“One of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about at Google is how we can make the world’s information more accessible and useful to people all over the globe,” Google says. “This includes providing rich local geographic data because, after all, a huge number of search queries have a geographic component. Our efforts to start putting Africa on a map kicked off back in 2009 when we announced the launch of Google Maps for Kenya. Not long afterwords, we announced that users across 45 African countries could build and edit maps in Map Maker. Most recently, we launched Google Maps for South Africa.”

With Google Maps launching domains for 30 more countries, that means not only scenery and roads for these countries, but also local business listings, which can drive a lot of business to brick and mortars. Search engines have all but replaced print yellow pages for many people, and businesses in these countries should feel the effects of that as the listings grow.

Google is encouraging users in the new countries to get involved and help them make the maps better. “You know your local area better than we do, which is why Map Maker is on offer. With Map Maker, any user can create or edit map data, ranging from schools to local businesses, national parks to taxi stops. If you know your local area, or you’ve seen something that’s missing, take up the opportunity to get mapping! As we’ve pointed out before, maps are also invaluable for governments, NGOs, universities and entrepreneurs, who can visualise, plan and market the areas and projects that they work on.”

Including islands there are now over 50 African counries with Google maps available.

Related posts:

1. Bing Launches New Maps with Apps
2. Bing, Google, and Yahoo All Making Maps More Interesting
3. Google Makes it Harder to Hide from a Bad Reputation

The Google Buzz team has had quite a week. Their new product quickly lived up to its name, though mostly for the wrong reasons, generating buzz about its own privacy issues. Calling the original Google Buzz privacy settings lax would be a gross understatement. It created a storm of complaints, best put in perspective by Harriet Jacobs in her F*ck You, Google piece.

In short, when you logged into your Gmail account Google simply took all of your frequent contacts and mashed them up into an active social network without much input from people they were connecting. If you exchanged a lot of emails with your editor and your under-cover sources from the same Gmail account, now they were connected through your public profile if you didn’t happen to catch the Buzz opt-out checkbox. Or what about using the same Gmail account for emailing your husband and your boyfriend? Well now they’re introduced – you’re welcome.

Yes, sounds like a pretty naïve and reckless way to implement a major feature but Google protested that they just wanted to help and meant no evil. After all, their CEO Eric Schmidt had an interesting take on expectations for privacy online: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. That was said nary two months before Google Buzz launched – I guess people like Harriet Jacobs and her abusive ex-husband just didn’t listen.

Oops, Our Bad: Thanks For All the Users…

Since the launch, Google has done an amazingly quick about-face and pledged to do better. The latest set of changes make signing up for Buzz a tangibly more transparent experience, probably what it should have been at launch time. The press has mostly applauded their quick response and patted Google on the back for their responsiveness and keen focus on Gmail user experience.

But let’s see what Google’s naiveté about privacy issues meant for Google Buzz:

• 9 million posts and comments
• 300,000 mobile check-ins per day
• Buzz already rivals Twitter for sheer network size

Those are some pretty impressive numbers for any online launch, but to achieve this in under three days is just unheard of. Actually, there are businesses that do generate this level of interests from their prospects in that short of a time-frame and Gmail deals with them on a daily basis: spammers.

The ‘9 Million-Post’ Question

The question is did Google simply make a “mistake” and not consider these fairly serious privacy issues, or did the massive amount of spam Gmail churns through each day actually demonstrate effectiveness of a new business model?

The former is hard to believe when you consider the army of privacy lawyers Google has and their job to review privacy considerations in revenue-generating AdSense programs. This is especially critical in Gmail, where you are shown ads based on emails you exchange. Gmail achieves this by reading through all your email and matching you up with advertisers interested in addressing your daily struggles. After the initial outrage over this concept a few years ago most users have resigned to trust Google that they have their best interests in mind.

Your Trust, Google’s Toilet Paper

Google Buzz violates this trust in a serious way. In light of Google’s experience in this field, it is hard not to take Google’s mea culpa with a huge dose of skepticism. After all, if Google had made Buzz an opt-in service – something that users had to enable rather than be tricked into joining – they would be just another social network trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Leveraging millions of Gmail users was a shortcut simply too tempting to avoid. The fact that Google decided to revise Google Buzz activation process over the weekend is simply a red herring: they only needed a few days to convert some of the hundred million plus Gmail users into millions of Buzz users, and become the de-facto Twitter competitor over a single long weekend.

