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Doubclick Insights Recap

July 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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The following article by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising at Google, talks about the DoubleClick Insights event. Video replays from the event are also included.

Tuesday I had the pleasure of delivering the opening keynote at DoubleClick Insights, a half-day event in which we brought together the industry’s top digital media executives for a series of honest conversations about where the space is headed and how we can move it forward together. In addition to several announcements I summarize below, the event was packed with viewpoints from ecosystem partners and luminaries. If you weren’t one of the thousands who tuned in for the livestream, you can watch the recording below.

Over the last few years, DoubleClick has focused its publisher efforts on helping you maximize revenues across multiple channels and formats. We introduced the next generation of DFP, expanded our capabilities across mobile and video, and acquired Admeld. Today we’re doubling down on publishers by building on this foundation to help you make smarter decisions, capture new spends, and work seamlessly with partners across the ecosystem.

Make Smarter Decisions
We launched the beta of Ad Exchange Market View, an interface that lets you see an aggregated landscape of pricing and uniques across the entire exchange, including which ad formats and regions are likely to get the best returns. It’s data that’s highly actionable, and no other exchange operates with this type of transparency. In addition, we also introduced the integration of 3rd party audience segments into the new version of DFP. For years, buyers have used aggregate audience data to target particular demographics and segments, and we think publishers deserve the same perspectives for their sales process. The early response to this capability has been enthusiastic and we look forward to expanding it further.

Adapting to the Empowered Consumer

Capture New Spend
With its high-touch private exchange, Admeld took pioneering steps toward helping publishers find value in the elusive “middle tier” between direct and indirect sales. We’re continuing to iterate on this model with the launch of AdX Preferred Deals, a tool for publishers to privately negotiate and sell non-guaranteed inventory to individual buyers. Preferred Deals (formerly called Direct Deals), are best suited for publishers who haven’t yet fully embraced the exchange model, and in the coming weeks we’ll share more information with our clients about how they can take part in this closed beta.

If we Build it, will (consumers) Come?

Work Easily with Partners
As the ubiquitous Lumascape attests, our ecosystem is complex and in order for digital advertising to be medium that provides a great experience for consumers, marketers and publishers alike, we all need to work together. DoubleClick believes in the power of openness, and we’re privileged to work with over 200 partners. This includes 100+ for core DFP, 40+ for mobile, 40+ for video, and a dozen each for data and rich media. Together, in partnership with the ecosystem, we’re ready to help you explore the next growth areas, and drive the revenue that funds a new generation of great content.

A Word About Digital Marketing Manager
Lastly, I wanted to mention an big announcement we made on the buy side — the introduction of DoubleClick Digital Marketing Manager (DDM), a integrated buy-side platform that will ultimately unify audience buying and reporting across all digital channels and formats — search, display, social, desktop, mobile and video. DDM will help buyers spend more and spend smarter. As a publisher, that means means more revenue for you and better ad experiences for your audience. You can read more about DDM at the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog.

Technology = Creative friend or foe?

My main takeaway from Insights, is that we’re entering an exciting new phase in this industry–one in which everything is being re-imagined, from the ads themselves to the ways they’re created, delivered, transacted and measured. DoubleClick’s goal isn’t just to help you thrive in this change, but help you drive it in ways that meet your evolving business needs. In short, our success is based on yours.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President of Display Advertising


DoubleClick Publisher Blog

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Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February

February 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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This month we have many improvements to celebrate. With 40 changes reported, that marks a new record for our monthly series on search quality. Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow. We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.

Here’s the list for February:

  • More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
  • Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
  • Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
  • More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
  • More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
  • More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
  • Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
  • Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
  • Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
  • “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
  • Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
  • Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
  • Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
  • Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
  • More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
  • Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
  • Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
  • Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
  • Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
  • Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
  • International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”] Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
  • Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
  • Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
  • Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
  • Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
  • Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
  • Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
  • Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
  • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
  • Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
  • Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
  • Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
  • Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
  • SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
  • Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
  • Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

And here are a few more changes we’ve already blogged about separately:

Posted by Amit Singhal, Senior VP and Google Fellow


Inside Search

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New Google research: Reaching your audience effectively with YouTube TrueView Ads

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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We’re excited to share a new study that gives great insights on how to make your ads compelling enough so that people want to watch, not skip them. We’ve recently conducted a survey of more than 1,600 Americans aged 18-45 and learned some interesting insights for TrueView Video Ads, the family of YouTube ad formats that give viewers choice and control over which advertisers’ messages they want to see and when.

