Just for fun, let’s see what Google Suggest recommends when someone is searching Google about…

Google Buzz:

This week Google has announced a few new twists for marketers who use its AdWords advertising program.

One allows marketers an opportunity to re-engage visitors who clicked-through to their site but left with out converting.  The other helps marketers understand how visitors interact with the ads they have placed on Google.com prior to committing a conversion.  AdWords Remarketing and Search Funnels in brief:

AdWords Remarketing

• analogous to what other providers call retargeting
• allows an opportunity to re-engage with visitors who clicked on an ad, did not convert, and then visited another site on the Google Content Network
• multiple Remarketing campaigns can run simultaneously

Of the two announcements, this is the one that I’m the most excited to.  Just to paint the picture simply, I’ll leverage the example from the AdWords blog:

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

You can also run a number of remarketing campaigns at the same time. For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your “How to get to the arena” page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel.

There’s a lot of opportunity here, and I can’t wait to do some real-world tests.

AdWords Retargeting is alive and kicking, patiently waiting for you to tinker with it in the AdWords Dashboard.

AdWords Search Funnels

• shows user interaction with AdWords advertisers ads over time
• creates relationships between views, clicks and conversions
• provides the following new reports in the AdWords dashboard: Top Conversions, Search Funnels, Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length

So, in short, Search Funnels provides a much broader view of how users are exposed to and interact with AdWords Ads overtime leading up to conversions.

Search Funnels sounded relatively tame to me until I watched the explanatory video in the post on the AdWords blog.

A lot of the data sounds good.  Maybe the person who does the Google product geek-to-human translation was on sabbatical when the video was pulled together.  Learn more about AdWords Funnels on the AdWords Blog.  Search Funnels are available in the AdWords Dashboard.

Which of these will have more impact on your future AdWords marketing activities?

Google Analytics might be one of the best things that Google Robin Hooded to website owners large and small. The analytics package provides incredible functionality and does so for not a dime.  That combination of functionality and free have lead to massive market share for Analytics.  One estimate last year put Google Analytics at a whopping 80%, while another fell slightly shorter, but still impressive at 74%.

It’s been a win-win for Google and for the sites that use the tool to measure their efforts, but a post on the Google Analytics blog today should have some eyebrows raising.  The post is short, titled:

More choice for users: browser-based opt-out for Google Analytics on the way

Maybe Google realizes they need to earn back some “do no evil” sentiment from the population at large.  Maybe there’s a clever reason why it’s best that you not know what happens with the traffic on your site.  Maybe, gulp, they really are just doing the right thing.  It’s hard to tell.  The blog post, almost short enough to have been slipped out of Mountain View in a tweet, is served point-blank.  In it’s entirety:

As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.

So, it’s coming soon, and it’s pretty clear that the solution would allow people to completely opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.

Depending on how the option is presented and received to the end-user, it could have an unnoticeable effect, or it could eventually impact quite a lot of what you know about your website traffic.  ‘Free’ may just become very expensive in the long run.

Thoughts?

I was doing some searches today to see if anything was new and exciting with how Google was handling Social Search results and saw something in the Sponsored Links results that’s new to me.  I searched for Terralever (the online marketing company I work at) and one of the AdSense results was for another local company, bluemedia.

I haven’t seen Google Ads like this before.

These aren’t geotargeted Ads triggered by the keyword “Terralever.”  These ads are different.

Right above the top Ad there’s a heading that says “Related to bluemedia”.  That’s new to me.  I took a quick glance at the AdWords blog and didn’t see any mention of how “Related to” ads would show up.  A few Google searches later and I resigned to the fact that this must be a Google experiment as sometimes the Ads appear and sometimes they don’t.  But, there’s a bigger question here.

What’s making these ads show up?

The “Related to…” leads me to believe this is likely based on social ties between our two companies.  I can think of a few ways that Google could conclude that Terralever is related bluemedia: Our two companies follow each other on Twitter, individuals from each company link to one other on LinkedIn, each company is a Fan of the other’s Facebook Page, and so on.

Just one more reason to buy AdWords ads?

Either way, this example is pretty innocent.  We don’t compete for business with bluemedia.  We do, however, communicate and (occasionally) collaborate with competitors in our local community and beyond.  If this is a sign of a new trigger for Google displaying AdWords ads, should we tighten down our social ties, or jump in and advertise, too?  My guess, assuming this experiment goes live permanently, is that Google hopes we just buck up and buy some ads ourselves.