Google “fixing” this privacy snafu a few days later is equivalent to spammers adding an “Unsubscribe” link to an email that’s already done its damage.

The strong impression from the last few days is that Gmail users were a pawn in a very cynical game: Google trying desperately to become a player in the social networking space, after the Orkut launch and their acquisition of a handful of other companies in this space failed to produce results.

We’re Not Evil

This is a tough act to pull off when your motto is Don’t Be Evil. It’s been said that eventually Google’s shareholders will push it to make product moves and decisions that end up hurting its brand in a quest for monetization. It will be interesting to see if Google comes out of this with their motto intact.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Buzz Deserve All the Criticism It’s Gotten?
2. Google Buzz Draws New Content-Scraping Controversy
3. Introducing Google Buzz

To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator – a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.

Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.

Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google’s products, our calculator is starting out in beta

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2. Google AdWords Testing New Flat Rate Local AdWords Ad Pricing Model
3. Adwords Bans: Poor Landing Page Quality Scores

Original Article: Multiple reports say that Google is in negotiations to acquire Yelp, a site that caters to reviews of local businesses. Mike Arrington claims to have confirmed this with “multiple sources,” and says the price is at least $500 million.

Yelp has an interesting page in which it squashes 9 “myths” about the service. Yelp says you don’t have to buy advertising to rank highly in Yelp search results, and that the only paid reviews are in clearly-marked ad form. Apparently a common myth is that Yelp reviewers are all young, and in high school or college.

“In January 2009, 94% of Yelp reviewers were over 23 years old,” says Yelp. “This means about 6% of reviewers fall into that ‘high school or college age’ category.”

Yelp.com had over 26 million unique visitors in the US in November. According to Yelp, people have  written over 8 million local reviews, with over 85% of them rating a business 3 stars or higher.

Let’s remember that nothing is final yet, and there is still a possibility that Google will not acquire Yelp. According to Arrington, one source says the deal is 80% likely. Take that as you will.

Related Articles:

> Yelp Releases A Blackberry App

> Yelp Controversy Highlights Trouble With Consumer Reviews

> Yelp Branches Out With UK Site

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1. Google’s Youtube Potentially Cloaking? Or VEVO Launch?

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

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The numbers are still significantly down from the same period last year, but any increase is a good sign of things to come. There has been a 5.4% decline from last year.

“The Internet has transformed the consumer experience of media, providing marketers with unprecedented opportunities to engage with their customers,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “The advertising sector overall has been hard hit by the economy, but digital media has been a bright spot within the larger economic downturn as it is capturing an ever-increasing piece of marketers’ advertising spend.”

“While all segments of the media industry have experienced declines, online advertising remains resilient and is once again showing signs of growth,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

The information from the IAB/PWC is considered the most accurate measurement of interactive ad revenue, the IAB says, because its compiled directly from info supplied by companies selling advertising on the web. The IAB releases a full report twice a year to reflect half-year periods. It will be interesting to see how the second half of the year plays out in its entirety.

Related Articles:

> Online Advertising is Having a Big Year

> Online Ad Revenue Tops $10 Billion

> IAB Releases Ad Unit Guidelines Update

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2. Nielsen Shares Predictions for Advertising Trends in 2010
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What do you make of Bing’s increasing popularity?  Let us know in the comments section.

Or, to be more precise, “Retailers have spent 47% more on search ads on Bing in Q4 this year than during this same time period in 2008,” according to SearchIgnite.  “Compared with Google and Yahoo!, Bing also saw better YoY click volume growth.”

Additionally, “[a]verage order values on Bing are 21% higher than across all engines, which could account for the spend growth.”

Impressive, right?  It’s only when you sort of step back for a moment that Bing’s achievements look less stunning.  That’s because, despite the progress Microsoft has made, exactly 75 percent of advertisers’ dollars went to Google during the first part of this quarter, and 16 percent headed to Yahoo.  Bing grabbed just 8 percent.

Still, some headway is better than none, and retailers are demonstrating a lot of confidence in Bing by giving it a try during the all-important holiday season.

Will retailers benefit by paying more attention to Bing?  Have your say.

