Google has launched a new feature for its Conversion Optimizer tool for AdWords. It’s called Target CPA Bidding, and lets advertisers set a bid that reflects the average amount they’d like to pay for a conversion, as opposed to the maximum they’re willing to pay for it.

"We launched Conversion Optimizer in 2007 as a tool to improve your campaign ROI," says Emily Williams of Google’s InsideAdWords crew. "Conversion Optimizer analyzes your conversion tracking data and automatically adjusts your bids for each auction. Over the past few years, we’ve been pleased to hear from a number of you that you’ve seen significant ROI improvements after implementing Conversion Optimizer. In fact, analysis indicates that, on average, those of you who use the tool experience a 21% increase in conversions along with a 14% decrease in CPA."

That analysis is based on Conversion Optimizer campaign performance over a year’s time, with a control set of campaigns.

"This latest update to Conversion Optimizer was made in response to your feedback," says Williams. "We’ve heard from many of you that you’re more accustomed to thinking in terms of a target or average CPA when it comes to managing your online advertising (as opposed to the Max CPA bids which the tool has historically required). We hope that having the additional Target CPA bidding option will make it even easier for you to boost your AdWords ROI."

To use the new Target CPA bidding feature, advertisers can go to the settings tab in their account, and go to "Focus on Conversions". From there, just click Advanced Options. Conversion Optimizer itself is only available for campaigns using conversion tracking, and have received at least 15 conversions over the last 30 days.

Google has been working to harden Google Apps for its arrival into the enterprise. The tools bring browser based productivity into another dimension.

And, where people are productive, security is to be questioned. In this short review, we look at the new feature Google offers admins and look a bit closer at security in a browser-based world.

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To further enable Google Apps administrators, the company has released a new cookie based reset tool for managing security between the client and the enterprise cloud. This functionality of Google Apps allows an administrator to flag a user for re-authentication on their next HTTP request to Google’s cloud apps.

This new feature is targeted at environments where a user of the the Google Apps cloud loses an IT asset and the company wants to remove access to any current for future page requests.

This feature shows how mobile and personal computer are again creeping together in security needs for cloud data service use.

This feature reminds us of the “remote wipe” in MobileMe that is offered for the iPhone. The iPhone versiion targets removing data from the physical device but for practical purposes is nearly akin to “cookie invalidated” by Google Apps, which forces log-out any active sessions of a cloud based application.

Both features target keeping sensitive information safe and can be activated at any time, killing an active user of the device. Google shares the goal of the tool here:

“Combined with the existing ability for administrators to reset user passwords, this new feature to reset users’ sign-in cookies improves security in the cloud in case of device theft or loss.”

Google goes into a bit more detail in the help file for the cookie reset feature, which describes how to find the feature to reset the cookie (in Users and groups: Passwords) and as an admin remove authorization from any current or future authenticated user or browser client:

“To prevent unauthorized access to an account, you can reset the sign-in cookies for that user, which has the effect of logging out that user from all current HTTP sessions, and requiring new authentication the next time that user tries to initiate an HTTP session to log in to Google Apps.”

The help file also describes how to find the feature, which shows up in the Users and but in our version of Google Apps (non premium) it didn’t show up in the password section as described.

So far, it looks like this security feature is getting a good response from the administrators that have responded to Google’s blog. We see it as a welcome effort on Google’s part towards preparing their cloud for the enterprise, but also it raises questions of the use of cookies and tying down access to machines (IP) vs. browser cookie.

Securing the browser for the cloud causes us to think of this question:

Are mobile phones (iPhone for example) inherently more secure than computer based browsers?

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Tweets about this, Tweets about that; there are Tweets flying all over Twitter about all kinds of things, but no easy way to display one or more of them gracefully on a website or blog. Until tomorrow, that is.

In a post today on the company’s blog for media companies interested in using the service, Twitter highlighted ReadWriteWeb’s use of screenshots in highlighting the smartest Tweets about last week’s HP/Palm deal. “But the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack,” the company wrote. “We have an alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow.” We emailed the company and they told us what it is!

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Robin Sloan, who works on Media Partnerships at Twitter, explained thusly:

The alternative is super-simple: just a little script that generates a block of HTML that looks just like an embedded tweet, but is just normal HTML text (instead of a flat image). Should be a handy tool — (I know I plan to use it a lot on Twitter Media).

