Make Money Online

It’s been two years since we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. This is the first in a series of posts over the next few weeks about our vision for online display advertising in the years ahead. Today, Susan Wojcicki previews the series and looks back at how we’ve brought Google and DoubleClick technologies together over the past two years. -ed.

The first online display advertisement — a simple, clickable image — appeared online over 16 years ago. Fast forward to 2010. You’re likely to see display ads — image, text, video and rich-media formats — on most of the websites that you visit. These ads are crucial to the Internet. They provide information about thousands of products, services and businesses. They help to fund the web content and services that we all use. And they enable large and small advertisers to reach new customers, increase sales and grow their businesses.

I’ve watched display advertising evolve from a series of simple, static images, to the incredible creative units that we see today. The best display ads today are often like mini-websites with complex animations, stunning graphics or videos, interactive and social elements. As technology enables better ways of matching ads, they’re becoming more relevant to the audience that views them and the website that hosts them. In addition, they’re bought and sold across the web more seamlessly than ever before.

Our belief in the potential of display advertising has spurred our investments in this area. We started investing seriously nearly six years ago, by offering display ad formats on our AdSense partner sites in the Google Content Network (which now comprises over a million online publishers). About three years ago, we acquired YouTube and began to offer various display advertising options.

And two years ago, we acquired DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. Since then, we’ve been busy integrating the DoubleClick and Google technologies, and unveiling new features to improve display advertising for users, advertisers and online publishers alike. I thought this was a good opportunity to look back on what we’ve done over the past two years by bringing Google and DoubleClick together.

Helping our advertisers get better results

By combining Google and DoubleClick technologies, we’ve made significant enhancements to advertising on the Google Content Network. For example, we’ve offered support for third party vendors, enabled ads to be frequency capped so that users don’t see the same ad over and over, introduced view-through conversion reporting and opened a beta of interest-based advertising. Through these enhancements, we believe we can deliver more relevant, measurable ads that create more value for everyone — users get more useful ads, and these ads generate better results for advertisers and higher returns for publishers.

We’re also working to provide an integrated solution that enables advertisers and agencies to plan, buy, create, serve and measure display ads across the web, in a single interface. For the longest time, getting a display ad campaign up and running has been inefficient and cumbersome. We’ve made significant upgrades to DoubleClick’s ad serving technology, DoubleClick for Advertisers, adding new measurement and planning technologies, including Ad Planner and Google Analytics. These improvements streamline advertisers’ and agencies’ online advertising campaigns.

New ways of buying display ads: the Ad Exchange

In September 2009, we launched the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers, ad networks and agency networks buy and sell display advertising space. The new Ad Exchange is a major step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The technologies in the new Ad Exchange — principally “real-time bidding” and “dynamic allocation” — are already delivering great results for participants. AdWords advertisers can run ads on sites in the Ad Exchange, using their existing AdWords interface. This gives AdWords advertisers more high quality sites to run display ads on. Similarly, our AdSense publishers are benefiting from more high-quality display advertisers coming through the Ad Exchange.

Maximizing revenue for online publishers

A few weeks ago, we launched the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, to help publishers get the most value out of their online content and improve the process of selecting the ads to appear on their websites. In making this upgrade, we’ve been focused on combining the best of Google’s technology and infrastructure with the best of DoubleClick’s ad serving expertise to help generate more advertising revenue for major online publishers. For these publishers, managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process that can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content. Ad serving is the core technology that underpins this process.

Unleashing creativity in advertising

There’s no shortage of creative marketers with brilliant ideas to engage and reach consumers — from remarkable rollerblading baby videos, to customizable ads featuring interactive Twitter feeds. We launched DoubleClick Studio, a rich media tool that makes it easier for agencies and advertisers to design interactive rich media ads. We’ve also continued to invest in DoubleClick Rich Media, which enables complex and creative ads to be easily trafficked and served. Ads created with these DoubleClick products are engaging users every day, and frequently appear on the homepage of YouTube, on sites in the Google Content Network and all across the web. To further help marketers run engaging ads across the web, we recently acquired a company called Teracent that developed technology that can tailor literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad, in real-time.

To date, we’ve put hundreds of thousands of engineering hours into building our display solutions and have partnered closely with advertisers, agencies and online publishers to help them get the best results; and to help users see more engaging and relevant ads. We’ve also developed controls like the Ads Preferences Manager and a specially-engineered opt-out plugin, so that users have transparency, choice and control over the ads they see.

