"The principle behind the advertising products we build at Google is simple: ads are information," says Vice President, Product Management Susan Wojcicki. "But the type of information that ads provide is getting more varied and inventive all the time, and as a result ads are getting more interesting, social and useful."

Users can break Google’s offerings down by search, display, mobile, measurement, and all features. Under search, you can find more info about product listing ads, search funnels, and location extensions with multiple addresses. Under display, you can find stuff about remarketing, the YouTube video targeting tool, the ad creation marketplace, above the fold advertising, and YouTube Insights for Audience. Under mobile, you’ll find info about click to call phone extensions. In measurement, you’ll see search funnels again, and analytics intelligence.

Under each offering, users will find info about the product’s status (such as if it is in limited beta for example), what it does, and why you’d use it, as well as a video demo.

"As advertising evolves, we want to build the tools that make it possible for marketers to connect with customers in meaningful, creative ways," says Wojcicki. "We’ve found that the best way to do that is to focus on the user, test new approaches regularly and listen closely to the feedback of the advertisers using our products."

Google will regularly add tools and features to the site, so this may be one to bookmark if you’re a Google advertiser.

"The category filtering feature allows you to prevent ads that fall into specific categories like ‘religion’ and ‘dating’ from appearing on your pages," says Arlene Lee of Google’s Inside AdSense team. "You can filter categories by visiting your Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab. Click the ‘change’ link to view available categories to filter. Your selections will be applied to ads in English, French, German, and Spanish, no matter how they’ve been targeted to your site."

"We also recommend taking a look at the columns showing how much of your recent revenue and ad impressions are generated by each of the categories," says Lee. "This will give you an idea how applying these filters may affect your account."

Previously, users could only filter up to 8 of the 11 categories, which include cosmetic procedures and surgery, dating, drugs and supplements, get rich quick, politics, religion, ringtones and downloadables, sexual and reproductive health, sexually suggestive, video games, and weight loss.

Google’s doesn’t guarantee that every related ad will be filtered, and recommends that users who see undesired ads block  the individual ad or advertiser using the competitive ad filter or the blocking features in the Ad Review Center.

Users can opt-out of seeing remarketing ads using Google’s  Ads Preferences Manager,as mentioned in Google’s announcement, but in case users haven’t seen that particular link, "Clicking on ‘Ads by google’ or ‘i’ (in rich media ads) alongside all ads we serve takes you to this page which explains our ad practices and leads to the Ads Preferences Manager," she says.

Original Article: Google is rolling out a new AdWords feature called Remarketing. What this does is allow advertisers to reach users on sites within the Google Content Network, as they browse the web. The feature was originally introduced as a trial a year ago as part of Google’s interest based advertising beta, but the company  is now making it widely available.

"We’ve received a tremendous response from the hundreds of advertisers who’ve been using it in recent months, across all industries – including automotive, retail, local and finance," says Product Manager Aitan Weinberg. "We’ve seen that remarketing has worked well for many different kinds of advertisers – whether they’re looking to boost brand awareness, or drive clicks and sales, and whether they use display or text ads. For example, if you’re a search advertiser, you can use remarketing to create an integrated campaign strategy. After driving traffic to your site with search ads, you can then remarket to those users who reach your site by showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Content Network."

Google says remarketing is a great way to reach users who are likely to be "highly receptive" to special offers.

"Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network," explains Weinberg. "In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad."

Advertisers can run multiple remarketing campaigns at once. "For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your ‘How to get to the arena’ page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel," says Weinberg.

Advertisers who want to use remarketing can set up and create their campaigns in the "audience" tab in AdWords.

By searching for hotels on Google Maps, users will be able to plug-in dates they plan to stay and see prices on selected listings.

Google’s Lat Long Blog offers more details. "You can click on the price to see a list of advertisers who have provided pricing information for that hotel, indicated by the "Sponsored" text, and click through to reserve a room on the advertiser’s site."

"By showing you this relevant hotel rate information directly in the Google Maps results panel we hope to make this aspect of your trip planning more speedy and efficient."

