Google Highlights New Search Ad Formats

Google has been experimenting on various search ad formats for the past couple weeks now but it is only now that they decided to put up a post explaining each one of them.  Actually it makes sense, with Google hoping to get some headway on the upcoming Thanksgiving Black Friday Sale which will see more users searching for great shopping deals. The new search ad formats are more interactive, more visual and perhaps engaging. However user reactions to these search ads may vary – that is it may result to better click-throughs for ads or lesser since some users might get totally annoyed with it.

So in brief here are the new search ad formats that Google has been testing out.

Ads with video trailer:

Ads with more links:

Ads with product extensions:

Location-based ads:

Comparison Ads:

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Highlights New Search Ad Formats

Product Extensions for U.S. AdWords Advertisers

Google has just rolled out a new feature of AdWords – product extensions which shall be available for all U.S. AdWords advertisers.  Product extensions are new ways by which you can add more relevant and specific information to your Google product ads.

AdWords’ product extensions let  you use your existing Google Merchant Center account for highlighting products directly in search ads, so that when your AdWords text ad appears and your Google Merchant Center account contains products that are relevant to the searcher’s query, it will display images, titles and prices of your products in what Google calls as plusbox located under your ad.

Succesful transactions resulting from AdWords product extensions are charged to your account on a cost-per-click basis. Meaning you won’t be charged if a user simply expands the plusbox and did not click through your site. Product extensions could improve your ads’ CTR (clickthrough rate).

In addition, since product extensions are charged on a CPC basis, it will only display if your ad is triggered by one of the keywords in your product extensions enabled campaign. You can even select which products are to be displayed when a user’s query triggers your ads.

To add product extensions to your Google AdWords ads, simply log in to Google Merchant Center and add your AdWords customer ID to your Account. Then visit the campaign settings tab under your AdWords account and click on the “Ad extensions” option. You will then nee to select “Use product images and information from my Google Merchant Center account.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Product Extensions for U.S. AdWords Advertisers

Enrich Your Google Search Results Page with Kikin

I never grow tired of reviewing more and more tools that expand the possibilities of Google search. I already took a look at tools that allow to see Twitter search results within Google SERPs and a few addons that generate relevant results from other sources (like Wikipedia, Youtube and other).

And here’s one more tool that retrieves search results from more sites: Kikin is the FireFox addon that “enriches and personalizes your browsing and search experience by adding results from your preferred social media websites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, eBay, etc).

Install:

Just click “Download”, allow FireFox to show you the pop-up from this site and install the tool. Re-start the browser and you are done.

Customize:

Go to TOOLS FireFox menus and select “My kikin“. You’ll be taken to the the kikin website where you will be able to customize your settings. To always see results from sources, select the green button. To only see results when they are relevant to your search, select the yellow button. To never see results from a source, select the red button.

Note 1: you will need to allow access to Kikin Facebook application to get the results from Facebook.

Note 2: you will also be able to search your Twitter stream if you connect the tool to your Twitter account.

Use:

Just search for anything that you are interested in and notice a cute box above the Google search results. Click through the tabs to see relevant results from the sources you set up in the options:

Warning:

The tool won’t work for me when I am using Google toolbar to search. I am not sure why. So if this happens to you, try deleting extra URL parameters in the Google search string appended by the toolbar. Hopefully, this bug will be fixed or clarified.

The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Enrich Your Google Search Results Page with Kikin

Favorite Tidbits from PubCon 2009

Posted by jennita

It has been a couple weeks since PubCon and yes, it’s taken me this long to recuperate! Bare with me here as I reminisce about my favorite tidbits over the 3 days of sessions. PubCon does an amazing job of putting together a schedule that covers a multitude of tracks and topics. Which usually means that I often end up with a case of “session envy.” You know, when you’re sitting in a session and you start to see tweets about how great another session is. It doesn’t even mean that the one you’re in is bad, it’s just that you want to be in two places at once.

Many people were live blogging the event and obviously there have been quite a few recaps of PubCon as well. I realize I’m a little late to the game.   But, let’s get to the good stuff! While there were many great speakers and presentations there were a couple that stood out to me. What I was looking for were answers to questions that we often get either through comments on the blog or through Q & A. With that said, these are my favorite take-aways from PubCon 2009.

Day 1 – How Do You Optimize For Universal and Personal Search?

This was a great session, full of valuable information. The biggest takeaway for me, came from  Bruce Clay. He took the road of sticking to a very specific topic, image and video content and explained how to get them indexed.

Since these are topics that come up quite a bit in Q & A I was excited to get some specific information on interesting ways to index images and videos. Thanks to Virginia Nussey over at Bruce Clay sending me the actual presentation (woot!).

Case Study – Indexing Images

The first thing Bruce spoke about was a case study they did involving getting images with text indexed. Here are the steps they took:

• Take a newspaper article
• Scan it to create a jpg
• Include that image into a PDF
• Submit that PDF to Google
• Search for info in the article as a PDF and the article is found.

So what happened? Well the PDF was indexed AND the text from the image was also indexed. Take a look at this SERP.

Obviously this isn’t going to work for you in all cases, but it’s an interesting way of getting images indexed and could be useful in a number of scenarios.

