With tablets and smartphones selling faster than ever before, the percentage of search they account for has inevitably skyrocketed. Google reports mobile traffic is now increasing 139% year on year. Next, we predict, mobile search will push 50% of all web traffic by 2014. Clearly, it’s a phenomenon worth your attention. How to approach it, however, is another matter entirely – though we’re already hot on the case here at Arena Media.
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Pay the most money and you can get your text-only ad to be number one on Google, right? WRONG! The Google AdWords system is far more complicated than that. A good “Quality Score” gives an edge to advertisers, even if they aren’t the highest bidder. This is at the core of what we do as search marketers, and helps us shave of those extra pennies from our CPAs or CPLs.
For years however, we have been in the dark about exactly how Google calculates and ultimately distributes quality scores. We’ve been fed snippets, here and there, of what we can do that “may help” improve our ratings – but never any solid guidelines of rights and wrongs.
As part of the How Search Works interactive infographic that was launched this week, Google have decided to publish their search quality rating guidelines publicly to the world. As you may or may not know, the document has been leaked back in 2008 & 2012, when finally they said they were considering going public with it. Now, they have.
It’s a bit of a large chunk of info, but gives some vital insight (for digital marketers anyway) on how to maintain and improve quality scoring within Adwords accounts. Happy bedtime reading!
If I search “Cabernet Sauvignon” after Newsnight tonight, I’m probably hoping to learn more about wine. But if I search the same thing on my way to a friend Saturday afternoon, there’s a good chance I’m looking for a place near me where I can buy a nice bottle.
Which search results are relevant for me doesn’t depend on which device I’m using – with Galaxy Notes, iPad Minis and a range of Touchscreen Ultrabooks on the market, the differences between smartphones, tablets and laptops are vanishing quickly. What matters to me depends on my situation.
With yesterday’s announcement of Enhanced Campaigns, it looks like Google Adwords is catching up with the way the world really works.
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What a couple of weeks! Following an explosive launch of the revamped MySpace debuting Justin Timberlake’s (who is an investor) new single and the annual CES just last week, another tech player surprises us today. Early this morning, Facebook unveiled their new Graph Search service that will directly threaten Google’s quasi-monopoly.
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When planning Search, some of the most crucial things to monitor are:
We have always been to two different places to get this information: Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. They recently combined the two tools into the new Google Trends. This is much improved and very useful.
Trends now includes features from both of the old products and makes it easier and more intuitive to dig into the data. Here are some examples…
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According to Google, YouTube is as effective as TV in building awareness for your business. *blinks*… Hard to believe, I know but in this post, I’ll try to outline the features and selling points of video for your search campaigns as well as explain how integrated YouTube videos that can be managed in Google Adwords may be the more efficient move for your client.
YouTube content and visitors are growing at a rate faster than one could possibly comprehend. With over 800 million unique users, it’s a channel opportunity hard to ignore. Using keyword, interest, demographic or topic targeting, we can basically manage TV ads on YouTube the way we would manage our paid search campaigns on Google Adwords, using the variety of various Ad formats at YouTube’s disposal. Move over TV buyers, digital and online is back with more for the media world!
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There are more ways to google what you are looking for than speaking your queries, getting results before you finish typing and searching by image. They announced yesterday that Handwrite will now allow you to (good guess) write your search query on your handheld device. The main advantage is that you don’t lose half of your screen to a hit-and-miss keyboard.
Yes, the search box is small. Yes, you can’t handwrite that many words onto a small space. Yes, shorter generic queries are the most expensive and yes, this is will keep those Google dollars rolling in.
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What have the search lot been talking about last week?Bing have announced a relaunch of its search engine, with a big emphasis on combining its social assets and search. A new 3-column design with a new social side-bar has arrived. This move directly pitches Bing’s Social Search against Google’s Search Plus Your World. With Facebook integration – a pivotal part of Bing social search – and the growth of Bing’s share in recent months at the expense of Yahoo, this could be difficult to ignore. Watch this space. |
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Tomorrow (Saturday 31st March) Google breaks a new TV campaign to drive usage of its Google+ service.
Whilst most of the UK have yet to discover Google+, the search giant already claim 100m global users, and brands like Cadburys have also generated 700m ‘Likes’ in only a number of weeks through the platform. My guess is that the UK figure is probably 4m-5m users, of which about half have re-visited since signing up. (Only Google know the real answer here and they are notoriously cagey about their stats).
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Google TV was in the news again yesterday. The partnership with Sony is forging ahead and according to Eric Schmidt of Google “by the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded on it”.
That sounds impressive, but that doesn’t mean people will be using Google TV – or buying the TVs in the first place: sales of TVs are down 21% according to GfK.
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