Web marketing blog

Google roll out click-to-call phone numbers

2010-02-08T10:19:00.003+11:00

The Google AdWords blog has announced the use of click-to-call numbers for advertisers targeting mobile users. This facility has now completed a stage of beta testing and is being rolled out to AdWords campaigns in Australia and worldwide. Google has been developing better options for AdWords advertisers to target Internet-capable mobile phone users, and the click-to-call option recognises the fact that many mobile searchers would prefer to call from the advert, rather than visit the website to find the number.

AdWords advertisers can now add a location-specific business phone number in the mobile ads, so that users can click the number to call the business immediately. Ads can be served based on user location, so that for companies with multiple locations or stores, a potential customer will see - and can click to call - the phone number of their nearest location. This new feature also makes it easier for advertisers to fully measure the results of their ads by allowing them to track how many calls they actually receive within the AdWords interface.

Google says that the beta trial demonstrated that those advertisers who participated saw improved click-through rates, plus they also received more visits to their websites in addition to incremental phone calls. The cost of a click to call will be the same as the cost of a click to visit a website.

Social media enhances email marketing campaigns

2010-02-04T08:24:00.004+11:00

A recent blog article from MediaPost examines the role that social media is starting to play by supporting existing forms of marketing, such as email marketing. It claims that social media is now a useful tool to help develop more targeted, relevant and successful email marketing campaigns, by extending the reach of these mailings using social sharing features. This means that recipients will share the content with friends who might be interested, which then helps to build brand awareness and potential develop the original email list with targeted contacts.

Social media is also seen as a valuable tool to build new email lists from scratch. Running promotions through Facebook or Twitter can create interest and involvement for future use, as long as the incentive relates to the long-term target market as well. As the article says, marketers will often attract prospects to their website and building email campaign lists through the use of promotions, but social media is unique because it "disarms prospects by building a connection with them in advance".

Web marketing newsletter published for February

2010-02-01T09:11:00.001+11:00

The latest issue of the monthly Web Search & Marketing newsletter has been published for February, covering some of the recent stories on web search and online marketing trends.

This month's edition considers the new Personalised Search function from Google which was introduced with limited fanfare at the end of last year. However, the implications of this change for all searchers, as well as for search engine marketing, is notable and something that every web searcher should consider.

It also looks at Google's continuing developments in the mobile search ad advertising sector, led by the launch of their first mobile phone product during January, as well as other developments with the acquisition of AdMob and improved targeting with Google AdWords on mobile phone devices. Finally this issue of the newsletter considers the differences in reported data between Google AdWords and Google Analytics, and why these might occur.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Predicted trends for mobile in 2010

2010-01-29T07:54:00.003+11:00

A recent article from Advertising Age's blog looks at some key trends that are predicted for the mobile advertising market in 2010. The underlying theme is how mobile technology is rapidly changing lifestyle and business behaviour, with the future trends for the next decade being hard to predict as the market is developing quickly with new functionality and opportunities for advertisers.

The five main trends covered here are: the opportunities becoming available for local advertisers to target their market; the growth in mobile shopping applications and point-of-sale technology; the role of branded applications and display advertising opportunities; the linkage between mobiles and outdoor advertising for targeting; and the importance of social networking and crowdsourcing from mobiles to influence market activity.

Twitter develops 'Power of Suggestions'

2010-01-25T14:22:00.003+11:00

The Twitter blog has posted an article about some new enhancements to help users find other people to follow based on topic or themed groups. They have always used some level of suggestions when users sign up for the first time and with the amount of data and activity now going through Twitter, you would imagine that they can now continually improve the relevancy of these lists.

Twitter says that they have "a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists."

The blog post also says that these lists will be refreshed frequently as the algorithms identify new users who should be suggested in these lists and some that are not as engaging to new users will be removed. Many tend to be A-list users who are highly active and followed, but this isn't a bad thing for new users to see how this micro-blogging service is being used.

Google reports big growth in net profits

2010-01-22T08:30:00.003+11:00

There is widespread press coverage concerning Google's latest quarterly financial statement, such as this article from eWeek. The figures for the last quarter of 2009 were above most analysts' expectations, with net profits of US$1.97 billion on sales of just under US$5bn. This profit figure is nearly 5 times higher than the same period a year ago, when Google made US$382 million. profit for the year rose by 54% to US$6.52 billion.

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt said that the digital economy remains very strong and the company would be continuing to develop new commerce and social initiatives in 2010. There would also be a plan for more acquisitions in different areas, following the acquisition of On2 Technologies, Recaptcha, AdMob, Gizmo5, Teracent and AppJet in 2009.