However, our work in recent years is really only the beginning of what’s possible in this area. Across the board, we’re building and seeing vast improvements in display advertising technology. These technology improvements will make it far easier to buy ads across the web at scale, create engaging ad formats, measure the impact of ad campaigns in innovative and insightful ways, deliver relevant ads to precisely the right audiences in real-time and maximize the value of publishers’ online content. With these advances, we think that display advertising, as a category, can grow dramatically.

Over the next few weeks, we’re looking forward to exploring these themes on this blog, and explaining some of the ways that new technologies are helping to move display advertising forward for everyone.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management

Read the rest here:
The future of display advertising

(Cross-posted with the YouTube Biz Blog)

Mobile phones are rapidly becoming essential tools for surfing the web, connecting with friends, and sharing and watching video online, and we’re seeing these effects at YouTube. The YouTube mobile site is more popular than ever: site traffic grew by over 160% in 2009, and now millions of people all over the world are streaming tens of millions of videos every day on their mobile phones. The mobile space moves fast, so we’ve been working hard to roll out new features and functionality quickly, especially as more and more people adopt YouTube-capable phones.

The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers. So today, we’re launching ads on the home, search and browse pages of the American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites (m.youtube.com from your mobile browser). This is a great way for advertisers to reach YouTube viewers across multiple platforms. In fact, at launch YouTube will immediately provide one of the largest audiences for a mobile ad campaign anywhere on the mobile web. And because YouTube mobile attracts early adopters, the site can deliver to advertisers a coveted demographic of tech savvy trendsetters. We’ve already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube’s mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of “District 9″) and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.

Our first tests of YouTube mobile ads — with brands ranging from L’Oreal to Land Rover — showed strong results related to click-throughs, user experience and brand awareness, and we’ve learned a lot in the months since then. As a result, ads on the YouTube mobile website will be banner ads sold on a full-day basis (like with the YouTube homepage on the web), making a mobile buy an easy and valuable addition to any YouTube campaign. For example, today Mazda is running a homepage ad on YouTube.com, and extended their campaign to run ads on our mobile site as well.

If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to your YouTube or Google sales rep, or visit youtube.com/advertise.

Posted by Taylor Cascino, Strategic Partner Development Manager

See the original post here:
YouTube calling: Now serving ads on the YouTube mobile site

[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry, join us here. -Ed.]

When you don’t have to sacrifice your love of the outdoors for your career or vice versa, it’s something special. In fact, my love of both skiing and marketing has grown dramatically since I took my job at Backcountry. Getting to work with Google, specifically managing our AdWords acount, is an online marketing geek’s dream come true. Combine that with every skier’s dream of Utah powder, and life is good.

Day traders wake up every morning to check their portfolio — I get up and check my AdWords accounts. Backcountry sells gear and equipment for the outdoor enthusiast from ski boots to tents, and we sell all of it online. My job is to drive valuable, qualified traffic 365 days a year to Backcountry using AdWords. The AdWords platform lets me manage hundreds of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of keywords with relative ease. I have access to huge amounts of data that are revealed as daily ebbs and flows in impressions, clicks and bids. If you do a Google search for [telemark ski gear], you’ll see our ad:

Backcountry was founded in 1996 by two self-proclaimed ski bums, John Bresee and Jim Holland. Since then, the company has grown to hundreds of employees. I’ve been working here for over two years. Ultimately, our goal is to “crush it,” as some ski town folk say: work hard, play hard.

A typical powder day for me is like this one last Friday when Park City got 12 inches of new snow overnight. Here’s how AdWords helps me manage both work and fun.

7 – 7:45am
Roll out of bed.
Get the coffee going.
Fry eggs and bacon.
Check snow totals.

If it looks like a good ski morning, I first check my email and glance over our AdWords campaigns. All I need to do is my daily reporting to see that I’m on target for my revenue and cost goals. As long as things are okay, I email my boss to say I’ll be out slaying the white dragon.

Just as I have the ideal tools to maximize our online campaign performance, I have the tools avid skiers covet for deep days: fat, rockered skis, stiff ski boots, Gore-Tex jacket and pants, helmet, goggles, merino wool layers, etc. After I grab my gear, I’m off.