That sounds like a small but exciting feature!

Uber-curator Robert Scoble has been talking about the need for some easier way to curate social media signals. Of this new feature, he told us by phone from Israel: “It’s nice. It’s a good little step along the path that we need to get to real time curation. I’d like to be able to bundle Tweets and tag them.” Scoble recently wrote about what he calls the 7 big-picture needs of real-time curators, and embedding Tweets wasn’t one of those. “A curator is an information chemist,” he wrote in that post. “He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.”

This is a little reminiscent of European blogger Robin Good’s argument a few years ago that a concept called Newsmastering was going to become the chic occupation at any firm with business touched by the online river of news. For some reason that hasn’t happened yet. It seems that online curation, editorial selection of items flowing through dynamic collections of online sources, has proven too removed from direct, immediate and crude value to have caught on with more than a handful of companies, most of which were already in the publishing business.

Twitter has high hopes for its favorite feature and may very well be adding more curation-type tones to that in the future, as well.

Either way, starting tomorrow, you’ll apparently be able to click a link and get some code you can paste onto a blog to display a Tweet. That’s cool.

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Professional social LinkedIn launched a new feature today that has tons of promise: the ability to follow new hires, departures, job postings and more at particular companies. It’s pretty awesome to have a newsfeed of company updates across your sector of interest, as an employment-o-phile (I love hearing about people’s jobs) this seems like a feature I’d really enjoy.

Unfortunately, the implementation is a big disappointment. The condescending, pageview hungry attitude that colors so much of what LinkedIn does is all over this new feature as well. I’ve recorded a short screencast tour of the feature below. Let me know if this drives you as nuts as it does me.

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To be fair, the company says this is only the beginning and that there is more development of this feature on the way. It’s hard not to be cynical about it though, as LinkedIn does things just like this all the time. There is also the ability to customize which kinds of company updates get delivered in your LinkedIn email newsletter, and maybe that will work out great for the stuffed-shirt-Blackberry wielding crowd, but the social media users the company seeks to connect with need more and better ways to consume this information!

There is a feed of your network updates you can subscribe to, but it’s filled to the brim with imported tweets and the most low-value LinkedIn updates like new friend connections. Please oh please, LinkedIn, why can’t you just make it easy for your users to get clear notifications of when people and companies make job changes and hires, in an interface of our choosing, so that we can come back to LinkedIn if we want to read more? It’s maddening.

We’ve been complaining about this for years and the company keeps coming to us saying “you’re going to love what we’ve got to show you next!” But new developments continue to have the same limitations. It’s a heartbreaking loss of opportunity for all parties involved.

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Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It’s actually not a new feature entirely. "We’ve offered a ‘Similar’ feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn’t get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:

I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It’s also worth noting that Gmail is in the mix for Facebook, with Buzz presumably being the connecting factor, which is interesting in itself since Buzz is more like FriendFeed than Facebook, and Facebook actually owns FriendFeed, but that’s not listed (while Microsoft.com is listed as similar to Bing).

In its continued effort to custom tailor search results and suggest that what your searching for might actually be something else, Google has brought its similar page results onto the front page of your search results.

You’ve likely seen the feature we’re talking about before, but never clicked on it and now you won’t have to, as it will be included directly at the bottom of your first search results page.

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The feature follows along the lines of many other improvements the search engine has made recently, such as localizing its search suggestions list, adding search suggestions to Google Maps and even suggesting a suicide hotline number for select search phrases. While we’ve certainly taken some issue with Google’s personalization of search results, there are obvious benefits to the user experience as a whole. The difference here is that Google is not, it would seem, making these suggestions as a result of studying your surfing history and personal habits, but instead by analyzing linking structures.

Google offers an example of how this new feature could prove to be handy to its users:

For example, with the recent earthquakes around the world, many of us have been looking for international relief organizations. We knew that Direct Relief International has been actively involved in Haiti, so we started off by searching for [direct relief international]. The first result on the page linked us to the Direct Relief website, where we found many ways to help in Haiti. But what if one wants to support several organizations? If you click the “Similar” link that’s on the same line as the “www.directrelief.org/” URL, you’ll find other nonprofits that are also involved in relief efforts.

The feature seems to be rolling out in waves, so don’t worry if you don’t see it yet, it will be there soon.

