Happy Halloween from the AdSense, DoubleClick, and Ad Manager teams!
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Ghoulish greetings
Browsing Posts published in October, 2009
The holidays are the most wonderful time of the year, and present merchants and affiliates with tremendous earning potential. In fact, holiday shopping can account for up to 50% of an online retailer’s yearly sales, meaning that affiliates too have an equal opportunity to leverage this peak shopping season.
In 2008, an estimated 85 million people shopped on Cyber Monday, known as the kick-off date to the online shopping season. This year, many online retailers are looking to the Monday after Thanksgiving to bring another sales surge.
The Black Friday – Cyber Monday weekend accounts for a significantly large portion of the holiday sales for online retailers. Yahoo Advertising reports that Black Friday is the new Cyber Monday, stating,
“When compared with the average day in November, Black Friday showed a 147% increase in conversions, while Cyber Monday had a 73% increase in conversions.”
This year, the lucrative Black Friday – Cyber Monday weekend falls between November 27-30; affiliates, make sure your campaigns are ready!
The 2009 forecast looks promising, when compared to 2008. Amazon.com has reported its third quarter income has increased to $199 million from $118 million last year. It’s forecasting 4th quarter growth of 21% to 35% over last year.
To leverage your earning potential, it’s important to note what shoppers will be looking for:
1. Deals
2. Discounts
3. Coupons
As economic difficulties continue, consumers are looking for money-savers now, more than ever. Coupon sites have seen monumental growth this year, with shoppers looking for discounts and deals. Sites such as RetailMeNot are seeing over 200% growth over last year.
According to Netelixir , keyword search advertising is expected to be the most important customer acquisition channel during the 2009 holiday season. With Google reporting a 7% increase compared to the third quarter of 2008, PPC affiliates will have a great opportunity to increase their search revenue. For affiliates looking to try their hand at PPC, the holidays are the perfect time to get started. And with Share Results’ recent launch of their SEM Agency , it’s easier than ever to get the support you need to drive the success of your affiliate marketing campaigns.
For more techniques, tools, tips and great resources to make sure you’re getting every last drop out of your affiliate marketing campaigns, be sure to come back to the Share Results blog . Until November 27, Share Results is throwing a big Holiday Blogging Event, packed with all kinds of seasonal information regarding trends for Q4, tips to get the best deals, consumer trends and how best optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns.
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Affiliate Earning Potential During the Holidays
On the face of it, developments in digital publishing have signaled a decisive victory for aspiring and professional authors in recent months, judging by recent announcements:
Amazon recently declared that it’s Kindle e-book reader was its overall bestseller by number of units shipped and total revenue generated. According to a MarketWatch article, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently mentioned during the company’s Q3 financial results (ended Sept 30, 2009) call that the Kindle is now the most popular product on its site by unit sales and dollar value across all product categories. Analysts expect that the e-book reader and ebooks will fuel the online retailer’s next stage of growth.
Google announced details of its upcoming Editions service, to be launched next year, which will allow ubiquitous access to books on web browsers and other devices. In a recent announcement, Google Book Search’s publisher partnership program head Tom Turvey said the new Editions service would kick off with between 400,000 and 600,000 books in the first half of 2010.
Consumer electronics giant Sony has judged the e-book reader segment important enough to take some focus off its television and Playstation projects to develop it’s Reader product. According to the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com, Sony had sold about 300,000 units of the product from its October 2006 launch till end 2008. (The WSJ.com post is currently unavailable online)
With e-book readers experiencing a boom, writers might be looking forward to a boom for their wallets.
Whether you’ve already had a few published books under your belt, or you’re working on your first book, you will be wondering: What’s not to like especially with Google Editions’ payout model?
With Google Editions, the revenue split of 55% to Google and its distribution partners and the balance 45% going to your pocket is more than just making about half the revenue from your sales, it breaks the historical monotony long held by publishing houses. Most published authors receive a fraction of the value of books sold. It’s not uncommon for an author to receive a $0.50 to $1 royalty fee for each copy of a book sold. If you’re a superstar author such as JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series of wizardry books, or king of horror, Stephen King, you’ll have more room to maneuver.