7:45am – 12noon

My commute to The Canyons Ski Resort takes 10 minutes. My friends and I know how to get the most out of our time on the mountain, balancing chair lift time, snow quality and vertical. Does that sound a bit like cost-per-click, conversion rate and top-line revenue? Take this lift to that lift, ski the trees while we wait for that chair to open, get after our favorite steep lines. Next thing you know:

Face shots are invigorating. Hard to explain, best to experience! After a few glances at the time and collecting my thoughts, I make my way off the mountain.

12pm – 5pm

I head a few miles down the road to the office. As the afternoon goes by, co-workers will emerge from their cubicles; sometimes because legs are cramping up but also to share stories about how the morning was. Where did you ski? How was the snow? Smiles all around.

I settle into work knowing what I need to succeed at my job is at my fingertips. AdWords gives me visibility into my programs to prioritize and understand trends. It also makes it easy to add and edit my account without getting bogged down in manual work. I regularly use Keyword Performance Reports to monitor both head terms and tail terms to stay on top of revenue opportunities. I’ll take into account the average order value and also the percentage of clicks that turn into sales (rate of conversion) in order to manage our keyword bids. As I do bid updates, I also check the AdWords Preview Tool to see how our ads are ranked and what is going on with our competition. We don’t really focus on “cost-per-click” but instead on “cost as percentage of revenue,” which means the more people purchase, the more ads we can run. So the higher the return on advertising spend, the more room we have to grow our paid search presence.

5 pm – 8 pm

I like this afternoon time in particular because it’s quiet and I can really focus on data-crunching. Uninterrupted time and a strong cup of coffee are essential for doing long-term analysis.

Campaign Performance Reports are great for identifying long- and short-term trends as seasons shift or for changes in demand by brand. We just wrapped up our winter sale, so this is a great time for me to run an Ad Performance Report to analyze which versions of ad copy had the strongest clickthrough rates for future reference. Finally, Google Insights for Search is a fun tool. It’s a great way to connect with our buyers by discussing big-picture trends with the brands we carry. We can look at AdWords Campaign performance and try to tie it back to general search volume in the marketplace and identify product searches on the rise. In short, given our metrics focus, AdWords gives me the information I need to make decisions about specific keywords, bids, and our overall spend.

There are typically the same few folks hanging out at the office this late. We’ll exchange some pleasantries, and as the lights get turned off I’ll shut down my computer.

When I earned an undergraduate degree in marketing and cultural anthropology, I had only a vague idea how I was going to create a career with behavioral and analytical activities. It turns out online marketing is an exciting mix of real-time data and customer service. AdWords lets me manage campaigns very efficiently, so I have time to dig deeper and do the strategic analysis that makes this job about much more than just meeting revenue goals.

Finally, I picked Park City because it’s more than a ski town. Here fanatical skiers, trail runners, bikers, snowboarders and climbers can live year round and still have a meaningful career. I’ll always be grateful to companies like Backcountry and Google for making this possible: Backcountry for fostering the passions of the outdoor enthusiast, and Google for innovation in creating the forums and tools that really work for us.

Posted by Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry

Originally posted here:
Ode to AdWords

Today, we’re announcing the next generation of ad serving technology for online publishers — DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

For the past few years, we’ve been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both.

For major online publishers — including social networks and online communities, entertainment sites, e-commerce sites and news sites — managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process. A publisher’s ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content.

Imagine you’re a major online publisher with a popular global surfing website and an ad sales team. Every second of every day, you have difficult decisions about what ads to show and how to measure their relative performance. For example:

• In the same ad space, a surfboard wax advertiser may want to run a static image ad for your Australian readers, while an airline offering flights to Hawaii may want to run an expandable interactive ad for your American readers.
• A fast-food restaurant wants to run their burger ads before noon and their pizza ads in the afternoon.
• You’ve sold 10 different surfboard makers a million ad slots at slightly different prices; now you have to allocate them across your various webpages to fulfill all these orders over the next two weeks.
• One of your surfing tournament reviews is linked to by a popular news site and you have a surge in traffic. Your sales team couldn’t predict this, so you’re potentially left without any ads for thousands of readers. You want to fill this ad space by selling it via an ad network which has ads available.

This is really just scratching the surface. Managing ad space can involve faxes, emailed orders, the manual scheduling of different ad campaigns across multiple sites and difficult decisions about how to allocate ad space most effectively.

