as it has been proved by other open source projects such as the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, that while an open algorithm may seem to help spammers, there would be an army of developers ready to combat the spammers.

If anything, all of Google’s talk about the importance of being open seems to be a cheap dig at Microsoft, and an attempt to make Microsoft seem like the bad guys just before Google launches a full-blown attack on Microsoft Windows by launching their own operating system.

In addition to traditional sponsored links, users will soon be able to view lists of targeted products, retailers offering those products, their prices and a product image when they search for shopping related terms on Google.

The best part of this ad format is that it is based on a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) pricing model. This means that the merchant only has to pay Google when a user clicks on his ad and completes a purchase on the site.

Product Listing Ads will be especially useful to merchants selling a large variety of products. Advertisers don’t actually need to create any additional ad text or keywords.

Whenever a user enters a search query relevant to an item in an advertiser’s Google Merchant Center account, Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name.

While this new system would make it very easy for merchants to advertise all their products on Google, it could also take control away from the advertiser. Google has not currently specified any details about how participating retailers will be able to specify CPA bids or exclude certain products from being included in Listing Ads.

The service is in beta at present, but will gradually be made available to more and more advertisers. The launch has been timed to gain popularity very quickly, with the approach of the holiday shopping season.

Display ads have long been an important tool used by marketers to influence users and to create brand awareness. This new tool from Google will now enable marketers to measure the effect a particular ad on their target audience, even if it is not immediately clicked upon after viewing.

The new service will be able to measure the number of conversions that occur within 30 days from the date of viewing, even if no click was recorded at the time of viewing.

If a user sees an ad on a given site without clicking on it, but later visits the ad site within the next 30 days and converts into a lead or sale, this conversion will be reported in the AdWords campaign tab.

This facility will also allow marketers to better compare the performance of their ads on the Google Content Network, vis-à-vis its performance on any other content network. Marketers can then decide for themselves, which is the best place to advertise and thus get the best value for the money they spend on advertising.

To make use of this service, marketers will need to ensure AdWords conversion tracking works for their accounts. Google Analytics goals are not compatible with View-through Conversion reporting, and this service is not available for search campaigns and for text creatives.

While Google continues to remain the undisputed leader among search engines, HubSpot’s study shows that it is no longer a good idea to concentrate only on marketing through Google, or even through other search engines.

The survey conducted by HubSpot, across 40 of their customers in four industries, has shown that though search is responsible for a lot of the traffic, that traffic does not necessarily convert into leads or sales.

In fact, they found that social media, email and even blogs are very important sources of traffic and sales. Even links coming in from various websites and directories contribute quite significantly to the traffic and leads that a marketer receives.

Quite contrary to the findings of this study conducted by HubSpot, other recent studies have found that while social media alone now accounts for almost 20% of online ad impressions, the number of actual conversions and the influence exerted by a social media presence was substantially lower.

Advertisers can make use of Google Spreadsheets to make the necessary changes to the keywords in their AdWords accounts.

By making use of the copy and paste facility in an external spreadsheet, advertisers can make several changes in their AdWords accounts such as changing the bid, creating a list of keywords, editing destination URL’s etc.

Users can edit keywords within an Ad Group and also edit the keywords with external AdWords tools.

In order to make bulk edits with a spreadsheet within the ad group, the steps are as follows:

1. Sign in to AdWords and navigate to the Ad Group that needs to be edited
2. Next, select the ‘Keyword’ tab and then the ‘More Actions’ command, which is at the top of the ad group table
3. Select the ‘Spreadsheet Edit’ operation from the drop down menu
4. Make the necessary changes
5. Lastly, click ‘Save’.

After these changes are saved, errors occurring in any of the cells are highlighted. When the cursor is placed on such a cell, the error is shown and can be corrected. Once all the errors have been corrected, the changes can be submitted to AdWords.