Google emphasized the new feature will not change the way hotels are ranked in Google Maps. While testing the feature, Google said it is working with a limited number of advertisers and it will only be visible to a small number of users. If the test goes well Google said the feature will be made available to more users over time.
 

According to the article, Anamitra Banerji told MediaPost after a meeting on monday that “we are working on an ad platform, but it’s only in the test phase.”

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Banerji assured MediaPost that Twitter would make it “explicity clear” that a post was from an advertiser and not a regular users. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association recently released a guide for companies to use, suggesting they use #spon, #paid, and #samp hashtags to indicate their relationship to a product being tweeted about. Banerji said this was simply a good work around, but that Twitter would take a different approach.

As opposed to someone tweeting about a product, these ads will be owned and operated by Twitter, much in the same way Google offers its AdSense advertising. Banerji did, however, offer a statement that separated the Twitter ad platform from others:

“We don’t think of ourselves as a Web site — essentially it’s a platform,” Banerji said. “We don’t really control the ads or the way the tweets are viewed and then consumed. We are completely open around other people innovating around us. Ultimately, publishers should have choice. But the one area of concern for us — and that’s if bad ads get identified in Twitter — it’s a problem for us in the long term. So, we should do whatever we can to encourage positive behavior.”

While the article says we should see signs in about a month, we can only wonder how long it will be. If you remember, Twitter announced their “hovercards” feature at the beginning of this month, but most of us are still waiting to see the feature pop up on our own pages.

This one, however, looks like it might be around by the beginning of next month, according to GigaOm. They report that “one source in the media industry” says that Twitter may launch the ad network during South By Southwest Interactive, which begins in Austin on March 12.

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"Google experienced a quality purge this quarter and banned what we believe to be more than 30,000 advertisers, accounting for about 5.3 percent of its active advertiser base," said AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes. "While this typically signals a negative impact on revenues, AdGooroo also tracked increased competition for ad placement, resulting in higher ad prices for Google and unusually high clickthrough rates. Google seems to be taking advantage of a strong Q4 to make some quality improvements."

The report maintains that ad coverage, which has been steadily climbing for the past 12 months took a sudden dive in December, dropping nearly 10% — from 5.48 ads per keyword in November down to 4.97 in December.

In the report, the firm notes that the fourth quarter has traditionally been strong for Google, and expects this to be the case again this year. "This seasonal improvement has less to do with total search query volume (which historically is about the same as November), and more with increased competition for ad placement (higher ad prices) and unusually high clickthrough rates," says AdGooroo.

Here are some interesting graphs from the report:

Other interesting information in the report includes lists of the top 25 advertisers on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and the most expensive keywords on each of these search engines. These are based on the total number of recorded first-page ad impressions, and doesn’t necessarily reflect total ad spend. You can check out the report in its entirety here (it’s complimentary).
 

Related Articles:

> Consumers Expected to Spend $6.2 Billion on Mobile Apps in 2010

> Click Fraud Rate Spikes In Q4

> Bing Makes Out Well In Search Spend Report

So we have to wonder about the estimates from Merrill Lynch, which is estimating the cloud computing market to reach $160 billion by 2011.The estimate includes $95 billion in business and productivity applications.

Whoa! That makes cloud computing one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

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But Merrill Lynch is not alone in its lofty estimates. Earlier this year, Gartner pegged the market at $150 billion by 2013.

In their estimate, Gartner included Google Ad Words estimates in their estimates. This seems sketchy at best. Here’s what Gartner analyst Lydia Leong wrote back in May:

“Obviously, one argue whether or not it’s valid to include advertising revenue, but a key point that should not be missed is that in the trend towards the consumerization of IT, it is the advertiser that often implicitly pays for the consumer’s use of an IT service, rather than the consumer himself. Advertising revenue is a significant component of the overall market, part of the “cloud” phenomenon even if you don’t necessarily think of it as “computing”.

What’s at risk is making cloud computing totally irrelevant. How can corporate IT departments make sense of the market when it appears that cloud computing is essentially tied to anything connected to the Internet?

But then you need to look at the dynamics in play. IT is built on legacy systems, custom, built to order environments. Cloud computing provides a level of automation.