Major online publishers use ad serving technology to manage the complex process of how and when the ads they have sold appear on their websites. In recent years, we’ve invested significantly in our ad serving products — DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers for large publishers and Google Ad Manager for growing publishers. Thousands of major online publishers use these products to serve billions of ad impressions every day.

But we see an opportunity to improve ad serving even further by combining Google’s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick’s display advertising and ad serving experience. Since we acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, our engineering and product teams have been working with online publishers to tackle the obstacles that prevent them from maximizing revenues from their websites.

The upgraded DFP includes a wide variety of features that will help publishers to get the most value out of their online content:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
• Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s “dynamic allocation” feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks. Dynamic allocation is described in this document [PDF].

DFP comes in two flavors, tailored for different publishers’ needs: DoubleClick for Publishers, for the largest online publishers, and DFP Small Business, a simple, free version designed for growing online publishers. We’ll be upgrading current DART for Publishers publishers to DoubleClick for Publishers over the next year as we continue to add features and modules, and we’ll be moving Google Ad Manager customers to DFP Small Business in the coming weeks.

To reflect our continued investment in DoubleClick’s products, as well as the central role of DoubleClick’s technology products within Google’s display advertising business, we’re also today unveiling some changes to the DoubleClick logos — including typeset changes, incorporating a new “by Google” theme and retiring the “DART” brand.

The upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers is a perfect example of our continuing innovation in this area, and we believe that it will add significant value to online publishers’ content. You can read more about the features of the upgraded DFP on the DoubleClick blog and on the DFP website.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

See the original post here:
The next generation of ad serving for online publishers

All website owners need to pay for the costs of creating content and making it available online. Whether delivering entertainment, products, news, services, social networking or opinions, they need to pay their way by selling advertising or charging their users.

Website owners, or “online publishers,” span the range from individual bloggers to multinational companies. If they sell advertising, they can do this directly themselves, via their own sales force. Alternatively, they can use an ad network to place ads on the pages of their website. Many publishers use a combination of these methods if they can’t sell all their ad space themselves (for example, a publisher may have an unpredicted surge in traffic — and therefore ad space — resulting from a popular post, or from a major website linking to them).

We have a long history of helping online publishers make money from their websites. We wanted to update you on our continuing work in this area, and how Google’s newer products can provide real and significant results for clients.

We currently have three main products that work together to help online publishers of all sizes and types maximize their revenue.

AdSense
AdSense, launched in 2003, places highly relevant ads on our partners’ websites, who share in the ad revenue. In 2009, our AdSense partners, comprising over a million large and small publishers, earned over $5.2 billion through AdSense.

AdSense is designed to help online publishers get the most revenue possible for their ad space, without having to directly manage advertiser relationships. When a publisher enables AdSense on their site, Google automatically maximizes the publisher’s revenues every time a page loads. It does this in real time, by selecting the most valuable ad from AdWords advertisers and a large pool of other competing ad networks and buyers.

Ad serving
Larger publishers with their own ad sales teams use our ad serving products (like DoubleClick’s DFP or Google Ad Manager) to serve the most valuable ad that they’ve sold directly to advertisers or ad agencies. DFP is the industry’s leading ad serving platform that powers the advertising businesses of the largest online publishers, while Google Ad Manager is designed to meet the needs of growing online publishers.

Our ad serving products are a key focus for us and we’re continuing to make significant investments in this area. You can read about some of our DFP customers here and some of our Google Ad Manager customers here.

DoubleClick Ad Exchange
DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a real-time auction marketplace for display ad space — it includes ad networks on one side, and major online publishers on the other. Publishers are in complete control of which networks they allow to bid, what ads can appear on their sites and which ad space they make available.

Maximizing revenue across various ad networks is sometimes called “yield management.” For major online publishers, the Ad Exchange offers an easy-to-use yield management solution — it selects the highest paying ad from across multiple, competing ad networks, in real time. However, the Ad Exchange goes further than simple “yield management” to provide a more complete revenue maximization solution.

Through a unique process called “dynamic allocation,” it also compares — again, in real time — the value of the highest-paying ad in the Ad Exchange with any ads that the publisher has entered into their ad server (such as ad network deals) and chooses the highest paying one. By definition, the Ad Exchange only serves ads when it can offer a higher price for ad space. In fact, analysis shows that the average price a publisher receives for ad space sold through the Ad Exchange is over 130% higher than the average price of ad space sold directly to ad networks and other third parties. (Of course, while similar, the ad space being compared is not identical.)