Some of the most surprising results from our study include:
-      8 of 10 viewers preferred TrueView to standard in-stream ads
-      9 of 10 viewers thought TrueView created a better viewing environment
-      8 of 10 viewers thought the skip button was very clear
-      Only 1 viewer in 10 always skips ads

Other results give insight into how advertisers can make their TrueView ads even more effective so that viewers watch, not skip, their ads. Based on the research, here are some of the best ways to make your TrueView ads stickier:

Make great ads that people want to watch and spark their curiosity.
Viewers have the option to skip a TrueView in-stream ad after five seconds, so piquing their interest quickly is important. By far the most popular survey response from people who chose to watch an ad was this one: “I was curious to see what the ad was for.” Attention-grabbing openers and humor also keep people watching.

Include branding in those first seconds.
TrueView advertisers pay only when people actually watch their ads. They’re buying real value, not paying per impression. So, insert your logo or brand name in the first five seconds—which cost you nothing if the viewer doesn’t keep watching. Enjoy those free impressions!

Include new, different information in your TrueView ad if it’s been airing on TV.
In our study, we found that seeing ads on TV affected whether viewers later skipped those same ads on YouTube. To keep them engaged across multiple screens, be sure to provide new product information in the ad messaging and make it personally relevant to the viewer with TrueView.

To read the full details about the study and learn more tips about creating better TrueView ads, visit Think Insights.

Posted by Christina Park, Product Marketing Manager, Think with Google


AdWords Agency Blog

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Google Analytics has learned 9 new languages

February 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Recently we introducednew and improved Google Analytics, so that you can quickly find even more powerful and useful data to improve your internet marketing efforts.

Now, we are proud to say Google Analytics is available in 9 new languages. This makes Google Analytics quite a Polyglot, and it is in total availablein 40 languages now. Newly introduced languages are:

- Arabic
- Croatian
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Latvian
- Romanian
- Serbian
- Slovenian
- Ukrainian

To change the language of your Analytics account to any of these new languages, you have to activate the new interface, if you haven’t already, by clicking on the “new version” button at the top of the account. Then, navigate to the settings page where you can select the new language.

You can also now enjoy reading the newly revampedAnalytics help center in any of the 9 new languages.

We are confident this will improve the usage of Google Analytics across the world, and help website owners and AdWords advertisers get even more out of their internet marketing efforts.

Happy data mining!


Posted By Shane Cassells, Google Conversion Team


Conversion Room

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Come Learn About Apps Script in Washington, DC

February 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Editor’s note: This has been cross-posted from the Google Code blog — Jan Kleinert

Google Apps Script is a JavaScript cloud scripting language that provides easy ways to automate tasks across Google products and third party services. If you want to learn more about Google Apps Script, collaborate with other developers, and meet the Apps Script team, here’s your chance! We will be holding an Apps Script hackathon in Washington, DC on Wednesday, March 7 from 2pm – 8pm.

After we cover the basics of Apps Script, you can code along with us as we build a complete script, or you can bring your own ideas and get some help and guidance from the team. There will be food, power, and Apps Script experts available to help throughout the day. Just bring your laptop, ideas, enthusiasm, and basic knowledge of JavaScript. Check out out the details of the event and be sure to RSVP to let us know you’re coming.

Jan Kleinert profile | twitter

Jan is a Developer Programs Engineer based in NYC, focusing on helping developers get the most out of Google Apps Script. Prior to Apps Script, she worked on Commerce, helping merchants integrate with Google Checkout and on Chrome, helping developers build great web apps.