In the latest financial statement, Google also reported that its traffic acquisition costs - the portion of revenues that Google shares with its ad partners - accounted for 27% of the revenues in Q4, totaling $1.72 billion. Paid clicks for ads served on Google sites and those of its AdSense partners increased 13% from Q4 2008 and 9%% over Q3 2009.

IE browser faces security concerns from Europe

2010-01-19T09:06:00.002+11:00

The recent news that Google is considering ending its operation in China following a cyber-attack in December has led to protests from the US Government and further concerns and issues being raised about attacks on various government websites worldwide.

In Germany the government has now issued a statement warning web users to find an alternative browser to Internet Explorer to protect their security. As reported by the BBC, this comes after Microsoft admitted IE was the weak link in recent attacks on Google's systems. However, Microsoft rejected the warning, saying that the risk to users was low and that the browsers' increased security setting (which is not the default level used by most users) would prevent any serious risk.

However, this warning has now been repeated by France, which - if heeded - will cause significant damage to the reputation and market share of Microsoft's browser. In reply, Microsoft have tried to downplay the concerns but clearly wants to get more users upgraded to the newer, more secure version of Internet Explorer. However, according to Australian security experts quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald, the European concerns are 'overblown'.

Regardless of all this - and despite their issues with China - Google must be taking a secret delight at the problems Microsoft are now having to fend off which were, presumably unwittingly, caused by the original China story. If many people do move away from using Microsoft's browser, the main alternatives are Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome product.

Google considers pulling out of China

2010-01-14T11:13:00.002+11:00

The BBC website reports that Google is considering ending its operation in China following a "sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack which appears to have originated from the country. Although Google hasn't directly accused the Chinese government of being involved in the attack, the implication is there since Google is now saying they are no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine (www.google.cn) which was launched in 2006 under an agreement to censor some of the search results, as required by the Chinese government.

The main issue now, according to Google, is that the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists have been targeted by the hacking during December. The BBC report says that Google will now hold talks with the government in the coming weeks to look at operating an unfiltered search engine within the law in the country, though no changes to filtering had yet been made. The company will also be considering its future position in China.

This is likely to become a big issue for Google, as the massive Chinese market has long been a target to grow their online business - nearly 340 million Chinese people are now online, compared with 10 million only a decade ago. However, local-based rival Baidu holds 60% share of the market, compared to Google's 30%, and this remains a core challenge for Google to gain more share, although this latest attack on their service will be a significant concern.

However, Baidu has called Google's move "hypocritical" and claims it is financially driven. The chief architect of Baidu has claimed in a blog that Google's plans to quit are for financial reasons, rather than a human rights issue, as Google had failed to dominate the Chinese search market. The BBC also reports that Chinese authorities will be infuriated that Google has gone public with their decision whether to pull out of the country, before negotiations with officials get under way.

France considers taxing Google ads

2010-01-11T11:27:00.003+11:00

A report by Reuters says that France is considering ways to tax Google for their advertising revenue, which is currently by-passing the tax system through the billings being made through Eire. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has apparently asked tax authorities to explore whether online advertising revenues of major search engines could be taxed in France as well as their home countries. He also said he wanted the French antitrust body to determine whether Google enjoys a dominant market position in online advertising.

These issues are nothing new and France has a long-held concern about the dominance of the US-owned Google search engine and several years ago had looked at developing a more Euro-centric search engine. The tax issue is also a concern in countries such as the UK and Australia, where the revenue from AdWords advertisers is billed through Eire and therefore avoids the local tax systems.

Google launches Nexus One phone

2010-01-07T09:58:00.000+11:00

Extensive news coverage has been given to the launch of the new Google Nexus One phone (such as this BBC report). This is the company's first own-brand smartphone, although it has been providing the Google Android operating system through other phones to date. The new Nexus One phone is designed to compete with the Apple iPhone and has been developed with Taiwanese manufacturer HTC using the Android operating system.

The phone is initially available in the US and is being sold directly from Google's website. It can be purchased 'unlocked' so that any chosen mobile carrier can be used, but clearly Google wants to gain a bigger share of the mobile phone market to capture more mobile search activity and to provide another advertising platform as a revenue stream in this growing market. An article by ComputerWorld takes a make detailed look at Google's likely strategy to develop a greater foothold in this market.

The latest market share figures reported from Gartner indicate that the Android operating system has about a 3.5% share of the global smartphone market, in comparison to Nokia, which has a 39% share and Apple with 17%.

Web marketing newsletter published for January

2010-01-04T11:00:00.003+11:00

The latest issue of the monthly Web Marketing newsletter has been published for January, covering some of the recent stories on web search and online marketing trends.