Related Articles:

> Microsoft Takes Users Behind Bing

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts On Publisher Searches

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1. Bing Launches New Maps with Apps
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3. Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts

This mirroring strategy works for obvious reasons. The visitor already has a psychological attachment to the phrase – after all, they typed it in!

Making Sure You Get The Click

A lot of SEO strategy talks about how to achieve rankings.

Whilst important, the SEO pro knows ranking is only half the battle won. While it’s true to say most searchers will click on the top results in preference to results lower down the page, they will also scan across the various titles displayed. All links on the results page compete for the click, and a compelling title may win out over a higher ranking position.

If the user doesn’t find what they want when they scan, they will likely rephrase their search and try again. So the way you phrase your title tag is not only important in terms of helping attain a ranking position, it is also important that it stands out.

But how do you know which phrases will work?

What You Can Learn From Adwords

Actually, the answer is right in front of us.

Google rewards top performing Adwords advertisers with the top positions i.e. the advertisers who are achieving the highest click thru rates. The copy and titles you see in the top PPC ads are proven.

If the advertiser has been in that position for some time, it is highly likely s/he is making a positive return on their spend. Their approach is, therefore, working.

That’s a lot of valuable information.

Look at the copy the advertisers are using. What words are they using in the title? Try emulating their approach. Emulating their description is a little more tricky as Google uses snippets. However, if the phrase the user is searching for also appears in your meta description tag, Google will tend to display the tag snippet instead.

Of course, SEO’s have to balance ranking considerations, too, but if you can get these factors aligned, you’re in a great position. Given that most people – estimated to be around 70-80% – will click on a natural search result, as opposed to an advertisment, if you can occupy the top few spots using a similar phrasing as the PPC advertiser, you are more likely to get the click.

Don’t stop there.

Check out the landing pages used by the top advertisers. If they are occupying top positions over a long period of time, they are either carelessly blowing through a lot of cash, or, more likely, their PPC campaign is making money.

Whilst it’s not advisable to copy exactly what they do – and it’s probably against the law – you can use their approach as a guide. How are they structuring their landing pages? Where are they placing their offer? What language are they using? What titles are they using? How is the copy structured?

Use a similar approach in your SEO campaign.

One thing to be careful of is to understand that SEO and PPC often have a different focus. PPC tends to be driven by ROI and other profit per visitor type metrics. Once a PPC advertiser pays for the click, they try to move the visitor to desired action quickly.

SEO, on the other hand, can afford to be less specific as there is little jeopardy in only appealing to a tiny fraction of visitors who click. SEO can afford to go wide and broad. Engagement and brand metrics come into play a bit more in SEO.

By The Way…..

Because SEO can afford to go broad, and has the added task of ranking for keywords based on the content of your page, Google’s Wonder Wheel is a great tool for finding related phrases which you can integrate into your copy.

If you haven’t heard of the Wonder Wheel, here is how to find it:

1. Conduct a search. Click on “Show Options…”

2. Click on “Wonder Wheel” (shown on the list at the right hand side)

3. Click on a few of the spokes….

4. Integrate any relevant, related keyword terms in your copy….

I use this tool a lot as it’s great for picking up on long tail searches that still relate to your chosen keyword term. If any of these terms prove worthwhile, you can then develop separate pages to target them specifically.

Related posts:

1. Building Ad Groups With Keywords From The Wonder Wheel
2. PPC vs SEO
3. Google’s Display Ad Strategy

I was reminded of this whole mental muddle today reading the headline from an email solicitation, something about “getting more PPC without using Google”.

But that whole line is kind of old hat. It’s the come-on that opportunistic, non-search-based ad platform companies used to sell their crummy, remnant, and sometimes fraudulent contextual text ad inventory. Sometimes it couldn’t have even been described that neatly. It was traffic, and you paid for the clicks, and potentially you used keywords to guide the system towards certain publishers, but that was about it. You might as well have paid the effective CPM rate, as bid on clicks. Didn’t matter.

That’s why I always advocated paid search as the term of choice for people who really wanted to go after clicks from ordered results placed near search engine results, but it scarcely matters what I advocate! — people will use all kinds of terms.

SEM is another term that arose. Agenda-setters in the business tried to remind everyone that paid search (or “PPC”) is one sub-type of SEM (search engine marketing), and SEO (on the “organic side”) is another sub-type. But the fight to make SEM exclusively the global term, and not to be used as synonymous with PPC or paid search, was lost. SEM is often used interchangeably with PPC or paid search.

