Archive of Google Posts

This past week our agency representatives at Google AdWords sent out their weekly update and highlighted a tool that I am very excited about.  (This is not completley new, the Google AdWords blog made mention of this on March 6, 2008 & David Szetela wrote a nice piece on this as well in a March 17th article on SearchEngineWatch.com). 

Advertisers can now exclude parked domains and exclude error page ads from the Content Network.

What does this mean?

Why Social Media Scares Me 

Andy still likes to joke about how he came across my MySpace page when I applied for this job and saw messages from my friends congratulating me on a new job and a big move.  The funny part - I hadn’t gotten the job yet! 

As we have read time and time again, what you put on the internet can be seen by just about anyone.  Google “casie gillette” and what will you find?

• I work at KoMarketing
• I played basketball at Marietta College
• My Sphinn name is Casieg

I don’t make a habit of creating very short blog posts that just announce something or refer to something interesting.  But in this case I couldn’t help myself.

Google AdWords is finally allowing advertisers to target individual sites and pay for the traffic by the click, and not just on a CPM basis (cost per thousand impressions)!

Now you can choose to pay by CPM or CPC.

Google changed the name of this targeting service too - from “Site Targeting” to “Placement Targeting” (perhaps a nod to the fact that Google’s Universal Search model is moving way beyond simple Web pages?).

Derek and I attended a SEMNE event last night where Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR spoke on Universal search and in particular video. He discussed not only YouTube but the increased frequency of YouTube and other videos showing up in Google search results. He also provided us with a statistic that really caught my attention:

In September, YouTube was the 3rd leading search engine with over 1 million searches (ComScore Data)

First of all, I had no idea that many people were searching in YouTube. Second, with 1 million searches on YouTube, 5 billion searches on Google, and the advent of universal search, I don’t think the question is ‘Should I use video?’ but instead ‘How do I use video?‘.

In a post on our blog in late August this year (2007), Derek did a fantastic job of laying out ways to make Google work for you (instead of you working “for” Google).  In that post Derek referenced Google Alerts and how to use this service …

I thought it would be fun to give people a list of some specific ways to use Google Alerts on a daily basis.  While these techniques can be used by any online marketer, the tactics listed below are especially useful for B2B marketers (and we specialize in B2B SEO and online marketing )…

KoMarketing Associates is proud to announce the first release of our free online marketing & search engine marketing guides!

I personally am excited about having these resources available for everyone out there to use. Here are some things you should know about the guides (and then they are each listed below):

• The guides are in their infancy, and we are planning on making these guides “living documents” that we will continually update. And, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please comment directly on this post.

• The information provided in the guides ranges from beginner-level to advanced.

What does Google mean to you? An opportunity for sales, a puzzle to be solved or a noose tightening around your neck? However we feel about Google individually, the fact that it is a tremendously popular website property holding an incredible amount of data on visitor traffic and behavior cannot be argued. A recent Nielsen/NetRatings report on search providers states that Google now processes 56.3% of US search results (PDF), representing over 4 billion search queries per month and year over year growth of almost 45%. In addition to the sheer volume of patterns and relationships uncovered between websites and web pages alone, consider how the depth and reach of Google services yield massive market research opportunities for understanding human behavior, preferences and insight into what we value (both online and offline).

I recently participated in a survey that PPC Hero conducted regarding Google’s AdWord Quality Scoring formula.

The survey produced some interesting results - primarily seeing what other “PPC experts” think are the critical factors in Google’s Ad Rank formula (the formula that determines Quality Score).

Honestly, I don’t remember how I answered the survey. But, below is a table with how I would rank each criteria today:

Of course, with Google rolling out its new top placement formula (see my previous Google AdWords new formula post), the importance of Max Bid just became elevated!

I’ve decided to dedicate this week’s Search Marketing Digest to providing a summary of some of the discussions going on regarding Google, Google’s Supplemental Index, and the changes they have made that have everyone involved in search discussing it. This post is for our clients, whom are sure to have heard something about this or will hear something about this in the near future.

Here is a Summary of What You Need to Know:

• Google has a database of web pages that are known as the Supplemental Index.

Google is rolling out a tweak to their AdWords system over the next few weeks that will change the way advertisers can obtain the top spots on a search results page - top ad placement formula change.

Hopefully this “new formula” will go the way of Coke’s new formula attempt in 1985…

Here is a snippet from the AdWords Blog about the rationale for this change:

“In addition to increasing control for advertisers, the improved formula increases the quality of our top ads for users. This is due to more high quality ads becoming eligible for top placement, thereby allowing our system to choose from a larger pool of high quality ads to show our users.”