 


Google Apps Developer Blog

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Pinterest and Instagram: The New Social Media

February 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Here comes Pinterest and Instagram – Get Ready!

I came across this interesting article about Pinterest and Instagram and how they may well become the new Social Media marketing phenomenon, by Peter Drew

What is this blog post about? Well the last month or so, I’ve been pretty busy investigating two new massive sites on the web and the internet social scene.

Instagram Iphone App (not on Android)  with close to 20 million active users in only 11 months.

Pinterest.com with an Alexa Ranking of only 110.

“Pinterest is social media’s rising star — and now has the traffic stats to prove it.” Great Article About Pinterest traffic From Mashable herehttp://mashable.com/2012/02/01/pinterest-traffic-study/

What is Pinterest Exactly? Well its hard to describe, because functionally its a simple plain old Social Bookmarking site, that uses images instead of links. Nothing to special there right? Well, no.. But this new system and layout they have produced utilises Twitter like trending capabilities within their layout. So within their Categories of content, you only really get to see the quality content rise to the top.. And Quality Galore is there to be found.

Adding the social component to Social Bookmarking has transformed this system into a thing of real beauty.I follow people who I know, when they or others like sites, images, this all influences the availability of me to find this content. The more people like it, they higher up it is displayed for people. So the cream really does rise to the surface.

You can browse the categories of content supplied to the site via users, you only get to see the best of the best in these categories. This being the case, you get to see some pretty awesome content. Considering the amount of traffic taken away from Facebook and Google as noted in Mashable, this new platform really is going to change the way the web is displayed over Time. Note in this blog post.. I had to add that image to the top of this blog post. Why? So people can pin it.. and it looks relatively attractive. Before I didn’t have to worry about that, but now I do, If I want some Pinterest Loving :)Additionally I had to add the Pinterest Pin plugin to make it easy for you to Pin my blog Post:)

Speaking of WordPress plugins, Here is the plugin I used to add “My” Pinterst content in the column to the right. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pinterest-rss-widget/screenshots/ Very simple to install, in under 5 mins and very flexible in how you want to display your pins etc.

Something very fascinating about Pinterest is that this social site is the only one I know of that has a much larger female following than males. As I remember and I cannot remember the link its like 60% females to 40% males. So a great place to market to females, if that is you have some pretty awesome quality content, that Pinterest is now inspiring from people and companies.

While we are here sharing the love, here’s some links to some very cool articles about pinterest and marketing.

If you have a website that displays pretty awesome content, right beside the “Like” button that should be on your page already, you now need a Pin Button right beside it, so you make it very easy for people to Pin your beautiful stuff.

Here is the link to get your pin button details. http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

Here is an example of a beautiful page. Why do I think its beautiful, because of its brilliant layout and the ease to which it allows its viewers to comment about, and to share their pretty and cool content. Its a great layout to copy for your site.http://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/iphone-slr-adapter .

 

Instagram is a pretty amazing Iphone only App. Their USP you would think, is the amazing filters in their app to make pretty much any of your photos look brilliant. But No, that’s not the case. There are many Iphone photo apps out there, that do different things to your photos, but Instagram is the only one out there, that has added the Social Network Component to it. E.G. Allowing you to follow cool people, and be followed. Plus the use of HashTags!!! This has really transformed this social network. One amazing example of the use of hashtags here:

If that isn’t cool I don’t know what is LOL :)

You can display your Instagram Images on your blog using this very simple and easy to install Instagram Word Press Plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pin-it-on-pinterest/ . Additionally, you can display Instagram photo content by you guessed it, Hashtags, which means the possibilities are endless what you can use these for. Most likely need a WordPress Dev to install this one though.http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ep-hashimage/

There isn’t all that much information out there about Instagram at present, I had to dig and explore it all myself as no info was thrown out at me via social media like most content is. So I decided to throw it out there socially for everyone now.

Here’s a case study. Some Awesome young Entrepreneurs on Instagram.

Some Young Ladies absolutely Killing it on Instagram. Check out there profile page!