No matter. With all of these nomenclature battles being unwinnable, we should turn our attention to the whole reason “PPC” was so attractive as a pricing mechanism. It’s because it represented a happy medium between CPM (paying only for impressions — “cost per thousand impressions”) and CPA (”cost per acquisition” — paying for lead conversions or even revenue-generating sales conversions).

You can draw up equivalents across these mechanisms, and measure or express them all for your keyword (paid search) campaigns. So the click isn’t anything special. It can be expressed in its CPM equivalent and you can and should also be measuring ROI, ROAS, or CPA.

Indeed, according to some scholars [see "Greedy Bidding Strategies for Keyword Auctions"], the most rational strategy for bidding in a digital media auction would take you straight to CPA or revenue if that was possible. If you could bid directly on the customer acquisition or revenue, you would. (And in fact, that’s what some forms of bid management automation attempt to do, at one or two removes. And it’s what manual campaign management also attempts to do, painstakingly.)

But step back further. Are search, keywords, or clicks inherently special? Why the drive to distinguish them from other forms of media? Is it for what they are, or what they represent?

It has to be the latter. They represent potentially the most extreme (and measurable) form of granular targeting and flexible bidding, of a certain type. This is reflected in the sky-high effective CPM rates for some keywords.

But that means that all of this distinguishing one type or another is done mostly for economic or practical reasons.

Search and keywords (and clicks) fall into the general category of auction-based digital media. Whether we’re bidding on clicks, acquisitions, impressions, or other, the universe of digital media is amenable to similar tests. From a rational bidder’s standpoint, there should be no inherently good or bad media, nothing inherently “creepy” or “wrong,” nothing inherently above reproach either.

That’s mostly true. It’s not entirely true. (Dropping ad-laden anvils on prospects’ vehicles is interruption media, and some companies would pay for it, but it’s stupid and illegal.) But isn’t it a good starting point for analysis?

“PPC” doesn’t matter per se. So pitches like “now you can get ‘PPC’ from other channels than Google” shouldn’t have any special weight. You shouldn’t be looking too hard for that inventory if your economic criteria show it’s not going to pay off for you. Nor should you have been ignoring it all along just because you thought that “PPC” or “Google” were special for some inherent reason.

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3. PPC vs SEO

Similarly, the flow of advertiser dollars from other channels into paid search platforms like Google AdWords has been predictable over time because of one factor: measurable performance when compared head-to-head with other channels.

In accounts where that condition hasn’t been satisfied, companies don’t increase budgets for paid search. They don’t always shut off their accounts, though. So the end result is an account that sort of wanders along, hoping for the best, performing far below potential.

At different points in time, this state of affairs might benefit Google a lot or a little. The times when it benefited Google less were when their relevancy incentives (mostly CTR-based) were set in a dogmatic sort of way. If your account was really lazily and loosely targeted, eventually stuff would get “disabled” or “deactivated.” That would kill volume for you, but you were probably doing horribly anyway, so it was actually a savings. Google, meanwhile, didn’t get to exact as much of an “idiot tax” out of you. So they had to rely on other mechanisms, such as ego bidding or a hot economy, to further their profitability.

It’s not quite like that now. Google has a sophisticated set of mechanisms for selectively allowing you to screw things up. They may not particularly like your fuzzily-targeted ads, but they’re willing to show a certain percentage of them in certain verticals as long as your bids are sky high.

The end result of a low-volume, fuzzily-managed campaign, of course, is a poor ROI for the advertiser. But here’s the curious thing. If the company has invested something in people and plans to run ads in this channel, they don’t shut it off completely. They treat it like their other underperforming channels: shrug their shoulders, hope it gets better, turn the budget down a bit so it doesn’t cause significant harm. From day one, I’ve suggested that this isn’t a true savings, but a squandering of potential. “All in” or “all out” should be the advertiser’s mentality. It is difficult, but not impossible, to optimize your campaign so that increasing the budget is feasible. If that’s not happening, why run it at all?

