Google targets verticals with new ad support
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(InfoWorld) - Google is ramping up its efforts to help specific vertical markets create more effective online advertising using its technology to help clients highlight as many of their assets as possible to drive not only online but also offline sales. At its New York office Thursday, the directors of Google's vertical industry practices discussed some of the ways Google is changing its advertising strategies to be more industry-specific, something that the company hasn't traditionally done, said Tim Armstrong, president of advertising and commerce, North America, for Google. Armstrong said Google wants its advertising practices to be so vertical-specific that in the future, the specialists in those markets will be driving the company's advertising strategy --Â so much so that he joked the he would be out of a job. "The vertical people will be running Google," Armstrong said. "I'll be the least useful person in the room.... If you were to come into Google for a day, you'd actually see the industry groups have become the most specific connection point with customer." Most companies don't have a quantitative view of all of the assets they have for sale, and part of what Google is helping vertical industry customers do is take stock of all of their offerings so they create better ways to constantly reach customers, he said. As part of this strategy, Google's retail advertising practice is working on new technology that will help companies in that space assess all of the resources on their Web sites so they can more carefully choose keywords for targeted advertising. Currently, Google is working internally with customers to help them do this, but the company is still handing hard-copy results to customers, said John McAteer, director of Google's retail practice. In the future, however, Google wants to provide an automated way to crawl and index an entire Web site so companies can electronically compile all of its assets and generate keywords on their own, he said. Eventually, Google will offer the technology as a public tool, similar to one it already includes in its AdWords platform that helps customers crawl their Web sites to come up with relevant keywords for ads, said Brett Goffin, industry sales manager at Google. Neither McAteer nor Goffin could provide a time frame for when this tool would be made available. As part of a presentation Thursday, McAteer and Goffin outlined a case study in which Google teamed up with Rooms to Go Furniture, a company whose top executive was skeptical that online advertising could drive offline sales. Google worked with the furniture company to place online banner ads in local markets, targeting several U.S. metropolitan areas to drive customers to local stores. When the campaign was over, Rooms to Go saw a return of more than seven times its investment, and customer average order size 20 percent larger than the retailer's average sale. Moreover, retail stores accounted for 86 percent of sales, while only 14 percent came from e-commerce sales, McAteer said. In addition to its retail work, Google also has been doing market research to help other verticals, such as the automotive industry. The company's automotive market team plans to hold a Webinar on Oct. 11 to reveal the results of a study it conducted with Compete Inc. to discover buying habits of customers in the automotive space. Bonita Coleman Stewart, Google's industry director for automotive, said the two companies found that the time to market for automotive shoppers has shortened to one month, reducing the amount of time companies in this market have to reach customers with campaigns. She said that Google has not identified how it will use this information to serve its advertising customers but that will be part of the discussion on next month's Webinar.
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Ads served to search query results based on category rather than keywords.
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New technologies from Microsoft will help advertisers better target ads to content in search, video, on Web pages and public kiosks.
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Vertical search engines (VSEs), or specialized search engines, are becoming increasingly popular, and e-marketing reporters and search engine industry analysts have deemed vertical the &#8220;hottest trend in search.&#8221; But just because vertical is trendy now does not mean it will be short-lived. In fact, as VSEs continue to diversify they will likely become more attractive [...]
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Blog: Openads is open source ad player that will compete with Google
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Google seems to be taking steps to assure that &#8216;Made for AdSense&#8217; sites which are unfocused, decentralized and give no real value to the searcher; are not listed in Google results (again, I said taking steps). Aaron at SEO Buzz Box points to a conversation a web publisher had in Google Groups with Google&#8217;s Adam Lasnik [...]