From the PriceWaterhouseCoopers summer Technology Forecast:

“Legacy IT soaks up much of the available IT budget and is a primary barrier to IT responsiveness and overall business agility.”

The report goes on to say that cloud will be necesssary for automating the world of IT:

“…IT must adopt an architecture that creates loose coupling between the IT infrastructure and application workloads. It also must modernize and automate IT’s own internal business processes for provisioning, managing, and orchestrating infrastructure resources.”

In other words, cloud computing will be huge but to call it a $160 billion market seems like a form of hype that can lead to all kinds of issues. It’s almost reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.

And look what happened there.

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Seen better CTRs when paid and organic listings are present? Tell us about it.

Professors Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang have highlighted the following findings:

- On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.

- The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.

- Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.

- The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.

- The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.

- Paid search advertising drives up to 54% of total revenue growth.

The professors used "a unique panel dataset of consumer responses to keyword ads on Google" to conduct their research. The complete findings from the study are evidently available in a paper entitled "Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence?" It’s 52 pages long.

"These findings have important implications for the incentives of search engines to strategically modify the rankings of their organic search listings in order to boost their revenues from paid search advertisements," says Professor Ghose.

Ghose’s point is an interesting one. Nobody’s making any accusations here, but would search engines tweak organic results specifically with the goal of increasing the performance of paid results, and bringing in more revenue?

Some think the idea is absurd. For example, one WebProNews reader commented:

No additional CPC is incurred when an organic listing is present, and the CPC certainly does not change depending on the organic listing’s position. The PPC auctioning process has nothing to do with the organic SERPs.

Lastly, manipulating the organic SERPs in order to charge more for PPC clicks is cutting your own throat, from an SE perspective. In effect, telling advertisers: "You got a better organic position, therefore you will be charged more for your PPC clicks." Under which business model does this make sense? Exactly none. (respond here.)

Even if a search engine did engage in such a practice, it is highly unlikely that anybody would know about it. I think the larger point is still just that it pays to optimize your site for organic listings, even if you are paying for listings. This may seem like common sense, but it is easy to dismiss the time and effort that go into an optimized site if you think you can just buy your way to clicks. What are your thoughts on the subject? Comment here.

Related Articles:

> Google and Heineken Study Search for Branding

> Report: Paid Search Spend Up 10%

> Search Ads Convert Better with Display

Google says the feature is part of its continuing effort to make ads more relevant and useful to users and help advertisers reach the people who are most interested in their products and services.

"AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user’s query doesn’t provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want," explains Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "Take, for example, users who search for "mortgage." Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side."

If a user clicks a promotion, they are taken to a page with more detailed, sponsored results. There they can choose from the offers listed on the page or refine their search further. If a user finds an offer they like, they can call the advertiser or request a quote.

"If a user requests a quote, Google automatically anonymizes the user’s phone number and sends you a unique code that you can use to contact the user," says Friedman. "You only pay if a user calls the phone number on your offer or fills out a form to request a quote."

Google cites speed, transparency, and privacy as the key points of focus with Comparison ads. They show targeted offers in less than a second, they only show real products (meaning no teaser rates, baits or switch offers), and they won’t send advertisers any user information.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Latest Version of AdWords API

> More "Ads by Google" Across the Web

> Google Gives Local Businesses New Way to Advertise

Google says the tool can give reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness or active user interest, in a particular product or service. It calculates the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits resulting from a display ad campaign.

"Campaign Insights compares two data sets: a large group of users (many thousands, minimum) who saw a particular ad, with an equivalent, large group that did not see the ad," explains Austin Rachlin of Google’s Inside AdWords crew. "It then measures whether there is any significant difference in searches and visits to your website between the two groups. Doing this, Campaign Insights can determine the incremental change that is directly attributable to the display ad campaign. With this insight, you can establish how well your display ad campaign is working beyond just clicks."

"Campaign Insights provides highly reliable results to marketers because of the statistical methodology our computer algorithms use to combine and analyze large volumes of data from several sources — the advertiser’s own campaign information, ad serving logs, and sampled data from Google Toolbar users who have opted in to enhanced features," continues Rachlin. "All of the results reported to advertisers are anonymized and aggregated over thousands of users."

