Search Engine Solutions Blog

Google is launching a feature Thursday night for businesses that want to target customers based on geography.

Marketers will be able to place photos and logos inside balloons that pop up on Google maps exactly where the merchants are located. A handful of advertisers, including Barnes & Noble and Ralph Lauren, have purchased keywords such as “New York books” and “Ralph Lauren New York” and tested the new Local Business Ads system over the past few weeks, said Dominic Preuss, product manager for Google’s local advertising. Users will notice that with certain searches on Google Local, icons representing types of businesses will appear on the map corresponding with a particular merchant. A given icon might be a coffee cup, a shopping bag, a grocery cart, a car or, in the case of Ralph Lauren, a flower. When someone clicks the icon, a balloon pops up containing more information about the merchant, including a logo or photo and maybe a link to the merchant’s Web site.

With Local Business Ads, merchants bid on keywords and pay per click as they do for ads now on Google AdWords, said Preuss. The ads show up on the maps as well as on Google’s main search results page as regular text ads, he said. The ads will not show up on any of the Google maps used by Web sites that have used the Google maps API to create a mashup, according to Preuss. Greg Sterling, an independent analyst who covers the local search market, predicted that the balloons would eventually be used to enable searchers to contact the company directly and do other things beyond just providing information. “There will be more interactivity,” he said. “We may see chat and video and click-to-call.”

Preuss said that was not in the works at this time. “We have no plans to do video or anything more interactive than the images,” he said. “Anything is possible. We just don’t have any plans.” Word of the new type of ads surfaced earlier this week, but Google was mum on the details at the time. Yahoo Local also offers icons related to advertisers on top of maps, but the presentation is different, and the balloons contain only text.

Source: C|net

Want some easy Google credits? No problem.

I believe that Google is counting how many people are using the “I’m Feeling Lucky” option. Technically it’s very simple as the core search engine needs to redirect you to the first position in its results set, so it “clicks” in your behalf on this organic listing. So now that it knows the URL, why not to save it to a database and give higher ranking score for more frequent “luckiers”? It’s simple as that!

What do do?

Search for a keyword that placing your website on the first Google spot (organic only, no compass or AdWords) and open a fresh Google search screen. Use the keyword you’ve found and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky”. That’s it. If you have Google Toolbar (you don’t? Get it right away here (feature list) and opt it out to show PageRank) use it as your first choice.

What should I do if my keyword search is not found on the first position?
Search for your company name plus the keyword. (E.g new york movers flatrate)

One Warning - Don’t get carried away! It is not a good idea to exceed a too much clicks a day from you and your employees, friends, or your clients who love you.

Google remains ahead of its search engine competitors. comScore Networks released its monthly qSearch analysis of search engines for June 2006, finding that Google gained in search market share for the 11th consecutive month and maintained its status as market leader with 44.7 percent of searches or 2.9 billion searches. Yahoo! was in second place, increasing its share to 28.5 percent, followed by MSN with 12.8 percent, comScore reported. It also found that Americans conducted 6.4 millions searches in June, a 6-percent decline from May but a 29-percent increase over June 2005. comScore attributes the decline as a seasonal effect. comScore also reported that Google and Yahoo! dominated the toolbar search market with 49.6 percent and 46.1 percent respectively.

Source: Chicago Business

Believe or not, but Google tests classifieds in print now.

Google Inc., the new-media giant, now has a decidedly old-media partner: the Chicago Sun-Times. In a quiet and small-scale experiment, Google is running classified-like ads in the pages of the Sun-Times, which so far is the only newspaper participating in the Web-search behemoth’s test.

Read more from Chicago Business >

My conclusion first: This is the best ever analytical tool you’ve ever saw, helps you to understand better your visitors and their behavior. I mean organic and PPC. This is the only tool shows you organic conversations! Don’t use Google Analytics if you’re spammer, or black hat SEO! Click here if you do.

Word of Warning: Ask yourself if you want Google to know that much about you and your company. Do you really want to share your revenue information with a company that also wants your advertising dollars? Do you want to share your revenue information with any other company at all? Google officials have declined that they will use the data to better understand how much you are willing to pay for ads, based on conversions. They also claim that they do not plan to tap into the data as a means of improving regular search results or to identify bad sites. Nevertheless, these things are easily possible if you use Google Analytics.

“Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web. With over 80 reports, your free Google Analytics account will track visitors through your site, and will keep track of the performance of your marketing campaigns - whether they’re AdWords campaigns, email campaigns, or any other advertising program. With this information, you’ll know which keywords are really working, which ad text is the most effective, and where your visitors are dropping off during the conversion process. Don’t be fooled by the fact that this functionality is available to you for free - Google Analytics is a full-featured, powerful analytics package. AdWords advertisers can find all of these benefits from within their AdWords account - Google Analytics has been fully integrated with AdWords. All of your reports and settings are available from the Analytics tab.” Google.com

Several useful features make it easy to pin down overall trends as well as to trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics, and identify your revenue sources. A unique feature facilitates the identification of critical pages and bottlenecks where you are likely to loose most of your online customers. The feature, called Funnel Visualization, shows you the bottlenecks in your conversion and checkout processes - attributable to such factors as confusing content or maze-like navigation - so you can eliminate or work around them, and start “funneling” visitors through the steps you want them to effectively take.

Another great feature, pioneered commercially by Clicktracks, is Site Overlay which allows Google Analytics to superimpose visitors and clickthrough data to your individual pages, giving you the ability to see exactly which links on each page are clicked, and with which relative percentages.

Google Analytics comes also with well over 80 predefined reports to analyze your data. Advanced Visitor Segmentation adds eighteen predefined segments for further drill-down into any of these reports, such as geographic location and new versus returning visitors.

Email I got from adwords-support@google.com on Wednesday, July 05, 2006 12:31 AM says:

What to do?

First don’t panic! Okay it’s email from Gog-gool so what? Don’t be shy and reply to the email you’ve got (unless it’s true what they said which in that case you have to fix this problem):

Five hours later I have a response from Google

This is a message I have received today from Google:

Today we’ll disclose some of the AdSense and AdWords algorithm facts. The best way to describe such a complex system is by using graphs. No more words, there you go:

Click here to download full diagram [PDF 2.08 MB]

Google on Thursday unveiled its much anticipated online macro payment processing system designed to offer shoppers with a Google account a quick way to pay for things. Google checkout made for the United States only. Even merchants from the United States selling products or services internationally will be unable to switch because buyers must also be American this could make gaining market share a lot more difficult. To be fair though, Google must be working on the complexities that need to be addressed before a service like this can be rolled out internationally.

Watch a quick video tour of Google Checkout: a faster, safer and more convenient way to shop online.
“Web sites and merchants can integrate Google Checkout into their sites as an alternative payment processing method to existing checkout and credit card processing systems” said Salar Kamangar, vice president of product management at Google.

Consumers with a Google account can type their credit card and billing information into Google Checkout once and then pay for purchases thereafter with practically one click on any Web site that features the system, Kamangar said. As things now stand, he said, “If I buy five things from five different merchants I have to fill out five different forms. This process can take three, four, five minutes” for each form. Google Checkout is meant to change that.

Once they’ve purchased something through Google Checkout, consumers can track their orders through the system, which will be live starting Thursday at Checkout.google.com.

Merchants using the system will be charged a processing fee of 20 cents per transaction, plus 2 percent of the relevant purchase price. Users of the Citibank Checkout option will receive $5 or 1,000 points for signing up. Customers who pay for search-related keyword ads through Google AdWords will be able to process, free of charge, transactions that add up to 10 times the dollar amount of their AdWords spending, Kamangar said. Beyond that, they pay the 20 cents plus 2.2 percent. Kamangar said the regular transaction fees are less than those charged by credit card companies, which can be about 1 percent higher.

Take a quick tour now

Conclusion

Why to wait a second? Many New Google services blocked due to over accounts which they can’t handle. Grab your Google Checkout Account today!

Before you start, you’ll need

• The federal tax ID number (or a credit card and an authorized Social Security number) for your business.
• A text-only version of your return, cancellation, and shipping policies.
• A shopping cart on your business website to accept online orders (unless you’re integrating via Buy Now buttons).

What is Web Awareness?

Web Awareness represents the number of search results for searching your domain, company or brand name. Use “.com” or full brand name if your name is too broad (e.g. ice). In the following sample Flatrate Movers web awareness score is 116,000.

Is it useful?

This is a very useful way to compare competitors. Let’s build quick excel sheet and drop the information in. As you can see the graph indeed reflects the company’s size. You can also compare branches, locations or divisions in your firm using Web Awareness techniques! For instance we can compare flatrate los angeles (1,130,00) against flatrate Miami (75,700) and flatrate Florida (131,000). What do you think now? Is it useful for Google relevancy system or not?

How do I increase my Web Awareness?

It’s very simple to increase Web Awareness if you will follow these steps:

1. Using AdWords
2. Using affiliate programs like CJ and LinkShare
3. Banners
4. Local search
5. Mentioning brand name on every single page of your website
6. Using CitySearch and other directories
7. Writing Press Releases
8. Writing articles

Download this excel sheet