In fact, the 45% royalty that Google Editions looks set to payout looks like the perfect out for many budding authors to quit their day job and do the “writing thing”.
Before you fire your boss, take note of a couple of big holes in the new business model.
#1 Quality, quality and quality
Someone investing a couple of hours reading a book would prefer a good book, over a poorly-written book in most circumstances (a fetish for spending reading kitschy/trashy romance/potboiler novels notwithstanding).
Yes, the possibility of self-publishing will break the hegemony/monopoly of the publishing houses, especially since manuscript acceptance rates of 1 in 10,000 are not uncommon. But just because you get to publish what’s in your mind, i.e. the “great American novel”, doesn’t mean that anyone else is going to like, or buy it. If your book meet Joe Public’s quality standards, you’ll have the consumer telling you “No”, rather than the publishing house.
The refund policies aren’t out for Google Editions yet, but judging by Sony’s ebookstore policy on refunds: “Please confirm all purchases before you complete them as all sales are final. There are no refunds for digital content.” It sounds like you can’t give a refund for a poorly-written book, but if everyone and his brother is blogging and tweeting about how badly your book sucks, you can expect sales to suffer.
#2 But I only like to write…
Assuming you’re going the self-publishing route and making the decision to avoid giving the publishing houses your fat writer’s paycheck, means having to ensure quality on your own.
There’s a myriad of service providers online to find proofreaders, book editors, designers and other specialists to make sure your novel looks like more than just a Microsoft Word document converted to Adobe PDF. Hint: the lack of a cover and extensive use of Times New Roman size 12 font throughout the book are dead giveaways…
Being able to post an accurate job description, screen service providers, screen competitive bids, and manage the team you’ve hired, will require more project management skills, than just being a dang good writer.
#3 Traffic Generation and The Lesson from Satellite TV
With the launch of satellite TV a couple of years ago, the complaint shifted from “There’s nothing to watch on network TV”, to “I’ve got 500 channels on satellite now, but there’s nothing to watch”. The lesson? Having lots of choice is always a good thing, but being able to stand out from the pack will play a direct impact on your sales.
Remember back in the early 1990s when there were just 20 websites in your niche? And you would make bank even if you had a garish bright yellow website and a couple of typos liberally sprinkled across your site? Google Editions may be that way too…for the first week or two.
Being able to market your book successfully means being able to put together the elements of a cohesive and integrated marketing plan. Almost every blogger or twitter user will be able to publish some content and generate a few random sales, but if you’re planning to make writing a full time gig, you’ll need a whole lot more marketing mojo in your corner.
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E-Books: The Bottomline
Here’s what e-book have going for them:
* More money in your pocket: The technology has eliminated the brokers and middlemen from the traditional book publishing ecosystem.
* Write what you like: You’re not constrained and restricted like you would have been if you had signed on with a major imprint.
But like Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben would say “With great power there must also come – – great responsibility!”
The balance of power and more importantly, profit, comes with the writer’s responsibility for viral/guerilla marketing skills. If you decide to DIY everything, you’d need to have decent editing, project management and marketing skills (the majority of which most writers lack). If you’re not represented by a publishing house, which invests heavily in a publicity campaign, you’ll have to find alternatives since most bookstores will probably not arrange “e-book signings” (especially if it’s a product which they don’t sell), unlike an author with a published paperback or hardcover novel.
In my opinion, unless self-published writers have the whole package, including management and social marketing skills up their sleeves, they might end up being the biggest losers in the new e-book paradigm.
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When it comes to holidays, Halloween is one of our favorites. You get candy corn, creepy crawlies, ghosts and goblins, blustery weather and the goopy joys of pumpkin carving all crammed into one glorious fall fun-fest. It’s also the one holiday where you can dress up as whatever you want — your favorite celebrity, your favorite animal or even, like one Googler last year, your favorite gadget.
As usual, we’re in the process of devising brilliant last-minute costumes, and we got curious about what others around the globe have been searching for in preparation for Halloween.
