Google Tweaks AdWords To Give Landing  - Page Quality More Weight

After quietly testing in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score. This means ads with landing pages that Google deems to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank higher for lower cost-per-click bids.  

“What we’ve seen is that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads. But the landing pages — the merchant sites, the advertiser landing pages — are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction,” Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team told me. This, says Alferness, means the user experience isn’t what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”

Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal. If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was. The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivizing advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding. Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.

Alferness says Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality.

“What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance — choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to sort of push on those best practices. I gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”

The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.

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About The Author: Pamela Parker is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker. See more articles by Pamela Parker

Google Looks to Cash in with YouTube Channels, New Circular Ads

Google is reportedly in the final stages of negotiating several deals for original YouTube content with major media outlets and celebrities such as Tony Hawk. The search giant is also testing out new ad formats, one of which is reminiscent of the Sunday newspaper circulars, in an effort to drive both online ad revenue and website visitors into physical stores.

YouTube Tricking Out Video Channels, Hello Tony Hawk?

Google/YouTube will advance over $100 million to partners, who will then split ad revenue sold against the content with the world’s largest video site, "people familiar with the matter" told The Wall Street Journal. By offering free channels with high quality content featuring household names, YouTube will try to draw premium advertisers and their big ad budgets online.

Earlier this year, YouTube went into the movie rental business, with 3,000 full-length offerings on their U.S site and, later, over 1,000 titles on YouTube.ca. Late in August, they also broke the 1 billion views marker with their Promoted Videos program. Now, they’re after a share of the global TV advertising pie, a market expected to reach $221.9 billion by 2015, with online and mobile TV advertising growing substantially from their relatively small bases in 2010 (PwC).

The ad budget may not come from traditional TV budgets, but with digital expected to take over 33 percent of the projected $578 billion global advertising spend by 2015, this is where the money is at. And Google, the proud papa of the biggest video site going, surely knows this and will capitalize on it.

The WSJ speculated on a number of potential YouTube partners, but no deals have been formally announced. As for Hawk, his side isn’t talking (yet) and had “no comment at this time.”

Google Launching Circulars in a Step Forward for Offline Retailers

Google also launched a new website promoting the different ad formats they’re testing; ads that may incorporate visual, local, and social elements. One third of searches with ads, said Google, show enhanced ad formats.

One of these new and highly visual ad formats is expected to formally roll out today and is designed to help drive traffic to physical stores. Google Circulars are large-format, location and query personalized ads with the option for numerous click-points.

Much like the Sunday circular in a traditional newspaper, these new ads will pop up when a user clicks on a search or display ad. They are desktop, mobile, and tablet compatible.

Every day, there are more than a billion searches on Google, with more than half of those searches coming from outside of the U.S. (Google internal data). Google will formally introduce the new Circulars ad format later this week at an Advertising Week event.

For now, here is a sneak peek at a Circular mockup:

                   

           

Article Written By  Miranda Miller, October 4, 2011

Facebook Launches “People Talking About This” Metric, Premium Ad Unit & More

Facebook is launching a new “People Talking About This” metric for fan pages this week, designed to show conversations happening about a brand or page owner across the web. It’s part of an upgraded Page Insights tool. Also released is a new Page Insights API tool.

Facebook emailed us the information about the launches tonight, which coincide with the start of Advertising Week in New York tomorrow. Given it’s a Sunday evening, I’m just going to post what was sent, and we may do a deeper follow up tomorrow.

Page Insights Tool

Facebook emailed the following about the updated tool:

With the new Page Insights, Facebook is emphasizing the importance of sharing on Pages, because this increases a brand’s reach, and reach is an important metric to marketers. Facebook has enhanced Insights to show brands how to get more people talking about and sharing the things Pages/brands put on their Pages, which is key to getting a brand’s message out to more people. And research shows that word-of-mouth conversations among friends are the most influential for getting a brand’s message across.

With the new Page Insights, Pages can:

See how posts they put on their Page reach people on Facebook – beyond their fans.

See Total Likes, number of Friends of Fans of a Page, the new public and internal Pages metric, ‘People talking about this’, and Weekly Total Reach of a Page

Optimize content for posts -whether they’re photos, videos, questions, etc. – see what’s working best at reaching the most people, and how to increase the viral nature of these posts.

Facebook also sent this screenshot:

People Talking About This

About the new “People Talking About This" metric (which is to roll out this week, Facebook told us), Facebook emailed:

“People Talking about this" counts ‘stories" – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user's news feed:

liking your Page

posting to your Page's Wall

liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums)

answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events

mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page

liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.

Conversations On Pages

About “Conversations On Pages," Facebook emailed:

1. Conversations on Pages let brands reach more than just their Fans – which is important in increasing awareness, finding new customers, and even driving sales.