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Google has launched a new feature in its search results, which displays results that are deemed "similar" to the query. If you search for eBay, for example, you may get results for Craigslist, uBid, Buy.com, and ebayanuncios.es.

Basically, if someone searches for a brand, there is a good chance Google will inject links to the competition on that results page by default (though at the bottom).

It’s actually not a new feature entirely. "We’ve offered a ‘Similar’ feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible," says Google software engineer Doantam Phan. "Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently."

I thought it would be interesting to see what pages Google thinks are similar to Google itself and some of its competitors. When I searched "google" I didn’t get any similar pages. When I searched "bing", I got the following:

For "facebook" I got the following:

For Yahoo, I got the following:

I find it interesting that Google deems Bing to be more like Dogpile than Google or even Yahoo. It’s also worth noting that Gmail is in the mix for Facebook, with Buzz presumably being the connecting factor, which is interesting in itself since Buzz is more like FriendFeed than Facebook, and Facebook actually owns FriendFeed, but that’s not listed (while Microsoft.com is listed as similar to Bing).

YouTube has launched a new feature that allows channel owners to send text messages and links to videos to the front page of their subscribers’ YouTube accounts. It’s a cool, if logical, feature to offer and one that could make visiting YouTube a lot more fun.

Called Channel Bulletins, the feature is pretty simple. But am I looking forward to seeing little updates sent out between videos from the people I’m subscribed to? Yes, I am.

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It would be nice if YouTube allowed channel owners to pipe in RSS feeds, maybe Twitter messages. The personal touch should be nice too, though.

If you aren’t subscribed to any channels on YouTube, you’re missing out on one of the best ways to experience the site. I’m subscribed to Steve Gillmor, Breaking the News, Social Data Revolution and Brown Man Thinking Hard, among others. (Would love to get your suggestions for video channels to subscribe to, RWW readers.)

Blippy CEO Phil Kaplan brought this feature to our attention and framed it as YouTube’s version of Twitter. It may play out that way for hard-core YouTube users, but I hope more casual publishers will regularly send out bulletins as well. I wouldn’t mind getting them as emails, even.

It would be nice for subscribers to be able to reply easily to Channel Bulletins, too. There are lots of ways this could go, but getting it started, offering messaging other than videos and comments, is a good move.

Channels have long been a part of YouTube, Paris Hilton got the first branded one in 2006, and it’s pretty far-out to think that text message communication between channel owners and subscribers has taken this long to arrive. Perhaps when you’re coming from a video-centric perspective, these things don’t always come to mind.

There are many other social features that could be added to make YouTube a more compelling site. Could I please be shown the YouTube channels and favorites of my friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google Accounts, for example? That would be great.

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Location based social network Gowalla quietly released a big new feature today: real-time PubSubHubbub feeds for check-ins by people and at locations. Hello, mashups and 3rd party apps of the future!

In addition to being real-time and easy to access, Gowalla’s new feeds are also marked-up with the beginnings of the widely used Activity Streams format. Put all of this together and Gowalla to Google Buzz is one obvious connection, but the possibilities are endless.

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For comparison, much larger competitor FourSquare offers private user-specific RSS feeds, which are slower and much more limited. It also offers powerful analytics for business owners about who checks in at their venue. The relative value of both systems for developers is debatable, but Gowalla’s new feature is clearly very nice.

These new Atom feeds from Gowalla can be remixed by anyone, though – not just developers. For example, I plan to run the feeds from a few coffee shops down the street from my house through an alert service so I can know who’s hanging out in the neighborhood.

I expect we’ll find out even more about what could be done with these feeds once they are officially announced. The Hub page says the feature is delivered by Superfeedr, so presumably the feeds will grow more sophisticated as Superfeedr continues to add new features as well.

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Here at ReadWriteStart, we’ve mentioned the importance of credibility as an entrepreneur when meeting with venture capitalists and potential investors, but it is also important to carry that credibility forward into your company as you interface with customers. Amid rumors that it was extorting businesses by offering to de-emphasize negative reviews in return for adverting purchases, social review site Yelp announced Monday that it would be “lifting the veil” on its review system and removing controversial features in hopes of securing customer trust.