The fuzzy, meandering, high-CPC-low-return campaign is not a negative scenario – short term – for Google’s revenues and profits. These inefficient campaigns collectively spend heavily, smoothing out the ups and downs of the keyword auctions where advertisers are managing more tightly to customer responses. That’s one of the reasons why, in the near term, Google’s revenues will continue to rise gradually or at least be flat, avoiding the severe hits that other advertising media have taken during the recession. Look for proof of this with Google’s upcoming Q3 2009 earnings release on October 15.

At Page Zero Media we inherit such accounts fairly often. There are two common targeting errors that companies make in the early days of planning AdWords campaigns:

(1) Loose and broad targeting, particularly of the type that addresses a mass market when you’re going for a niche market. A company will say to themselves (perhaps having watched Conrad Hilton in Mad Men saying he wants to put a Hilton “on the moon”): “We want someday to be the biggest and best insurance company in the world!” But for now, they’re just focusing on being top-of-mind in car insurance for high-risk drivers, especially those under the age of 25. Somewhere along the line, possibly in a text message from a golf banquet with impressive friends, the CEO forced the associate to the assistant marketing director to try broad matches for the words “insurance” and “car insurance” in the campaign. They’re still eking along, in select markets, costing the company $18 per click whenever they are clicked, eating into the allotted budget for all the good stuff.

(2) Insider thinking. Companies get into their own jargon, right down into the regulatory mumbo-jumbo from arguments in Congress about all the players in their industry. The next thing you know, there are ad groups containing all the jargon about high-risk drivers — jargon that’s only ever come up in those Congress debates, in board meetings, and expensive consulting reports. People click on the ads occasionally, but they’re inevitably just looking for information, not a car insurance vendor.

As these cardinal errors continue to eat away at the overall budget, the ROI for the whole campaign looks poor. The budget stays where it is. And the company concludes that the channel doesn’t match the hype.

–

I got a note from a colleague who has spent years building out paid search campaigns that have formerly failed for the above reasons. Here’s his tale of woe – the industry sector changed to protect the innocent:

If I can lend a “yes this is the way it works” rule to any PPC work for [insurance] that we should inscribe into our core being: Seth Godin needs to be read by every one of the people who do campaigns for them. Most of the time (probably CEO driven) they focus on the whole “getting their name out there” thing. Each new one I see is a broad, undisciplined mess. They constantly target information seekers with words like “best insurance” or “top insurance companies”. The people who click those 1) Already have a vendor and are satisfied with them; and 2) Are simply looking for ideas; 3) In no way are targeted properly. The kicker is that those words are $5, $6, or $10 a click. They might as well spend that money on a TV commercial because that is akin to interruption marketing, PPC style. You can get fooled as well, because if someone has an article on top insurance companies on their site, like our client does, people will read it and stay. The bounce numbers tend to be pretty low, so if you are looking at that only, you get a false sense that the words are working. But when you look at signups, they are very close to 0%. I am not sure many of them do it, but content and blogs should be king for these sites, for those words; and they should spend that money on writing content. If you have and write articles based on all the key buzzwords like “car insurance comparison”, you should get bang for that on organic search for $0. Example: “Best [(competing but ultimately very different type of) insurance]” and so on. Our new client spent $22,000 on those words via adwords. They got one person to sign up for an account. ONE! [Edit: we did more checking, and it might have been two.] Conversely: Targeted to their selling proposition of [doing more research on individuals in high risk insurance categories to offer them a break on rates if possible], those words [all having to do with insurance rates, unfair insurance rates, demographics of insurance rates] and so on, with a good ad, had $4000 spent and they got 20 people to sign up. OK, long story short: For financial services, not unlike others but especially for them, being targeted to exactly what you do if you are spending $4 a click or more is so vital it is not funny.

–

Google has worked themselves into a situation where the “idiot tax” helps Google’s bottom line. So although they’d prefer it if most advertisers improved the relevancy of their advertising, the current system is built to hedge against idiocy. That being said, then, Google doesn’t stand to gain a whole lot as advertisers become savvier and more efficient. In the past, the genius of the ad platform meant that Google’s earnings and profits raced ahead faster than expected. During the recession, they’re outperforming everyone else. But as the economy recovers, this current efficiency also means that you may not see Google grow as fast as you expect. They’ve wrung a lot of cash out of relatively wasteful advertising. Less wasteful practices will definitely help individual advertisers… a lot. They won’t help Google nearly as much.

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