2. Friends of Fans represent a larger set of consumers than just a brand's Fans – 34x larger, on average for the top 100 brand Pages, and 81x larger for the top 1000 (comScore).

3. Friends of Fans are also much more likely to visit a store, website, and even purchase a product or service (comScore).

4. Starbucks Fans & Friends of Fans spend 8% more in stores and are transacted 11% more frequently than average Starbucks customer (comScore)

5. Bing Fans conduct 68% more searches on Bing than average Bing searcher. Friends of Fans conduct 27% more searches on Bing (comScore)

Premium Ad Unit

About the new Premium Ad Unit, Facebook emailed:

Investing in ads helps boost a Page's brand messages, and we've seen that social context around advertising is both better for brands and better for people because the advertising becomes more relevant.

So today Facebook is also introducing a new expanded Premium ad unit that combines Page posts with social context from your friends when available. When the person viewing this brand's ad has friends connected to this brand's Page, Facebook will expand the unit to include a line above that shares which friends like the Page – thus combining the brand's voice in the ad with a friend's voice, together.

Facebook sent this screenshot of the new ad unit:

Facebook Page Insights API

About the new Facebook Page Insights API, Facebook emailed:

To encourage third party development and analytics innovation, Facebook is also announcing a Page Insights API for the analytics developer community, so that they can create customized Page Insights solutions for existing and potential clients.

Webtrends (Gatorade, Simon Malls), Wildfire (Electronic Arts and Virgin Atlantic) and Context Optional (Sony Playstation and Levis) are already creating customized insights tools for clients based on the new Page Insights through the Facebook Insights API.

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About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely citedauthority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a process which relies heavily on the proper application of keyword rich, relevant and descriptive original text. This makes sense given that search engine users type words into the search engine in the first place and it is these words that the search engine crawlers root out.

Having a site plastered with the most glorious images that the eyes will ever be lucky enough to see, won’t help you at all to appear in the search listings for a relevant keyword topic. If you want to be represented within the search results for a particular range of keywords, the only way to do so is to use search engine optimisation techniques focussing upon these keywords and key phrases. Even image searches are performed using keyword sets.

But let’s face it, we’re not in the 90’s anymore and nobody wants to visit a site and be greeted by unforgiving columns of text and absolutely nothing else. Thankfully, you needn’t sacrifice all of the fantastic images on your site in order to improve your SEO performance; it is simply recommended to improve the context and relevance of these images by supporting them with keyword rich, descriptive text.

Images can rank within relevant search engine results based on the keyword text that surrounds them on the page. So, in order for an image to demonstrate good SEO, think about applying a keyword relevant heading, caption or description to the image.

An internet without pictures would be a dull place to surf, but a picture without plenty of supporting text based context is unlikely to be found by a search engine user who isn’t already acquainted with your brand, company name or products.

Google Analytics just announced a new set of reports called “Real Time.” They will be seen in the new interface of Google Analytics (available to all users), under the Dashboard tab; according to another recent announcement, this tab will soon be renamed the Home tab. This new feature does not require extra tagging.

According to Google, full roll-out could take up to 1-2 weeks, but in order to get the new feature sooner than later you can signup for the beta by filling the form athttps://services.google.com/fb/forms/realtimeanalytics/

Google Analytics Real Time will show the number of people coming to a site for every minute, and the number of visitors actively on the site at that moment. It enables monitoring the sources sending traffic to the website, the pages being viewed, the GEO location of visitors, and the keywords that brought the visitors (if from search, paid or organic).

While for some users this feature will not bring new insight into user behavior (e.g. small websites), this feature will be specially interesting for content websites. Publishers will get an instant insight into which content is attracting visitors and can adapt the website based on that. For example, if an article about a certain celebrity is receiving high engagement it could immediately be added as the featured post on the homepage or sidebar.

Other occasions where real time data could be helpful:

• Verifying the effectiveness of an ad just as a campaign goes live
• Measuring social media impact as it happens
• Watching the impact of a tv campaign when you know your commercial is on

Do you find it useful? Let us know in the comments how you use it and why you think real data is / is not important.

About The Author: Daniel Waisberg is the Founder of Conversion Journey, a consultancy that provides insights on improving the performance of websites. He is also the founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement & Optimization website. See more articles by Daniel Waisberg

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Today Google launched a paid version of Google Analytics that processes higher volumes of page views and provides additional support. The general feature set and user experience remain the fundamentally the same as the standard product. This comes as an important addition to the enterprise set of tools that Google offers. The new version audience is mainly enterprises that receive a high amount of traffic and need a certain commitment from Google’s part on data collection, up-time, and support.

The new Google Analytics premium is not about features, as shown below there are few capabilities available on the premium version that are not available on the standard version. It is designed for organizations who value guaranteed availability, dedicated services and support; it is also critical for sites who want to process data more frequently and without sampling.

