Micro-blogging site Twitter is all set to introduce its much anticipated advertising model. It was informed that the ad platform is in the testing stages and is expected to be launched within the first half of 2010. As per available details, Twitter will link ads to the search service, so that only users who make a search on Twitter will see the related ads. Ads will not be seen in their regular Twitter stream. Third party software will distribute ads and the revenue from ads will be shared between Twitter and the application developers. Twitter allows its users to send micro messages of up to 140 characters and its ads will also use the standard format of 140 characters of text. In the beginning, Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers, but in the due time it will shift to a Google’s AdWords-style self-serve model. Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has around 27 million users.

Google introduced “Click to Call” in January as a component of its location extensions offering in mobile. Advertisers were permitted to include a phone number associated with a physical location, which would then show on high-end smartphones as an additional line of text.

When the user clicked the phone number and initiated a call the advertiser would pay the cost bid for a click, in the same way as if there had been a click on a URL. However there’s a great deal more value delivered through a call in most cases.

The advertiser was originally required to associate a telephone number with a physical address to utilize Click to Call. Now Google has decided to expand the scope of the offering to any advertiser. There is now no need for a physical address. That means calls can be directed to call centers and more easily utilized by “national” advertisers.

Google told me previously that click-through rates (”CTRs”) on these ads have been from “5 to 30 percent better” than other AdWords CTRs in mobile. Even the URLs in these ads get more clicks, according toSurojit Chatterjee, Product Lead, Local Mobile Advertising, Google.

He added that this expansion of the Click to Call program is partly being driven by national advertiser interest. “There was a tremendous response from large insurance companies, travel and rental car companies and healthcare, among others,” said Chatterjee. “There has just be a great response.”

Google believes (and hopes) that smart advertisers will start bidding more aggressively on these types of ads. But for now they remain a bargain relatively speaking. As I said previously, it’s a call for the price of a click.

Weekly Agency Update
The latest from Google for you and your clients

March 2, 2010

Contents
Agency Blog review
Agency Learning and Development
Must Know Product Updates
- Search
- Analytics
- YouTube
- TV
Did You Know?

AdWords API v13 sunset countdown:
8 weeks until 4/22/2010

Tip of the week: Less than 60 days until most v13 services are no longer available. Are you prepared?

Agency Blog Review | Back to top

From the Agency Ad Solutions Blog
A summary of the most recent posts from the Agency blog. You can sign up to receive updates about new posts via email here.

Go for the Gold with YouTube – The winter games are running for a few more days, and it is not too late to target games-related content on YouTube. Visit the blog for quick tips to expand your reach.
Automotive Industry Spotlight – reaching Hispanic auto consumers – View the results of the Automotive Buy Flow study conducted by Google and Compete, and use the data to effectively target Hispanic auto consumers.

Agency Learning and Development | Back to top

This week’s highlights: Upcoming webinars and AgencyLand-exclusive exam prep

Upcoming webinars:
AdWords API Migration Webinar
Monday, March 1, 2010 8amPST / 10amEST / 11amEST
We’re excited to announce a webinar led by our Developer Relations team covering what you need to know to get your application migrated. This webinar is for developers, so please register only if you work with code and the API.
Register here. Once you register, please post questions here.
Think with Google: Mobile-ize Your Business
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 11amPST / 1pmCST / 2pmEST
Please join Google for an upcoming webinar about what we’re seeing in the mobile ads space and how to think about incorporating mobile into your marketing strategy.
Register here

AgencyLand exclusive webinars
February prep sessions for Google Advertising Fundamentals exam
Selling Google AdWords
February 25, 2010 at 9:00 AM PST

Featured AgencyLand resources
2010 Search Strategies for Retail Marketers – PDF reviewing how search has changed, how retailers should use search, and Google search product innovations.

Access Agencyland here.

Not yet an AgencyLand user? Click here to request an account.

Have you completed the new AdWords Certification Program exams? Visit Google AgencyLand for study materials and to sign up for a test.

Must Know Product Updates | Back to top

Search
Register for Google AdWords Certification Exam Prep Event in Chicago
We recently shared news of improvements to the Google Advertising Professionals program with a strong focus on new, rigorous exams, up-to-date with the latest AdWords functionality, and would like to invite you and your colleagues to attend our Google Advertising Professionals exam preparation event on March 18-19, 2010 at the Google Chicago office.

The goal of the event is to help prepare members of your team to pass the two new exams – Google Advertising Fundamentals and Search Advertising Advanced. There will be a full day of training on Thursday, March 18; attendance on Friday, March 19 is optional for anyone who would like to take the exams.

To secure your place, please register here by March 10, 2010. We’ll follow up with more details once registration has closed. Please note that information about program improvements and new exams is being shared only with trusted partners at this time. We appreciate your assistance in keeping this news confidential.

Analytics
Google Analytics Tip of the Week: Improving Conversions
If your clients utilize web forms, head over to the Google Conversion Room to see how even the smallest of changes, like using the appropriate negative (white) space, can boost conversions. Follow the full list of guidelines and start converting more visitors into customers today.