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Yelp features a review filter that sorts through reviews of local businesses to determine which is more trustworthy and places the top ones on the business’ profile page. Some have claimed that Yelp was helping businesses pick the best reviews to show if that company was purchasing advertising on Yelp, a clear case of extortion that the company has vehemently denied, calling the claims a “conspiracy theory.”

Now when users visit a business’ Yelp profile, they can choose to look over the reviews the filter has automatically reviewed by clicking a link near the bottom of the page near the pagination links (not exactly the easiest feature to find, I had to search for “filter” to find it). Yelp has put a CAPTCHA pop-up between the profile and the filtered results to keep robots from crawling the filtered data. Perhaps this is an attempt to prevent them from figuring out how to game the system.

When I tested this new feature on one of my favorite downtown Phoenix restaurants, LoLo’s Chicken and Waffles, I saw some similarities among the 25 filtered reviews. A handful were from users who live in other states or who are what Yelp calls “less established users,” and some were either very short, or filled to the brim with Internet abbreviations and misspellings or slang. Others, whose content was hidden from view, had managed to violate Yelp’s review guidelines or terms of service, which I can assume means a variety of things including profanity or obvious spam.

Yelp is also discontinuing the use of the “Favorite Review” feature, which Yelp packed with advertising deals to businesses. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says they decided to remove the feature in hopes of eliminating any confusion.

“Despite our best efforts to educate consumers and the small business community, myths about Yelp have persisted,” writes Stoppelman. “[The "Favorite Review" feature] led some people to the wrong conclusions about whether businesses could control the review content on their page. (They can’t.) So, to eliminate the opportunity for that misconception, we’ve eliminated the feature.”

By allowing users to go under the hood and see filtered results, Yelp is, I believe, taking a significant step in the name of transparency and openness. While they aren’t revealing any special algorithms for how they determine what makes trustworthy reviews, they are responding in a timely and appropriate manner to the continued allegations of foul play. Regardless of the merit of these claims, Yelp seems bent on securing the trust of their users, a practice every startup should mimic.

Also it is important to remember that a certain level of transparency is attractive to users, but not too much. There is a boundary between what should be shared with the community and what should be deeply guarded company secrets, such as fancy algorithms or the inner workings of the site’s major functions. Users can trust a company more when they feel they have some sort of insider’s view of the company through partial transparency.

Simply blogging about the company’s activity is sometimes enough to satisfy this need, but other times is may be appropriate, as Yelp has done, to incorporate features which help to underscore the product’s attempts at truth, honesty and validity, if those are major facets of your business.

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An innovation at Ping.fm now lets users direct a blog feed to all of their social networks automatically.

“A blog post can automatically go to up to 50 social networks,” said Loic Le Meur, CEO of Ping.fm’s corporate overlords, Seesmic.

This new feature is a real-time feed effected by Superfeedr, a service that transforms a wide variety of feeds into normalized XMPP or Pubsubhubbub format.

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According to the Seesmic blog, a user enters their feed into the RSS section of their Ping.fm dashboard, and the service sends the information as a status update to all of their social networks.

Currently this feature, which is powered by Superfeedr, only carries a single feed but Le Meur said the company is working on expanding it to allow multiple feeds within a couple of weeks.

“We are testing with (just) one right now,” he told us. “We will add several soon after we scale one. Ping.fm has 700,000 users so (are being) careful!”

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On the one hand, when we hear about Facebook making Facebook Connect an opt-out experience, we feel a little chill run through our bones and we want to commit Facebook suicide. And then again, every time we hear about another big player on the web implementing Facebook Connect, we smile, because for us and so many others, our Facebook friend list is our de facto representation of our real-life friends on the Web.

YouTube this weekend announced that it would be stepping up its Facebook integration, allowing you to see what YouTube videos all of your friends are sharing on Facebook.

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It’s only been since last December that the video-sharing site has had Facebook Connect capabilities, but now, as YouTube says in its blog, “when you log in to your YouTube account, you’ll get a prominent invitation in the Recent Activity module (see below) to connect to Facebook, which we highly recommend that you do. In fact, we hope to integrate more social networks with YouTube going forward”.

The blog also highlights “real-time sharing”, saying that now, when you share YouTube videos on other social networks, it happens immediately and not 10 minutes later. We have to imagine that this has lowered the number of exasperated support requests from impatient users, as we’ve all come to expect things to happen instantaneously and not when the server feels like getting around to it.