We used Insights for Search to track the fastest-rising searches related to [costume] in the U.S. in 2009. The query at the top of the charts is [lady gaga costume] — no surprise, as the star wears quite a few costumes on a regular basis herself:
And many people seem to be planning a tribute to the late pop star Michael Jackson — searches for [michael jackson costume] started spiking in June of this year and have increased steadily since then:
Since Halloween is most popular in the U.S., we focused on queries there — but we did investigate searches in Canada and the U.K. for good measure. In Canada, people are overwhelmingly searching for costumes for two — variations on [couples costumes] dominate the top 10. Both in Canada and across the pond, searchers are looking for costumes based on Lewis Carroll’s classic story Alice in Wonderland, with [mad hatter costume] in the top 10 in the U.K. and [alice in wonderland] in Canada.
Since [vampire costume] was one of the top 10 searches this year, we figured we’d check in with the various vampire TV shows and movies to see which is, um, making a killing in the costume race. The query [twilight costume] has the most search volume, with [true blood costume] not far behind. (Pointy teeth and body glitter — done!)
Thinking of dressing up your little ones? Popular queries in the U.S. related to [kids costume] include [ladybug], [minnie mouse] and [tinkerbell].
We also did some digging to see if people were taking inspiration from the movie Where the Wild Things Are and wearing a [max costume] this year. Based on the fastest-rising related terms [footie pajamas], [footed pajamas] and [max costume pattern], it seems like at least a few folks are choosing to make [max wolf suit] costumes at home:
As a dog-friendly company, we share the country-wide impulse to dress up our dogs for the holiday. Related searches for [taco dog costume], [dog shark costume] and [banana costume] (so cute!) all rank high.
At Google, we’ve been gearing up for tomorrow’s real deal with festivities on our Mountain View campus, complete with Halloween crafts for visiting kids and a haunted house. Googlers are also pulling out all the stops for the costume contest:
We hope you have a happy Googleween!
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A ghooooulish Googleween
(Cross-posted from the Google TV Ads Blog)
Small businesses often think that television advertising is too expensive and cumbersome for them to use. They assume that they need a fancy, expensive commercial to use in their TV campaign. But Google TV Ads changes all of that — we make it easy and affordable for you to make a TV ad, plan a campaign and reach your customers through the power of television. We launched the TV for All contest two months ago to prove just that.
More than 200 companies submitted commercials for the opportunity to win $25,000 worth of free national advertising on cable channels such as CNBC, Hallmark and Bloomberg using Google TV Ads. Today, we’re happy to announce the three winners of the TV for All contest based on votes from the YouTube community.
Amazing Gates, Owners.com and ZAGG.com received the largest number of votes among the 10 finalists. Each of these businesses will receive $25,000 in free national advertising through Google TV Ads advertising.
Check out the three winners and all entries at www.youtube.com/tvforallcontest. For more information on Google TV Ads and how it can help your small business succeed, visit our website at google.com/tvads.
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Three contest winners making their way to television
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Halloween is in two days and falls on a Saturday this year so the parties and get togethers will be in full swing. It doesn’t matter if you’re throwing a Halloween jam or giving out candies – dressing up in a costume can make it more fun and enjoyable.
So who will you be dressing up as this year? According to a recent article from MercuryNews.com, Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga and Kate-minus-Jon will be some of the hottest costumes in 2009.
Halloween can also be a great time to start an affiliate marketing career. Brian G. Johnson from NetMarketingCourse.net said that:
“It is estimated that during the 2009 Halloween season, consumers will spend more than 7 billion dollars on costumes, candy, decorations and other assorted seasonal niche items.”
This can be a huge opportunity for new and established affiliates to generate revenue and ride strong into the holiday season.
Happy Halloween from the Share Results staff!
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Halloween 2009
We’ve posted a couple times about how the Custom Search Element can help provide a more customized search experience for your users while enabling you to earn money. Today we’re excited to announce two new features for the Custom Search Element that will enable you to further customize your website search to the look and feel of your site: themes and rich snippets.
Themes
You can now customize the layout and styles of your Custom Search Element. To select a theme for your Custom Search Element, just go to your Custom Search Engine account at http://www.google.com/cse/manage/all and click Control panel. On the Control panel page, in the left-hand menu, click Look and feel.