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Google undeservedly has gotten all the credit for many clicks on the&#160;online ads&#160;it delivers via its search engine, but Microsoft wants to put a stop to that.So said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Advertiser Publisher Solutions Group during a panel discussion at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Thursday.Currently, systems for tracking ad conversions and analyzing online marketing campaigns focus on the last ad a user viewed or clicked on, he said. This gives all credit to that last publisher and not to others the user may have been at before and influenced the user to seek more information about the advertiser, McAndrews said.In particular, this situation has unfairly benefitted Google because many times someone will see a display ad on a site and go to Google, search for the vendor&#39;s name, and then click on the vendor&#39;s text ad served by Google, he said.But Microsoft is developing a technology called &quot;conversion attribution&quot; that will track the trail of ads seen by a user, so that advertisers get a more complete understanding of how effective their marketing campaigns are, he said.Along the way, advertisers will get a more balanced view of the value of their ads across a wider trail of Web sites and via a variety of ad formats, not just the last ad displayed by the last publisher, which is often Google, he said.&quot;We&#39;ll introduce conversion attribution to give [more publishers] credit and it will devalue search [advertising],&quot; McAndrews said.Search advertising is the largest online ad format, accounting for about 40 percent of total ad spend. Google has built its empire on these pay-per-click ads, which the company matches to the content of queries on its search engine and to the content of third-party Web sites on its ad network.While search has been the main driver of the blistering growth of online advertising in the past five years, that won&#39;t be the case in the coming five years, McAndrews said.In addition to the &quot;conversion attribution&quot; technology, the shift away from search ads will be fueled by the increased spending in online ads from large companies which prefer display and rich media advertising designed to boost their brands, and for which pay-per-click text ads are less effective, he said.Google didn&#39;t have any representatives participating in the panel. The company didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comment.Microsoft didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for clarification on the availability of the &quot;conversion attribution&quot; technology.McAndrews, who&#160;came to Microsoft recently via its $6 billion purchase of aQuantive, of which he was the CEO, shared the stage with other ad executives in a panel titled &quot;Edge: The Advertising Model&quot; moderated by conference chair John Battelle.
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Google AdSense Expands to Multiple Advertising Units  Google is now letting AdSense publishers place Google contextually targeted AdSense advertising on up to 3 placements on one web page. Google AdSense had always stuck to their guns about one AdSense ad per web page, however, web users may be getting used to ...
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Tabby 'wants to be alone' Google has raised fresh privacy concerns in the US, thanks to its new Street View service on its maps. It is apparently not enough that the advertising broker would like to find your next job for you, or tell you what you might want to do at the weekend, now it wants to peer into your living rooms.â¦
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All your ads are now mobile Google has expanded its AdWord product to mobiles, allowing creators of mobile content to embed Google advertisements into their pages and receive revenue on click-throughs.â¦
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InfoWorld - Google has begun inviting mobile Web site developers to display Google ads on their sites as part of a limited beta test.
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(InfoWorld) - Google is coming for you. In fact, Google's minions are driving Chevy Cobalts with roof-mounted 360-degree digital cameras, and they want to take your picture. Smile! You're on Googlecam. In an unprecedented campaign, Google is enhancing its Google Maps service with a new Street View feature that allows you to view crisp, navigable photos of roads in nine major cities across the United States, including San Francisco, New York, San Diego, and Denver. (To see the full list, go to maps.google.com and click the Street View link on the upper-right corner.) Once you zoom in close enough, you can click the Street View link and look around the location, or click an arrow to see the next Street View photo. To snap the pictures, Google mounted digital cameras on the roof of passenger cars -- reportedly Chevy Cobalts, according to the tech blog Gizmodo -- and drove around San Francisco and San Diego. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company partnered with Immersive Media for the underlying photo technology and has worked with third-party firms for street-level photography for the additional cities outside of California. Only San Francisco and San Diego use high-resolution street-level images, however. Other cities use lower-res captures. Street View could be a boon for "landmark drivers" who prefer driving instructions such as "Turn left at the large brick church, and drive until you get to the pizza place on the corner" as opposed to "Meet me at Second Street and Fourth Avenue." It certainly reveals how far Google will go to prove its mapping prowess -- and, incidentally, attract users to more localized advertising. According to Greg Sterling at Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, Calif., Google has a Business Referral Representative program that sets a precedent for localized involvement. That program involves Google representatives providing local business information and photos to Google for a fee. Sterling said that precedent for collecting