As for sharing, users can automatically share videos they post on YouTube to Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. This new feature twists around the usual, making it possible for users to see what their friends are sharing on Facebook. In this case, it does not mean that they have to create the video for you to see it – if they share it, you can see that.

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We’ve seen the feature before on services like MapMyRide and surely many other maps, but as of yesterday, we will probably begin seeing it pop up all around the web – elevation on maps.

Google announced yesterday that it would be bringing elevation to its Maps API, ensuring a whole new slew of Google Maps mashups.

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The new service, available for use as either the ElevationService class or the Elevation Web Service (which doesn’t require an API key to use), provides “the elevation in meters for one or more sets of coordinates” or a select number of points, equally spaced along a path.

As Google points out in its blog, the most obvious use for elevation is in planning out something like a bicycle route. “In fact you’ll be happy to hear,” the company writes in its blog “that the Maps API bicycling directions already factor in elevation”.

Already, for bicycling junkies like myself, the ability to check out routes and elevations on sites like MapMyRide is extremely useful, if not just really interesting. The mashup on Google’s blog post about this new feature shows how the data can be used to give a side-view of any path, alerting you to any unforseen inclines or descents.

Aside from bicycling, there are any number of uses for this sort of data – avoiding hills in icy winter travel, figuring out sight lines or just choosing the best route to drive that moving van and not have everything slide to the back end.

While there are other services, as we’ve mentioned, that have already offered this feature, there’s something about it coming to Google Maps. We already use Google Maps to plot out our routes and get directions, so why go somewhere else to get elevation? Now, you might not have to. We’re hoping this gets added as a standard feature on Google Maps soon.

Take a minute to play with the embedded map below and see how the elevation data can be used with Google Maps.

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Google is touting a new feature for their mobile VoIP application, Google Voice: instant notification of new SMS text messages and voicemails. You may have thought an app meant to replace your phone’s functions would already be doing that, but in reality, Google Voice delayed notifications for 15 minutes by default. You could change this to 5 minutes or force a refresh manually, but many don’t bother tweaking settings or obsessively refreshing just to see if they have new messages. Now that’s no longer necessary – messages are delivered almost immediately.

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According to news posted on the Google Voice blog, the new notification feature called “Inbox Synchronization” will notify your Android-powered device (sorry, iPhone users!) of new messages “within seconds” of receiving them. That’s not exactly real-time, but close enough – at least now your text messaging friends won’t think you’re ignoring them.

Unfortunately, this feature isn’t being switched on automatically – Google Voice users will have to make the adjustments themselves. To enable it, you’ll need to open the Google Voice settings on your phone and touch Refresh and notification. Doing so will automatically disable SMS forwarding to your phone, too, so you won’t receive duplicate notifications.

Also included in the update is a new pop-up bar that appears when you tap a contact’s photo. From here, you can quickly respond via voicemail, email or IM.

Google Voice: Not There Yet?

Despite this obviously welcome advance for the Google Voice app on Android handsets, some are still questioning why the service hasn’t been better integrated with the mobile operating system itself. Only days ago, tech guru and founder of O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, posted on Google’s new service, Buzz: “What’s with Google Voice as a second-class citizen on Android?”

He cites a few examples of improvements that he believes should be made specifically regarding the app’s voicemail feature. “There’s no link to [voicemail] from the phone app, even if it’s installed, so you have to use the old-fashioned voice mail, or else check it in a separate application,” he notes. “Phone numbers that are left in messages are not clickable dial links when the message is transcribed.”

Soon after, dozens of commenters chimed in, some with their own gripes, mentioning issues with transcriptions and making calls. However, more were actually sticking up for the service than complaining.

Anecdotally, we’ve heard stories from Google Voice users who’ve complained about minor issues that, on their own, don’t seem like “make it or break it” bugs. But they can be irksome enough that some of these users aren’t making a full transition from phone-based calls, texts and voicemail over to the VoIP application. That may change in the future as Google pushes out more updates and bug fixes…at least we hope it will.

In the meantime, at least some people are having fun with the service’s issues. For example, over on the Facebook page ****GoogleVoiceSaid, mimicked after the Twitter account with a similar name, users share the worst (and funniest) translations Google Voice has created. An example post: “This is or you need the hello. Yeah for hello hello at.” Sounds like voice recognition still has a ways to go.

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