While using a spreadsheet within the ad group, users can make employ common keyboard shortcuts as well as spreadsheet formulas, with the Formula Autocomplete feature. These formulae can be used to change bids based on the performance stats in the spreadsheet.

All the cells in the column can be modified, but only columns with text in black will apply the changes that are saved. These columns are ‘Keyword’, ‘Max CPC, ‘Destination URL and ‘Status’.

Bulk editing of keywords with external AdWords tools can be done using either the ‘AdWords editor’, which is a free downloadable application for managing the account or by using AdWords API.

Some time last month, Yahoo! launched a new homepage layout. Their search team is now concentrating on unifying this homepage with the search results page. They have undertaken a lot of research with eye-tracking studies and usability experiments to achieve this. This new search results page is expected to provide which are personally more relevant to the user.

Yahoo! engineers are currently trying to align the framework of the search results page with the new homepage, in order to provide quick access to various search applications which are available in the left hand column of the three column page. The left hand column also provides direct one-click links to other pages, thus managing to retain the user on the Yahoo! page, which advertisers are bound to like.

One important new feature is a section ‘Show Results From’ which allows users to see results from the sites they are most used to and interested in.

The newly launched note-taking application, Yahoo! Search Pad’ is at the top of the left column to provide easier access to research carried out.

SearchScan and SafeSearch features are also in this column to protect against viruses and spam during the search process. The Search Assistance feature is placed directly below the search box.

New Yahoo! Search results page

Yahoo! is also looking out for new ways for users to explore the organic results through a ‘Related Concepts’ section in the left column. They are essentially trying to find easier ways to display enhanced results from a larger number of sites.

A few random users from the USA have already been selected as test subjects for the new search results page. Feedback from this test will be used to fine-tune the page before the general launch.

In light of Yahoo!’s recent search agreement with Microsoft, it remains to be seen how much Yahoo! itself will benefit from these innovations.

Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam.

The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well.

Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet.

Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out on her blog, all the content on Twitter is created by the profile owners. Twitter is robbing profile owners by disallowing them to reap any benefit from their own work.

Twitter is likely to see some backlash as a result of this decision. Their justification for their decision is that it disuades spammers from abusing the service. However, Twitter is quite good at stopping spammer accounts already. And, moreover, that doesn’t then explain why verified reliable accounts such as @Google and @stephenfry also have their links nofollowed.

The popular micro-blogging service has timed these updates quite well. They are now so big, that minor backlashes and disenssion among SEO, social marketers and developers would hardly affect their growth, which is now self-propelling.

Click fraud has reduced not only compared to what it was in the first quarter of the year, but also compared to what it was in the second quarter of 2008. At present it is 12.7%, while in the first quarter of 2009 it was 13.8% and in the second quarter of 2008 it was 16.2%.

According to Click Forensics this data has been collected from ad campaigns of large as well as small advertisers spread over all of the leading search engines and over 300 ad networks.

The president of Click Forensics, Tom Cuthbert says, “The increased diligence of online ad networks to detect and block invalid traffic sources has contributed to the decline in the over all click fraud rate this quarter. However increasingly sophisticated attacks, such as publisher collusion fraud, continue to be a concern. Ad networks should pay close attention to such threats in the coming months.”

Publisher collusion fraud is a lot more difficult to track as publishers make use of bots and rotating IP-addresses to click on their own ads, thus raising their rankings and also increasing the commission which they earn from the ad networks, which cannot easily detect such invalid clicks from the valid ones.

These ad networks consist of lesser known sites that still manage to reach large audiences, at a much lower cost than the bigger, well known internet sites.

The bid simulator can be accessed in the new AdWords interface by clicking on a CPC value to adjust it, or clicking on the tiny graph-like icon next to the current bid value, as shown in the screenshot below:

Accessing AdWords’ bid simulator

When the tool opens up in a new layer (on the same page), it shows a simulation of the estimated clicks, cost and impressions that particular keyword will get if the bid values are increased or decreased. The tool also includes a graph to illustrate the change in number of clicks as CPC changes.