YouTube
Updates to the YouTube Keyword Tool for Promoted Videos: Localized Data
As you may have read in past updates, the YouTube Keyword Tool is a great way to discover keywords for your clients’ Promoted Video ads on YouTube. The tool, which offers estimated keyword impression volume as well as suggestions for additional terms, has now been localized for all languages supported by YouTube. (The language displayed by the tool is based upon the language preference you’ve selected for YouTube.) Search by descriptive words or phrases, YouTube video id or url, or demographic for great suggestions for making the most of your clients’ Promoted Video campaigns.

TV Ads
Case Study – achieving engagement and cost-effective clicks with InVideo Ads
Interested in adding Google In-stream Video Ads to your clients’ media mix, but looking for examples and best practices before moving forward?

Check out the newest case study from the TV Ads marketing team, which highlights how Alltel Wireless, working with The Martin Agency, was able to achieve their goals of audience engagement and cost-effectiveness with Google In-stream Video Ads on YouTube and video partners on Google Content Network. With the auction model, they were able to buy high-quality inventory at competitive prices, and ultimately generated a large volume of traffic at 50% the cost of other online video providers, with a 2% CTR.

Read more on the TV Ads site.

Did You Know? | Back to top

Here’s a quick cheat sheet with the latest on all things Google:
Shopping Made Smart
If you even wanted to make smart decisions about what to buy, what price to pay, and where to buy it, you’re in luck. With the new Android application called Google Shopper, the power is truly in the hands of the consumer with features like image recognition, barcode scanning, and voice search. To see Google Shopper in action, watch this video and head over to theMobile Blog for more details.
Something old, something new …
Google Docs helps take the headache out of wedding planning with over 20 wedding templates to help with everything from estimating and tracking your wedding budget, and collecting addresses for invitations to comparing vendors and much more. Say goodbye to Bridezilla and hellos to wedding planning bliss a la Google Docs.

Want to learn more? Keep up-to-date with the Google Friends Newsletter. Subscribe here.

Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network

Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York. Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture. Universal, ultra high-speed Internet access will make all this and more possible. We’ve urged the FCC to look at new and creative ways to get there in its National Broadband Plan – and today we’re announcing an experiment of our own.

We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

• Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
• New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
• Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.

Like our WiFi network in Mountain View, the purpose of this project is to experiment and learn. Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there’s still more to be done. We don’t think we have all the answers – but through our trial, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the shared goal of delivering faster and better Internet for everyone.

As a first step, today we’re putting out a request for information (RFI) to help identify interested communities. We welcome responses from local government, as well as members of the public. If you’d like to respond, visit this page to learn more, or check out our video:

Google is still at it making changes to how ads are displayed in the SERPs. In the latest post on the INSIDE ADWORDS blog, Google describes how these changes will occur. It seems these changes are only being made to sites that are hosted on hosted domains. For example blogs on wordpress or blogspot that you do not have your own domain for, but host it through them. As described by Google:Let’s say I wanted to create an ad linking to this blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com. In the past, blogspot.com would have been an acceptable display URL. Because there are so many independent blogs hosted on http://blogspot.com however, we now require the display URL to reflect the specific blog reached upon clicking the ad– in this case: adwords.blogspot.com.

Incorrect:Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com

Display URL: blogspot.com

Correct:Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com

Display URL: adwords.blogspot.comGoing forward, ads that don’t include this additional information in their display URLs will be disapproved. A suggested display URL will be provided in the disapproval email notification, but we encourage you to proactively adjust any ads that you think might be affected by this change.

-Ryan Walker

www.gazelleinteractive.com

Another day, another new product from Google, the sprawling technology giant that has been on a tear lately. Now comes “Near Me Now” a service that makes it fast and easy to learn about your immediate vicinity with a much simpler interface than other local search applications use. It launched last week on the mobile version of Google.com. When an Apple iPhone or Android phone lets Google.com grab its user’s exact location via these phones’ GPS capabilities, Google adds a “Near Me Now” button to its Web search interface, automatically making it very easy to find local information.

How is this different than Google Local? For one thing, it clearly elevates Google’s local strategy by kicking local search up a level to a button on the home search interface for mobile devices. In Google’s world, a one-level transition is a big deal.

Second, the interface is designed to minimize pecking at a mobile device keyboard. For example, when a user hits Near Me Now, a new menu appears allowing him to choose from restaurants, coffe shops, bars and ATMs. One finger click opens up the next level, which shows links to particular establishments.

A Minimum of Keyboard Tapping

Contrast this to typing in a full name of a restaurant or a place name, or having to tap in a type of cuisine, and it’s clear that Google is counting finger taps and aiming, as always, to minimize the steps needed to get the info you want. This is something Google has recently identified as a key initiative, namely, making voice data input or other simplified forms of query and information entry a priority on mobile devices. The logic is sound. I personally find that trying to peck away at mobile keyboards remains a real chokepoint and an inconvenience.