A continuing effort
Today’s online publishers, large and small, operate in a complicated and fragmented advertising environment. We’re focused on developing a full suite of technology products — such as AdSense, ad serving products and DoubleClick Ad Exchange — that can maximize all publishers’ advertising revenues. We’re also working to bring new advertisers to online advertising and make the process easier for them, to grow the advertising pie for everyone.

By doing this, we hope to help all publishers fund their websites, which enables them to create a wide variety of online content for all Internet users.

If you’re interested in the ins-and-outs of our approach to maximizing revenue for publishers, you can read more in this document.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management

Source:
Our approach to maximizing advertising revenue for online publishers

A few weeks ago, we jump-started the holiday shopping season with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Like us, you probably browsed the shops and sites for the coolest products and best shopping deals for your holiday purchases. But if you’re a business or an advertiser, you probably know that some of the biggest shopping weekends of the year are approaching — and you need to get your business ready for the rush!

If you’re as geeky as we are, you’re probably doing everything you can to figure out how to best use the tools available on the web to find the right customers and effectively measure the results from the money you spent on marketing.

At T-minus ten days before Christmas, its not too late to look over your holiday campaigns and we’d like to share with you our top 10 holiday tips — a quick checklist to help you make use of important data now and improve your holiday campaigns.

Consider it a gift from one geeky data whiz to another!

1. Update your wishlist:
Use the Search-based Keyword Tool to find keywords that you never thought of incorporating into your campaign for the holidays. (Here is a how-to guide for how best to use the tool: Monetize The Long Tail of Search).

2. Know what’s hot this season:
Research on Insights for Search to see what the “Rising Searches” are and understand how people are searching for your brand (and your competitors!).

3. Read the wish lists:
Who could be looking for you? Type your website URL into Google Ad Planner to see who is looking for your site, broken down by demographic categories like age and gender.

4. Follow the reindeer:
Where else are they going? Use Ad Planner to find other websites that share the same demographics as yours. Putting display ads on that site might be a great way for you to target that audience!

5. Build new toys:
Create new AdWords campaigns for your holiday lines and products. Incorporate new keywords and keep in mind the trends you found on Insights for Search.

6. Train the elves:
Test your AdWords campaigns by introducing new holiday promotions. Then, test your promotions — a promotion for “30% off” might resonate better with your customers than “Buy One Get One Free.”

7. Check your list twice:
Use Google Analytics to better understand where your traffic is coming from during the holiday season. Find out who’s coming to your website, when they’re coming and where they’re coming from.

8. Map out the route:
How long are people staying on your website? Use Google Analytics to understand your purchasing cycle. Which pages have the highest bounce rate? And which pages are people leaving the quickest?

9. Test run on the sleigh:
Run experiments using Website Optimizer on the landing pages you have linked from your ads. Make sure the images are in the right place and that they’re not a distraction for your customer. Play around with the size of the image and the image type.

10. Does the chimney work?:
Test different versions of your purchase page to find out what works best. Change the “purchase” button on your webpage. Pick different colors — bright versus dark colors — and vary the button sizes. Try out different text on your button. See which of these variations lead to the most clicks to conversions.

We wish you a happy, data driven holiday season.

Posted by Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist

Excerpted from:
The top ten ways to get your business ready for the holidays

2009 has been a busy year for Google in the area of display advertising — that is, the image, video and interactive ad formats that run across the web.

Our goal is to improve display advertising on the web for everyone. We’re working to help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns, enable publishers to make more money from their ad space and deliver better, more relevant ads (and, ultimately, more ad-funded web content) to users.

To achieve these goals, in 2009 we released a host of new features for display advertisers on the Google Content Network and on YouTube, launched the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange and made significant enhancements to our ad serving products.

On Tuesday December 15 at 10am PT, we’re hosting an educational webcast for analysts, investors and press about our display advertising business. This is our second educational webcast — the first, on search advertising, was held in September.