AdWords bid simulator in action

Documentation provided by Google describes the function of the Bid Simulator: “It doesn’t predict the future, but it estimates the click, cost and impression data that your ads would have received over the last seven days had you set different keyword-level bids. ”

The tool does not work for all keywords, and the graph does not show up for all keywords that have the bid simulator enabled. Search volumes are the determining factor for whether or not the simulator and the graph within the simulator are enabled or not.

According to Google, “The bid simulator requires historical information in order to provide click and cost data for different bids. If a keyword didn’t receive many clicks in the last seven days, it isn’t possible to simulate clicks and cost.”

Values for the bid simulator only apply to the search network – that is, Google search and other search partners.

According to sources, Microsoft has declined to make any upfront payment or revenue guarantee, which Yahoo! had initially asked for.

Microsoft search technology will now be used on all Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will also be able to sell search ads on its own sites as well as on Bing through the Microsoft adCenter technology.

The deal, though not quite as all encompassing as expected, gives Yahoo! the control it wanted over its advertisers and consumer data.

According to details available, the partnership for online search and advertising will be for a period of 10 years.

In a joint statement issued by the companies, the deal was forecasted to increase Yahoo’s! annual operating income by about $500 million, while also reducing their capital expenditure by$200 million.

The deal is likely to give Microsoft a larger share of the search market, thus helping it to fight rival Google. According to the latest reports from comScore, Google has about 65% of the U.S. search market, while Microsoft Bing has 8.4% and Yahoo! has 19.6%. Jointly the two companies will account for about 30% of the market share.

Microsoft Live Search had been losing market share in the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, but Bing seems to be changing that situation now.

Reports from Efficient Frontier show that ROI received by advertisers has gone up by 43% for Google, and by 24% for Microsoft Bing, but has dropped by 8% for Yahoo!

This is in spite of the fact that the over all expenditure by advertisers on search marketing has gone down by 21% compared to the same time last year.

The amount that advertisers spent on Bing has gone up by only0.1 percentage points compared to last year, but has gone up by 0.7 percentage points when compared to the first quarter of 2009.

In the second quarter of 2009, Bing received 4.5% of ad spend of the clients of Efficient Frontier, while Yahoo! received 20.5% and Google received 75%. At the same time, Bing had 4.1% of the total clicks while Yahoo! had 24.3% and Google had 71.6%

Bing has been doing especially well in the travel and financial services sectors.

The report by Efficient Frontiers also shows that the amount which its medium spenders (between $50,000 to $2,00,000 per month) are spending on SEM has gone up by 5% in Q2 of 2009, compared to the amount spent at the same time last year, but small advertisers (below $50,000 per month) spent only 59% of what they spent last year, and large advertisers (above $2,00,000 per month) spent 78% of what they spent last year. Over all, the budgets have gone down by 21%.

On the other hand, another SEM company reported that large spenders (over $1 million per year) spent 18.77% more than they did last year, while small spenders (below $1 million per year) spent 25.33% less than they did last year.

comScore reports that Microsoft had 8.4% of market share soon after the launch of Bing in June 2009, compared to 8.02% in May 2009. but that figure is still less than the 9.2% which they had in June 2008. This may be the effect of the recession though.

Research from the UK Trade and Investment government offices has found that despite favourable circumstances only 75,000 businesses in the U.K. are engaged in exporting their products and services.

Chief among the reasons for this low turn out are language and cultural barriers, apart from other factors like administrative restrictions, cross-border logistics etc.

To help businesses overcome these obstacles, Google has tied up with Applied Language Solutions, HSBC, Royal Mail, Institute of Export, U.K. Trade and Investment and Alibaba.com, to launch a new comprehensive solution called Export Adviser.

Google Export Adviser

UK-based businesses interested in export can now avail of this service.

The Export Adviser will help novices to start an export business by guiding them through various steps like identifying and evaluating target markets, judging the market demand, creating an English language keyword list, translating that list and forecasting a cost per click for those multilingual keywords.