Who should worry about this new product? Yelp, UrbanSpoon, CitySearch and many other purveyors of local information that have search interfaces that are sorely lacking compared to the Near Me Now. Team this with Google’s super-simple AdWords ad-placement technology, and Google may finally have the makings of a real revenue play for local ads. Of course, the same problem with enticing small merchants and restaurants to buy ads on Google remains. Small-business owners are notoriously technophobic.

But Google’s own rivals are rapidly seeding the market for a major local Google play. Yelp’s salesforce is making the rounds and encouraging local merchants to buy ads. Other director providers are linking up with local sales operators to get feet on the street for local ad sales. And, ultimately, this may be a case of Google sticking with it long enough for the market to catch up with its technology.

Google may even get some inadvertent help from California, where legislators are considering a law that could force print phone directory companies to receive explicit opt-in requests for the dead tree phonebooks from residents. Making this opt-in could effectively kill the already staggering director industry and, conversely, chase more local merchants online. The upshot? Near Me Now is a clever and well-timed release from Google that could have a huge impact on online local ad sales. The next question is: What will Google release next week?

http://www.google.com/phone

Google has released the Nexus Phone. Google employees have had this phone for a few weeks now. Initial reports are that the hardware is quite buggy.

http://ping.fm/r2Dmi

http://ping.fm/0KJqm

http://ping.fm/ORxM4

http://www.tigerwoodswomenlistpictures.com/

Google has announced the launch of its real-time search which will go fully live sometime over the next few days in the US, UK, Australia and India. Further countries/languages will be available early next year.

Google has released a demo video on You Tube:

Results are being pulled from around the web from sites such as Twitter, Yahoo! Answers and other social media sites as well as from traditional sources such as news articles, regular web-pages and blogs. Facebook and MySpace information has been promised later.

Google has built algorithms that trigger these results when a certain term becomes popular i.e. when it suddenly becomes newsworthy. These terms appear to correlate well with searches that go hot on Google Trends. At the time of writing “baghdad explosions” is the number one “Hot Topic” but real-time search appears to be lacking a little bit:

It fares much better for “copenhagen climate change”:

The results, as you can see above, appear in a scrolling box within the results. The box updates constantly with new results, presenting more results to the user who also has the option to pause the feed.

So how will this affect the world of search marketing? In the short term, it’s unlikely that it will change much from the point of view of companies using SEO or Adwords. The real-time results only appear for very specific searches that are seen as hot topics by Google, so it’s unlikely that many of the big-money searches will have these results very often.

What it does do in the medium to long term is cement Google’s position as the leading search engine – Bing and Yahoo! have again got some catching up to do. Bing has Twitter search results but these are clearly not as sophisticated and come purely from Twitter. It’s possible that Google’s real-time search will now force Bing to bring more sources into its Twitter search.

• @taylorswift13 okay song, wouldnt write about it though..okay imma let you finish in reply to taylorswift13 #
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• Tiger Woods is a Certified Idiot, http://bit.ly/7CRvaY via @AddToAny #

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• Just wrote a Sidewiki entry on "Business Center Portal" http://bit.ly/4AQ2lh #
• Tiger Woods is a Certified Idiot, http://bit.ly/7CRvaY via @AddToAny #

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Just wrote a Sidewiki entry on “Business Center Portal” http://bit.ly/4AQ2lh

• Google Local Ads, Extensions, Getting all too Confusing http://ping.fm/BtYIW #

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• Google Local Ads, Extensions, Getting all too Confusing http://ping.fm/BtYIW #

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Google Local Ads, Extensions, Getting all too Confusing http://ping.fm/BtYIW

Google is busy in coming out with a lot of new products. At times it is making us, the advertisers very confused with terminology.

First they had Google Adwords Local Extension. Where-in your address can be displayed in ads when someone is searching for you. It is just extension of Google Adwords.

Then they started Google Local Ads. Available on a fixed price per month. Currently they are testing it in beta phase at SF and San Diego only.

The difference in these two was, in adwords extension, you see just the address, whereas in Local Ads, you will see a blue balloon on ad as well as on the map.

Today, while searching for Plumber Montery, I started seeing blue balloons in adwords extension as well. First I thought that they started Local Ads all over the country, but later I realized that it is just regular adwords extension.  So now I am at total loss of understanding.

But oh wait. This is just available in Google Chrome only. On Firefox, the search displays still old format.

So now another feature of using Google Chrome. You will get adwords local extension with balloons.

My request to big G – Please don’t go Yahoo way. We appreciate your concept of keeping it simple. We understand that you are a corporate now and all that big stuff. But please keep it simple. Don’t confuse us with tens of different formats, same advertisement being offered with two type of google ads, different ad formats on IE, Firefox and Chrome. Please go the way you are famous for, that is SIMPLE way.

Notice 1 & 2 in blue balloon. Also notice 1 in blue balloon in map as well – This is on Chrome

Same search on Firefox. No blue balloon – Just a Plus sign and address

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