The webcast will be available at investor.google.com, and a replay will be available on the same website. If you’re interested in hearing about our efforts in this space, please feel free to tune in.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management

See original here:
A deep dive on display advertising

We’ve always said that a top priority for us is making sure that your search results are relevant, useful and safe. Of course, this commitment to a positive search experience extends to the ads you see on Google too. Earlier this week we took a stand to fight Internet scams, and in recent months, we’ve also put a new procedure in place to eradicate “scammy” ads. But that’s not all we’ve done in the past year to help you get the best possible information from our ads.

Given that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses running ads through our AdWords system, you can imagine that reviewing all the ads is no easy feat! That’s why we have both automated and manual ways to check them, and advertising policies meant to ensure that the ads you see on Google — and on partner sites that show our ads — are appropriate, fair, consistent and of the highest quality. We regularly review and update our guidelines to make sure they continue to provide the best user experience. Here’s a recap of the improvements we’ve made in 2009.

Making sure the ads work
When you click on an ad for a holiday gift basket, you probably want to go directly to a website with gift basket choices. That’s why we have link policies to ensure that the URLs in our ads actually get you to the sites you want to visit. For example, our updated Display URL policy helps advertisers better organize the URLs in their AdWords campaigns to make sure that when you click on an ad for gift baskets, a webpage with gift baskets is exactly where you go.

Making sure the ads are legitimate
To protect you from unsavory online entities that hope to victimize folks, we’ve shared tips to help you avoid falling for scams that sound too good to be true, and have taken recent legal action against fraudulent online schemes. To make sure that the ads are safe, we’ve also increased our efforts to detect scam ads and remove them from our system. For example, we’ve recently implemented a new process for permanently disabling AdWords accounts that attempt to harm users by doing things like installing malware on your computer, or offering free services that bait you into accepting hidden fees. This practice better protects users and is even stricter than our previous process of disapproving scam ads and disabling their domains. We’re now trying to proactively prevent suspicious characters from creating new accounts with us regardless of their websites.

Making sure the ads are appropriate
We try to make sure that the ads you see aren’t obtrusive, inappropriate or offensive. Our editorial policies help verify that ads meet basic grammar, spelling and composition rules. For example, we don’t allow excessive punctuation or capitalization, because it would be really annoying if all ads were littered with lots of exclamation points or used all caps for their messages.

Our content policies make sure that the types of things offered in ads are appropriate. There are some things we don’t allow because they are not legal in many countries — like child pornography and drugs — and other things we don’t allow because they’re offensive and considered socially unacceptable. To help us figure out where to draw these lines, we consider factors such as legal regulations, public sentiment and general codes of ethics and values.

Our commitment to appropriate ads also applies to the sites we accept to our AdSense program. We want website owners who have news and shopping-related information on their sites to be able to show you relevant ads. But we don’t like sites that do inappropriate things, like repurpose copyrighted material without permission or automatically initiate unwanted downloads. To protect users and ensure we work with good sites, we take a look at website content and practices in accordance with our AdSense policies, and don’t allow sites that violate the policies in the program. We act quickly to weed out the non-compliant sites so that someone who’s looking online at sites that, for example, have illegal content like child porn or engage in shady invalid click activity won’t see ads from Google there.

As new issues crop up, we revisit our content policies to make sure they’re comprehensive and help to show you the best ads we can. Over this year, for instance, we’ve updated our global alcohol policy and U.S. trademark policy to give you additional relevant ad options. You can find more information about these changes and all our other policies on our Advertising Policies page.

Continued here:

“Use Google to Make 1000s of Dollars!” or “Easy Cash with Google: You Could be Making up to $978 a Day Working from Home!” You may have seen offers like these using Google’s name or logo that sounded too good to be true. Unfortunately, nearly all of them are, and, despite hundreds of consumer complaints and our own efforts to keep these sites from tricking people, some scams continue. To fight back, we’re working to stop various fraudulent “Google Money” schemes, and this week filed suit against Pacific WebWorks and several other unnamed defendants.

Google hasn’t created or endorsed any of the sites like those described in our complaint. Misleading ads try to take advantage of consumers in the midst of a difficult economy, and as the economic situation has worsened, the problem has only grown. As far as we can tell, thousands of people have been tricked into sending payment information and being charged hidden fees by questionable operations.

Even as we’re taking legal action to try to cut these sites off at the source, we’re still working constantly to remove scammy URLs from our index, and we’ll permanently disable AdWords accounts that provide a poor or harmful user experience, whether or not they use Google’s trademarks illegally. That said, we can’t guarantee that schemes like these won’t pop up, like the proverbial “Whack-A-Mole”, someplace else online — either on a different network or under a different name.