The opportunity finder tool offers a neat tie-in between three Google tools to translate keywords, mine keyword data and predict demand in the market, as demonstrated by the simple example below, where a search for ‘seo’ brings up a map showing where most opportunities lie among emerging markets, along with suggestions for related keywords and rising keywords in various languages.

Google Export Adviser’s opportunity finder tool

For those who wish to expand their export business, the Export Box, created in partnership with Applied Language Solutions offers a slightly expensive (considering the target market is SME) solution: For a price of £3,000 users will be provided with the following:

1. A translated website, built as landing pages for specific search terms
2. Keywords and Adverts specially researched and designed for the target country in the target language
3. £1,000 worth of paid advertising on Google AdWords using Multilingual PPC, plus a free Google voucher worth £200
4. A free online shop front and discounts on Gold Supplier membership for Alibaba.com to market products to over 8 million international buyers
5. £1,000 worth of language support
6. Membership to the Institute of Export and discounted international banking with HSBC.

SMEs that don’t want the full support of this £3,000 package are lured by an alternative £200 AdWords voucher, the details of which can be found from AdWords account managers.

Screenshot of Google Export Adviser website

The email sent out yesterday informs advertisers that if they wish to continue running ads on Google AdWords, they will need to use Visa, MasterCard or American Express credit cards or switch to direct debit payments before the end of the month.

In their own words…

“We are writing to inform you of an upcoming change affecting the use of Switch cards with AdWords. As of July 31st, 2009, we will no longer accept the use of Switch cards. Please select an alternative form of payment to fund your AdWords campaigns before July 31st, 2009 to keep your ads running. Google currently accepts Visa, MasterCard, and American Express credit cards. ”

No reason has been supplied for this change in policy.

The move could be to drive more advertisers to pay via direct debit, rather than credit cards. Google introduced the ability to pay for AdWords accounts via direct debit in the UK only in August last year. Current postpay users paying by credit cards can switch to direct debit.

Instructions for switching to direct debit can be found on the AdWords Help centre at:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50328

Google still does not allow pre-pay users to switch to postpay or direct debit.

The latest reports received from users seem to be very favorable for Bing.

The reports sent in last week, generally gave the impression that this new effort by Microsoft, was nothing great, and Microsoft would not be able to hold its own, against Google in the search engine market, no matter how hard they tried.

In fact one enterprising blogger even coined an acronym for Bing. ‘But It’s Not Google.

The more recently received comments and reviews are a complete turn around, when compared to these earlier reports.

Now people are not only appreciating Bing, and saying that it is good, some of them are even saying that it is better than good old Google and they may now switch loyalties to Bing. A few others who are not quite so effusive in their praise, still grant that Bing is as good as Google, and the only reason they will continue to stick to Google is habit.

It is not to be expected of course that Google will or should take these comments lightly, and continue to rest on past laurels. Maybe this is the wake up call they need to innovate and further improve their own search engine.

The new platform will be called Bing. It is expected to help users obtain knowledge about their query and thus make smart decisions.

Steve Ballmer first introduced Bing at the D7 Conference held in San Diego recently.

According to the Bing team, four and a half new websites are being created on the net every second, but a large portion of searches conducted still do not produce the results that users are looking for. That is to say, the results obtained do not help users in the process of decision making.

Bing will be endowed with a new set of intuitive tools, along with an excellent search service, which will combine to provide users with results which are far better organized, thus helping them to make better decisions.

Bing will also have features like cash back and Price Predictor, to help users save some money.

Bing will focus on four key areas, viz. making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition and finding a local business.

The brand name Bing will also be incorporated into some of Microsoft’s other services. For instance Virtual Maps and Farecast will henceforth be known as Bing Maps and Bing Travel respectively.

To help users learn more about Bing, Microsoft has started a new website DiscoveringBing.com. Its new Twitter account is @bing.

