|
|
Hit Search Online Marketing: Paid Search Predictions for 2010by Andrew Redfern @ 8th February 2010 12:07 pm Google
It is widely expected that the amount of money invested by businesses into the paid search market will grow significantly over the next 12 months. This means that the need for campaigns to deliver an ever-increasing return on investment (ROI) is greater than ever. Digital marketing community Econsultancy has posted its predictions for the paid search market in the next 12 months. • High keyword prices will force marketers to try new strategies According to research carried out in the US, two-thirds of marketers see their biggest challenge in the paid search market as high prices for keywords. Despite the growth of paid searches beginning to slow down, advertisers are continually pumping more money into the industry, and as a result, keyword prices are becoming more expensive. Because of this, marketers will need to focus on careful keyword management, testing, and targeting, in order to increase the ROI on their campaigns. Quality Score optimising will become a priority; this will bring costs down whilst simultaneously driving conversions up. Geographic and demographic targeting will also be more widely used this year, with these strategies reaching out to national advertisers and retailers. • Paid search will be more integrated Although search marketing accounts for more than half of digital marketing budgets (representing tens of millions of pounds for the larger companies), most search marketing programmes are still managed separately from traditional marketing departments. This year, organisations will look to integrate their paid search operations more tightly into the business, rather than running them as a standalone unit. Integrating systems will make search marketers change the way they report and organise their KPI’s, leading to a big shift in how this information is communicated upwards in the business. Search marketers will therefore need to adjust to new processes, using dashboards and proposals for investment. In return, they will be looking to see more executive support and therefore larger budgets. • Paid search will go multichannel Google recently found that over half of online shoppers research their purchases on the internet before eventually buying the products in-store. On this basis, search marketers are currently missing out on credit for half of the revenues their campaigns are driving. However, the tools for measuring across channels are now much more accessible to businesses, whether it’s linking phone numbers to keywords, or taking in-store surveys to see how the customer learnt about the products they’ve purchased. These tools will make it much easier for firms to make properly informed decisions on the allocation of their search budgets, and also make sure that they are driving both online and offline conversions. Learning how offline buyers are researching their needs will allow multichannel traders to find new, low cost keywords to drive profitable expansion of their paid-search programs. • Facebook and Twitter Will Give Google a Run for Its Money Social networking sites like Facebook, which currently has over a billion queries on its site every month, will extend their own search technology to allow users the ability to query the content in their news feeds. This will make it much easier for users to get recommendations from their friends on anything from restaurants and mobile phones, to films and TV programmes. Advertising money for keyword placements is sure to follow suit, therefore search marketers will need to alter their campaigns to account for a more social set of keywords. This will enable them to catch consumers earlier in the consideration process than they could on traditional search engines like Google or Yahoo! And since these users will still in the research phase of purchasing a product (ie, placing a lot of value in word-of-mouth recommendations) these clicks could be very valuable. While it will be difficult to incorporate all of these changes into campaigns, those marketers who can capitalise on some of these trends will most likely be a step ahead of the competition. Ref: HSLP0101AA206 Google Earth: 5 More Cities Modelled In 3Dby Andrew Redfern @ 23rd December 2009 2:59 pm Google
Google Earth has today lauched 5 new cities in superb 3D. Manish Patel from the Google Earth 3D Modeling Team on the official blog “A few weeks ago we released new 3D models with more detailed facades for 5 California cities. Even though we’re based in California, we know there are a lot of beautiful cities with amazing architecture elsewhere around the country, so we’re adding 4 new cities scattered from coast to coast. Now you can fly through Portland, Austin, Chicago, and Philadelphia and see vivid, detailed 3D models throughout the cities.” See a video of how this works below Google Announces Research Awardsby Andrew Redfern @ 23rd December 2009 11:49 am Google
Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and Jeff Walz, Head of University Relations updated the Official Google Research Blog with its recent Research Awards. Maggie comments “Ondrej Chum, Czech Technical University, Large Scale Visual Link Discovery. This project addresses automatic discovery of visual links between image parts in huge image collections. Visual links associate parts of images that share even a relatively small, but distinctive, visual information. Bernd Gartner, ETH Zurich, Linear Time Kernel Methods and Matrix Factorizations. This project aims to derive faster approximation algorithms for kernel methods as well as matrix approximation problems and leverage these two promising paradigms for better performance on large scale data. Dawson Engler, Stanford University, High Coverage, Deep Checking of Linux Device Drivers using KLEE + Under-constrained Execution Symbolic execution. This project extends the recently built KLEE, a tool that automatically generates test cases that execute most statements in real programs, so that it allows automatic, deep checking of Linux device drivers. Jeffrey G. Gray, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Improving the Education and Career Opportunities of the Physically Disabled through Speech-Aware Development Environments. This project will investigate the science and engineering of tool construction to allow those with restricted limb mobility to access integrated development environments (IDEs), which will support programming by voice. Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, North Carolina State University, Predictive Elastic Load Management for Cloud Computing Infrastructures. This project proposes to use fine-grained resource signatures with signal processing techniques to improve resource utilization by reducing the number of physical hosts required to run all applications. Jason Hong and John Zimmerman, Carnegie Mellon University, Context-Aware Mobile Mash-ups. This project seeks to build tools for non-programmers to create location and context-aware mashups of data for mobile devices that can present time- and place-approriate information. S V N Vishwanathan, Purdue University, Training Binary Classifiers using the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm. The goal of this project is to harness the power of quantum algorithms in machine learning. The advantage of the new quantum methods will materialize even more once new adiabatic quantum processors become available. Emmett Witchel and Vitaly Shmatikov, University of Texas at Austin, Private and Secure MapReduce. This project proposes to build a practical system for large-scale distributed computation that provides rigorous privacy and security guarantees to the individual data owners whose information has been used in the computation.” Google “Analytics In A Box” Hits The Marketby Andrew Redfern @ 21st December 2009 11:25 am Google
Jeff Gillis on the official Google Analytics Blog announced a new product collaboration with Coradiant, the web application performance management company , which will sit server-side and collect much more accurate information on in-house Web Applications.
Copenhagen: Google and its Carbon Footprintby Andrew Redfern @ 18th December 2009 11:19 am Google
With the UN climate talks in Copenhagen coming to a crunch in the next couple of days its corporate spotlight is firmly switched in the direct of large companies and what they are doing to reduce their carbon footprint. In early 2009 a Harvard University physicist the bold claim that carrying out just two Google searches can generate the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle. Google moved swiftly to refute those findings at the time and its interesting that today they have provided an interesting piece on there official blog ahead of the final days of the UN climate talks in Copenhagen. The piece entitled “Carbon offsets at Google” and written by Alice Ryan, Green Energy Project Manager at Google it gives a good insight into the green journey its undertaken since 2007. Alice says “As leaders from around the world meet in Copenhagen to address global climate change this month, we thought it was a good time to reflect on our own carbon footprint. In 2007, we committed to become a carbon neutral company. We know that it isn’t possible to write a check and eliminate the environmental impact of our operations. So what does “carbon neutrality” mean to us? First, we aggressively pursue reductions in our energy consumption through energy efficiency, innovative infrastructure design and operations and on-site renewable energy. Our Google designed data centers use half the energy of typical facilities. We’re also working to accelerate the development of economic, clean renewable energy at scale through research and development, investment and policy outreach. At this time, however, such efforts don’t cover our entire carbon footprint. Therefore, since 2007 we’ve gone a step further and made a voluntary commitment to buy carbon offsets to cover the portion of our footprint that we cannot yet eliminate - which is what we mean by “carbon neutrality.” So what exactly is a carbon offset? The idea behind an offset is that we pay someone to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a specific, measurable way, thus offseting an equal climate impact on our side. To determine our impact, we calculate our annual carbon footprint, which is then verified by an independent third party. We include direct energy consumption (like