Microsoft and Yahoo Join Forces for PPC Advertising

, , , ,

I got an email from Microsoft adCenter promoting the new alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft.  They’re calling it “Search Alliance“.  The aim is to have their online paid advertising fully unified before the 2010 holiday season, although they did say that they’ll wait until 2011 if they “determine this will be more effective”.

Microsoft bought out Yahoo, so now the primary tool behind both search engines will be Bing, and behind the pay per click (and other paid online advertisements) will be adCenter.  The Search Alliance has stated that each company will “continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences”.  Not sure exactly how they’ll pull that off with the same search engine for both, but they may just mean the search interface.

The support will be broken apart, Yahoo supporting the bigger advertisers, and Microsoft will provide support to “self-service” advertisers.  They are combining their platforms for the advertising audience, so ads put together under this new alliance will reach consumers using either search engine.  The Search Alliance brags that advertisers of all sizes will now be able to have access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million worldwide searchers.

At any rate, this is pretty big news – Yahoo and MS pulling together to battle the mighty Google.  I expect this may be an epic battle.

/0 Comments

Google Does SEO?

,

The stance Google’s taken on search engine optimization has always been a little hazy.  However, they do acknowledge many elements of SEO as being important for a good web design (as implied by all the information given within the Google Webmaster Tools pages).  But it appears they’re taking it a step further.

Google has begun a small project by showing how to improve SEO for some select pages within countries in northern Europe.  They will then put up a post about each page describing their findings and what they recommend to improve listing positions.

This isn’t exactly offering SEO services for clients (like our own Tulsa SEO services), but it is showing that they acknowledge how important SEO is for improving results, and are even willing to help by giving some tips.

Mark Jackson has a good article detailing more on this in ClickZ.

/0 Comments

So How Is Google Buzz?

,

Google Buzz is the latest update from Google.  Went live yesterday, looks to be Google’s effort to break into the social media market.  I personally tried it out a bit, it ties directly to Gmail.

It does do updates regularly, and appears to share the information with anyone who follows you.  A lot of people have commented that it looks to be an imitation of Twitter.  The nice thing is that you can connect to other sites, to reduce all the different social machines that need maintenance.

Google Buzz options

The default for me was to activate sharing with Picasa and Google Reader (I didn’t select either of these).  The other options available are visible in the image above.  The blurred domain is a site I set up on BlogSpot/Blogger through the same account.  With Twitter, it will read your Tweets, but from what I can tell it only reads to Buzz, not vice versa.

Looks like Google’s still ironing out the kinks on this, I’m sure plenty of people will be giving feedback for it.  For now I find it nice since I don’t have the mass of content that is dealt out on Twitter, and so far it appears to still stay within actual social connections (and hasn’t spread into the marketing machine yet).  So every “buzz” I’ve gotten so far has been from a friend, making an actual comment on life instead of a business telling me how good their merchandise is.

I don’t know if it’s automatic for all Gmail users, but from the amount of people I’ve seen pop on with it, I’m guessing it is.  It’s just another option underneath the Inbox, and it will show updates for some “buzz”es (but not all) within the Inbox.  It appears it will post the updates for anything you have contributed to to your Inbox, with the little Buzz logo next to it.

We’ll see if it’s something that gets used a lot or not, should be able to tell within a few weeks how well it’ll work.

/0 Comments

How Much Money Does Google Make? Billions.

,

Google just upped their record from the 4th quarter of 2008 by 17%.  So how much is that, exactly?  Revenues in the 2008 4th quarter: $5.70 billion.  And they’re only improving.  Revenues in the 2009 4th quarter: $6.67 billion.

The fact that this is only for one fourth of the year blows my mind.  If that stays consistent, then that’s in the neighborhood of $25 billion a year.  They’re doing okay.

If you want to get more of the details on these numbers, check out this article from Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land.

/0 Comments

Google Knows What Your Boyfriend/Girlfriend is Thinking

,

It’s not always dead on accurate, but by using Google in the right way you can often figure out what your significant other is interested in.  How?  By using what’s known as “predictive text”.  It’s the ability by Google (and Yahoo) to see what you’re typing in and try to predict what you might be looking for.  By only entering a few words in, you can often glean a lot of very interesting information.