Whether Bing will help Microsoft to displace Google in the search market only time will tell.

Google Suggest is a drop down menu that provides a list of query suggestions when a user starts typing in a query. The feature was added to the search engine’s home page last August and is now being updated.

To begin with, links are being added to Google Suggest. If a search query appears to be navigational, that site will appear in the drop down menu itself, thus saving the users time when he conducts the search operation.

Another new feature is the addition of Sponsored Links or ads among the search suggestions. Such related ads will now appear directly in the search suggestion box. The ads will be marked ‘Sponsored Link’ and will be on a coloured background to differentiate them.

Thirdly, when a user who is on a particular results page starts another search, he will receive certain search suggestions which will be related to the previous search which he has carried out.

The last feature to be added to Google Suggest is a personalization of suggestions. This means that when a user signs in to his Google account and if his computer has ‘Web History’ on the ‘Enabled’ mode, search suggestions will be sent to him by Google, based on his past searches. Google has found that users who are signed in often repeat their searches. In fact the figure for repeat searches is as high as 25%. Users have however been provided with an option labeled ‘Remove’ which they can use if they do not want a past search to show up in future.

The final change being made on Google Suggest is the deletion of the number of searches that have been conducted for a given query, as Google feels that this data has been of no use to their users.

Marissa Mayer Google’s VP of Search and User Experience said that Google Search Options is an attempt to organize universal search results – including news, blogs, images and videos.

This options panel appears on the left hand side of the search results page. Apart from the content drilling which was possible on Google Search, this panel allows users to sort the results by their time frame. i.e. whether they have just been received, or came in the previous day, previous week etc.

Google has also introduced the Wonder Wheel, where the search topic is placed in a light blue circle and related words surround it. The results appear to the right of the wonder wheel, and the wonder wheel also contains similar Timeline features.

Although the new options panel looks very plain and simple, as it is blue letters on a white background, a lot of thought process has obviously gone into its designing to enable users to have clarity and ease of use so that they can save time and still find exactly what they are looking for.

Google undertook a lot of eye-tracking and usability studies to ensure that each term is located in such a way that the user finds it easily and feels totally at home with this new panel right from the start.

It seems likely that Google would be interested in buying Twitter, as Twitter is a very valuable asset in the emeerging field of real-time search. It can provide a great real-time database of information, as reported by over 7 million potential sources – the current estimated number of Twitter users.

Several users are now making use of Twitter to discuss various issues like brands, customer care, feedback and the news. This database of information can easily be mined to pull current news and can be monetised with ads.

While there is no official word on the price being discussed between the two companies, it is certainly expected to be well over $250 million, which was the figure arrived at during the latest valuation of Twitter.

Twitter had recently turned down an offer of half a billion dollars from Facebook. That amount was to have been paid mainly in Facebook stock, which is not publicly listed, and was deemd to be overvalued. Google, on the other hand, would pay in cash or its publicly listed stock, which is certainly a better option.

Founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams have also dealt with Google earlier, when they sold Blogger to the search engine.

It is also possible that Google may receive some competition from Microsoft, who may also show an interest in the acquisition.

According to reports from All Things Digital, however, the two companies are merely discussing potential product tie-ups, such as Google building a real-time search engine, and not a possible takeover.

The possibility of a potential acquisition is exciting, but most Twitter users might not be thrilled about Google acquiring the service, especially given Google’s recent spate of failures with services such as Dodgeball and Jaiku.

On Internet Explorer

When seen on an Internet Explorer (IE 7+) window, with no toolbars installed, ads now cover 49% of the screen area for Live Search results when seen on a monitor with 800 x 600 resolution, 44% of the results area at 1024 x 768 resolution and 37% of the results area at 1280 x 1024 resolution.

Ads seen on IE 8 with no active toolbars on an 800 x 600 monitor

On Firefox

With just one active toolbar installed, on Firefox the ads now cover 55% of the screen area for Live Search results when seen on a monitor with 800 x 600 resolution, 46% of the results area at 1024 x 768 resolution and 38% of the results area at 1280 x 1024 resolution.