Custom Search Control documentation.
Rich snippets
Rich snippets are another new feature that allow you to customize the actual Custom Search Element search results with additional relevant content, like thumbnail images and actions. We like to think of rich snippets as a way to add more flair to your Custom Search Element search results.
Here’s an example of search results from a Custom Search Element which uses both themes and rich snippets. The thumbnail image next to each search result shows rich snippets in action.
Rich snippets require you to mark up the page with metadata. For more information, check out the Custom Search Developer’s Guide.
If you have any feedback for us on either of these new features or on the Custom Search Element itself, please leave a comment. We love hearing what publishers have to say about Custom Search!
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A more customized search experience for your website
The holidays present online retailers with tremendous earning potential. With mere days left in the month of October, and the countdown to the real holiday madness just around the corner, now is the time to have a good look at your marketing campaigns to make sure you’re set up to enhance your sales volume, and ultimately, seal the deal. Here are some key areas of your marketing campaigns that you should look at to make sure you’re in shape for the season.
1. Quality Affiliates
Having knowledgeable, capable marketing partners is crucial to the success of your online campaigns. A quality affiliate will have an attractive, user-friendly website with a high page rank, and will employ multiple marketing methods to promote your product(s). So make it a point of recruiting these affiliates and regularly logging into your account to evaluate the quality of partners that you are attracting to your program.
If you don’t feel confident about the caliber of your partners, you should speak to your affiliate manager, or consider re-evaluating your recruitment strategy. Your Traffic Report can also help you identify your top-performing affiliates, along with their conversion rates, and can be pulled based on Affiliate ID. Once you have partners whom you believe have the potential to perform well in your program, the more likely quality sales will be generated.
2. Click-Through Rate
Your click-through rate is an important indicator to help you determine whether (a) customers are attracted to your product/service, and (b) if they are abandoning your landing page for some unforeseen issue. For example, you may create an effective banner ad or coupon, but a problem on an affiliate’s site, your landing page or your shopping cart could be impacting the customer’s ultimate decision to buy.
The Deep Linking tool is applied by merchants who want to help their affiliates highlight specific products that match the need of the customer. This tool allows affiliates to send customers to an exact area of your site that truly responds to their buying need. When a customer sees a product on a banner that they like, and then lands on a relevant landing page for that item, you are helping to seal the deal, and reduce the odds of shopping cart abandonment. If you’re seeing low stats, consider permitting a tool like deep linking in your program, or talk to your Share Results affiliate manager to offer some insight.
3. Seal the Deal
Once an affiliate has sent a customer to your website, and the customer is ready to buy, it’s up to you to seal the deal. Make sure you have the right tools, and are doing everything you can to make buying convenient and simple.
An example of a deal breaker might be a banner on an affiliate’s site promising a flat price for one of your products, only to have that customer discover shipping charges during the checkout process. In fact, according to comScore, 43% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges, and 72% of consumers say that if an e-commerce site eliminated free shipping, they would use another e-commerce site that did offer free shipping. Free shipping is just one of several incentives that are important to online shoppers, so make sure to incorporate this in your strategy whenever possible.
Most importantly, remember to apply your Share Results marketing software to its full potential by using the tools at your disposal, and to check in with your affiliate manager regularly to find more strategic techniques for closing the sale.
Is your affiliate marketing campaign ready for the holiday season? If not, this is the blogging event to get you ready for the busiest season of the year. Check out last week’s blogs, and make sure to tune in until November 27 for more tips and techniques to help you end Q4 with your most successful campaign yet!
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Merchants: Boost Your Sales and Seal the Deal with 3 Quick Tips
Every day we get millions of search queries about music. You want to know more about your favorite artists, find that new album or iconic song or figure out the name of that tune stuck in your head. In fact, according to Insights for Search, two of the top 10 queries in the U.S. are music-related. But often, if your answer is in a song, it can take a while to get there. We call this “time to result” — and we’re always looking for ways to reduce it.
Today, we’re rolling out a search feature that does just that by enabling you to search and more easily discover millions of songs, all via a simple Google web search. If you’re searching for music, “time to result” is really “time to music.” Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala. When you click the result you’ll be able to listen to an audio preview of the song directly from one of those partners. For example, if I search for [21st century breakdown], the first results provide links to songs from Green Day’s new album. MySpace and Lala also provide links to purchase the full song.