We can solve only part of the problem — the rest is up to you. Just as you should be careful about giving out financial information in the real world, you should be skeptical and review any offers online before sending any information, and always be on guard when presented with an offer that seems too good to be true. Below is a significantly abridged list of some names that we know are suspect. For more tips on how to spot a scam online or what to do if you think you or someone you know has been tricked, check out this earlier post.

Although there’s no secret kit that can guarantee riches, many people really do make money online. In our experience, the best way to build a business on the web is to really serve users — offer useful products and services or write about something you have a passionate interest in. If you are wondering if a particular program is legit, Google’s business and advertising programs can be found from our home page, and the best place to find real jobs at Google is google.com/jobs.

Names to be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.

Posted by Jason Morrison, Support Engineer (Search Quality Team), and Stacey Wexler, Senior Litigation Counsel

View original post here:
Fighting fraud online: taking “Google Money” scammers to court

At Google, we’re committed to giving you the information you want — regardless of the form in which it might appear.

Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result. So over the past few years, we’ve blended videos, images, maps and more into the search results on Google.com.

It also makes sense to provide you with richer types of information in the ads. If you’re looking to buy your mom a new handbag for the holidays, for instance, you might want to see pictures, prices, the addresses of boutiques in your area and a map of how to get there — all within the ad.

To provide a better search ads experience, we’ve been developing and testing a variety of new ad formats. These formats are focused on giving you the information you need, while retaining what you love about Google advertising: that the ads are relevant and useful.

If you’re in the U.S. you may have already seen a number of these ad formats when searching on Google.

Some of them include visual elements. For example, if you’re curious about the movies that are playing this holiday season, you might see an ad with a video that lets you watch a trailer.

You might also see an ad with more links so you can quickly find a specific page in an advertiser’s website. If you’re researching airfare to visit your relatives for the holidays, it saves time to go directly to Priceline’s page about booking flights, rather than the general homepage or rental car page.

Or, if you’re trying to find a holiday bouquet to bring to your dinner party hostess, you might see an ad that shows your local florist’s location on a map and provides driving directions.

Other new ad formats might help you find all the addresses and locations of a chain store in your area. So if you’re vacationing abroad this season and have a craving for something familiar, the ad might show you all the nearby Pizza Huts that can deliver to your hotel.

And starting today, you might spot ads that include images and prices for specific products. When shopping for the ski outfit your nephew has been hinting about all year, you might see pictures from the retailer’s inventory to help you quickly determine if they have the color and style you had in mind.

Still other ad formats may introduce new ways of presenting information, such as Comparison Ads, which allow you to specify exactly what you’re looking for and to compare rates and prices in a single location. With the approaching new year comes resolutions to get things in order, so you might want an ad that lets you see side-by-side refinancing offers.

While we experiment with new formats, we’ll remain loyal to our core principle: that getting the right ad to the right person at the right time matters. As we continue to think up innovative ways to give you the information you want, you’re likely to see even more ad formats until we pinpoint the most useful, relevant and engaging ones. We’ll keep trying new things until we discover the “perfect” ads that improve your overall search experience.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, VP, Product Management

Originally posted here:
New search ad formats

Can you spot the difference between these two sample display ads? Of course you can. However, the most important difference is not discernible to the naked eye.

The lower ad was customized and chosen from thousands of different creative elements, automatically and in real-time, by machine-learning algorithms developed by Teracent, a San Mateo, California startup.

We think that this technology has great potential to improve display advertising on the web. That’s why we’re pleased to announce today that we’ve entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Teracent. The transaction, which is subject to various closing conditions, is expected to close this quarter.

As you know, we’ve been busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the web for everyone. We believe that Teracent’s technology fits neatly into these efforts.

Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns. In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers web users better ads and more ad-funded web content.

We’re looking forward to welcoming the Teracent team to Google and to making this technology available to our display advertising clients — including those who run display ad campaigns on the Google Content Network and our DoubleClick clients.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management and Joerg Heilig, Engineering Director

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Displaying the best display ad with Teracent

(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.