Ads seen on Firefox with one active toolbar on an 800 x 600 monitor

According to Tina Kelleher of Microsoft, these changes have been made taking into consideration the feedback sent to Live Search by adCenter advertisers. This alteration will enable the generation of more clicks for pay per click campaigns being run on adCenter.

A recent report from analytics firm Covario found that global technology firms increased their ad spend on pay per click ads on Microsoft adCenter by 45.7% in the last quarter of 2008, compared to the same period in 2007.

The placement of a fourth mainline ad was introduced by adCenter last September in the U.S.A; and has shown very encouraging results in that market since then.

There is no mention of any consideration for how this change might be received by users and the impact it might have on the perceived quality of Live Search results.

The updates are supposed to make account organisation more intuitive and help users find the right tools on the right account screen. Navigating through accounts will be faster, editing keywords, ads, bids and placements will be easier and users will get more detailed statistics and in-context reports within the campaign management screens.

Some of the updated features are as follows:

• Easier account navigation
  New tabs have been added in the main navigation bar providing direct access to AdWords Tools and Billing. Secondary navigation between active campaigns can be done via a menu on the left – paused and deleted campaigns are not represented on this tree.
  
• Easier Account Monitoring
  Users can easily check on the performance of all the elements in a campaign by clicking on Keywords, Networks or Ads, thus displaying all the keywords, placements and ads in a single table. Graphs provide a quick overview of the performance of the segment being viewed. Users can then decide how much to bid on specific keywords or placements.
• Details and Filters
  Dynamic roll-ups give a broad view of the overall performance of a campaign within the same page. It is also possible to set up filters to display only certain ads or keywords by clicking on ‘Create Filter’ under ‘Tab Options’, thus focusing on selected parts of the account only. Detailed information about particular ads can be viewed by clicking ‘Show Query Report’ or ‘Automatic Placements’ on the ‘Networks’ tab.
  
• Dynamic Keyword, Bid and Ad Updates
  Users will now have more flexibility to expand accounts. They can create ads, add keywords and set bids in any order on the same tabs used to manage campaigns or ad groups. Users can also use a one-page creation process to build new ad groups. Fast, in-line editing by clicking on any bid or keyword enables users to make quick changes in the account.
  
• Networks and Placements
  The old ‘Placements’ tab is now the ‘Networks’ tab. It summarizes the performance of ads on Google Search and Partner sites. Domain and URL level reports for content network placements are also visible here. Users also have the option to have ‘Managed placements’ or ‘Automatic Placements’.

Google is still working on certain updates, such as campaign settings, position preference, demographic bidding and certain specialised ad formats.

This move comes as something of a surprise to users familiar with Google’s advertising ethics, because during an interview in 2004, Google co-founders Sergey Brin had said, “One thing that’s important to us is the distinction between advertising and pure search results. We make it clear when something is paid for. Our advertising is off to the side and in a couple of slots across the top. Ads are clearly marked. There’s a clear large wall between the objective search results and the ads, which have commercial influence.”

Of course, in order to make sure that users can still differentiate between the ads and the organic search results, Google Mobile Search is using a different coloured background for the ads.

To be fair, the ads are not interspersed within the regular organic results. They are, instead, placed at the end of the plain text results on a universal search results page.

Mobile search advertising has still not found its groove. Google continues to test various ad placements to find the right solution. Google started by placing ads at the top or one at the top and one at the bottom of the mobile search results page. Recently, this changed and ads were placed only at the bottom of the Google Mobile Search results page.

Given the fact that the mobile screen is very small and there is really no place available to demarcate the page into a separate column at the side or at the top for displaying the ads, the only choices really are to place ads atop, below or in between organic results. Google already tested the first two options. They are now taking tentative steps towards the third option.