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Making search more musical
Ever heard of Hotwired.com? Do you recall navigating a Time Inc. site called Pathfinder? Remember a company called MCI?
If any of those things ring a bell, then you might look back fondly on October 27, 1994. That’s when the first banner ad was created. Adman Frank D’Angelo was in on that historic moment, and he shares his perspective in a fascinating piece in Ad Age.
As with many advances in marketing, the birth of the banner ad really started because of an industry leader’s vision – in this case, Ed Atzt, then chairman of mega-brander Procter & Gamble. At a May 1994 industry speech, Atzt implored his colleagues to jump on the new media bandwagon. Frank D’Angelo’s boss, an ad agency head, was in the audience. He brought Ed Atzt’s challenge back to his agency, which happened to have MCI, then a rising telecommunications company, as a client. (MCI would later become WorldCom – but we won’t go there.)
MCI, says D’Angelo, was a perfect fit for this “new” online advertising. After all, one of the company’s employees was Vinton Cerf, the acknowledged “father of the Internet.” But D’Angelo makes it clear what a bold move it was for an advertiser to agree to a banner ad on Hotwired.com, a spin-off of WIRED and the first commercial digital magazine.
“Keep in mind,” says D’Angelo, “this was 1994; the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was less than a year old (soon to be replaced by Netscape Explorer), and Web access? Purely dial-up, 24.4kps if you were lucky, meaning these ads took a while to load. The online U.S. population? Two million, if that.”
Still, MCI and five other advertisers took a crack at admittedly clunky banner ads. Read the rest of D’Angelo’s story to discover what happened.
Fifteen years later, banner ads may be under siege, but they are still very much a part of the web advertising landscape. D’Angelo says “no other development since has advanced advertising measurement, effectiveness and accountability than the display banner.”
The larger issue today, however, is the continuing quest for optimal measurement. In that context, D’Angelo references a recent report from eMarketer, “Online Brand Management: Connecting the Dots,” that is worthy of consideration.
The report discusses a huge challenge: Are advertisers getting their money’s worth from display ads and other branding-oriented ads? The report asks: “Do [advertisers] have the right metrics, and are they able to connect the dots, both within online platforms and between online and offline media?”
Needless to say, there are no easy answers, but the report offers valuable insight into where we are and where we need to go in terms of measuring advertising effectiveness. One of the quotes from Carrie Frolich, managing director, digital, for Mediaedge:cia, sets the tone for the report’s findings:
Remember why you’re advertising. You are not advertising for clicks or [gross rating points]. What you’re advertising for is to sell me stuff or change perception, and that’s what we need to be measuring against.
As we look back on the past fifteen years, and look forward to the next fifteen, we should always keep that in mind. No matter what technological advances come along, no matter how wonderful the creative might be, no matter where the ads are placed – the objective of advertising, both online and offline, should always be to have a measurable impact. Let’s not forget it.
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Fifteen Years and Counting
A few months ago, we launched category filtering in a number of English-speaking countries to help you control the ads that appear on your pages. To provide you with more ad filtering options, you’ll soon be able to filter 3 more categories from your pages, for a total of up to 8 categories. You should notice this change within the next few weeks.
To get started with category filtering, sign in to AdSense and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab. You can choose from the listed categories, which include religion, politics, and dating, and your selections will be applied to ads in English no matter how they’re targeted. Please keep in mind that filtering ad categories may affect your AdSense revenue — we recommend first reviewing the percentages displayed in your account to understand the amount of revenue you may be blocking.
We’re continuing to work on additional filtering capabilities, and we appreciate all the feedback you’ve provided so far. Feel free to leave us a comment, and visit our Help Center to learn more about category filtering.
The rest is here:
Coming soon: Filter more categories
(Cross-posted on the Google Student Blog)
We had a busy summer here at Google interacting with students through a wide variety of scholarship, internship and networking opportunities across North America. Here’s a look back at a few of our programs (you can bet we’ll be hosting them again!) along with news on some upcoming initiatives.