Posted by Deeksha Hebbar, Associate Marketing Manager, Google TV Ads

Original post:
Three contest winners making their way to television

Major retailers are re-evaluating their marketing strategies, with more and more opting to invest in Internet search ads, as this medium becomes mainstream. Indeed, Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing firm, predicts a ‘double-digit’ increase in search ad spending this quarter, most notably from retail advertisers during the peak holiday online shopping season.

As this marketing medium becomes more popular, marketers are also becoming savvier. As a Wall Street Journal article reports, some of the new strategies include buying top ads tied to phrases consumers tend to search for when they are in the final stages of making a purchase decision. Being aware of how consumers search when they are ready to purchase, is critical to making your ROI as lucrative as possible.

With Halloween fast approaching, a good example of this might be using long-tail keywords like “buy a Spiderman Halloween costume” versus a more general search term like, “Halloween costume”. A consumer would be far more likely to use a long-tail keyword like the Spiderman example above when they are further down the sales channel, and are ready to buy.

When you do incorporate long-tail keywords in your search ads, make sure the landing page where you are sending the consumer truly matches their interest. Using the same Spiderman costume example, it would be wise to send the consumer to targeted page on your website. In this case, unless the landing page had a selection of Spiderman Halloween costumes, chances are that your ROI on this search ad would be less than attractive.

If you haven’t tried your hand in search ads, the holiday season is probably the best time of the year to give it a shot. Whether you choose to go with Google, or with Bing which increased its share of searches and search-ad dollars in Q3 (Source: PaidContent.org), Share Results is now offering its SEM services (contact Jamie [at] shareresults [dot] com), with a team of search engine experts, to get you going with what is now recognized as a very popular, and very savvy way of marketing.

See more here:
Search Ads Up, Marketers Savvier

We first launched Promoted Videos as a search advertising program on YouTube, allowing content creators to drive viewership of their videos by targeting the hundreds of millions of searches that happen on YouTube every day. But in the past year Promoted Videos has evolved into a much broader discovery vehicle, appearing on search, the YouTube homepage, video watch pages and recently across the AdSense network. We’ve also built better conversion opportunities via Call-to-Action overlays. As a result, Promoted Videos is now driving millions of video views per week, with clicks having increased 500% since January. In a world where 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Promoted Videos has become a critical way for creators to get their content in front of viewers across the web.

Now that it’s easier than ever to drive views of your video, we also wanted to make it easier to run these campaigns in the first place. Starting today you can buy Promoted Videos directly in AdWords. Any AdWords advertiser with video content — from a small business looking to promote a product, to a movie studio premiering a new trailer — can use Promoted Videos to make sure their videos find a larger audience. This integration will provide a single destination for your overall Google ad buy, and will give YouTube advertisers access to campaign tools in AdWords.

AdWords is a global platform, so we’re excited to use this integration as a way to start rolling out Promoted Videos internationally. With this launch, Promoted Videos are now available in Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. We hope our international users, partners and advertisers will take full advantage of this new opportunity to ensure their videos are more easily discovered around the world, and we look forward to expanding to other countries in the coming weeks.

Posted by Jonathan Goldman, YouTube Software Engineer

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One-stop shop: Buy Promoted Videos in AdWords

High-end mobile phones, like iPhone, Android-powered devices and the Palm Pre , continue to grow — Gartner estimates that global sales of smartphones will soar by 27% in 2009, to 177 million units. Naturally, as a result more and more people are browsing the web on the go.

Because these devices offer a browsing experience that is similar to desktop computers, advertising on smartphones is a natural extension for any AdWords campaign. However, it’s not always been easy for advertisers to reach people on smartphones. That’s why we’re investing in new high-end mobile advertising products such as our search ad options for high-end phones and AdSense for mobile applications. We hope to make advertising on high-end mobile devices as intuitive, effective and user-friendly as our existing AdWords tools.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new feature for our AdSense mobile publishers that enables them to serve text and image ads on their sites — specifically on these high-end smartphones. This helps mobile publishers earn revenue and fund more mobile-specific sites and web content.

New features like this help to nurture the smartphone ecosystem by encouraging the creation of more mobile content and by helping advertisers to grow their businesses by reaching new audiences. Our users’ experience is also improved, with increasingly relevant and device-optimized mobile ads that load faster and fit better on small screens.

For more info about this feature, check out the Inside AdSense Blog.

Posted by Danielle VanDyke, Software Engineer

Excerpt from:
AdSense for Mobile optimized for high-end phones