As with the previous January newsletters, this issue attempts to predict what might happen over the next 12 months with the main trends that might be expected in web search and online marketing, as well as look back at the predictions we made a year ago.

The past year has seen some continuing product and service developments by Google, as well as the launch of Microsoft's Bing search engine and their acquisition of Yahoo's search service. The full launch of this combined search tool is likely to be one of the main developments in 2010, which should also bring advantages to web users and advertisers as Google and Microsoft compete for search share and advertising spend. In addition, the social networking scene can't be ignored, particularly the recent growth of Twitter, but 2010 will be a notable year in terms of how this media will be used and how it will be developed.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Social marketing predicted for change in 2010

2009-12-23T09:59:00.002+11:00

New research by Forrester claims that social marketing will become more strategic and planned in 2010 with companies taking tools such as Facebook and Twitter more seriously. As reported by Media Post News, the new research contains a list of social computing prediction for 2010 and suggests that companies who are taking this media seriously will create social councils - cross-functional teams aimed at sharing ideas about social media - and allocate budgets and planned structures for these groups.

It also suggests that an increasing number of companies will adopt 'listening platforms' to monitor social media, that Twitter will become more profitable or get acquired and also Facebook will take a more proactive approach to protecting members' privacy in the light of increasing demands from users.

In another report - the 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa - the No. 1 objective targeted and measured by marketers was said to be an increase in website traffic, followed by an increase in lead generation, increase sales revenue, improved search engine ranking and improved brand or product reputation.

Estimating the cost of poor Google AdWords management

2009-12-21T14:17:00.002+11:00

New research prepared by Google AdWords specialists, Web Search Workshop, estimate that up to 20% of all AdWords advertising spend is wasted, due to poor campaign planning and management. This provides Google with extra income that gives little benefit to the advertiser and reflects some basic principles of effective AdWords campaigns that are not being followed by some companies.

Advertisers to spend more online in 2010

2009-12-17T12:44:00.001+11:00

New research by US company Round2 Communications says that 72% of advertising companies will increase their online marketing spending in 2010. A summary of the results have been published by Media Daily News and explain this trend towards online spend because 33.9% of respondents said that ROI (Return on Investment) for new media is "somewhat" better than traditional advertising, and 28.2% said new media's ROI is "significantly" better.

As a result of this growth in spend on digital media, the more traditional channels (such as TV, radio, newspapers and magazines) are expected to lose out, with 86% of respondents saying that they expect their spending to remain even (45.7%) or decline (40.3%) in 2010. However, print still remains the most dominant media channel with 47% of respondents saying this is their single biggest media investment, well ahead of email marketing (13.4%) and interactive advertising (10.2%).

Search and video advertising main growth areas in the US

2009-12-16T12:03:00.005+11:00

Media Post has reported on new research in the US by eMarketer that shows online advertising declining by 4.6% in 2009 - the first drop since 2002 - although this is expected to grow again in 2010. The two areas that saw growth in 2009, however, were search and video advertising.

The eMarketer report identified a move towards 'non-advertising' marketing, such as social media and building websites or brand 'microsites'. This means that spend is being channeled into other areas not previously tracked by the research, so that the annual decline in figures may be misleading. The use of social media is also having an impact on how online advertising is being used and how communication channels are changing.

The search marketing sector is shown to be taking a larger slice of the online budget, as it is in Australia as well. The US figures show spend under $11 billion in 2009 growing to nearly $16 billion in 2014. This will make the sector about three times as big as banner or video campaigns. However, although search advertising will see the largest annual increases through to 2013, according to this research, by 2014 it is expected that more new dollars will flow into video advertising than into search.

This expected growth in spending on video ads will far outpace any other online format, running between 34% and 45% from 2009 through 2014 and is the result of video ads moving to a position as the main form of brand advertising online. By 2014, it is estimated that US advertisers will be spending 46.5% of the online advertising market on search and 38.7% on a mix of banner, video and rich media display ads.

Facebook faces privacy backlash again

2009-12-11T08:59:00.002+11:00

Social networking website Facebook has once again run into a backlash from changes being made to its privacy policy. As reported by the BBC, the new conditions were introduced earlier this week with a pop-up box asking members to review and select their privacy settings. However, like previous changes to privacy and usage conditions, the change is attracting a large amount of negative feedback.

Digital rights groups and bloggers have responded with criticism of Facebook's changing policy, claiming that these are unnecessary and encouraged users to share their updates with the wider online community, as well as making content available to search engines. However, Facebook has responded by saying the changes should help members to manage updates they wanted to share, not trick them into revealing too much.