Right now Google is telling advertisers who want to try out Campaign Insights to check with their Google representatives.

"This is the second consecutive quarter of sequential growth for paid search spend, indicating marketers’ continued confidence in search marketing as an efficient component of their overall marketing mix," said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite. "Multi-channel retailers in particular have continued to rely more heavily on paid search as a key driver of sales in a challenging economic environment."

According to the report, Bing saw the most pronounced growth in spend among the top three search engines, an increase of 15% year-over-year (presumably compared to Microsoft Live Search). Yahoo, on the other hand, was down 24% year-over-year.

The report also states the obvious,  that there was no movement in search share, as far as rank, but year-over-year, Yahoo lost share to Google, while Bing showed "little" growth.

"Microsoft is headed in the right direction with Bing and attracting more advertiser dollars. That said, it’s an uphill battle against Google and there’s still a long way to go before Bing garners a significant amount of the search ad revenue pie," said Barnette.

More information about paid search spend for the quarter can be found in the report. SearchIgnite says it manages over $350 million in paid search annually.

Yahoo saw its search share fall to 19.6 percent, from 20.1 percent in May, while Google’s share remained flat at 65 percent.

In a report, Douglas Anmuth, an analyst for Barclays Capital, wrote he had been expecting Bing’s share to come in between 10 percent and 11 percent. He said the comScore data was good news to investors of Google and Yahoo concerned about Bing’s initial impact.

"While the share gain is positive for Microsoft, and Bing was the only one of the 3 large search engines to increase queries [from month to month], we had expected Bing share to come in between 10-11%," Anmuth wrote.

Mike Nichols

"As a result, we believe the search data is a slight positive for both Google & Yahoo, and it should serve as a sigh of relief to some investors who were concerned about the early impact of Bing. Bing’s gains did come virtually all from Yahoo, but the overall impact was still less than anticipated."

In a statement, Mike Nichols, general manager of Bing, said the company was "gratified to see some upward momentum for Bing in the public numbers from comScore" and was working hard to "build a loyal fan base for Bing."

In a recent blog post, Microsoft reported that Bing saw 8 percent growth in unique users in June and that advertiser TigerDirect had seen its sales and order volume triple since the launch of Bing.

The trend was not seen in other categories, such as travel and finance, and U.S. search spend was down 6.5 percent for the quarter.

Retail search spend increased steadily as the quarter went on, with June showing an increase in spend of 55 percent compared with June 2008.

"We’ve seen very strong paid search spend from retailers for the last several quarters, a trend that can be attributed to an increase in retailer’s promotional activity as they turn to heavy discounting and sales to drive purchases," said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite.

Google continued to lead with 77 percent of search market spend. Yahoo showed declined in Q2, coming in at 17 percent of spend and with their search share down 26 percent compared with a year earlier.

The launch of Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, showed little impact on its share of paid search advertising. Microsoft’s search spend remained at 6 percent in Q2.

"Microsoft appears to be focusing its efforts on driving consumer interest and capturing increased search query share," said Barnette.

"We have not yet seen this translate into more paid search advertising dollars for Microsoft, although typically consumer adoption precedes advertiser adoption."

The vast 90% of Twitter account holders have probably lost their passwords, lost interest, or just don’t have time. A whopping 50% of Twitter users only Tweet once in every two and a half months. In addition, the majority of these lethargic Twitter users have Tweeted just once in their lifetime!

In addressing the gender breakdown, the study reports that men have more Twitter relationships than women—which goes contrary to typical social findings that define women as more relational. However, the study in no way suggests that men are more relational, only that men have 15% more Twitter followers and have followed more people than women.

These statistics could be alarming for Twitter. Most social networking sites report that the top 10% of users are producing 30% of the activity. With Twitter, this typical statistics is turned on its head. What this means for Twitter is that all the rage might not be that outrageous. With a slide in popularity and a scary user-not-using stat, Twitter may have to do something new to stay popular.