Below is a detailed description of the tool capabilities, availability, support and pricing.

Google Analytics Premium – Product Description

Processing Power

• Guaranteed processing for up to 1 billion hits per month (vs. the 10 million a month for standard accounts).  This applies to a single business or enterprise, but can include multiple web properties. In other words, if a company owns several sites, but the combined volume is under the 1 billion limit, all can be part of one premium instance, but if each site may reach the 1 billion limit separately, then the company would need to pay separately for each site.
• Faster, intra-day processing
• Service Level Agreement around data collection, reporting, and processing
• 99.9% on Collection up-time
• 99% on Reporting up-time
• 98% on on-time Data Freshness (within 4 hours)

Advanced Analysis Tools

• Up to 50 Custom Variable slots (the standard version provides 5)
• Unsampled report downloads for custom report requests
• Unaggregated report downloads for large report requests (up to 1 million rows per download)

Dedicated Support

• Dedicated Account Management
• Phone & Email support 10 hours per day, 5 days per week (relevant to the time zone in which the contract was signed)
• Implementation Consultation & Tagging Audit
• Live & Webinar Training
• 24/7 Product Emergency Escalation Support, if the product is ever outside of the SLA

Pricing & Availability

At first, Google Analytics Premium is is available to companies based in the US, UK, and Canada, although the sites can be located globally. However, according to Google, it will expand into other regions as quickly as possible.

Prices varies per region and will be as follows: $150,000 USD (US), $150,000 CAN (Canada), or GBP 90,000 (UK) per year (billed in monthly increments).

User Interface Changes

As mentioned above, Google Analytics Premium is not about a new set of features. The interface is almost identical to the standard interface we are used to. I believe this is an advantage for users, as most people are already acquainted with the tool and won’t have to get to know another interface.

The following differences can be seen in the tool (screenshots from Analytics Premium a website developed by Cardinal Path, a Google Analytics premium reseller):

• When you click the “Download” button on a report, you will have the option to request an “Unsampled Download”

• There will be an “Unsampled Downloads” section in the Custom Reports tab

• Up to 50 custom variables will be available in the Custom Report builder

Google’s also released this video about it:

Who Should Use Google Analytics Premium

One very important question that comes to mind is: does this mean that Google is not going to invest in the free version moving forward? According to Google:

We are more committed than ever to our standard version. With the release of Google Analytics v5 we are poised to release features faster than ever and are confident that measurement can keep up with the digital consumer journey at last. In the last 3 months alone we’ve released many great features to the new version of Google Analytics.

Another important question is: do I need Google Analytics Premium? That question is a bit trickier. Here are a few cases where you should certainly consider the premium version:

1. If you are currently using a paid tool: the advantage of GA Premium is that pricing is not based on pageviews or hits or visits. If your site generates 1 billion hits per month (in which case you are probably paying a very high amount), now you can use Google Analytics with a higher level of accuracy. In addition, you can feel safe that in case you lose your web analytics budget, you can downgrade to the standard Google Analytics without losing your data or needing to switch tags (and can upgrade again later).
2. If you are using standard Google Analytics and currently getting sampled data and unsampled data is important for you you. Some websites generate large amounts of data, which results in data sampling on Google Analytics. The premium version will power the collection and processing of this information, in addition to have higher data limits (1 billion hits a month). A plus is that the reports should load faster and data will be fresher, even at larger volumes.
3. If your website visitors need to be segmented in more ways. By offering 50 custom variables (the limit now is 5) Google will enable more segmentation options, usually needed on large and complex websites.

Closing Thoughts

This release comes as great news for the industry, as it shows how strategic is Analytics to Google and how much they are willing to invest in it. The unsampled reports and the SLA are great differentials (which were always used by Google’s competitors on the field). It means it will bring the market up and we will keep seeing advancements in this arena.

One single feature that is still not on the level of the competitors is user access management. As of today there are only two types of users on Google Analytics: Administrator and Viewer. For SMB and enterprises this is not enough in order to administer who sees what and who can change the tool settings. As mentioned in an article about Analytics User Management: “Everyone who has access to a web analytics tool needs to take responsibility for that access.”

To summarize, in an interview with Thomas Davenport he said that “it ain’t about the math, it is about the relationships”. Google’s strategy to first conquer the end user (i.e. analysts, SEMs, and more recently marketing managers) and then go for the enterprises looks very smart. Google Analytics is by far the most used tool, and this can only count in favor when an enterprise is choosing a tool, employees are already comfortable with it.

About The Author: Daniel Waisberg is the Founder of Conversion Journey, a consultancy that provides insights on improving the performance of websites. He is also the founder of Online Behavior, a Marketing Measurement & Optimization website. See more articles by Daniel Waisberg

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