Rising college sophomores participated in two Google programs: Google FUSE, in its inaugural year, and the Google Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI).
For FUSE, we welcomed 50 rising college sophomores to our New York City office for a three-day retreat designed to connect students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computer science. The retreat focused on making connections between students and Googlers, encouraging students to create meaningful academic experiences and allowing them to learn more about possible career paths via hands-on activities, panel discussions and a bit of fun around the New York City area.
Another group of twenty rising sophomores spent two weeks at the Googleplex in Mountain View for the second annual Computer Science Summer Institute. This special program included an interactive and collaborative Computer Science curriculum, as well as a living-learning residential experience for student networking. Students worked in teams to create an interactive web application using Python in Google App Engine. When not in class, they heard technical talks from Google engineers, spoke with professionals from across the technology industry and academia about the many things they can do with a Computer Science degree. They also had some fun joining the Bay Area summer interns on a boat cruise and catching a baseball game after an exciting San Francisco scavenger hunt.
In addition, our engineering internship program hosted more than 450 college (undergraduate and graduate) interns in 15 locations across North America. These interns were an integral part of the engineering team and made significant contributions this summer working on exciting projects including Android, Chrome, Docs and machine translation.
We also had more than 100 students working across multiple functions, including sales and engineering in Mountain View, New York, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Boston as part of the Building Opportunities for Leadership and Development (BOLD) Program. BOLD is a 10-week internship program designed to provide exposure to the technology industry for students from groups that are historically underrepresented in technology. This summer experience includes a unique glimpse into a business or engineering career, professional development and leadership courses, as well as one-on-one mentorship designed to further support professional growth.
Of course, we realize that growing future leaders in engineering and business doesn’t just start with college students. For this reason, we partner with the LEAD programs in both business and engineering to encourage outstanding high school students to pursue careers in these fields. This year, all four LEAD Summer Engineering Institute participants had the opportunity to tour a local Google office to attend technical talks and interact with Google engineers (okay, with some tasty food and video games thrown in as well).
As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to recognizing student achievements and promoting leadership, we also offer a number of academic scholarships. We are currently accepting applications for the Google Lime Scholarship for Student with Disabilities in the U.S. and Canada, and the Anita Borg Scholarship in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the United States. In case you’re curious, we offer a host of scholarships for many other international regions.
If one or more of these opportunities sounds like something you’d like to participate in, you can find applications for full time opportunities and summer internship opportunities on our student job site. Visit our scholarship page for more information on our scholarship opportunities. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates on application deadlines and new program announcements.
Taking a break from bowling during Google FUSE.
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Growing the next generation of computer scientists and business leaders
I was checking out Google Experimental Labs and stumbled upon this interesting experiment called Google Social Search. Google Social Search is basically an added element to your search results based on public content from your social circle. Your social circle is a combination of Gmail chat buddies, contacts, and people you are publically connected to on social sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed. In order to use Google Social Search, you must be logged into your Google account, and go to www.google.com/experimental to Join the experiment. Do a search, and if there is web content relevant by people in your social circle, you will see these results on the bottom of the search results. You can also click on ‘+ Show options’ on the top of the result page, and choose ‘Social’ under All Results.
Here is an example of a search I did for ‘iphone case.’ Choosing only options from Social search, I can see if anyone in my social circle mentions ‘iphone case,’ on twitter. In this case, a friend of mine mentions a Hello Kitty iPhone case, which allows me to read about it.
(Click on image to enlarge)
There is a great video that illustrates what social search is and how it can be used. I think Google Social Search is pretty interesting, as it shows results from your connections, allowing you to read about your friends’ opinions on certain products, services or topics.
Read more from the original source:
Google Experimental Labs: Google Social Search
The first phone to have Google Maps Navigation and Android 2.0 is the Droid from Verizon. Google Maps Navigation is initially available in the United States. And like other Google Maps features, Navigation is free.
Visit google.com/navigation to learn more and browse a gallery of product screenshots. Take Google Maps Navigation for a spin, and bring Internet-connected GPS navigation with you in your car.
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Announcing Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0
Recommended