A really bold move, though, would be to intermingle sponsored links within the organic text-based results on the mobile search page. Will Google go back on its own word and implement such a system in order to get more money from mobile search?

Microsoft adCenter had commissioned Kelton Research to carry out the survey across 400 small businesses, which had fewer than 250 employees.

The study was conducted online, with the help of 38 questions selected for the purpose of judging the mindset and behaviour of such business owners.

Last year a similar study was conducted in U.K. and revealed similar results.

Surprisingly, of the 59% who said they did not use search marketing 90% said that they had never even attempted to do so, though 86% felt that they were missing an opportunity to expand their businesses.

In fact, 73% of these businesspersons went to the extent of saying that they would rather do their own taxes than start a search marketing campaign. This just goes to show how scared people are to try marketing their businesses through paid search, which could actually be beneficial to them.

72% of the people who do use search marketing say that the number of sales inquiries they receive have gone up and 68% report that they have found that paid search marketing has been effective.

Among the major factors which respondents to the survey reported, were fears regarding costs, time involved and complex procedures involved in the process of search marketing.

In order to allay these fears, Microsoft has offered a free search marketing assistance campaign.

Director of adCenter at Microsoft Advertising, Brian Boland says, “Given today’s current economic conditions, small business owners need more effective ways to optimize their marketing dollars. By investing in paid search marketing, small businesses can track online sales, and determine the return on investment for their campaigns, while at the same time boosting traffic and visibility for their websites.”

The Quick Launch program offered by Microsoft adCenter offers free guidance to advertisers with a minimum monthly budget as low as $500. The advertisers will also be given advice on managing their campaigns through classroom-style training programs, and help to build Keywords etc.

The advertisers will not be required to create special mobile landing pages, or ads in mobile formats as the ads will be pointed to the desktop landing pages, thus saving the advertisers a lot of time effort and money.

These ads will continue to have the advantages of the standard mobile ads. For instance, they will have delivery of mobile specific calls-to-action. In addition, they will reach users who are conducting related mobile searches, which is an activity that is fast gaining in popularity.

Earlier, Google Search was running desktop results pages, which were modified to suit these phones. Now Google has launched results pages, which have been specifically formatted for the iPhone. Hence, it will now be possible for advertisers to create ad campaigns for mobiles only, and these ads will receive separate mobile performance reporting.

The advertisers will have the right to choose, whether they wish to start displaying their ads on mobiles, or continue advertising only on desktop and laptop computers.

In order to start displaying ads on the iPhone, G1 etc, advertisers will have to access their AdWords account where they can go to “campaign settings”. From there they have to go to “Networks and Bidding”, which has the option “Device platform”. Lastly, they select “iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers”.

This will mean that as and when newer mobiles with full internet browsers are released, the ads will be launched on these handsets as well.

For further assistance, advertisers can visit the AdWords Help Center.

Beer manufacturers will be allowed to directly advertise the sale of their products.

Manufacturers of hard alcohol and liqueurs, on the other hand will not be able to directly advertise the sale of their products. They will only be allowed to provide information about the hard alcohol or liqueurs, such as providing the recipes, which are available on their websites or sending brand messages.

To give an example of this new policy, AdWords explains, that hard alcohol and liqueur can be marketed to people who are on the lookout for relevant alcohol related information. In other words, search advertising will be allowed. They can suggest ideas for cocktails to be served during the holiday season and the calorie content of these drinks etc.

While beer manufacturers have been given a free hand to market their commodity, even the manufacturers of hard alcohol and liqueur will be able to take advantage of the upcoming holiday season, to reach their target audience.

These changes to the policy have been made keeping in mind, the feedback received by Google AdWords, from their advertisers over the years. It is obvious of course, that it will also help AdWords to generate some much needed revenue.

In the coming weeks Adwords will also expand this new policy to cover other countries, keeping in mind the local rules and regulations regarding alcohol.

For further details on the alcohol policy, interested users may visit AdWords’ Advertising Policies Page.