Last week I did an internal presentation at Terralever talking about how search engines like Google and social networking sites alike were likely both attacking the idea of extending their understanding of both information and the social graph. Today I tripped over an example of Google Social Search and recollected on the presentation. In broad strokes:

Facebook and its data

Facebook’s value lies in the data it has regarding individuals and how the relate to one another. As it stands now, Facebook has incredibly deep information regarding how people connect to one another, what their individual and common interests are, and to a far lesser degree, how they connect to information on the larger Internet.

Google and its data

Google has a set of information which is in many ways the antithesis of what Facebook has. Google has spent years perfecting the task of providing users of their search engine with the most relevant possible search results based on an incredibly complex algorithm that gauges the latent value of content which heavily relies on how that content is regarded from elsewhere on the web.

Facebook, people and information

Where Facebook is headed toward they don’t need to be so concerned about understanding people-to-people connections (as they’ve got that one covered), but instead they are being more conscious about how individuals relate to information. Facebook’s goal was recently stated by Ethan Beard, Director Facebook Developer Network, in his Le Web ’09 Keynote speech: (‘We’ refers to Facebook in this context)

“Platform started in 2007, and this platform is our future. We don’t aspire to only be a website. We aspire to be a technology people use to connect with the things they care about, wherever they are.”

Google and a more social search

Google understands that their relationship with users and information is far more personal than it was at its inception. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, says the following about the perfect search engine:

“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

As social has rapidly made advances towards providing users more qualitative information through the gauging its relative importance, Google has followed suit, and one of the ways in which it has changed was unveiled in October last year. Called Google Social Search, it was a baby-step towards providing more socially-relevant content based upon what Google knew about the person searching.

A Google Social Search example

Today, I tripped across a new flavor of Social Search when showing a colleague an example from that presentation about social and search that I made last week. Here’s the example: I searched on “Facebook Connect,” a technology which allows developers to leverage some of Facebook’s potential on other web sites.

The results I got, for the most part, were what I’d come to expect. However, at the bottom of the page, there was a new section called “Results from people in your social media circle for facebook connect” (followed by the obligatory Google “BETA” designation).

The two results that are listed beneath that heading are from friends whom I’m connected through on Twitter, and each piece of information that was supplied is an individual Tweet regarding Facebook Connect.

How’d Google provide those results?

I do Google searches at least a few times a day to see if anything has changed, and this is the first time I’ve seen this type of social result. I did find an article published on the Official Google Blog that was posted last week that mentions new changes, just not this specific instance.

By clicking on the “My social circle” and “My social content” links beside the BETA results, I learned that Google gathered this information for me as I was logged in to Google with an email address for which I have also created a Google Public Profile. It was that profile provided the breadcrumbs for Google to know of my connections to Jay Baer and Justin Copeland.

How Google explains Social Search:

Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better.

As things continue to heat up between in the search-and-social landscape it should be interesting to see what both Facebook and Google declare to be the best way to connect people with information and provide it in a way that is useful to the end-user.

Who is poised to be the best provider of information in the social age? Facebook, Google, or neither?

Today Google rolled out changes to its flagship product: web search.  The changes are clearly aimed at facilitating the searcher’s ability to find what they are looking for and find it in short order.  If you’re a search engine optimization (SEO) practitioner, your world is about to get more interesting.  For the rest of the planet, what can be expected from Google search results just got a whole lot better.  What’s new?

The updates include Search Options and enhanced search results featuring microformats for content such as reviews. Google provided a brief video introducing new functionality:

Search Options

Search Options allows the user to quickly refine search results by providing additional context to the search being made.  After making a query, a user has several options to further clarify or modify their search results, including:

• Refining results to videos, forums or reviews
• Specifying the time frame from which to display results
• The ability to augment search results with images from the sites returned
• Lengthening the amount of copy shown for each result
• Showing related search phrases
• Displaying related topics to the subject searched upon (“Wonder Wheel”)
• Viewing results on a timeline

The options above are available when viewing “all results.”  As criteria are applied, the user’s scenario changes.  For example, if the searcher specifies video results only, the options change, removing criteria which is not relevant, but adding other opportunities, like the ability to specify the duration of the videos displayed.

Search Result, Snippets and Microformats

In search results, Google is now also returning different information depending upon the the context of the information searched upon.  In Google’s words:

We call the set of information we return with each result a “snippet,” and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These “rich snippets” extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing.

The example which Google provides shows a restaurant search in which the results display star ratings of a result right in the search result listing (as opposed to needing to go to a review site).  Snippets fundamentally change the function of search results.  How and what information to display regarding a particular topic or result is unclear, but what is clear is that this will be a feature which continually evolves.  Google’s blog posting continues to explain the role of Google and the community in defining the feature:

We can’t provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google’s search results stays high.

These new enhancements to Google Search are highly significant; the most significant changes since Universal Search was introduced.

