"Clicks2Customers Blog" - 5 new articles
Precursors To A War Of Superpowers?It has been a very, very busy time for the folks over at Google lately. The much hyped Google Wave is open to a few lucky individuals who got invitations (read more about it at Wikipedia here) and is set to revolutionize the way we communicate online. Not only that, the Google Wave interface is reported to possibly be rolled out to all Google Apps, read more at Engadget here. That’s just about it right? Well, no… Google appears to be in the process of stockpiling at the moment. Along with Wave, the next-generation of Google search, aka Caffeine, may be just over the horizon. Designed to integrate more tightly with social networking, and apparently twice as fast and more accurate, Caffeine is set to change the way we search. There is a detailed test of Caffeine at Mashable here. Google also just purchased AdMob, a mobile display advertising company, for $750 million. AdMob is one of the largest mobile advertising platforms in the world, claiming to serve more than 7 billion ads a month! You can read more about it at the official press release here. Finished? Definitely not! They have also just acquired Gizmo5, which will most likely add the ability to make calls to Google Voice. They even decided to release a new programming language, simply called Go. There was also the announcement of a project called SPDY (SPeeDY), which is set to improve upon the current HTTP standard. Read more about SPDY at the Chromium Blog here. Page load time is set to become a more important part of the search results page (read more at Search Engine Land here), Chrome for Mac is set for a December Beta release and finally Google dropped the prices for their extra paid storage, giving you twice the storage for a quarter of the price! What are all the pieces of the puzzle adding up to? In my mind, only one thing, the coming release of Google Chrome OS. There is one place in the market where Google is forever losing and though there have been many battles, Microsoft continues to bundle Internet Explorer as the primary (and only) browser with Windows. On my installation of Windows 7, if I open Internet Explorer where does my homepage land? Not on Google, I am rather directed to the MSN portal page with a Bing search box. Google, earns it revenue through advertising, whilst Microsoft sells software. Every person who doesn’t use Google, is one less prospective customer and one less possible click for Google. The chances of Microsoft (unless legally forced to do so) bundling a competitor’s browser (namely Google Chrome) with Windows is just about zero. The only way for Google to gain ground is to do exactly what it is doing now, undermine the very basis of Microsoft’s domination - Windows. Chrome OS will be open source, hence as open source it will also be free. The lure of this is (especially) in the budget PC and netbook market where the additional price of Windows software adds a sizable chunk onto the price. With Google offering Chrome OS free, and if it is good, they already have one foot very firmly in the door. The integration of Chrome OS with the Google suite of applications and services will mean one thing, more places to display advertisements! Is this the beginning of a battle of the titans? Will we in a few years time see Google having a large piece of the operating system market, which at the moment is almost completely dominated by Microsoft? Only time will tell, but I get the feeling something is afoot… How Good Is Your Client’s Internal Site Search?After using Google for so long we have become quite used to an almost ‘psychic’ search. You type in something and Google will return a match, even offering suggestions if you make a spelling mistake, and you generally find what you want quite easily. This ‘comfort zone’ we have developed can however lead to problems, as the Google search algorithm is far superior to what is used internally on many sites. When finding landing pages on client’s sites we are often forced to use search queries. Issues arise when there are a large number of products, landing pages and hence keywords. Checking all these search terms can be a time consuming endeavor. So, often it is assumed the keyword will generate a good enough search on the client’s site, landing on an appropriate enough landing page without having to check thousands of queries. If client’s sites all employed more predictive algorithms then this methodology for generating destination URLs would be fine. Realistically many client’s site DO NOT have this feature. Take a large car parts site for example, a search for “ford hubcaps” produces a results page with 7 ‘matches’ which include 1 hub cap remover, 3 sets of hub cap screws, and 3 other items, not exactly a well focused results page! Just by adding a space between ‘hub’ and ‘cap’, the search query will return 27 results that are much more focused… A more glaring example of this would be a search with keyword “power windows” (implying automatic, electric car windows), which returns zero results, however if this keyword is ‘reverse engineered’ and the query is instead “electric window motor” the query returns 1,422 results! So, next time you are dealing with a client that has a large site, and you intend using search queries as your destination URLs, be sure to either check the keywords before hand or research how predictive the site search algorithm is. It may not necessarily be true that your high traffic keyword list will automatically generate good landing pages on your client’s site, if the site search is not up to scratch! In a circumstance like this your click-through-rate might be great but your conversion rate might be less than expected, due to improper ‘engineering’ of search queries related to base keywords. What is a GOOD example of predictive search? My favourite is CDUniverse whose internal site search I think is excellent. User ExpectationWe’re all familiar with the concept of user experience and its importance. Personally, I prefer to think more specifically of user expectation. It somehow seems to stir stronger feelings of personal responsibility. I’d venture that our responsibility for user’s expectations is something the creative department is more aware of than anyone else. The reason: when you think about ad copy you are forced to think about keywords, ad text and landing page simultaneously. You picture the user, the ad, the user’s decision to click, and the landing page they are taken to. You do this for anywhere between a millisecond and many minutes with each and every ad. Neglecting user expectation, that is, creating a discord between keyword, ad copy and landing page does serious harm to three important parties: 1. The advertiser is harmed:
2. Google is harmed:
3. Clicks2Customers is harmed:
In a nutshell: Give the right people (keywords) the right message (ad copy) about the right thing (landing page). Wolfram|AlphaIf you have never used it, Wolfram|Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine” which equates to an online ‘computer’ of sorts, using a vast archive of information to generate facts and figures about most things. Though not a ’search’ engine as such, it represents an interesting resource to be utilised in research. It is the product of Wolfram Research (read more about them at Wikipedia here) and the man behind it, Stephen Wolfram. For instance, did you know that the average age of an internet user is approximately 27.5 years and there are about 1.393 billion internet users in the world, with the USA having 223 million of those - about 16%, so now you know where to target those ads! More interesting facts - Google.com apparently gets 480 million visits a day (or 5556 visits per second), Yahoo! 370 million whilst Bing gets only 160 million. Google itself has market capital of $158 billion whilst Coca-Cola falls behind, with $122.5 billion and Yahoo! a mere $23.66 billion. So, if you are looking for numbers for anything, a presentation, research, or just trying to kill, some time check out Wolfram|Alpha here and see what it can dig up from the world wide web for you. And of course, for people that enjoy them, a ‘mash-up’ exists. Goofram combines results from Google and Wolfram|Alpha side by side on one page. Though inputs into Google will always give results, Wolfram|Alpha can only compute certain words or phrases, therefore sometimes you will draw a blank, but in many cases you get two, very contrasting sets of results, on the same topic. Check out Goofram here. A Second Look at Trademarks
Google recently lifted their restrictions on trademarks meaning advertisers can now include previously restricted brands in their ad copy. People, in general, tend to identify with brands. CTR (Click-through rate – read the definition at Wikipedia here) is in most cases higher on more targeted ad copy. Previously AdWords would disallow these trademarked terms completely.If your client allows it, all trademarks can now be used in ad copy, provided the website provides a product or service associated with the trademarked term. The question is, have you done it? As a copywriter in charge of multiple accounts I have been surprised at how many adverts have been running without brands and hence have been running as the ‘generic’ alternative. It can also be a lengthy procedure as doing a manual analysis of the existing copy is the only way to ensure that you don’t miss the lesser-known brands as opposed to focusing on the more obvious such as “iPod” or “Nike”. However, only by taking a second look will you discover the generic adverts that can now run as more brand specific (and hence targeted) copy. You can read the full Trademark Policy for Google AdWords & AdSense online here. More Recent Articles |