natural gas) and electricity use, employee commuting, company vehicle use, business travel and estimates of carbon emissions from building construction and from the manufacturing of servers used in our datacenters. We then buy an equivalent number of carbon offsets. While carbon offsets seem simple in principle, in practice they are surprisingly complicated. In particular, it’s often difficult to say whether or not the offset project results in emissions reductions that would have happened anyway. We find ourselves asking whether the project in fact goes beyond “business as usual.” In the world of offsets, this concept is referred to as “additionality.” Carbon offsets have a mixed reputation because some projects are not additional. Here at Google, we have set a very high bar to ensure that our investment makes an actual difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing offsets that are real, verifiable, permanent and additional. To date, we have selected high quality carbon offsets from around the world that reduce greenhouse gas emissions - ranging from landfill gas projects in Caldwell County, NC, and Steuben County, NY, to animal-waste management systems in Mexico and Brazil. Our funding helps make it possible for equipment to be installed that captures and destroys the methane gas produced as the waste decomposes. Methane, the primary component in natural gas, is a significant contributor to global warming. We chose to focus on landfill and agricultural methane reduction projects because methane’s impact on warming is very well understood, it’s easy to measure how much methane is captured and the capture wouldn’t happen without our financing (for the projects we’re investing in, they couldn’t make enough money selling the gas). We need fundamental changes to global energy and transportation infrastructure to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions over the long term. In the meantime, the projects to which we contribute offer measurable emissions reductions and allow us to take responsibility for our carbon footprint. To that end, we’re always looking for good emissions-reduction projects to support. If you have a landfill gas or agricultural methane carbon offset project you think we should consider, please visit this page for more information about how to participate in our latest carbon-offset procurement round” Web Translation Engine for Facebook usersby Andrew Redfern @ 2nd October 2009 2:48 pm Google
If you are looking to translate your website into another language, Facebook has developed a free service called “Facebook Connect”. The Social Networking site has developed and used a similar application since January 2008, translating its original content into 65 different languages. Early Google Wave invites sent outby Andrew Redfern @ 1st October 2009 11:54 am Google
Google Wave has taken a huge step closer this week with invites for advanced Sandbox testing being sent out to selected users. The system which was demoed a few months ago combine email, chat, social media and elements of wiki style collective editing caused a huge buzz and has been in rapid development ever since. This early version is far from being the finish article however many of the early bugs have been ironed out leaving a stable workable version. the live email/chat system central to Google Wave will allow for easy collaboration and multi-media conference conversations between users. Google are hoping it represents the future of email Lars Rasmussen Google Wave’s head developer said “It struck us that e-mail is still the main communication tool on the web, which seemed remarkable given that it is 20-year-old technology. They aim to move the medium forward with their communication and collaboration tool which they descibe as “a conversation sitting in a cloud”. What is perhaps most interesting about Google Wave is it’s Open Source nature means developers around the world are free to use the systems API and pitch in with their own applications. This means that the system will sone develope into it’s own organic social network system in the same way Facebook has developed to encompass thousands of different application. Further to this the openness is taken a step further by the “Google Wave Federation Protocol” which is an open protocol allowing any individual, organisation or software devloper to become a “Wave” provider and share waves with others. Just like traditional email which allows communication between users no matter which mail application or system is in use at either end this protocol will mean that Wave communication is possible regardless of what software is being used. The testing of the system has caused huge interest in the media and on sites like Twitter as people clamour for an information on the system. Other Related Stories That May Be Of Interest:
|
Search Categories
|
Hit Search Company Address: Hit Search Limited, Liverpool Innovation Park, Liverpool Digital, Baird House, Liverpool, Merseyside, L7 9NG. Google - Our Telephone Number For Search Engine Optimisation, Search Marketing, Pay Per Click And All Other Enquires is 0845 643 9289. Terms | SEO | PPC | Contacting Hit Search | Online Reputation Management | Online Press Distribution |
Hit Search RSS Feed