This is not the first time that Facebook has received such a response to changes, which reflects the extent of membership and usage of the site around the world. However, although it might damage their reputation in the short term, it remains to be seen whether this backlash has a long-term affect on usage of the service.

Facebook began testing the latest privacy changes during 2009 before introducing them site-wide. The changes let users decide who should see their updates, whether all 350 million Facebook members should see them, and if they should be viewable across the web. A spokesman said the changes to privacy made it easier to tune the audience for an update or status change so default settings of openness should have less impact, although users still have the ultimate choice of what to place on their profiles or updates.

Google sues work-from-home scammers

2009-12-09T15:42:00.001+11:00

The Sydney Morning Herald has published an article about Google action in suing Pacific WebWorks, a US company that is alleged to have created a scam advertising campaign that promised "up to $978 a day working from home". However, all that job seekers got in return for their application was a recurring bill on their credit cards and it's claimed that thousands of people have been duped into thinking they were applying for work with the search company.

In reality, the scam is simply selling a kit that claims to show recipients how to make money from home with Google. Buyers' credit cards are then charged with ongoing fees, while the job seeker receives nothing. Because the logo is displayed prominently on the ads, Google claims the unaffiliated websites are misusing its trademark to deceive unsuspecting consumers, many of whom have turned to Google to lodge complaints and ask for refunds.

A Google spokesperson said: "Misleading ads try to take advantage of consumers in the midst of a difficult economy, and as the economic situation has worsened, the problem has only grown. As far as we can tell, thousands of people have been tricked into sending payment information and being charged hidden fees by questionable operations".

Google launches 'real time' search

2009-12-08T10:08:00.003+11:00

As widely reported by the global media, including the BBC, Google has launched a real-time search service as part of its main search results, giving users access to information that has just been published from various sources, such as news, social networks and Twitter (as they announced recently).

Google says that this information will be taken from over a billion pages on the web and reflects the changing nature of content and search on the web. The announcement was made at a special event staged at the Computer History Museum in California, where Google said this was the first time that any search engine has integrated the real-time web into its results page. The new real-time search will also be available on phones and is being rolled out now.

Google's vice-president of search Marissa Mayer was quoted as saying: "This is a technical marvel, getting all these updates in seconds, making them searchable right after they are posted and making them available so that anyone in the world can find them. The updates (on Twitter) are so truthful and so in the moment. That is a really, really powerful part of this. Are you at this event right now? Are you on this ski slope right now? And because of that 'right now' element of it , this is hugely valuable data".

New developments from Google

2009-12-02T16:33:00.004+11:00

Google remains very active in developing and introducing new products and features for various parts of its product range. On the main search side the Google Webmaster Blog has announced that in cases where webmasters indicate a country specification for a domain, this will be indicated in some search results within the green information line. These 'region tags' will be displayed against results where the location or relevancy of the listings may be unclear.

At the same time, Google's main blog has announced a new way of displaying image results. The new format for images to be displayed within the main Google search results will include one larger image and additional smaller images alongside, so that searchers can see more pictures than before.

Finally, another new feature that has been announced relates to Google Analytics, which now provides 'asynchronous tracking'. This is one of many enhancements being added to this service at the moment and the new code snippet can help to reduce webpage load time and also enables enhanced data collection and accuracy through the elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded. The asynchronous tracking code is now in Beta and available to all Google Analytics users.

Web marketing newsletter published for December

2009-12-01T10:09:00.001+11:00

The latest issue of the monthly Web Marketing newsletter has been published for December, covering some of the recent stories on web search and online marketing trends.

This month's edition looks at the top 10 ways to develop high quality links for a website, as voted for by industry practitioners. It also reviews the new Internet advertising figures released for the past quarter by IAB Australia, which show continued growth in the search advertising market. Finally this month, the newsletter considers the introduction of Google's new service, "Promoted Videos", which is a new way to place videos on YouTube (as well as on other video related sites) and to make it easier for people to find these videos.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Google introduces new AdWords formats

2009-11-25T13:48:00.001+11:00

In another announcement on the Google blog, the company has introduced some new AdWords formats for clients, at this stage limited to the US market. The article includes a number of examples of how additional content will be displayed for some advertisers within the AdWords format - this can encompass videos, additional links into a large website, location maps and product information (prices and images).

If these formats prove successful it will create new opportunities for advertisers as well as potentially a higher income for Google from certain adverts. It will also start to change the visual format and space taken up by the Sponsored Results on Google, as well as increase the clickthrough rates from these adverts.