local information and photos is being continued with the Street View program. Street View is "about creating more utility for consumers, which in turn will lead indirectly to ad revenue over the longer term. Google has long focused on small businesses and local users, so this is just trying to take those efforts to the next level," Sterling said. Still, regardless of whether Street View is purely a mapping enhancement or a new play for ad revenue, there is tough competition from Microsoft and others. There are also some nagging privacy issues to deal with, plus the sheer magnitude of the project. The story so far ... Of course, Street View is not a new idea. Amazon.com tried a 360-degree street-view mapping feature in its A9 service that it subsequently abandoned. Microsoft has provided a Bird's Eye View feature in Live Virtual Earth that allows you to zoom in on a location, albeit not quite to the street level. (There is a preview of Microsoft's "street side" technology that does allow you to see street-level views, but only for portions of Seattle and through a rather clunky interface.) Another competitor, EveryScape.com in Waltham, Mass., has mapped out the Union Square section of San Francisco with 360-degree street-level views and plans to "virtualize" four more cities this year. Users can sign up to become "scape" artists who drive city streets with roof-mounted cameras. There's a strong user-participation angle, but EveryScape doesn't have Google's funding or advertising incentive. Street View is an audacious project that, according Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch in Darien, Conn., will likely expand to every major American city and even to higher-population rural areas. "Google is adding cool and interesting features to their mapping service as a way to enhance their core services and generate new revenue," he said. While Google has no set plans to update street-level photos on a regular basis, according to Google Maps product manager Stephen Chau, it does have policies for updating aerial shots on a regular basis that could set a precedent for Street View updates. Google fandom reaches new heights Google is immensely popular, of course, but Street View seems to have attracted an unprecedented level of interest, some of it perhaps even slightly obsessive. One Wired blog allowed users to submit odd Street View sightings, including a man being arrested and another urinating at a roadside. Other sites, such as Street View Gallery and Street View Spy, also allow users to post strange Street View sightings. There's even a Cafe Press T-shirt for those who don't want to be photographed. Google's Chau said the company encourages user participation, but only through the My Maps feature. "We get offers from people to drive the [camera] cars almost every day," he said. For users who want to participate through the My Maps feature, they can geo-tag their photos (adding location data) and post them in public forums. For example, after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis on Aug. 1, users posted photos of the fallen bridge and aftermath. Why the fandom? For photographer Charles Bandes in Boston, it's the community aspect -- the fact that a large company might be visiting. "I am fascinated by the idea that Google is taking snapshots of my community, and the idea that they might actually take a photo of me if they make a map of my neighborhood is even better." For Bandes and others, it's an opportunity to meet Google face-to-face. Meanwhile, from Google's standpoint, camaraderie with users could help them capture out-of-the-way locations. "I think user participation would be a great idea as Google simply can't do the level of coverage required alone," adds Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif. Right-to-privacy controversy Yet, the idea of photographing the entire United States one street at a time is a monumental undertaking, even for Google. It's also controversial, especially for privacy-rights advocates. For example, BoingBoing users argue that it's wrong to take photos in public places and use them for commercial gain, that it's "creepy" for cars to be prowling city streets, and that -- if the government were monitoring the public with photographs on public streets, there would be more of an outcry. Tom Austin, a Gartner analyst covering Google, said that anyone can take photos in public places, but the privacy issue could become a problem when Google expands to foreign countries where photographing people on public streets requires a signed waiver. Google's Chau did say that the company filters out some photographs that might be perceived as inappropriate and that individuals can request that the company remove specific photographs. That kind of user-specific filtering could be a death blow to Street View, however, once it expands to hundreds of U.S. cities, because monitoring such a vast library would be nearly impossible. Whether the local advertising monetization works or the privacy issues persist, or whether many more metropolitan areas become "Google-ized" this year are all interesting questions waiting to be answered.
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By Ryan Blitstein, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Feb. 16--Google has acquired San Francisco in-game advertising company AdScape Media, according to a news report.
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BERKELEY, California  - Web search leader Google  Inc.  and marketing software maker Salesforce.com Inc.   said on Tuesday they have jointly developed a new  product that lets Google advertising be resold using Salesforce  software, as part of a wide-ranging alliance.
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Google appears to be promoting itself more aggressively in advertisements alongside search results.
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Businesses and developers can work with the Google Ads rival on a free or subscription-based level.
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The search engine giant has made it easier to navigate different media. It's also setting itself up nicely for video ads