 

Yep, that’s 72,196 followers on Instagram. Plus you see their domain name right there, if you tap on it, it takes you directly to their website where they are selling their clothing range. Plus they have a Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/SaboSkirt I do not know these people, but I just love what they are doing online.

They are marketing their products via awesome photos from Instagram. Instagram offers this clothing company a platform that,

1. Makes their products look Awesome (Via the brilliant photo filters available).

2. Offers them a market place to display their wares. Why? because its all about Quality. This company displays quality and people love it.  How much of this converts to sales? I do not know, but I can guarantee you, they are generating a lot more sales than before Instagram existed.

On January 29 I posted an image of their profile herehttps://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150515778481482&set=a.403563776481.180069.706761481&type=1 And they had 63,503 followers, so in 11 days, they have gained exactly 8693 new followers.. Pretty amazing stats!

One thing I did notice, is this company is not on Pinterest? why I do not know, though I think their products may well do as well on Pinterest as Instagram, both sites equally rely on quality and as noted earlier, Pinterest has a majority female audience, so I think the SaboSkirt Brand would do exceptionally well in Pinterest. If anyone reading this knows people in this company, send them this article.

Here is an excellent interview with the founder of Instagram.

Before posting this article I had to add the Pin Plugin to this blog, so people reading this can obviously Pin it. This is the link for it. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pin-it-on-pinterest/ So you can add it to your own blogs.

Massive changes happening on the web right now. Great time to be alive.

Me being me, I’ve been investigating these new products from an Internet Marketer Developers perspective, obviously and I can tell you I am right now developing two vastly different products so we can all benefit financially from these new changes, these two products are both related to Pinterest and vastly different from each other though compliment each other wonderfully.  Pinterest is all about traffic as noted via @Mashable. Any new site that is taking on Google and Facebook traffic wise is something we really need to focus on right now.  If your not in there working it, your competitors will be.

Interestingly, after my investigations and playing around in there, Ive got close to 200 followers already without trying at all and one of my boards called Seo-Software URL here http://pinterest.com/peterdrew/seo-software/ as you can see already has over 400 followers which is neat, considering I’ve done very little.. in 2 to 3 months I can guarantee you my Seo-Software board on Pinterest will have over 10,000 followers.

In a week’s time I’ll be leaving a comment on this post, sharing how much traffic this post gets from the Pinterest domain as referral traffic, from people pinning this article and from my posting it in my Seo-Software Board. I will also share how many “Re Pins” this article gets, a Re Pin, is when a person on Pinterest likes the Pin so much they re pin it on one of their own boards for safe keeping.

So please “Like” this article or leave a comment below, so you’ll be notified when I update this article with the referral information etc. Similarly if you think your friends on Facebook would enjoy this information here, Please “Like” or comment.

Love to hear your feedback.

Cheers

Pete!

Filed Under: News, Online Marketing, Social Media, WordPress Tagged With: , , ,

L’Oreal: Xmas Corridor Cross Media Research

February 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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L’Oreal Luxury Products launched a multi-media campaign during Christmas 2010 in UK, France, Italy and Spain. They covered a wide range of franchises including Armani, Diesel, Ralph Lauren, Yves Saint-Laurent, Cacharel and Lancome. The campaign ran on YouTube and TV in each country.

Research was conducted with MetrixLab to understand the impact of YouTube and TV in terms of incremental reach, effectiveness at raising awareness and impacting branding metrics and efficiency of both media.

The results show that YouTube is a fantastic platform to compliment your TV campaigns. Some key highlights include:

  • YouTube offers incremental reach: 15% average total reach (20% for Top 5 campaigns) and 3% average incremental reach (5% for Top 5).
  • YouTube reaches lighter TV viewers. 77% of YouTube exposed had lower average contacts with TV.
  • YouTube can be used as a lever to optimize TV budgets: Shifting 40k€ TV budget to YouTube results in +2 to 3% incremental YouTube reach.

Please download the full research here.

