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Posted on November 9, 2006
Google Base...
BY BEN CASTELLI
Equals more of your products in the consumers face. Google Base is great service that allows you to submit the products and services that you offer directly to Google. By uploading specific product information to Base, you are more likely to have your products show up in the search results on Google when a user searches on a relevant query. Check out the search results for "striped beach chair":
Best Promotions is coming up at the top of the natural search results because the beach chair is an active item in Google Base. This is cool because Best Promotions is a fairly new website and would not necessarily have visibility on the first page in Google for this search term yet.
Uploading to Base will also give your products and services visibility in Google related sites like Froogle and Google Local. It is important to make sure your items have pictures and good descriptions attached to each item.
The Base interface shows you impressions and clicks for active items although it would be nice to have the ability to run cumulative reports similar to Ad Words. There are 3 ways to submit Google base, upload individual items manually via web form, submit multiple items through a bulk upload or the API. The bulk upload dashboard was recently redesigned for easier use and to show more useful data.
If your products or services are not getting any visibility in Google, consider Base to help them show up in the search results when a user types a specific query that matches what you have to offer.
Posted on October 27, 2006
Google Alerts Deepening Online Conversation Tracking
BY JAMES CLARK
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is rolling out significant updates across the board this week. The lastest update is to its popular Google Alerts service. Now, Google has added blogs to its Alerts notifications. This is following the announcement of placing blog search results in Google News.
Why is this significant? In our experience talking with organizations about online reputation management, they often respond saying they monitor online conversations using Google Alerts. The previous version of Google Alerts failed in capturing the online conversation due to the lack of blog tracking. Now when anyone signs up for Google Alerts they will have the option of tracking blogs in addition to Google News, groups and the web. Even better, the default is set to the Comprehensive Alert to track all, giving communications professionals the ability to track a deeper thread in the online conversation.
My issue with Google Alerts is that its still an email-based deliver system. Why not put an RSS feed directly on the Google Alerts sign up page?
As Google is rolling out advanced features in many areas of its business, we can only assume there will be a RSS tie in with Google Reader.
Our biggest concern from a usability standpoint is blog spam. We'll be testing this out to see if the quality of the results from blog posts are good or not. There are companies out there like Collective Intellect and Umbria that have entire systems to track the blogosphere and in our opinion their greatest value is eliminating blog spam. Try doing a Technorati search on a specific topic, 90% of the results are irrelevant, maybe popular, but irrelevant. Google Alerts is no way a substitute for a brand monitoring systems like Collective Intellect and Umbria, but it is a first step into understanding the impact.
So it's still up to the Communications Analysts to take the data from search that is relevant, the data from blogs that are popular and craft a strategy to identify and converse with the influencers.
Note to PR Firms: Google Alerts just upped itself a notch to becoming your clipping service - and it's Free.
Others in the Google Alerts conversation:
TechCrunch
Google Blog
Posted on October 23, 2006
Time to Syndicate Your Press Room - Google Blog Search now in Google News
BY JAMES CLARK
Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) recent move to add links to Google Blog Search on the front page of Google News and placing a Search Blogs link at the bottom of each news results page raises the importance of adding a Syndicating Press Room to your web site.
Almost a month ago we posted "Syndicating Press Room - The 9th Free Thing Every Site Should Do" in response to Seth Godin's post about 8 things every site should do.
It continues to be our strong belief that if you are responsible for visibility, public relations or expert positioning one of the first items that should be addressed is getting your press room syndicating RSS feeds for the masses.
The residual benefits are tremendous and the impact can be immediate.
Others in the conversation:
Steve Rubel
Marshall Kirkpatick
Posted on October 19, 2006
Google's Latest Testing Tool
BY BEN CASTELLI
Google just announced yesterday it will be releasing yet another free service, Website Optimizer. Straight from the Google Analytics Blog:
"Website Optimizer is a free tool that helps AdWords advertisers test different landing pages and determine which one drives the most conversions. A true multivariate testing tool, Website Optimizer allows you to test variations of headlines, promotional copy, and images. The tool allows you to update your site with the winning test combination and continue to experiment."
I recently posted on the importance of split testing landing pages and after initial review, Website Optimizer looks like a great tool to facilitate the testing process. It goes beyond the elementary A/B split testing and offers multivariate testing. Multivariate testing allows you to test different ideas for images, headlines and sales copy on different landing pages at the same time, delivering insight into which combination of elements work best to increase conversion and ROI. Here is an example screenshot from the combination report which shows which combination of elements you are testing are performing the best.
The guys over at ROI Revolution pointed out one very cool aspect of the new Website Optimizer: "The comprehensive reports of your test results work similarly to Google Analytics, and are VERY EASILY applied to pages already tracked in GA." This is great for users who are already running Google Analytics and are familiar with interface and set-up process.
As the Google machine keeps rolling out the free analytics and testing tools to help advertisers improve their campaigns, the only challenging part is finding the time to stay educated on all of them. Currently Web Optimizer is in beta launch and available to AdWords advertisers on a sign-up basis.
Posted on October 6, 2006
New Generation Embracing Social Networking
BY BEN CASTELLI
The power of Social Media continues to grow as less people go to the computer for information or to interact with their computer, but to interact with other people. It appears social networking's growth into the mainstream is attracting an increasingly older audience. CNET News recently reported on a new comScore report which reveals that over 51% of U.S. based visitors to MySpace in August were aged 35 or older. Compare that to a year ago when only 39% were aged 35 or older. ComScore attributed some of the increase to the explosion of online video and the fact that MySpace is now serving up more video than YouTube. A few other interesting statistics from the report were that visitors to MySpace aged 12 to 17 dropped from nearly 25 percent last year to about 12 percent in August. The percentage aged 18 to 24 has decreased only slightly, from 19.6 percent last year to just more than 18 percent this year. The total number of unique visitors to MySpace has more than doubled over the past year to more than 55.8 million.
MySpace has always been a great place to find young influencers and marketers have definitely taken note. The research now shows the potential for reaching a wider age demographic and also helps to address advertising concerns that MySpace would only ever be popular with the younger generation. Google certainly sees the potential and in August secured a deal that gave them exclusive rights to provide Web search results and sponsored links across MySpace. This move gives Google an important source of traffic and ad revenue since each members MySpace page will contain a Google search box. Also, ads will appear both in search results and contextually targeted placements on MySpace pages.
Social networking is becoming more than one-generational and will continue to appeal to a wider range of visitors due to the simple fact that humans are social animals and social media helps fulfill that basic desire to interact with others.