For example, you can type in “how can I get my girlfriend to” and then let Google roll, see what it comes up with.  (Warning, even though it’s only text, it’s not all child-friendly content.)  Replace “girlfriend” with “boyfriend”, “wife”, “husband”, etc. and you have a new research tool.

Mind you, in many cases these results may not match at all with your significant other’s thoughts and desires, but it can still be fun to explore.  And for marketers, this is a gold mine.  These are the hot buttons that are looked for to prompt action by many marketers, and Google is just giving it to you.

If you want to see more detail and screenshots of examples of these, check out Vanessa Fox’s excellent article on Search Engine Land.

/0 Comments

Google is Not Immune to Error

As posted in article by PC World, even Google can make errors on occasion.  In this case, some statistics for users of Google Business Center were sent to incorrect Business Center users.  This included information such as how often the business had appeared in listings, how many times the business was clicked and follow-through clicks on the business site itself.

This error was found to have been by human mistake, not an error directly with any of Google’s systems.  Google was on top of it and corrected it quickly.  They published a written statement to acknowledge the error and that when they discovered it, said they paused all emails to Business Center users until they could determine the cause of the issue.

/0 Comments

Even Google Can Get Penalized

,

Apparently Google in Japan got a big penalty placed on them by Google themselves, taking their toolbar PageRank level from 9 to 5 (Search Engine Land posted an update about this on an earlier story they had).  This is a huge sign – one, that Google takes bad actions by any site (even themselves) very seriously.

Only now has the penalty been removed, although the toolbar PageRank is only up to 8 (not 9).  That’s almost a full year of penalization (11 months, to be precise).

The malady that Google Japan performed?  They paid bloggers to review a new Google widget.  This isn’t the first time Google instated a penalty on themselves – it does go to show that Google enforces their rules consistently, even against themselves.

It demonstrates that if you want to be sure to keep good rankings, you do have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

/0 Comments

Real-time Search Example on Google

The news about Google’s real-time search has been out for a little while now, but many people are still wondering how this is affected by real-life situations.  Well – Matt Cutts was gracious enough to show by example.  He displays exactly how Google tracked a recent mild earthquake and how long it took to show results on Google.

It’s good to see that their real-time search update actually functions as intended, and I can see the potential for it to help in a variety of ways.  Being the top search engine and a huge point where people check on things every day, getting your breaking news from Google (for info relevant to what you’re looking for) may get info to some people (who don’t check the news so often) faster.  Whether or not Google should take this role is not something that’s universally agreed upon, but there are visible benefits.

/0 Comments

Android vs. iPhone – Which is Better?

Now I’m already an iPhone user, but I’ve heard plenty about Google’s Android. And while I’m not able to do a fair comparison, Danny Sullivan (SEO extraordinaire) is, and he did.

He does more of a businessman’s review, as to how each phone worked in an efficient manner (or not), and what his impressions were of each overall.  Check it out if you’re trying to decide between the two.

/0 Comments

Put Business Phone Numbers on Cell Phone Ads

, ,

Google’s made a little tweak to AdWords, so now you can put an ad that will show on cell phones that lists a business number.  If the owner of the phone calls that number, that counts as the click that is paid for.

The benefit of this is that it’s a very quick hot lead for anyone who advertises on the mobile network.  And it’s easy to do, since it defaults to all devices in AdWords, anyway.  To make sure you’re listed, check to see that mobile devices are checked in your settings in the campaign settings in AdWords.

Also, to have your phone number listed, you can either have the business information synched up with your business account or enter it manually, both done inside of the AdWords campaign settings.  Make sure whichever you do that you include your phone number.

Then to see the results, just choose the “Filters and Views” drop-down list and choose “Segment by”->”Click Type”.  This will show which clicks were URL clicks, and which were calls, from either the Ad Group or Keywords tabs.

It’s just an addition Google’s made to AdWords, and sent out an announcement through email to Google advertisers.  This could be a good change for people who use AdWords for markets that actively use their cell phones.

/0 Comments