Posted by Rosie Rankin, Agency Team


Think with Google

Filed Under: News, Online Marketing, YouTube Tagged With: , , ,

Introducing Chrome for Android

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, we’re introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet. Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.

Speed
With Chrome for Android, you can search, navigate and browse fast—Chrome fast. You can scroll through web pages as quickly as you can flick your finger. When searching, your top search results are loaded in the background as you type so pages appear instantly. And of course, both search and navigation can all be done quickly from the Chrome omnibox.

Simplicity
Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web.


One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier.

And as with Chrome on desktop, we built Chrome for Android with privacy in mind from the beginning, including incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options (tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’).

Sign in
You can now bring your personalized Chrome experience with you to your Android phone or tablet. If you sign in to Chrome on your Android device, you can:

  • View open tabs: Access the tabs you left open on your computer (also signed into Chrome)—picking up exactly where you left off.
  • Get smarter suggestions: If you visit a site often on your computer, you’ll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing.
  • Sync bookmarks: Conveniently access your favorite sites no matter where you are or which device you’re using.


Chrome is now available in Beta from Android Market, in select countries and languages for phones and tablets with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. We’re eager to hear your feedback. Finally, we look forward to working closely with the developer community to create a better web on a platform that defines mobile.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps

(Cross-posted from the Chrome blog and on the Mobile blog)


The Official Google Blog

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Optimize This: Online Marketing Summit 2012 Presentation

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Optimize This OMS

I’m headed to (hopefully) sunny San Diego today for the annual Online Marketing Summit conference where I’ll get to present on one of my favorite topics: Optimization. Of course, if you read Online Marketing Blog very often, you’ll know my definition of optimization is a bit different that traditional SEO.  My post last Thursday “Are You Optimized?” touched on this.

The competition for attendance during the breakout sessions at OMS is really tough during the time slot I’m scheduled for. SAP, Wider Funnel and SAP are all presenting at the same time as I’m giving the all new “Optimize THIS: Integrating Social, SEO & Content presentation”. This post is a bit of a preview on the presentation so if you’re at OMS this week, make sure you check it out.

In Optimize THIS, I have about 45 minutes (including Q & A) to help attendees learn the principles and best practices of optimizing content and social media participation for better marketing performance.  Most marketers and even consumers face a deluge of information as they look for answers online. Google has morphed itself into an entirely new type of social search engine and the state of flux has many businesses facing new challenges that are difficult to keep up with.

There’s plenty of speculation that businesses like Google that have attracted a huge user base because of their ability to organize and provide useful, relevant information see free or organic information as a problem to the advertising solution. In other words,  SEO is aeen a bug, not a useful way to modify websites so search engines can crawl and index them more effectively to the benefit of all: user, brand, search engine.

Google Dominates search, but should they dominate your online marketing?  What would happen if Google disappeared tomorrow? What if your business disappeared from Google tomorrow? What would that mean to your marketing? What would it mean to your business? There are numerous stories of companies devastated as collateral damage to algorithmic updates.

Google’s market position over-influences SEO practitioners to develop keyword glossaries, create, promote and optimize content solely focused on Google. That’s a reasonable approach, but I for one, am not a big fan of putting all my marketing eggs in one basket. The perceived reward of single stop marketing is also a risk.

Diversification or “Un-Googling” your online marketing isn’t just good for mitigating risk, it’s also a better approach to meeting customer needs, especially when optimization is viewed holistically with the way a business communicates digitally with its customers.

A more customer centric approach to online marketing is the catalyst for integrating content marketing, SEO and Social Media. The icing on the cake of customer centric online marketing diversification is even better organic performance on Google vs. focusing solely on traditional keyword popularity and links.

Optimize for customers

The road to Social, SEO and Content Marketing integration is through understanding the fundamental shifts in how consumers discover, consume and share information online. Search behaviors are not just inspired by a consumer need, but by paid, owned, earned and share media. The consumer journey online for solutions weaves its way through search and social interactions finding, interacting, reacting, buying and sharing.