The impact to the Google searcher are clear: Search just got better.  What impact will this have on the SEO community?

At long last Google has released a beta Data Export API for Analytics.  Announced today, the beta is open to all Analytics users.  It’s going to be great to see what developers and marketers team up to do now that Analytics data can be accessed without hacking.

From the Google Analytics blog post announcing the availability of the API:

A Google Analytics API has long been one of our most widely anticipated features. Today we’re pleased to announce that the Google Analytics Data Export API beta is now publicly available to all Analytics users!

What’s so exciting about an API? The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with their own business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. Individuals and business owners will have opportunities to access their Google Analytics information in a variety of new ways.

The post continues on to provide sample ideas, tips on how to get started, and real-world applications.

• The Google Analytics API blog post
• Google Analytics Export Data API information for developers

Just a quick note: Google AdSense users were notified today of the upcoming launch interest-based advertising for AdSense.  An email and post on the AdSense blog outlined how it will work and what publishers need to do in order to participate.

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network.  As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.  To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009.  Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

Google has made no secret about its feelings towards paid link building, openly attacking the practice and going so far as to set up mechanisms to allow individuals to ‘out’ those using the tactic.  Apparently Google’s Japan didn’t get the memo.

In the promotion of a new site feature, Google Japan was spamming its own index by using a well known pay-per-post company called CyberBuzz.

Google Japan did make mention of their marketing practices and violation of Google’s search guidelines in doing so on the Google Japan blog.

Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

That’s where the story sounded like it would end, but CyberBuzz then followed up by saying that they are not a pay-per-post company and that allegations otherwise are false.

While its possible there may be a misunderstanding, Google once again pointed the finger at… Google.  Viewing the cached version of CyberBuzz’s FAQ’s showed that they had changed as the pay-per-post allegations surfaced.   What went missing from CyberBuzz’s pages?  According to a Japanese blogger, it was the following:

Q: How much money can we get as a reward?
A: From a couple hundred yen to thousands of yen ($1-$100 USD) depending on the campaign and your Buzz-level (akky: like karma points)

Q: What do I have to do to get a reward?

A: (snip) Registered members are paid when they write up a blog entry related to the product/service.

I came across this on the Asiajin blog. Start reading here, then follow the related posts: Asiajin – Google Japan Buys Dirty Pay-per-Post Links.

Techcrunch, CNet, and WebProNews also have good coverage.

I recently wrote on how you can easily use Yahoo Site Explorer to learn what websites link to your site. And, in a subsequent post I covered brand reputation management (or monitoring) using Google Alerts. Today’s post combines elements of each of those posts to provide another method of monitoring links to your website, this time using Google Alerts.

If you haven’t read my first post on Google Alerts and you’re not familiar with the tool, you’ll want to start by reading that post.  Assuming you’ve used Google Alerts before, you just need to be aware of a few things to start using Alerts to monitor what sites link to your website.

The method uses a well known variant of Google’s traditional keyword search: the ability to place “link:” before a URL in a standard Google search query to learn what sites Google credits with linking to another website.  Here’s an example of what sites Google recognizes as sites linking to this website (the Google Search launches in a new window): link:http://www.onlinemarketingperformance.com.

Now, all we need to do is use that exact same method and setup a Google Alert which will notify us when it finds a link to our site.  Here’s what that looks like:

Am I that unpopular?

Wait, we’re not done yet.  Let’s back up a step and look at what Google returned for the number of links to my site.

Google reported that there’s approximately 31 links to my site. That’s a bit disheartening. I know there are more than that. What gives? First, it’s widely accepted that Google does not accurately report how many links it is aware of. I’m not going to debate that point or pontificate why that might be. However, the obvious thing to do (to me) would be to just see where Google notes it has seen my URL posted. I’d imagine that more often than not there would also be a link to my site.

Mentions of my URL seem as though they’d be accompanied by links

Let’s try a standard Google search on my domain.  I’m going to also remove the “http://” and the “www.” as I’m not sure how others might represent my URL.  So, my search would be for “onlinemarketingperformance.com” (with the quotes-without them Google will return partial matches, even with spaces and dashes).  Here’s that result:

This time Google says there are almost a thousand mentions of my domain name.  And, by clicking through and reviewing the results, it’s clear a strong majority of those mentions also provide a link to my website.

So, I’ll add that search as another Google Alert.  Here’s my final link (and URL mention) monitoring with Google Alerts:

That’s it.  I’m all setup to monitor links to my site.  Of course, I’ll occasionally be alerted when there is a mention of my URL that doesn’t have a link, but that’s fine.  I’d prefer to know than not know.