Case Study – Indexing Video

Next, Bruce went through another case study where they got a video indexed. Here are the steps they took.

• Take a Video
• Run it through our processor
• Edit the text transcript and save with the image
• When playing the video, search for words
• Jump into the Video

You can see this most clearly at Google audio indexing in the Labs section. Do a search for “economy” then notice how it shows you where in the video the word “economy” is spoken. I can see this being the wave of the future. How awesome would it be to have your videos come up in a search for words that were spoken within the video. Yea, pretty cool.

What I really liked about this presentation was that the information was displayed as a case study. If you read SEOmoz often you know how much we like to test theories out and put them to action. And although indexing images and video in this way may not be new to everyone, it’s new to some people and could be a great way to enhance your sites.

Day 2 – SEO/SEM Tools

This was seriously one of my favorite sessions. The speakers (including Rand) had a ton of great information but the one that really stood out to me was Jim Boykin of We Build Pages. He gave away some really great tips but the one I liked the most had to do with how to find out what keywords your competitors are targeting. Here are the steps to take:

• Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Enter in the URL of your competitor’s sitemap
• check box for ” Include other pages on my site linked from this URL”
• When you get results, Change “Match Type” to “Exact Match”to see actual searches and volume for specific phrases.

Obviously not only does this help with checking out which keywords your competitors are focused on, but it can also help you make sure you’re site is also focusing on the right keywords.

Day 3 – The Search Engine Smackdown

For me the third day was my favorite. I actually wanted to attend every session in the first slot. I ended up watching the first part of the Link Buying session and the second part of the site review with Matt Cutts. I have to admit also that I loved the fact that the PubCon team programmed Matt Cutts doing a site audit at the same time as the Link Buying session… pretty darn ingenious if you ask me! Rand posted information about the site review, so I wont go into detail but it was a great session.

Although I think the best part came after the session when Matt took to shaving Evan Fishkin’s head due to a bet they made while at the SEOmoz Werewolf party earlier in the week. And although that alone was pretty great, I loved the fact that while Matt was shaving Evan’s head, people were asking him questions and he was answering as if it were a regular Q & A. Here’s a short clip of the shaving!

Ok, ok back to the Search Engine Smackdown. I should admit that I debated whether I should head back to the hotel after a long 3 days or go to the final session, and I’m glad I went! These are the topics I found most interesting… and yes they’re all from Matt Cutts.

Google Social Search
Here’s the information straight from the site:

Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called “Results from people in your social circle.”

To see even more social content you can click the “Show options” link at the top of the results page and then click on the “Social” link.

What is your social circle? It’s a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Learn more about social search.

I can see myself using this quite a bit. Most of my job is about “social searches” in general,so this one is right up my alley! It was a fun find for me.

Testing for Speed

As Rand mentioned in his post, Google representatives have mentioned several times that page load time is important and Matt himself said at this session that although they haven’t used speed as a ranking factor in the past, that they’re thinking about adding it in the future. He gave some resources on how to check the speed and ways to make it faster.

• http://code.google.com/speed/ - Ways to clean up your site’s speed
• webpagetgest.org – Let’s you input a URL, select test location and other configuration options, then test!
• http://code.google.com/closure/ - a JavaScript compiler

Wrap it up

I’m sure if you follow me on Twitter you know quite well how I feel about Vegas. I really wish there was a good way to clone myself so I could attend multiple sessions at once. With up to 7 tracks going on at the same time, it’s difficult to pick one. In the end PubCon was a hit, and it was great to meet many of our SEOmoz members and see some old friends. See you again next year!

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Illustrating the Long Tail

Posted by randfish

The long tail of search demand has been around since the dawn of web search and, since that time, search marketers have been attempting to tap into the powerful stream that high quantities of unique content can provide. I recently came across some great data from Hitwise (about 1 year old, but still highly relevant) showing off just how substantive the long tail can be. Bill Tancer’s post – Sizing Up the Long Tail – gives some stats:

…the head and body together only account for 3.25% of all search traffic! In fact, the top terms don’t account for much traffic:

• Top 100 terms: 5.7% of the all search traffic
• Top 500 terms: 8.9% of the all search traffic
• Top 1,000 terms: 10.6% of the all search traffic
• Top 10,000 terms: 18.5% of the all search traffic

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.

Top 10,000 Search Terms by Percentage of All Search Traffic

The truth is my research is still greatly understating the true size of the tail because:
• The Hitwise sample contains 10 million U.S. Internet users and a complete data set would uncover much larger portions of the long tail.
• The data set I used filtered out adult searches.
• I only looked at 3-months worth of data (which were some of the slower months for search engines).

To help put this in perspective, I made a few spiffy charts that can help to illustrate these points:

In this first chart, you can see a representation of Hitwise’s data from the four chunks Bill broke down.

In this next representation, I’m showing the classic “long tail” style curve, but color-coded to help show the various areas of keyword demand. Note that you could conceptually say that the 9,000 of the top 10,000 terms should technically fit into the chunky middle. Bill classified them thusly in his post, but I tend to think that at those demand levels, we’re still talking about “head” of the curve figures.

For both of these graphics, there’s a large, high-res version available by clicking the chart. You can find lots, lots more on our Free Charts page

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