Online commerce and content are increasingly a social experience and content is the key to helping companies Attract, Engage and Inspire their target audiences to act: purchase, interact and share with their networks.

What does a customer centric optimize content marketing approach look like? Start by identifying common customer characteristics. Segment that data and develop consumer profiles or personas that describe: Search Keywords, Social Topics, Pain Points, Triggers and Goals. Figure out what information would be most meaningful during the stages of your customer segments’ journey through the buying cycle. Essentially, find out what customers care about and leverage that data in a way that allows you to target your “best” customers as a group.

Translate what you now know about your customers into a content plan that addresses pain points, triggers and consumer goals with brand content optimized for search keywords and social topics. Implement website, blog, social content and engagement marketing to meet your target customers needs with the right context, relevant language and meaningful topics that will inspire them to take action.

Structure your content marketing plan with optimized and socialized channels of distribution. We like the hub and spoke model that can scale to a “constellation” of hub and spokes.

Monitor social channels for community response and engagement with socialized content. Use web analytics to monitor search and user experience impact of your content on engagement, fueling social network growth and of course, inspiring sales.

By formulating a content plan based on consumer segment information needs as they move through the buying cycle, optimization can be more in tune with customer interests than generic keyword popularity. Content is more helpful, usable and likely to be shared socially. For customers prone to use search, you’re visibile. For those that focus on social channels, you’re there too. For those that use both: even better.

There’s a lot more to say on this topic (as I’ve done in Optimize) but you can expect to see plenty of screen shots and some examples in my presentation tomorrow. If your’re ready to get optimized for 2012 and beyond, I hope to see you there.

2/7 OMS – San Diego
Hilton San Diego Bayfront
Optimize This: Integrating Social, SEO & Content
Learn the principles and best practices of optimizing content and social media participation for better marketing performance
11:45 AM–12:30
Room: Sapphire H


Online Marketing Blog

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Landing another blow against email phishing

February 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Increase your business with more online customers with help from SEO Consultants London.

Posted by Adam Dawes, Product Manager

Email phishing, in which someone tries to trick you into revealing personal information by sending fake emails that look legitimate, remains one of the biggest online threats. One of the most popular methods that scammers employ is something called domain spoofing. With this technique, someone sends a message that seems legitimate when you look at the “From” line even though it’s actually a fake. Email phishing is costing regular people and companies millions of dollars each year, if not more, and in response, Google and other companies have been talking about how we can move beyond the solutions we’ve developed individually over the years to make a real difference for the whole email industry.

Industry groups come and go, and it’s not always easy to tell at the beginning which ones are actually going to generate good solutions. When the right contributors come together to solve real problems, though, real things happen. That’s why we’re particularly optimistic about today’s announcement of DMARC.org, a passionate collection of companies focused on significantly cutting down on email phishing and other malicious mail.

Building upon the work of previous mail authentication standards like SPF and DKIM, DMARC is responding to domain spoofing and other phishing methods by creating a standard protocol by which we’ll be able to measure and enforce the authenticity of emails. With DMARC, large email senders can ensure that the email they send is being recognized by mail providers like Gmail as legitimate, as well as set policies so that mail providers can reject messages that try to spoof the senders’ addresses.

We’ve been active in the leadership of the DMARC group for almost two years, and now that Gmail and several other large mail senders and providers — namely Facebook, LinkedIn, and PayPal — are actively using the DMARC specification, the road is paved for more members of the email ecosystem to start getting a handle on phishing. Our recent data indicates that roughly 15% of non-spam messages in Gmail are already coming from domains protected by DMARC, which means Gmail users like you don’t need to worry about spoofed messages from these senders. The phishing potential plummets when the system just works, and that’s what DMARC provides.

If you’re a large email sender and you want to try out the DMARC specification, you can learn more at the DMARC website. Even if you’re not ready to take on the challenge of authenticating all your outbound mail just yet, there’s no reason to not sign up to start receiving reports of mail that fraudulently claims to originate from your address. With further adoption of DMARC, we can all look forward to a more trustworthy overall experience with email.


The Google Apps Blog

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