Google to acquire Teracent

2009-11-24T12:57:00.003+11:00

Google has announced the acquisition of Teracent, a US-based technology company that can generate and customize the different creative elements of online adverts, automatically choosing new elements in real-time, by machine-learning algorithms.

This new technology is designed to improve conversions by picking and choosing from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — thereby tweaking images, products, messages or colors in response to activity data. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

As the importance of conversion rate and ROI increases in a crowded webspace, the new technology from Teracent can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns which will also enable publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers web users better ads and more ad-funded web content.

As is usual with Google's acquisitions, the company has identified a technology developer with a huge potential in the future and one that will complement Google's services, as well as benefit fro the additional investment and programming input. Google intends to make the technology available as soon as possible to display advertising clients, such as those using the Google Content Network and through the DoubleClick network.

Google reveals new Chrome operating system

2009-11-20T16:48:00.003+11:00

Google has made public its much-anticipated operating system, known as Chrome OS. Designed to power computers in the future, this new OS will eventually be taking on Microsoft's core product head-on, such as the recently launched Windows 7 system. Google's blog made a brief announcement about the new operating system and the launch in the US has been widely covered by the global media, including the BBC website.

The Google operating system will be a free and open source system, initially aimed at low-cost netbooks. Being open source, it allows contributors to help develop the product and it intends to remove many of the features of a traditional program. Most notably, all applications are designed to run in a web browser and all the user's data is stored on Google's servers, so that effectively most PC or laptop users will be working 'in the cloud' with limited software or content held on their own hardware.

Google has said that the first computers running the system would be available before the end of 2010 and had first announced its intention to build an operating system in July this year. The new system has been designed around the Google Chrome browser which was released in 2008 and now is reported to have 40m regular users. All programs or applications - such as word processing and e-mail - will run in different tabs in the browser and the aim is to improve the speed of work, although much of this will also be dependent on access to the Internet.

Any documents and files created on a computer would be automatically synced and saved on Google's servers. As a result, anybody who lost their computer would be able to buy a new machine and easily recover all their data. However, although Google expects most tasks to be done online, it will also offer the capability for users to access some programs when there is no connection.

Consumer views of online pay models

2009-11-18T12:23:00.003+11:00

With much talk recently around the future of newspapers and online content, and whether these should now starting charging users for access, Media Week has reported on some new research by Forrester in the US which found that while a minority of consumers is willing to pay for online content, not all pay models are considered equal.

Using a mail survey of just over 4,700 consumers, the responses showed that 80% said they wouldn't pay for access to online content if the publisher erects a pay wall. Then 8% of respondents said they preferred an online subscription, with the same percentage also preferring a multichannel subscription. Only 3% said they would prefer to use micropayments, which is one of the options being considered by publishers.

These results are therefore not good reading for publishers and suggest that they should keep offering free, ad-supported products to the vast majority of users who won't otherwise pay for the content, while giving those who will pay a choice of payment methods for access to premium products.

How people would want to access content online also varied, with 37% favouring a website, while smaller percentages preferred portable devices like mobile phones (14%), laptops and netbooks (11%). Another 10% favoured getting their former print publication via an emailed PDF and only 3% favored e-readers like the Kindle, although this reflects the early reach and acceptance of this new technology. Notably, 44% said they preferred none of those options!

When it comes to predicting who will pay for online content, the study found that people who are college-educated, 'technology optimists' and higher earners are more likely to pay for online newspapers than those who are unwilling to pay. Age was barely a factor in willingness to pay, however, but this did become a bigger factor amongst those who are willing to pay for online magazines.

Online video ads perform better next to content

2009-11-16T10:30:00.004+11:00

MediaWeek reports on a new survey from third-party ad server Eyeblaster, which suggests that online video ads placed on social networking and gaming sites don’t have the same success in terms of 'user engagement' compared to content sites and email.

The company examined data from thousands of campaigns that had been run for brands over the past year and specifically focused on two key metrics - Dwell Rate (which measures the proportion of ad impressions that resulted in a user engaging with an ad, such as mousing over it or clicking on it) and Dwell Time (which measure the amount of time users spend engaged with a particular ad).

The results showed that overall, online video increased both Dwell Rate and Dwell Time when compared to other forms of online advertising, but also that online video tends to perform better when adjacent to content or email than in social media and gaming environments. This probably reflects the reason for the different types of site usage in the first place, although video sharing is becoming a more important component of these type of sites.

Eyeblaster found that people tended to browse social networks really quickly and so auto start video ads often didn't have a chance to actually start, plus people have few opportunities to stop and linger like they do on content sites due to the different browsing habits on the social networking or gaming sites.